The Telepathy Tapes is a Trojan Horse
The hit podcast has become a pipeline to a world of fringe Christian belief.
Hi,
This week The Telepathy Tapes won “Best Indie Podcast” at the Webby Awards.
“For the voiceless, thank you!” said documentary maker and creator Dickens on Instagram, surrounded by some children in Telepathy Tapes t-shirts.
The podcast continues to grow in audience and accolades, its creator repped by giant US talent agency UTA and listeners breathlessly spreading the word. The show’s lack of scientific vigor is largely ignored, its audience lapping up the idea that autistic children are some kind of magical beings that can communicate via telepathy.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
It’s the “Indigo Children” concept from the 1970s reborn, pseudo-science masquerading as scientific fact:
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent “perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented,” Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in “The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived”. The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children. Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, “Indigo Evolution,” is scheduled to open on about 200 screens — at churches, yoga centers, and college campuses…
The parallels are uncanny — from the breathless talk of “the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented”, to the fact there’s a documentary in the works.
As I pointed out in January, there has been criticism of the series — and last month The Cut reported on a variety of issues including how creator and host Ky Dickens misrepresented the results of some of the experiments.
But over the last month, Webworm has been looking at some of the voices bringing this podcast to life, discovering a group of conservative Christians obsessed with telepathy as a means to talk to God.
Whether Ky Dickens knows it or not, her hit podcast has been used by a variety of fringe religious groups to push their agenda.
Joe
The first we hear from Joe is about 30 minutes into episode seven of The Telepathy Tapes. Dickens refers to him simply as “Joe”, before Joe himself says, “I was a trial attorney in New York before moving to Arizona and becoming an associate pastor.”
It’s an introduction that gives him an air of authority — before he starts talking about how four autistic children under his leadership were sharing “spiritual gifts”.
What Dickens leaves out in that introduction is that fact that “Joe” is Joe Infranco, the former VP and Senior Counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council — the former group taking down Row v. Wade, and whom John Oliver recently referred to as, “A misleadingly friendly face on what is an utterly hateful ideology.”
Infranco is a pastor at Highlands Church in Scottsdale, Arizona — a church known for sexual abuse by pastors. One man accused of indecent exposure, Bob Wade, is still active at Infranco’s church.
Infranco has an extensive anti-LGBTQ+ track record — both in sermons and in helping spearhead “Prop 8” — and is just one of many right-leaning American Christians who appears to have used The Telepathy Tapes to further their own agenda, tolerating Dickens leftist, mainstream, queer identity in service of spreading their own more divisive beliefs.
Within the podcast he’s relatively subdued, and Dickens certainly doesn’t push the pastor on his other ideas. But outside of the carefully curated Telepathy Tapes, Infranco isn’t staying silent on his loopy theology.
Now elevated by his “fame” on The Telepathy Tapes, Infranco appears on podcasts like Blurry Creatures, a show with two Christian hosts who explore “ancient Giants, the nephilim, alternative history, and sightings of ‘beings’.”
There he talked candidly about his belief that autistic children were delivering direct messages from God. At 58 minutes into the interview, Infranco claims one of the autistic children under his care told him exactly where on his hands Jesus had been nailed to the cross.
The comments are full of Telepathy Tapes listeners rejoicing at these various revelations.
It’s unclear whether Dickens simply failed to vet him at all, or she knows exactly who he is and is deliberately concealing his identity from listeners.
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The Families
Joe Infranco is not the only interview subject on The Telepathy Tapes who is tied to far-right religious movements.
The “First Fruits of Zion” is a Christian organisation established in 1992. It is deeply obsessed with Israel: In their belief system, the Jews must all return to Israel to enable Jesus to come back, at which point all the Jews will be vanquished to Hell, while all the Christians will go to Heaven.
“For more than 30 years, First Fruits of Zion has been restoring the Jewishness of Jesus, bringing Messianic Jewish teaching to Christians and Jews, and reconciling disciples from the nations to God’s prophetic promises concerning Israel.”
The First Fruits of Zion website writes extensive praise about the podcast, referencing “Josiah”, an autistic child mentioned on The Telepathy Tapes:
Josiah began to deliver on God’s good gifts by communicating what seemed to be a steady stream of oracular revelations about God, Jesus, heaven, angels, demons, and spirits — not to mention direct messages from heaven that demonstrate inexplicable personal knowledge pertaining to the intended recipients.
The First Fruits of Zion then link to a book written by Josiah’s mother, Tahni Cullen, called Josiah’s Fire: Autism Stole His Words, God Gave Him a Voice.
In a Facebook post made on November 27 of last year, Cullen wrote about their excitement at being included in the podcast:
It’s not long before other familiar names like “Joe Infranco” appear.
Another family interviewed in podcast, Katie Asher and her son Houston, also have a book called The Book of Heaven: A Story of Hope for the Outcasts, the Broken, and Those Who Lost Faith. Asher has also written for the First Fruits of Zion, penning a piece called “I Can Hear Thoughts.”
Arthur Golden (also simply referred to as a “retired lawyer” in the podcast) and his son Ben are part of an ultra orthodox movement in Israel. Their website lists a “facilitated communication” with Ben (Binyamin Golden):
Another fringe website published a piece called “Facilitated Communication with autist Ben Goldin” in July of 2019, which included prophecies about a market crash and chemtrails.
In a final example, author Max Davies also appears in The Telepathy Tapes and has a book called Jesus, Josiah, and Me: How My Supernatural Encounter With An Autistic Boy Revealed the Wonder of God’s Presence.
All these books have been given a massive bump thanks to Ky Dickens podcast — a podcast platforming a bunch of people with fringe religious beliefs who are using autistic children to play out a fantasy of having a direct line to Jesus Christ or other God figures.
I note that while it’s now scrubbed from the website, when it first launched, TheTelepathyTapes.com listed most of these books.
Ky Dickens’ Descent Down The Wormhole
Webworm has reached out to Ky Dickens for comment about the various people she’s platformed on her podcast.
There’s a world where she has no idea what these people really think, or one where she is simply incredibly naive. There is another world where she is deeply aware.
Over on X, formerly Twitter, Dickens is currently retweeting a ton of Qanon-adjacent accounts just because they are saying something positive about The Telepathy Tapes.
She doesn’t appear to care that the audience lapping up her product are increasingly holding fringe beliefs that have zero basis in reality.
This includes her reposting the thoughts of conspiracy influencer Ian Carrol:
When Carroll is not sharing this thoughts about what The Telepathy Tapes means for “vaccines, aliens and the CIA,” he is tweeting about straight pride:
From what Webworm has observed, The Telepathy Tapes has fast become a pipeline to the world of fringe far right Christian belief; of unhinged rants about magical children and — increasingly — the fictitious link between vaccines and autism.
There is so much crazy just beneath the surface of something the public seems to think is a beautiful human rights story with a promise of magic.
But to be very clear: there is no magic here, only people with a very specific agenda, exploiting autistic children for a glimpse of the divine.
David.
If you’d like to get in touch about this story in confidence I am: davidfarrier@protonmail.com - else see you in the comments.
Please share this piece: www.webworm.co/p/trojanhorse
Finally, this was Webworm’s approach to Ky Dickens and The Telepathy Tapes for comment. It remains unanswered.
There's this old saying about a lie running around the world before the truth has its boots on, and I feel that's more true than ever. Lies are running laps around the truth, faster and faster and faster. And so often the lie gets a boost from being some warped or backwards version of the truth and it always seems to appeal to the same kind of people, the same kind of mind. 15 minute cities. Chemtrails. Climate change. Non-verbal kids. Each has its own bizarre counterpart. Naomi Klein's Doppleganger had it perfectly; for every important truth of the world there is a mirror version that is seized upon by grifters, desperate people, and idiots, and spreads like wildfire.
My son is autistic and he's an excellent kid. He doesn't need to be magical to be special. Seeing autistic kids preyed upon in this way is sickening, but as usual it's the bigger picture that worries me; how lies can be so fervently and furiously believed, the rabid hunger among a certain - large - segment of the population for not just unreality but anti-reality, and where that raging appetite is taking the world.
Guess what, jerks? Non-verbal autistic children are valuable in and of themselves. They don't need to be "useful" to deserve love and respect and a good human experience. I keep thinking of my sister and her nonverbal autistic grandson, and how she lights up when she talks about him. He doesn't do anything special or different that I'm aware of (I live a long way away so I don't see him much) but just his presence is enough for her to be head over heels for him. Everyone, autistic or not, should have that, instead of their humanity being graded on their utility.