Episodes

Yeah, this is kind of a weird one. Starts with a deconstruction of the two versions of the Christian End of the World novel Left Behind, then follows with an analysis of the weird shit young Jesuit listened to back …

We're a day late, but boy howdy do we have some nonsense to share with you. Learn how the book of Revelation apparently predicted modern attack helicopters. And how Christian and Jewish zealots are working together to raise s...

When we started this series, who thought we would be doing a multi-episode detour into the Book of Revelation? Certainly not your fearful host. But the more we got into this topic, the more we realized that end-times fanatici...

Yeah, there's still a little sex-trafficking teaser at the beginning of this one, but it also inaugurates our next topic. That is--how did the apocalyptic year-2000 obsessions of the 90s seed the ground for the eschatological...

We said last episode was our final Satanic Panic episode, and we meant it! At least, mostly--we still have to wrap up the surprising and awful story of how our interviewee, Justin Sledge, found himself caught up in a late-bre...

The Paranoid Strain? They still do episodes of that show? Will wonders never cease. Sorry we're late. I promise, we weren't being neglectful. We just got caught up in a combination of holiday obligations, ongoing research, an...

Our de facto holiday episode is here, not that there's anything notably Christmassy about it. Or even Hannukah-y. We continue to lift up the rocks of the Satanic Panic and watch the horrible worms and bugs squirm in the disin...

We're waist-deep in Satanic Panic, with no end in sight. Our story continues with details of the McMartin preschool trial, the highest-profile, most emblematic event of the whole sad, deluded era. Our expert interviewees walk...

You asked for it, you got it. The 80s Satanic Panic--especially related to supposedly abusive daycares, was a direct antecedent to the Qanon child abuse/sacrifice mania. So we dive into the whole icky story. Joining us is int...

Last stop before our full, multi-part discussion of the Satanic Panic of the 80s and early 90s. This stop is back in the depths of antisemitism, the miasma from which so many conspiracies arise. Learn how the unsolved murder ...

Out with the old, in with the new. In this case, no more Birchers of fluoride--we've moved on to other Q-related topics. This time, we're taking a long windup to get to the Satanic Panic period of the 80s and …

A Stupid Surprise

We're finishing up our Bircher talk here, with our discussion of the group's great crusades to keep people from having more rights, because apparently expanding civil, women's, or gay rights played right into the commies' han...

We find ourselves falling deeper into the history of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch's baby, and the anti-communist organization that seemed so fringey in the mid-20th century, yet seems so clearly a prologue to Qanon to...

As the title suggests, this is the moment where we hand off the story from contemporary Russia to the USA's number one Cold Warrior, a former candy magnate who founded the most successful and influential anti-Communist moveme...

Our second full part on the topic of Putin's Russia, we cover more of that fun-loving gaggle of nationalist extremist conspiracy theorists who run that place these days, and with the help of our intrepid guide, Professor Yabl...

Having finished our dissection of Fed conspiracies, we now move on to consider how the other great world power of the 20th Century ended up becoming a dysfunctional autocracy overwhelmed by conspiracies. We learn what makes R...

(Plus, satanic giants found the Federal Reserve)

Episode 3! We hope you like hearing Federal reserve conspiracy theories debunked, because boy, that's what you're getting this time. Thrill to the history of monetary policy. Experience the chills of arguing with bitcoin enth...

Second episode! Which means the introduction to this series literally took up an entire episode. Does that mean we're getting better or worse? Hard to say. This time, we're taking on the conspiracist view of what actually tra...

We're back, bay-bee! For the next umpty-bajillion episodes, we're going to take a new angle to look at Qanon. Why, when we've already done Qanon several times? Because we believe the Qanon conspiracy is...in a sense "eating" ...

We did it! We reached the end of the marathon. In this one, we chat through the Zapruder film, and its cultural impact. But the most important thing about this episode is it marks the end of the new-content dry …

PENULTIMATE! It does not, as a young Jesuit believed, mean "better than ultimate". It means "the one before the last one." Which is what we have here. Some more discussions of the impact of JFK conspiracizing prior to the fin...

This time, we focus not on Oliver Stone, but rather the real guy whom his movie portrayed as a fearless, untouchable campaigner for the truth--former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Our analysis of the man's caree...