What Is a Cult?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

No one in the history of the world has ever joined a cult, right? They joined a group that they think is really going to be great. Cue doesn't have a carismetic leader. It eminates a formf of o manipulation that's actually kind of brilliant. But i want talk to people who work in the fields of calls and say, look, is this occult? And everybody i talked to kind of was the same thing, of, it feels like it, but in other ways it feels like its not.

Michael Shermer speaks with Mike Rothschild, a journalist specializing in conspiracy theories, about QAnon and its followers.

On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt like “the calm before the storm” — then refused to elaborate as puzzled journalists asked him to explain. But on the infamous message boards of 4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own. In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump’s remarks began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America. But did any of what Q predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider and wider? No. Why not?