When Family Members Believe Conspiracy Theories

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Amina Serna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm producer Amina Serna filling in for Brian today. Welcome back, everyone. Can you reason with a loved one who believes in conspiracy theories? A few years ago, podcaster Zach Mack noticed his father went deep down into the rabbit hole. Think chemtrails, a cabal of global elite, that kind of stuff, so he challenged his dad with a literal year-long bet. It's the subject of a new three-part series from NPR's Embedded podcast called Alternate Realities. He joins us now. Hi, Zach.

Zach Mack: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Amina Serna: Before we get into your bet, I want to ask you to describe your dad. You grew up in the Bay Area where you say your dad was pretty much the lone Christian conservative even within your own family. What was he like growing up and when did you start noticing a change?

Zach Mack: Yes, so my dad, he's very playful. He's very friendly, lots of dad jokes. He's pretty active. He loves to go sailing or hiking or skiing. He just loves being outside. He's very social. He's from the Midwest. Basically early on, shortly after I was born, he was away from religion and then came back to it. Throughout my life, he has just gotten steadily more religious, and so he is the lone Christian conservative in our household. We grew up in the very liberal California Bay Area. I want to say around 2019 when he got an iPad. My dad is not very tech savvy. He's not really someone who's on the internet a lot. He's not on social media. He started getting more access to the internet, and I think as that happened, people started sending him weird links, and he started finding things and going down the rabbit hole a little bit. Then I think, like so many people, the pandemic was a really radicalizing force for him because he has always been very distrusting of institutions, specifically medical institutions, and pretty distrusting of vaccines. He didn't want me to get vaccinated when I was very young, but my mom won that battle. I think that was like a real radicalization point for him, and so many people during the pandemic when misinformation was flying, and everyone was, like, pretty afraid and unsure of what was going on and who to trust.

Amina Serna: We'll definitely circle back to the vaccines. Your podcast begins when you decided to confront your dad about him being radicalized online. Of course, he did not agree, and instead, he texted you a photo of a sheet of paper where he had written out a list of 10 predictions for 2024. He challenged you to a monetary bet. Before we get to his boldest prediction, number 10, can you give us a brief run through of the list? It goes to this idea that there's one through nine, kind of go through this idea of like there's a cabal that he calls the globalists secretly running the world, right?

Zach Mack: Yes. All of his predictions are all sort of tugging on the same string, which that he believed there was going to be a huge political reckoning, that a lot of right-wing conspiracies/fantasies predict similar stuff. It's all this stuff, like, a lot of the top Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Joe Biden are going to be rounded up and convicted of treason. The Clintons are gonna be convicted of murder. All these things that the electromagnetic pulse device is going to wipe out all digital communication. Just all this political upheaval. A lot of it has to do with Democrats being, like, rounded up.

Amina Serna: Listeners, while Zach's bet with his dad is pretty unique, maybe you've tried to break through to someone you know who believes in conspiracy theories. Tell us your stories. What worked, what didn't, what did you learn about your loved one? Were you surprised that there were some things on which you met in the middle? 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text that number.

Zach, let's move on to his boldest prediction, and let's take a listen to about 50 seconds of Episode 1 of Alternate Realities. Here is your dad, and he speaks first.

Zach's Father: I threw this in because I thought you'd be excited about it.

Zach Mack: Yes, it's an exciting one. It's probably the most exciting one.

Zach's Father: The US will come under martial law in 2024 because of mass rioting and chaos. The military will have to step in.

Zach Mack: For the record, I was never actually excited about the possibility of this happening. For this one, do you think this will be happening all over the country, only in certain parts?

Zach's Father: The whole United States will come under martial law, and the biggest cities will be targeted—New York, unfortunately, Washington, DC, the Bay Area,-

Zach Mack: Okay.

Zach's Father: -Chicago, LA, Houston, Dallas.

Zach Mack: You seem pretty confident about that.

Zach's Father: I am 100% confident.

Amina Serna: We hear your dad in that clip saying that the United States will come under martial law. Later on in the Episode, you ask him again, and he goes into why it'll come under martial law, which you were not very pleased with. Do you want to tell us what your dad thought was really going to happen?

Zach Mack: Yes. He was watching these prophets online, and they are predicting all these. Prophets often make big, bold predictions, and so they're making all these bold predictions. He's buying into it, and yes, he just believed that there was going to be this massive political upheaval. I should note that one of the ones he actually almost got is he said Eric Adams would be removed from office, and wow, did we come close on that one. To be fair, Eric Adams was already under investigation when he made that prediction, so it wasn't out of nowhere.

Amina Serna: Did you split it that way?

Zach Mack: No, because Eric Adams is still in office, so a bet's a bet.

Amina Serna: A bet's a bet. As you were just starting to explain, the majority of your father's views come from a YouTuber/podcaster maybe named Julie Green. One of the left-leaning media watchdogs I cited for this calls her a "MAGA prophet." Can you describe her content for listeners who aren't familiar? There's a religious undertone here.

Zach Mack: Yes. She's like a middle-aged woman in Iowa, just a regular-looking person in a regular-looking house, but she's just spouting off like really wild things. It's sort of all under the guise of religion, but it's all very political. She's talking nonstop about these big political upheavals. It doesn't really seem to have anything to do with religion except for the fact that she's saying she's communing directly with God, and that God is speaking through her. If you're watching one of her videos, sometimes you'll see her speak as if she's God, because she's claiming God is speaking through her in that moment, and then she will later analyze her own words, which she claims are God's words.

I will say she's not very unique in this space. There are a lot of these very trumpy MAGA prophets who are making bold predictions. At some point my, my father lost a different bet to my mom, and had to stop watching her entirely, and that didn't really change anything. He just moved on to the next one, and now he has these other prophets that he likes more. I wouldn't say that Julie Greene is the real problem or the focus there. She's just one of many people of a larger movement.

Amina Serna: I want to take a quick call, but first I wanted to ask you briefly, just how do you think your father's beliefs in conspiracy theories dovetail with or intersect with his religious views?

Zach Mack: Well, I think part of his belief system. His belief system, it's all jumbled up. He has a deep distrust of institutions that's gone on for a long time and stems from stuff that happened with his dad growing up. He has a distrust in vaccines. I think, as you've seen over the years, our country's become more polarized, and a lot of right-wing stuff has merged with the Christianity, and right-wing politics and right-wing conspiracies have really kind of like merged. I think he's being met at that intersection and a lot of the stuff that he's consuming is pulling him towards there. Growing up, he wasn't particularly interested in politics. He was always more conservative, and he considers himself an independent, but he would typically vote Republican. This is beyond that, right? This is just full-blown conspiratorial, and things that are provably false. Yes, I think just more and more in this country you're seeing those things all get intertwined.

Amina Serna: Let's go to Kylie in Northern Virginia. Kylie, thanks for hanging on.

Kylie: No problem. Good morning. I have a really large someone in my family who believes very deeply in conspiracy theories. The way that I deal with this is, basically, whatever they tell me, I put it into ChatGPT, and I ask, like, how rampant is this theory on the internet? What I've started to do is just bring it back to my cousin and say, like, "This is a pattern I identify. Every time you tell me some conspiracy theory, it's all over the internet." I'm like, "First of all, if there's some big conspiracy," then like, "Why are you always late to the conspiracy?" Because you should be able to be telling me the conspiracy before it's all over the World Wide Web, because I assume that most people who are conspiracy theorists have a mistrust of government institutions. I find it difficult to believe that their main mechanism for communication is constantly the internet. That's the way that I handle it.

I also usually will ask questions like, "Do you know somebody who's actually done this, have been a part of this, or whatever?" That's the way that I deal with it. I just point out, like, you're not saying anything new, so, like, where are the new theories? Where is your underground connection that's giving you new theories? Because these theories you're giving me, I'm finding them on, like, Reddit pages from 10 years ago, so I'm not compelled.

Amina Serna: That's interesting, Kylie. Thank you so much for sharing. Zach, does that come up with your data?

Zach Mack: Oh, yes. So many of the conspiracy theories that he was talking about are just like the greatest hits. It's, like, these are all ones I've already heard or sort of a slight remix on ones I've heard for years. It was kind of impressive at how unoriginal a lot of these were. You just see it they get passed around. They get sort of slightly changed over the years. That does happen.

To relate to Kylie, I tried some of this stuff with my dad as well. At one point, we came across this research team that was doing work with, like, AI chatbots with conspiracy theorists, and it looked like they were having some success at. Basically, you take a conspiracy theorist, and you have them talk to this AI chatbot about their beliefs, and it can gently push back or ask some probing questions or provide some evidence. That was meant to be effective in the sense that this chatbot would have infinite patience. It would also have a ton of information.

I think part of the frustration when you're talking to a conspiracy theorist is, as much research as you do, you will inevitably get to a point where you can't keep going with them because they'll say something that you don't know that much about, and that sort of stalls things out, but whereas, the chatbot can just keep pulling information. That didn't work at all for my dad, but it has been proven effective for some people. I think it just depends on what their core beliefs are, and how and why they're coming to these ideas. I think it's effective for some but not everyone.

Amina Serna: Here's a text. "My parents went down a MAGA QAnon rabbit hole when they moved from a suburb near New York City to a rural community in the Midwest. Almost because they wanted to fit in, the biggest conspiracy they believed in was related to vaccines and COVID. They refused to get boosters despite their poor health and their doctors encouraging it. I love my parents, but I have a hard time being around them."

Zach, in the course of your reporting, you found out that there was a generational distrust of institutions in your family. We think of the anti-vax debate as being a modern phenomenon, but your grandfather, who was a chiropractor, actually pulled your dad out of school because of vaccinations in the 1960s, right?

Zach Mack: Yes. In the '60s, my father was supposed to go to kindergarten in Ohio, and there was a new vaccine mandate at the time. Yes, my grandfather, who was a chiropractor, and he just didn't believe in a lot of vaccines and modern medicine, and deep distrust of institutions. At some point, he lost his license as well, so he was very embittered towards the medical institution. Yes, he held my father out. My father grew up in a household that was very distrusting, and grew and grew from there.

Amina Serna: There's another big connection you draw between your grandfather and father, but I blew my mind, so I won't spoil it for listeners. I'll let them listen to the podcast and find out for themselves. Somewhat related to that is in Episode 2, you spoke to Charlie Safford. He's a researcher who designs therapeutic techniques for people who believe in far-right conspiracy theory. Let's take a listen to Charlie.

Charlie Safford: Even if your father doesn't put the pieces together, there is some awakening of his own mortality that might be contributing to all of this as well.

Zach Mack: This is Charlie Safford. He designs clinical therapy techniques for people who believe in far-right conspiracies. He believes conspiracy theories are fundamentally emotional coping mechanisms.

Charlie Safford: I don't know how old your father is. I'm guessing he's probably in his 50s to 60s.

Zach Mack: Yes. He just turned 69.

Charlie Safford: Okay. Whether he knows it or not, he's addressing issues related to mortality. One of the ways that you come to terms with your mortality is to look back and say, did my life have meaning?

Amina Serna: Zach, you'll notice I cut out that next line for a reason. What did that mean to you when you heard this?

Zach Mack: It just means that I think when I originally got into this, I thought people who were into conspiracies just simply got ahold of the wrong information, that it was just they had some bad information, and if I could just help them find some good information, they'd be set. They'd be on their way. The more I learned about these conspiracies, the more I learned that different people come to them for all sorts of reasons, and they're usually doing something for them emotionally in some way.

I think for some people, it is access to what they call esoteric knowledge. It's like, I know something that you don't know, so you sort of feel a little bit more important. You feel a little special if you know something that other people don't know. Which is, I think, especially helpful for someone like my father, who's often isolated in his family and community as the lone Christian conservative, as sort of the contrarian in the group.

Yes, there's just all sorts of reasons, and I think for some people, it's not feeling of use anymore. You see a lot of, like, older people who might feel less of use, and then suddenly, you know, these conspiracy theories like QAnon or these prophets are telling their followers that they're part of this secret war. They're soldiers, and they're, like, playing an important part in this secret war that's happening, beneath the surface. I think that's really enticing to be told that you are important, that you're a part of something that is important, and I think it is, yes.

Amina Serna: Zach, a listener very thoughtfully asks, how are Zach and his mom dealing with the anger/sadness over all of this? I know in your podcast, you talk about some of the early interactions your mother and father had regarding finances that came into play. Maybe you want to talk about that.

Zach Mack: Yes. One of the things that happened between my parents is that my father took some money out of a joint account without telling my mom, and invested a lot of money into, like, precious metals and various things. He was buying survivalist gear and generators, and he was just doing things with their money that she didn't know about or approve of. It was all sort of in service of preparing for these massive government shutdowns and apocalyptic times. I think it's one thing to be prepared, but it's another thing to live in reality and also just discuss finances with your partner.

Yes, obviously, that was creating a lot of problems. This whole thing has been extremely difficult on the family, and it was really emotionally difficult to make this series, but ultimately, I'm glad I did, because what I found out immediately after putting it out is just how ununique my story is. I've heard from hundreds and hundreds of people who have DMed and emailed me saying, hey, I'm going through the same thing with my spouse or my parent, and this is just happening all over.

Amina Serna: We have a listener who has gone through it personally. Here's John in the Lower East Side. Hi, John, you're on WNYC.

John: Hi. How are you?

Amina Serna: Hi, good morning.

John: Hi. How are you? Good morning all. Yes, I actually got swept up during Y2K, and it was at the beginning of the internet, and you started hearing the things about the the black helicopters of the United Nations taking over. It actually scared the bejesus out of me. I was actually considering, like you were saying earlier, arming myself, survival food, all of those things, for my family, and I basically really took a long, hard look, and I know that I've also been a longtime listener of WNYC, and listening to Brian Lehrer at the time and other hosts that were talking, and it basically talked me off the ledge, and I didn't pursue any of that stuff. I think the only thing I did buy was a Radio Shack scanner, which was fun to have.

It's very easy to get swept up in these things. I've got advanced degrees in engineering, so it's not like a lack of education. Sometimes, they just press the right buttons. I actually have some friends, one who's a medical doctor, and he got swept up into the whole QAnon thing. I was really shocked when the January 7th happened, and he was talking to me on the phone about pulling money out of the bank, and these things are going to happen, and Trump is going to remain President, and there are these plans in place.

I was just, like, buddy, you got to calm down, this isn't for real. This is some bad stuff that's happening. I think people are always looking for this greater superhero, let's call it, in the background, that wants to come save the day, and they're not happy with the way society is going and things like that. It's very easy to get sucked into these things.

Amina Serna: John, you mentioned the things that you believed in, and your friend as well, but what is it that helped you overcome the conspiracy theories around Y2K.

Zach Mack: Yes, I want to know how you got out.

Amina Serna: Were there certain people in your life? I know you mentioned listening to the show, but were you having conversations with people or did you have support elsewhere?

John: Yes, it was, but it's interesting because even there were people at work, and there were guys that maybe came from the South that were contractors, and they were talking this stuff up. Maybe there's that Christian conservative thought process of I think it's people that feel like they're losing control of where the country is going or where their comfort zone. They're just always seeing the green-eyed monster in the corner.

When I really started looking at things and reading between the lines, I started saying to myself, does this really make sense? I don't know if I just had a couple of sobering moments, and at that point, I was just like, no, this is it. Actually, it did go until midnight of New Year's Eve, and the lights didn't go out, the black helicopters didn't land in the middle of the United Nations and things like that, and nothing happened. I think at that point, you basically say, okay, that was a nice little anxiety attack you gave yourself. Get over it and move on.

Amina Serna: Thank you so much for your call, John, and Zach, I'm curious about your reaction, but I just wanted to maybe flag that there are listeners who are fully adults who were not around for Y2K, were not born yet.

Zach Mack: Oh, yes, yes. Wow.

Amina Serna: Probably don't remember it was a scary time. People were not very sure what was going to happen. Just to say that, John, we can get it.

Zach Mack: I don't even think of Y2K as a conspiracy theory, as much as it was just like this unknown thing.

Amina Serna: It was on the news.

Zach Mack: We didn't know what was going to happen, or if this thing was going to happen or not. Some people really became very paranoid and started preparing, and other people were just like, well, I guess we'll see, but I think the reality is like we didn't know what was going to happen. Hats off to John for once it didn't happen to going back to his regular life. I think a lot of people, what I've seen over and over in some of the research I've done is when the thing, the big thing that they think is going to happen inevitably doesn't. A lot of people will just say I got the timeline wrong and continue to double down on their beliefs. Just the thing not coming to pass is not always the sobering moment for everyone. Some people really hold on to those beliefs.

I think John was just really articulate in the appeal of a lot of these ideas. Basically, a lot of conspiracy theories, they explain the unexplainable. I think at the end of the day, we all want to feel safe, right? The world is really scary. It's unpredictable. We don't know where things are going. Even though some of these conspiracies are very scary, at least you have the information you need to know, right? They're giving you answers, and I think that provides a sense of control and comfort.

Amina Serna: That's a fabulous way to end. Zach Mack is a producer at Vox Media and host of Alternate Realities, a series from NPR's Embedded podcast. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts. Zach, thanks so much for joining us today.

Zach Mack: Yes, thanks for having me.

 

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