episode 8: The Never-Ending Greta Thunberg Climate Conspiracies

[00:00:00] CLIP - GRETA THUNBERG TV APPEARANCE:
My favorite conspiracy theory about you is that this is not the first time you've been on this earth. In fact, Greta was here in 1898, and she's a time traveler. It does look like you, though.
Yeah, I mean, it's got this—the hair's green. From a distance, yeah.

[00:00:24] CRISTEN:
Wanna hear a wild fact? Greta Thunberg is 21 years old. She can buy you a beer!

Like, wasn't it only yesterday that she was just a Swedish girl in braids giving some very impressive speeches?

[00:00:41] GRETA THUNBERG:
My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 15 years old, and I'm from Sweden. I speak on behalf of climate justice now.

[00:00:49] CRISTEN:
In 2019, Greta became a global celebrity—arguably one of the most recognizable faces and voices on the planet. So recognizable, in fact, that some folks were seeing Greta in places she never existed. Places like 1898. I don't know whether anyone sincerely believed Greta was a time traveler. I wasn't even aware of it until I saw the Conspiracy Chart. It's this very handy infographic that went viral back around 2020. Climate misinformation expert Abby Richards came up with the chart as a way to show how conspiracy theories range from grounded in reality to QAnon-level delusional and dangerous. On your chart, Greta Thunberg is a time traveler appears, and I was wondering why that Greta conspiracy in particular?

[00:02:00] ABBIE RICHARDS:
So, I put that conspiracy in like the middle section, which is like unequivocally false but mostly harmless. So it's above the "we have questions" section. Like, it's not seriously meant to be interrogated, but it's not quite in like reality denial. And honestly, it's in that section because that section is populated with a lot of different, like, conspiracy theories about specific celebrities of one sort or another. You know, like we also have like Tupac, who's alive and in Serbia, or Avril Lavigne was replaced by a clone named Melissa. And I think that "Greta Thunberg is a time traveler" fits in perfectly right there. And I chose that one because I do think it's like a fun one as far as like conspiracy theories that you can engage with that aren't, you know, fundamentally that harmful.

[00:02:48] CRISTEN:
Time-traveling Greta is about as benign as it gets in Abby's line of work. She's a researcher, content creator, and senior video producer for Media Matters. Now, was it absurd that major news media earnestly reported that Greta is not a time traveler?

[00:03:12] NEWS CLIP 1:
Twitter is going nuts over a 120-year-old photo of a girl digging for gold in Canada. The believers insist the girl is 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.

[00:03:25] CRISTEN:
Yeah, maybe. But the reason I was curious why Abby included time-traveling Greta in her chart is because of how harmless it is compared to most other Greta-related conspiracy theories.

[00:03:43] ABBIE RICHARDS:
I didn't really want to get into like "Greta Thunberg is funded by Soros" because I'm careful about what I put on the chart and how much amplification I'm giving it by putting it on there. 'Cause I know that when people see the chart, like, plenty of people are conspiracy theorists, and they go look at those top two sections and go, "What haven't I heard about here before? And how can I incorporate it into my beliefs?"

[00:04:05] CRISTEN:
For the record, the untrue conspiracy theory that Greta is funded by billionaire George Soros originated on a French satirical website. It took a photo of Greta with Al Gore, edited out Gore, and replaced him with Soros. And satire or not, once you are in George Soros conspiracy land, you're in danger, girl.

[00:04:35] ABBIE RICHARDS:
As soon as we get into like globalist conspiracy theories where there's like a small group of elite that are controlling the world with near-supernatural abilities, I put that right at the top, you know, once it's past the antisemitic point of no return because it is in that fundamentally antisemitic blueprint for conspiracy theories that is baked out of, you know, early 20th-century antisemitism. So, if she's like a puppet controlled by, you know, these puppeteers who are telling her what to do so that they can enact like their evil mastermind plan—like, I do view that as being inherently, you know, using that blueprint and therefore in that top section.

[00:05:17] CRISTEN:
Being a teenage girl made Greta an easy target. Being an autistic teenage girl made her a puppet. This is Conspiracy She Wrote. I'm your host, Cristen Conger. Grab your sustainably made red string and follow along.

[00:05:26] CRISTEN:
The deluge of disinformation that came for Greta Thunberg boiled down to a few fear-mongering, if contradictory, narratives. She was Antifa, but maybe also a PR stunt paid for by eco billionaires. Or maybe also a child star of fame-hungry parents. One of the most infamous examples of this in U.S. media came courtesy of arch-conservative commentator Michael Knowles in a Fox News appearance.

[00:06:26] FOX NEWS CLIP:
The climate hysteria movement is not about science. If it were about science, it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.

[00:06:40] CRISTEN:
Meanwhile, Brazil's then-president Jair Bolsonaro called Greta a "little brat" after she tweeted about the violence inflicted on indigenous forest defenders in the Amazon. Vladimir Putin put it more gently when he was asked to respond to Greta's speech at the 2019 UN Climate Summit. He sort of smirked at the question, called her a very kind and sincere girl, and then heavily suggested she was being used. And that, quote, "I don't mean to say that this is the case, but we should closely follow further." Classic Putin. And, of course, there was one misogynist in particular who went out of his way to take Greta down a peg.

[00:07:36] NEWS CLIP 2:
It is round two of an unlikely feud: the President of the United States versus 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. Less than 14 hours after Thunberg became the youngest person ever named Time's Person of the Year, President Trump, one of the five finalists for the annual honor, weighed in, tweeting, "So ridiculous."

[00:07:59] EMILY RYALLS:
I think the fact that she gets so much attention is just—is threatening, right? It's not just some random girl that they're going after, right? It is the girl who Time is naming a person of the year. Like, there is some nervousness, I think, about her power, especially given that they don't want to admit that the environment is in crisis, let alone do anything about it.

[00:08:24] CRISTEN:
Emily Ryalls has studied Greta Thunberg's coverage in the press and on social media. She's an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at California Polytechnic State University.

[00:08:38] EMILY RYALLS:
To me, when I see somebody like Putin go after Greta Thunberg, I'm embarrassed for him. Like, don't you have better things to do? So I think, absolutely, at its base level, it's that conservative misogyny, for sure.

[00:08:53] CRISTEN:
I came across Emily's research while looking for context on why Greta got so much attention to begin with. And when I say so much attention, in that 2019 Person of the Year profile, Time Magazine described Greta's celebrity as one of the swiftest ascents to global influence in history.

[00:09:21] EMILY RYALLS:
Most of the time when I'm looking at news profiles of quote-unquote "real life girls," they're oftentimes, you know, bad girls, mean girls, girls who have been arrested, girls who have done something that as a culture we're sort of repelled by or turned off by. And so to kind of be able to have this opportunity to study someone who, for all intents and purposes, was really being lauded in the media, right? A teen girl who was being held up as, you know, the face of a generation and the face of climate change, we thought was really fascinating.

[00:09:56] CRISTEN:
I would imagine it's significant as well that, given the historic gender gap in autism diagnoses, you kind of have this combination of both, like, the gender representation of a girl with autism who is claiming this kind of space.

[00:10:16] EMILY RYALLS:
Absolutely. But I also think, you know, some of the qualities or characteristics that might be associated with Greta's autism also, in many ways, make her sort of non-normatively feminine. The fact that she is so direct in the way she speaks, right? Girls generally are not socialized to talk like that. Certainly not to talk like that to adult men or, you know, the President of the United States. She also, you know, likes to be alone quite a bit, and girls are socialized to really prioritize relationships above all else.

For me, at least, what makes it most provocative is how little she seems to be bothered by it or at least how incredibly adept she is in using social media to kind of speak back to those trolls, but not in a way that's direct. So she kind of really holds on to her power in that way. And that's just not something that we typically associate with teenage girls.

[00:11:24] CRISTEN:
Could you give any kind of examples of what you mean by that?

[00:11:27] EMILY RYALLS:
One of the most famous ones, right, is that Donald Trump said she had to work on her anger management problem, and that she then just changed her Twitter handle to "a teenage girl working on her anger management." So she didn't reply directly to him. She didn't bother to get into it with him because what a waste of time that would have been for her, and it would have really opened her up to then all of his followers joining in on dumping on her.

So instead, I think she really brilliantly handled it. She addressed it. It was snarky, but then that was sort of the end of it, right? Because if you are a powerful man and this teenage girl has just kind of replied to something you said about her, are you going to keep at it? Some of them will, of course, but you have lost all your power at that point if you just keep going after this teenage girl who has not come for you directly in any way. In some ways, it's all very teenage behavior, right? But none of it is ever her directly going at any of these people. And so I think in that way, she keeps her power. She keeps the power because she's not really engaging with them, and they end up just looking stupid.

[00:12:45] CRISTEN:
But why were all these stupid-looking men coming for Greta in the first place? More on that after the break.

AD BREAK 1

[00:12:59] GRETA THUNBERG:
People seem to have to see me as an angry teenager who condemns every individual's behavior, um, which is kind of funny to me. I'm not an angry teenager. I probably don't take life seriously enough, like in private.

[00:13:13] CRISTEN:
So talk to me a little bit about why she has been such a target of, like, high-level conspiracy theories and misinformation.

[00:13:26] EMILY RYALLS:
I mean, I think right off the bat, most obvious is that these people still want to argue that climate change isn't real. And so anyone who's getting the level of media coverage, attention, and popularity that Greta is getting for speaking about this issue would probably get that level of vitriol, right?

I think the fact that she's a girl is probably even a bigger part of it, right? She is a teenage girl. Most of the vitriol is coming from very conservative spaces. And so she's doing it wrong as far as they're concerned, right? Who does this girl think she is? She is not focusing on what she needs to focus on, right? There are always people who say she needs to go back to school. Well, you know, she's in school. Like, they have a certain idea about what a teenage girl should be doing, and she's not doing it. And I really think that is a huge, huge part of it. But I think the fact that she is white and young are also layered into all of that.

[00:14:36] CRISTEN:
To kind of ask you a question that you posed in your 2021 study on the media construction of Greta, why does it matter that one teenage girl with ASD has become the focus of so much attention?

[00:14:54] EMILY RYALLS:
Yeah, I mean, I think it matters in both good and bad ways, right? One of the things we talk about in the piece is that there has just been this overwhelming push to name Greta as the face of the climate change movement, right? As the face of a generation. And of course, what that does is really negate the girls of color, indigenous girls, who have been working on climate change for decades, right? Girls who come from parts of the world where climate change is most immediately affecting their lived experiences.

[00:15:28] CRISTEN:
Girls like Shia Bastida, who co-founded the ReEarth Initiative; like Kulsum Rifa, who's been a leader with U.S. Youth for Justice and Sustainability; like Jamie Margolin, who co-founded Zero Hour; Leah Thomas of the Intersectional Environmentalist. And let us not forget, Greta Thunberg was inspired to start her school strike for climate justice by students in the U.S. Specifically, X González, one of the high school students who...

[00:16:11] EMILY RYALLS:
And to Greta's credit, she does often talk about these other girls. She will bring them in for photo ops. She will post on her social media what they're doing, but it doesn't seem to matter. One of the things that we found most concerning is that there was oftentimes a move by journalists to make it seem as though girls of color activists were somehow influenced by Greta. In other words, they started doing the work after Greta, which of course is not the case.

And so all of that becomes really risky, I think, in terms of the vitriol that she's getting. So Greta becomes more powerful and more threatening because she is white. The other thing is that it just creates this space where a lot of us think somebody's doing the work. And if Greta has got it under control, and people are telling me she's the face of it all and that she's an icon and she's doing all the work, then it allows me to be a little lazier and think, well, the kids have got it right. That generation's going to take care of it, and I don't have to worry about it.

[00:17:17] CRISTEN:
Our misinformation expert, Abby Richards, says there are really three big groups that are responsible for most of the climate misinformation that ends up in the media, including anti-Greta conspiracy theories.

One of those groups is right-wing pundits like that Fox News ghoul you heard. Then you have more explicitly anti-science conspiracy accounts.

[00:17:51] ABBIE RICHARDS:
And then the third is the intellectual dark web types. And they're just involved in the broader culture war. They hate anything PC. They hate cancel culture. They don't like, you know, leftist academia and leftist science. And so, like, you know, that's why, you know, we see a lot of Jordan Peterson come up in climate change denial.

[00:18:10] CRISTEN:
As soon as you said "intellectual dark web," I immediately thought Jordan Peterson.

[00:18:16] ABBIE RICHARDS:
You knew where I was going. Yeah.

[00:18:18] CRISTEN:
Well, and—and are there any prominent, like, women kind of climate disinformation influencers in this mix as well that you've noticed?

[00:18:31] ABBIE RICHARDS:
I mean, like, yes, like, women can lie too. Um, but there aren't too many that come to mind for me. It would be really interesting to research a bit more of, like, the world of women influencers in the climate denial space.

[00:18:51] CRISTEN:
I feel like, yeah, climate trad wives are just, like, waiting in the wings.

[00:18:56] ABBIE RICHARDS:
Oh my god. I bet they are. Someone tag them in. They would do a better job, to be honest. Women do it so well.

[00:19:01] CRISTEN:
Were you surprised at all by the volume and intensity of the conspiracy campaign against Greta Thunberg, you know, back when she really was just like, you know, Swedish teenage girl sailing across the sea?

[00:19:23] ABBIE RICHARDS:
No. Um. I wish I was because on some—like, on some level, I'm always surprised at how low people go in, you know, just attacking a young girl. But at the same time, of course, they're attacking a young woman. That's like one of their favorite types of people to attack. The further you stray from being a cis white straight able-bodied male, the more ways that they have to attack you and the more things that they'll go after you for straying from that. So I wish I were more surprised, but unfortunately, I think I'm a bit too numb to it all.

Greta has been the focus of many of these attacks because she's so prominent in the space. But she's also by no means like the only activist facing these sorts of threats. And it's also frequently, you know, the less prominent, less famous activists with far fewer resources who face the real, like, the threat of real violence. So Greta isn't just this solo activist, right? The more she became prominent, the more she was partnered with big institutions and organizations, and she was invited to speak with them. She went to events with them, and she became almost like a surrogate for them. And so by attacking Greta, she becomes a proxy for attacking these big institutions.

[00:20:42] CRISTEN:
Institutions like UNICEF, the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization.

[00:20:51] ABBIE RICHARDS:
It's part of a massive attempt to muddy the waters and make it increasingly difficult to pass meaningful climate action, right? It is just making it—it's harder to be an activist. It's harder to get anything done. And it's harder to actually have conversations about the problem and its solutions because it's hijacking the discourse, right? If we have to sit here and talk about whether or not Greta is a Rothschild, like, no longer are we having a conversation about climate change, the science behind it, what needs to be done, what's standing in our way, how will our lives be better once we address it? Like, we've fully lost the plot, and that is the point.

[00:21:35] CRISTEN:
Do the targeted attacks against her stand out in any kind of way from the other kinds of attacks on other prominent climate activists or eco celebs?

[00:21:50] ABBIE RICHARDS:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very similar formula that we just see rolled out essentially over and over again. And sometimes it varies because, you know, maybe we're not attacking a young woman with autism, but instead we're attacking, like, an indigenous person. And we're going after them for, you know, the color of their skin or we're going after someone for being queer or, like, what—whatever. Like, there's so many different ins that people can find to attack someone. But fundamentally, that blueprint of, like, undermining the activist and therefore undermining the movement I think is pretty consistent.

[00:22:29] CRISTEN:
There are also a few key tactics at work in that blueprint. One is delegitimizing activists by portraying them as hysterical and/or hypocritical. For example, Greta Thunberg has never demanded that everyone drive electric cars. Okay? But this fabricated claim has been repeatedly memefied. It's usually a split-screen style of meme, where the top half is a picture of Greta speaking at the mic with a speech bubble saying, "I demand everyone drive electric cars." Now, again, she's never said that. The bottom half is a photo of Congolese children working at a mine, captioned, "We're mining the cobalt for your batteries as fast as we can, Greta." See, the meme implies she's hysterical and a hypocrite who supports child labor!

[00:23:38] ABBIE RICHARDS:
We see a lot of narratives about elitism. They're trying to make, like, climate action seem like this out-of-touch priority of the wealthy who are just, like, actually looking to just disenfranchise everyday people, or they just don't care about everyday people. I've seen this emerge at every COP that I have studied, like the global climate conference that happens every year. There is, without fail, a lot of media hype about the elitist hypocrisy of flying planes to COP, especially private jets, which is a super legitimate conversation to be had, but it's not being brought up in any sort of, like, meaningful way that's trying to discuss how we should change our air travel culture. And like, you know, what's a more effective way to set up this massive conference? Like, no, that's entirely brought up to hijack the discourse and dismiss, like, climate change. Like, all of a sudden, we're not talking about climate change. We're not talking about the actual conference, what its goals are, what impediments exist, how this, again, might make our world better, safer, healthier. No, we're just having a fully hijacked conversation about private jets. We're not talking about the problem. We're not talking about the solutions. We're just talking about, like, is Greta Thunberg a Soros puppet. And it's so tiring.

AD BREAK 2

[00:24:58] SKY NEWS:
Now it's time for Lefties Losing It. Let's start with climate catastrophist clown Greta Thunberg, who's all grown up these days but still behaving like a spoiled little brat. Here's her latest arrest.

[00:25:13] CRISTEN:
Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi was reacting to Greta Thunberg's April arrest in The Hague. Greta was there for the 37th highway blockade rallied by a group called Extinction Rebellion. It was protesting the Dutch government's fossil fuel subsidies. Police swooped in. She and a bunch of other protesters were technically detained, not arrested.

But one of the latest Greta conspiracy theories involved her previous arrest. That time she was in Germany to protest a coal mine expansion. SWAT teams rolled up. Maybe it was the intense optics. I don't know. I don't care. It is predictable as hell. A conspiracy theory lit up on X that Greta's arrest was staged. The German police department said no, it wasn't.

And for now, at least, wherever Greta shows up to protest, the media will cover it. Folks will turn out, and Rita Panahi will call her a spoiled little brat because they never get tired of saying the same stupid shit. Greta does not care. She uses her celebrity to amplify climate justice and activism. If it makes her a right-wing punching bag and conspiracy fodder, so be it.

[00:27:07] CRISTEN:
So why is climate change such a hotbed for—no pun intended—such a hotbed for conspiracy theories?

[00:27:07] ABBIE RICHARDS:
So I think whenever there is a major action that needs to be taken, there is a lot of resistance to, right—a big change that needs to occur that a lot of people don't want to see that change happen. You're going to inevitably see a lot of different tactics that arise to muddy the waters and make it harder and harder to enact that change that we need to do. So I think with climate, I mean, yes, of course, there's so much money that goes into maintaining the status quo—maintaining the fossil fuel status quo.

But on top of that, you have this psychological environment where we are all complicit in it. We are all benefiting from certain comforts that oil and gas have given us, and a lot of us don't want to have to make any sort of sacrifice. We are afraid of any sort of change, even if it might be positive. It's still different from what's normal. And if it's really linked into our identity and we feel like, you know, our identity helps us understand the world and our identity is linked into being someone who drives a car all the time, eats a lot of meat—like all of these things that we do that are complicit in climate change make us feel guilty. And then that kind of creates a perfect psychological environment for conspiracy theories to thrive because they give us narratives that excuse that complicity.

[00:28:38] CRISTEN:
And there are so many narratives to choose from. Especially since the 1990s, the climate space has been littered with anti-science denialism and misinformation. Today, for instance, there's the New Earth Conspiracy Theory, which posits that climate change—it's all vibes. It's just the sun and the earth vibrating at a higher frequency, preparing for some kind of grand planetary ascension.

If that's too woo-woo for you, there's the Great Reset Conspiracy Theory. That's the lie that climate change is manufactured by evil elites, and they're using it as an excuse to build an authoritarian one-world government.

For example, 15-minute cities. Now, this is an actual urban planning concept, and it's all about designing cities so that everywhere you need to go is no more than a 15-minute walk or bike ride away, which...that doesn't sound all that sinister.

[00:30:00] ABBIE RICHARDS:
And 15-Minute Cities as a conspiracy theory takes that concept and interprets it as an attempt by the elite to essentially create climate ghettos where you're trapped in a 15-minute city and not allowed to leave. It's, you know, fundamentally misinterpreting the entire initiative, but there's a lot of anxiety about control, right? There's a lot of anxiety about powerlessness, and as soon as people feel like that's being infringed upon, then they're very susceptible to being told that that's being infringed upon. It does kind of create an environment where conspiracy theories like that can thrive.

[00:30:40] CRISTEN:
That is exactly what happened in 2023 over in Oxford, UK.

[00:30:46] ABBIE RICHARDS:
The idea was to try and push Oxford to become more of a 15-minute city, right? Because it's not like they're rebuilding it from scratch. But they wanted to help to create that infrastructure, and that also included, you know, certain zoning laws around which areas you could be driving through, and if there would be, like, fines attached to it or like a toll you'd have to pay, and that essentially was enough to spark massive protests. I mean, there were big protests in the streets with people carrying signs being like, you know, "no climate ghettos." Like, people really, really reacted to it.

[00:31:22] CRISTEN:
They also reacted to one of the main speakers at a Stop Oxford protest in early 2023.

[00:31:31] CLIP - OXFORD UK PROTEST:
So people, listen. Make no mistake. These are the first steps of a dystopian reality called 15-minute neighborhoods. From a small seed, a huge tree can grow.

[00:31:41] CRISTEN:
This was a 15-minute city conspiracy gathering. And a 12-year-old named Jasmine gave a 15-minute speech about the perils of greedy evil politicians and climate tyranny. There is also a blonde woman in a bold red lip standing next to her the whole time. She's nodding and smiling and giving clap cues to the audience. But Jasmine really got the crowd going with her Greta bit.

[00:32:46] CLIP - OXFORD UK PROTEST:
How dare you…

[00:32:46] CRISTEN:
Do climate conspiracies pipeline into other conspiracy communities and/or kind of the other way around?

[00:32:46] ABBIE RICHARDS:
I haven't specifically researched it as a pipeline, but my gut instinct is yes, just because of, like, how intrinsically connected the worldview is, you know? Like, if you're going to be super engaged with a climate change conspiracy theory like the Great Reset, right, where climate change is essentially a ruse manufactured to some extent by the elites and they're using it as an excuse to implement an authoritarian world government, that has the same undertones that, you know, many other conspiracy theories about elites controlling the world does as well. And we know that, like, if you believe one conspiracy theory, you're much more likely to, you know, believe more and that you can hold multiple conspiracy beliefs that are even contradictory at the same time. So it would make a lot of sense that someone holding one of these can also hold others.

[00:33:45] EMILY RYALLS:
One of the other sort of fascinating things about Greta is that even though people want to call her the face of the movement, she really refuses to do it, right? So she doesn't give a lot of interviews. She doesn't really play to the media. She's just not interested in being a celebrity. She seems to really just want to fix the environmental crisis, right? And so social media, I think, is where we get perhaps a clearer sense of who Greta really is. And there's no way to know who Greta really is, right? Because it feels like the closest access that we have to her. I almost hope for her that she has some sort of private social media somewhere, right? Where she is able to just be around friends and family and not have to do the constant work of being, you know, quote-unquote "Greta Thunberg"—like that image, the idol of it all.

[00:34:39] CRISTEN:
In 2019, Greta sailed an ocean, talked to world leaders, led the largest climate protest in history. Greta achieved idol status. That December, she posted an uncharacteristic selfie. Her hoodie's up, her long hair's down. She's smiling, looking relaxed. The caption reads:
“The endless conspiracy, denial of facts, the lies, the hate, and the bullying of children who communicate and act on the science. All because some adults, terrified of change, so desperately don't want to talk about the hashtag climate crisis. This is hope in disguise. We're winning.”

[00:35:36] GRETA THUNBERG:
Hope is—is a verb. It is something that you—you need to do. It is something that you need to earn. You can't just sit and lean back and expect to be given hope by someone else. You can't really wait for someone else to do something. Hope is something that you think—hope is something that you need to create.

. . .

[00:35:58] CRISTEN:
Thank you so much to Abby Richards. There's a question I wish I'd asked her, which is, whether this very episode is also part of the problem. 'Cause guess what? I'm not talking about the conspiracy-unrelated climate problems and solutions either. Instead, we've linked to some other shows in the episode description from folks who specialize in climate justice and the kinds of issues Abby wishes we were talking more about instead. Thank you as well to Emily Ryalls. If you want to go deeper, check out her book The Culture of Mean on representations of girl bullying in pop culture.

[00:36:57] EMILY RYALLS:
I'm excited that you're doing this work because I don't like to really dig in much to the conspiracies. So I like that now I have a place I can turn to where it will be taught to me so that I don't have to get into that part. I was at a conference recently, and I went to a panel on incels, and I was like, thank you for doing this work. I do not want to, right? So thank you for doing this work.

[00:37:23] CRISTEN:
Conspiracy She Wrote is an independent production of Unladylike Media. No cabal-owned media profiteering in this podcast, okay? It's executive produced, written, and hosted by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer. Engineering and sound design is by Marcus Hom. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, and our theme is “Tarana” by Our Gift.

[00:38:06] CRISTEN:
Next time on Conspiracy She Wrote: the question I've personally been asking since Britney Spears was freed: What happens when a celebrity conspiracy theory is true?

[00:38:06] TESS BARKER:
I knew enough to know that, like, people could call me a wackadoo, but that that was true. So that was kind of an interesting life experience just to have to be like, you guys can say whatever you want about me. I know the truth, and I'm not going to shut up.