Noelle Cook on The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging

In this deeply human and revealing episode of Faithful Politics, hosts Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram sit down with Noelle Cook, ethnographer, filmmaker, and author of The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism and the Lure of Belonging. Cook’s award-winning documentary and forthcoming book explore how ordinary women become entangled in conspiracy movements—from QAnon to spiritualized extremism—while searching for meaning, identity, and community.

Cook recounts how the January 6th insurrection inspired her to study women drawn into these spaces and what she discovered: that many were mothers, caregivers, and former churchgoers who turned to online conspiracies to fill the void of belonging. Through intimate storytelling, she shares her road trip with two women convicted for their roles in January 6th, revealing how trauma, faith, and hope intertwine in the psychology of belief.

Together, the hosts and Cook unpack questions of empathy, extremism, and how conspiratorial thinking becomes a kind of spiritual coping mechanism in a fractured America. The conversation explores what churches, communities, and even families can learn from these stories about the human desire for connection—and the danger of mistaking belonging for truth.

Learn more: https://www.noellecook.com/about

Guest Bio:
Noelle Cook is an ethnographer and filmmaker whose work examines the intersections of gender, conspiracy, and extremism. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism and the Lure of Belonging and associate producer of the award-winning documentary The Conspiracists, which won Best Feature Documentary at the Miami Women’s Film Festival and an Exceptional Merit Award at Documentaries Without Borders. Her research focuses on how digital spaces, spirituality, and trauma intersect to shape modern extremist movements.

Transcript

0:18

Hey, welcome back, Fetal Politics listeners and watchers. If you're watching on our YouTube channel, we're so glad to have you. I am your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by my favorite work wife, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Doing great, thanks Will. Today we have with us Noelle Cook. She is an ethnographer whose work explores the intersection of gender, conspiracy, and extremism. She's the author of a forthcoming book, The Conspiracists, Women Extremism and the Lure of Belonging, and associate producer of the award-winning documentary, The Conspiracists, which won best featured documentary at the Miami Women Film Festival and an exceptional merit award at Documentaries Without Borders. And we're going to be talking to her about this film of hers by the same name, The Conspiracists, which follows a group of very interesting women um through a journey of conspiracy theories, spirituality, and really just kind of a look at today's most urgent social challenges. So welcome to the show, Noel. Thank you for having me. Yeah, we're really glad to have you. And we're going to get into your documentary, of which I love, but I want to just do some level setting if we can, just to learn a little bit more about who you are and kind of like what brought you to this work. So my research on you says that you've spent years basically studying these sort of fringe elements of the American landscape, uh conspiracy theories and all kinds of other stuff. I... I'm just taking a guess here, but that's probably not something like the little girl version of you dreamt of doing. So how did you get into this work? Well, the little girl wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, so I did that for 22 years first. ah And then I got divorced and I went back to school and got a degree in anthropology. And so I ended up doing this work because the pandemic hit right when I had started my master's program and my graduate thesis went out the window. I was in India and got sent home almost immediately. I was supposed to do a documentary film there. uh So January 6th rolls around and after sitting in the house for a year and having no real inspiration, I decided to go down to DC to take pictures of a protest because I had done many of the other marches like the Women's March and the Science March. And I just, as an amateur photographer, like the visuals of protests. And I got a lot more than I bargained for when I went down that day. So. I definitely know that you did. So kind of describe for our listeners what happened and how, describe this documentary for us. Like what's the basic storyline premise and where did that day take you um as you went in that direction? came because of population I started studying after January 6th, and I looked at my photographs. And I was quite a ways away from the building, but was able to use a 400 zoom lens. And what really struck me was how many women were there and how many women looked just like me. Middle-aged white women sitting next to people in full body armor. And men, not just men, women were using violent rhetoric too. I was just surprised to see people my age doing that. even though historically they've always have. And my cohort is who handed over the second election to Trump. I think they raised their approval by about seven points this election, as opposed to 2020, you know, 2016. And then the other group that grew the most were their sons. And that's primarily what I saw at January 6th was a lot of millennial men and lot of Gen X women. And so I started looking into that. How I did it for the first year is on paper. It was purely open source. I was reading the court documents from the files of the FBI affidavits to learn what each person did. I looked at the first 100 women and made a spreadsheet and looked for patterns to try to understand women who probably had caregiving responsibilities and families and probably didn't have criminal records. What prompted them to break the law at that level that would get them potentially thrown into federal prison? uh And so what I learned for the first year is exactly that. The average person that I studied didn't have a criminal background, and these were the women, ah but they all became very active politically during COVID. ah And so that's how I ended up studying them on paper, and then in Facebook groups I joined for a year, and then I started getting over my head because I was following them where they led me, and there were things I was beginning not to understand, especially with spirituality. which is a term that was coined by two sociologists in 2011 to describe the meeting of new age religion or spirituality with conspiracies. And so that is kind of where I got led, where these women found QAnon, they turned it into spiritual belief as well, oftentimes replacing organized religion in the last five years. Wow. em So in the document, uh you travel, carpool, road trip um with em two women in particular. um Can you just sort of talk about who these two women are and maybe like how you got connected with them? Well, Yvonne is the main uh person in the film, the one we actually did the road trip with. And I started speaking to her once she took me into a realm I was unfamiliar with. And I asked her in messaging and through Facebook, you know, could you explain this to me? And she gave me her cell phone number and said, call me. So I called her. And that led to about an hour long conversation. And another one followed the next day and the next day. And that's how that happened. So that by the time Yvonne was going to trial, because she chose to reject plea deal. She is such a true believer that she truly believes that she was guided to January 6 by what she now calls spirit and was placed there for a purpose. And she believes that her trial was to speak the truth and tell her true story, that she is an advanced being from a higher entity here on Earth to help lead people, humanity, into Earth in 5D, which would be heaven on Earth. And this is a new age concept. going back for very long time. But em none of this is really new. A lot of it's recycled and repurposed. And what's happened, I think, with some of these extremist groups is they found each other online and they melded into a trade show almost where everybody has their booth. They're selling a different product, but they've all got their booth and they're all willing to give you swag to take home and consider. And you're to come back with some really strange mixture of ideologies at the end of the day. And so the documentary happened because of Yvonne. I went to Yvonne's trial and I watched her stand up in front of the judge and tell him that she was a divine sovereign being and that she did not recognize his authority or jurisdiction and she got 30 months in prison for that. But she was pardoned, right? She had just completed her sentence and was in a halfway house when the pardons came down and so it was vindicating for her, see? She believed that she had gone to jail because she was telling her truth and that the light was going to outweigh the dark and then she gets pardoned and it really feels to her, it's only ingrained those beliefs more now. We took the road trip with her from her sentencing in DC. I flew out to DC. We hadn't planned to do a film. There had never been a plan for a film in the first place. That just kind of happened. I was doing research for the director on a different topic and as she heard about my research, she decided to do a film. We were originally just going to film Tammy in Pennsylvania, but after Yvonne's sentencing, she decided she wanted to do it with us and I had agreed to caravan with her back to Idaho from D.C. because she had to pick up one of her children's car in Ohio. So it was a very strange situation with two very unlikely people, you know, me being asked to do this favor of driving cross country with her so we can get this other car back. And it just kind of speaks to the nature of this whole project that started out as an academic project. and then turned into building relationships with two people essentially is what you saw in the film. And interestingly, in the entire time we were talking, we never discussed politics. I never ever had to say what my political views were. We literally talked about their belief systems and conspiracies because of that all consuming and that wholly in charge now of their identities and their sense of belonging and participation. And so that's how that road trip happened. It was very spontaneous and We just went with it. And that's why it's just Liz and me, no crew, just the three of us in a car. Then we stopped to meet Tammy along the way. What I think was really interesting, Tammy I also met in similar way, only it was a little bit different way. uh I also had been following her on paper and I had learned a lot in that first year about what a tragic life she had had and really started to put the pieces of what I was learning about her uh next to research and showing who is most susceptible to conspiracies. And one of the primary drivers is because people have to make sense of trauma they've endured in their lives. And for Tammy, conspiracies helped explain some of the trauma that's happened. For example, Save the Children was used to entice a lot of middle-aged women into the QAnon movement. uh Tammy was one of them. And in Tammy's life, behind every corner lies someone ready to assault a child. So for her, It was, it seemed obvious that this was real and she was gonna do everything she could to go all in and fight it. uh Two of her children, she told me, were involved in something called Cash for Kids in Pennsylvania. And the first moment I heard that, I thought for sure it was a conspiracy, because we're saving children. So I Googled it and sure enough, it was a scandal in Pennsylvania in early 2000s where... Two juvenile court judges were incarcerating youth into a for-profit detention center and getting kickbacks. And two of her kids got caught up in this. uh And so she knows that this happens. And she calls it trafficking. She thinks that this is trafficking because two of them were for literally like a playground fight were put in for like two years and one of them wasn't even a teenager yet. ah it just, there's a lot of, this woman has such tragedy in her life. that I understand why she tries to explain it. It helps her feel less powerless. And so I reached out to her on Facebook because her co-defendant in January 6th committed suicide. And I knew so much about her already that I reached out to her in Facebook and said, heard about your co-defendant. I'm sorry, are you okay? Because again, suicide surrounds her as well. And she got back to me again with a phone number. And I called her and we started talking. And so I started to realize there's a lot of this that's replacing uh what used to be like third spaces where we would have, we're rather going to church anymore. People are getting their spiritual information or ministry online so often. And in some cases have flat out rejected organized religion, like in Yvonne's case. uh Yvonne, for example, during COVID, uh when they closed the church down. to in-person gatherings. That was when she decided, she was already dabbling in some conspiracies. So that was when she decided that the church now was part of that group that was making us complacent slaves and that organized religion was only in place to control us. And it was a manmade institution. So she rejected it completely and went full on new age. Prior to that, she had been evangelical uh for 20 years and pretty active in her church. But. the more she got into conspiracies, the more alienating that became to the people in her real world. And so, you know, when she starts to go off on some of these things about adrenochrome, for example, perhaps in a Bible study, that's going to raise some eyebrows. And so I think what happens is the more outlandish the conspiracies get, the deeper these women go to find community and to find belonging and to find friendship. which is what I experienced. They almost immediately wanted to talk on the phone. And that was, there's several other women that I talked to on the phone over the years too, but I did not include in the book because I really wanted to do a really thorough job on explaining Tammy and Yvonne's belief systems and some of the things that might have led them to where they are today. And how the recent scholarship has now caught up to that same field work I've been doing since 21, because once they get published and peer reviewed, uh it's all matching up. There's a variety of reasons that people are drawn to conspiracies, but it really seems to be very personal to each person. it's a lot. Did I answer your question? Okay. and it completely rewired my brain a little bit because I had another question prep, I wanted to. um said. A humanizing tone? Was that it? Because that's your number two. yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna use a humanizing tone or ask you about your humanizing. No, no, but in all seriousness, like, when I watch this documentary. It's like. How do I say this? Like when you watch a documentary, there's normally like an aha moment where you watch it, you learn something, you kind of move on with your life. uh This documentary was basically like one long aha moment uh because what you're looking at is you're looking at other Americans uh acting and behaving like normal people, you know, but... they just believe things that are different than you or I. And I think what gets lost in sort of like the public debate about MAGA or conspiracy theories is like, it's so easy to just like dehumanize them, right? Or dehumanize their thought process. to do that myself, to be honest with you. When I first started this project, I did it from a very clinical distance. And I'm not dehumanizing them because that's not what ethnography does. It's observing and trying to understand something in their culture and what it means to them. So that was kind of a nice method to use because I didn't have to, uh I wasn't trying to change minds. I was trying to understand why they believed what they believed. Yeah, and some of the things that you all were talking about in the documentary and even just some of stuff that you brought up now about uh dimensions and whatnot. ah I mean, you were having conversations with these people and they were talking to you about Mike Pence being a reptile or something like that. No, he's a pedophile. The Queen of England was the reptile. uh get them mixed up. But even still, in this context, it's kind of funny, it's sort of joking, but in the moment, you're like, yeah, okay. You're doing very good active listening. And I think they could sense that. And then I think that's one of the reasons that they confided in you. And I just got to know, what was going through your brain? As you're hearing these terms, these concepts, these conspiracies, um like, was there any point when you're like, my God, what did I get myself into? Or... But you know what it was? It was more the vicarious trauma of hearing their daily lives, to be honest with you. That was actually more, because you have to remember for a year I did this on paper in a very detached way. so I knew what they, knew what, nothing they said shocked me because I had already read it in one of my Facebook groups or on Instagram. But once you start talking to someone. And we found, know, what was interesting to me is in the beginning we found some commonalities, right? We're middle-aged women the same age. So yeah, we've experienced some of the same things in life as middle-aged American women. That was surprising. One of the first things that really took me back was when I met Tammy. Very shortly after I met Tammy, she said, I'm really worried because she was just about to come up on her. She had taken a plea deal in Jason. She had walked in and out and she was sentenced to 20 days. So she said that the judge wants, or her lawyer wants 15 character letters that they submit to the judge. And I've looked at all these cases, so I know what she means. Everybody submits as many letters you can get talking about what a value to the community you are and that you're a good character. This was out of character that you would storm the Capitol. But Tammy said to me, very candidly, I don't know 15 people. The only people I have any interaction with are my children who... or not, who are either incarcerated, strung out, or just not gonna help. And so I thought about that for a minute and I stopped and paused, like, gosh, would I have 15 people if I had to do that, like, right now? Because when you spend your whole life raising children and taking care of other people, you find yourself in midlife with not, many women find themselves with not a large social safety network anymore. And that's why the internet is so addictive, I think, and fills such a huge void in people's lives. especially middle-aged women who are sandwich generation. As childhood extends longer now, our parents are aging. And so we're caring for kids, maybe grandkids, and now parents too. As housing costs rise, as jobs disappear, as any social safety nets begin to disappear as well, you know, when life gets harder, there's got to be a way to cope. And I see uh conspiracies being used pretty strongly as a coping mechanism oftentimes. It's a way to tell yourself everything. It's probably like, you know, some people do with organized religion or traditional religion, where you pray about it and you just keep praying. You keep doing the same thing, hoping. It's a method of hope, right? That this is going to be answered. This is going to be solved. You know, for Tammy, her favorite conspiracy is the Nassarajah-Sara conspiracy, where it's about abundance and prosperity. And we could trace that going way back to the 80s. And so it's easy for her to fathom because it's familiar. uh And what she wants more than anything is to help move her family out of this intergenerational pattern of trauma, poverty, uh incarceration, addiction. And, you know, she's actually doing quite well in the last couple of years. And she's got a job. I think that's because she found a couple of people online outside of myself that are uh also conspiracists, but I'm not a conspiracist. the people she found online are, but they also are decent people who aren't exploiting her. And so she has some support system now that she might not have had before. And so she's finding some independence again in her life, and she's not spending as much time online. em so, Yvonne, on the other hand, has gone even further into her beliefs. And because she's alienated so many people in real life, she thinks she's just here on Earth as a prophet teacher type of thing. em And you find that it's already interchangeable, whether you're talking New Age religion or Christian nationalism, the vocabulary is different, but the meaning and intent is often the same. So this is absolutely like, um I mean, I don't, there's a lot of words I could actually use to describe it. I'm not feeling like negative in the sense like I'm like feeling really judgmental about it. I'm feeling pretty curious. Like why do you think that these spaces, like we're so attractive to women. think you're kind of like appealing to that or kind of mentioning that. um But what is it about these spaces that churches, schools, uh medicine, what do they miss that these spaces are offering? Go ahead. COVID, the pandemic really opened up space for even more um women to be online looking for things like remedies to help with COVID or to boost your immune system. And you have to remember these are very gendered spaces because you're dealing with children, dealing with health, everybody started to have to homeschool when school shut down. And so people were online looking for homeschooling tips. who had never considered doing such a thing before. And I think algorithms just start bringing more and more. I've done that myself with my research with Tradwives. I'll follow one and the next thing I know, I've got someone with vintage sewing machines and hashtags that say Ted Kaczynski in them. So, you know, that's what happens, I think. And so many women, because this was the women's sphere of education, health, family, uh moral training, all of those things. And you can see that getting replaced online everywhere we look. uh multiple big accounts on Twitter are the moral police now. There's people who, know, the anti-vaxxers now have convinced people whose own children and who themselves are fully vaccinated, but somehow the COVID vaccine became the evil. And um so most of them think that whether they're saving children from sex trafficking, cabal of adrenochrome drinking pedophiles, or they think they're saving them from... Some people believe nanochips are in the COVID vaccines, other things that are designed to kill us. So they all seem to turn around on vaccines. The majority of the ones I talked to turned on vaccines during COVID. There's been a COVID, there's been an anti-vax movement for years and probably the most prominent one in my memory was Jenny McCarthy when she came out saying that vaccines cause autism. And I've seen it grow, but it was still somewhat fringe. And I think it's interesting when we, earlier when you asked me about talking to fringe groups, in the beginning they felt fringe, but then they exploded into the mainstream. I mean, I was sitting at Thanksgiving table in 2023, I think it was, and there were four generations who knew what QAnon was. At least I had some basic idea of it. And most of those people were not online, like my mother and my aunts, were not, but they had heard of it somehow, somewhere. I think that a lot of this stuff has... just kind of exploded into the mainstream since COVID. Going back to 2020 when Target put out the little house on the prairie dresses for everybody and all the dry goods were being purchased and everyone started talking about homesteading and baking and self-sufficiency, which then you go looking for sourdough recipes, right? You wanna do a sourdough starter. All of a sudden you're gonna get fed people with hashtags like revolt against the modern world, which is a Julia Savola book from like the 30s who was even more fascist than Mussolini. um Because there's a, real trend to reject modernity, technology, which is interesting, they all live online, know, and those who are doing Homestead off the grid all have podcasts and full on businesses that they're selling from. So there's a real contradiction in how things actually manifest in the real world versus what they say online sometimes. Wow. uh Yeah. I know that the conservative space especially is sort of really populated with podcasts, YouTube channels, stuff like that, uh which is one of the reasons why people should like and subscribe to our YouTube channel because we have to get better. We have to do better people. I am curious, is sort of just taking a quick off-ramp for a second to talk about conspiracies kind of as a concept. Are conspiracies on a spectrum of any kind? Because I believe there could be aliens up there. I don't have any proof. But if someone were to ask if you believe in aliens, I'd probably be like, yeah, probably. uh But there's a difference, I think, between that and believing that we live on a different dimension. uh So can you talk just a little bit about conspiracies? I don't know. If it is a spectrum, what is that spectrum? And how do we... How do we know that somebody's conspiracies are bad, but like, the little conspiracies I keep are good? I mean, I think when you, the conspiracies that um other people, a lot of these conspiracies, if you were to ask Tammy and Yvonne, they would tell you they are not racist. And yet so many of the conspiracies that they believe in and parrot have all kinds of racist and anti-Semitic undertones and overtones, both. And so. There's a real lack of intellectual curiosity sometimes, I think, about just sharing stuff without really understanding what you're doing. Because I can guarantee neither of them would identify as racist. And yet I can give you multiple examples probably today on social media that would say they, at first glance you would say they are. uh So there's this, again, conspiracies are about feelings. It's about how they make you feel. And then you find enough people that share that same feeling and you're kind of off to the races. And then when you have powerful people in positions of authority who are self-serving enough to see this problem and learn how to exploit it for their own purposes, and now you've got the president of United States sharing QAnon memes. And I'm pretty sure Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, just went on yesterday or the day before and literally said exactly what QAnon believes is that Trump is a white hat FBI informant taking down Epstein, which would be part of that elite cabal of pedophiles. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that, but that's exactly, that's probably the best example I can think of, of, of, he knows it's not true. He knows that's not true. But as part of the base starts to splinter on the Epstein files not being released, they have to keep throwing out some more hope because this group has shown that for five solid, six solid years, they will work off the method of hope and be satisfied. Yeah, you know, in the documentary, there was often uh language talking about uh awakening or transformation. And I've heard this language uh before in other conspiracy types, primarily QAnon, like the Great Awakening, right? So like, what should we make of this kind of language uh when we hear it, especially like in, you know... conspiracy theories, you know, like, what is this awakening or this transformation? Like, like, what are we awakening from? uh Well, we're working to truth, whatever that means exactly. But I guess that we're supposed to be divine sovereign beings. Essentially, I think that would be kind of work both ways through some more of the fundamentals of Christianity pieces to the spirituality pieces. It's about explaining things that... uh I'm gonna screw up right now. So you're have to say that again, because I forgot exactly. I get so many things going through my head at once, as you can imagine. It's so hard to filter it. So you can ask me that again, and I will think of a better answer, because I just blanked it. Yeah, no, no, no, no problem. So and wait, hold on. I lost my turn about two and that's two of us. right. So. Thrive magazine, oh, Transformation, okay. Yeah. So in the film, uh it appeared that conspiracy believers uh often use language such as like transformation or awakening. And I'm really curious on like, do you interpret that kind of like framing spiritually uh in relation to like conspiracy theories or even extremism? Well, in this case, in what I've studied, it's kind of magical thinking that there's going to be, it could be a fairy tale, it could be a Bible story, whatever you want to make it, it's a hero coming in and making everything okay. You know, and it kind of fits with the whole daddy thing that they're using with Trump, which is very bizarre to me. Not only does it reinforce the whole patriarchy thing, but that's okay, see, this group is good with that. ah So I think it means that... things are just going to magically change. That's really what it is. Things are going to magically change overnight, whether it's uh powerful people who hurt kids are publicly executed, which is what they expect to happen once the cabal is taken down. um Or it means all of a sudden all this money that you're owed by your government is going to come in and you're going to have this abundance and prosperity and every problem you've had disappears. ah It's really, that's what it is. It's a method of hope again. It's just something to believe in. And it's what gets them through the day because so many conspiracies are coping mechanisms. And now they've also become community. And again, because conspiracies are so alienating and you've lost a lot of people in the real world, it's not uncommon to have... Tammy, for example, used to go to Trump rallies, not so much to listen to Trump speak, but to meet up with her telegram fam, is what she called them, people that she's in groups with online, you know, which I guess is not that odd considering I ended up going on a road trip with someone I met online, so. I mean it's like everything is online right now right? mean it's like it's not that part that's the strange part you know like meeting people oh and yeah like online and all that right it's like there's more to it and obviously I know that we've been we've been saying that you know how do you actually connect in the moment with what they're saying and not like, like, hold judgment to the side and then try to like balance like actually empathy with academic rigor. Like, how do you do that? And, and I think with that, I really, I really want to know, like, was there ever a time like when was it hardest to do that? Like, was there a time when you had to bite your tongue so much or just like you couldn't or you were just absolutely floored with what was being said. I think, yeah, I see again, because of the nature of how I did this over a period of time, nothing surprised me exactly. And our phone calls up until that road trip didn't talk about much that I had to push back on. We were talking about everyday problems. We were talking about either their beliefs when I was asking questions so I could understand better. It wasn't until the road trip that I actually pushed back on anything at all. And even then I had to do it pretty mildly. when we were in Tammy's living room, you haven't seen the film, but there is a scene when we're in Tammy's living room where I'm asked a direct question about what I think and feel, which I've always been honest about, by the way. I will answer questions, honestly. I just don't, don't, I just go where they lead me, essentially, so I can understand them. ah And we did have a conversation that did get a little heated. ah And, you know, I think with empathy, that happened by accident ah because I... I had to clinical distance with academics, but Tammy changed all that for me in September of 2022, when only about six weeks after we'd been talking on the phone, she called me to tell me that her transgender daughter had committed suicide in the Men's County Jail that afternoon. And I found that really shocking that someone I've only been speaking to from online, I'd be the first person she would call. But that was how few people in the real world she had to turn to. And so, My academic project went out the window and I put my master's program on hold and uh started writing a book instead because there was no way I was going to be able to maintain the academic boundaries necessary to pass the kind of review I would need to because I was personally involved. I helped her find a lawyer who took it pro bono and after a year didn't get enough back from the prison to do anything with it. um we that's how Tammy and I got close through those traumas of hers pretty much. um And so. I think that was what it was, is having a human experience together. And I mean, I don't know how you don't have empathy for someone. And I already had, I did have empathy going in for her because I knew so much about her life going into it. ah So I definitely did have empathy for her. Because if her life were fiction, if I was writing a book of fiction, an editor would take out half of the stuff because they would tell me it wasn't plausible or it too much or over the top. eh For real, I mean, it's just insane. And I had to leave so much out of the book. They edited a lot out because there's so many people living still who were involved in these things. I think what was the most interesting part to me was um learning so much from people so different than myself. I didn't know that um you didn't get to just make phone calls and that someone had to pay an exorbitant amount per minute to talk to their loved one who was in prison. until Tammy, the day after Sabrina died in jail, um was saying that they were wanting to have a phone call, but Sabrina didn't have credits in jail and Tammy was waiting for her disability check to come in before she could buy more for herself. I mean, that's just wrong. And so I think the interesting part is there are some places that we can work together. Tammy and I have actually talked about that. So I'm trying to help her focus on something other than online conspiracies, because she knows a lot. She's experienced a lot. to do some good work as a volunteer. So we've been talking about that. And you don't learn about other people's lives unless you're willing to talk to people very different than yourself. And there are lots of times I had to bite my tongue. Again, I had the luxury of hiding behind the shield of ethnography, right? So I didn't see that as my job to push back on people or change their opinions or minds. um Now the documentary was different. because I was there with them in person. And Yvonne is very uh strong-willed and uh has a very big personality. And uh I had to bite my tongue a few times on that trip. Our conversations weren't like what you saw in the documentary on a regular basis because a lot of what you saw in the documentary was her sharing a lot of this stuff with Liz for the first time, the director. I knew all this stuff, as you can see probably from my facial expressions while I'm driving. I'm like, okay, here we go. you know, because I know what's coming next. So I didn't, couldn't, you can't really shock me anymore, I don't think. I pretty much have heard and seen it all, you know. Yeah, but what was interesting is just how many of them, the tipping point into full on conspiratorial beliefs and departing from a shared reality really seemed to spike in 2020. So the studies that keep coming out about that are gonna be very fascinating, I think. Well, they already are. They're coming, they're showing the different types of reasons people are doing conspiracies, which is exactly what I experienced living through it with them. So. Yeah, you know, em going back to what I said earlier about you really got a chance to see people just be humans. And I think that you and Liz did a really great job of capturing that uh and also just capturing your own humanity. I know at the very end, you know, there is there was a, you know, a scene of you basically just kind of like letting out everything you're holding in. And uh and it's like. And it's like, I felt that because I'm like, yeah, like that's how I feel like every day, you know, because like I have friends like the people in your in your documentary, you know, and I'm I venture to guess anybody watches it will be like, yeah, that's that's Uncle Billy, you know, or that's, know, that's Aunt Stacey or that's, you know, my best friend that's been having some issues. And you just look at these people and you're like, like, I don't care who you voted for. Like, I just want you to to live. like a good life, you know, and uh the current is different. But I do have to ask, though, like in the movie, you went by a different name, I believe. And I'm curious on why that is. When I first started doing this, I just made an account. I wanted to keep it separate from my kids' last names. I still had my former married name at the time. And so I just pulled something from my family tree that went back like seven generations. And um used that just to follow people. And then it stuck. mean, Tammy knew it was my real name, but she still calls me Tara. And it's... uh It's fine. But I originally did it just to keep, because I had no intention of contacting anybody when I first started doing this. I just didn't want the algorithms to be putting it onto my own personal accounts, right? So I used a separate computer and a different name and all that. em But I used my real picture and anything I spoke to them about was actual facts about my life. em And then at some point when we were on that road trip, if you ever... booked like a Hilton and you have an honors or rewards number, you walk in and the TV's emblazoned with welcome, whatever your name is. I'm like, oh, hey, that's my old Mary name. She's like, it's just labels. So it doesn't matter. It's again, how they feel. The particulars aren't important. You know, uh one of the other things that I noticed uh watching it, and even though it wasn't necessarily a focus, but there were instances of Christian nationalism, adjacent type uh things that I could see. There's two in particular. ah was, you know, the praying of the Ashley Babbitt Memorial that was there. ah They have like some... things that said God bless America and whatnot. And uh the other was something that Yvonne had mentioned. It was about Roe, uh you know, Roe basically coming into uh existence. And she made something very, very quick that I picked up on just because this is the world that we live and breathe in, where she was talking about after, you know, abortion was legalized, she was waiting for the churches to do a message about it. You know, like, I mean, I mean, uh the Grahams didn't preach a sermon until like six years after Roe was passed. ah So, like, it was very interesting just to kind of hear that perspective. And I'd love to just get your take on like, were there any other sort of like, you know, elements of Christian nationalism that came through for you as you were, you know, road tripping? The road trip itself, I mean, I think what you just said, the abortion thing, uh the Roe versus Wade, I think what was interesting for Yvonne during that experience is that she had found like a shaman type when she had started this awakening of hers. And that was what made caused her to walk away from that shaman part in the group is partly because of their disappointment in the overturning of Roe versus Wade. And she went her own way then and decided she had leveled up essentially past them because as you heard in the film, she's very adamant about it. Although she does contradict herself here. And this is something that I've never asked her about, but she follows Dolores Cannon through New Age spirituality stuff. in the film she says, but Dolores Cannon says the soul doesn't enter the body until birth. And so the logical question would be then what's the problem with abortion if there's no soul involved and it's just tissue? So that's always been something I was curious to hear how she would respond. Then one day maybe I'll ask her. ah But again, I know the answer. I already know the answer because conspiracies are flexible. You can rationalize and justify it in any way you want. There will be an explanation for why it makes sense. And you just have to just know that's case. And I think one of the biggest problems when people talk this way is they do alienate so many other people. So then you're going to find more more elements from other extremist groups, and I would call Christian nationalism extremist. um I think that the biblical womanhood piece of Christian nationalism has trickled down. I see that in Yvonne talking a lot about wishing she was younger so that she could do the homesteading and the... homeschooling and probably anti-vaxxing. I'll just use anti-vaxx now, but that didn't happen until 2020. So I think again, because it is almost like a trade show online where you have so many different ideologies merging at all times and the vocabulary starts to co-mingle and the intent is typically the same. And you're left with all of the same elements, which is whiteness, supremacy. And then, course, now control of government and because it's divinely appointed, the Constitution is divinely appointed in their eyes. That's the Christian nationalist idea. So, And I did see that at January 6, I did at the time on January 6, I didn't know what the appeal to heaven flag was. My husband is a professor of the revolution and Constitution. And so he said, I think it's a revolution. We looked at that, we learned the actual name of it. But he said it was from the revolution area. era, ah their shofars were being blown. uh I saw groups of people praying all over the place. And then it wasn't just at J6, because one thing that The Right has done also is a lot of movement building over the last several years, whether it's General Mike Flynn's traveling thing, whatever, the Great Awakening Tour. It's like a bus that goes to very, know, then whatever local celebrities there, whether it be influencers or J6ers or whatever, will show up on stage. you start to really look at these different groups and how different their individual ideology might look. But they over, you stay in your lane, I'll stay in mine, but together we're gonna create a giant freeway. And that's exactly what's happened. I went to that truck convoy in March, 2022 in Maryland. I was living in Baltimore at the time for 10 years. That's why I was able to go to J6 and spontaneously. And there were groups speaking in tongues. There was one scene where there was a funnel cart and family with children standing in line. And over here is a guy shrieking into a megaphone. I said megaphone, megaphone. Screaming at everybody about sins and dying and hell. And these women standing, like singing in tongues. And the kids, no one even flinched. No one looked, no one questioned. It was just normal. And everywhere you look, there were signs of Christian nationalism at that truck convoy. em and various online ministries that recruit out of those spaces. And I think that's the problem. mean, I know who some of these online ministries are through some of my open source research. And I can tell you, nobody should be preaching to anybody from their living room, some of these people. And I think that's the problem that we're facing right now em with Christianity in general is em fewer people go to church physically anymore. And you can find whatever you want. create whatever hodgepodge you like, just sitting on your couch. Yeah, it's really concerning because the community that needs to bring accountability isn't there and another community is. I guess is it like, is it the community aspect that is so powerful in this because like the idea that they can over like essentially. they, the community is way more important than facts. Now, honestly, I think that's the case in many communities. If not most, that might be right. The natural inclination is to move away from uh facts and truth being the uh most important thing into community, you know, conformity being the most important thing. uh interesting, yeah. it's definitely, I think it's definitely community, at least with the women I've spoken to. Because the best example I can give is the night that Russia invaded Ukraine, for example. I was actually talking to one of the women online and I was watching these groups as everyone was trying to make sense of what was happening. And for about two hours, there's all these back and forth chats with people trying to figure out who the good guys were. which was really interesting, again, with middle-aged people who grew up in the Cold War era, we should already know who the good guys were in lots of ways, right? Because we've been indoctrinated into believing that. And yet, within about two hours, I asked Yvonne, like, who are the good guys? She said, I don't know, I'm trying to figure it out. So it wasn't like she's online researching anything. She's watching to see which one of her favorite influencers are going to tell her who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And within two hours, Russia was the good guy. And that was really fascinating to watch happen in real time. um facts don't matter. You can preach policy all day. You can give facts. You can lay evidence across the table for them. If they don't feel it, it's not real. And the way you feel it is through relationships you build in community. Right. Noel, if somebody were to watch this film because they want to learn more about conspiracies, um what would you hope that they walk away with? I think I would hope that they could walk away seeing humanity in people. maybe the film is, the book goes into this a lot more, I think, when you read the book, you can understand how you get these different points of belief. The documentary can't really do that as well. The documentary shows you more in real time what it's like to be with conspiracists, right? But I think, I mean, you can see it in the living room scene with Yvonne and myself arguing about, you know, things like reproductive rights and um people who are transgender. Those are the two things we, there was nothing I could say, no amount of logic, including what I just mentioned about Dolores Cannon and the soul not entering the body and birth, it's going to change the mind of someone whose community is part of the community identity to believe these things. And that's why she left the people she met on Mount Shasta, because that community no longer participated in her larger community's belief system. And that was where her identity and purpose was. And I really do believe that is a driving factor with so many people is a sense of community. I agree. So what's next for you? Book tour, more documentary screenings? don't know. Award ceremony? This all, like I said, none of this was actually planned. It just literally just happened. I didn't try to write a book at first. An acquisition editor approached me to write a book. same thing with the documentary. So I haven't really figured out what's next. I know I like telling people stories. I like talking to people a lot, if you couldn't tell. uh I'm just very curious about what makes people tick. It's just been something I've always been very interested in. And I don't feel the need to judge. I feel much less judgmental than I used to, which is weird because I've heard such outrageous things. But I also have heard the pieces that makes these women something that feel familiar and something that is comfortable for me because I've had similar shared experiences. I remember once, before the road, it was long before the road trip, but sometime in late 22, early 23, I kind of had my own little mini existential crisis. I was like, what am I doing? I'm talking to and treating these women who are so completely different than me as if we sound like friends. Like my husband would walk in the room and say, who are you talking to? And I'd say, Tammy. He's like, oh, I think we're talking to my best friend or something, somebody I knew really well, but I do know them really well. And I think that was what was so. Interesting to realize that people that I don't share reality with in many, ways also still share parts of another reality. Because what's interesting about conspiracists is they very rarely explain the past through conspiracies. The past, they present the facts. Cash for Kids was what it was. Yvonne, when she was discharged from the Marines, it was because she had bought cocaine on base. There was no conspiracy there. The past is always based in the factual events that occurred. but it's the present and the future that are explained through conspiracies, which is really interesting to me and why it was so easy to have those conversations for multiple years. I didn't have to sit and listen to conspiracies over and over at all. We talked about our lives as middle-aged women most of the time and about what was going on in our daily lives. I just happened to find people who had a lot going on. So there was always something to talk about. That's so funny. Well, how can people watch the film and preorder your book and follow what you're doing? The book is available for pre-order. It's released on January 6th, the fifth anniversary of the Capitol insurrection. You can order it on any, I would say bookshop.org that you can do at Amazon and Barnes and Noble or wherever you'd like to buy books. As far as the film, it's entered into multiple festivals. um The next one that I will be going to is in November at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference where it will screen at the Visual Anthropology Film Festival, which I'm really excited about. because my old advisor will be there and he can see what happened when I became a college dropout and stopped my master's degree. You're like, suck it, teach. uh why I'm doing this. He got me in, I started out with sociology and moved to anthropology because I'm like, there's there's no career path for me at this stage of life. So I might as well do what I love. know, once I realized there was something called visual anthropology and ethnographic storytelling, I was all over it. So I went to India with him actually to work on a documentary film and that got sent home 12 days later. So, so. thank you so much, Noel, for coming by Faithful Politics. um Yeah, this has been absolutely amazing. And just thank you for just the work that you're doing. um Like I mentioned at the top, um I really, really appreciated this documentary. And I hope everybody will watch it because it's like everybody has a friend um like the people in the documentary. And I think it's important that we just recognize that these people are human. that they think differently than uh us. you know, it's just like Josh and I, I mean, Josh comes from a different political pedigree than I do. And, you know, we have this podcast and you were road tripping with a bunch of people that you don't agree with. So like, it can happen. So yeah, thank you for everything that you're doing. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I appreciate talking to you both. Yeah, thanks. And to our audience, hey, thank you for joining us again. And as always, make sure you keep your conversations not right or left, but up, and we'll talk to you later. to you. Bye.