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[00:00:15] The Lincoln Memorial is actually a portal to a secret underground society.
[00:01:22] are going to rise up and become deputized. I have always heard President Trump.
[00:01:24] I like the way he talked.
[00:01:26] He reminded me of most men.
[00:01:27] Joe Biden last night in the debate.
[00:01:29] He's, it's like he's not even a human being.
[00:01:31] Donald Trump and the migrant Republicans
[00:01:33] represented extremism.
[00:01:35] Can you imagine repatriating all the black Americans
[00:01:38] that had to spoke about to Africa?
[00:01:40] Now, this is the evidence.
[00:01:42] You want me to make an act of faith?
[00:01:44] Risking myself, my wife, my the Thanksgiving holiday here in 2023. So if you listen in real time, you know, hopefully this connects, you've had a good time. Hopefully you've stayed away from foolish family members. I know my partner and I, we swore off going
[00:03:00] and doing family crap on holidays years ago.
[00:03:03] It's, there's a lot that can come up, right?
[00:03:06] I mean, especially in this day and age, there huh so and no offense to any of the vegans or vegetarians but uh... yeah now it was it was good it was good still got some leftovers still got them they're hanging in they're hanging tough uh... but uh... yeah man thanksgiving is always a fascinating holiday uh... especially as it's paired with kind of this capitalistic
[00:04:20] uh... home
[00:04:22] really materialistic
[00:04:24] uh... venture into the these fire, something like that right around the time of the Black Friday, a holiday shopping madness. Some people correlated that to just distractions, like people wouldn't be distracted, like you could go out and buy and buy. I don't know if I necessarily believe that. But I do know that corporations,
[00:05:40] they'll go to the umpteenth end
[00:05:42] to get you to buy their product.
[00:05:44] We're living in an era now where wealth, where it's interesting where we find ourselves in terms of where do we go, right? What works for change? What works for actual, you know, sustainable long-term change? We talk about all these things that are there. We talk about all these boycotts.
[00:07:04] You know, for example, take Starbucks. And that's just the economy and the data we live in. Now, I'm not taking a defeatist perspective and saying, oh, all is lost and let's just give up. No, but if you've listened to this show long enough, you know that part of my, part of my ethos is I do not want to be a fundamentalist on either end.
[00:08:20] I don't wanna be a lefty fundamentalist.
[00:08:22] I don't wanna be a conservative right-wing fundamentalist.
[00:08:26] And I think from my own self,
[00:08:27] I'm trying taking anything away. I'm just simply saying the decades following that if you study your history, if you study and not just like history, politics history, but I'm talking myself again, what is real change? What happens when you actually sustain something? You know, people are talking about, oh, a ceasefire, ceasefire, ceasefire, right. But the people who can do a ceasefire aren't doing a ceasefire. The only thing I can say about Israel is at least they're just being honest about how they feel about Palestinians, right? Some of the interviews that I've seen,
[00:11:00] I know this is not all Israelis,
[00:11:02] I know this is not all Jewish people.
[00:11:04] But the commercial, or not the commercial,
[00:11:05] but the interviews that I've in front of you. Yeah, I'm tired of having to, you know, toe that mark.
[00:12:20] Everybody knows, or most people who think no,
[00:12:23] that we need another party that is good.
[00:12:26] Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not dumb.
[00:12:27] I know there's way be bringing in money. Somehow, some way, some manner. Somebody's gotta be doing it. So, if you gotta, you know, you gotta go out and go to work, most likely your time is tied up with that.
[00:13:40] I gotta go to work.
[00:13:41] I gotta get there on time.
[00:13:42] I can't lose my job, cause we lose my job.
[00:13:43] We lose the house.
[00:13:44] We gotta pay bills, right?
[00:13:46] And it's just this machine that kind of keeps going forward What is the lobbying that you would do, which is essentially that's what you would be doing, right? A person, what does that lobbying do? Especially if somebody over here is saying, hey, can I get a meeting with you? And I just have a couple of million, maybe even more dollars to give. Is there just sitting around here?
[00:15:00] I want to give to your campaign, right?
[00:15:03] And we know that that's the have conspiracy theories that pop up. Now conspiracy theories, I want to, you know, I really want to get more into this because there's so many levels of conspiracy theories, right?
[00:16:20] There are some that, you know, delve into like developed, how conspiracy theories are really flavorful. I mean, they're like the fast food, high fatty acid, trans fat food of ideologies, right? Cause they sound good. Oh, we didn't land on the moon, really? No, man, that was on the stage
[00:17:41] and they put that stuff to go, oh my gosh, tell me more.
[00:17:44] Oh, there's aliens that live, you know,
[00:17:46] in the middle of the earth and stuff.
[00:17:47] I could tell you why, I mean, they're pedophiles, right? Fascinating stuff, fascinating stuff. So I wanted to start a primer conversation on this. So I brought these cats on to talk about that. And so we should hop into it. They have some really interesting perspectives in regards to just where we find ourselves right now
[00:19:02] because chances are you know somebody
[00:19:05] who believes in a conspiracy theory, okay? University of Texas at Tyler and director of UT Tyler Center for Ethics. He is also a program director in the philosophy, religion and Austin studies program. So these two cats edited this volume and there's some great authors in it. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. As always, whitehatchpodcast.com, for workspace, profane phase, check out the show notes.
[00:20:23] I'll put their bios in there and a link to this book.
[00:20:25] It is a really good read. first, let me ask these two gentlemen what's been happening from birth to now. Michael, we'll start with you or Mike, I guess, Mike, Mike. Yeah, that's fine. Well, from birth, it was in Kansas City, 54 long years ago. So as well, yeah, I was going to get into
[00:21:42] the chiefs and my suffering ball let it go. I'm just enjoying
[00:21:45] life now, as long as it lasts. Yeah, so Kansas City back in the day, man. The ball team, man. Whoo. But you got the glory years going on now. I, a lot of Cincinnati Bengals fans around here. So maybe it makes me a small person, but I'm glad they've lost two in a row. I had a bad experience at a Bengals game. But anyway, yeah. So happening, what's going on, brother? Yes, I'm Greg Bach, and I teach philosophy and religion at the University of Texas at Tyler. I'm also the director of the Center for Ethics here. I'm originally from California. I did my master's degree also at the Talbot School of Theology at different years than Mike,
[00:24:20] but left California back in 2005
[00:24:24] for the Green Hills of Tennessee. assuming y'all both have been going and our members of AAR, the AAR community, correct? I have been a member of the AAR in the past. Yeah, I've presented, I guess maybe just once, but yeah. Okay. Several people I know in that community. Yeah. How did the, what was the genesis around this book given, I mean, obviously conspiracy
[00:25:44] theories are nothing new. That's the best way to learn something. So I thought, let's do this together. And we didn't feel we had enough material to write the book ourselves, but we knew a lot of people and we got some great authors in this book from different disciplines to write their perspective. And I think I learned a lot through the project. Yeah, and that was,
[00:27:00] I think it ended up being stronger,
[00:27:03] even though sometimes edited collections
[00:27:05] are a little bit harder
[00:27:05] because you know, you've got different voices every chapter.
[00:27:07] But this kind of want to get into a little bit of the history of that and just kind of the the establishment if you will of QAnon. Yeah I can jump in here I think that you know QAnon's in the title
[00:29:22] and then this sort of deep state government. And then I think Trump is supposed to be like the,
[00:29:25] it's gonna say savior, but that, well, in some ways,
[00:29:27] yeah, right, he's the one that's going to expose
[00:29:29] all this evil, defeat them, they'll all be,
[00:29:32] the truth of what he's been saying will be made known one day,
[00:29:35] there'll be like this great renewal in America.
[00:29:37] So it's got a lot of political, I mean,
[00:29:39] tends to be on the right kind of political movement
[00:29:42] and a lot of religious and apocalyptic language,
[00:29:45] spiritual battle language, which we talked about
[00:29:47] in the book as well, so that's the components to it? You know, is there some origins to this? Like, can we be like, oh, okay, this person here, like do we know who Q is in general? Stuff like that. Like what is so attractive for this? We're for people to kind of get on this. And of course with social media, I mean, it's like a wildfire that spreads.
[00:31:03] I think we're so polarized today in society
[00:31:05] and not just, you know,
[00:32:24] since water, Vietnam and Watergate, that's kind or a lot of this. And that's really troubling to both of us, which is part of why we wanted to ride it. We wanted to help the church deal with this and not undermine its witness to Christ and his kingdom. So with that in mind,
[00:33:40] I mean, part of my background is I grew up
[00:33:43] in a very fundamentalist black Seventh-day Adventist I think this week the rapture is supposed to happen, right? It's like, so there's always just something that's coming up that's saying, okay, the rapture's happened. No, Jesus is coming. No, Jesus is already here, right? Or the lizard people are gonna take over. So I'm curious how y'all navigate some of those questions and I'd also be curious how you navigate, maybe even some of this in classrooms. If that makes sense.
[00:35:02] Yeah, it always, the end of the world thing never sees such an amazing me when, you know, when Jesus said,
[00:35:06] you know, Jesus said, I don a copy. I'm sure they still made plenty of money. But yeah, I think that's part of it. I don't know if you have thoughts, Greg. Well, I think you're both right. There's this end times theology in the church, especially the evangelical world that has been, you know,
[00:36:21] going steady for the last few decades,
[00:36:23] as long as I can remember it.
[00:36:24] And it's part of our theology that's the technical part like, okay, yeah, we gotta put these headings and, you know, this type setting. But I'm curious, how was your feedback to different,
[00:37:41] to various authors as you were putting this manuscript together?
[00:38:42] Yeah, it was actually, at least from my perspective, relatively easy to put together.
[00:38:45] Yeah, and we really gave them.
[00:38:46] Once we got going in.
[00:38:48] We gave voice, we let them have their own voice.
[00:38:50] We didn't steer them too much in one direction or the other.
[00:38:54] So it's really each chapter stands alone.
[00:38:57] You could just open it up, whatever chapter interest you
[00:38:59] and read it.
[00:39:00] And you'll find that we don't all agree with one another either.
[00:39:03] And there are different definitions of conspiracy theories
[00:39:05] in the book.
[00:39:06] So we thought that made it a better book there I'd be curious. Yeah, that's a good question. I was thinking that like some of the data is it was more like like a I think a higher percentage actually of certain white communities by this so like white evangelicals or white Republicans compared to you know other people from other races or ethnicities it's higher but there's but it's not not solely right so they're you know they're definitely yeah
[00:40:25] it's like making people from Latinx's history from the beginning. I don't know if it's a white evangelical problem. Clearly some of the articles in the chapters in the book pull this out, but specifically in relation to QAnon and the election fraud and stuff like that. There's clearly surveys
[00:41:42] that have been done about that. But if we're in our country or Watergate. Others that you might, you know, people debate or encounter, all those kind of things. So we wanted to, we want to allow for that. And I think maybe this is a good place to say this, just that as someone who's more skeptical of this kind of stuff, my chapter is on humility and imparts because I've worked a lot on that
[00:43:00] virtue in books and dare I say even in my life, although, you know, you can ask my wife how
[00:43:05] well I'm doing.
[00:43:06] She would know better than anybody. ludicrous. And that's where a parallel is in class. Like I don't, we're talking about conspiracy theories a little bit in my classes, but students say things. I mean, I can reflect back to things students have said all the time, over 20 years here. And I get freshmen. And then think, and I just think, man, how could you even think that's true? And then I think of some of the stuff I thought and did and said, well, I was 18 and cut them a
[00:44:21] break. So it's that mix of grace and truth don't know. And that there's this ongoing kind of rising conspiracy, at least on this side of the country, where 9-11 might not have happened. It might have been holograms. It might have been AI to get us to,
[00:45:42] to come together.
[00:45:43] And again, like you just got through saying,
[00:45:45] like you can easily dismiss it.
[00:45:47] But sometimes in a classroom, it's like
[00:48:20] a strain of skepticism towards intellectuals or academics or research.
[00:48:26] I mean, we saw that with COVID, but publicly available evidence, right? You should be able to test these claims in some sense philosophically, historically, whatever it is, theologically, all those things matter, not just in a lab, right? But evidence much more broadly construed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why, and it was, and this is, and this is, this brings up a good question too. And I'd be curious for both of y'all's input on this.
[00:49:42] What is, what is the harm?
[00:49:45] What is the effect, particularly we're also, you know, talking about Jesus Christ, we're talking about somebody who we believe rose from the dead, and then we attached to convince somebody that Q is telling the truth rather than that Jesus is the truth. That's a worry. Yeah, I do think. I mean, I like chapter nine of y'all's book. This is by Jay Aaron Simmons in Kevin Carnahan.
[00:52:22] It's much worse than you think, just the title alone caught my attention, but just that you
[00:52:25] are in the openingiles, right? So they're trying to like hide what they're doing
[00:53:41] and push back against Trump
[00:53:44] who was supposed to reveal it all.
[00:53:45] So yeah, it's kind of this, even know what season that you're taking these from. But what is that mean, Greg, I think you even said it, like we live in such a polarized time. What, where do we find ourselves now? I mean, we're all academics. I teach, I've been teaching now for over two decades myself. How do we navigate some of these things?
[00:55:01] I mean, I remember it in the 2016 election,
[00:55:03] I'm a big AR fan of Alzheimer's there.
[00:55:05] And I remember Eddie Gloud, who was the president at the time,
[00:55:08] got up and gave the plenary address. campus were very much a changing demographic campus, primarily here in least in Chicago to Latinx. But I'd be curious, how y'all deal with some of these things and the impact of where we find ourselves with when so many people are connected their devices. I'm a Gen Xer, so I still remember a
[00:56:20] time without Wi-Fi and going without a wire and without internet. all views seriously, hearing all views within certain constraints and ground rules, of course, but hearing all views and having that conversation, exploring them. And the first chapter of the book is, I think lays down some really great guidelines on just how to have a conversation with another person which can apply to the classroom as well. We listen, we praise and we probe,
[00:57:42] this is chapter one. We've listened to what the other person has to conspiracy theories, we're talking about flatter, moon landing, hoax, vaccines, all that stuff. We just put it out there and we applied the ideas that we're learning in the readings to these cases. Occasionally in the class, somebody will come out and say, yeah, I believe that stuff or whatever. And we're just making sure that intellectual virtues are a part of this as well.
[00:59:00] So being open-minded, listening, seriously,
[00:59:04] taking the other point of view seriously,
[00:59:06] having a hunger for the truth no matter what.
[01:00:05] not trying to, whatever, enforce my particular views on them.
[01:00:07] But I think, I mean, this is just, I mean, having good characters, one of those things
[01:00:09] that variety of traditions, religions, philosophies,
[01:00:13] wisdom traditions, like it just seems to me,
[01:00:15] humans across the world and different cultures
[01:00:18] who reflect on human nature see the value of good character.
[01:00:22] I feel like we've lost that emphasis.
[01:00:24] And so I want my students to kind of know
[01:00:26] that a lot of the think that, and I would agree that I think these are the spaces and places to do it.
[01:01:43] The challenge, of course, is, you know, right? These things go into or these ideas go into people's ideology, right? You think about stuff that was five years ago, people were like, oh, this will never catch on. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute. Like there's all kinds of different sections of AI now, right? It's like the other day I've typed into one, give me two academics arguing at a department meeting. And 20 seconds later, I've got these two realistic
[01:03:04] looking human beings that you think
[01:03:07] would take it out of things, like our sources and what we believe and why. And that's where, for me, I think it's important, this is really important of the professions becomes important again in society, at least the way they're supposed to operate, there's a code of ethics and people sort of self-police.
[01:04:22] So whether it's journalists or academics, I mean, you know, I don't want to... I mean, I don't think they would put it this way, but over the years I've made a more focus just to love my students, right, and whatever that
[01:05:42] means as a professor at East Grand Tuck like that. Greg. I think the AI technology represents an unprecedented challenge to our society, especially our institutions of knowledge. And I like what Onora Onil one will get people thinking more carefully. No, that's good. I know exactly. And I think this is this, you know, when it comes to topics like this, I'm, I was glad to see this come across my desk and I'm like, Oh man, this is good. So my next question I think would be then just be, where do we go from now?
[01:08:24] I mean, where do we go?
[01:08:25] Where do we go from here?
[01:08:26] Like what?
[01:08:27] Yes. It's fine with us. We don't, you know, the plants go to end. And so people were assuming like this is a verified real account and come to find out. No, if somebody just paid their little $8 and they're now blue and verified. And so what happens right when the foundations of what we think are supposed to be checks, right? Peer reviews that I forget which president that was just had to resign.
[01:09:43] Um, and it was, and it was a lot in regards to Christianity, America, evangelicalism, the future of our face and whatnot. Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say, yeah, let's do that. I'd start with just saying we need to get out of our bunkers and our echo chambers and
[01:11:03] get across the street and talking about stuff. And I've got where normally I might have five students participate instantly. Now it's like 10 to 15 out of my 30 person class or, and sometimes more.
[01:12:24] Um, I had some hope, another colleague of mine talking to their students,
[01:13:21] but alone and in community. I mean, community is huge.
[01:13:23] I think that we just, like the past,
[01:13:25] this is my third year being a part of a church plant in town.
[01:13:28] And the first thing we did was read Life Together
[01:13:30] by David Bonhoeffer, which is just a,
[01:13:32] I've never read it before,
[01:13:33] an incredible description of community.
[01:13:36] And we're actually trying to live it out and it works.
[01:13:39] Like my life's better, their lives are better, right?
[01:13:42] We like a feel like a part of the community.
[01:13:43] It's not just,
[01:13:44] hey, let's have some community and meet at Starbucks
[01:13:47] or at the bar or wherever it is. Alcohol or social media or conspiracy theory right where we could we're supposed to find that in Church and our community and with God so yeah, we'll return to kind of those old practices that Jesus and his followers have shown us our important parts of seeking God and experiencing his grace the past couple thousand years It's not gonna happen on a screen
[01:15:03] Yeah, no, that's a good point as a real good point
[01:16:05] Yeah, I agree. And I think that's really the heart behind it is to help people. I mean, this is tearing apart in certain places, churches, families. And if it's not tearing them apart,
[01:16:09] it's putting great strain and stress on relationships. And really, we want this to be, yeah, like
[01:16:16] to equip people to love their neighbor, whoever that is, including their conspiracy,
[01:16:20] theory-believing neighbor as a way to love God and serve. y'all, this is, there's so much else to cover, but I, what I want to be respectful of our time, but also I think it's important for folks to go out and check this out. So I really appreciate both of y'all coming on and talking a little bit about this, this great read and that's, that's out there and that exists for us to take in and, and, and learn more. Anyways, folks can contact you. What does
[01:17:44] any, any, you know, maybe y'all just to see putting your information out there. I mean, I subscribe it. I think it's called Team
[01:19:04] Delete Me. So they're like, just take my stuff off the internet. Here's my university address.
[01:20:03] Or have you ever wondered what attending or working at one of those schools is like?
[01:20:06] The Chapel Probation Podcast brings you the stories
[01:20:09] from students, faculty, and administration
[01:20:12] who experienced all the racism, the queer phobia,
[01:20:16] the misogyny, and purity culture weirdness
[01:20:19] that are kind of the hallmarks of these schools.
[01:20:22] I'm Scott O'Kamoto, author of Asian American Apostate,