Alternate Realities
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What is the impact of conspiracy theories on families?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. Since the COVID pandemic, lots of conspiracy theories have been floating around the Internet. For some, these ideas and the conspiracy thinking that fuels them may not have had much of an impact. But for others, they can feel urgent and personal. This is the case for journalist Zach Mack. Mack's father holds a number of conspiratorial views. He believes, among other things, that a shadowy cabal secretly runs the world, a group he calls the globalists. Last year, as Zach tried to make sense of his dad's beliefs, he began recording their conversations with his dad's permission, of course. Here's a moment from one conversation in which Zach's dad urges Zach to start stockpiling emergency supplies.
So you really want to store up two months worth of food and water because they probably won't be able to pump water throughout the city because that's all controlled by computers and electronics, and the EMP is going to shut down everything electronic. I know, I know it sounds like conspiracy theory, but they're going to do this. This is what they're planning, and I just want to have you be prepared, okay?
Today on The Sunday Story, a look at what happens to one family in this age of misinformation and conspiracy theories. A conversation with reporter Zach Mack when we return.
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We're back with a Sunday story and reporter Zach Mack, who spent the last year documenting his father's conspiratorial thinking and its effect on his family. Mack says his goal was to bring his father, quote, back to reality. He turned his reporting into a new series called Alternate Realities for NPR's Embedded Podcast. Zach Mack joins us now. Welcome to the podcast.
Hello, Aisha. Thank you for having me.
So to start, you know, can you tell me a little bit about your family? Like what was it like growing up for you?
Yeah, so I grew up in the East Bay, like San Francisco Bay Area, right next to Berkeley, Oakland. Very middle class, me, mom, sister, public schools. I guess one of the wrinkles in my upbringing is that my mom is a liberal Jewish woman and my dad is a increasingly conservative Christian. So growing up, I went to both temple and church, and my parents always sort of had very differing ideologies about the world.
Okay. So when did you feel like your dad was starting to become maybe a different person than the person that you knew? Like, what did that look like?
So growing up, he never really talked about politics. He never really expressed much interest in them. But I did know that he was always sort of skeptical about vaccines. I did know that he hated the Clintons and that he generally voted Republican for And then I think around 2019, he got an iPad. And I specifically remember in 2019, him trying to tell me that Mark Zuckerberg wasn't really the creator of Facebook, that the government was really behind Facebook. And then once the pandemic hit, it was like really starting up with the Bill Gates conspiracies and vaccines and all that stuff, I think is when things really started to change.
And then it came to like a turning point, right?
Yeah, yeah. So a year ago, we sort of had a big family blowout over Christmas. Things were not going very well within the family. And shortly after that, I confronted him about some of his beliefs. And I said, hey, I think you're being radicalized online. And his response to that was to send me a list of 10 predictions that he said would all take place sometime in 2024. and challenge me to a bet for $10,000 that all 10 of these predictions would happen within the year. And when they do, I will see once and for all that he's right.
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