Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

In recent years, a new alternative world history claim has arisen from the Internet — and it's a doozy. It revolves around an alleged worldwide cataclysm believed by adherents to have taken place sometime in the 1800s, a disaster that wiped out a worldwide advanced civilization and allowed the nations as we know them today to rise up. The event was a "mud flood" in which several meters of mud washed in and buried the ground levels of houses and buildings everywhere. Those cities and towns that were partially buried constituted the worldwide advanced civilization called Tartaria, which had free wireless energy and was populated — at least in part — by giants. It was a civilization "reset": out with the old, in with the new; and that "new" civilization is us. If this sounds too silly to be worth anyone's time to even listen to, then consider the fact that of all the hundreds of topic suggestions in the Skeptoid queue, this is the one that I chose for this week. And I chose it for good reason, so attend.
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Tartaria and the Mud Flood is truly a 21st century conspiracy theory, in that it exists almost entirely on the Internet — if not entirely. While some parts of the narrative go back centuries — and we'll talk about those — the whole thing as a single consolidated claim only goes back to around 2017. August of 2016 is when the first videos began to appear on YouTube about the Mud Flood idea, and we know this because of tools such as Google Trends. This is a tool that allows you to see the popularity of specific Google search terms over time. When we search for "mud flood" or "mud flood theory" or "tartaria" we learn that the Internet was essentially devoid of any interest in these things until about December of 2018. Ever since then, there has been mounting interest in those subjects among Internet users.

YouTube is what drives a lot of these pop-culture trends on the Internet, so we should expect that when we go to YouTube and do a search for videos on those subjects that were posted in that date range, we're probably going to find at least one early influential video. Long time Skeptoid listeners might remember that this is exactly how we found the original YouTube upload that constituted the "case zero" for the "Finland does not exist" conspiracy theory. Applying that same methodology here, I did find a YouTube user, Philipp Druzhinin, who had been posting videos about a mud flood since August of 2016. At first there wasn't much interest in his videos; they had very low viewership. That is, until December 2018/January 2019 — the same time that Google Trends reported the Internet became aware of the subject. Druzhinin had an enormous spike in his downloads right at that time. Which one triggered which? I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. Lots of conspiracy theorists have made Mud Flood videos, and it makes no difference who was the lucky one to get the early traction; what matters is that this is when the subject first became a thing.

But taking Druzhinin's YouTube channel just as one representative example, the descriptions on his videos and his Facebook postings indicate run-of-the-mill broad-spectrum conspiracy mongering. We find the familiar anti-Semitic themes such as the Rothschilds and George Soros; central banking; the Illuminati; microchip implantation and 5G; Q-Anon; climate change denial; the familiar tripe of who's "really" running our lives; pretty much the entire catalog of modern conspiracy mongering. Make no mistake: Tartaria and the Mud Flood does not come from historians or archaeologists or geologists, it comes from the darkest underbelly of Internet conspiracy theory culture.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4765