Part One: Why Kidnapping Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere

We finished, you know, kind of our discussions right before he tragically passed earlier this year. Sophie and I recorded the whole thing. We were about to release it as a surprise, but we've, as a result of the writers and now the actors strike in solidarity, decided to delete the entirety of Boston Blood Meridian. So you know, I'm very sorry. I know a lot of you were looking forward to this, and all I can say is that if you want to do something about this and force

us to release it. David Zoslov's home address is Beverly Hills, California, So you know, I don't I'm not telling you to do anything. Just just think about it. That's where his sixty five million dollar Beverly Hills mansion is also loupe me.

Upon arrival, she got into an Uber driven by a fifty two year old man named Daniel Piedre Garcia. His niece later described him as a hard working and funny guy who had an instinctive ability to lift other people up when he was in a bad mood. Piedros was the sole breadwinner for his family and had started driving for Uber after recovering from an injury at a previous job. He started driving copas to her boyfriend's place. She was

not familiar with El Paso. She had been won there two times before, and she got spooked because she saw a sign for Juarez, Mexico, which convinced her, for some reason, that she was about to be kidnapped and trafficked across the border. Now, El Paso, if you've never been, is the sister city or sibling city or whatever to Juarez. They're effectively suburbs of each other, right Like Juarez and El Paso are basically the same city with a border

in between them. So seeing signs for Juarez while you're in El Paso. Not a weird experience, but Copas are all over the place. It's content, yeah, because it's right there.

viral for several reasons. Obviously, it's at the intersection of a bunch of salient issues in US politics. You've got immigration, you've got the border, you've got gun control, you've got racism. But it's also a story that could kind of be briskly described as part of the now expansive Karen goes crazy genre, right where you've got like a woman who reacts in some sort of aggressive or violent way because you know of shit that people would kind of could

kind of like sum up in that way. When the story broke on Twitter before much was known about it, many of the posts that I saw just kind of casually assumed that Copus was a white, suburban woman because that was the picture of the person who would do something like this that most jibed with their pre existing assumptions, and kind of the again assumption was that she was probably a strong right winger who would imbibe a lot

of racist propaganda about the border. Now, as I'm going to talk about, we don't have super clear information about like what sort of info ecosystem she existed in, but Copus is a black woman, and from what I can get about her socioeconomic status, she seems to have been kind of broadly middle class. You know, she's a grandmother.

There was not anything I found her social media, and there was nothing in it that would make you think she was not posting about guns, She was not posting paranoid conspiracies about the border or about any of this stuff. Like it was like a weirdly normal thing, like like social media profile from everything forty eight. Okay, so you know someone who had a kid and young and became a grandma pretty young. But you know, there was nothing

in it that like set off. I do this all the time, right, like I used to for a living, when you know, mass shootings and stuff would be done, scrape shit on the people who had committed the shooting to talk like try to figure out like what had been going on with them prior to making that decision, and copus. I don't. There's nothing that's I would consider

a warning sign in her publicly available information. The most recently updated post on her Facebook before killing Piedras was a profile pick from February seventeenth, and in general, most of the activity on her Facebook was just like occasionally updating her portrait. What update she did post We're all super normal. There's an update from March of twenty twenty two that's just a video of her dancing with her grandkid with the text Tatum's birthday dance. He loves dancing

with his Gigi. Love him and it's one of those because I got to this, I don't know, maybe a day or two after the shooting. The comments on there are it's this weird thing that you get with the internet where like somebody does something terrible and then people find their anadyne social media posts and start like commenting on it. So the first couple of comments on this year old post are like family member being like, oh, it's so cute, you know, you and the kid are

so cute. And then it becomes like a bunch of weirdos posting like your family member is a murderer, like fuck this lady she killed somebody, which is like, yeah, I mean she did kill some buddy, and I broadly agree, yeah, fuck her, because that's bad. You shouldn't shoot people in the back of the head.

Like again, what she did is bad. I like you shouldn't be able to do that and just like walk away from it obviously, but like it's weird to just be like, hey, family members of this person who murdered a guy, like your your relative might get the chair, Like that's such a strange thing.

changing it, Like there's so much there. I don't know what to say about it. But it's like I feel it's like Finnigan's Wake. We're like somewhere trapped in that post is like the secret to the madness of the United States. Yeah, but I.

it's it's it's weird, but it's not weird. As far as Copus goes, the closest we get to anything that reveals like what kind of ideology might have made her shoot a stranger in the back of the head while he was driving her down the highway is a lecture, a quote or a clip from a lecture that she posted on her Facebook. And the lecture is by a guy named T. D. Jakes who's an American non denominational megachurch preacher. And it's like a kind of very patriarchal,

traditional little like thing. He's talking about how like a woman is like salt, you know, she makes everything better, including like she makes men who are like shitty better, and that's like the job of a woman, right. It's like, yeah,

it's obviously like it's toxic, but it's not. Also, this isn't like a like Tdjake Saint Jordan Peterson, Right, this is a guy you walk into any maybe even never heard of him, but you walk in any fucking bookstore in the United States and there's Tdjke's books and shit like he is an incredibly popular megachurch preacher. So I wouldn't there's nothing in here that I would call like

a warning sign. The most actual, like like kind of thing that we get that might suggest some toxicity in her in her personal life comes from the fundraiser that her family posted on Gibson to Go after she got arrested. It reads, or it starts, our daughter, who is an attractive forty eight year old African American woman, is being detained in El Paso, Texas at the El Paso County Detention Center because of the charge of her shooting a Hispanic male. Now that's a little weird, right who I

heard her? Her family? Right?

which is why she decided to shoot him. Yeah, it's again peculiar that, like they describe her as attractive, What we can say safely, giving given the known facts of the case, is that Phoebe Copis was a pretty normal seeming person from the outside who probably, i mean, it's probably accurate to say had a distinctly irrational fear of being kidnapped, and that fear was exacerbated by her proximity

to Mexico. Coppus has spoken out since her arrest through her lawyer, to claim that she demanded Piedras pull over and let her out, and that he told her he was taking her to affair in Juarez. Again, there's zero evidence of this, and the police report states the defendant never called for police or emergency services to report her being in any immediate danger prior to shooting the complaining witness.

The defendant took a photo of the complaining witness after he was shot and sent it to her boyfriend via text message prior to calling nine to one one. Copus's lawyer, Matthew Koasick, has claimed that the media that Copus had been ingesting had contributed to the mindset that she was

in when she carried out the shooting. From Yahoo News quote, he said that his client was in fear of her life because of her knowledge of violence and kidnappings and Warez and seeing highway signs on US fifty four showing exits Touarez. During the hearing, Kozik showed news articles reporting on violence and Warez, including stories about drug cartels and kidnappings. He also showed photos where the shooting happened in traffic signs showing the highway led to Warez. So, like, that's

what her defense is going to rest on. And I think there's a degree to which, like, I don't think that's a good defense, but it's it is accurate that if you are like somebody who engaged, like who consumes mainstream news media, most of what you hear about Wjuarez is kidnappings and murders, right, most of what you hear about the US border is kidnappings and murders. Now I

can remember like fucking fifteen years ago. I was on a road trip and we like were in El Paso and crossed over to Warez to get lunch, and when we came back, the border patrol guy was so suspicious of us that he like stripped our car down like took every like like almost to like the fucking metal because he was like, nobody stops in Warez for lunch.

It's the most dangerous city on Earth. And it's like, man like, yeah, if you're fucking doing weirdo, like if you're doing certain things, it's dangerous, but like it's also a place just a lot of people live. You can go get lunch in Warez. The cartels aren't coming for you there, you know, Like but it is like that's just how people think about the city, which is peculiar

to me. But I yeah, I started kind of looking into the media surrounded kidnap surrounding kidnappings in the United States because it was one of those things I felt like there had to be something peculiar there that like would set someone like Phoebe Copus off, Like there had to be even if we don't have, you know, kind

of evidence from her info diet. When I started like looking into just kind of going on the big the major social media apps, looking up like what kind of the trending stories involving kidnapping or human trafficking was, you start to like see some patterns, and one of the patterns is that kidnapping related content is among the most reliable ways to go viral on the Internet right now.

If you start looking for kid tiktoks using kidnapping, using human trafficking, you'll see a bunch that have multiple million views.

And if particularly, one of the things that keyed me in is like I would see some weirdo who would do something like take a clip from a made for TV movie about a kid getting kidnapped and then like put an a AI voiceover over it to be talking about like here's you know, how kidnappings happen, and that video would have like four million views and everything else in their channel would be like ten twenty thousand, right, So it's like, oh, this is like a reliable way

to get follows and to get views is like putting kidnapping shit out there.

weirder and weirder. So one TikTok that I found in my research was from the account TV moments, which has two hundred and forty four thousand followers and fourteen point three million likes, and it mostly posts clips from news stories with on screen text summaries, stuff like triple homicide suspect and appears in court with the text heartbreaking story and read above it, or titles like child abducted from Berkeley home, American kidnapped walking dog in Mexico, and this

video that I'm about to show our Sophie's about to show you, which is posted April second, used as a clip from news Nation, which is a news network that is kind of like a mild conservative bent and here's here's how it sounds.

to forty thousand dollars for information leading up to her recovery. Now, FBI investigators believe that her attack was targeted and we're still waiting for more information on that.

a lady, like. They were looking for this woman because of like a family connection, right like, which is the thing that happens. And that's how most, very very rarely are people abducted at random anywhere in the world. It's not a super common kind of crime. But this would have been, I think, kind of one of the most recent stories that COPUS might have encountered relating to El Paso. It was kind of a big deal, and it sets off up this kind of idea that like Americans are

getting randomly picked up off the street right at the border. Obviously, the reality is that El Paso in particular is one of the safest cities in the United States. It's the fourth safest large city in the US. It has extremely low rates of violence and property crime. But that's not what people think when they hear about it because of the reliability of content that involves kidnapping in the border

going viral. Every aspect of this story is tied in with the fact that for more than a century, the United States has been engaged in a kind of perpetual moral panic over our border with Mexico. And it's one of those things that like this is, you know, people have been kind of like broadly positive about some of the ways that the RITE has performed poorly at the

ballot box in the last couple of elections. But one area in which they're like conservative propaganda in particular has been undoubtedly successful is at creating a sense of fear in behalf of the majority of this country about the border. An NPR pool from last year showed that more than half of Americans perceived that there was an invasion going on at the southern border. Support for immigrants has broadly

declined over the last four to six years. And it's, you know, again, all of this is kind of playing it. It's kind of cooking into the stew of whatever was going on in this woman's head when she decided to shoot that guy. The fact that Texas recently made permitless

concealed carry legal also certainly played a role. And there's something else that I suspect might have contributed, which is that for the last eight years or so, false stories have been spreading with increasing regularity about random people being targeted by kidnappers or robbers. These primarily spread today on TikTok and Facebook, that's where most of the stuff comes from. But also this kind of brand of content has been going on and been spreading in this country since well

before the birth of the internet. You might remember, Sarah, because you and I are both old. Like the stories about like hook handed killers in the backseat of cars, right, Like do you hear did you hear that as a kid? You ever hear that? Like? Yeah, these tales about like people waiting in the seats of cars.

it to see if someone's there. Like that's that was just like a thing in driving school, like there might be people waiting under your car to attack you.

a man. How many fights are you getting it? Are you scrapping with dudes like that? Like I've been in more fights than most people, just because like I'm a public person, who gets assaulted on the streets sometimes and I don't get in enough fights to be concerned about my beard getting bolled, Like that's not.

danger means being perpetually armed and prepared to do violence. Yeah, it's cool.

through social media right now. I can trace the origins of it back to twenty fifteen, which is it when rumors started spreading on so social media, namely Facebook, that car thieves had cooked up a new tactic for like getting people right. Text from one relevant story reads, car thieves are always trying to find new schemes for getting into your car to steal your valuables. You may have heard reports of tech devices used to enter your car,

but some thieves are using a less intricate method. There have been a rash of robberies using, of all things, a penny or a nickel. How are they using a coin to enter your car? Whether your car? Basically, the idea is that like if you see a penny or a nickel in like slid into the door handle of your car. It's like evidence that a car thief is trying to like break in, right, And they are.

obsess over this kind of shit. It's because it's stupid, because like that's the initial version of this is that like thieves were you know, if if there was a coin in the door of your car, I meant that a thief was trying to disable your remote locking systems. This does not really work, right, Like you can't actually

disable a car's remote locking system like realistically this way. Yeah, there were a couple of cars a while ago that had like a specific sort of problem that allowed something similar to this to work, but it was never like a widespread thing. And because it like I don't know, because that was such a silly thing. The the theory, I don't know. Conspiracy theory isn't what. I don't know

what to call these things. But so it starts off with like this is evidence that someone has tried to get into your car, and then it evolves to instead of they're using sticking pennies or whatever in your car to disable the locks, it's a way to mark which vehicles have goodies so that they can steal from them later. And like, why then just do it now? Why not?

Just breaking news again? I had my car broken into not all that long ago, back in I mean this was in San Francisco, but like a bunch of shit jacked from it. Because that's say, if you park with anything in a car in San Francisco and walk away, your car will be broken into and within seconds. But it's also like nobody's like marking your car for later. They see shit, they break a window, they grab it right, Like that's the way that.

being spread among car burglars. And in an article at the time, they tied this myth back to certain myths that had spread back in like the eighties and nineties through what were then called Chaine letters. Sarah, again, I apologize, but like you and I are both ancient, you know.

Look at this weird thing that we got, and we're going to talk about what chain letters were, because really what we're seeing when we look at a chain letter is the birth of meme culture. It goes back surprisingly far, but it all relates very directly to the shit spreading on TikTok and Facebook. But you know what else relates to misinformation spreading on the internet. Oh, advertising, because advertising is what makes disinformation profitable. So Sarah Sophie, here's some ads.

Oh great, we're back and we're about to start talking about chain letters. So chain letters, as I've talked about, like, there's the I didn't really I never really thought about

this before. I started researching this. But the more I got into it, the more I realized, like, oh, like everything that's happened that's happens today, that's happened for the last twenty years on the internet in terms of like what we call meme culture was sort of preceded by chain letters, and in fact an interesting aspect like the chain letters are like they are letters that would back in the day would arrive in your mailbox, and there were a mix of like forward this, you know the

next ten ten people that you know, in order to not get bad luck. Sometimes they were like here's a story about like a bad thing that's happened, or like here's a you know, a thing to be worried about. You know, forward this so that your friends know about this danger, about these crimes, you know about this thing that murderers do or whatever. Like there's a variety of

different kind of like chain letters over the years. One of the things I didn't realize until I got into this is that geneticists, like scientists and researchers teaching genetics use chain letters in there because you can apply some of the same algorithms that you apply to like calculating mutations in genetics to the way chain letters alter over time.

There's a surprising amount of stuff about it. Like it's a really good way to talk about because over time, both like people would alter chain letters in order to make them more relevant, but also just mutations would occur because like a lot of chain letters were initially handwritten and then they'd get mimeographed, and then after a time it would get so messy that you'd type up a

fresh version and you'd introduce changes. So like it was actually, like it is a pretty good way going over Like, oh, here's eighty years worth of like related chain letters, and we can sort of track the alterations over time in the same way that we look at the way that mutations get introduced into into a genetic sequence. I didn't realize that it's not really relevant to the story, but it's kind of cool.

for this purpose. Yeah, cool stuff. So I found a contemporary casual history of chain letters on Slate, and there's a couple of other places that have done similar sort of again casual histories, and they generally tie the birth of the chain letter back to Europe, generally England and the United States starting in the seventeen hundreds, right, kind of when we both have the origins of a relevant or of a reasonably reliable postal service, you know which

kind of starts to happen in the late seventeen hundreds, and when we have a printing press so that people like obviously, right, you can both print letters and copy them sort of semi reliably, and you can send them places. That said, again, this is what you get in the casual histories when you really dig into it and you find the chain letter like like the chain letter nerds, I guess you'd call them the obsessives, they kind of

bristle ats starting to get in the seventeen hundreds. Argument is that it goes back much much further, and this is where things go off the rails a little bit. The most detailed analysis of the history of this art form that I have found comes from an independent researcher named Daniel W. Van Arsdale. Starting in the nineteen nineties, he started collecting huge numbers of chain letters and posting them on his private website, which is a thing people

don't really have anymore. His website is down, but it's still you can find it on the wayback Machine. And it's very much like a late nineties, early two thousands, Like, here's this maniac who is obsessed with chain letters, and I'd agree that probably no one else in history ever was. And he wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of words.

He read like God knows how many of these letters he like categorized them and graphed them and anyway he splits chain letters into He's probably the number one expert on the concept of chain letters to ever stand for. No one knows. I don't, Okay, someone probably knows. I assume this man is dead.

What a glorious time. So our buddy Van Arsdale in his in his Maniac website splits chain letters into several broad categories. One category is what he calls letters from Heaven. These are letters that people claim were written or channeled via God or an angel or some other divine being. And like generally either like you know, this letter will protect you if you send it to X number of people. These became particularly and in Europe, starting in World War

One and then again in World War Two. You would send them to like there were primarily things like you'd have families who were their kids were overseas and they were worried about them, and they would get a letter being like this will protect your son if you send this to X you know number right whatever. Oftentimes there was a kind of a scam involved, where like you wouldn't just have to forward the letter, you'd send a donation to a central area and you'd forward the letter

to ten random people or whatever. And you know, folks are superstitious. They're kind of when you're waiting for your to know if your son got killed with the psalm, you're kind of out of your mind a little bit, you know, like with worry.

if you send money to somebody. Right, these are kind of, broadly speaking, what most chain letters, you know, for two hundred years or so in the West like kind of fell into. But Van Harsdale argues that the origin of the chain letters starts a lot older than the printing press, than the postal service, and even potentially than Christianity. One example that he picks out that he this is what he says, is like kind of the earliest example that you can find of chain letter like content is from

the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Bet you weren't expecting us to go there?

knows it shall be among the spirits near Raw. And he who recites the words of Isis and Sarah shall repulse Epep and Amin Tet, and he shall have a place on the boat of Raw, both in heaven and upon the earth. The man who knows not this picture shall never be able to repulse the serpent nehra Rah. So it's like both you have to you know that in order to avoid being, you know, punished by these evil spirits, you have to recite these specific words, and

you have to share them with other people. Right, and if you don't. Someone who hasn't seen this is vulnerable to this, right you could. It's that same idea, right like, where there's this here's this thing that you've now been informed of, and you both have to be aware of it and also spread it to other people otherwise you will suffer in some way. You know.

seventy during the reign of the Empress Shatoku. A total of over one million copies of or different Dahrani are from the from the Great Durrani Sutra of the Spotless and Pure Light were printed to be placed in one

million pagodas built at the command of Shautoku. In this sutra, it has stated that if a person we were to build several million small pagodas and place copies of Dorani in them, that person's life would be lengthened, evil karma would be expunged, and rebels or enemies would be vanquished. So again, back in the day, you had to be emperor to like indulge in in chain letter culture like you know today you could just send a bunch of letters to your friends and family, or you know, you

could in the eighties when people sent letters. But back in seven seventy you had to be the emperor, so you could build a million pagodas to put the message in. Otherwise you're gonna get killed by rebels.

in Japan. There were kind of variants of this all throughout Asia, where like basically, if you're the king, you want to make a bunch of pagodas with a specific message in them in order to avoid bad luck befalling you.

which the super rich act and the paranoia that is kind of ever present in their lives is proof that like when you're one of the people who like gets God's hits God's Great Roulette Wheel and winds up with millions and millions of dollars, you're still always worried that

something is going to take it from you. And likewise, just everyone feels that way, right, Like, if you're precarity is is a is an inherent aspect of humanity, right, even if you're not in a precarious situation, just the fear that like, you know, my kid could die oversee in the war, or I could get cancer or whatever. Life is random and that's scary, and all of these things. The kind of commonality between all of these things and chain letters is like it offers you sort of a

feeling of protection from the inherent randomness of life. Right yeah, the first recognizable chain letters started to spread from the fifteen hundreds on across Europe. It actually does go back further than the casual slate histories of chain letters seem

to say. And there were basically ponzi schemes, right like you would be asked to pay money to whoever's name was on top of the list in order to avoid bad luck, and then you would like erase the name on the letter, usually the handwritten letter that you'd received, and then like add your own name to the list and send it on to other people, and like, you know, honestly, that's how cryptocurrency pretty much works, right Like this this is again these are not like we keep inventing fancier

ways to do the same thing over and over again.

here's a quote from Van Harsdale's website. An eighteen eighty eight letter solicits dimes for the education of the poor whites in the region of the Cumberlands. This letter states it as an adaptation of a previous solicitation and acts that four copies be sent to friends for compliance. You will receive the blessing of him who was ready to die for us. This is the earliest known chain letter. An eighteen eighty nine example let an American an American

college student solicited dimes and ten copies. This letter claims to be self terminating. Recipients were asked to increment a generation count at the top of the letter until it reached some preset maximum, at which time the chain was to stop. This practice continued at least through nineteen sixteen, but a few years after a chain letter was launched only those circulated which had the inflated maxim We have two examples of a solicitation for used postage stamps to

build a children's ward in Australia. The first is from nineteen hundred and is number one hundred and seventy three of one hundred and eighty maximum. The second highly modified was still in circulation ten years later and is number three seventy five a full eighty maximum. Right, so you see what people are doing where they're saying like this isn't a scam, you know, will terminate this is certain

point when the money has been raised. And there was this understanding that if you made it feel like you were closer to the end of the chain letters circulation, that that would get more people to respond. So everyone would just lie and like pretend like you were. You know, it doesn't matter if you're one seventy three of one eighty or three seventy five of four eighty. But that's just the way the decided human beings.

But once the telegram and reliable postal service started to enable the mass transmission of these letters for the first time. Things very quickly got out of hand and they came purely vehicles of like separating folks from their money. And this happened in the US and Britain before basically anywhere else. In London, a popular kind of chain letter was called the peripatetic Contribution Box, and it was a mix of

all these kinds of impulses. The basic idea was that each person who received the letter would send a dime to the originator and make three copies of the letter, asking friends to do the same thing. One of these letters was sent by the Bishop of Bedford in eighteen eighty eight to raise money for a destitute women's own during the Jack the Ripper slayings and so it it's this kind of thing where like women are being murdered.

There's this. This is the first famous crime spree, right, this is the first mass media crime spree, right, the first crime spree that like newspapers in like the early news media have like adopted and are covering. And so he's he's like hitching in order to try to raise

money for a women's shelter. He's basically hitching onto the fame of the jack the ripper slangings, and it helped make it like you can contribute positively to solving like stopping these murders if you donate money and it works, like this is the first example of that I've ever

found of that kind of tactic working. It went so viral that the bishop was receiving sixteen thousand letters a week, like he couldn't deal with the mass of Like that's a lot today, right, Like if you're getting you yeah, like mister Beast couldn't pull that off, you know, Bishop Beast, Yeah, Bishop Beast. And it's like, from what I haven't found any evidence that this guy was a scammer. He was just like, oh, people are concerned about poor women in

London because of these murders. I will use that concern to try to like fund a women's shelter. And it just worked. And because it works so well, scammers see opportunity. They're like, wait a second, all these people are sending dimes to this bishop ass motherfucker because it's like raise money for this What if we send copycat letters claiming

to be the bishop but with a different address. Perhaps we can get some of those sweet sweet dimes, and so like an unknown number of people make money off of this. But also just as an accident, other bishops in towns that have similar names start receiving coins because like people are dumb, right, like yeah, wild.

By July eighteen ninety eight, the New York World was pre printing chain letter forms to fundraise for a memorial for Spanish American War soldiers. Do not break the chain, which will result in honoring the memory of the men who sacrificed their lives, it shided. Upon seeing what the world's proprietor had rot his rivals at the New York Sun were blunt in their assessment. Pulitzer is insane. Yeah,

they had good reason to scoff. Earlier that year, a seventeen year old Red Cross volunteer in Long Island, Natalie Shank, had contrived a chain to provide ice for troops in Cuba, causing thirty five hundred letters at a time to pour into the tiny post office of Babylon, New York. We did not consider what patriotic Americans are capable of, the girl's mother fretted to the breast. Yeah, this is like a common thing with chain letters, like people starting them,

especially in the era where they weren't always common. Some people would like start them to try to raise money for causes. It's always this like, well, now suddenly we have created like a massive logistical problem for our town in the postal service, and don't know what to do. No one, this is like nineteen dot right, nobody can handle thirty five hundred letters like.

the US mail. Sometimes you'll see people report that, like there was a German scheme to clog the mail. For what I've come across, I'm not sure if there was actually a plot or it's just that, like anytime one of these went viral, it caused a logistical problem. It was like a bomb going off in the post office. By eighteen ninety nine, this had all become enough of a problem that the US Postal Service had declared dime chain letters a violation of lottery laws, and they started

regulating shit right where. They're like, this is this is a lottery, Like you're running an a legal lottery and you have to stop. We can't handle this.

You need to send the dime and like drop it off at this location. And this actually worked better than you'd think. One chain letter factory because this obviously, like as with breaking into cars and shit, became the purview of organized crime, right because it's much more efficient in the capitalist sense if you like have an organization that's

putting out chain letters and reaping money. One chain letter factory in Toledo, Ohio had one hundred and twenty five full time employees making these things when it was shut down by the Feds by the mail cops.

all of this. These these things are spreading in a kind of a similar way to how disinformation and shit and cons spread on the internet. Right. You start with questionably accurate stories of disasters and tragedies around the world.

Then you move to a call to action, either to like try to get money for something or to spread various beliefs about the world, and then you kind of the way in which you tend to get people to spread stuff and get people interested is to share often false stories of horrific violence or stuff like kidnapping, right,

shit that people are are inherently drawn to. And as a result of this, kind of the earliest sort of chain letter meme that is kind of directly in the in the chain of evolution to the stuff that we've been started this episode talking about, are chain letters that would warn recipients about knife wielding murderers hiding in the

backseats of cars to murder in of dying women. These started to spread in the eighties and nineties, and once once email became a thing, one of the first things that would spread through email were copies of this specific chain letter. And I'm going to read one early modern example of this letter. A friend stopped at the Pay at the Pump gas station to get gas. Once she filled her gas tank, and after paying at the pump and starting to leave, the voice of the attendant inside

came over the speaker. He told her that something had happened with her card and that she needed to come inside to pay. The lady was confused because the transaction showed complete and approved. She relayed that to him and was getting ready to leave, but the attendant once again as urged her to come into pay or there'd be trouble. She proceeded to go inside and started arguing with the attendant about his threat. He told her to calm down

and listen carefully. He said that while she was pumping gas, a guy slipped into the backseat of her car on the other side, and the attendant had already called the police. She became frightened and looked out in time to see her car door open and the guys slip out. The report is that the new gang initiation thing is to bring a woman, bring back a woman and or her car. One way they're doing this is crawling under women's cars where they'll pump it while they're pumping gas, or at

grocery stores in the nighttime. The other way is slipping into unattended cars and kidnapping the woman. Please pass this on to other women, young and old alike. Be extra careful going into and from your car at night. If at all possible, don't go alone. This is real exclamation point. Exclamation point. The messages number this is real exclamation That's how you know it's real exclamation point. It then ends

with the message number one always in caps. Lock your car doors even if you're gone for just a second. Number two, check underneath your car when approaching it for re entry, and checking the back before getting in. Number three, always be aware of your surroundings and of other individuals and your general vicinity, particularly at night. Send this to everyone so your friends can take precaution. And guys, all caps. You tell any woman you know about this. Thanks.

no comparison. The second is that it allowed exact copies to spread indefinitely, which put an end to researchers being able to like study heredity with these things to an extent or at least altered it, right, because it just

changes the way in which shit mutates. For a while, in the nineteen nineties, it seemed as if the Internet might lead to a stagnation for this kind of message, but social media provided impetus for a new generation of to make slight adjustments on existing messages in order to build online followings or take advantage of roobs. We see this in pieces of pieces of this in QAnon and pizzagate.

The way conspiracy theories snowball over time due to the participation of huge numbers of people, and this brings me back to today's bullshit conspiracy theories about kidnapping. God knows how many iterations we've seen at this point, but the most pernicious family of myths all focus around the idea that kidnappers stage some sort of item in a victim's car. Sometimes the idea is that this is being done to

mark them. Other times it's that when the person stops to remove the item, you know, a shirt that's been left on the hood of their car or a piece of cheese. In one version of it, criminals will leap out of a nearby video to vehicle to grab them right they're trying to distract it. You got to be always be ready, keep a hand on your gun at all times, you know, if you see a shirt on your car, just start shooting.

vast majority of trafficking victims know their attacker. They are usually related to their attacker, right, or to their trafficker, I should say, trafficking people being forced into slavery or what like slavery, particularly like sex slavery. This is not a thing that happens that strangers due to strangers in the United States. This is a thing that like parents

due to their kids, or like a guardian. Well, it is usually either a parent who's trafficking the kid for money, generally as a result of like a drug addiction, or like a single parent who someone comes into their life and then traffics their kid. It's nearly always someone that

the child knows. Right, That's just like the way that trafficking works, and it's the same thing with like when adults are trafficked, it is nearly always it's either people who are migrants coming to this country being trafficked in order to like work on farms and shit or otherwise do labor for very little to know money, or it is when it's sex trafficking, it's like people being trafficked by you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, by family members. The vast

majority of trafficking victims are adolescents or teenagers. Sixty to sixty seven percent of trafficking victims in the US are fifteen to seventeen years old. A huge number of them are LGBT or gender non conforming because, like one thing that often brings people into trafficking, they are young, they

do not have resources, like financial resources. They are kicked out of their homes because they are queer, and they are then forced at some point into the set trade by somebody that they trust, right, Like, that is when it happens. This is how it actually occurs statistically.

I'm in danger. I have a reasoned, like all of this fear that is ever present in me me, yeah, yeah, it's these dangerous Yeah, these dangerous looking kids who are going to threaten me. The fear that is ever present in my life, because human beings more or less can't exist without anxiety has a cause. And it's the dangerous, you know, weird looking kids around me who are going to kidnap me by putting cheese on my car. And it's one of those things we started this episode talking

about Phoebe Copas. But if you do what I have been doing, and you spend hours and hours coming through viral Facebook and TikTok posts about like kidnapping conspiracy theories. In every one of them, you will find people talking

about their guns. A representative example comes from an article I found twenty seventeen article published by Channel fourteen News, an Amarillo, Texas station, and the title of the article was woman find shirt on car, warning goes viral and obviously one of these And right in the I found a Facebook post that was like twelve thousand shares and one of the first responses was a user going, I keep my pistol in grabbing distance everywhere I go, Like, no, people are not getting traffic this way.

just zone out on your phone. Right, everyone will say, well, yeah, it's good to be, you know, aware, But the version that gets transmitted primarily is like, you need to always be hyper vigilant because you are permanently in danger of being kidnapped and sold into fucking taken ass movie slavery.

will have an article up on my substack, Shatterszone. You can just find it by typing that in about specifically the way in which kidnapping and trafficking as key phrases have become like super reliable ways to go viral. On TikTok there's a lot of like weird fuck, So there's this fucking weird. I don't know how to describe this, but I find it deeply unsettling. One of the first things I found and I was looking to Phoebe Copis.

I decided, after I was reading about her, I want to see what people are like saying about this on TikTok.

more toxic than any other form of social media. But I also think all social media should be made illegal and the people who run these companies pushed into the sea, like I hate it.

Like it's all like shady fucking yellow journalism types have always known that, like, yeah, if you make white people feel like they're about to get abducted off the street, because they're always I think a lot of it goes does go back to you know, you think about like the emperor in Japan, like he's like, wow, I was born to rule this land, but I also still, despite all my power in my armies, feel scared all the time.

And that's just like a thing that people feel. I'm going to go make all of these pagodas to like spread this because I feel like if I spread this, like this book says, if I spread this specific chunk of text, then nothing bad will happen to me. The rebels will never come into my palace or whatever. And you know, then it gets translated to like, wow, I'm a white person in the eighteen nineties. Things are great, we roll the entire world. But yet I'm scared all

the time. There must be gangs of brown people waiting to kidnap me. And then you know, today it's too Yeah. Yeah, I'm a sub urban American, you know, the most fortunate kind of person who has ever existed in the history of the planet. Right, I am unfathomably safe and secure. Yet I'm scared all the time. There must be a reason for it, and it turns out that's the most profitable thing to to cash it on.

you're in a place of relative prosperity and safety. Right, it becomes like a vestigial or like there's things to feel scared about, you know, and he personally whatever you're doing with your life. But like that, this is also why we have like our great summer movies where it's like living a normal life and then you have to fight a dinosaur or a magic truck or whatever else Steven Spielberg has thought up for us.

to show up in your religion. It's going to show up in chick tracts and sermons and your beliefs about what's actually happening, because it has to come up somewhere.