Speaker 1: The question is was he the shooter?
Speaker 2: It seems like we're being spoon fed and narrative. I
Speaker 2: now believe there is a federal level of corruption and
Speaker 2: conspiracy involved in this murder.
Speaker 3: Okay, and the ten months since Charlie Kirk's death, some
Speaker 3: of the loudest voices on the right have worked over
Speaker 3: time to discount the official narrative of his killing, and
Speaker 3: millions have followed them down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: In a way, the.
Speaker 3: Conspiracy theories around Kirk's death were inevitable. Ms now is
Speaker 3: Brandy's Drosny reports that the MAGA media universe Kirk helped
Speaker 3: build was doing exactly what it was designed to do,
Speaker 3: but that relentless suspicion and so called fact finding is
Speaker 3: now tearing MAGA apart, and Brandy tracks the scent in
Speaker 3: a new documentary series joining us Now. Ms NOW Senior
Speaker 3: Enterprise reporter Brandy's de Drosny senior report at the Bullwork
Speaker 3: Will Summer.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson is back with us, Brandy.
Speaker 3: I remember months ago talking to you about kind of
Speaker 3: this concept.
Speaker 1: You're running to a meeting about it.
Speaker 3: And so I'm very happy to say that it is out.
Speaker 3: In congratulations to you, and the team for getting this out.
Speaker 3: One of the things that's so interesting, this continues to
Speaker 3: be interesting to me, is that conspiracy theories are not new.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: We all have family members, especially now who believes I'm
Speaker 3: not going to name any of y'all, but you're probably
Speaker 3: watching some online conspiracy theories and it's been happening since
Speaker 3: YFK and he was assassinated into now and I want
Speaker 3: to play some more sound about conspiracies and attention from
Speaker 3: the doc listen to this.
Speaker 2: Stephen Pricesca studies how this kind of thing happens, how
Speaker 2: people online collaborate to interpret events and create narratives to
Speaker 2: explain them. People in academia call it participatory misinformation or
Speaker 2: collective sense making.
Speaker 4: When we are trying to understand anything that we don't
Speaker 4: understand initially, it's we're uncertain, something's ambiguous, something's new or novel,
Speaker 4: and so we don't understand these things in isolation.
Speaker 1: There's deflective sense making process.
Speaker 4: It does involve these crowds of peace coming together trying
Speaker 4: to understand something, but in practice, some there are some
Speaker 4: people just have more influence within a particular community. There
Speaker 4: are people who's almost entire livelihoods are based off of
Speaker 4: navigating this attention economy.
Speaker 2: In other words, there's a hierarchy, and in this case,
Speaker 2: one person sits.
Speaker 5: At the top.
Speaker 3: I have spent a lot of time as less time
Speaker 3: than you watching Candae almost as this has changed and
Speaker 3: how she's talked about it. When you think about where
Speaker 3: the right is on the disbelief in institutions, this felt inevitable.
Speaker 3: But most importantly this is stranger, probably because of social media.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean listen, conspiracy theories have been around or
Speaker 2: as long as people have been around, right, we want
Speaker 2: to explain the way things work, and we want to
Speaker 2: neet explanation for that. Before in the before times, you
Speaker 2: had a handful of people whose job was to create
Speaker 2: these conspiracy theories in a handful of ways, radio righting
Speaker 2: pamphlets to spread those conspiracy theories. We are in a
Speaker 2: moment where there's just a huge, huge market for it.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of conspiracy theorists. Alex Jones said
Speaker 2: the other day there are a million Alex Jones is
Speaker 2: now and he was incredibly right. You know, there are
Speaker 2: lots of people who make a living online spreading conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories and coming up with him Candice Owens again sits
Speaker 2: at the top of those right now. But not only
Speaker 2: you know, has changed the just the number of people
Speaker 2: who peddle in these conspiracy theories, but the way that
Speaker 2: they are spread has just expanded with social media. So
Speaker 2: even right now, and you know, you mentioned MAGA, but
Speaker 2: it really really is starting to be less and less
Speaker 2: just a maga thing, just a right wing thing. It
Speaker 2: really is spreading to every political ideology. Just I think
Speaker 2: COVID and the distrust spread by Donald Trump and the
Speaker 2: like in our and our systems has has really just
Speaker 2: just disrupted trust in this way. That's it's it's kind
Speaker 2: of it's hard to even see how we come back
Speaker 2: from that now.
Speaker 1: But it's a problem, Brandy. So much of this feels
Speaker 1: like the psychology right that.
Speaker 3: Human beings are typically it seems nowadays more likely to
Speaker 3: bleed a deep, dark, winding conspiracy theory than kind of
Speaker 3: the knowing, normal, boring explanation for some of these sometimes
Speaker 3: unexplainable things that happen in this country. And as you
Speaker 3: as someone who steeped deep into this world, what do
Speaker 3: you take what's your biggest takeaway.
Speaker 1: From the documentary that you made? Part one I think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: I think that the biggest takeaway is just how you
Speaker 2: know this. Conspiracy theories used to be a very small beat.
Speaker 2: Disinformation used to be a very small beat. Will Summer,
Speaker 2: who's also on with us right now, used to be
Speaker 2: on this beat with me at the Daily Beast, you know,
Speaker 2: over ten years ago. And now I have this sort
Speaker 2: of saying that we are all disinformation reporters now, So
Speaker 2: everyone who's a political reporter has to be on the
Speaker 2: disinformation beat, has to understand how conspiracy theories and lies
Speaker 2: are used by people to gain power or wealth or
Speaker 2: further some sort of cause, and understand how to track them,
Speaker 2: trace them, understand how to debunk them eventually. But I
Speaker 2: think that it's just the widespread nature of all of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you've been covering this for a long time
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 3: It feels like this is maybe simply what happens when
Speaker 3: a political movement is largely built on conspiracy theories, that
Speaker 3: people with power and influence play in those conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: play them up in order to win, and then you
Speaker 3: end up with a.
Speaker 1: Situation that brand is covering. Now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, certainly, I think whether it's Charlie Kirk
Speaker 5: or Donald Trump. These people who promoted conspiracy theories to
Speaker 5: build their bases, to build their political power.
Speaker 1: Often they then face that themselves.
Speaker 5: You know, whether it's I mean, Turning Point USA played
Speaker 5: in a lot of these conspiracy theories. Charlie Kirk had
Speaker 5: his own show those sort of devoted conspiracy theories, and
Speaker 5: now we're seeing that unfortunately really rebound against his family
Speaker 5: and his organization.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some of it's a nightmare watching the ways in
Speaker 3: which people, you know, his wife for what happened, which
Speaker 3: is quite disturbing.
Speaker 1: Rick. I want to bring you in here. You know,
Speaker 1: you are.
Speaker 3: Someone who has probably understands the Republican Party and it's
Speaker 3: the way it's changed and the way the Right has
Speaker 3: infiltrated in taking over the Republican Party. You're probably not
Speaker 3: surprised at this, and I don't know if you've watched
Speaker 3: the documentary.
Speaker 1: But it's probably things that you have been talking about
Speaker 1: that you know that this was where we were going
Speaker 1: to end up. What does this end?
Speaker 3: I think you know Brandy's concern that we're not going back.
Speaker 1: I shared it. I assume you do as well.
Speaker 6: I really do you, Gene and people believe in conspiracy
Speaker 6: theories to give themselves a sense of coherence. But the
Speaker 6: people that are selling these conspiracy theories, as Brandy pointed out,
Speaker 6: this is an industrial part of what I call the
Speaker 6: influencer industrial complex. On the right, you've got the Candice
Speaker 6: Owens is and the Alice Jones is and a million
Speaker 6: other imitators, and these people are making money off of
Speaker 6: trying to give MAGA voters a sense of coherence and
Speaker 6: understanding and giving them like this is the secret esoteric
Speaker 6: knowledge they don't want you to know. And that's a
Speaker 6: very profitable niche. And while Donald Trump used conspiracy theories
Speaker 6: to gain more political power, these people are gaining more eyeballs,
Speaker 6: more clicks, more subscribes, and they're using it, or they're
Speaker 6: using it because there's a powerful financial incidentive for a
Speaker 6: lot of them. I don't know how we wrap this up,
Speaker 6: but it is. As you know Brandy point out, everybody's
Speaker 6: got to be a disinformation reporter now, and everybody's got
Speaker 6: to focus in their own life on not reposting the
Speaker 6: thing that you think is, you know, really cool right away,
Speaker 6: because that temptation relies on the virality of social media
Speaker 6: to spread these things.
Speaker 3: Further discernment is lacking on social media, Brandy in the
Speaker 3: minute that I have left that to end this up,
Speaker 3: maybe a more hopeful notice a very depressive segment so far.
Speaker 3: When you talk to experts on misinformation, disinformation conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: is there a way to get maybe not owens and
Speaker 3: people at the same time, but person by person, to
Speaker 3: pull them back from operating within this world.
Speaker 2: I don't know about experts. Maybe I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: myself because I feel like I've been actually these things
Speaker 2: long enough. I was just at the Tyler Robinson hearing recently,
Speaker 2: and I spoke with a lot of people who were
Speaker 2: there in the crowd that were very much of the
Speaker 2: opinion that Erica Kirk was in on some cover up
Speaker 2: of the murder of her husband. And what was striking
Speaker 2: to me is that these people who believed it were
Speaker 2: sitting behind I'm sorry, we're sitting in front of her
Speaker 2: the next day at one of these hearings and.
Speaker 1: Just being close with her.
Speaker 2: When I talked to them later that same day, they said, actually,
Speaker 2: I think I was wrong, and I feel really really
Speaker 2: bad for ever having thought that, because they heard her cry,
Speaker 2: they heard her talking to Charlie Kirk's mother, and so
Speaker 2: they had that personal experience. I think we have to
Speaker 2: get to a point where we can empathize. Obviously everyone
Speaker 2: can't meet Erica Kirk, but I think we can get
Speaker 2: to a point where we treat other people as humans
Speaker 2: and don't just see them as you know, characters and
Speaker 2: conspiracy theory or characters on the internet, but really humanize
Speaker 2: those people that we're talking about before we spread things
Speaker 2: about them.