Whiteness and Gendered Extremism

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Less than ten minutes a day, every day, subscribe or follow sideide Hustle School wherever you get your podcasts. or find us directly at sidehustlesschool dot com ACast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere AkS d. com This is a question I've never asked anyone before I realized Why were you at january sixth? That's a good question actually. This is conspiracy, she wrote I'm Kristen Conger My guest, Noel Cook had the surreal experience of being at the US. Capitol on january sixth, twenty twenty one And I swear It was for research. I was in january sixth because at the time I was living in Maryland. COVID had shut down all in person research. I had just started a graduate program in women and gender stududies. And I was looking for a project and I decided to try to go down and photograph the Stop the Steel rally to see if I could get some sort of comparative ethnography through visuals to compare to some of the other marches I had been to in twenty seventeen on, like the original Women's March. That was what my intention was whileile I was doing my own research recently, I ran across Noell Cook's new book The conspiracists, women extremism, and the lore of belonging And in it, she explores the question of how ordinary women get radicalized into conspiracism And the answers that she uncovers in the process Encompass So many themes we've covered before on conspiracy, she wrote. I just immediately emailed her And asked if she would come on the podcast, like, I needed to talk to this woman I mean, because what she gets into includes star seeds on TikTok who believe they're aliens in human forms sent to elevate earthly consciousness There are anti vax moms who find a sense of maternal empowerment in rejecting medical science And then there's the whole white woman appeal of conspiratorial spirituality, AKA in spirituality And january sixth is just the beginning of Noelle's story. In the years since she's developed unexpected relationships with two of the women arrested at the Capitol that day One isvon Sain. Cyr last summer, Yvonne became the first J sixixer to get a refund for the restitution she was ordered to pay to the government as part of her sentencing And the other woman is Tammy Butree And it is not a spoiler to go ahead and tell you like these women are both still steeped in Q andon conspiracism And as Noel unravels in our interview It's not just them. L women are crafting entire worlds in this way And we ignore them at our peril So grab your red string and follow along My name is Noell Cook. I am an ethnographer. I study extremism partarticularly as it pertains to women And middle agge women is my specialty. That is mostly because I am a middle aged woman and being at the Capitol inssurrection back on january sixth, twenty twenty one, I noticed how many women who were participating in that day were my age. and that is how I started studying this population. What is an ethnographer? It's basically a storyteller But it's based in methodology and anthropology. It's participant observation essentially, where you go into a different culture, unlike your own, perhaps, spend some time observing the practices of that culture and understanding what those practices mean to them, which is a great shield for this type of research because it didn't require a lot of pushback. See, I wasn't trying to convert or to change minds. I was trying to understand why they were doing what they were doing and what it meant to them Can you just describe the energy that you felt when you got there, especially considering the timing of when you got there When I arrived there, I honestly had no idea what was happening. And I got there literally at about two o'clock when they breached the Capitol I didn't have any idea that there was anything so serious going on inside because there was no indication with law enforcement. There was no helicopter circling. There were no sirens. There was nothing to indicate what a bridge actually meant. becausecause when I walked up to the Citol, you hit a kiosk. and there was a single female officer standing in that kiosk as I walked up and she said, Be careful They just breached the capital How did it feel when I got there? The energy was very strange One of the first things that happened when I walked onto the back lawn behind the east frront of the Capitol was a woman walked up and touched my arm and said, Be careful, huun, they're gasing the patriots in that very moment, you know, I wanted to go, Oh, no, not the Patriots, but then I realized, wait a minute, she's serious and this isn't a place for joking at this point or sarcasm because this is something serious is happening here. And that's when I kind of wandered around and ended up kind of embedding myself over where I did see some law enforcement to try to watch what was happening. But it was around that time and Ashley Babb was shot and they had brought her out. And so then I thought, oh, I'm going to go on the other side. This is getting dangerous back here. And then the other side, of course, was the side that was televised most, and that was much worse than the east side I was on So that's how I ended up there. Why? Why was it so surprising to see the numbers of specifically, you know, middle aged white women who were there I mean, historically I'm not surprised because women have always participated in these kinds of movements. Without them, we couldn't these movements couldn't exist, right? If we didn't have the support of women through upholding patriarchy and extremism, both And so I wasn't really surprised, I guess what surprised me the most is The age range. When I first started doing this, I looked at the first one hundred women arrested. And I made a chart tried to think of everything I could possibly categorize them as their label, right? And at the end of the day, when I got done with all a hundred of them and I had like twelve different types of datas sets I'm looking at, there was no real pattern that emerged except for age. It was ant ideology. it was GX. That was maor the first one hundred women were the vast majority were G X. And so that was kind of like, I think what was most interesting to me, it wasn't so much like, how could women like me do something like this? They've done this for throughout history What wass surprising, I think, witnessing it, is seeing it up close and person on people who look like they could be my neighbor, look like they could be sitting next to me at a school meeting, who have families, have children, have caregiving responsibilities still. And yet we're willing based on a conspiracy that the election had been stolen were willing to show up to the U.S. Capitol and potentially commit political violence You know, and depending on how you view the violence at the Capitol, I see the bodies as a weapon because if there hadn't been so many bodies it wouldn't have happened, right? And so I think anyone there participating in the crowd who is trying to push through The barriers was definitely engaged in violence. And that kind of surprised me, I think, because I wondered, what what point do you get to in order to be willing to crawl through broken windows of the U.S Capitol, knowing that that could result in some sort of federal prison sentence But then the flip side of that is also it shows this entitlement that goes on with this community Wh there is this idea that either based on conspiracy beliefs or just based on cultural entitlement that they've been raised with, believe that they can do these things with impunity. And that was surprising to me to see how many people felt like they had been done wrong for being arrested for climbing around in Senate offices And I think that was what made it so surprising is how many of these people who lived ordinary lives were willing to upend them for conspiracies I have not visually revisited january sixth in a while and it's It's so unsettling and mind boggling, especially from the vantage point of twenty twenty six when we kind of know that they're all going to be pardoned and this whole thing is going to be sort of right Whitewashed away Right. We're written, We're erased. Its written In some cases it's literally being erased. For example, Von is one of the women in the documentary. She's also one of the women in my book And she, you know, she did this entire thing where she took her case to trial. She's one of the few women that elected for a jury trial And she took the stand in her own defense. and she shared her belief system with the jury and the judge, which started out with I'm a divine sovereign citizen and I don't recognize your jurisdiction And so she was sentenced to thirty months So someone like Avon, what's happened since january sixth. has completely bolstered her belief system. It's done nothing to bring her back into any shared reality because she had her case on appeal And so when those pardons came down and her case is on appeal, she literally was washed off the record It was erased off the record. It's as if she never was there. And many of these people have already done their time, especially the misdemeanors have done their time. so they aren't going to get much back from it. But people who had it on appeal, it literally rewrote their history So you have your you know, your chart of, you know, the first hundred women. but you end up, you know, and you you end up talking to a lot of different people, but you really focus in on Yvonne and Tammy I started out talking to several people. I probably at length with at least a dozen women But getting to learn their backstories, getting to learn their histories was a very time consuming process. And in talking to many of them, it started to become clear also that talking to me had some sort of motivation on their end Either they were trying to solidify their own identity as a J sixer, which was going to give them more influence online, or people were trying to monetize platforms or raise funds As I watch people kind of settle into this new identity and community it was hard to determine how much of this now was true belief versus opportunity. And so at the end of the day, I settled on Tammy and Yvanne because I was convinced and remain convinced that they are true believers and they weren't trying to monetize themselves, essentially. They weren't trying to become influencers. And so that's what made them interesting to me. the ordinary people were what I was fascinated by, not the people who had the motivation of turning themselves into spectacles or fundraising off of it for the next six years. Tal to me a little bit about like Did they have particular gateways into conspiracism and conspirituality you know, beyond just, you know, it was a stop the steel rally all focused around the conspiracy theory of a stolen election But talking to Yvon and Tammy, I mean, it's a whole all encompassing worldview where they don't They don't really talk about Politics directly all that much No. And in the years I was speaking to both of them, I feel like that is hard to believe, but I never had to talk about Trump or my own political beliefs because so much of our conversations revolved around our lives as middle aged women We did not really talk much about january sixth. And I didn't pretend to like any of these things. We literally just spoke about our lives essentially. and through those conversations is when I started to see how conspiracies as coping mechanisms ofentimes. in times of uncertainty, in times of feeling powerless. I saw some of these conspiracies being used as a coping mechanism and as a method of hope The pipeline that led them into this was not directly stopped the steel. For the women I talked to, most of them had already been dabbling. U and almost every single woman I spoke to always started out with twenty twenty changed everything and I think so many people went online looking for alternative health remedies to bolster their immune systems against this new virus. And in the process of that, people who were already set up online with their online shops and their cults and their other influencer groups were poised and ready to start signaling. And so you had two phenomenon going out at the same time in twenty twenty You are three, actually. You have the pandemic, you have this idea of the stolen election. and you have for the first time, many people were going online looking for tips how to homeschool. So parents were women in particular were online looking for some of these answers and tips. And I think that is one way that COVID became such a great a gateway drug, essentially for so many women into conspiracies, which then eventually led them into conspirituality. Which again, I see is a way to soften some of the extremism. In the film, you hear Yvonne talk about divine feminine. And in the book, she goes into that more. one thing about spirituality, it gives women a very specific role. And it looks empowering in many ways because again, we're talking middle aged women who are often invisible by the time they're fifty especially my generation, generation X, who childhood now is extending out what ten years? So your kids go to college or whatever they're doing and then they come back home and they're with you till they're thirty. So you still kind of got that parenting going on Plus, our parents are aging out. And so a lots of us are involved in caregiving for parents now So we're kind of sandwiched between these two worlds. At the same time, spending a lot of time online, again, Genx is the first generation that had to kind of straddle that line between analog and digital and kind of figure our way out as we muddle along, which hasn't been real great. And so I think that the pandemic just was such a huge draw for women in particular because it opened up all of the spheres that women are allowed to participate in It's education, health and moral training with the culture wars And it's the one opportunity especially in some of these more conservative spaces, where women have an opportunity to speak out loudly and ferociously if they want to, because they're mama bears and women can become quite vocal and use violent rhetoric when they're protecting children. and that's seen as just part of what being a mother is. And so I think that was kind of just the perfect storm of so many things converging at once that it really drew a lot of women my age into it The one thing that I did notice very clearly by about year two was how much this resembled a giant trade show, almost of ideologies and ideas And I sometimes would think about it as like you walk into this conference hall and there's different booths set up And I might start out at the astrology booth, and then I might move over to somebody who's got this big chart about corporations up on the wall.'s very anti government, very conspiratorial in that way And then I'll walk around the corner and then someone else is selling all kinds of supplements that are promising to do all kinds of things for me. And then you go a little bit further, you'll find a guy talking about sovereign citizens. And you start to see how UFO guys and sovereign citizens and militia members all start to merge together in this conference hall. And everyone's got their own booth with their different swag But you kind of walk around as the average person and you pick up pieces of it and then you kind of leave with it and that's the beauty of conspiracies. Th are completely adaptable and flexible. and they can shift and change as you need them to And now when you start to add some of the vocabulary from the other ideologies, particularly sovereign citizen language, which also kind of dovetails into biblical language sometimes as well about sovereignty And you know again, things people had never heard of six years ago are now part of their everyday vocabulary. whichich is always funny to me because one of the other boos at the T trrade showh is the Flat Earthers, for example And so you'll have someone like Vugh who believes in Star seeeds and alien DNA and all of these things We then well walk out of a chat group or out of a room, a physical room in the film, we actually were at a place where someone who was a flat Earther was there And in Avam was like, canan you believe that this person's at flat earth or isn't that crazy? And so you realize, okay, some things are more crazy than others, depending on how crazy your own beliefs might sound the average person. at the end of the day is a detachment from a shared reality Whever pieces you're throwing into the mix. Well, and one thing I find so fascinating is that we have so many kind of out there ideas that seem totally antithetical to you know traditional evangelical Christian moralism, but they all seem to reinforce kind of the same Yeah culture wars and political agenda around gender identity, sexuality, abortion, like yeah, I think The the spirituality piece, that kind of evolved. It started in twenty twenty because a lot of these groups were already online withith their stores selling their elixirs and tonics that were going to help boost your immune system. People were taking all kinds of bizarre things that You know and oftentimes cause more harm than good But I just think that there was so much already set up. for commerce, you know, there's a huge there's a huge capitalist piece of this. I think the algorithms are a huge problem Right? Because once you go on searching for one thing, you're going to be led to a whole bunch of other stuff. And that's what happened to me. when I started studying something like Tradwise, for example, that's how I started to think about it as a trade show. It wass like, wait a minute, you've got all this evangel like very Christian extremism, almost Southerven Mountain style stuff going on. But you're also talking about alien DNA and potentially you yourself have some sort of alien hybrid DNA And how is that messhing up with your evangelical Christian friendont? And the answer to that is it didn't mes up in the real world in many ways Online, that is where that conglomerate kind of took hold more than in the real world For example, at Yvon, when she went down her spiritual journey and started calling herself a starseed She did lose most of her in world friends who were evangelicals because it did not. mes up with their belief system That didn't happen online as much. And I think that was part of the problem When when churches shut down to in person gatherings, people were going online for ministry And they kind of stayed there. And it works in both you can see both. You can see evangelical Christians also using the same language. It's very strange We've talked a bit about Yvonne You also end up spending a lot of time with Tammy and she really she seemed to have a really big impact on just kind of your perception of an understanding of the J six women So why what was it about Tammy that moved you so much We've talked a bit about Yvonne. You also end up spending a lot of time with Tammy and she really, she seemed to have a really big impact on just kind of your perception of and understanding of the J six women So why what was it about Tammy that moved you so much Her honesty, honestly, I think, she was so honest about everything and then it happened in her life. And it was interesting because I first start wased speaking to her. I had studied her for a year on paper. so I already knew so much about her. And it was during that first year without ever speaking to her that I started to develop some empathy and was aware of it because it was still somewh of a distance empathy though, you know, for a stranger It was when we started talking, things changed and it became very clear that everything I had learned on paper was pretty true, where she was kind of on her own completely every other adult in her life was embroiled in some kind of crisis at all times, whether it be you know, out of drug binge or incarcerated or whatever. There was just a constant crisis going on in this woman's life. And she was very kind. and that surprised me. I wasn't expecting someone to be kind and thoughtful like she was towards me. And then I got to know her more and I started to understand why she had been at january sixth, and her ideas were very different than what placed Yvonne there, for example. Whereas Avonne felt it was her divine calling that she was placed at J six because she's a truth teller and she had to go through all this suffering not that much unlike what organized religion sometimes tells you to do, right? There's going to be some suffering involved She did all that, She went to jail for it, but then she got the ultimate reward at the end of the day and she was exonerated by Trump and it's erased from her record Tammy went for a very different reasason Tammy saw a ad on Facebook with a bus from her area going to the Capitol and she said, Yay, I don't have to go by myself. You know, I'm always looking to meet people somewhere. She was very lonely and she lived in a very rural isolated community. So she was always looking for times and places to meet people. So she was entering this place from a very different space than Avanne was She wasn' int political prior to this. She in fact she hadn't voted for about a decade Tammy hadn't. And in fact, Von didn't vote for Trump the first time either. So these people weren't overly political to begin with, which was also very interesting and that was the v The vast majority of the women I looked at hadn't participated politically in any meaningful way prior to january sixth. And so real that was a great way to start your political activism, right? Like, whoa. And so what was fascinating about Tammy because again, her purpose was to kind of help quell the loneliness in her life She would spend hours with me and she obviously trusted me. And one reason I got close to her, as you mentioned, is because about six weeks into speaking to her She called me to tell me that her trans daughter had just hung herself in the Mints County jail And she did she called me before she called anyone else. And that was another thing was like she has no one to call. But then if she did, who would she call based on her community Right? Who is she going to reach out to to explain that her trans daughter just hung herself and didn get any kind of sympathy for that becausecause We already know what most of her community thinks about trans people, right So that was fascinating to me that I would be the first person she reached out to. But in that moment, you know, I'd been talking to her for about six weeks. I'd studied her for a year in advance. I knew enough about her that the empathy kicked in And I'm like, yeah, I need to help this person. She literally has no resources and no idea how to even move forward with this. And so that is how I kind of cross that line and it stopped becoming academic because I chose to get involved in her life and try to help her find some resources during that time. Mental health, for example, was impossible for her to find a therapist until she actually went to jail for january sixth for seventeen days. And then she got a probation officer who was able to get a court order for therapy after the death of her daughter so that she could finally get some help But it took for probably nine months to even get a basic therapist. and it took a court order to do it As I really started to feel some empathy also Working with some of these women and seeing how broken some of these systems actually are when you have to navigate them day in and day out How exhausting it could be, how deflating it can be, and how yeah, at some point maybe it is easier to dissociate and to just kind of create your own, you know, make your own eventual world. And that's what I've seen so many of these women do. Because when you start to talk to a lot of people who have really gone into the true belief system where they've upended their real world lives for their online identities. It has been literally become the community and identity and purpose that these people have And that's where they spend most of their time now. And so trying to extract people from that without another place to go is really difficult Tammy trusts me more than she's ever trusted anyone in her life, probably I have a track record now never leading her down the wrong path, never giving her bad advice, right? But yet I've done absolutely nothing to remove her from her conspiracy communities E though sometimes during our conversations, because we have the kind of relationship now that I can say straight up Hey, I've watched you scream about saving the children for all these years now And the Epstein files are out and you're not saying much. What's up with that? right? Like I could have those conversations with her And she's honest about it. And she'll say, yeah, I'm not ready to go there yet. And what that means is In order to go there, in order to go, yeah, this is what I'm seeing and Trump may not be this this this hero after all, it's going to be being shunned from your online groups that you've spent most of your days with now for what five years It means creating a whole new identity and sense of belonging and sense of community which was something for decades she'd been trying to build for herself. So how do you extract someone? from those spaces when you know you got the dopamine hits, you got all the things that we know about what this online activity does for your brain And then the algorithms just keep reinforcing whatever delusional ideas you might be harboring And savvy influencers and media users know how to make sure the algorithms keep serving you more You mentioned earlier about white women and the population I was studying. and I've been asked before, well, how come we're not looking at any women of color Well, because I looked to the january sixth women that were arrested and there weren't any women of color, they were arrested. They were all white women or women who identify as white women anyway So it, you know, it's definitely problem that we see and it's not about class. A lot of people want to say, well, this is just a poverty situation. it's not. or education, lack of education, lack of intelligence. And I reject all of those explanations. They're way too simple U because But I think people. realize is someone like Avghne, for example. She's very, very bright She makes a choice and I remind her of a conversation we had a year or two ago where I said something about where you had described this to me as the gamification of life at one point or like like a choose your own adventure. It it choose your own adventure we talked about And she says in the film, Yes, and when you realize you can control the game, it's magical And what that translates to, essentially is when you learn to dissociate well enough and you can create your own reality and live within that, and find the rest of your community is doing the same thing online,'s magical because you can completely dissociate from what's real and what's not And I think that's what's allowing so many people to ignore the fact that Trump is all over these Epstein files. They still want to believe that he's there to save the day. you know, and I'd like to ask most of them too. It's like, okay, let's just say let's say your hypothesis of he's been an undercover FBI informant all these years taking down his cabal of el leite people who are hurting children. If that's true, he really sucks at his job, thenen, because these documents are going back to the late eighties and ninetyies, right So how long do how long can we keep that one up So it just again, it's the thing with conspiracies and with when you start to get into that mindset of belief systems, you can literally moreph you can shape and mold Everything to fit one of your conspiracorial responses or answers for why it's happening because it's so flexible and pliable Well, and even to the point that, you know, as Yvon's talking about, this is, you know, you can choose your an adventure. It's the gamification of life. But at the same time She is you know, kind of pressing you for like, are you ready to give up your free will and ascend And it's like isn't that kind of the opposite of like you give up your free will and yet you can kind of create your own reality that Yeah, it's really straight. whichich again, you know, I started to look at some of this conspiruality. It's not that different than some organized religions, right There is always this expectation that there will be some kind of suffering involved because you're waiting for some big reward at the end. It comes with an instruction on how you're supposed to live your life, you know kind of your guidebook for how to live your daily life. All these things are very similar to organizeed religion in many ways. But they're not.'re completely decentralized. And that's how the pick or choose your own adventure comes in because you might start out evangelical Christian. But at the end of the day, you've merged in constitutional shheriff language, along with all this you know manifestestinity stuff. becausecause when you get up free will is part of that predetermination that also goes way back. This is how you get the white supremacs, the blood and soil people, the star seeds, everybody speaking the same language is all about sovereign divine birthright stuff. None of these women that I've talked to would identify as racist or antiemitic They would tell you absolutely not. In fact, Tammy has still black grandchildren And I know her not to be a racist However online in these communities, Most of these conspiracies have kinds of racist overtones, undertones or anti Semitic. But again, when there's a lack of curiosity to see where these things came from, and you're just part of this community that shares indiscriminately You don't stop and ask those questions Even when I stop and ask those questions now at this stage of the game with Tammy, I can do that with her. I still she knows where I'm going with it And this is where it became so clear to me is she'll literally say, yeah, I'm not going to go there yet because she knows on some on some levels, she's still Got one foot in shared reality But her community and the place she's made for herself for the last five years has its own set of rules and its vocabulary that she has to adhere to when she's there. The part about Tammy is in the last couple of years, she has gotten a job And so she's offline a lot more than she used to be And she's a lot more engaged in her real world and her real life whichich is probably the number one best thing for people is getting them offline so much But again with middle aged women There's not a lot of options for us, you know We spend an awful lot of time online because it's Kind of one of the few spaces left Well, and then the time offline, like you were talking about earlier, you have the sort of sandwich generation caregiving on either side. Right Right. And then there's the invisibility factor. And I think this generation,enics women aren't ready to be invisible It is just culturally what happens once you turn fifty basically. And I see a lot of these women finding, you know, some of so it's so ironic They would find empowerment in some of these movements, right? Because it's not empowering at the end of the day, it's upholding patriarchy one hundred percent. part of the divine feminine is a reinforcement of traditional gender roles. It's giving women empowering them to speak out and to be vocal and active in the spaces that were already designated their r So it's not, you know there are a few of the women. There were a few women who were arrested who were who were active members of like militias, for example But those are the women that we often hear about that are more often brought in by the men in their lives. A lot of times we hear about women in extremist movements that like there is a guy in Maryland who was planning to do something to the power grid, right? And he was accelerationist, ne Nazi guy And his girlfriend was photographed in all of the pictures with him. They're both wearing the same gear. They're holding the same kind of weapons. but it was always this guy who was a neo Nazi and girlfriend. You know Kathleen Belou, I believe was the one who wrote about you know the girlfriend the wife, the girlfriend They always are just labeled in that defined feminine role as opposed to an active participant in whatever the movement is that they're involved in. And so you can see that still happens so often with like that Nazi in Maryland a couple of years ago with his girlfriend. They were literally labeled that by the press, as Nazi and his girlfriend And yet she had full autonomy. She was there of her own volition That was what was so interesting about so many of the women I talked to on january sixth, they were not dragged there by men Many of them went on their own, or they went with adult children, or they went with female friends U These women were not brought there because men in their lives said, let's go. Some of them did, of course. But most of the women I was studying were solo or had come with other women. Avonne came with her husband, but she ditched her husband somewhere along the way. She went inside. He never did. He was outside for hours trying to figure out where she went And so I think that was what I also thought was very fascinating as how many of these women are working autonomously. They are using their own agency to participate in these ways So I think it does dispel some of that myth that women are being dragged along by their husbands, kind of similarly to how we look at like Jadie Vance's wife or Melania Trump. and we always feel sorry for them as if they're there like they didn't know what they were getting into. And it's kind of like, well no. Oftentimes they absolutely know what they're getting into and they're an active and voluntary participant. You know I think that is one thing also that needs to be kind of dispelled is that Many women are ively participating without the role of any man of their life pushing it And they're acting in different ways because men and women engage with conspiracies in different ways as well Again, so many of the women got brought into the health pipeline which led them into lots of anti governmental conspiracies and stuff and then the schools. And you look at women and men and you look at who actually is causing change in policies and causing change in the way we live our regular lives. that's affecting all of us. And you look at the women, they're the ones who haveve really done a lot of damage here If you look at school boards, entire curriculums have changed across the country in certain areas because of groups like Ms for Liberty. that knew how to harness that collective of getting mothers in there to scream and yell because again, it's one of the it's one of the few arenas that women can be unfeminine Otherwise, this group and these conservative movements require women to be pretty demure and passive in many cases. but this is a movement that allows them to be aggressive, obnoxious, and violent. And well, so that's worth noticing And at that point, like I often, with a lot of the research that I've ended up in for consonspiracy She wrote, you know, as I'm, you know, kind of trying to put a gendered framework on it, I have to pause and ask myself like Wait, but which women A I talking about? Like is this a gender thing or is this explicitly an intersection of gender and whiteness It's whitest Yeah And know, and that was the one thing sometimes when I looked at this trade show with these bizarre groups that didn't seem to have any obvious fit The one thing, their messaging may be different, their vocabulary may be different, The participants may be different end goal seems to lead to the same place, and that is an identity of whiteness. And it really is that way. When you I remember looking at visuals and looking at memes. and you'd have like the Western culture people with the pictures of the castles and the beautiful scenery like this is what they stole from you, right? And then you'll get, this could have been we could have had this and it's always about whiteness. And you see the same thing even leading into conspiruality aliens and you'll see like Pleedans who are like you the star seeds that most of these women identify as But if you look atict depictions of what a Pelidian is supposed to look like, they all look like they're from Sweden And so it's very easy to kind of see how whiteness as an identity plays out across the board It's aesthetic. There's a lot of aesthetics when it comes to some of the movements to draw women in. that was look even even something like Tadwives It's an aesthetic movement that looks pretty benign on the surface. until again, you start to get a little deeper into it, start to look at those hashtags and and realize, oh, wait, this is an accelerationist. And part of it is just we don't understand enough about extremism, I think. The average person doesn't to see like we just think there's Nazis and there's non Nazis. And it's so much more nuanced and insidious because a lot of these people are getting stuff through school boards and other policies that are going to impact us for generations And so I wish we had a better way a delivery method for educating the average person about what they're seeing I don't know how to do that because we no longer can rely on legacy media to share the full story with us either, right? So it's a huge problem that's not going away anytime soon Well, is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to make sure listeners know? Yeah, I think the one thing is haven't I think it's hard for some people to understand how I read I'm able to presresent these women's stories. with empathy. And that was something that I struggled a lot with myself. I certainly didn't anticipate feeling that way. Ye one shielded me on paper by setting people on paper, you hover above, they all look kind of the same and you don't have to deal with the human quality piece And it was when I started talking to them in person and getting to know them as people finding that in some cases, we even had common ground, which blew my mind, right I that I had to start to examine that and I struggled a lot with the empathy piece. But I finally have come up with this I think empathy can be a way of restoration in some ways I Because I think when you stop and listen to some of these people and if you can separate some of the crazy hateful conspiratorial language you get beneath it and you start to understand, o, okay. So this belief started to form around when this big system broke in your life and you start to see all these failures and all of these systems that have been very difficult to navigate and how so many people midlife are kind of on their own to figure these things out and don't always have the resources or the skill sets to do that in a healthy way So you can have empathy without sympathy And that's kind of where I came down to is I can be empathetic to these women and their histories I can also look at their actions and believe that they deserve consequences for those actions and not have sympathy for the consequences, but I can have empathy people who made the choices they did, if that makes sense It makes so much sense. I mean, and it also just encapsulates the complexities and the you know two things can be true at once that I It's a hard one. Yeah, that gets flattened so often in all of this. That's just it. And you know and again, I wasn't dealing conspiruality again is for women, it softens it. It softened it for me to study it also Right? I wasn't sitting in accelerationist spaces or neo Nazi spaces that were doing that overtly. That kind of messaging is done much more subtly in the groups, the spaces I was in It's done through aesthetics. It's done through eventually, if you know, you know, right? You have to be able to know what you're looking for Um justust to see it the algorithms will bring it to until you recognize it more clearly Thank you so much to Noel Cook Her book, The Conspiracy, Women, extxtremism and the Lore of Bonging is exactly the kind of summer beach treat you're looking for, right It truly it is fantastic. You can get it wherever you get books. You can also Watch a documentary of Noelle's road trip with Yvon and Tammy that I highly recommend and it is also called The Conspiracists Now going back to Noelle's trade show analogy. I'm curious Which booths have been catching your eyes lately? I mean, for me, especially after talking to Noell and you know, with the mama bear and homeschooling of it all It is a little conspiracy adjacent, but I want to see the homeschool booth Yeah I guess what I'm asking is is Conspiracism seeping into homeschool curriculum as well? or is it just Christian fundamentalism Anybody know I'd love to hear from you with that answer or any kinds of conspiracy theories that you would like me to explore. Links to get in touch are in the episode description If you ever w to check out my sources, just go to conspiracyieshrote d. com slash episodes Thank you so much for being here This has been conspiracy, she wrote Until next time I think that's been the thing that makes me the most angry about all of this