Jon: Well, look at Mary at Bohemian Grove. I mean she’s a left-wing version of an anti-Bohemian Grove conspiracy theorist. Everybody likes mysteries. People say that it makes sense of a senseless world... I think people are drawn to conspiracies because our leaders sometimes behave in conspiratorial ways. So I think that also, there’s prejudice about Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg, and, you know, all of those groups; the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, that are sort of interesting to right-wing conspiracy theorists. But I think there’s a certain element of, if not anti Semitism... there’s definitely a certain element of a template. It’s like, ‘We believe that there’s a secret room from which a shadowy cabal secretly controls the world. Now let’s go and look for things that will confirm that.’ It’s confirmation bias. You could argue – and I’m a bit worried about saying this – but let me just say it, and we’ll see how it sounds... You could argue that the way that some people on the hard-left take some decontextualised tweet, and work incredibly hard to destroy the person who wrote it is a form of a conspiracy theory in itself. Because it’s taking a sliver of somebody’s life, completely decontextualised. They’re not interested in context. They’re not interested in intention. You know, that in itself, plucking a fact out of the ether and giving it a meaning beyond what it deserves, is a kind of form of conspiracy theory.

Jack: It’s a good point and it somewhat relates to the act of sequencing photographs, in the sense that you remove those subjects from context.

Jon: Absolutely! So yeah, I’d say that conspiratorial thoughts, or, you know, confirmation bias, all the different sorts of psychological impulses... there’s a bunch of other disorders, or psychological quirks that feed into this, and I think those things are probably true for things like the way that the left like to publicly shame people. And the right too, of course!

Jack: The raid on Bohemian Grove was a pretty interesting story. When the Phantom Patriot broke into the Grove in 2001, it was off-season, so there was no-one there. Instead of fighting the Illuminati, he went into a nearby cabin and tried to set it on fire – but his matches wouldn’t work, and his torch ran out of batteries.

Jon: Was he armed?

Jack: Yes, with a shotgun, home-made mortar-device, handgun, crossbow and a machete...

Jon: God! I didn’t know as many of the details... I saw him on C-SPAN at the time. And somebody, I think Alex or Kelly [Violet], basically messaged me to say: ‘Don’t mention him again’