StS Episode 241: Wildfire Conspiracies, with Gail deVos

Standard disclaimer: All show transcripts—yes, including this one—have been AI-generated and skimmed by at least two busy and fallible humans. They offer an overview of the show but you’ll find occasional typos and glitches and therefore should not be assumed to be accurate or verbatim. Readers who wish to quote anything here for any reason are encouraged to check it against the original audio at the time stamps provided. Thanks.

 

 

KEYWORDS: The Onion, Info Wars, Testosterone Replacement, Trump, Gail de Vos, Folklore, Urban Legends, Wendigo, Ogopogo, Wildfire Conspiracies, Pizzagate, Climate Change

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 241 and I’m your host Pascual Romero, with me is my other host…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward. And we don’t have a Ben with us. Ben is somewhere hiking across the outback or something, making his way to Skepticon in Australia.

0:00:53
PR: Or, that’s what he’d like you to think he’s doing.

0:00:56
CW: Yeah, probably participating in a secret chupacabra government experiment somewhere.

0:01:01
PR: Yeah, most likely.

0:01:02
CW: So, for episode 241, we are going to be speaking with Gail DeVos. She is an author and storyteller, and deep within the world of folklore, although she doesn’t call herself a folklorist, we’re going to be talking with her about Canadian wildfire conspiracies. And there was a lot to talk about in terms of it kind of broached over to American conspiracies a little bit, if I dare say so myself. We had this discussion with her a while back and sort of we’re sitting on it for a little while. Her book, her new book, the Watkins Book of Urban Legends actually comes out today, November 19th, when we’re recording this on Tuesday. If you look on Amazon, today is the publication date. So you can get that book. It’s make a great stocking stuffer or gift for the urban legend lover in your life. And you’ll get to hear from Gail pretty soon. Pascual, meanwhile, we haven’t heard from you in a bit. How’s life going for you?

0:02:01
PR: I’m chugging along, very busy as always, but I’m still, you know, keeping one toe in the skeptic pool as much as I can. So, you know, trying to make it when I can, but I’m around. I’m still out there in the universe. So I’m glad that I can hop in once in a while, hopefully more soon. We’ll my frustration at the state of things come January might just force me to be on every episode and I’ll just rant for an hour, but we’ll see what happens.

0:02:32
CW: Is something happening in January that I could be concerned about?

PR: No, we should actually just pay attention to the moment because nothing bad is coming at all and nothing we should worry about.

0:02:43
CW: La la la la. Plug your ears.

0:02:45
PR: Have a great end of the year and pretend everything’s fine. I don’t know. I’m just, I, yeah, so we’ll see. But that aside, is there anything you’re skeptical of this week?

(MUSIC)

CW: Yes, there is. There’s a few things here. Number one, I don’t know if you saw this headline that caused many people to do a double take, the Onion has bought InfoWars.

PR: It took me the better part of, it was like the whole afternoon before I could ascertain if it was real or not, because I was like, it’s the Onion, like, they would say that, but also, boy, that would be amazing. But yeah, it turned out that did happen.

0:03:38
CW: Yes, a glimmer of light in this dark age here. And you know how hard it was for me? Like I would take a screenshot of the headline and send it to friends and they’d be like, Celeste, that’s the Onion. I’m like, I know it’s the Onion, but it’s a real article about what the Onion just did. But Ben Collins, the Onion CEO, apparently he spent the better part of a decade as a disinformation reporter. So this is a, you know, getting InfoWars neutralized is near and dear to his heart.

0:04:09
PR: Yeah, that’s awesome.

0:04:11
CW: So he said he called upon a group of Onion alumni to sort of ask them for ideas, like, you know, feel it out and say, okay, if we could buy this, what would we do with it? And he said he got a lot of really good ideas. And their undergirding mission is to fight fear and misinformation with humor, because he says that works way better than scolding people or doing, you know, you can do hard hitting journalism, but having a good joke that’s under 10 words is sometimes more effective than that. So I got to hand it to him. I agree with a lot of that.

0:04:46
PR: I think that we live in a meme culture now. It really is fighting misinformation with with very succinct and catchy. Funny things is actually, you know, it’s a tactic. And I tend to think it works.

0:05:00
CW: Yeah. Now, I don’t know if you read their press release about it from what was it? Tetrahedron Industries or whatever they called it. But their plans for the supplement and vitamin part of the business, according to the press release. They’re going to take all of the vitamins and condense them into a giant super omni supplement that the CEO will then eat in order to live forever.

0:05:25
PR: It sounds reasonable. I mean, I think that gets to the heart of what’s been advertised about those vitamins.

0:05:31
CW: I know, I know. Why not?

0:05:33
PR: There we go.

0:05:34
CW: So the Wall Street Journal actually has a little 20 minute podcast explainer. If you want to seek that out, it’s called The Onion is Buying Info Wars. No joke.

0:05:43
PR: Yeah. And today, after reading the notes for this episode, I came across a piece saying that Alex Jones is suing to try to block the sale. Is that true?

CW: Yeah. Yeah. That came out today, just hours ago. He’s saying that the bankruptcy judge should not sign off on the sale. They should block it because the onions offer is a, he called it a flagrantly non-compliant Frankenstein bid. I think that just has something to do with the fact that in order to get a higher bid amount, the onion talked to all the parents of Sandy Hook who were going to be recipients of this money, and the parents agreed to take a lower amount in order to have the Onion win the bid. Jones doesn’t like that because this other company, the first United American companies, which I guess that abbreviates down to FWAC, is also bidding for InfoWars. And go figure, FWAC is affiliated with Jones and his supplement store. So he’s trying to have his people buy his thing in his bankruptcy auction. Then he has the nerve to call out the other bidder as shifty.

0:07:04
PR: Yeah, you know, of course, this is not a legal podcast. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that. But I will say that I did a pretty hefty breakdown of kind of why he was stuck with this bankruptcy debt and that he couldn’t really change it. And just based on the amount of information I took in and learned from that, I’ve just got a gut feeling that this probably won’t work in his favor because the point of the fundraising and the auctioning of this was to pay the victims, the families of the victims. So I would say that probably from the judge’s standpoint, at least, you know, from what I’ve read, it seems that they kind of get to make the rules on that. So, yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see what that, you know, what that means fully and when it’s legally fleshed out. But I would guess that that’s probably not going to fly because they they kind of get to make the rules of, you know, you paying me back, I get to decide how you do it, you know.

CW: Yeah. Yeah.

PR: We get to decide what’s acceptable.

0:08:03
CW: Absolutely and and if if this means we get to watch Alex Jones lose again in court, I’m okay with that.

0:08:10
PR: I love it. Yeah, if heaven for me would be just him losing in court once a week just every Friday afternoon another billion-dollar lawsuit is lost by Alex Jones.

CW: Until one of the veins in his forehead finally pops and doesn’t know. Now, Pascual, you as a manly man, I noticed you were a little skeptical of something aimed at manly men.

PR: Yeah, speaking of Alex Jones and forehead veins. So I’m a middle-aged man. I’m in my mid-40s, and I’m sure many men in my demographic probably experience the same thing online on social media. Lots of advertisements for various online men’s health services and products and that ranges from you know supplements that are untested and unproven to actual prescription medications, hair loss medications and of course things like Viagra, but the one that really hit my skeptical radar was there’s a lot of people advertising that they can prescribe hormone therapy for low testosterone and you just go online and do an online consultation. They usually say it’s a doctor, 90% of the time it’s actually a physician’s assistant who is authorized to write prescriptions and they are authorized to make diagnoses. But I had to bring it up because you cannot be diagnosed with low testosterone on a video call.

CW: I mean they don’t like take your blood right from the video screen you can’t just…

PR: The needle doesn’t come out of your computer and you know so.

CW: Can you pee on your keyboard? Will peeing on your keyboard work?

PR: And you know, and speaking as a guy who I actually have a wonderful primary care physician who I’ve got a particularly unique relationship with because we’re just very just on the same page and she’s always helping me kind of navigate my life and where I’m at as a middle-aged man and working on my health. And so I did ask her about it at one point. I was like, you know, they always describe like these symptoms of low testosterone and like is that something we should be concerned about as I’m getting into middle age and she’s like hormones do change so it’s it’s a possibility but being tired isn’t really a good indicator. That’s one of those non-specific symptoms. Yeah you are a human living in America right now I think you’re just gonna be tired I mean and you have a stressful job and you’re a parent and you have stressful things in your life, like you are going to feel those effects despite where your hormone levels are. I’ve been monitoring my health pretty regularly the last few years as I’ve worked on my weight and things like that. And so, she’s like, she can track that stuff. And so we got labs done and she’s like, no, you’re fine, you’re in normal range, especially for your age. And, you know, cause I asked her, I was like, well, what’s the harm of, you know, getting on like a low dose of testosterone? And she said, well, it can be very harmful. Because if it’s not needed, it does come with a number of side effects and risks that probably aren’t worth it. The more superficial risks, it’ll accelerate hair loss, because that’s, hair loss is a function of hormonal changes and if you’re prone to it, it’s likely to accelerate it considerably for some people. It’ll also shrink your testicles, which is another… I don’t know how much that concerns me necessarily just on face, but it is a weird thing.

CW: I sat on a plane next to a wrestler. His name was Lanny Poffo. He’s Randy Savage’s brother actually. He was a weird, I’ve had really strange luck sitting next to people on planes, but over the course of an overnight flight from here to Florida, he told me all about his whole career and when he wrestled Hulk Hogan and when he took steroids and he said, my testicles turned into little raisins. I’m like, thank you for that image, sir. Okay.

0:12:37
PR: Yeah, that is a side effect. And then some of the riskier things are it can greatly increase your chance of prostate cancer, heart disease, sudden cardiac incidents tend to happen more often. Speaking of wrestlers, they have a very high rate of that as a demographic, so and a lot of them are on steroids. Now keep in mind there are different types of steroids, but kind of the base level, the standard go-to first thing you do when you get into that is get on some kind of testosterone hormone replacement or hormone treatment. So it comes with a lot of risks, especially when it’s done irresponsibly.

CW: Yeah, well, they kind of approach this because I’ve seen these ads too, even though they don’t apply to me, I see them. And it always strikes me as like, oh, it’s no big deal. You know, you’re just like you’re picking up a vitamin or a supplement. You might need X to boost your T. And there’s this whole push for American men, especially American men anyway, to be more manly, like Tucker Carlson wants you to shine red light on your balls and there’s almost this political agenda attached to it, like you know America is turning into a bunch of girly men, you know.

PR: Yeah, which incidentally, you know, ironically enough, breast enlargement is another side effect of testosterone. That’s the thing, it just seems so frankly just kind of blatantly irresponsible on face because again my biggest concern because I’m sure a lot of people historically as we know wrestlers and stuff like they’ve gotten a hold of it anyway and most of them have gotten it through of legal means through doctors and things like that. There’s always a doctor willing to just say, yeah sure you’ve got you’ve got low T but it just seems like this is a whole step in them. It’s just another step in a very irresponsible direction because you’re not looking up labs, you’re not getting any kind of testing done. The only way to know hormone levels is to do labs. I mean you have to test blood. There’s a physicalelement to it, like you have to see what the hormone levels in your body are. And that’s not something that can be tested.

0:14:56
CW: That’s a good, that’s a good just red flag. If your doctor says, yeah, I’ll set you up with some testosterone without checking your hormone levels first. That’s a bad doctor. And oddly enough, these, the people who are trying to get testosterone for themselves, again, I’m making, I’m painting with a broad political brush here. A lot of those folks are very much against gender affirming care because they see it as dangerous.

0:15:20
PR: And that’s kind of the most ironic point, because if anything is gender affirming care, it is hormone treatment. And I mean, with a bullet. And, you know, I don’t know how anti-trans politicians and stuff plan to thread that needle because I’m sure that it will hurt a whole lot of people who like them. But it really is just a lot of hypocrisy is exposed in the fact that these people, you know, are so nonchalant about this, but I’ve never seen a person of, you know, I’ve known people who’ve transitioned male-female, female-male. They all have had responsible care and very careful treatment with lots of testing and lots of, you know, assurances. There is not an online transgender mill, you know, so.

0:16:11
CW: Despite what you might have heard about schools just sending them through.

0:16:17
PR: To me, it’s just so ridiculous because it’s like this is where the irresponsible gender affirming care is. I mean, this stuff is truly not done with any measure of true responsibility. Again, because I just don’t see an ethical way to do this. And, again, and even my own doctor has told me, like, if we were worried about low testosterone, there would be a whole bunch of other things we’d try first. There would be regular exercise. Dietary changes can be really important. Just the types of nutrients you’re getting affect your hormone levels. This goes both ways, men and women. And men and women both need estrogen and testosterone. So these are things that if you’re really concerned about that, you really need to talk to your doctor. And if your doctor is a responsible person who understands this stuff, most likely they’re going to try everything else first because hormone treatment can be a pretty intense thing. And again, it comes with a lot of side effects that no matter how healthy you are, they can negatively impact you. And it’s really kind of that careful balance of is it bad enough that it’s worth it to risk the side effects. And I just caution anyone who’s listening to and podcasts. I mean, podcasts have tons of these ads.

CW: I have a feeling Joe Rogan has pushed it before.

PR: Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure that guy is full of it.

CW: So the real gender care we should be worried about is not male to female or female to male, it’s male to extra male. Yeah, I mean…

PR: We’ve got to watch out for that. That is like a 45-year-old male turning into more of a 45-year-old male is…

CW: Bad news.

0:17:57
PR: Bad news. Well, yeah, we should maybe have an endocrinologist on one of these days and we can go and do a deep dive into various forms.

0:18:06
PR: Yeah, that would be great. I’m sure we know someone. I’m sure someone knows someone.

0:18:09
CW: If anybody knows an endocrinologist, send them our way.

0:18:11
PR: Send us a referral. Hopefully our insurance will take it.

0:18:14
CW: Well, that kind of leads into a bit of a laundry list that I wanted to get to, getting longer as we speak.

PR: Yeah, speaking of 45.

0:18:22
CW: Oh, 45 turning into 47 here. Oh, we had a whole little emergency podcast release last week about Donald Trump getting elected and what that means for people who care about skepticism and science. And and so far, the thing that’s worrying everybody is Trump’s cabinet picks. These are not officially members of the cabinet yet. They have not been actually vetted and gone through the whole consent and advice stage in Congress. And in the news right now, there’s talk of Trump finding a weird trick in the Constitution to bypass that whole process and just appoint them for a two-year period or up to a two-year period without the advice or consent of Congress. We’ll see if that actually happens. And we’ll see if any of these guys and girls actually make it here. But just to run off a list here, hours ago we found out that Dr. Oz was named head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. And then Linda McMahon, who is a wrestling executive and wife of Vince McMahon. She is going to be maybe, like I said, I’m not counting any of these chickens until they hatch, but she has been pegged as Secretary of Education. She is supposed to be a fierce advocate for parents’ rights, and she’s also very anti-DEI. So she spent, about a dozen years ago, she spent a little bit of time on the Connecticut School Board, but that seems to be the only education experience she has. And as we know, they want to get rid of the Department of Education. So, yeah, they want to get rid of a lot of federal departments. So they’re kind of, they, Trump, I don’t know if you want to say he or they, people seem to be getting appointed with the express purpose of blowing up a department or some part of the government.

0:20:16
PR: These picks are very much like if someone didn’t know how to write a movie villain and they were just like the shallowest possible ridiculous villain you could. This is what it would look like they’re like, well, we’ll just put the opposite of that in charge. It’s just, it’s very like, GI Joe, you know, actually, no, I won’t even give it that much credit. I liked GI Joe.

0:20:44
CW: It’s Biff, it’s Biff from Back to the Future, writ large here. And apparently Biff in the second movie was based on Trump. So there you go.

PR:  Yeah, oh, yeah, the White House will be a casino in four years time if we don’t figure something out.

CW: Life imitates art imitates life It’s a circle and then his other picks that have made news this week Matt Gaetz was chosen for Attorney General and That’s that’s a whole nother legal can of worms for another podcast. We just do not have the time to even go there. And Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to be… Did I say that right? Vivek Ramaswamy?

PR: Your guess is as good as mine. I actually have not heard it said because I just can’t watch the news anymore.

0:21:30
CW: I heard it a number of times during the early primaries, but not since. And anyway, the two of them are going to be heading DOGE, which is the Department of Government Efficiency. Oh joy.

0:21:47
PR: Very efficient to use more than one person to head something.

0:21:51
CW: Very worrisome there. RFK Jr., as we mentioned last week, is going to be heading up the Health and Human Services, and that encompasses the FDA and the CDC, among other important institutions that have to do with public health. So I stress again, don’t freak out until we have to freak out. We don’t know if these appointments are going to go through at all right now that, you know, as I said, he’s trying to bypass Congress. We’ll see if that happens. And if he doesn’t get to watch these people get questioned by senators and representatives who will hopefully lay bare their utter lack of qualifications for these jobs. And secondly, if they do get in the people on this list who do actually reach their post, we don’t know how long they’re going to last in those positions. Trump has like a long and storied history of hiring and then firing. And it’s happened before that a loyalist of his will get a position and then, and I dare, I even hope this will happen again. They get into a position, they’re in charge of all these experts. The experts bring them facts and data and clearly understood material. And they change their mind and they start becoming of the same opinion as all these experts. And then Trump gets rid of them. Cause he’s like, ah, you’re not going to do the thing I wanted you To do he’s like so we’ll see if that happens to any of these folks If that happens with all these folks. We all we could be looking at a situation where we have a revolving door again much like his first term and Not you know, a lot of things get this damaged But he doesn’t really accomplish his set goals.

PR: I will say like my my bit of optimism you know and and where I can find it is that the man is famously lazy and does not follow through on anything and when he gets pushed back he gives up, and I don’t mean that in the you know not paying people for jobs and stuff. I mean, he’ll, he lets his lawyers do that, but, but even like, you know, when he did the Muslim ban thing, like ACLU shot that down. I mean, they just jumped in and just came in guns blazing and it just, he just dropped it. He was done, you know, and his ability to mess things up is certainly there. But I just can’t imagine he’s gotten more motivated. I think he is just as lazy as ever. All he wants to do is be president. He doesn’t want to work. So, you know, I think that’s a good possibility. I also think, like you said, that the turnover rate the last time was tremendous and I just don’t see any reason to think it’s going to change this time. I’ve heard little pieces about Musk already rubbing him the wrong way from time to time because he wants to be the president instead, you know. Yeah, so I don’t know, you know, things can go bad. There’s a lot of things that are possible, but I do count on his laziness to at least catch us some breaks here and there. I do expect there’s just gonna have to be shakeups pretty regularly, unless he suddenly turned into a different person, I just can’t imagine.

CW: I mean, I’ll ask you to remember, there was a period four or five years ago where we were all tracking time by Scaramouchis. So we’ll see how many Scaramouchis each of these department heads actually last. That said, skeptics everywhere, I’m reading what my friends and my colleagues in the skeptical world are hand-wringing about and a lot of skeptical buttholes are clenching right now. I just want to tell everybody just calm yourself and gird your loins. We donít know what weíre in for exactly. We donít know how long weíre going to be in for it. This is what weíve trained for though. skeptics everywhere have we’ve been looking at UFOs and eyewitness accounts and anti-vax stuff. This is not, you know, we’ve, we’ve been, now we’re going to be like dealing with something incredibly important. The government of our country might soon be led many departments of it anyway, by wrongheaded science deniers. We have a very important role in writing the ship. Don’t freak out. Don’t think that one person don’t think that you listening to this will have to do it all. You won’t. You can’t. But you can do something. And so think about what you’re good at. Think about where your specific specialization lies and prepare and think about how you can contribute. I’ve made a short list, Pascual, if you’ll humor me here and let me just read through my list and chime in if you think of something to add to this list. But this is not an exhaustive list, but just things that we should be sort of getting ready to take on. Number one and two at the top here because of RFK, I would think vaccine safety and public awareness of how vaccines work. And this is an old fight. We’ve got data, we’ve got measles behind us, thanks to used to be Dr. Wakefield. We’ve got persuasive ways to present the real science on vaccines. And I think we’ve made a lot of headway over the past 10, 15 years. And we’re going to have to just keep banging that drum. And then the other one was fluoridation of water. I think I touched on this last episode. RFK already tipped his hand that he is going to be trying to get fluoridation of water ended in the U.S. and hey, educate people around you, refresh yourself on the key points of fluoride like the fact that it’s naturally occurring, it’s only considered toxic by people who don’t understand toxicology and how it works, and yes, it’s been taken out of the water before in some places, and the results have been pretty terrible. Kids get twice as many cavities. So a more ominous one is plan for the next pandemic. Now, no matter who got elected, I think public health officials will tell you that this is good common sense advice. Planning for a pandemic might look different for every person, depending on your health needs. It could just be like having a supply of N95 masks. Buy a box of those, keep them in your pantry. Keep food in your pantry in case there’s some sort of lockdown like last time. And you know, make sure you always have ways to work remote if you might need to. And maybe you could have some preemptive discussions with friends, your circle of family about best practices to put in place if your area gets hit with a measles outbreak or a bird flu outbreak or some, dare I say it, novel virus that pops up. It’s just, you know, always a good idea to sort of pre-bunk other people for the coming cost increases in groceries, in food and necessities. And what I mean by pre-bunk, I think we’ve talked about this term before, is you can inoculate people against misinformation. If you seem to know something ahead of time, like, oh, these tariffs that are about to put in place and the restrictions on pesticides and fertilizer and GMO technology that the new head of agriculture might be putting into place could result in vast increases in food costs. So when that happens, we can look to the reasons why here. And so if you can inoculate your circle of people with like, hey, there could be a real steep increase in grocery prices if RFK and his friends have this, this, this, and this happen. Well, you know, real-world effects do happen when politicians put their fears about anything artificial into practice. Then, in terms of education, and this has already been happening to some degree but I’m expecting it to speed up, keep an eye on your area and encroachment of religious schools into the public purse strings. Just recently, I read in the paper, the Ohio is now funding the construction costs for Christian schools. They’ve already been funding the education of many students in Christian schools through public vouchers. The voucher program has allowed a lot of religious schools to claim taxpayer money and call it simply parents choice. But what this does is it starves the public schools and it enriches the private sector, the religious schools. Now, Trump has been an ally for school choice for quite a while, and this can get creative, like not just the vouchers I mentioned, but also grant programs. And I forget exactly how they did this in Ohio, but they funneled a grant program run by the Center for Christian Virtue and that has resulted in construction of a lot more buildings for Christian schools because they have much more of a demand for these schools due to the vouchers. So it’s kind of a self-feeding, self-continuing cycle here.

0:31:34
PR: Just one thing to interject in there is I did hear that Oklahoma is already starting to put religious material in public schooling, you know, and these people are all bracing for fights to the Supreme Court, but unfortunately as we know that’s where they want it to land. I hear a lot of talk about parents being ready to pull their kids out of public schools and put them into homeschooling or, you know, private schools that are, you know, at least outwardly advertised as being not religiously affiliated or whatever. But I think that if you can and if it’s safe for you to continue keeping your kids in public school, it’s probably the best thing because the more that becomes a vacuum, the worse it gets. So I have a plan already in mind. If it got to the point of religious indoctrination in school, I may consider taking my kids out, but I do want to make sure that those kids are still counted in the public school system. Because I think an exodus from that, it ends up causing another kind of worse effect of people being pushing to close schools. And, you know, there’s all kinds of other problems that can happen.

0:32:43
CW: Yeah. And it comes down to privilege. The parents who have enough money and spare time will be able to pull their kids out. But a lot of parents don’t have that choice.

PR: Yeah,  exactly.

CW: Yeah. So the next thing on my list here is keep an eye out and you know this from listening to all the folklore we talk about on Squaring the Strange, the formation of new or relapsed toward old scapegoats. With the formation of this Department of Government Efficiency thing, think back to the days of the welfare queens in the 1980s, the welfare queens that never existed. More recently, we had the diseased caravan of migrants that was supposedly being put up in fancy hotels and given free cars. And then it seems like a constant complaint that, oh, these stupid government scientists are doing all these unnecessary studies. Yeah, if you pull any scientific study out and just look at the title, it might look like it doesn’t apply to anything, but a lot of this is why we have the progress and the technology that we have today. So already, I’ve heard wildly inflated numbers about what they want to cut out of government spending. So we’ll see what actually gets cut and how that gets rationalized. And we’ll see how much public support these cuts end up having if or when they do take place. But we already know that Musk has a giant social media platform, and he has and will continue to use it to push rumors and innuendo and false narratives. And I expect a lot of scapegoats will be thrown out for slaughter pretty soon from there. So this is not a complete list of things to keep an eye out. This is just my little prognostication here. And politicians, like diapers, should be changed often and for the same reasons. So we just have to sit back and remind people why these politicians stink and what we can do about it. So if you’re frustrated, if you’re angry, just think of all the things you can do. We can write letters to the editor, we can make a TikTok, you can edit Wikipedia, you can aggregate and share good scientific sources. And for anybody who works in any sort of federal capacity, stay in your job and be an inside agitator as best you can. If all the good people of expertise decide to seek a different job because they don’t want to put up with the next four years. I just, I hope that doesn’t happen.

0:35:21
PR: Yeah, I think it’s important to consider who you are and where you, you land on the privilege scale. And I don’t mean this as a, you know, nobody has to feel bad about this. It’s just if you’re a person who is in a situation where you can kind of objectively look at yourself and say like how badly does this impact me and try to take try to take a little bit of inventory of that and most people it probably won’t be as bad as they expect you know just just keep that in mind because there are going to be people who do need the support and do need a little extra care and attention going into this and and I think it’s just really important to consider that so that you can kind of be there for each other. You know, I’ve made a promise to myself that I’ll continue, you know, although I’ve been very regularly absent from this show in recent years, really, you know, I will continue to be on here as much as I can because I think it’s important to just keep saying these things because the reality is that there are people in the world that want us scared of this, and I know that there is a very real reason to be concerned, but it’s also really important to just show that, you know, you’re willing to bear whatever we have to to get through it and do what we can to push back against it. So, especially as skeptics, we can really use what we know to push back against a lot of what we’re hearing and seeing, and sometimes it feels like you’re just yelling at a wall, but we know we have a nice community around this podcast and every day I see things that make me feel good about the people around us and the messages that are getting out.

0:36:59
CW: You make some good points there. And then there are people who will need support in the coming years. We haven’t even touched on the trans community, but we’re going to just do what we can do in that realm. And, Pascual, I’d be delighted if you were on the show more I know you’ve got a lot going on every single day, but it’s nice having you here today.

0:37:19
PR: Good to be here and I’m glad I could be here to talk about this because you know again I want people to know they’re not alone like we’re there’s a lot of us so we’re all here and we’re here for our friends who are affected by this we’re here for our trans friends and our immigrant friends and you know minorities and women and you know just everyone that this affects.

0:37:39
CW: Yeah people who believe in science and don’t think vaccines are evil. Yeah so well without further ado we’re going to get to Gail DeVos and wildfire conspiracies.

(MUSIC)

0:38:02
BR: I’m super excited to have our next guest on. She’s Gail de Vos, an adjunct professor at the School of Library Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She teaches online courses since 1998, which is… I wasn’t even online until about 2000 myself, so that’s remarkable in and of itself. She’s author of several books including What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture and the new Watkins Book of Urban Legends. I’ve had the privilege of reading her work and seeing her present at Contemporary Legends conferences over the years and I’m delighted she agreed to come on. Welcome.

Gail de Vos: Well thank you for having me as a guest.

0:38:49
CW: Hi, Gail.

0:38:50
BR: So Gail, before we begin, can you sort of give us a bit about your background and what you drew to folklore and legends and storytelling?

0:38:57
GD: Yeah, my background.

0:38:58
GD: I am-

0:38:59
BR: You can make something up if you want. You’re a folklorist.

0:39:02
GD: Well, actually I’m not a folklorist, I’m a librarian. So one of the things that I have to be very careful about is that I don’t step on anybody’s toes. And that’s how I felt the first time I went to one of the ISCLR conferences is when, like, are they going to accept me because I’m a researcher, but I’m a librarian, not a folklorist. Anyways, my research that I do as a librarian is all folklore. So, it’s semantics, right? I’m just not trained in the field of folklore. But that’s my main interest. My main interest developed from being a storyteller. I wanted to tell stories to teens. I’m not very good with cute and happy stuff. I like mysterious and creepy, spooky stuff. So, I love legends and ghost stories and teens seemed to be where I was going. And so that’s what happened.

CW: I think a dark librarian is perfect for our show.

0:40:08
GD: I love that, I’m now the Dark Librarian.

BR: I acknowledge this up front, I have no, I don’t have a degree in folklore, folkloristics and so on. And sort of like you, I came to folklore in contemporary legend research, sort of an outsider. And again, I try and be very respectful. There are people who know far more than I will ever. And so I’m happy to defer to them. But one of the things that I enjoy about the field is that they are welcoming. I mean, there are lots of, as you know, there are lots of independent researchers, there are librarians, and Stephen Winnick, who you know and our listeners may or may not, but many years ago, we were at a conference one time and he, I sort of asked, I kind of feel like I shouldn’t be here. He’s like, no, you’ve done your research, you’ve done good work, I’ve read it. You research, you know, you have a scholarly background and so on. So he initiated me as an amateur folklorist. So I wear that badge.

0:41:24
GD: Yeah, that’s how I feel too. Everybody’s been really welcoming and accepting and my books are used in folklore courses. So what can I say?

0:41:32
BR: Exactly, exactly. So speaking of which, I want to sort of touch on the fact that you are Canadian and we’ll be talking about Canadian topics on the show. But Canada is a country rich with folklore and legends, especially drawing on First Nations tribes. My first real encounter with First Nations legends was in researching Ogopogo, the lake monster in Lake Okanagan. But that was the first time when I had sort of seen this tension between sort of the cryptozoology monster, oh wow, there’s all these monsters, and then when you sort of start looking at some of the actual legends, they’re like, well, this is not quite as advertised, and certainly not as sensationalized. So we’ll be talking about one specific story today, but can you talk about some of the other favorite Canadian stories and myths and legends?

0:42:26
GD: Oh, yeah. As you’ve heard probably, I talk a lot about cultural appropriation with the First Nations people. So some of the legends, if you will, to me, they’re considered monsters outside of the world of Canadian people. Well, not even outside of the outside of the native people, let’s put it that way, but Sasquatch definitely who is related of course to Bigfoot or was a predecessor, you know, started the whole thing. Sasquatch is believed to be an actual character, spirit, whatever you like, not a monster. So he’s one of my favorites and he shows up all over the place, he or she or they. As does Wendigo, and the Wendigo I talk about a lot, because that one shows up not only in stories and in ghost stories and monster stories, but it shows up in the legal system here in Canada, because people have been convicted of being a Wendigo image keeps changing, the story behind it keeps changing as the greed that people are witnessing also changes. So it’s very adaptive, it’s very powerful, and it’s not a monster at all. So there you go. Actually in the Watkins book of urban legends, I talk about one instance of the Wendigo, which I didn’t talk about earlier, and it’s the Wendigo of Fort Kent. And Fort Kent is a place not too far from here, and it was a doctor and his wife, and they became Wendigos and cannibalized the village. And yeah, it was a legal story.

0:44:26
BR: I’m always fascinated by the, where the, for lack of a better phrase, where the worlds collide, right? Where, you know, you have the, you have folklore, you have legends, and then all of a sudden you have, you know, cue the record scratch, you have the legal system. Another example that I think of is when psychics and fortune tellers are subjected to laws. Of course, oftentimes it’s sort of, you know, it’s advertised as entertainment and, you know, you have tarot readers or, you know, meeting tall, dark strangers and so on. But every now and then, there are actual, you know, enforceable laws that are created sometimes to protect consumers from, you know, fraudulent fortune tellers and so on. But I’m always fascinated by where you have this sort of amorphous, fluid belief system about whatever it is and all of a sudden that comes in contact with enforceable laws which say, you can’t say that or you know, in this context, this is illegal. And so that always fascinates me and I’m glad you mentioned that case.

0:45:28
GD: Well, one of my focuses is folklore and popular culture, but popular culture is really a large topic as is folklore so when the two worlds collide if you like anything can happen.

0:45:41
BR: Absolutely now am I am I correct in remembering that that you did a bunch research on on the two wolves, right?

0:45:48
GD: I did, I did indeed.

BR: So Celestia, do you know what we’re talking about?

0:45:51
CW: Not not exactly, but okay folklorist

BR: So this is and again, I don’t want to go too far down the field because we have a lot to talk about, but this is cool. So there was these, oftentimes there’s these sort of new agey memes that were circulating and I’d seen them for years and I never really gave them much thought. And well, what’s like Gail tell us about it. So give us and the listeners a sort of a primer on the Two Wolves story and how that evolved.

0:46:20
GD: All right. So one of the things that’s happening with the memes and everything around it, that this instance of our reference to the two wolves that are within you. And the basic story that is told around this story is the fact that it, of course, it was an ancient, wise Native man, always a grandfather, who told his grandson that there are two wolves that live within you and one of the wolves is angry, miserable, just a very nasty type of wolf. While the other one is very forgiving and very giving itself and cares, and the best that you can imagine. And every day people feed these wolves within them and the grandson looks at the father or grandfather and says, well, if they’re fighting, who wins? And the grandfather very wisely says, the one you feed.

0:47:29
CW: You know, I have seen that in meme lore. I haven’t heard it as a folklore story, but I’ve only seen it in memes. Now that you recount the one you feed, you know.

0:47:39
GD: Yeah, and it shows up and it shows up and it shows up in so many different ways and of course people keep sending me new ones because they’re now they’re jokes. But when you look back at it, it was a Cherokee Wise man grandfather, whatever. It was Billy Graham who wrote about it in a book. And so it’s not folklore at all. It started off as a story. It became folklore because people grabbed it and made their own story around it. But when I did the research that Ben was referring to, what I looked at were instances of reference to the story in political cartoons, in newspaper headlines in wellness and caring kind of things. And yeah, most of them said they were Cherokee stories and the wise grandfather. But yeah, if he’s using the story, it doesn’t fit into Native philosophy at all.

0:48:44
CW: Now, you said Billy Graham, the evangelist?

0:48:47
GD: That one, that very same one.

0:48:50
CW: Now, when you traced it to him, did he tell the story or did he claim he heard it from a Native grandfather?

0:48:57
GD: Oh, he heard it. But it has been changed since he did it because when he wrote about it in his book, and I can’t remember the name of the book right now, it was up north, so it was Inuit rather than Cherokee. Everyone wants to be a Cherokee Even our premier is a Cherokee princess. So what happens with Cherokee, Kleenex, you know, brand names that become the source or the link for these stories, they’re the anchor. So it became Cherokee.

0:49:38
BR: See, you learned something already.

0:49:41
CW: I think the Cherokee people are owed a bit of a trademark licensing fees.

0:49:46
GD: No kidding.

0:49:47
BR: Well, the ones that annoy me is that when I go into a gas station, I see all these, all these dream catchers made in China for, for two cents. And I just, I, I have no native blood in me, but it just annoys me to no end. I can’t imagine that First Nations Native Americans look at that other than just sort of rolling their eyes and this. Anyway.

0:50:12
GD: I know. Well, you come to my house, there are dream catchers in many of the windows, but they’ve all been made and gifted to me from various First Nations people.

0:50:23
BR: You didn’t buy them at a gas station outside Phoenix?

0:50:25
GD: I did not, no. I did not.

BR: I think that’s the way you’re not doing it right, Gail. Clearly you…

GD: I know, but hey, my dreams are good. It’s okay.

0:50:35
BR: Okay, well let’s move on to today’s topic. So I was realizing as I was going through this, and just to be clear, I actually first heard about this, well, that’s not quite true, I first heard about it on the news a couple years back, and I, like many news stories, sort of came across my feed and I glanced at it and didn’t really pay much attention to it. But then when I saw you present on this in Utah a couple of months back at the Folklore Conference, there’s a whole deep dive into it and it’s just so fascinating and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you come on. But I did realize that I wanted to sort of set the stage because what we’re talking about, the wildfire conspiracies in Canada, there’s a specific context. And so, even though we have many lovely and delightful Canadian listeners, many of our audience may not be familiar with Canadian politics. So without turning this into a Canadian Civics 101 course, can you sort of give an overview of the social and political climate so that people can better understand what we’re going to talk about?

0:51:35
GD: Okay, well, one of the things I’m just going to mention is that these are the same conspiracy theories circulated through California, through Texas, through Hawaii, through Brazil, through Greece, they’re still everywhere. Okay, so they’re not unique to Canada, but because I live in Alberta where they are prime, I decided to focus on the Alberta version of them. And because our premier is one of the firmest believers in these conspiracy theories about wildfires, especially the arson aspect of it, it seemed to be made for Gail, right?

BR: Yeah, it’s your name all over it.

GD: It did, and so I’ve written about it, and I talk about it, and I have a hard time with it. I mean, for those who don’t know what’s happened, we just had a major fire in one of the national parks a couple hours from me, a place called Jasper National Park, where one third of the little village of Jasper burnt down to nothing. My reservations for my trip at the end of this month to Jasper also burnt away. So it’s a personal thing but what happened immediately with that fire is you got things like this okay so this came out of X. I just can’t. The conspiracy theorists are claiming that Jasper fire was started as a way to implement 15-minute cities.

0:53:18
CW: Okay. What would be a 15-minute city for anybody who doesn’t know?

0:53:25
GD: Okay, a 15-minute city, and that’s another conspiracy theory, is a community within a city that has shops and doctors’ offices and libraries and everything you need in your neighborhood within a 15 minute walk from your house. So you could live in the middle of the city like many people do and not need a car like many people do. The conspiracy theory is that once you bought into this 15 minute city, then you’re not allowed to leave. You have to buy everything in that 15-minute city. You can’t go elsewhere. It becomes a horrendous conspiracy.

0:54:13
CW: I think this is based off of a Twilight Zone episode.

0:54:17
GD: It could very well be.

0:54:18
BR: It certainly sounds like it is.

0:54:20
CW: Welcome to Pleasantville, you’ll never leave.

0:54:23
GD: Exactly right. And so wildfires are also tied into that as well as other conspiracy theories. And one of the things that you discover with these conspiracy theories is talking about being intertwined, it’s really hard to separate and segment one conspiracy theory from another because they are layer upon layer upon layer and they end up being this various versions of the same story. And to me it all reflects fear of change, fear of the government, fear of whatever.

0:55:03
BR: So take us back for a second. So in broad strokes, right, so there’s obviously there’s wildfires in Canada as there are around the world, literally. And I live in the desert here in New Mexico, so we actually had some pretty bad fires north of here. The world’s changing, and global warming is real, folks.

0:55:27
GD: No, no, no, no, it’s not, Ben.

0:55:29
BR: It’s not? Okay, well, I’ve-

0:55:30
GD: That’s part of it.

0:55:32
BR: I misunderstood.

0:55:33
GD: Climate change is wrong. It doesn’t exist. It has nothing to do with the climate change. Totally irrelevant.

0:55:40
BR: Okay. All right. Well, you hear it here, folks.

0:55:44
CW: Sarcastic font enacted. No kidding.

0:55:46
BR: So, yeah, but it strikes me as a case of where all politics is local, right? So whatever is going on nationally, internationally, and so on, oftentimes it will sort of trickle down and, you know, sort of crystallize in local actions and local policies. And this is one reason why, for example, I always encourage people to participate in your local elections. They actually do have consequences. Like whatever political party you’re part of, don’t assume that the only ones, the only important ones are for your prime minister or the president. Local politics matters. I’ll get off my soapbox now. But again, it’s a case of where you have this political polarization. I sort of, my mind jumps to the Pizzagate case.

0:56:36
GD: Right.

0:56:37
BR: Where you had a comic ping pong pizza and you had these QAnon believers. You had this guy that went into this pizza place in Washington, D.C. armed with a gun. And he was going to rescue kids, children that Hillary Clinton apparently personally was trafficking or something and he went in there and there was nothing to it. The entire conspiracy theory was false. Not only were there no trafficked children in the basement, it didn’t have a basement. There literally was no basement there. But again, you have a case of where people, they see these conspiracy theories online and social media amplified and oftentimes they believe they’re doing good, right? This guy who went in there to rescue the children, he’s like, he’s a hero of his own story. I’m doing good, I’m rescuing kids, why isn’t everyone helping me out here? Can you sort of put that in the context of the Alberta wildfires and what were some of the conspiracies about them?

0:57:33
GD: Probably the most frightening one was that our premier believed in the conspiracy theory that it wasn’t climate change, it was arson. The arsonists would come in and set these fires for various reasons and many of those arsonists were far-left political figures, perhaps even the Prime Minister of Canada, and they were setting it to make a point. Oh, because so many arsons and so many fires coincided in Alberta, she went out and hired a whole bunch of people to investigate the arson. I’m not sure how she handled it when it was discovered that these fires were started by lightning strikes.

CW: Now, thinking a fire might have been set by a human being is not a huge leap. I mean, there’s been a lot of fires in my neck of the woods out here and in California where, you know, the report comes out and it was traced to a campfire or somebody flicking a cigarette or some other human-caused thing. But the bigger picture you mentioned where not only is it an arsonist, but it is political arson, like…

0:58:54
GD: yeah, people from the far left…

0:58:56
CW: yeah, like my enemies, my political enemies are responsible for this.

0:59:00
GD: And really, I mean, campfires are a cause, but that’s not arson, that’s carelessness. A train going through and throwing up sparks often causes fires. Again, not arson. It is unfortunate, but it happens. So the fact is that arson in itself has to be a certain kind of practice, action, if you like. And there have been arsonists that have been caught in Canada that have set fires. The most famous one was caught caught last year in Quebec, he was one of the biggest deniers of climate change on social media and kept talking about these conspiracy theories as if they were true and then they discovered that he set most of the fires he was talking about.

0:59:56
CW: Oh, so was it like a case where he was thinking he would set a few fires just to make people understand that this is really true, this conspiracy?

1:00:05
GD: No idea what he was thinking.

CW: Oh, okay.

1:00:08
GD: And part of the thing about fires is that the more you look at them, my daughter’s a first responder and a volunteer firefighter in BC, and I talked to her quite often about what’s going on. Many of the people who do set fires are actually firefighters themselves sometimes. There have been many cases of that and we’re not sure, maybe they needed something to do on a Saturday afternoon, I don’t know why. I mean, the stories get lots and lots of action on social media and then people know it’s true because they read it on X or they heard about it on a certain podcast or something like that. And how can you say it’s not true, social media?

1:01:11
BR: I think one of the fundamental questions people always ask is why. People are always looking for motives. It’s a fundamental, it’s a deep, profound human need. I mean, a lot of the cases like in journalism, the what happened is pretty straightforward. The when it happened, who’s involved, those are all the other Ws in journalism, those are pretty straightforward. But the how and the why, those are the most difficult ones to tease out, right? Because you’re looking at motivations, you’re looking at things, even like the assassination attempt on Trump. To this day, we still don’t have a good, clear indication of the shooter’s motives. It’s understandable that the public wants to know why, how did this, why did this happen, what were the motivations? But the simple fact of the matter is that sometimes we don’t know, we may never know.

1:01:57
GD: When your shooter or your person that you did the action is no longer there to explain. It makes it very, very difficult to get back to wildfires. So I’m just going to, there’s an article about the Jasper one because it said, no sooner had the first pictures of fire ravaged Jasper emerged than conspiracy theories about the cause of the wildfire started to spread. And it’s going back to that idea, like, why did this happen? How could it happen? We love Jasper, and not just us, people from all over the world who are into mountains and parks know Jasper and come there in droves. But it said, as the disaster in one of the most loved places in Canada consumed the country’s attention, familiar narratives about state-directed arson that I mentioned, the lasers which you mentioned earlier, lockdowns and climate change reignited online. And so what is happening with these conspiracy theories is they die down until the next and then they ignite, reignite, and they become localized. So the same stories that were told in Hawaii when they had the fires there are told in Jasper, which were told in Texas in the spring. They just, they’re localized. So one of the things that we need to do is look at the wider picture of how many of these stories are the same? And then once you realize that, you realize these are all conspiracy theories. There’s nothing true there at all, except for the fact that people tell them.

1:03:49
CW: Hmm. Yeah, I was amazed at how quickly the Hawaii fire last year in Lahaina turned into conspiracy theories with people. I don’t know as much about Hawaii as you know about the Canadian fires. But my mother was from there and I have a friend who was living there at the time. And on social media, through various channels, I just heard immediately, oh, it’s the developers. Because there’s a longstanding, you know, between the people who’ve lived there a long time and the people whose ancestors are from there, as well as the people who immigrated, you know, like 100 years ago, who consider the land like, okay, Hawaii is my place. But these rich developers, these people with money, these, you know, other investors from other countries and celebrities like Oprah, and other people who buy off the huge swaths of the island, they’re just getting greedy, and they want more and they want to push the natives a tiny postage stamp. And so it just, I want to say it caught like wildfire, these conspiracies about how this was not a natural wildfire, this was planned. This was a way to burn down, you know, half of the area and then rebuild it as a swanky new resort that will earn somebody money, but not the people who lived there before.

1:05:12
GD: Right, and part of the story included the fact that, and to prove that, you know, the Obama’s house did not burn. Well, it wasn’t even there. Please, people, start listening and think critical thinking.

1:05:29
CW: And it’s quite likely that someone with a rich estate has things in place to protect from fire, whereas, you know, the average, a poorer part of town, the houses are closer together, there’s like a whole lot more fire hazards. So there is such a thing as like some, you know, not every house is created equal out there. Some are more likely to burn than others.

GD: True. And one of the things that’s happened here in Alberta is we have Fire Safe, an organization that goes through the firefighters, I think it’s across Canada, but we had a safe, fire-safe person come and look at our house. We’re at a lake, we’re surrounded by trees, and pointed out danger and what would happen if we had a fire coming through here. We, this week, got rid of two big old trees that I love, but they were too close to the house, they were a fire hazard. He showed us how individually we could make our houses fire safe as a small community, because we don’t have a fire department that close. So those small communities do have a chance to look after themselves if they’re allowed to. But the big organizations of course don’t allow that because they want that property. That’s the story.

1:07:00
BR: Yeah it strikes me you know we’re talking about how many conspiracy theories are motivated by political agendas and also just natural disasters. You know anytime like you said anytime there’s a fire there’s there’s some natural disaster people looking for people to blame. Another example that jumps to my mind was, that’s one of the ways in which some of the vampire legends emerged in Europe hundreds of years ago. There was a fire, there was a lightning strike, there was a drought, cows stopped giving milk, there were a series of stillbirths. People are wondering, why did this happen? Who is God angry at us? Were we not, you know, pure enough in our motives? Or was it the witch down the road? Was it the, was it that strange weirdo that died two months ago at the edge of town who nobody liked? Maybe he was a vampire. Maybe he’s coming out and doing things to us at night. Maybe we need to dig him up and stake him and things like that. So there’s just so many ways in which ordinary people very naturally, you know, we seek reasons, right? Why did this happen to us? And it’s so easy to go for that.

GD: Yeah, and at the same time, it’s, they don’t want to blame themselves. So it’s easier to find that weirdo that lived down, used to live down the block or down in a strange house. And obviously it’s their fault because heaven forbid it be mine. Or be natural.

1:08:27
BR: Yeah, I mean, I was reading the other day, I was reading a book by William Nafee titled Plagues, Poisons, and Potions and it was talking about the Protestants were accused of intentionally spreading the bubonic plague to Catholics in the 1600s. There’s many, many, many other examples but they’re just we can even go more, more, speaking of more conspiracies and legends, there was the AIDS-infected needles, right? Just a couple decades ago, there were rumors circulating that gay men were trying to give everybody AIDS by either intentionally spreading AIDS or by somehow putting AIDS-infected needles in coin slots. Of course, those don’t exist anymore. That danger passes by.

1:09:14
CW: I remember being afraid of those as a kid, though. I remember hearing people would put little needles in there. But I think at the age I was, I didn’t understand that it was like AIDS-infected needles. I just thought people wanted to poke you.

1:09:26
GD: Well, there’s still those stories going around on the internet, you’re a gas tank. It’s not necessarily AIDS, it does poke you or poison you or does something.

1:09:38
BR: Yeah, and there was the needle spiking panic. Taya Medair did a piece on it and I’ve actually done some research on the… I don’t want to go down that, that’s a separate topic, but yeah, needle spiking panics are still a thing. There was one that circulated around the UK a couple years back and I traced it. It was circulating around the UK and then actually leaped over here to a concert in Texas, I think it was, there was a famous case where there were several people trampled. I’m forgetting the performer, but there was several people trampled in this panic. And one of the stories that I dug up was that part of the reason for this panic was that someone claimed they’d been stuck by a needle in the crowd.

1:10:30
GD: Do you mind if I read you a paragraph from the new book?

BR: No, absolutely.

GD: Okay, so this is Watkins’ book of urban legends, which is a whole story by itself, but this is the first paragraph of my entry on wildfires, which ties into what we’re talking about. Conspiracies about wildfires have a long history, possibly beginning in 64 CE with the burning of Rome while Emperor Nero was away from the city. The conspiracists suggested that Nero started the fire so he could rebuild the city the way he wanted it to be. Nero countered this conspiracy with the idea that Christians had started it themselves to discredit him. Since that time, conspiracy theories and disinformation have flourished and spread almost as fast and dangerously as the fires. The growth of social media has fostered the expectation that information about emergencies will be forthcoming immediately. And when this does not happen, regardless of the reasons behind the delay, the stress results in the speculation, disinformation and conspiracy theories quickly becoming readily available. And regardless of how outlandish the stories may be, they are just as quickly repeated and believed. And so I’m just going to jump over and just talk about there are numerous conspiracy theories about fires that circulate where and whenever fires are out of control. This crisis of truthfulness was labeled an infodemic by the United Nations and has resulted in conspiracy theorists building massive online networks. These networks can circulate hoaxes faster than authorities can debunk them. The stories regarding the massive wildfires around three continents all have similar themes and villains. The villain is never climate change, but it is always the leftist woke, and this could prove to be devastating for the future of this planet. If people believe global warming is a hoax, they are less likely to take steps to reduce their carbon footprint. And that’s one of the reasons why this work that you’re doing, that I’m doing, that folklorists all over are doing, debunkers are doing, conspiracy deniers, if you like, are important is because the future of our world depends on us starting to act, not just react.

1:12:59
CW: Yeah, I have said on this podcast, I don’t know how many times now, that every news desk, every every TV station needs to have a folklorist on call to talk about, oh, there’s a rumor circulating blah blah blah. Well, actually the same rumor circulated in the time of Nero in Ancient Rome, you know, I mean I did not know that until you know you brought it up and and did the research on it that the people believing in these conspiracies in Hawaii or or you know, Marjorie Taylor green with her space lasers goes all the way back to ancient Rome.

1:13:37
GD: Yes, because well laser beams, you know, they’re very dangerous. One of the things I talked about, and it’s probably the one that I enjoy the most, is blue roofs. Any home with a blue roof will have a much better chance of surviving a fire.

1:13:57
CW: Now why, is that purely superstition, or is that like a conspiratorial belief where the men in the black cars who set the fires will spare your home?

1:14:07
BR: Celestia, as somebody who has no degrees in physics, I can tell you that lasers can’t affect the color blue. So the analogy I would use is if you’ve – you’re familiar with Green Lantern, right? So Green Lantern’s ring is ineffective against – I think it’s yellow?

CW: Orange I think.

BR: Whatever anyway the point here is… The point here is that obviously? lasers are It’s like super anti kryptonite lasers blue all you need to do protect yourself is to have blue on you, am I right?

CW: Ben is countering conspiracy and folklore with pop culture and usually that’s my job.

1:14:50
GD: Well, but there’s no way of dividing it here. I mean, in Mexico, or maybe where you are too, Ben, there’s a spiritual belief in that color of blue being very protective. And so blue doors and blue roofs and blue will protect people.

1:15:11
CW: So it’s magic in that case.

1:15:13
GD: In that case, in that kind of well, spiritual belief and magic, are they all that different?

1:15:20
BR: Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. I mean, oftentimes, in fact, I see that just in my daily drive, there are a lot of homes around here, where the window frames are blue. And yeah, it goes to tradition of being blue, keeping out bad luck.

1:15:35
GD: Yeah, and lasers.

1:15:38
BR: Bad luck and lasers.

1:15:40
CW: So there is a group of people who do believe that the blue roof will somehow signify to the evil doers that their home should be spared.

1:15:52
GD: Well, there is that too. I mean, we have all sorts of different ways of identifying ourselves as being in the right, on the right side, correct side. Right, left, I don’t want to get confused.

1:16:05
CW: Yeah.

1:16:06
GD: But, you know, that we’re a believer and please do not bother us because we’re fine. Thank you very much.

1:16:13
CW: That reminds me of lamb’s blood over the door.

1:16:16
GD: Well, yes. Yeah. Where do you think that came from?

1:16:20
CW: Well, exactly.

1:16:21
BR: Well, so let me ask you this. So obviously it’s difficult to parse out why exactly people share conspiracy theories. Oftentimes, in some cases, there’s a clear political motivation and we’ve talked about examples there. Other times, especially if it’s scare lore, right? It’s warnings, right? So these stories are shared by people who either don’t know any better or just to be on the safe side, they want people to know what’s going on. Do you have any sense of the role of Russian troll farms in this? I know that certainly over the past few years, the last couple of election cycles, of course, there’s been an increased scrutiny of Putin and his troll farms, you know, spewing disinformation about Biden and Clinton’s and that’s a Tuesday for them, but do you have any sense as to whether they were either generating or amplifying them?

GD: It’s funny you should mention that because in Canada today, as a matter of fact, they’ve just discovered how much interference there was by these Russian bots in social media and and with these memes on Canadian politics and beliefs. Yes, they’re there. And you know, as soon as there’s a fear or that you can you can judge that people are Nervous about something or want an explanation those bots are in there to give you whatever they think Will work for them. They don’t really care about the truth because that’s not what they’re dealing in They’re dealing and making sure that people are not using their critical thinking but buying Into the story that they’re being told or sold. And so it just furthers that disquiet in people who are trying to find out the answers. I’m not sure I’m answering what you’re asking, but…

BR: No, no, you did.

GD: It’s a very scary time right now, because you don’t know who to believe, how to believe. Are your friends passing this along because they believe it or they don’t believe it or because they’re afraid to believe it or because they’re warning you or why? Why? And they can’t tell you either because they don’t know.

1:18:41
BR: This goes back to the sort of the ambiguous nature of folklore and legends, right? The contested nature. This is why urban legends are told as true.

1:18:50
GD: Right. And that’s why they’re localized, and that’s localized meaning that they’re brought to your community so that they become more real. It’s a lot easier to believe that it’s really happening if you mention Jasper instead of some, for us, someplace far away like Hawaii, although so many of us have been to Hawaii that that community is also familiar, but that localizing makes it more pertinent to your own life and helps you understand or try to understand what is going around you and what’s happening. There are so many scary things out there right now that nobody knows if they’ve got firm footing anywhere.

1:19:35
CW: I’d like to revisit and pick apart a little bit the whole Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now, I realize this is not in Canada. She’s a, unfortunately, belongs to the United States.

1:19:48
GD: Her laser theory hit Canada last year in one of the fires in British Columbia.

1:19:55
CW: Yeah.

1:19:56
GD: And in Jasper. It’s fine. We won’t accept her as a, you know, pertinent citizen. But, yeah, go ahead.

1:20:05
CW: Well, she brought up Jewish space lasers in her role as a congressperson in 2021.

1:20:13
GD: Right.

1:20:14
CW: And she was widely mocked. It turned into a number of articles about anti-Semitism and years and years of conspiracy theories placing Jewish people as the villain. And it seems like she’s definitely quickly tried to distance herself from saying anything about Jewish space lasers. And in fact, you can buy little Jewish space laser pins now, from various leftist satirical organizations. more broadly. And did she come up with the Jewish space lasers? Or is she just repeating something that I mean, when did the whole laser thing, enter the public consciousness? Was it with our first satellite being launched into space? Or is it more recent than that?

1:21:02
GD: Those are questions I really can’t answer, because what I focused on were her more recent comments because they were more pertinent to me Jewish person So the Jewish laser aspect of it, you know the anti-semitism be the stories that have been you know, since time of the blood libel or and before and how they keep coming back every generation or every decade or every two years or whatever you want to call it.

1:21:39
CW: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t even know that the Jews had their own space program.

1:21:44
BR: You didn’t know that? It’s mentioned…

1:21:46
GD: The Jews, as I said, were very talented and rich.

1:21:49
CW: Oh, I was…

1:21:50
BR: It’s in Chapter 3 of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s right there. It specifically mentions space lasers. I don’t know how you missed that.

GD: I don’t know why it’s tied in, it’s, that’s always been that whole idea again about a certain segment of the population, whether they racial, religious, whatever, are very strong in science, are very strong in art, or better dancers, or, you know, lump all those people together by just using that term, labeling them. And so therefore, everyone knows that this group of people are very, very proficient in doing these things. So of course it would work. Of course they would do that. Of course, it makes so much sense. And when they’re a group of people that are already disliked or distrusted or, or whatever, it is a very easy sell for people who are anti-whatever.

1:22:58
CW: Yeah, fear and jealousy probably comes into it too. I mean, that’s, you’re setting your, you’re setting your other, your, your, your enemy up to be pretty powerful if you believe they can zap you from space.

GD: Well, and that’s it. I mean, yeah, being somebody who could really harm you gives you, gives them a lot of power.

1:23:18
BR: But that’s James Bond stuff. I mean, come on. Well, Gail, let me ask you this. So, um, so what has been the reaction to the findings that in fact, with maybe a handful of exceptions, uh, these, these fires were started by lightning. So was the conservatives sure of this? They were flogging it left and right. Did they say, oh, wow, we were wrong? Or was it that no lightning was created by space laser?

1:23:52
CW: Oh, no, we were wrong?!?

1:23:55
GD: Yeah, that’s a hard thing for them. No. The articles that I’m looking at are recent. So they’re all ones that happened just when you asked me if I would be interested in doing this. So they’re still blaming arson. They’re still blaming other things rather than lightning strikes. And they don’t want to believe lightning. You know, if you look at a wildfire, like it burns strangely. Some things get burnt, some houses get burnt, but their neighbors don’t. So obviously, it’s something else happening. And what they don’t know and what they’re not looking at is the way wildfires work. And that’s one of the things I worked, studied a little bit with my daughter who explained to me, and I’m not going to go into it right here, but there are definite differences between the behavior of a wildfire and a normal fire, a house fire or something. A wildfire behaves totally differently. It creates its own rules. It moves up the mountain rather than down. It does all sorts of very strange things that unless you know something about how it behaves it seems mysterious and unbelievable – You know there’s mystery and Unbelievability you’ve opened the doors to conspiracy theory the reason why that house didn’t burn Although it didn’t have a blue roof is because it belonged to so-and-so who of course has all this power and etc etc or started the fires themselves and made sure their place was protected or belonged to the wrong government.

1:25:49
BR: You know you’re talking about the oftentimes sort of mysterious and unexpected nature of fires reminds me of Topic that I’ve written some about we did a show on years ago, spontaneous human combustion. And that’s another case of where it can be very mysterious, even to people who have looked into fires. How is this possible that only this body burned and the nearby sofa didn’t burn? To many people, in fact, I’m even thinking about chupacabra victims. People say, well, this is strange. How could this, this, here’s a dead animal. It has puncture marks on this neck, but it’s not eaten. It’s not torn apart. How is this possible if it hasn’t been drained of blood? Well, the answer is that that wasn’t how it was killed. It was killed through internal bleeding. Same thing with spontaneous human combustion. The fact that a person immolated by fire, whereas, you know, whereas objects nearby were unsinged, isn’t inherently mysterious if you understand the nature of fire.

1:26:57
GD: Right. Well, the question you asked me is if the knowledge that most of these fires started from lightning strikes changed the number of narratives. No. No. It just strengthened them because the media is lying to them. The scientists are lying to them because, you know, they know. They know what really happened.

1:27:22
CW: Their gut instinct just overrides any expertise.

1:27:26
GD: Yeah, and you’re not going to, you know, so if you don’t believe in your media, and you don’t believe, like your regular media, and you don’t believe at any level, if you don’t believe the logical explanations for something, the science, because heaven forbid we believe science, it’s the same thing with vaccinations. Look at the hideous happenings now. We just lost a child to measles. It’s the first time in Canada for I don’t believe in them anymore. So it’s the same thing. It’s like people’s behavior isn’t being changed by the debunking. In fact, it’s those, the debunking, and this is one of the things we’re discovering is the debunking enforces and reinforces some of these beliefs. So there has to be a pre-education. I mean, education is the answer, but it’s not after the fact. It has to be preparing them for the possibilities of, some strange things are going to happen, and it’s not this, this, this, or this. And trust me, they won’t.

1:28:45
CW: Yeah, there’s been a few skeptics recently coming out with talks and articles and books about pre-bunking people, which sounds like you’re preemptively giving them bunk, but what they mean is pre-debunking, like inoculating them against all the weird things they’re going to hear.

GD: Because debunking after the fact is not working.

1:29:04
CW: You know, I hate to bring my gut instinct into this, but I do believe something that conspiracy theorists often say is follow the money or look at the money. And you know, that’s the thing that skeptics do too, when we’re like, okay, well, who wrote that article? Are they trying to push their own, you know, for instance, the alternate MMR vaccine that Wakefield wanted, that’s a money thing. But to me, I’m wondering, like, okay, do insurance companies charge more for houses that don’t have a blue roof. That would convince me. If insurance companies started offering a discount for blue roofs, I might be like, huh, maybe there’s something to that.

1:29:48
GD: Yeah. Well, good luck with that one too.

1:29:52
CW: But they don’t. But yeah, the moral of the story is they don’t. Yeah.

1:29:55
GD: They don’t. And one of the things is, is how far up do you have to go to start reaching these people? The ordinary Joe, we were talking about this on a topic about femicide and how to stop the increasing, and this has nothing to do with wildfires of course, but the increasing amount of femicide. Women already know that. You have to talk to the men and get them to do something before somebody dies. And so, but you have you have to manage to convince them. And it’s the same thing with any of these conspiracy theories. How do you reach these people? Education is the tool, but it’s when that education and how that education is used. And in some cases it’s humor, it’s the memes that go along that call it and go, oh, this is stupid. That whole thing is stupid.

1:31:00
CW: I am a firm believer along with you there that that humor is a way to get information into somebody that that breaks through a lot of barriers and resistance.

1:31:10
GD: Right. And of course, as a storyteller, it’s the telling of the stories and telling them well and often that help as well.

CW: Well, thank you for your service as a storyteller.

GD: Oh You’re so welcome. Thank you for having me on the podcast.

1:31:25
BR: Tell us a little bit more about your new book and where we can find it.

1:31:28
GD: Okay, so the walking book of urban legends is going to be out soon. It’s not quite I have a copy in my hot metal hands, but nobody else has. And it is a book that is written not academically. My other books on urban legendism are more academic. This one was asked…I was asked to write it for the general population, not that academic books aren’t for the general population, but you know what I mean. It’s more folksy, it’s more personal in many cases. The first couple of chapters are about me and how I came to be involved with urban legends and why they’re so important to me and the different ones that we have. And so there’s over 200 different stories in here. Each one is introduced with a little bit of personal history to the story. I do go through, there’s several chapters on ghost stories because they fascinate me and I know they fascinate my reading public. I have to admit to everyone when I went on legend trips that I’ve never found a ghost.

1:32:42
BR: Wah wah.

1:32:44
GD: I know! Well, I mean I keep looking. I’ve been in many places that are supposed to have a ghost. I even told stories in a place that was haunted and never saw a ghost.

1:32:56
CW: Are there any social handles or other online things that people can find you at?

1:33:01
GD: Well, there’ll be lots. You can find me on Facebook as Gail Arlene de Vos. The publisher has quite a bit of information, so you can go to Watkins publisher out of the UK. It’s being sold by Penguin Random House in North America. So there’s information on their sites. I have a website blog, if you just look at Gail DeVos, you can find it. And I’m on X and Instagram, quite a few different places that I’m trying very hard to to make contact with people but the best way is is to go into any of them just search me.

1:33:46
CW: Okay well thanks very much for coming on.

BR: Awesome talking to you. Before we before we go I want to give a shout out to another book not one that I’ve written or you’ve written but it’s titled The Global Grapevine by Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter by Gary Allen Fine and Bill Ellis. I’ve met both of them. It’s a very folkloric book. It’s academic, but it is brilliant for people who want to sort of see how the intersections of rumor and legend, the sort of real world consequences. Excellent book. So check that out.

1:34:22
GD: Yeah, I recommend reading anything by either one of those gentlemen.

(MUSIC)

1:34:27
CW: Well, that was cool of Gail DeVos to join us. As a reminder, her new book is The Watkins to Urban Legends and it’s just out fresh off the presses now. You can order it on Amazon or your local independent bookstore if you’re holiday shopping. Isn’t there an Icelandic holiday, Pascual, where it’s like book flood, it’s like jokundflud or something?

PR: Yeah.

CW: Flood of books the night before Christmas.

PR: Yes, yes, and that is just such a great tradition. Yeah, I think it’s called the book… Yeah, the word. I think you’ve said it about as close as I possibly could. Because Icelandic is a tough language.

1:35:25
CW: Icelandic is not easy. Yeah. Yeah. But if you’re shopping for jokinslud or whatever the word is, buy Gail’s book. And I’m sure we’ll have some other suggestions in the coming shows before Christmas. Ben will be back sooner than later to join us. And in the meantime, Pascual, great having you here. Hopefully the three of us will all be together again soon.

PR: All right. See ya.

CW: Bye-bye.

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