Tyler McBrien

When it first came up, I mean, as you said, it's a very conservative, very Christian, evangelical Christian area of the country.

When they went up in 1980, there's this great archival news clippings from the time where people were skeptical, but kind of had more of like a live and let live attitude than

It was saying that people in town were more interested or more worried about selling beer and porn and gas stations than whatever these guys said.

At first, they had no gate, no surveillance cameras.

It was just part of a cow pasture, and there were these cows pooping on it all the time.

But then it started to get a lot of local attention from local religious leaders saying that these were satanic and preached abortion and genocide because of the population control vibes.

I find myself like, you know, when you read, I don't know, like the Unabomber Manifesto or even sometimes like Osama bin Laden.

Yes, yes.

critiques of American empire.

You're like, you made some points.

I don't agree with the tactics.

And it was, I think, a pretty local target for a while.

And then there was a Wired article, I believe, in 2008, around the time when the internet is also...

growing that these conspiracy theories that were at once localized just spread and multiplied and changed their forms.

And another inflection point came in 2016 when Trump was elected, QAnon's on the rise, and then it just kind of became subsumed in 2016.

The QAnon world, it became part of Georgia's special brand of QAnon.

This may resonate with you.

I was talking with the AJC's politics reporter who's covered this, and he said that conspiracy theories used to be fun.

They used to be like this crazy lore.

And Elberton really played up the lore, and still does with the Guidestones.