Derek Barris (3:29)

According to recent reporting by Vanity Fair's Tara Palmeri, Washington DC's hottest church is taking place every Sunday in a MAGA dive bar.

Matthew Rimsky (3:41)

Wow.

Derek Barris (3:41)

Yeah, she's talking about King's Church, which is one of DC's fastest growing evangelical congregations. This church launched in 2008 in a courtyard by Marriott.

Matthew Rimsky (3:53)

Yeah.

Noel Cook (3:54)

Oh my gosh.

Derek Barris (3:55)

Now from there it moved to the International Spy Museum, as you do then it was in a high school auditorium and most recently it landed every Sunday in Penn Social, which is a 13, 000 square foot bar that houses the church's 700 weekly attendees.

Matthew Rimsky (4:14)

Wow.

Derek Barris (4:15)

While the church claims that God transcends politics, Paul Mary writes that it's mostly attended by White House and Capitol AIDS think tank staffers, bureaucrats and interns who are on Capitol Hill. Church leadership claims that the church is bipartisan. Yet Palmeri asked a number of people to point out Democrats who were in the mix and no one could right besides a dogged devotion to the centrality of Christ in life and in this case, politics is part of life, Paul Mary notes how the church makes community a central component of its offerings so reading her article a day before listening to your excellent interview with no Noel Cook, Matthew, I couldn't help but recognize the parallels that she's going to be bringing up in a couple of minutes here. Two passages from Palmary really jumped out at me. The first could have honestly been said by Cook. I mean, she pretty much does say the exact same thing, which worry anyone left of center.

Matthew Rimsky (5:21)

She writes, what makes kings so startling, even unnerving for the secular left is how effortlessly it fills a void progressives never cracked, blending identity, community, and political machinery. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. And I also think there's a time lag issue and the fact that progressives are not as driven to instrumentalize culture until threats are imminent. It kind of reminds me of what Mark Bray says about antifascist movements, that they emerge in response to danger and then they generally recede and so often we don't even know how effective they were. So what I see now, though, especially in the Sunday morning street gatherings in Minneapolis with singing people are improvising body armor by duct taping books to their bodies, they've got their umbrellas out and plywood shields is like. I mean, that is a blend of identity, community and political responsiveness. I mean, there isn't, you know, it's not in a bar it's not, you know, there's nobody running a big open tab.

Derek Barris (6:25)

Well, I agree. I mean, it is really inspiring and really important being in Portland, Oregon. You know, we have waves of it happening. What I think the Vanity Fair article is pointing to, though, is the fact that the Christian right has been working tireless, tirelessly behind the scenes.

Matthew Rimsky (6:43)

Yeah.

Derek Barris (6:43)

For generations to acquire power. So what Mark Brace says is right. It responds to danger but then recedes. What Palmari is saying is it's always there, building for the moment. And what we see time and again is how responsive the left is when it really matters in that moment, but not being nearly as proactive or long term in its coalition building. Now, we've talked before about how churches offering not just community but services has really tapped into a social need. For example, I reported on going to Rick Warren's mega church a while back. The Saddleback campus in California features shopping, childcare services, educational opportunities, travel opportunities as well. Palmeri notes that mega churches like Warren's are not favored by Gen Z, however, because they actually prefer things like a focus on ancient rituals. The Nicene Creed is recited weekly at King's Church, for example.

Matthew Rimsky (7:50)

Wow.

Derek Barris (7:51)

But they're still fulfilling that need of belonging. Now, her closing quote of the article, which is included in the show notes, hit me hardest.

Matthew Rimsky (8:00)

A new power is taking root in Washington. It doesn't march or lobby or storm the Capitol. It pours coffee, sings under disco lights, baptizes interns and sends them into the machinery of government. And it grows every Sunday. Yeah. With the inclusion of the Nicene Creed, it makes me wonder whether I mean this. They're nominally evangelical, but I wonder if they're going to be cherry picking all of the sort of, of trad goodies from all of the proximal Christian movements that are also maga. Like, you know, they'll bring in the Greek Orthodox for some good incense and, and then they'll have some tradcast sermon from Bishop Strickland one afternoon. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how sort of multi denominational it's going to be.

Derek Barris (8:45)

Okay, well, I'm on their website right now and under their core beliefs, which is the first part of their About Us page, and it says we believe that the Christian faith should not be first defined by its limits, but rather by its central message. The Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed are historic confessions that demonstrate the heart of the Christian faith. So they do put it right front and center in terms of who they are.

Matthew Rimsky (9:11)

Right. Yeah. Interesting.

Derek Barris (9:12)

One thing that really jumped out at me during Your interview with Noel is how flexible beliefs can be, provided they fill that need for belonging. It's how you jump from Christianity to Puanon, for example, as she'll unpack a bit, she will get to that. But the other element about the interview that stuck out to me was the fixed gender roles that these women encountered in far right religion. And of course, this is nothing new. We've unpacked this for years, and we've known about churches maintaining patriarchal structures for a very long time. But Cook also mentions her privilege as a straight white woman in terms of gaining access to the women in her book, something that she mentioned she liked, likely probably wouldn't have been afforded if she were gay or trans, for example.

Matthew Rimsky (10:02)

That's right.

Derek Barris (10:03)

So here you have women caught up in very defined, rigid gender roles whose belief system is generally anti LGBTQ plus, generally anti immigrant. Yet the foundation of their gendered hierarchy is shared by some strains of Islam and Orthodox Judaism. For example, the majority of mosques in America and Orthodox synagogues separate men and women during prayer, and then they use this division to define home life and social roles as well. Now, there are a few fringe Christian groups, there's Orthodox Christianity, there's some Mennonite nominish communities that also separate their genders during service. Yet we're seeing more of this happen at home and in society, where I thought we were kind of moving in the opposite direction as a Gen Xer.

Matthew Rimsky (10:54)

No, no, no, no, Derek, no, no, I.

Derek Barris (10:57)

Apparently not. So to me, this is all a fascinating case study of how this need for belonging is being weaponized by different religious groups whose differences largely rely on metaphysical ideas and ethnic divisions. But at the foundation, there's this desire for male centered hierarchy being expressed in nearly identical terms. So it was really fascinating hearing Noel unpack a little of how this roots in these women's lives.

Matthew Rimsky (11:25)

Yeah, it's a great point. And just to speak of the economic and life experience themes, I often had the image while reading this book of the conspirituality grifters hanging around outside of the places where you recover from all of that patriarchal damage, outside of the recovery clinics or family courts or divorce courts or unemployment offices or check cashing shops.

Derek Barris (11:51)

Right. Except also in online spaces here. So I wonder if they're specifically gaming the algorithm to recruit for people who would be hanging out at these places as well.

Matthew Rimsky (12:03)

Yeah. So I think at the heart of Cook's success in this book is the really difficult and precarious method that she deploys. Like, we've done some interviewing and original reporting on this podcast. But our project usually relies on the public record. Here's what Cook says about that position and that set of limitations. In her introduction, she writes, quote, I immersed myself in their worlds. I started with the arrest records and tracked down social media accounts across different platforms. I read their blogs, Facebook entries, and Instagram posts. I watched their TikTok and YouTube videos. I started hanging out in the online spaces they frequented. I joined the same online groups they belonged to and let the algorithms bring me friend requests from people who believed the same things they did. Meanwhile, I dug around in newspapers and public records and found court cases, domestic disputes, and passed brushes with the law. I even reconstructed a few family trees. I learned a lot this way, but I still had only a remote understanding of what I was seeing. I was hovering too high above it. I was summarizing people and their beliefs based on a few key facts about them. From that height, it all looked simple and clear. It was easy to put people in well defined, predetermined boxes. But summarizing lives based on short personal sketches and a handful of demographic markers can make the actual individuals disappear. Human agency and contingency fell to the background. Actions and beliefs became expressions of demographic factors, as did identity. This approach tended to reaffirm the broad stereotypes and labels we put on people and and it can obscure as much as it reveals. This all started to change when I got to know the women personally. Now, getting to know Tammy Boutre and Yvonne St. Cyr, these are her main subjects, but, you know, she selected them out of a larger pool of women she met through January 6th connections. It meant connecting through Facebook, as she mentions, and then it quickly progressed into spending hours on the phone taking impromptu spiritual teachings with them and from them, traveling to meet with them, attending court dates. She visited Tammy at her trailer in rural Pennsylvania. Now, Tammy is a survivor of chronic trauma and substance abuse. Her kids were victimized by the Kids for Cash scandal. And after serving a 2023 prison sentence for her QAnon fueled January 6th involvement, she's still in it. She's still focusing on her role as a dragon slayer grandma. And then Yvonne, who is Noel's other main subject, is an Idaho grandmother and a former Marine drill instructor who was convicted of felonies for storming the Capitol and like giving, you know, drill sergeant orders to, you know, the people who were storming. She was really stubborn in opting out of every plea deal that she was offered because she viewed her, you know, activism and 2023 imprisonment as kind of like A soul contract because she considers herself to be a Pleiadian healer. She was one of the people that Trump pardoned in 2025. Now, as Cook's research progressed, she realized that in some ways she was the only reliable friend they had, which I found extraordinary. So when Tammy's trans daughter Sabrina died of suicide in prison after having been denied medication, she was there on a drug charge. Noel was the first person that Tammy called. And I think that's extraordinary because Sabrina's gender identity was actually taboo within Tammy's QAnon group. And yet there were few other people to whom she was so deeply connected because, you know, this is her daughter. And so it brought up something, Derek, that I'd never really thought about with regard to all of the potential wedge issues like this in the personal lives of maga People like how many queer people they know and love and are committed to, they're bound to in some way. Tammy also has mixed race grandchildren who she speaks about adoringly with Noelle. And so that's all amidst posting anti trans and racist memes on social media. So there's something like really horrifying to me about living in that level of contradiction, like caught between family bonds and this desperate need to belong. But there's also a part of me that thinks that might be a way out for some people if the contradiction becomes intolerable. I mean, that would be the hope. I can say that as somebody who spent three years interviewing former students of Pattabhi Joyce, the yoga teacher, about his criminal life, I was also in this same position often that Noel describes of becoming close to interviewees. Now, the context was totally different because it was kind of reversed because I was supporting the disclosure of these stories which the subjects really wanted to disclose, whereas Cook is doing something more critical, but never adversarial, to the point that she loses her subject's trust. But I do want to say for the listeners is that, you know, I know firsthand how hard that line is to walk because, you know, getting close to your interview subjects because there's some kind of like, deep trust involved and that's necessitated by the project itself. It tests many norms of journalistic and academic distance and. And yet I think it goes places that neither of those disciplines can usually. So I highly recommend this book. I hope every disinfo researcher reads it. Not because it comes to empirical conclusions, but because I just believe soaking in this qualitative research empathy will help everyone ask better questions. So my interview with Noel Cook is coming up right after the break and the book link is in the notes. Foreign.

Jordan Harbinger (18:26)

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Matthew Rimsky (20:07)

Hello Noel, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.

Noel Cook (20:10)

Hi Matthew, thank you for having me.

Matthew Rimsky (20:12)

Okay, really, really broad question to start with. In the introduction to this excellent book, you cite a scholar of right wing extremism, Cynthia Miller Idris, who says that, quote, when women get involved, a movement becomes a serious threat. And throughout the book you are unpacking this. But what's the reasoning here? In broad terms, I think it's important.

Noel Cook (20:35)

To understand that men and women bring different things to right wing movements, that they play different roles. Women do essentially behind the scenes organizing and movement building. The right is far more patriarchal than the left and they segregate by gender. Men and women have their own spaces, objectives that fit with traditional gender roles. We see that online. There's very masculine spaces that are dominated, like groiper spaces, for example. They don't have Many women involved, the women I study who are middle aged, they hang out in online spaces that are mostly populated by other women who are also similar ages. And they speak to issues of motherhood, children, health and wellness.

Matthew Rimsky (21:15)

Do they also wind up providing sort of emotional labor for the movement or even care services?

Noel Cook (21:21)

I think so. With each other in lots of ways, actually. And some of that, for example, with like Vaughn in the book, who is a true believer and does believe that she has gifts, divine gifts, that she is here to share. And so in that regard, yes, she does believe that her spirituality and her belief system does provide a caregiving in ways. And I think that's probably how she and I became close talking early on because my questions were not combative. They were their curiosity that she potentially saw me as an. I would. I'm not, I'm going to stop short of saying, like a new recruit, because she definitely was not out trying to recruit anybody. But it was very much like with evangelical Christians where they want to share the good news. And so she was always happy to share whatever she knew with me and I guess largely in ways to help me kind of see things, see her truth the way she saw it.

Matthew Rimsky (22:16)

Now, both for Yvonne and Tammy, but for maybe other women that you have kept tabs on or been in conversation with, is there any kind of extinction rate for this effect, for this involvement? As the women who get caught up in fascist movements realize that they're not actually being offered freedom or dignity by the misogynists who are running the show.

Noel Cook (22:38)

Some women certainly become disenchanted and they leave when they bump up against that inherent misogyny in the movement. But that's not how most of the women on the right respond. They believe men and women are different and they have unique roles. They accept the patriarchy and concentrate on serving women's roles within the movement and handling women's issues in quotes. Women aren't marching with tiki torches. They're in the libraries banning books and at the school boards running for our for positions or trying to ban back sedations.

Matthew Rimsky (23:10)

Now, one of the reasons I, and I know many others have been waiting for this book for a long time is that you have pinpointed, I think, a methodological crisis in researching the far right that looking at social media feeds wasn't getting very deep. So I'm wondering at what point did you realize that the open source Internet observation eavesdropping technique was missing things, or worse, it might have been creating caricatures of the people who we actually want to Understand better.

Noel Cook (23:46)

When I first started studying these women, I had not intended to do interviews, but I was encountering beliefs of theirs over time that I wasn't understanding or that I needed a better interpretation of what it meant to them. Because again, I'm trying to understand their beliefs and what they mean to them. And it's not across the board. You can take different conspiracies and different meanings of them and they can morph depending on which group is using them or disseminating them. And so I didn't intend to talk to anybody, but because some of these ideas were complicated and foreign to me, I had no choice but to reach out and ask some questions. And it turns out to be the piece that was missing for me when I actually started to talk to these women. And as similar as they might have looked on paper or on social media, it was different. When we were speaking, for example, Tammy, it was very clear she had entered this movement more looking for something to participate in and a way to meet people and more of a social outlet. Whereas Yvonne looked at this as a new faith based belief system and handled that much like someone would who was on a mission or a missionary who was trying to find people who were asking questions or who were interested that you could share this with. And again, Yvonne is different than a lot of people online doing this. She was never asking for compensation for it. And that's, I think, another way to just to really understand a true believer is when they truly are trying to share this with you in an effort to make your life better and they're not really getting anything out of it at this point except a lot of ridicule in the real world from real life connections. So that was interesting.

Matthew Rimsky (25:33)

And then what they get from you is certainly not ridicule at all, but a certain amount of actually empathy and listening, which itself comes with its own difficulties, let's say. And I know that this book actually had, you know, academic roots and you had advisors who actually said, hey, you know, you got to be really careful doing, you know, studies with real people and you have to make sure that your roles are clear. And I'm wondering how you navigated all of that and really sort of fostered trust with people that you're actually presenting now in a critical light.

Noel Cook (26:10)

Well, I think that was part of moving into year two when I started to actually personalize it and get and talk to people as individuals instead of looking at people as just QAnon conspiracists, because sometimes these weren't even by the time I rolled into year two, you realize these conspiracy spaces online, it's not just QAnon conspiracies anymore because it's a. It's kind of what I describe as like a trade show where everyone has their booth and you know, something like the Conscious life Expo. Whether you've got the numerologist over here, you've got the energy healer here, here's somebody who will read your aura, but there's also the crypto guys over here and there's this anti government map up on the wal to show you how everybody's controlled by corporations. So you start to see this whole like some of the online anti government conspiracies come in with all the alt wellness stuff, which would then work with the QAnon stuff. And so you get everybody dabbling in different languages at this point, but all of the messaging kind of converges and is the same. And so that was kind of interesting because it wasn't just conspiracies anymore. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric, anti science rhetoric with women who had never been that these were ordinary women who had not been affiliated with any sort of organized group prior to the Capitol Insurrection. These were all people who had been radicalized online in their online groups and in some cases by savvy influencers and or cults that already had an online established presence.

Matthew Rimsky (27:43)

This trade show scenario that you mention, I wonder if you feel like it had a specific kind of function, especially the variety. Because I think my sense is that because you reach a point with any particular conspiracy theory or any kind of, you know, variety of rabbit hole, you'll come to a little bit of a dead end with regard to finding the real truth of the thing. But if there's a number of things that you can kind of bounce your attention from one to the other, then that's probably really vitalizing for the movement as a whole. Like they to I think they have to offer a kind of smorgasbord. Does that fair?

Noel Cook (28:30)

I think it's fair. But I've gotten pretty jaded over the last several years. And so I see a lot of opportunists at the top of the food feed, you know, the feeding chain. Food chain who again, I kind of base this again on going back in time looking at social media accounts, not just from these average people, but also the influencers they follow. For example, in 2020, 2020 and 2021, Yvonne had gotten heavily influenced by the online cult Love is One, which she found through Facebook because she was online looking for alternative remedies. To boost her immune system during the pandemic. And she met these people then who taught her about, oh, and all this trauma you have, let's cleanse that by doing an etheric surgery with mother God. And so here's this woman who's now, because she's been at the trade show and she took home her bag of swag from each of the booths and dumped it on the floor. She's chosen a pieces and one of them is a sovereign citizen piece that allows her to now say, oh, I'm not going to be a complacent slave. I'm not going to register my car, pay my insurance or my house payment. And so now she's got these real life consequences where her house is taken away. And I forget how I got all the way out this far in the.

Matthew Rimsky (29:46)

Field, but we're talking about how specifically certain people will attach to influencers or whether or not they need to bounce from one to the other. But it sounds like Yvonne really latched on really hard to mother God.

Noel Cook (30:02)

Well, part of that was because of the pandemic restrictions. Yvonne's one of those again, this is again where personalities and life circumstances, it differs from every person I have talked to as their entree point or their tipping point into conspiracies in general. And for Yvonne, I think it is her personality. She wants to go all in on something. Which is why in the late 80s as a woman, she joined the Marines, right? That was unusual for women to join the Marines when she did. But she didn't just join the Marines, she rose the ranks up to drill instructor. And that was a voluntary assignment. She asked for it. She didn't need some people have to go in the drill instructor position to advance into the next level. And she did not. She chose to do it. She chose to go in there and break them down into Marines. And so that tells you a lot about who she is is because when she left the Marines, then when she was dishonorably discharged, she went straight into evangelical Christianity. And she wasn't just content sitting in the, the, the, the benches, she, she wanted to lead. And so she became like a youth group leader. So when the pandemic hit and she was photographed on a youth event without mask, she got a phone call and was scolded. And then shortly thereafter, churches shut down to in person gathering. So now she's been scolded, her leadership position is called into question and she can go to the physical location. That was her aha moment. The church and organized religion is nothing but a Man made tool to keep us complacent slaves and to keep up the programming. And so she completely rejected it. And part of that also, you got to remember the flip side of that. And again, this comes from my observations of being in the distance at the same time that was happening. People in the church were distancing herself because of some of her crazy bullying. You know, she's sharing some of this cabal stuff with them and some of the Pizzagate conspiracies with people at church. And so as she becomes more isolated in the real world and the church is shutting down, it was almost, I don't want to say she was pushed out. She was. It was a conscious choice, but I could see how she made, you know, you watch over time, you see how someone makes those connections. And it's not quite as simple as it looks right at first, but that's how she found Mother God. And that's how she decided that God was now spirit and might be a woman too. But she's more into the whole divine, feminine, divine, masculine, and it's probably both.

Matthew Rimsky (32:29)

There's a real dialectic because she is go hard or go home. But that also puts her in a position where she is sent home when she gets to be too much for whatever group she's in. Right, right.

Noel Cook (32:39)

Whereas Tammy entered this from a totally different space of just wanting to meet people because she was so socially isolated, sandwiched between caregiving roles of grandchildren and children. Some of the women were sandwiched into care of parents now who are aging. They just got their kids out and now they're back to caregiving for parents. As I think there was a lot of that during the pandemic. And other people who otherwise maybe hadn't spent all their time online found themselves online a lot more. And as we know, conspiracies are most likely to stick for people when there are times of uncertainty, chaos. And so I think that there was just this perfect storm back in 2020 of the political climate, the actual global pandemic crisis, and then all the people online poised and ready to go as soon as they saw a way to sell you something. And that's what I noticed with like love is one, for example, I went back to whatever social media was still able to be found on the way back machine. And I don't see them posting much about QAnon ever up until about 19. And then I see like one of the acronyms, like if you know, you know.

Matthew Rimsky (33:52)

Yeah.

Noel Cook (33:53)

And by 2020, we've got the where we go one week go all while they're selling you collidal silver to boost your immune system and protect your family. So it was interesting to watch how many people were poised, ready to go to suck those people in.

Matthew Rimsky (34:06)

Well, you've got really diverse stories going on here and I think this speaks to your scope of practice because you're really careful to clarify that you are not writing this book in a data driven fashion, that the portraits of Yvonne and Tammy are not meant to be generalized. So how do you see this qualitative research interacting with whatever data driven studies begin to emerge and shape the discourse? Like how do you think it could influence policymakers or thinkers?

Noel Cook (34:37)

I think academics and policy scholars put too much faith in quantitative methods that lead them to a place where too much. They put too much faith in crafting policies as a solution when, excuse me, the model is based on persuading people through logic. And I think what that mindset misses is a lot of politics, right wing politics, belief in conspiracy theories is about feelings, not logic. You can't change someone's mind with great policy proposals or the right catchphrase. You need to appeal to emotion. You have to have an emotional trust. And if you don't establish a degree of trust, it doesn't matter how amazing your policies are or how clever your rhetoric is, you're not going get anywhere. And I think that's a real problem. On the left, you can't just engage with ideas, you have to form relationships and build trust to persuade. That takes time and energy. And on the left, everyone wants to be intelligentsia and craft solutions and post and blog the politics. And in person, political action tends to be confrontational. There's a place for all of that, but that's. And it's important. But I don't see many people trying to do persuasion work based on building relationships and trust. And I'm not trying to. Am I talking also about trying to convert neo Nazis or Christian nationalists who are probably beyond persuasion that these are ordinary people who have not been doing it that long. And what I see is oftentimes using conspiracies as a coping mechanism in many ways. And those are people who are potentially able to be persuaded. And so I think that's why qualitative is necessary for sure.

Matthew Rimsky (36:21)

I don't know if you know Sarah Stein Lubrano, but I've interviewed her about her book Don't Talk about Politics, where she basically says, you know, if you're not doing something for the person you want to talk about or persuade, if you're not in service to them in some way, if you're not like actually showing them that you care about the material conditions of the, of their world, why the fuck should they listen to you? Why should they have anything to different, you know, to, to, to get from you at all? And I find that very, very compelling. And it seems like you're, you know, you're tracking stories in which, which that's probably true. You're talking about women who, and people in general in this movement who actually need better relationships and sources of social support and access to better information.

Noel Cook (37:08)

And that's kind of going back to your last question. I think in some ways is like when I started this out as academic and I was trying to use academic methodology. It was when I started talking to Tammy in the summer of 2022 that I realized I wasn't going to be able to proceed that way. Because one of the first conversations we had that she shared with me was right before her sentencing for her role in January 6th. And she confided in me that my public defender wants me to get 15 character letters. And I don't think I have 15 friends anymore. And that was kind of one of those moments when I was went, huh, I wonder if I do, you know, because like when you're in your mid-50s, late-50s, and your kids are grown, your social life has kind of gone down the drain and you don't have a lot of connections anymore. And so that kind of, kind of was one of those bumps that put me into like, oh, wow, this is kind of common ground here. And the interesting thing about the years I spoke to these women, do you know, I never had to once talk about Trump. I didn't talk about politics. We literally talked about our lives as middle aged women and we could talk about raising children, we could talk about about divorces, we could talk about. There were a lot of things we had in common, which was surprising to me.

Matthew Rimsky (38:20)

Yeah, well, let's go there because throughout the book you are talking about issues like patriarchy, unpaid labor and divorce as being risk multipliers for women like Yvonne and Tammy. And potentially you, when it comes to conspiracism, you wind up on the other side of the line. But I'm just wondering, that seems to be, is it fair to say, like that's a key sort of part of the method is to realize this common ground?

Noel Cook (38:49)

Yeah, it is common ground. Because you know, what I did have in common with them? For example, I went from when I got divorced after 22 years of marriage, I found myself in a Very vulnerable position, having been a stay at home mom raising children, because now I have this giant gap in a resume to explain. And then I have my age, because women over 50 are pretty much invisible and useless in our society. So you have that working against you. And so, and then the financial piece of it, not to mention the emotional labor that goes into, you know, most of the time it's the women who are responsible for the rest of the family's emotional labor to making sure your kids are okay, whether they're adults or children at that point. And so I think, I think.

Matthew Rimsky (39:35)

The.

Noel Cook (39:35)

Vulnerability that something like divorce does create with poverty or insecurity, financial insecurity, lack of social safety, network, no friends, I think it. And then mental health, for example, is another problem. So you're going through a big traumatic event. Well, what happens when you need to go get a therapist? If you don't have employer based insurance, you know, you're kind of out of luck. And if you, if you do have something even like Medicaid. It took Tammy after the death of one of her children, three months. She was on a waiting list for three months. But by the time that three months was up and she was almost ready to see a therapist, she also faces housing precarity and she lost that housing and now she has to move an hour away to live with one of her children and start the whole process of a waiting list again. And so this was, this is a woman who was in crisis. A child committed suicide. And I watched her unable to get in to see someone. She was finally able to get a therapist through her parole officer or probation officer. She served her 20 days in prison for her role on January 6th. And then it was when she met with her probation officer that they said, yes, they would help, they would get a court order for therapy, and that's what they did. And she then found a therapist. But it shouldn't take being arrested for a federal misdemeanor to be able to find a therapist.

Matthew Rimsky (40:58)

I imagine that when you're in conversation with this person and they say, and they reference my divorce, like there's an immediate doorway there of, oh, I know, know what that is. And wow, what were the downstream effects of that? And then you can almost like very forensically figure out what were all of the elements that came into play that maybe you had support in and that they didn't. Yes, that, you know, created this fork in the road and these very, very different outcomes to be on the different sides of this particular book.

Noel Cook (41:32)

That was something I grappled With a lot in year two, because I was like, you know, somebody would walk in the room and say, who are you on the phone with? And I mention one of the names and they'd say, oh, I thought, you know, it was one of your friends from somewhere. Because I was talking to all my friends, right? Because we were. We built relationships. And I had grappled with that for a while because I like, how am I building with relationship. How am I building a relationship with people so polar opposite from me? But then I realized there. There are some commonalities. And again, I'm a privilege. I'm an appreciation, privileged position of not being part of a marginalized community that's targeted. So it's easy for. Easier for me probably to say that I'm able to have these conversations and build relationships because I'm not one of the targeted groups. That's something you probably can't do if you're part of the LGBTQI community or something. That's another problem with this kind of work is who gets to do it. Right. I did this and kind of destroyed the academic piece of it because I recognized very early on with Tammy, when I helped her with the death of one of her kids, that I had gotten personal. And it was very difficult to pass any sort of review with academia. But at the same time, I also watched these women, these same women I talked to, and I talked to a lot of women. I just focused on these two because I. I guess case study is the best thing I can call it to match with the research that's coming out academically. These are two long term case studies. And it was an unusual situation that I happened to be in. And this is where all those things I told you about the damage done by divorce also in some ways helped me because there was no real career path. I had gone back to school to get a degree, but there was nowhere to go with it. So this was a luxury I had in some ways, to spend this kind of time doing this where I really did devote full time, and I was available whenever people wanted to talk. And in the process of that, I started to care about these people as human beings. And I did have empathy for them, because it's kind of impossible not to sometimes when you read their stories and.

Matthew Rimsky (43:47)

How gratifying it must be for them to have you on speed dial, that, you know, if you actually. If you're going to take the call and they're going to have a lot of people in their lives that aren't actually taking the call.

Noel Cook (44:02)

Right. And Tammy, I would say that's especially true. And I know we probably bonded over the suicide of her child, you know, in a way that was different than I did with Yvonne. Plus, they're just different people who also are doing this for different reasons. Yvonne really is more of a prophet type teacher, one who wants to teach. She doesn't need much from me because part of her belief system says there are no attachments. Whereas Tammy's entire purpose for this is to have somebody to talk to. She would go to all of the rallies in Pennsylvania when Trump would be there. I would never once hear her talk about what Trump had said. It was always about who she got to meet from her telegram, Facebook, bam.

Matthew Rimsky (44:45)

Right.

Noel Cook (44:45)

You know, so it. Everybody has a different reason for going in here, but you can oftentimes when you talk to someone over time, you can see that tipping point where they started to question. And for Yvonne, the first tipping point was a weight loss journey. And she was in a dietitian's office who showed the documentary Fed Up Wow about how the government hides the results of what processed sugar does to human body.

Matthew Rimsky (45:09)

Right.

Noel Cook (45:09)

And, and she was in that moment already where she was looking to question things and to make, you know, to find reasons for things that had gone wrong. And so she's like, oh, well, if they lied to us about that, what else are they lying to us about?

Derek Barris (45:22)

Right?

Noel Cook (45:22)

And, you know, and now within six months, we've got the COVID restrictions coming down, and so she's able to connect all those dots, put it all together, and take off with it.

Matthew Rimsky (45:39)

Now, in your account, speaking of, you know, vulnerabilities, Ivan and Tammy are vulnerable in QAnon in part due to their own long term experiences of CSA of intimate partner abuse and constant economic stress. And so the conspiracy theory provides them with a stable but also fantastical explanation for a world of predators, which is. Is real to them on the qualitative level. It's a really kind of slam dunk connection in my view. But are you aware of any data that might generalize that correlation? Like how widespread do you think that particular pathway might be?

Noel Cook (46:18)

I think it's pretty common pathway, actually, and there are a lot of studies out that confirm it. But trauma is not a guaranteed pathway. There isn't one formula for who believes in conspiracy theories, that trauma has to fit within other experiences and personal characteristics. That's the problem with the belief in conspiracies. It's very hard to predict. And mostly all I can say is that someone who is more like someone is more likely to believe in conspiracies. Who has certain risk factors for a belief in conspiracies like trauma. But it's not like just because you. Or molested as a child, you're going to become a conspiracy, right? A lot. It's all personal circumstances. You know, you mentioned me earlier about why I didn't go down any of these rabbit holes. And I, and I was. I've thought about that a lot, and I've never been prone to conspiracism.

Matthew Rimsky (47:09)

Right.

Noel Cook (47:11)

I have to have some kind of physical evidence before I'm going to believe anything you tell me. Right. There's got to be something that I can make sense out of by looking at it. And so I don't know why that is. Maybe it's that I didn't grow up with religion as part of my, my core, you know, being I don't have that faith that, that I don't have that part of my part of the red brain will not just believe something on blind faith. And I, that's the only thing I can connect it to is I didn't have that religious background. Maybe.

Matthew Rimsky (47:44)

Well, the word connection is important here because in documenting Yvonne and Tammy's early life experience, you do draw on some research on the ACE scale as predictive of various health and mental health challenges in later life. And one of the things you note is that memory deficits are common with high ACE scores and that Yvonne can't actually remember big chunks of her childhood. And I'm wondering whether you feel there might be a relationship between losing chunks of memory and the fact that conspiracism actually works to fill in all kinds of gaps.

Noel Cook (48:21)

I think that that relationship is complicated because the women I've talked to, they never really use conspiracy theories to explain their own past traumas or what's happened in the past. They talk clearly and honestly about the past without trying to explain or rationalize it. And that's. I was struck by that probably in year three. I'm like, how come every time, like for example, Tammy in the book we talked about how she, two of her children were caught up in a scandal called Kids for Cash, which was a massive breakdown of the juvenile justice system, and yet she doesn't explain that through a conspiracy. Exactly. It's just exactly what it is. And she doesn't explain the things that happened to her in her twenties through conspiracies or her childhood through conspiracies. It's only the present and future that conspiracies come into play, which I don't really understand. And that would be something for a psychologist probably, to help me figure out, because I'm fascinated by that part. It just kind of struck me one day. It's like, why isn't the whole world explained through conspiracies throughout your lifetime? Why is it just starting now?

Matthew Rimsky (49:25)

That kind of leads to my next question. Because with this empathetic approach at the heart of your work, you also, as you describe your intellectual distance, I'll just quote you here. You say, where they see patterns, I see creative wishful thinking. Where they see conspiracy, I see falsehood. Where they find certainty, I find elaborate coping strategies for handling life's disappointments, hardships, uncertainty, chaos, and cruelty. And so it makes me wonder how you feel about Naomi Klein's formulation that conspiracy theorists get the feelings right but the facts wrong, and that in the cases of your subjects, the feelings emerge out of this lifetime of experiences, and then they sort of maybe impact the way in which facts are taken in or understood in the present day. And then, of course, we have a complication like the way in which the Epstein case then just presents itself as almost like a verification for QAnon.

Noel Cook (50:22)

Yeah, I think that's right. Actually, with most conspiracy theories, there's kind of a grain of truth. Often, not all of them, but often. And the funny thing is, there is a cabal of elite men who harm children. And I keep wanting to say, like, yeah, you guys, right. You know, you were right. But the thing that's kind of unbelievable to me is, since all of that stuff's really started to come out in the last couple months, I keep scanning the social media. I have not asked either of these women directly about their thoughts on the Epstein case.

Derek Barris (50:52)

Right.

Matthew Rimsky (50:53)

Okay.

Noel Cook (50:53)

But I keep watching social media, and it's being avoided. It's kind of like not being talked about. So what I can see. So I. Again, I kind of go off my gut of having known these people for so long and how they operate. So I have. I haven't really inserted myself into that conversation yet because I know that at least Tammy, I'm pretty sure, is gonna have some questions in her mind already. But I also feel like they're in denial right now. I need time to process it. And so I'm just kind of waiting and taking. Like, with most things, I take their lead. When they're ready to talk about it, I'm gonna ask about it.

Matthew Rimsky (51:25)

Well, I'll come back to that at the end because I think that question of what actually. What actually changes something or what breaks a particular Spell, or what gets seen in a different light is like the ultimate thing that we're looking at here. But just before that, I want to ask about, you know, of all the tragic stories in your book, Tammy's relationship with her trans daughter Sabrina provides some ray of hope, I think, because it's extremely complicated, as anybody might guess. Guest. But it also shows that Tammy was able, in a limited way, to preserve and protect her relationship with a person with whom she shared family connections, but also experiential solidarity, despite the fact that her political milieu told her to disbelieve, to reject, to mock trans people. Now, the story ends in tragedy, but did you find that there were some hopeful elements in the. In it?

Derek Barris (52:23)

Yeah.

Noel Cook (52:24)

I also found to be very sad, though, because again, when Sabrina committed suicide in the men's county jail where she was being held on a drug charge, I was the very first person Tammy called. And she'd been speaking to me for about two months online. I'm just a person from the Internet. And that really struck me as like, well, you really are isolated. There really is no one else you can rely on here. And you know that I started to help her during that period of time. And that is how I really. I started to really recognize what would that be like if I had no one to turn to for even practical help. Right. And so, like, I may not, you know, I never. I never did anything like help her with money, but I can help her with my social capital. Right. I can help her with. I found a connection for her in Philadelphia for a boutique law firm that handled these kinds of cases, and they took their case pro bono. But unfortunately, the prison, after a year, sent them back almost nothing to build a case for. So because there was. There were a lot of problems with Sabrina's incarceration during that period where, because Sabrina had been in that same jail prior to transition in a very rural area of Pennsylvania, had been. Was pretty much harassed unmercifully when she ended up back there in 2022. And Tammy struggled with that a lot because it was a very hard thing for her to understand. And she didn't talk about it with her online friends. I did notice that, too, when she shared it with her group. But she called the person her son and used the dead name. And so that was weird. But Tammy was very, very much about. Her phrase for months was justice for Sabrina. And I really hope to maybe help guide her into some sort of community that she could work on, some kind of, you know, something that would help make her feel like she was getting justice for Sabrina. But I think so, as much as I would have hope, I also saw like, ugh, you know, like, oh, no. Because then within a day or two, we're back transvestigating Michelle Obama through memes on Facebook. And so that's been hard for me to reconcile because there's a disconnect. It's almost like it, it's, it's. It's your fantasy world versus your reality world. And, and I see that with, with so many of these women that I've talked to who either have children who are gay or in several cases, I've met very conservative MAGA women who have trans children. But I, they, and they will tell me that later after they've heard the story about Tammy, but they won't. They don't feel comfortable telling their, their friends in their own communities because that is something that could get them ost.

Matthew Rimsky (55:09)

That's an incredible form of social taboo function. Right. Because, you know, it forces the person to cycle very, very quickly between realities. I can imagine that the person is in their kitchen interacting with their trans or queer kid, and then they're going into the study to tap away on Facebook. And those are two completely different worlds.

Noel Cook (55:33)

Two completely different worlds. And we can even take it a step farther. Tammy has biracial grandchildren. Two of her daughters have children with black. She adores these children. Adores them. And both of these women, and the majority of women I spoke to would never identify themselves as racist. But again, go back to your online communities and you're sharing, you know, all kinds of anti Semitic memes. You're sharing. You know, I'll never forget the type Tammy put up. One where it was a meme of Al Sharpton on one side and the Confederate flag on the other. And it said, one of these is racist, the other is a flag.

Matthew Rimsky (56:07)

Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder with a story like that, like, what percentage of the person is actually committed to the online discourse? Because if the majority of the material life actually is, well, I'm going to help with the grandkids today, and I've got to organize my queer kids school thing for something. Something, then what is that other world then like? And how much space does it occupy? And with these two women, it occupied enough space to send them to the Capitol on January 6th. 6th. But that ratio is very, very confusing to me.

Noel Cook (56:46)

I don't know. Now, don't forget, Tammy's ending up at the, at the Capitol was because she wanted to meet people. It had nothing to do with Politics actually, you know, she was looking to meet people in her area, whereas Yvonne was going to the Capitol because she was believed she was doing something that God placed her there to do or spirit placed her there to do. Yeah, I don't know. There is a total disconnect. But the majority of the time and space that these women occupy during the day is online. And the majority of information that they take in is from online. They consume their news online, their influencers and gurus are online. Dolores Cannon is always playing in the background or some other YouTube video. It's constant. And I would think that becomes the primary.

Matthew Rimsky (57:35)

There's some very idealistic part of me that's reversing that ratio actually experientially where I'm thinking that, you know, actually what you have to do in the day to day is occupying most of your time. But actually Facebook is on the side. But I think you're describing something different. The opposite actually, that the online world is the central reality that the person.

Noel Cook (57:57)

Is navigating, especially five years, six years later. Because again, so many people have isolated or alienated people in their real life and so their circles become much smaller. It was already smaller based on their age and their life circumstances. Then you throw in all of these other ideas, especially when you're messing with your belief in Christianity. Right. And your. Your denial of traditional God situation that that had got Yvonne especially ostracized for most of her real world friends.

Matthew Rimsky (58:28)

Right.

Noel Cook (58:29)

Tammy didn't go to church and she didn't have any friends to begin with really. So, you know, she's. This has been an opportunity for her to find a. Of participation and belonging through her online groups and also any opportunity to go to rallies, to do in world experiences too, which, which is not just with conspirituality. I found this in 22 with the truck convoy, for example, that went across the country. I went to that where people were coming from different places that would maybe take six, seven hours to drive to Maryland. They were so caught up in that sense of community in this village that was being created that they would go home for the work week and then come back the following weekend at the Hagerstown Speedway with their new convoy family. And I really saw that just happening everywhere with these different groups. Some people abandoning their actual real lives to just tag along to whatever traveling circus was going around. It was kind of remarkable. And these were ordinary people who lived really ordinary lives to begin with. They weren't already doing weird transient stuff.

Matthew Rimsky (59:34)

But there's something also ordinary about hanging out too, because you seem to be describing a tailgate party.

Noel Cook (59:39)

Exactly. That's exactly right.

Matthew Rimsky (59:41)

Might have been getting the old college days back or something.

Noel Cook (59:44)

Well, and what I recognized it as when I went to the original Women's March in D.C. in January of 2017, I know that feeling. I know that feeling of being in a crowd of your own people. Right. I felt it. I felt that energy, that sense of camaraderie, that solidarity, that belonging and participate, all of those things. So I understand that feeling. And I watch that at things on the right side, whether particularly that truck convoy that went through, where that was. I found my people. It's like the Blind Melon video where the bumblebee comes in and opens the gate and they find their people.

Matthew Rimsky (60:20)

By the time you filed this book, both Yvonne and Tammy were still strongly holding onto their beliefs, and they even felt validation from Trump's pardons. Now, you've mentioned that you, you are very sort of careful about how you maintain contact, and you wait until people get in touch with you. But as far as you know, are they still holding that line, especially as more things emerge, the Epstein files and so on, as Trump continues to abuse the working class and especially maybe as the woman who Yvonne once associated with the divine feminine Marjorie Taylor Greene, has now ostensibly rejected. Q. Went on.

Noel Cook (61:02)

Yeah, I haven't. Again, they're not talking about a lot of that on social media, and I haven't spoken to them directly, but I don't see a whole lot of change in anybody's, anybody's devotion to Trump. And in fact, if anything, Yvonne is more in because Yvonne Went is one of the few women who took her case for January 6th to trial. Right. She was offered a plea deal. She could have probably done what most women had done and gotten a couple of misdemeanors and done, you know, 60 days in jail. She took it to trial, and she was convicted of two felonies, four misdemeanors instead, and given 30 months and, you know, even that she, she decided that was going to, you know, that was part of her mission, that there was somebody who would be in there in that women's facility in Minnesota who needed her message and that she was just gonna take her show in there and teach whoever wanted to learn. And that's what happened. You know, you can request books be sent to you. So she's still getting Oliver Dolores Canon books. She's still getting. I was very curious to see what would happen after being off social media, and you would never know it.

Matthew Rimsky (62:08)

Last question. I'm fishing for something hopeful here. I'm wondering if you have run into any women in this study who might be able to look at what's happening on the street with regard to ICE and say, oh, this is what I was actually afraid of. This is what I was worried about. This kind of government mental oppression is really what I should be paying attention to. And they're activated in that direction.

Noel Cook (62:41)

I'm sure there are a few that, that might be true for not the ones that I am watching or know of anyway. I think that only works when it's the other. When it's the other side. Right. But it's your side because that's your identity. It's part of your identity. You're not going to go against that identity because if you're, if you, your community believes that there are quote, illegals in, quote, you know, taking, taking over your country, which somehow they will believe that you're not gonna, you're not gonna leave that because leaving that idea, rejecting that kind of idea. And some people will because it's gonna get really personal. Someone in their family is gonna be affected. And that's one of those tipping points or a crack that happens that you can kind of start to distract someone potentially. But most of them know, most of them aren't going to jeopardize that identity, participation and belonging piece unless they're sharing.

Matthew Rimsky (63:35)

Enough of the same space together, I suppose, where enough of them watch the footage of Renee Goode getting murdered and they say, oh, actually I know people that could be my daughter or I know people like this. And somehow together they don't have to suffer the social alienation of changing their beliefs because they're all seeing it at time, the same, same time.

Noel Cook (63:56)

You would think so, but they all saw, you know, does it again, does it matter what the facts are? Does it matter what you actually see? Or are you going to take in what someone else is telling you to think? Right. I think that happened with Charlie Kirk. We all saw what happened. Right? But there's a whole bunch of them who believe it was a setup, it was fake, it was this or that. I don't know how when you have evidence of real time situations and you're showing people that evidence, evidence. And now with AI, lots of people just chalk it up to his doctored or it's AI or it's clipped or it's edited, it's, it's a gotcha. And so again it's. Until someone has something hit them personally up close, it's, you know, I never heard Tammy say anything about justice for Sabrina or anything about the way transgender people were. Were treated in prisons or. Or whether it was okay to take a trans woman and put her in a men's jail. Right. In the very early stages of that, she was talking about prison reform and looking into ways of doing that. But that kind of fades out. Like we all, a lot of us have that, those moments of crisis and clarity that then when everyday life, the same everyday life that kind of drove you to conspiracies in the first place, that doesn't stop. And no new protections have been put in place. There's been no alternatives offered. So of course they're going to end up back where they started. Right? I mean, that's kind of the way I've observed it.

Matthew Rimsky (65:20)

Anyway.

Noel Cook (65:20)

It has to hit people pretty personally before they're willing to walk away, because there's a lot of. There's a woman I met on Twitter, Erica Roach, who was a former QAnon conspiracist. She was a moderator for several large influencers in the QAnon spaces. And it was finally during some of the pandemic stuff, because of our own personal background in nursing, that she was hearing things she just knew were not true. And no way could her brain twist it into making sense. And so she started to push back and ask those kinds of questions, and then she'd be met with other things that she would even more outrageous or outlandish. She said, that's definitely not true. So it wasn't until it pushes up against your own ego and what you know, right. And what you. You're not going to let go of that, you start to step back. And as she starts to step back, she's getting turned on. And the more she gets turned on, the easier it is to keep going back. Because now, obviously, now you're like, these people are hateful also. And that's what happened to her. But everybody's experience is different. And, you know, I thought maybe the Sabrina thing would help Tammy, but not so much, because it's about so much more than just conspiracies for Tammy. It's her community, it's her social life. It's how she spends time for time.

Matthew Rimsky (66:34)

Noel, thank you so much for the immense amount of work that you poured into this and for building the relationships that allowed it to happen. It's kind of. I mean, it's God's work, really. It's very difficult to do, and it gives us a view that we just wouldn't otherwise have. And I think that's super valuable. I think people should be mulling over this for a long time.

Noel Cook (66:54)

Thank you. Yeah I think my my motto from day one was do no harm. That's all I could promise is do no harm because it was kind of an I unknown world here, you know But I think it's the only way to really understand people is to get to know them.

Matthew Rimsky (67:07)

Thank you, Noel.

Noel Cook (67:08)

Thank you so much Matthew.

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Noel Cook (67:56)

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