Guffey:
I think a five year old would watch it and go, 'Oh, look at that man inciting a riot.' I don't think that it's really open to debate. It's obvious Trump's inciting a riot. You have to look at the whole thing in context. Everything that was said the previous night, pumping up his acolytes the night before. And then the sixth happens. And really, it was only a matter of a few coincidences and synchronicities here and there that prevented that mob from going in, trussing up Pelosi, trussing up Mike Pence. They had cameras on them. The zip tie guys had cameras mounted on their chests as if they were planning to livestream either holding Pence and Pelosi hostage until the election was reversed or executing them outright.
Hawkins:
A while back you wrote a book with the intriguing title, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as an Art Form. It certainly seems apropos of our current subject. Do you want to talk about the book?
Guffey:
Well, of course, cryptoscatology is a combination of crypto for secret and scatology, which is the study of sh*t. So it's the study of secret sh*t. I wrote Chapter One for Paul Krassner. I gave a lecture at the late lamented Midnight Special bookstore on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. And Paul Krassner happened to be in the audience, and he got my number from the guy who organized the lecture and called me. He said, 'Hey, I rarely see conspiracy theorists who have a sense of humor.' We actually had a long conversation about the comedians he had known who were really into conspiracy theories. Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl, Freddie Prinze, Jr. So he asked me to write this piece for The Realist. Unfortunately, The Realist died before the article could be published in the magazine.
So, I wrote a kind of overview of conspiracy theories. I broke it down into six categories: insanity, disinformation, misinformation, satire, legitimate research, and a sixth category that combines elements of the others. So, I give examples of each. For insanity, I use a book titled Stephen King Shot John Lennon, which was written by a very peculiar man, Steven Lightfoot, who I actually met in Monterey in 1999 outside my hotel, where I was attending the World Fantasy Con. He looks kind of like an aging hippie. He lives in a white van with 'Stephen King Shot John Lennon,' in big letters, stenciled on the side. And I asked him, 'What's up with this van?' And he goes, 'I've been driving around all over the United States. No one wants to know the truth.' And he threw open the back of the van and he had all these stapled little books filling up the back. Then I read it and it's just utter insanity. He claims that Mark David Chapman is actually Stephen King and that Stephen King shot John Lennon.
Hawkins:
In putting Cryptoscatology together, what was your favorite wacky conspiracy theory?
Guffey:
One of my favorites is a guy named Dr. Peter Beter, which was his real name. He was a professional economist. He wrote a book called The Conspiracy Against the Dollar back in 1971. And then at some point between '71 and the late '70s, he starts doing what he called "Peter Beter's audio letters." They're archived on YouTube. They start out as being, like, alternative facts about the state of the economy of the United States. Fairly mundane, then slowly they get crazier and crazier until finally he's talking about the war between the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. The Rockefellers had this secret base on the moon where this particle beam war was happening. And then it got even crazier. He starts talking about the organic robotoids created by the Soviet Union who were killing off American politicians like Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger. They'd been killed and replaced with these organic robotoids, essentially clones. Just like some of the QAnon people think that Nancy Pelosi, the one that we see today on camera, is a clone while the real one was taken to Guantanamo.
Hawkins:
Let's talk about horror, for a moment, as a political genre. You've just written a book, Bela Lugosi's Dead.
Guffey:
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