It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
As artificial intelligence expands across more professions, robot preachers and AI programs offer new means of sharing religious beliefs, but they may undermine credibility and reduce donations for religious groups that rely on them, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
“It seems like robots take over more occupations every year, but I wouldn’t be so sure that religious leaders will ever be fully automated because religious leaders need credibility, and robots aren’t credible,” said lead researcher Joshua Conrad Jackson, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the Booth School of Business.
The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Jackson and his colleagues conducted an experiment with the Mindar humanoid robot at the Kodai-Ji Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. The robot has a humanlike silicon face with moving lips and blinking eyes on a metal body. It delivers 25-minute Heart Sutra sermons on Buddhist principles with surround sound and multi-media projections.
Mindar, which was created in 2019 by a Japanese robotics team in partnership with the temple, cost almost $1 million to develop, but it might be reducing donations to the temple, according to the study.
The researchers surveyed 398 participants who were leaving the temple after hearing a sermon delivered either by Mindar or a human Buddhist priest. Participants viewed Mindar as less credible and gave smaller donations than those who heard a sermon from the human priest.
In another experiment in a Taoist temple in Singapore, half of the 239 participants heard a sermon by a human priest while the other half heard the same sermon from a humanoid robot called Pepper. That experiment had similar findings -- the robot was viewed as less credible and inspired smaller donations. Participants who heard the robot sermon also said they were less likely to share its message or distribute flyers to support the temple.
While participants said they believed human preachers were more credible, it was still a close contest with the robots. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being most credible, the robot preachers received an average credibility rating of 3.12, compared with 3.51 for human preachers.
“This suggests that there are a lot of people out there who think robots could be effective preachers, but there are more people who aren’t convinced,” Jackson said.
While the robot preacher studies focused on Eastern religions, Jackson believes the findings could apply to other religions.
A third experiment included 274 Christian participants from the United States who read a sermon online. Half of the participants were told it was written by a human preacher while the other half were told the sermon was generated by a highly advanced AI program. Participants in the AI sermon group reported the sermon was less credible because they felt an AI program had less capacity to think or feel like a human.
“Robots and AI programs can’t truly hold any religious beliefs so religious organizations may see declining commitment from their congregations if they rely more on technology than on human leaders who can demonstrate their faith,” Jackson said.
Article:“Exposure to Robot Preachers Undermines Religious Commitment,” Joshua Jackson, PhD, University of Chicago; Kai Chi Yam, PhD, and Ting Liu, PhD, National University of Singapore; Pok Man Tang, PhD, University of Georgia Terry College of Business; and Azim Shariff, PhD, The University of British Columbia, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, published online July 24, 2023.
Exposure to Robot Preachers Undermines Religious Commitment
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-Jul-2023
Wednesday, March 08, 2023
Robots are performing Hindu rituals -- some devotees fear they'll replace worshippers Holly Walters, Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology, Wellesley College
THE CONVERSATION Wed, March 8, 2023 A robotic arm (below on right) is used to worship by maneuvering a candle in front of the Hindu god Ganesha.Monarch Innovation
It isn’t just artists and teachers who are losing sleep over advances in automation and artificial intelligence. Robots are being brought into Hinduism’s holiest rituals – and not all worshippers are happy about it.
In 2017, a technology firm in India introduced a robotic arm to perform “aarti,” a ritual in which a devotee offers an oil lamp to the deity to symbolize the removal of darkness. This particular robot was unveiled at the Ganpati festival, a yearly gathering of millions of people in which an icon of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, is taken out in a procession and immersed in the Mula-Mutha river in Pune in central India.
Yet this kind of religious robotic usage has led to increasing debatesabout the use of AI and robotic technology in devotion and worship. Some devotees and priests feel that this represents a new horizon in human innovation that will lead to the betterment of society, while others worry that using robots to replace practitioners is a bad omen for the future.
As an anthropologist who specializes in religion, however, I focus less on the theology of robotics and more on what people actually say and do when it comes to their spiritual practices. My current work on religious robots primarily centers on the notion of “divine object-persons,” where otherwise inanimate things are viewed as having a living, conscious essence.
My work also looks at the uneasiness Hindus and Buddhists express about ritual-performing automatons replacing people and whether those automatons actually might make better devotees.
Ritual automation is not new
Ritual automation, or at least the idea of robotic spiritual practice, isn’t new in South Asian religions.
Historically, this has included anything from special pots that drip water continuously for bathing rituals that Hindus routinely perform for their deity icons, called abhisheka, to wind-powered Buddhist prayer wheels – the kinds often seen in yoga studios and supply stores.
While the contemporary version of automated ritual might look like downloading a phone app that chants mantras without the need for any prayer object at all, such as a mala or rosary, these new versions of ritual-performing robots have prompted complicated conversations.
Thaneswar Sarmah, a Sanskrit scholar and literary critic, argues that the first Hindu robot appeared in the stories of King Manu, the first king of the human race in Hindu belief. Manu’s mother, Saranyu – herself the daughter of a great architect – built an animate statue to perfectly perform all of her household chores and ritual obligations.
Visvakarman, considered to be the architect of the universe in Hindu belief. British Museum
Folklorist Adrienne Mayorremarks similarly that religious stories about mechanized icons from Hindu epics, such as the mechanical war chariots of the Hindu engineer god Visvakarman, are often viewed as the progenitors of religious robots today.
Furthermore, these stories are sometimes interpreted by modern-day nationalists as evidence that ancient India has previously invented everything from spacecraft to missiles.
Modern traditions or traditionally modern?
However, the recent use of AI and robotics in religious practice is leading to concerns among Hindus and Buddhists about the kind of future to which automation could lead. In some instances, the debate among Hindus is about whether automated religion promises the arrival of humanity into a bright, new, technological future or if it is simply evidence of the coming apocalypse.
In other cases, there are concerns that the proliferation of robots might lead to greater numbers of people leaving religious practice as temples begin to rely more on automation than on practitioners to care for their deities. Some of these concerns stem from the fact that many religions, both in South Asia and globally, have seen significant decreases in the number of young people willing to dedicate their lives to spiritual education and practice over the past few decades. Furthermore, with many families living in a diaspora scattered across the world, priests or “pandits” are often serving smaller and smaller communities.
But if the answer to the problem of fewer ritual specialists is more robots, people still question whether ritual automation will benefit them. They also question the concurrent use of robotic deities to embody and personify the divine, since these icons are programmed by people and therefore reflect the religious views of their engineers. Doing right by religion
Scholars often note that these concerns all tend to reflect one pervasive theme – an underlying anxiety that, somehow, the robots are better at worshipping gods than humans are. They can also raise inner conflicts about the meaning of life and one’s place in the universe.
For Hindus and Buddhists, the rise of ritual automation is especially concerning because their traditions emphasize what religion scholars refer to as orthopraxy, where greater importance is placed on correct ethical and liturgical behavior than on specific beliefs in religious doctrines. In other words, perfecting what you do in terms of your religious practice is viewed as more necessary to spiritual advancement than whatever it is you personally believe.
This also means that automated rituals appear on a spectrum that progresses from human ritual fallibility to robotic ritual perfection. In short, the robot can do your religion better than you can because robots, unlike people, are spiritually incorruptible.
This not only makes robots attractive replacements for dwindling priesthoods but also explains their increasing use in everyday contexts: People use them because no one worries about the robot getting it wrong, and they are often better than nothing when the options for ritual performance are limited. Saved by a robot
In the end, turning to a robot for religious restoration in modern Hinduism or Buddhism might seem futuristic, but it belongs very much to the present moment. It tells us that Hinduism, Buddhism and other religions in South Asia are increasingly being imagined as post- or transhuman: deploying technological ingenuity to transcend human weaknesses because robots don’t get tired, forget what they’re supposed to say, fall asleep or leave.
More specifically, this means that robotic automation is being used to perfect ritual practices in East Asia and South Asia – especially in India and Japan – beyond what would be possible for a human devotee, by linking impossibly consistent and flawless ritual accomplishment with an idea of better religion.
Modern robotics might then feel like a particular kind of cultural paradox, where the best kind of religion is the one that eventually involves no humans at all. But in this circularity of humans creating robots, robots becoming gods, and gods becoming human, we’ve only managed to, once again, re-imagine ourselves.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
Artificial intelligence program poised to shake up Catholic education, doctrine
Magisterium AI uses artificial intelligence technology to provide information for users on everything relating to Catholic doctrine, teachings and Canon law.
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — A new Catholic program using artificial intelligence, Magisterium AI, is promising to revolutionize academic research in Catholic education and holds the potential to disrupt long-held doctrines and beliefs.
Created by the U.S.-based company Longbeard, Magisterium AI uses artificial intelligence technology like the one used by the now-famous ChatGPT to provide information for users on everything relating to Catholic doctrine, teachings and Canon law. Unlike other AI programs, which have access to vast swaths of ever-evolving data, the information used by Magisterium AI is limited to official church documents and is carefully curated.
“This way, it avoids the pitfalls of the use of AI,” said Fr. Philip Larrey, who teaches philosophy at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and is chair of the Product Advisory Board at Magisterium AI, in an interview with Religion News Service on Wednesday (Aug. 23).
Artificial intelligence programs can sometimes “hallucinate,” meaning they will assemble incorrect or partially incorrect information in order to provide an answer to a query. “Magisterium is trained to only use official documents of the Catholic Church, which is a very small, consistent and narrow documentation,” Larrey said.
“It’s never going to give you a wrong or false answer,” he added.
The Magisterium AI interface. Screen grab
With a simple interface, where users can type in questions that will be answered by the artificial intelligence, Magisterium AI hopes to be a helpful service for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The project can be used by priests seeking to write a homily, canon lawyers looking for the latest updates and researchers wishing to access Catholic documents from the ancient past.
Magisterium AI is already used in 125 countries and is currently available in 10 languages, but its creators hope to add even more. Every day, more information is being entered into the program’s database drawn directly from Catholic resources.
Fr. David Nazar, the rector of the Pontifical Institute for Eastern Churches, believes AI technology has the power to revolutionize research in Catholic academia by providing scholars with access to large amounts of data. Eastern Christian Churches spread all over the world, from Russia to Ethiopia and India, rely on extremely ancient and diversified documents.
The Rev. David Nazar, SJ. Video screen grab
Magisterium AI “shortens the time and refines your research,” Nazar told RNS in an interview Wednesday. Research that has been ongoing for 10 years over 400 documents and manuscripts could be done in a month or a week, he explained.
The institute is currently digitizing 1,000 documents from its archives and adding them to the Magisterium AI database. This includes one of the largest collections of Syriac manuscripts outside of Syria, which were brought over to Rome after the start of the war in the Middle Eastern country. While the program has the scope of “preserving and researching history with precision,” Nazar said, it also has the potential to be a powerful tool for promoting ecumenism and addressing ancient doctrinal questions.
“The early church councils were as concerned about defining principles — the number of the Trinity, the nature of Jesus etc. — as they were about excluding false expressions of the faith,” he said. The varied amount of languages and cultures that convened at these ancient councils meant participants “often misunderstood one another, and some people were called heretics for the wrong reason.”
Nazar brought up the example of Nestorius, a bishop who was deemed a heretic after the Council of Ephesus in 431. Research conducted at the institute over years led to the conclusion that Nestorius was actually largely misunderstood in his beliefs and wrongly condemned. This understanding promoted communion between the Catholic Church and his remaining followers today.
With tools like Magisterium AI this kind of research could happen in much less time, Nazar said. He acknowledged that as more data from the church’s vast and ancient documentation is inserted into the program, researchers might uncover uncomfortable facts about the church’s doctrine on hot-button issues like married priests and the role of women in the church.
“The truth shall set you free!” Nazar said, quoting Jesus. For the scholar, there is a consolation in finding out that people were wrong, and that is much more valuable than “neurotic concerns over words.”
Image by Gerd Altmann/Pixabay/Creative Commons
Beyond changing how research is conducted in Catholic schools, Magisterium AI also holds potential for canon lawyers, who can use it to access the latest developments. Pope Francis, for example, has issued a massive number of Motu Proprio, which are changes to the wording of the 1983 Book of Canon Law, during his pontificate. Canon lawyers can view the most updated laws thanks to the AI-powered program.
It can also offer support for priests writing their homilies for Mass, by offering information about church teaching and commentary by experts from the past and present. Larrey said that despite the bad reputation often attributed to artificial intelligence, he believes such programs have a potential for good.
“Is this going to replace canon lawyers or teachers? No, it’s going to be a help,” he said. “Fortunately they won’t substitute a priest so I think I’m safe!”
While Pope Francis has acknowledged the advantages and positive aspects of artificial intelligence, he has also warned against the potential pitfalls and consequences this technology holds, especially for the most vulnerable people in society.
This month, the pope announced that “Artificial Intelligence and Peace” will be the theme of World Day of Peace on Jan. 1, to promote dialogue and ethical reflection on the question of AI.
Navigating the intersection between AI, automation and religion – 3 essential reads
The merging of technology and faith is sparking a transformative shift in redefining spirituality and religious practices.
AI is slowly becoming part of the religious sphere. (robertprzybysz/iStock via Getty Images)
(The Conversation) — In a era marked by rapid technological advancement, we are seeing everything from artificial intelligence to robots slowly seep into our everyday lives. But now, this technology is increasingly making inroads into a realm that has long been uniquely human: religion.
Over the last few months, The Conversation U.S. has published a number of stories exploring how AI and automation are weaving themselves into religious contexts. These three articles from our archives shed light on the impacts of such technology on human spirituality, faith and worship across cultures.
1. Prophets come to life
As one of the most prominent religious figures in the world, Jesus has been continually reinterpreted to fit the norms and needs of each new historical context, from Cristo Negro or “Black Christ” to being depicted as a Hindu mystic.
But now the prophet is on Twitch, a video live-streaming platform. And it’s all thanks to an AI chatbot.
AI Jesus provides insight on both spiritual and personal questions users ask on his channel. Twitch user ask_jesus
Presented as a bearded white man wearing a brown hood, “AI Jesus” is available 24/7 on his Twitch channel “ask_Jesus” and is able to interact with users who can ask him anything from deep religious-in-nature questions to lighthearted inquiries.
AI Jesus represents one of the newest examples in the growing field of AI spirituality, noted Boston College theology faculty member Joseph L. Kimmel, and may help scholars better understand how human spirituality is being actively shaped by the influence of AI.
2. Robotic rituals
A unique intersection of religion and robotic technology has emerged with the introduction of robots performing Hindu rituals in South Asia. While some have welcomed the technological inclusion, others express worries about the future that ritual automation could lead to.
A robotic arm performs “aarti” — a Hindu practice in which light is ritually waved for the veneration of deities.
Many believe that the growth of robots within Hindu practices could lead to an increase in people leaving the religion, and question the use of robots to embody religious and divine figures.
But there is another concern: whether robots could eventually replace Hindu worshippers. Automated robots would be able to perform rituals without a single error. This is significant because religions like Hinduism and Buddhism emphasize the correct execution of rituals and ceremonies as a means to connect with the divine rather than emphasizing correct belief.
It’s a concept referred to as orthopraxy, according to Wellesley College anthropology lecturer Holly Walters. “In short, the robot can do your religion better than you can because robots, unlike people, are spiritually incorruptible,” she explained. “Modern robotics might then feel like a particular kind of cultural paradox, where the best kind of religion is the one that eventually involves no humans at all.”
According to College of the Holy Cross religious studies scholar Joanne M. Pierce, preaching has always been considered a human activity grounded in faith. But what happens when that practice is taken over by an AI chatbot?
In June 2023, hundreds of Lutherans gathered in Bavaria, Germany, for a service designed and delivered by ChatGPT. But many are cautious about using AI to conduct these religious practices.
St. Paul’s Church in Fürth, Bavaria was packed with over 300 Lutherans who attended a church service generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.
In their sermons, preachers not only offer advice, but “speak out of personal reflection in a way that will inspire the members of the congregation, not just please them,” Pierce said. “It must also be shaped by an awareness of the needs and lived experience of the worshiping community in the pews.”
For the time being, it seems as though the inability to understand the human experience is AI’s biggest flaw within the preaching sphere.
(The Conversation) — Jesus has been portrayed in many different ways: from a prophet who alerts his audience to the world’s imminent end to a philosopher who reflects on the nature of life.
But no one has called Jesus an internet guru – that is, until now.
In his latest role as an “AI Jesus,” Jesus stands, rather awkwardly, as a white man, dressed in a hooded brown-and-white robe, available 24/7 to answer any and all questions on his Twitch channel, “ask_jesus.”
Questions posed to this chatbot Jesus can range from the serious – such as asking him about life’s meaning – to requesting a good joke.
While many of these individual questions may be interesting in their own right, as a scholar of early Christianity and comparative religion, I argue that the very presentation of Jesus as “AI Jesus” reveals a fascinating refashioning of this spiritual figure for our AI era.
Reinterpreting Jesus
Numerous scholars have described how Jesus has been reinterpreted over the centuries.
For example, religion scholar Stephen Prothero has shown how, in 19th-century America, Jesus was depicted as brave and tough, reflecting white masculine expectations of the period. Prothero argues that a primarily peaceful Jesus was perceived to conflict with these gender norms, and so Jesus’ physical prowess was emphasized.
By contrast, according to scholar R.S. Sugirtharajah, around the same time in India, Jesus was represented as a Hindu mystic or guru by Indian theologians like Ponnambalam Ramanathan in order to make Jesus more relatable for Indian Christians and to show how his spiritual teachings could be usefully adopted by faithful Hindus.
The point is not that one of these representations is necessarily more accurate than the others, but instead that Jesus has been consistently reinterpreted to fit the norms and needs of each new context.
The AI Jesus who engages individuals online in the form of a chatbot is the latest in this ongoing pattern of reinterpretation, geared to making Jesus suited to the current times. On AI Jesus’ Twitch channel, users consistently treat this chatbot Jesus as an authority in both personal and spiritual matters. For example, one recent user asked AI Jesus for advice about how best to stay motivated while exercising, while another person wanted to know why God allows war.
AI Jesus at work
AI Jesus represents one of the newest examples in the growing field of AI spirituality. Researchers in AI spirituality study how human spirituality is being shaped by the rising influence of artificial intelligence, as well as how AI can help people understand how humans form beliefs in the first place.
Over time, such systems can revise and recalibrate these statements based on new information. For example, if the AI system is exposed to new data challenging its beliefs, it will automatically nuance future statements in light of that fresh information.
AI Jesus functions very similarly to this kind of artificial intelligence system and answers religious questions, among others.
For example, in addition to fielding questions referring to war and suffering, AI Jesus has responded to questions about why sensing God’s presence can be difficult, whether an action that causes harm yet was done with good intentions is considered a sin, and how to interpret difficult verses from the Bible.
This AI Jesus also adjusts his responses as the chatbot learns from user input over time. For instance, as part of the running stream of questions from some weeks ago, AI Jesus referenced past interactions with users and nuanced his responses accordingly, saying: “I have received this question about the Bible’s meaning before. … But in light of the question you have just posed, I want to add that … .”
AI spirituality beyond AI Jesus
This chatbot guru is facing increasing competition from other sources of AI spirituality.
For example, a recent ChatGPT church service in Germany included a sermon preached by a chatbot represented as a bearded Black man, while other avatars led prayers and worship songs.
Other faith traditions are also providing spiritual lessons through AI. For example, in Thailand a Buddhist chatbot named Phra Maha AI has his own Facebook page on which he shares spiritual lessons, such as about the impermanence of life. Like AI Jesus, he is represented as a human being who freely shares his spiritual wisdom and can be messaged on Facebook anytime, anywhere – provided one has an internet connection.
In Japan, another Buddhist chatbot, known as “Buddhabot,” is in the end stages of development. Created by researchers at Kyoto University, Buddhabot has learned Buddhist sutras from which it will be able to quote when asked religious questions, once it is made publicly available.
In this increasing array of easily accessible online options for seeking spiritual guidance or general advice, it is hard to tell which religious chatbot will prove to be most spiritually satisfying.
In any case, the millennia-old trend of refashioning spiritual leaders to meet contemporary needs is likely to continue well after AI Jesus has become a religious presence of the distant past.
(Joseph L. Kimmel, Part-Time Faculty Member (Theology Department), Boston College. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Donald Trump supporter at Drake University in Des Moines
outside the Democratic Debate
In the previous two installments of this series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Donald Trump supporters known as “QAnon.” According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by Trump’s mortal enemies. Not surprisingly, none of the so-called “evidence” provided by my friend proved any such thing. Onward from there we go …
Fun with Adrenochrome!
The second link my friend sent me, entitled “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” was posted by a QAnon advocate who calls himself Vinctum. On Twitter, Vinctum describes himself as a “Red Pilled Armenian bloke from the Netherlands that’s into Personal Growth, Spirituality, Psychology, and Conspiracy facts.” Though he joined Twitter as recently as January of 2020, he already has more than 3,000 followers. His YouTube channel has considerably more: 181,000 followers.
“ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep” is a nearly 15-minute video that contains almost no facts whatsoever. It’s as if someone read and reread John W. DeCamp’s 1992 true-crime book “The Franklin Cover-Up,” which revolves around reportage about an alleged pedophile ring operated by prominent Republicans like Nebraska businessman Lawrence E. King Jr. (a crime ring that reportedly overlapped with Iran-Contra money-laundering schemes operating out of the Reagan-Bush White House), and decided to toss these scandalous rumors into a giant blender mixed with 100% pure gonzo jabberwocky — but this time around, Democrats are now the evil, mustache-twirling villains at the center of the soap opera. As with so many of QAnon’s claims, elements of past conspiracy theories have been distorted and flipped, always in favor of Republicans. Any allegations that reflect badly on Republicans are conveniently left out of the retelling.
According to “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” Hollywood performers such as Patton Oswalt, Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Hanks torture children on a regular basis in order to maintain healthy, moisturized skin. Of course, it’s just not possible to maintain a superior level of skin care without extracting Adrenochrome from naked, prepubescent bodies writhing in pain on a subterranean obsidian altar built at the feet of an enormous statue built in honor of Baphomet, the great goat-headed god. Vinctum draws passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” to make his case, but can’t even quote Thompson correctly, and even misspells his last name. (Is proper spelling really so much to ask? After all, Thompson’s name is emblazoned on the front cover.) I doubt this poor fellow has ever read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from cover to cover, despite the fact that it’s a very short book and shouldn’t take this “bloke” more than a couple of hours to get through it. He doesn’t even seem to understand that the book is meant to be humorous.
In 2017, a year after Trump’s election, I published a novel entitled “Until the Last Dog Dies,” which was about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. After wading through hours of this humorless QAnon material, in which even the most innocuous Disney cartoons are flensed of fun and replaced with dark speculations about the demonic symbols hovering like unholy specters over Uncle Walt’s films, I’m beginning to think that my novel was far more prescient that I could have imagined. For example, did you know that Illuminati Satanists inserted the subliminal word “SEX” into the animated film version of “The Lion King” in order to pervert the minds of children around the world? After all, what could be more demonic than the word “SEX”? (Isn’t it odd that these Christians are so concerned about the word “SEX” allegedly appearing for less than half a second in a Disney film, but don’t care at all that their president cheated on his wife with a porn actress? I don’t care what Trump does in his private life, or who he does it with, but this dichotomy seems to be a prime example of what psychologists call “compartmentalization.”)
Vinctum’s only source to back up his peculiar claims that Adrenochrome is being extracted from living human beings is in fact Hunter S. Thompson, but he never bothers to explain how this scenario might work in the real world. What was the source of Thompson’s knowledge? Is Vinctum suggesting that Thompson was a member of the Satanic Illuminati, and that’s how he knew about Adrenochrome being harvested from humans? Vinctum never bothers to clarify. He just floats a spooky suggestion, and allows the viewers to use what little imagination they have to reach their own ill-informed conclusions.
Because I’ve always been something of a masochist (as my friend Damien once told me, back in high school, “You’re never bored when you’re a masochist”), I went to the trouble of following some of the links that Vinctum flashes on the screen while he’s droning on and on. From these links, I learned that Oswalt, the Emmy-winning comedian and actor (who, coincidentally, has been an outspoken critic of President Trump’s policies) is in fact a sadistic pedophile who spends his free time hunting down innocent children at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. In the weird, wild mythology of QAnon, Comet Ping Pong is the equivalent of Mordor, the home base of arch-villain Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
On the surface a modestly upscale pizza joint in a residential Washington neighborhood, Comet Ping Pong is in reality the ultimate abattoir of evil in which Hillary Clinton and former White House chief of staff John Podesta are alleged to have tortured uncountable children to satiate their heady lust for young, nubile flesh. What was the evidence for Oswalt being a pedophile, you ask? Other than some doctored photos placing him at Comet Ping Pong, nothing. Needless to say, even if Oswalt had visited Comet Ping Pong, there would still be no evidence that the man’s a pedophile. I’ve not seen a single shred of evidence that links Comet Ping Pong to any criminal activity whatsoever, much less an international sex ring. And you know what? No one else has either. If those who devoutly believe they’ve seen such evidence would only pause a moment, take a step back from their own biases, and try to peer through the layers and layers of obfuscation QAnon has placed in front of their eyes, perhaps they would be able to see reality as it actually exists rather than the cheap illusion QAnon wishes them to see.
* * *
Not only does QAnon remind me of Salem witch hunters and New Age UFO cultists, but this brand new religion also resembles L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. At a backyard barbecue in Venice, California, 20 years ago, I met a fellow who had been a member of Scientology for 10 years until he finally woke up to the fact that he was being played for a fool and decided to turn the tables on them. This man spoke to me for a long time about what it was like living at the large Scientology compound in Riverside, east of Los Angeles. He did hard manual labor, like digging ditches in the desert soil, for 10 cents a day. If he came down with an illness, church officials made him work anyway.
Everyone at the compound had been so thoroughly brainwashed that if you ever questioned the word of L. Ron Hubbard, even for a second, your knee-jerk response was to turn that doubt back on yourself. For example, let’s say you suddenly found yourself entertaining a pernicious thought like, “Hey, is it possible that L. Ron Hubbard’s a liar?” Immediately, you would then think, “Wait a minute… what have I done wrong that I would even be thinking such a thing? Am I a liar? What have I lied about recently? Oh, yes, I did tell a white lie about something, didn’t I, just the other day? So that explains it! Now I understand why I’m doubting the great LRH. I’m so relieved! There’s nothing wrong with Ron. There’s just something wrong with me …”
QAnon’s followers rely on this same psychological safety mechanism on a daily basis. Since 2017, not one of QAnon’s major predictions have come true. For example, QAnon insisted that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, would team up with Trump to expose the “deep state.” In the first week of November, 2017, QAnon announced that Trump would declare “a state of temporary military control” within “the next several days.” By 2020, Hillary Clinton and her Satanic minions were supposed to be in prison. Despite the fact that none of these events have occurred, QAnon never once lost any followers. Instead, these followers have grown even more obsessive and loyal. QAnon’s acolytes said, “Wait a minute, QAnon’s not wrong. We simply misinterpreted his predictions. We’re the ones who are wrong! There’s something wrong with us. We need to continue studying the posts until we come up with the correct interpretation….”
Like Hubbard, QAnon has based his/her/their entire cosmology on past sources without ever acknowledging them. After all, the Great Godhead doesn’t need “sources,” does He? In the late 1980s, a former Scientologist named Bent Corydon broke away from the Church of Scientology and wrote a scathing book about his experiences entitled “L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?”, in which he revealed that Hubbard drew most of his ideas from philosopher Alfred Korzybski, author of “Science and Sanity,” and occultist Aleister Crowley, author of “The Book of Lies” and other tomes about ceremonial magic (or “magick,” Crowley’s preferred spelling). When Hubbard’s documented ties to occult organizations — e.g., Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis in Pasadena, California — became publicly known, Hubbard explained that he had been infiltrating the organization on the behalf of the United States military. Most of his followers believed him.
This same “the Great One can do no wrong” attitude is prevalent among QAnon’s followers. If a video was released tomorrow that depicted Donald Trump having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking victims, Trump would calmly approach his podium and say, “I had to do that in order to fully infiltrate the sick perverts who are secretly in control of this country!” and almost every single one of QAnon’s followers would enthusiastically agree. “Out of Shadows”
In the Christian world of QAnon, Democrats and Satanists are the same.
The hatred that Christians harbor against Satanists has always baffled me. After all, they share the same beliefs. Both groups ostensibly believe in the existence of the same mythological entities. A Christian and a Satanist would naturally have far more in common than a Christian and a Buddhist. A Buddhist doesn’t even believe in Satan. The respective belief systems of Christians and Satanists are branches of the same cosmology.
Perhaps this is why QAnon’s “Christian Patriot” followers appear to spend the majority of their day dwelling on Satanism, the main topic of a thinly disguised QAnon recruitment video entitled “Out of Shadows” which features conspiratorial ruminations by a former Hollywood stuntman named Mike Smith. The third link my friend sent me led to this video, a feature-length YouTube “documentary” that took the internet by storm in April. As of this week, this video had received more than 18 million views. It’s a peculiar film, as it does indeed contain some accurate and vital information.
Of course, the most effective forms of disinformation must include some accurate and vital information, otherwise the lies won’t be accepted so easily. The former Scientologist I met at that backyard barbecue told me that he wouldn’t have pursued Dianetics at all if not for the fact that his earliest encounters with Hubbard’s teachings led to many lifelong anxieties being cured. He felt he had taken away some useful teachings from Hubbard. It’s only after Scientology gets you hooked on the brain entrainment methods that do work, only after you’ve invested so much of your life into their coffers, that they start dumping the really insane nonsense on you.
“Out of Shadows” follows the same pattern. The “documentary” begins by sharing accurate but little known information about Hollywood’s intersection with the CIA. I applaud the filmmakers for bringing to light the fact that the entertainment most of us imbibe so unthinkingly often carries with it a hidden political agenda. This has been true of Hollywood films going at least as far back as World War II, and no doubt even earlier. I myself have written a book that touches on some of these same issues, though my approach to the material is radically different. My forthcoming book, “Hollywood Haunts the World,” is backed up with genuine evidence from the first page to the last.
About 20 minutes into its running time, after dealing with the potentially dangerous intersection between Hollywood and the U.S. intelligence community, “Out of Shadows” abandons any pretense of objectivity when it presents a montage of various news reporters repeating the same words (“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” being the most memorable refrain), not bothering to mention the fact that this mimicry was the result of a pro-Trump campaign initiated by the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2018.
Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.
Stelter’s CNN article, published a few weeks earlier, offers further context, observing that at the time, the FCC was reviewing Sinclair’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media and that “Sinclair critics — Democratic lawmakers and some of the company’s Republican rivals — have alleged that the FCC has given Sinclair preferential treatment.” The scripted promos sent to all Sinclair stations, Stelter wrote, “show how the company wants to position itself in local markets from coast to coast”:
The instructions to local stations say that the promos “should play using news time, not commercial time …. Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written …. This copy has been thoroughly tested and speaks to our Journalistic Responsibility as advocates to seek the truth on behalf of the audience.”
The promos begin with one or two anchors introducing themselves and saying “I’m [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I’m [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”
Then the media bashing begins.
“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script says. “More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’ … This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
The fact that the filmmakers present this montage in “Out of Shadows” with no context whatsoever, then spend the rest of the “documentary” promulgating far-right conspiracy theories, is extremely disingenuous, to say the least. Ironically, the main message of “Out of Shadows” could be summarized as a call to question authority because what we see in the media is driven by a hidden agenda. Unbeknownst to most of the people who saw it, “Out of Shadows” is a perfect example of that very manipulation.
Among corporations and intelligence agencies — not to mention certain high-profile political figures — it’s standard operating procedure to accuse your opponents of offenses you yourself are committing. The filmmakers of “Out of Shadows” take this tactic to heart. This is a consistent strategy used by the QAnon cultists, as when they fret about “black hats” locking helpless children in cages — despite the fact that the only government agents known to have committed such acts against children (i.e., immigrant children) are the Homeland Security agents carrying out the policies of Donald Trump, the very man QAnon claims is working hard behind the scenes to free abused children from subterranean cages. (In a world that still contained nuance and humor, I suppose one might call this “irony.” In our current situation, however, we’ll just have to call it a “fact” and leave it at that.)
After the montage, the filmmakers present genuine information about such insidious U.S. intelligence programs as MK-ULTRA and Operation Paperclip. Veteran conspiracy theorists will find no surprises here, but this might be educational for viewers who have never been exposed to this information. The filmmakers use the CIA’s longstanding involvement with mind control programs to segue awkwardly into a six-minute segment about the late Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, co-author of an infamous 1981 military paper about the future of psychological warfare operations entitled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory,” in which Aquino and his collaborators offer up such blatantly authoritarian statements as the following:
In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe — neither through the primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.
These media are, of course, the electronic media — television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasters make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have but the courage and the integrity to guide civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then devise moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.
MindWar must target all participants if it is to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people ….
In case it’s not obvious, that last sentence is a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. After all, is there an agreed upon definition of “enemy propaganda?” Who decides what “enemy propaganda” is and what isn’t?
Aquino’s story will be old news to viewers well-versed in these areas, but the vast majority of those who saw this video had probably never heard of him, nor had known that a High Priest of a Satanic church called the Temple of Set had served as a U.S. intelligence officer in Special Forces, Psychological Operations for many years. The filmmakers imply that Aquino’s existence is some deep, dark secret of the U.S. military, when in fact the lieutenant colonel flaunted his Satanic affiliations for decades. He even appeared on a 1988 episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show alongside his wife, Lilith.
Keep in mind that the documentary began with the intent to prove that Hollywood is a propaganda tool. So why spend so much time talking about an oddball military officer who published a disturbing paper nearly 40 years ago? Other than his brief appearance with Oprah, Aquino had no known connections to Hollywood.
From Aquino, we then segue back to more or less accurate information about MK-ULTRA, interspersed with wrongheaded analyses of supposed Satanic symbols embedded in pop culture that harken back to the height of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s. Perhaps you remember such delightfully stupid moments in American history as when Procter & Gamble was accused of slipping demonic symbols into their “man in the moon” logo (devil horns hidden atop Moon Man’s head, three sixes in the curlicues of Moon Man’s beard, and — choke! gasp! — 13 stars twinkling in the background), and when televangelists insisted that Mighty Mouse was imbibing the devil’s drug, cocaine, because he was seen sniffing an animated flower in a single frame of a Ralph Bakshi Saturday morning cartoon.
The filmmakers of “Out of Shadows” seem particularly bothered by innocuous music videos featuring the likes of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. In the case of the latter, the documentary suggests that only the complex machinations of dark and sinister forces could explain Perry’s rise to superstardom after abandoning her original Christian gospel orientation and reshaping herself into a double-platinum pop star. It doesn’t occur to the filmmakers for even a moment that Perry’s decision might have been influenced by the simple fact that the marketplace for a Christian gospel singer isn’t nearly as large as that of a scantily clad, quirky pop singer. (Apparently, this is one of those rare instances in which faith in the fairness of free-market economics has failed the conservative Christian community.)
Most of what these people perceive to be “Satanic symbols” are nothing of the kind. In “Hollywood Haunts the World,” I deal with the plethora of esoteric symbolism woven into numerous films, from Victor Sjöström’s “The Phantom Carriage” in 1921 all the way to Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” in 2020. Very few of these hermetic films could be described as “Satanic” in nature. In my first book, “Cryptoscatology,” when commenting on Alex Jones’ 2000 documentary, “Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove,” I wrote that Jones’ biggest weakness was the typical “Christian tendency to confuse paganism with Satanism.”
Indeed, Christians often confuse hermeticism with Satanism. They confuse esotericism with Satanism. They confuse Freemasonry with Satanism. They confuse spiritualism with Satanism. They confuse Mormonism with Satanism. They confuse homosexuality with Satanism. They confuse Dungeons & Dragons and Procter & Gamble and Mighty Mouse and comic books and pop music and cocaine with Satanism. When anything that is other or different or unfamiliar is confused with Satanism, you’re going to experience a great deal of bewilderment. And then you panic and begin making YouTube documentaries that end up containing about 15% truth and 85% disinformation. That vitally important 15% keeps a lot of eyes on the screen for the duration of the documentary. But that 85% is the real reason you made it, isn’t it?
While suffering through this 118-minute piece of QAnon propaganda disguised as anti-Hollywood/anti-government propaganda, I was struck by the fact that I could easily make the filmmakers’ case for them far better than they were doing themselves. If they really wanted to connect government conspiracies to Satanism, why not go beyond Aquino? Why not mention Louis Tackwood, for example?
What follows are relevant passages from Alex Constantine’s 1993 book, “Blood, Carnage, and the Agent Provocateur”:
In 1971, Lee Smith, an ex-convict from the California Men’s Colony, testified before Congress that he’d been paid to foment prison unrest. He’d been instructed by authorities to blame “Marxist revolutionary forces” for stirring up the violence. Afterward, conditions at the penal colony worsened ….
[Louis] Tackwood, who’d been recruited by [the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section] to provoke prison riots, blew the whistle in 1971, charging that the secret LAPD unit had been “set up on the same basis as the CIA” ….
Tackwood pulled LAPD skeletons out of the closet with the publication of “The Glass House Tapes” in 1973, including the disclosure that the department had about 125 provocateurs on the payroll. Some in the press, not many, asked questions. Liberal community groups in Los Angeles, discovering they’d been infiltrated, sued the LAPD. CCS [Criminal Conspiracy Section], the secret police unit, was disbanded, its spies and provocateurs reassigned. In its place evolved the OCID [Organized Crime Intelligence Division], which incidentally maintains no files on organized crime. The OCID does, however, keep extensive files on local politicians and private citizens ….
One of the most controversial aspects of “The Glass House Tapes” was Tackwood’s claim that the Los Angeles Police Department, in concert with various U.S. intelligence agencies, was using Satanic cults in California for the purposes of blackmailing and brainwashing high-profile initiates. I find it ironic that this scenario has now been embraced by the right wing, when back in the early 1970s the only people talking about this were far-left radicals like the members of the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee, with whom Tackwood collaborated on “The Glass House Tapes.” Subsequent nonfiction books like Walter Bowart’s 1978 “Operation Mind Control,” Maury Terry’s 1987 “The Ultimate Evil” and John W. DeCamp’s aforementioned 1992 “The Franklin Cover-Up” explore similar themes in far greater depth, so why are none of them mentioned in “Out of Shadows”?
The same is true of MK-ULTRA and Project Paperclip. Why don’t the filmmakers cite such well-researched books as Gordon Thomas’ “Journey Into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers” or Christopher Simpson’s “Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effect on the Cold War“? If the main purpose of this documentary were to inform the public about these topics, books such as these would be mentioned. That’s the type of move that encourages the viewer to pursue further research once the documentary has been seen. As I’ve mentioned before, William Cooper did this on his “Hour of the Time” radio show almost every episode.
At one point in “Out of Shadows,” Mike Smith says:
Let’s take the word “Hollywood.” Where does that come from? Well, “Hollywood” comes from the holly tree. The ancient druids back in the day used to take the holly tree, make wands to weave spells, cast spells, or channel spells. And when they needed help, they would consult the Magis or the “mediums” of the day to help channel their spells to the population. Well, cut to today. What do we have in our houses? We have these black boxes. What are they called? TVs. But if you stop and you say the word “television,” [you get] “tell a vision.” You turn on that television, and what do you get? What’s the first thing that pops up? A list of “channels.” And when you turn on those “channels,” what’s on those “channels”? Programming! They’re programming you. They’ve been programming you your whole life. You don’t even know it!
Jordan Maxwell, who’s been delivering lectures about occult symbolism for decades, said these same exact words to me in Mesquite, Nevada, in the summer of 1999. I first heard Maxwell make this observation during a radio interview on KPFK in Los Angeles in 1993. And yet Smith doesn’t bother to cite Maxwell. Neither do the filmmakers credit him at the end.
In the 1970s, the muckraking journalist Mae Brussell (who’s often referred to as “the Queen of Conspiracies”) began dedicating many episodes of her underground radio show “Conspiracy: Dialogue” to what she called Operation Chaos, an alleged CIA plot to destabilize the anti-war movement of the 1960s by assassinating various influential rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
Alex Constantine, a writer heavily influenced by Brussell, published a book in 2000 entitled “The Covert War Against Rock” that expands on Brussell’s theory at great length. By contrast, former CIA agent Kevin Shipp uses “Out of Shadows” as a platform to flip Brussell’s theory, conveniently leaving the CIA out of the equation and implying that such ’60s and ’70s rock icons as Morrison and Frank Zappa were not victims of COINTELPRO-style surveillance and harassment, but were instead the conspirators themselves. Here are Shipp’s own words:
It’s odd because, in Laurel Canyon, so many of the soon-to-be-stars there — their parents were either in the military industrial complex or intelligence or the Pentagon. In Frank Zappa’s case, his dad was working at Edgewood Arsenal where they were doing biochem studies, psychotropics, exposing U.S. troops to VX nerve gas and other things. The family kept gas masks in their house. He grew up with that in case there was an accident. And Edgewood Arsenal was doing very similar, related MK-Ultra projects on U.S. troops. The Gulf of Tonkin is another prime example. The commander of the Gulf fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin — his son was Jim Morrison. They claimed the USS Maddox was attacked by Vietnamese vessels. It was never attacked. As a matter of fact, they put ghost ships on the radar to make it look like they were Vietnamese ships. The Maddox was never attacked. It was an actual, literal “false flag” to enable the U.S. to declare war on Vietnam. So Jim Morrison’s dad was involved in the false flag of the Gulf of Tonkin.
After presenting information that seems to link MK-Ultra mind control experiments with the unlikely notion that the intelligence community was the main influencer behind the 1960s counterculture movement, we get Shipp’s implication that Morrison and Zappa were somehow brainwashed by their military parents to become rock stars and thereby create a generation of freako-pervo-weirdos. Shipp’s not the first person to suggest something like this. Perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, for example, was convinced that the Beatles were formed by British MI6 intelligence agents to influence American teenagers to experiment with psychedelic drugs. (In my experience, American teenagers don’t need British intelligence agents to indulge in illicit substances.)
If you think we’ve now reached the nadir of absurdity, you’re quite wrong. Numerous QAnon followers — far more than you could imagine — are convinced that Hillary Clinton was assassinated long ago and replaced with a clone, which is clearly a recapitulation of the conspiracy theory introduced to the world by Dr. Peter Beter on May 28, 1979. Beter insisted that President Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger, among several other key American politicians and military leaders, had been murdered by the Soviet Union and replaced with what he called “organic robotoids.” By carefully analyzing news footage, Beter claimed he could tell you the approximate time and place the real Carter was offed and switched with his robot clone. Beter’s special “audio letter” containing this startling announcement is archived on YouTube.
In 1992, a right-wing group called “Police Against the New World Order” — a loose-knit conglomeration of active and retired police officers, National Guard members and military officers — published a saddle-stitched, 76-page booklet entitled “Operation Vampire Killer 2000,” whose main purpose was to warn fellow law enforcement officers (as well as private citizens) of ongoing attempts by “New World Order” globalists to “overthrow the Constitutional Republic of these United States of America” by fomenting various crises that would lead to the establishment of martial law. Here’s a direct quote from the booklet: “Aided by their controlled media, and NWO government-paid agitators/’leaders’ on both sides, the goal is to frighten Americans, of all colors, into accepting Martial Law.”
The group was led by a retired Phoenix police officer named Jack McLamb. Whether his views were right or wrong, sane or paranoid, it’s clear from reading his booklet that McLamb’s intent was to warn the citizens of the United States against encroaching fascism.
QAnon has borrowed much from “Operation Vampire Killer 2000” while also managing to stand the original message completely on its head. Instead of warning against martial law, QAnon is urging people to welcome it with open arms.
[Early on] QAnon was advocating for a military takeover of the country, and martial law being enforced everywhere, and that this was actually a good thing. We shouldn’t really worry if Trump declares martial law and the military takes over policing, setting up camps to intern dissidents and whatnot. That was actually okay, and we should support Trump when he does that. So that was one of the early warning signs for me. Not to fully go the tinfoil hat conspiracy [route] that they’re preparing us for this, but just that [QAnon was] once again acclimating people to that [idea], making it seem that it wasn’t such a big deal, and at the same time sucking in a lot of conspiracy people who were warning about that very thing ten to fifteen years ago, particularly the more right-leaning [conspiracy theorists warning us against] FEMA camps [being set up] everywhere, and now they were [saying], “Oh no, the FEMA camps are good because we won’t be in them! It’ll just be the Democrats!” And that’s a very interesting technique — or experiment — to see if you could do that. QAnon was pushing this idea that [former national security adviser] John Bolton was a good guy, that he wasn’t a part of the Deep State or the Washington elite, that bombing and invading Iran was actually a good thing, and that we should all advocate for that. So, once again, [QAnon was] converting a lot of the alternative conspiracy people who have been — rightfully — questioning what’s going on in Iran and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and suddenly turning them around and getting them to advocate invading Iran and taking their oil and whatnot. So this is really, really strange and disturbing — the speed that these people all dropped [their former convictions and began advocating for] things they were previously against. Instantly, in the course of a few weeks, they had reversed course and basically just became Trump Republicans, advocating that anything Trump says is good.
Louis Tackwood, Alex Constantine, Walter Bowart, Maury Terry, John W. DeCamp, Gordon Thomas, Christopher Simpson, Jordan Maxwell, Mae Brussell, Lyndon LaRouche, Dr. Peter Beter, Jack McLamb. Work plundered from all the above researchers has been stitched together by QAnon into a weird, sprawling patchwork quilt of conspiracies. That the original researchers are never cited by QAnon suggests that the purpose of Q — and particularly of the “Out of Shadows” documentary — is not to inform. It’s to disinform.
That’s why there are only four specific sources cited throughout “Out of Shadows”: the aforementioned former Hollywood stunt man named Mike Smith, who admits that his supposed information was gleaned from too much time spent surfing the internet while convalescing from a work-related injury, which means that his experiences in the film industry are irrelevant in the context of this film; a still active stunt man named Brad Martin; a “former” CIA operative named Kevin Shipp; and a journalist named Liz Crokin. That’s it. Instead of interviewing a university professor like Christopher Simpson about Project Paperclip, they use accurate information only to drive home the real point: Believe in the theories of QAnon. And what’s the inevitable result of accepting QAnon’s theories into your heart?
