American Hysteria

Latest Episodes:

TERRORISM pt. 1 Oct 07, 2019

Show notes

Since 9/11, the fear of terrorism has centered on what we call Islamic extremism, but this two-part episode will instead explore a topic that is becoming more and more prevalent in our news cycle: domestic terrorism, the kind that is directed at Americans by Americans. We will explore both the radical movements of the far left and far right since this nation’s dark beginnings, and how one movement sought to use violent intimidation to maintain the status quo of white supremacy while the other side fought up upend it. We’ll start with the slave revolts of the 1700s and the “slave catchers” that represent the earliest version of what we now know as the police. We’ll reach the Ku Klux Klan’s beginning as well as the blockbuster hit that led to their rebranding in the 1920s, and their rise again during desegregation, just as the allegedly dangerous Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and their problematic white allies, the bomb-making Weather Underground, inspired serious government intervention that caused more death than it stopped. It becomes obvious that the far right and far left have always battled in the streets, just as we see today. For part two, we will explore how we got to the modern versions of domestic terrorism, what we have come to know as the Alt-Right and Antifa. Coming next Monday, October 14th.

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith

Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler

Show art by Roache

Voice Acting by Will Rogers

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WARDROBE MALFUNCTION (mini episode) Sep 30, 2019

Show notes

Eighty-four million Americans witnessed the greatest pop culture spectacle of 2004, when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Their live performance ended with what became known as a “wardrobe malfunction” when Justin ripped away a portion of Janet’s leather top, revealing her right breast complete with nipple piercing. This salacious scandal, sometimes called Nipplegate roused a moralistic America, even helping President George W. Bush to win his second term.

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Co-written by Riley Smith

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

PORNOGRAPHY Sep 23, 2019

Show notes

Pornography has existed all over the world for all recorded time, and now porn websites are visited by an estimated 60 million Americans every month. With each new technological advancement, porn soon follows, and each generation subsequently fears for our vulnerable women and our uncontrollable men. For this episode, we’ll spend most of our time in the 1970s, also known as the “Golden Age of Porn,” when America was introduced to Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie, Deep Throat, Playboy, and Hustler. We’ll explore the subsequent feminist and fundamentalist fallout and the war on porn in the 1980s, spurred on by a surprising gruesome advocate. Porn has long been charged with corrupting the youth as well as normalizing, glorifying, and even causing sexual violence. Today we ask the question: What does porn do to us, or more accurately, what can porn make us do?

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith

Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler

Show art by Roache

Voice Acting by Will Rogers

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES (mini episode) Sep 16, 2019

Show notes

AFTER SHOCK: Since the 1970s, violent video games have been a popular scapegoat used by Republicans and Democrats alike to explain mass shootings. From the extremely simplistic Death Race to the more realistic Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Call of Duty, what do our most comprehensive studies tell us about the effects of gory video games? How much have they truly influenced school shooters? And what does this manufactured panic act to cover up?

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Co-written by Riley Smith

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

DANGEROUS TEENS Sep 09, 2019

Show notes

Despite how these last few years have felt, schools are still statistically the safest place our kids and teenagers can be. Our evolving archetype of the goth mass shooter that was born out of the Columbine massacre isn’t accurate to who those young men really were, nor what they hoped to to achieve. From the Reagan and Bush era wars on crime and drugs came another kind of juvenile threat known as Superpredators, as The Central Park Five case demonized black kids as a violent mob wrecking havoc all over the nation, eventually leading social scientists and politicians to predict that their numbers would explode into the hundreds of thousands. With this in mind, when we demand political actions again extremely rare, though devastating, event of the school mass shooting, the angry young white men we have come to view as the most common perpetrators are not the ones stopped by the rising presence of school police. Today I ask the question: When we panic about school shootings on both the left and the right, who are the invisible victims of our collective outrage?

*Note: This episode states the chance of a K-12 student being killed by a school shooter as 1 in 614 million. This is the risk faced each day, not for an entire lifetime. My apologies for not making this clear. Thanks to statistician Chandler Piché for reaching out.*

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith

Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler

Show art by Roache

Voice Acting by Will Rogers

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FURBY (mini episode) Sep 02, 2019

Show notes

AFTER SHOCK: Many of us were gifted a strange robotic creature in the last years of the 1990s, a furry animatronic friend that children taught to speak, or so America believed. With misconceptions around the technology of Furby came strange urban legends and conspiracy theories about its possible use as spy equipment, the possibility of it crashing planes and stopping life support machines, and its alleged demonic possession that left an entire generation of kids haunted for years to come.

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Co-written by Riley Smith

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TOY RIOTS Aug 26, 2019

Show notes

After the heavy first half of this season, I wanted us to take a little break together and have some fun. We will be covering the volatile toy riots of the 1980s and 90s, from Cabbage Patch Kids to Tickle Me Elmo to Beanie Babies to Pokemon. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to when adults created a market for these toys out of thin air, with pointless plush selling for tens of thousands of dollars, and we’ll even hear a little from my Grannie about her personal mission to find a precious Tickle Me Elmo. I’ll explore just what it is about these fad toys that have led adults to fight each other in the aisles, to break each other’s arms, to create smuggling rings, and even commit murder, sometimes trampling the very children the toys were made for.

Thanks to my Grannie Sheila Haagenson!

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith

Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler

Show art by Roache

Voice Acting by Will Rogers

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LIVE VARIETY HOUR Aug 19, 2019

Show notes

For this very special episode, we present to you a mash-up of some of our favorite parts of American Hysteria’s LIVE VARIETY HOUR in Seattle. Special guests include Tinky Winky, Satan, Alex Jones, and John Harvey Kellogg. Expect drag, banned dances, urban legends told in the high school halls, favorite PSAs from the 80s and 90s, and even a little romance. CWS hosts this round up of the most hilarious and horrifying moments from season one. You’re gonna want to see our videos, make sure you head to our social media now!

Guest hosted by our producer Rod Rodriguez

Produced by Clear Commo Studios

Assistant Produced by Riley Smith

Co-written, Produced, and Starring Lily Orrey, Erin McCarthy, and Will Rogers

Produced, directed, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two Flexible Skeptics Contemplate the Unknowable Universe: American Hysteria in Conversation with the Something Scary Podcast Aug 12, 2019

Show notes

Today I plan to lose all creditability among our dedicated skeptics by sharing my ghost experiences, talking about astrology, and even getting a tarot card reading. Instead of abandoning me, I ask you to indulge yourself into the unknown for just one episode. With the amazing Sapphire Sandalo of Something Scary asking me the kinds of questions I love, I promise to keep my skepticism alive while also respecting the great mysteries that have always fueled me, and led me here, to American Hysteria.

Thanks to Sapphire Sandalo, make sure you follow her and her projects on Instagram @awkwardsapphire

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

THE MAD GASSER OF MATTOON (mini episode) Aug 05, 2019

Show notes

AFTER SHOCK: In the summer of 1944, Americans saw terrifying headlines about a possible Nazi chemical weapons strike in the form of an invisible poison gas. Underneath those headlines, a small town in Illinois began experiencing apparent “anesthetic attacks” by a mysterious figure that would come to be known as the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Could it have been an escaped Nazi hellbent on the town's destruction? An urban legend leading to a mass hysteria? Or a sadistic homosexual trying to poison his intolerant neighbors with invisible gas?

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and co-writing assisted by Riley Smith

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices