This Place Rules
Andrew Callaghan's HBO documentary on the lead-up to the 2020 election is an unsettling portrait of a country hypnotized by misinformation and toxic media echo chambers
I was 15 years old in the summer of 2003 when I first succumbed to internet conspiracy theories. Specifically, the big one - the one that paved the way for an unthinkably large swath of this country to become a mob of paranoid, terminally-online election deniers and Q-Anon disciples: 9/11.
It was the era of the decentralized internet, before we had major hubs like Facebook to serve as distribution centers for all your aunts and uncles. There were no algorithms pulling you in. You had to seek it out yourself, mostly via forums and poorly designed websites. Social media wasn’t much of a thing yet, and everyone wasn’t online. (What a warm, distant memory that is now.) It wasn’t long before the 9/11 truth movement became a legitimate phenomenon and a growing portal to chaos, as the seeds of mass delusion were slowly planted across the country. By 2006, 36% of the US population believed in some variation of a 9/11 conspiracy.
In high school I was consumed by it. So were my friends. We were exposed to arguably the largest treasure trove of “alternative” information ever, via the most accessible means ever, at a time in our lives when we were particularly vulnerable to it. We were stoners who already hated authority and the government. A site like InfoWars was catnip for dudes like us, and it quickly became the lens through which we viewed reality: an information war. There were those who were awake and knew what was really going on, and there was everyone else watching CNN. “Did you know Bush planned 9/11? It was part of the Neo-Con agenda. There were bombs planted in the world trade center. No plane hit the pentagon - the real plane was diverted to Cleveland and the passengers were executed. The cell phone calls from the flights were faked. Bin Laden didn’t admit to doing it, that was a body double.” God help you if I ever cornered you at a party.
The 9/11 wormhole naturally led to the Alex Jones universe of the New World Order, illuminati, weather control systems, chem trails, area 51, false flag attacks, etc. It was all a mesmerizing tornado of secret knowledge. I would often listen to the Alex Jones show before bed. Sweet dreams.
Me and my buddies were engulfed. I still have the AIM chat transcripts. One friend messaged me on a summer night in 2005, regarding 9/11, “Dude, they were ROBOT PLANES.” Another one, in 2004, where I say, “Man, crazy how much going on is a conspiracy…” He replies “Dude, EVERYTHING is a conspiracy.” I still have a grainy cell phone video of me drunkenly explaining how Bush was behind 9/11 in a hotel room on prom night in 2006. Another kid I knew made his high school senior project about 9/11, where he presented a power point presentation to his class and showed clips from “Loose Change.” I had arguments with my dad at the dinner table. “You haven’t seen any of the evidence! You’re just a sheeple boomer!” I even knew one kid who got caught up and never recovered. He currently lives in an off-grid commune in Idaho and speaks at conspiracy events like “Red Pill Expo” and “Anarchapulco.” He sells an online course about how to speak to your family and friends about conspiracy theories in a convincing way. Thankfully for me and most of my buddies, we eventually got better at deciphering information. We developed information literacy.
What Andrew Callaghan depicts in This Place Rules is a nation plagued by poor information literacy. As he traverses the country in the months leading up to the 2020 election and showcases the gamut of Q-believers, right-wing militants, Trump cultists, and anarchists, Callaghan paints a picture of a populace fervently manipulated by misinformation. In doing so, he also reveals the other key piece to the puzzle: our toxic media ecosystem. Cable news networks like Fox News (and CNN/MSNBC to an extent) were once useful services; now their main utility is hyper-polarized punditry. The internet was once a relatively innocuous space for email and online shopping; now it’s a ubiquitous maze of misinformation rabbit holes and tightly-sealed echo chambers. Thanks to that, 16% of the country believes in Q-Anon. Over 50 million people believe that the Democratic party is a cabal of satan-worshipping, baby-eating pedophiles, and that Donald Trump’s sole purpose of getting elected was to expose and imprison them. 40% of the country still believes that the 2020 election was stolen, thanks to fringe news networks like Newsmax and One America News, and the social media platforms that allowed it to flourish. Conspiracy theories used to be fodder for fun weed-conversation. Now they’re an existential threat to democracy.
In This Place Rules, this terrifying new reality is best illustrated when Andrew meets a “Q family.” That’s right - an entire family that has fallen under the spell of Q-Anon, even the kids. In one scene, Callaghan stands next to an 8-year-old at a rally, as the kid shouts Q-slogans into a megaphone. “Biden is a child molester. And he kidnaps children, and does horrible things to them. Just like Hillary Clinton and Obama, who made the virus. The virus was man made.” Inside their home, we’re presented with the disturbing juxtaposition of these innocent kids having nerf battles…while speaking more Q-pilled nonsense. “What do you think is in McDonald’s food?” Callaghan asks an 8-year-old girl. “Probably ground-up children,” she replies.
The kid’s dad explains the main Q-Anon website and it’s corresponding “Q-drops” - anonymously-posted riddles and clues that serve as the basis for the entire Q-Anon phenomenon. In a stunning moment of insight into the country’s information illiteracy problem, the father pulls up an image that looks like it was put together by a stoned 7th grader in 2008. It shows a picture of Anderson Cooper surrounded by demonic imagery. When Andrew asks about the misspelling of the word “sacrifice,” the father claims that was purposely done by Q for unknown cryptic reasons.
There was probably nobody better suited to document the mania of 2020 than Andrew Callaghan. Callaghan has a unique talent for seeking out the weirdest people alive and making them comfortable enough to let their guard down in his presence. The result has been a wildly-entertaining and immensely popular catalogue of videos, since he first began in late 2018. After getting screwed over by his original employer, Callaghan started Channel Five in 2021. A completely independent operation with him and two friends, he now has over 2 million Youtube subscribers and pulls in 100K a month on Patreon. In just a few years he’s explored seemingly every subculture imaginable: Phish fans, satanists, pick-up artists, nude yogis, nascar fans, sneaker-heads, Gen-Z clout-demons, anti-vaxxers, biker gangs, etc. Characterized by his eye for the bizarre, eccentric, and captivatingly weird, his videos often share similar sensibilities with Nathan Fielder, Vic Berger, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Fittingly, Tim and Eric are the executive-producers and were the ones who originally approached him for the documentary in 2020. It was also around that time that Callaghan shifted towards covering serious subjects like the George Floyd protests, moving away from his original man-on-the-street comedy identity and more towards something that mirrors the work of Louis Theroux. Accordingly, This Place Rules feels like a combination of those styles.
Callaghan’s signature asset, besides the big hair and oversized suit, is his interview style. He refers to it as “radical empathy” - emphasizing listening and making an earnest attempt to understand people, as opposed to trying to make them look dumb. There’s no loaded questions, no hostility, no agenda, no dunking on anyone. It’s such an effective technique because it garners trust and allows people to open up in a way they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s what makes This Place Rules such a compelling document of one of the most unhinged periods in American history. We get a rare, candid look at so many of the people involved.
We get the blaring, misguided perspectives of countless Trump disciples at “Stop the Steal” rallies and the “Million Maga March.” We get a whiskey-fueled weightlifting session with Alex Jones. We meet a Q family. We get shouting matches between right-wing militants and Antifa kids. We get on stage with a MAGA rapper. We get drunk Gen-Z kids telling Trump to suck their dicks on election night. We get an interview with an “exotic horror film actor” who compares wearing a Trump hat to being a Jew in Nazi Germany. It’s all so ridiculous, there’s simply nothing that Andrew needs to add. In one of the few moments of the film where we aren’t being beaten over the head by inanity or cynicism, Andrew travels to Atlanta to interview Black teens who actually have something real to protest: the police shooting of Rashard Brooks. He interviews kids from an Atlanta housing project in a scene that highlights the absurdity and futility of most of the other subjects of the film. Callaghan makes that context clear: these are folks who’s livelihood is being regularly threatened. They don’t have the time or luxury to sit around thinking about lizard people or fly to D.C. to take part in some fantasy-revolution-LARP session.
Despite his hands off approach, when Callaghan does inject his point of view of into the film it’s to point out how a pervasive lack of integrity is at the core of all of this chaos. “We were pitted against each other, for profit, by organizations and individuals who do not care about us, and are enriched by our division,” he narrates. He’s not wrong. Information literacy is clearly a huge problem, but we wouldn’t have sunk so low without the host of bad actors who cynically took of advantage of our propensity for division and outrage for their own personal gain. Alex Jones made $165 million in a three year period off of an empire of merchandise. Trump made 4.5 million off of digital trading cards in one day. Proud boys leader Enrique Tario boasts how he would make up to $15,000 per day from political T-shirt sales at times, including both right and left-wing shirts. Tucker Carlson’s show broke the ratings record for the most watched cable news show of all time in 2020.
What Callaghan is also conveying is the recent phenomenon of “audience capture:” the act of cynically pandering to a certain demographic of people once one realizes how much more profitable it is to do so. Whether you are a pundit on TV or online, it is far more profitable to play to one extreme or the other than it is to provide a more balanced and nuanced point of view. People tend to like having their worst fears, tribal biases, and beliefs confirmed, and preying on that impulse has become the MO for a large portion of our modern media environment. Just look at how many seemingly-rational pundits and public “intellectuals” became anti-vaxxers in the last two years.
I certainly don’t have any ideas for solutions to any of this. The toxic combination of information illiteracy, fear, and outrage, and a media sphere that cynically cultivates those instincts, is an overwhelming problem to solve. But if there’s anything to take from This Place Rules, maybe it’s that radical empathy could be in order for the millions who were manipulated and led astray. I optimistically prefer to think that a lot of those people aren’t bad people. They just got lied to, and they might just figure that out.
I hope I’m right.
I think you should do more of these.