American Hysteria

Since we are on a break this week, I wanted to share with you my former work with an incredible paranormal podcast called Euphomet. Together with host and my good friend Jim Perry, we were once invited to Sedona, AZ to climb to the top of Bell Rock in search of alien vortexes with a man famous in his time-- the only attorney to actually sue the US Government for UFO information under the Freedom of Information Act. So today, balance your healthy skepticism with a little bit of magic, or at least, a more heartfelt look at the great unknown. Listen to 'Euphomet' wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a surprise early Season Three premiere! Merry Whatever y'all! Learn about the history of America's relationship to Christmas, and the several wars that have been fought in the name of and against this always controversial holiday, as well as some of the darker sides and forgotten traditions that may change your perspective on the season of giving for good.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join our Patreon now! American Hysteria has officially left our network and we are striking out on our own for the very first time. We need your help to keep the show going strong while we work on season three. If American Hysteria has been important to you, please consider donating to our Patreon and actively join us in the work that we do. You'll get extra content each month, live streams, shout-outs on the show, and even a chance to help us with the process of creating American Hysteria. Thanks so much for all your support and care so far! It means the world to us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For our season finale, I am going to step into the unknown recesses of the mind, especially my own. I’ll share my upsetting brush with a self-actualization program that taught me that life is empty and meaning when I was ten-years-old. I’ll give a partial history of psychology’s changing ideas about how we think about thinking. Then we’ll look at the Cold War beginnings of this concept called brainwashing when American POWs suddenly became communist sympathizers, and how the US government tried their hand at the same thing. After that, we’ll check out the human potential movement and the new age philosophies that helped influence the Manson Family’s murders. Moving into the 1970s, we’ll follow a kidnapped heiress turned domestic terrorist, and see how the mass deaths at Jonestown influenced her fate. We’ll meet the man who invented cult deprogramming, paid for by families to abduct their wayward loved ones back. At the close, I’ll share more about my modern-era spiritual journey and how it’s informed my own mental health. Does life have meaning? Who knows, and who cares. Come hang out for more more special episode, and let’s get weird, man.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In part one of Terrorism, we looked at the history of domestic extremists on both the left and the right, from the slave revolts of the 1700s up through the formation and then rebranding of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as their violence during the era of desegregation. From there we looked at far left groups that developed in the late 1960s and early 70s, the Black Panthers and their sometimes allies, the Weather Underground. For part two, we'll move into the modern era, with the militia movements of the 1990s and the rise of white supremacist groups following Obama's election. In the last few years, we have seen movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter investigated as terrorist organizations, while the far left group known as Antifa battles in the streets with the newest iteration of organized white supremacists known as the Alt Right, whose young male members are radicalized through victim narratives on online message boards and disturbing meme propaganda. We'll end up in the park where I was once arrested as part of Occupy Charlottesville, the same park that just a handful of years later would see the most famous far right rally in recent history, as neo nazis carried tiki torches around a confederate monument, with one driving his car through a crowd of counter protesters, while the white supremacists screamed and chanted together about their terror at being replaced.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since 9/11, the fear of terrorism has centered on what we call Islamic extremism, but this two-part episode will instead explore a topic that is becoming more and more prevalent in our news cycle: domestic terrorism, the kind that is directed at Americans by Americans. We will explore both the radical movements of the far left and far right since this nation’s dark beginnings, and how one movement sought to use violent intimidation to maintain the status quo of white supremacy while the other side fought up upend it. We’ll start with the slave revolts of the 1700s and the “slave catchers” that represent the earliest version of what we now know as the police. We’ll reach the Ku Klux Klan’s beginning as well as the blockbuster hit that led to their rebranding in the 1920s, and their rise again during desegregation, just as the allegedly dangerous Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and their problematic white allies, the bomb-making Weather Underground, inspired serious government intervention that caused more death than it stopped. It becomes obvious that the far right and far left have always battled in the streets, just as we see today.  For part two, we will explore how we got to the modern versions of domestic terrorism, what we have come to know as the Alt-Right and Antifa. Coming next Monday, October 14th.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eighty-four million Americans witnessed the greatest pop culture spectacle of 2004, when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Their live performance ended with what became known as a “wardrobe malfunction” when Justin ripped away a portion of Janet’s leather top, revealing her right breast complete with nipple piercing. This salacious scandal, sometimes called Nipplegate roused a moralistic America, even helping President George W. Bush to win his second term.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosCo-written by Riley SmithBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pornography has existed all over the world for all recorded time, and now porn websites are visited by an estimated 60 million Americans every month. With each new technological advancement, porn soon follows, and each generation subsequently fears for our vulnerable women and our uncontrollable men. For this episode, we’ll spend most of our time in the 1970s, also known as the “Golden Age of Porn,” when America was introduced to Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, Deep Throat, Playboy, and Hustler. We’ll explore the subsequent feminist and fundamentalist fallout and the war on porn in the 1980s, spurred on by a surprising gruesome advocate. Porn has long been charged with corrupting the youth as well as normalizing, glorifying, and even causing sexual violence. Today we ask the question: What does porn do to us, or more accurately, what can porn make us do? American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AFTER SHOCK: Since the 1970s, violent video games have been a popular scapegoat used by Republicans and Democrats alike to explain mass shootings. From the extremely simplistic Death Race to the more realistic Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Call of Duty, what do our most comprehensive studies tell us about the effects of gory video games? How much have they truly influenced school shooters? And what does this manufactured panic act to cover up?American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosCo-written by Riley SmithBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite how these last few years have felt, schools are still statistically the safest place our kids and teenagers can be. Our evolving archetype of the goth mass shooter that was born out of the Columbine massacre isn’t accurate to who those young men really were, nor what they hoped to to achieve. From the Reagan and Bush era wars on crime and drugs came another kind of juvenile threat known as Superpredators, as The Central Park Five case demonized black kids as a violent mob wrecking havoc all over the nation, eventually leading social scientists and politicians to predict that their numbers would explode into the hundreds of thousands. With this in mind, when we demand political actions again extremely rare, though devastating, event of the school mass shooting, the angry young white men we have come to view as the most common perpetrators are not the ones stopped by the rising presence of school police. Today I ask the question: When we panic about school shootings on both the left and the right, who are the invisible victims of our collective outrage? *Note: This episode states the chance of a K-12 student being killed by a school shooter as 1 in 614 million. This is the risk faced each day, not for an entire lifetime. My apologies for not making this clear. Thanks to statistician Chandler Piché for reaching out.*American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices