The big dumb weather conspiracy

Like many things, there used to be a bipartisan consensus that in a disaster, you help as many people get through it as quickly and safely as possible. In the past 20+ years, though, we’ve seen a shift in how the right responds to climate catastrophes — including building out a robust selection of conspiracy theories from chemtrails to Flat Earth. Will Menaker from Chapo Trap House joins us to discuss right-wing conspiracy theories about the weather, the climate, and whether we’re living on a discworld. Our guest is Will Menaker, host of Chapo Trap House. Their Movie Mindset series returns in October for spooky season, and you can also buy their new Year Zero comic book here: https://badegg.co/products/year-zero-1. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? There’s still a week left to get your first month for just $0.50 by signing up for our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Enter “PANICYEAR” at checkout for 90% the first month. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! You can vote for us to win a Signal Award in the Conversation Starter category or Weird. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:31Ryan Broderick?

  All right, let's try not to think about the current whores for a minute. Well, we'll get to them, but just to start, this is a weird question that we wrote before, obviously, all of this happened. What's your like favorite insane right wing conspiracy theory misinformation kind of thing? What's your favorite right wing meltdown of the last decade or so?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Um, God, I like, I like the ones that veer into what would be a plot in a Philip K. Dick novel. Like, I like the ones about how like every prominent politician has already been executed and the ones, the people that you see on TV are their clones. And then sometimes the clones have to be arrested and executed, but then unfortunately they are replaced yet again by another clone. And as of late, I've really been enjoying the like expanding aperture of transvestigations to include every human being who's ever been born, but particularly celebrities. And I just think there's like sort of a Skinner, Darkley situation going on here where these

• 1:35Speaker 02

  people are going to end up transvestigating themselves and concluding that they were born a different gender than the one they currently present as or assume is their identity.

• 2:00Ryan Broderick?

  I actually saw a really good transvestigation post a couple of weeks ago, which was so like Andrew Tate like did a video like in a speedo and his bulge wasn't prominent enough. And so a lot of his followers started transvestigating him and asking why his bulge wasn't bigger.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  The skull ratios never lie. There's a divine mathematics to this. And basically, any prominent, any prominent person, any person you see on TV, the movies, the news, et cetera, they are trans. And the scary thing here, though, is that if in your endeavors to expose this fraud or like this, I don't know, demonic ritual occultism being perpetrated on the world, through your efforts to expose this, you yourself gain some notoriety, then I think like the veil must be torn away from your eyes as well. And you must realize that all human beings are trans.

• 2:57Ryan Broderick?

  Have you come across any sort of right wing conspiracy theories about the climate, about weather? Weather machines, poisoning the air, chemtrails, anything like that?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a big fan of chemtrail stuff. And then like, I think like a more recent vintage, like a more recent variation on chemtrails is people who just say like, "The sky is wrong."

• 3:21Ryan Broderick?

  I love those.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  "The sun didn't used to be this color." Or, you know, like clouds, when I was growing up, the clouds didn't look like that. And like, it's of a par with like Flat Earth conspiracy theories, which like, I don't really know if that can be like neatly broken down into a right or left wing political point of view.

• 3:43Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think so either, yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  It's like an all encompassing mania that like very basic facts about the physical universe are wrong. The earth is flat, it's a disk, Antarctica is a giant ice wall. But like, kind of similar to the chemtrail things, what I like about these sort of, like I said, like mega conspiracies that are not like, oh, the CIA called Kennedy. It's like the earth that you think, when you think of the earth, you're thinking of the wrong shape. It's like, what I like about them is like, let's say it could be conclusively proven tomorrow that the world is flat. Like, take me to the ice wall, let me, you know, throw a penguin off the edge of the planet.

• 4:24Ryan Broderick?

  I want to see where the giants live, yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, the Earth is flat now. Now what? Like, who cares? Like, it would not affect my daily, I mean, like, because life here on the disk world, whether it's a sphere or a disk, is going to proceed pretty much apace.

• 4:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  And like, similar to chemtrails, it's just sort of like, okay, the contrails that you see coming out of airplanes, they're actually like spraying the world with mood-altering chemicals, which I, you know, once again, that's true, tight. I hope they're doing that. But, but too, it's like, what, okay, like, okay, I'm aware of it, I believe in it now. Well, like, how can I mediate the effects of the chemicals that the government's spraying on me? Like, what can be done?

• 5:06Ryan Broderick?

  Got to get rid of planes.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  And like, well, okay, get rid of planes. I hate airports.

• 5:12Ryan Broderick?

  The reason I ask is because we here at Panic World HQ have been wondering how the right's response to climate disasters has changed. There are events where it's glaringly obvious, you know, we need the government and that we should be mad that they failed us, and they're trying to convince us to stop expecting them to do anything. Today, we're going to be talking about the rise of right-wing conspiracy theories about the weather and about the climate. And the flatness of the Earth. I'm Ryan Broderick, this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. Sometimes you'll be hearing from our resident flat-earther producer, Grant Irving, he'll pop up from time to time. And our guest this week is from a little show called Chapo Trap House. Will, welcome to the show. Hello.

• 5:57Ryan Broderick?

  I, I wanted to say my favorite kind of flat-Earth-adjacent conspiracy theory is the idea that mountains are the trunks of giant trees, and that trees are grass, and that everything used to be bigger.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I mean, you see that one about that, like, the mesa that's in Wyoming that was featured in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind? I mean, can't lie, kinda looks like a giant tree trunk.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  But once again, like, if you believe in this, what do you want me to do with it? I'll just go, okay, mountains are trees, trees are grass, everything used to be bigger. But like, in the reality, and like, in the world that I've lived every second of my conscious life in, the proportions of things, trees, dogs, animals, human beings, seem to be pretty much uniform, you know? Like, it just, it doesn't bother me one way or another.

• 6:50Ryan Broderick?

  So, before we go deeper into our timeline of sort of how these things have spread, how they've taken root, so to speak, I wanted to ask, like, have you personally, you know, how have you felt the impacts of climate change? You know, have you gone through extreme weather? What has that been like? What is your relationship to, to the ever-changing weather patterns of the earth right now?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this before coming on the show, and it's just like, it's sort of one of the, I think the difficult things about climate change, I think that people have, is that it's just so massive, like, because it's, it's the planet, it's everything. And it feels like, it's either imperceptible, or it's too great to, like, even conceive of, or that, like, why bother recycling, right? Like, it just...

• 7:35Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  But then I was thinking about, like, well, what can I see or experience of it in my lifetime? You know, this isn't a catastrophe, but like, it disturbs me that, like, you know, I've lived in New York City my entire life, and we used to have very serious winters in New York City.

• 7:52Ryan Broderick?

  Sure did.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  And we just don't anymore, like, not, like, for, in recent memory. We could get a couple feet of snow, but then, like, the next week it's 50 degrees and it all melts. And I remember growing up, when I was a kid, there was snow pretty much frozen on the sidewalk from, like, December to April, until it all melted in the spring. Like, there'd be huge mounds of, like, disgusting gray, snow, you know, mountains piled up at every cut and street corner. So, at one time, you don't really notice it, but then if you think about it, it's, it's quite upsetting and frightening to think about.

• 8:25Ryan Broderick?

  100%. I grew up in New England and I have distinct memories of being able to jump off my porch into the snow as a kid, like safely. You know, it was that big. And my mom's a flight attendant and she mentioned this and I kind of thought it was bullshit and I looked it up. She has, she says-

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Your mom is a flight attendant, so she's in on the flat earth concern?

• 8:43Ryan Broderick?

  She does the chemtrails. She does the chemtrails. She has the, she does the hose. She plugs it in.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  But also the flat earth, because you look out the window of a plane and I don't see a sphere. I don't see a curve.

• 8:53Ryan Broderick?

  She's seen it. She's seen the edge. Yeah. But she has talked about how the air feels different. She's been flying for 50 years plus. And she, you know, she talks about how there's more turbulence. Everything feels different. And I did look it up and it is changing the way like air travel works. But I feel like Hurricane Sandy was the big one for me where, you know, the big first sort of extreme weather moment of my life. And then most recently, the wildfires turning all of New York City just unbreathable orange for several days. That, that really freaked me out.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I remember that and I like, I posted a photo of what like, it looked like outside my living room window. And it was like, yeah, it was, the sky was just orange. It looked totally apocalyptic. But to me, I was like, this is kind of cool. Time to put this on the gram. And my cousin who lives out west pointed out that I had all my windows open. So I'm, I'm unprepared for these kinds of things. And, and yeah, I was going to say Hurricane Sandy was the other big one. Because 9/11 didn't even shut down New York City. And Hurricane Sandy did. Like, the whole week, the subways were just closed. And like, that was, that's something that was inconceivable to me for my entire life, prior to that hurricane.

• 10:09Ryan Broderick?

  I was living in Astoria at the time and I went to like Astoria Park and watched Manhattan just go dark, block by block. You know, that night it came in. And I remember just going, this is like something out of a movie. I've never seen anything like it since. And then, you know, all the photos of Lower Manhattan just like washing away. And, and as you said, this is a massive topic. It's a massive thing to wrap your head around if you're in one of these events, even if you're just watching on the news. And so- Trying to figure out, you know, how we track the right wing reaction to it. We wanted to start with the founding of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 1979. And they they regularly face criticisms for how they respond to natural disasters. So we start our story in 1989.

• 10:52Ryan Broderick?

  Hurricane Hugo devastates the Southeast and the Caribbean. South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings calls FEMA "the sorriest bunts of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with", criticizing their slow response. So we got a shockingly fair thing to be upset about, wanting emergency response to run really well. And it's criticized by both parties. It was the main talking point about FEMA in the 90s, when Hurricane Andrew destroys Miami and much of the Gulf Coast.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  I remember like natural disasters used to be sort of a nonpartisan thing, or at least that's how I remembered it. Like FEMA really like didn't become like didn't enter my consciousness until Hurricane Katrina, where it became like a real national disgrace and a debacle. And was, you know, politicized because like it was, you know, made the Bush administration look terrible. I will say, though, my only conscious like thought or memory I have about FEMA from the 90s was that FEMA was a crucial part of the X-Files movie, the rather disappointing X-Files movie, Fight the Future. The Martin Landau character is like Mulder, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  And essentially in the movie FEMA will be the government agency that is that that will carry out the alien colonization of our planet.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  President will declare a state of emergency, at which time all government, all federal agencies will come under the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, the secret government.

• 12:23Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's interesting you say that because that is kind of what our researcher Adam discovered as well. He actually, he has a, I'm going to read what he wrote here. "Conspiracy theories are probably pretty widespread, but absolutely nowhere in any serious mainstream news source I can find from the time. To track down anything, I have to go into archive text of books published by wackos", like HAA. RRP, the ultimate weapon of conspiracy, which was published in 1998. And it reads, several researchers have commented that the United Nations would not have bothered to create a law against environmental modification unless someone actually had the technology to do it. Can the military and/or their scientists call up an earthquake on demand? In a moment, I will show that there is a growing body of evidence that they can,

• 13:07Ryan Broderick?

  and that H A A R P may be part of this technology. Have you ever heard the acronym HARP?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Certainly, but like only in within the last five or 10 years.

• 13:17Ryan Broderick?

  Can you define it for our audience?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  It's the government weather machine.

• 13:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  It's the machine that the government, it's in Alaska, I believe, and it's what the government does to control the weather.

• 13:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right. It stands for High Frequency Active Aural Research Program. It was a Navy project in the mid 90s to improve transmission signals by using a layer of the atmosphere itself as the transmitter. It's pretty nifty. And it immediately becomes a fixation for conspiracy theorists. But you know, it was X-Files stuff. It was silly. In 2009, Jesse Ventura visits HARP as part of the TV show Conspiracy Theories with Jesse Ventura.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Why don't you let me in? I have the documents right here.

• 13:56Ryan Broderick?

  Let him see the weather machine.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  God bless Jesse.

• 14:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that is, it's kind of amazing that that's just like all of how our politics works now. Conspiracy theories with whoever you want it to be.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  And another X-Files connection, Jesse Ventura.

• 14:12Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. I mean, in a lot of ways, like I did an X-Files rewatch a couple of years ago, and it started to get kind of uncomfortable by like how much it sort of predicted, just like the way people talk about everything now. But as these things start to get uploaded onto the internet, people start sharing them, and that takes us to what you brought up Hurricane Katrina. So like, what are your memories of the media and the political class reaction to Hurricane Katrina?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I remember. Watching it on cable news from here in New York and being, you know, like much of the rest of the country, you know, horrified at just seeing a major American city just sink for an entire week and the people left behind in it to be essentially abandoned by their own government or like for like a week while thousands died. What I will say, what I think is like the most salient fact about Katrina from like, from my perspective of like remembering the like recent history of this country is that it was early in George W. Bush's second term. It was the event that ended his presidency. And like, I don't mean that like in a literal sense because, you know, he served out his

• 15:20Speaker 02

  full term, but like it forever severed the connection in Americans' head between George W. Bush is sort of like the commander in chief, the leader, the guy who's going to protect us from bad guys. And it's like, people forget, like, the 2004 election was a really close election and they probably still were. But, um, like, Americans had already soured on the war in Iraq and like George W. Bush, whatever you want to believe, like, won that election pretty narrowly. I remember Katrina mostly for its like political ramifications as that it like really permanently undermined George W. Bush and his administration's credibility as competent stewards of American national security.

• 16:04Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. So on this show, we come back to sort of 9/11 often as the beginning of a lot of the paranoia and the conspiratorial mindset of America's starting. And I think when you talk about climate change, Hurricane Katrina is that for this world. And I remember even in the 2000s, you know, I'm not sure young people really understand how much of a cultural punching bag Al Gore was for talking about climate change. I mean, there's, I think there's a couple South Park episodes about it. The very idea that you could blame something like Hurricane Katrina on climate change was ridiculous and yet the Republicans who were in power had really no ability to manage

• 16:49Ryan Broderick?

  extreme weather, no ability to manage natural disasters like it. It is the moment where a lot of antennas go up among, especially like the fringe, the political fringes about this stuff.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, cuz like this idea of like outside threats, if they're fomented by human beings, that is sort of like, I don't know, rational, or you can put that in a context, you can wrap your arms around it.

• 17:12Ryan Broderick?

  You can wrap your head around it.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  But like, to see destruction wrought by weather, by natural disasters on such a scale, particularly of, you know, an entire city that is just essentially like a bowl sitting there, when those levees break, it just fills with water, and like, it's horrifying. And I think it blinkers more of people's ability to like conceive of a threat like that, and also just like makes people question, or begin to like demand, like, well, why aren't we protected from that threat?

• 17:44Ryan Broderick?

  100%.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  And like, there are certainly a lot of things that could be done to protect a city like New Orleans, or New York City, for instance, from like rising sea levels, or a storm surge like that. It would cost trillions of dollars, but like, I think that's the point. It's like, any mitigation of what the effects of climate change are likely to be, would require such a massive state capacity and state intervention, that people just give up. And like, they don't want to care about it, and any damage caused by it is just sort of like, oh, well, that's the weather, it happens.

• 18:13Ryan Broderick?

  So, yeah, I'm glad you brought this up, cuz I want to throw this theory by you, which is that like, in a lot of my experience, when you're talking about conspiracy theories, you're talking about kind of like, miss and disinfo, you know, on the right in particular. I tend to categorize it in two ways. One is like genuine people, like real people, who are trying to make sense of something that they cannot make sense of, and then bad actors, who are trying to find someone to blame for this problem that we don't want to deal with politically. When you, when you look at a lot of the earlier kind of internet chatter about something like Hurricane Katrina, it is a lot of people running cover for Republican Party that did not want to invest the money to protect a city like New Orleans.

• 18:58Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I would sort of argue.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  But also that like, when you get into conspiracies about like the government, government control of the weather, and like, you know, I think you're seeing that more and more now, when you like, when floods happen, or hurricanes, like, I don't think it's widespread, but like, that narrative is out there, and I think it's just a way of like...

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Conceiving of a threat of that magnitude or like destruction wrought on that on that level that is so catastrophic or like people losing everything or like, you know, you think about like the state of Florida and sometime soon, insurance companies are just going to stop insuring construction. They're going to stop giving homeowners insurance for floods and things like that in Florida. And what's going to happen to the state of Florida then? What's going to happen to the real estate market? Well, I mean, politicians in Florida are already asking the federal government to just essentially bail out all private insurance in the state of Florida for for homes and buildings.

• 19:53Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Because like the thing is like, the government is doing it to you in so much as that they like are not doing anything to mitigate the effects of climate change and have been like bought out by the petroleum industry. And, you know, I'm not the first one to make this observation, but like, yes, there is a machine that controls the weather and is trying to kill you. It's called the car. It's called the internal combustion engine. And like, and that's what I mean is like to assign blame, like, like, who is the culprit for it? I mean, like, even for me to say, like, it's easy to just say it's the government and oil companies fault. But really what it is, is like the collective responsibility of post industrial human civilization and anyone living and taking part in it, which is quite a lot of people.

• 20:31Ryan Broderick?

  It's a lot.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  So like, if it's a weather machine, well, then it's just like, well, yeah, someone is at fault for it. You can blame someone there doing it to you, rather than like, it's something that we as a species, to varying degrees of responsibility, certainly, are doing collectively to ourselves and our ability to, I don't know, maintain human civilization or anything like a dignified life in large areas of the country of the planet.

• 20:55Ryan Broderick?

  Before we move on from Katrina, I want to run through some of the details of what happened, just so we have it here. So, per of the New York Times writing at the time, the 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically under financed that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years. And then, as the, you know, as we start to understand how the government responded and sort of the racism baked into how the government responded, the Huffington Post wrote at the time, this I thought was really interesting, "Yahoo.com's page provided one of the most blatant examples of the racial bias. The website featured a photo of two white residents." Wading through the water with food.

• 21:40Ryan Broderick?

  The caption read, "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area." Then there is a photo of a black youth wading through water with food. The caption reads, "A young man walks through chest-deep floodwater after looting a grocery store." And then we see that get even worse as FEMA comes into the city, starts putting people into the stadium. And that's where we get a moment that we've talked about on the show before, which is when Kanye West tells all of America that George Bush doesn't care about black people.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  I remember seeing that live on TV, too, man. That was...

• 22:15Ryan Broderick?

  It was moon landing. It was amazing.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  It brought Kanye so many years of goodwill from so many of us. He like, he could have gone so far and he still managed to go too far to, to, to voice that.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I mean, my favorite part about that moment was Mike Myers standing next to him and like his look when he said it was like, "Wuh."

• 22:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. It's like one of the greatest faces ever made on television. But we're gonna throw to a break and after the break, we're gonna be talking about how a little show called Infowars gets in on the mix. But first, a word from our sponsors, Infowars.

• 22:54Speaker 00

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• 23:54Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so I did not, I did not realize this until we started doing research for this show. Paul Joseph Watson was not the first Prison Planet guy.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  What?

• 24:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was, it was an established, like, offshoot of the Infowars network before Paul Joseph Watson took it over. Which I didn't realize.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Wow, so the Prison Planet is sort of like the Dalai Lama. It's just sort of like, you have to be reincarnated as Prison Planet.

• 24:20Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. So, at the time, Infowars' Prison Planet, they publish a post that reads, "In this exclusive interview for Prison Planet TV subscribers, Ben Livingston explains how for decades the US government has had the power to both lessen and increase the severity of adverse weather for their own purposes." And then there's an article from the time entitled "Connecting the Dots: Katrina, Another Deliberate 9/11." And this is interesting. It reads, "Was New Orleans' Hurricane Katrina disaster another deliberately created spike event in the same vein as the Oklahoma City bombing and New York City's 9/11? Eyewitness accounts from at least 25 people who are fearful for their lives because they are

• 25:04Ryan Broderick?

  talking saw people blowing up the New Orleans levees after the main storm had subsided. These levees in question were extremely strong, and that would take something akin to an atomic bomb to destroy them. In addition, how do we explain water temperatures being substantially hotter than they should have been? Was the water cooked by an EMF, microwave radiation, pulse technology, or some other energy source to redirect the hurricane?" So Infowars was growing, but this was still extremely fringe, though some local news and a Spike Lee doc did cover the bomb theory, so we can flag this slowly inching more into the mainstream.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  This stuff lands to it, like, to people, and like, even to a certain extent lands in my own psyche, like, in my own heart. Because like... I don't know if the levees were intentionally blown up or not. My suspicion is that, you know, if I had to like guess, my thing is that they probably weren't. But like, so many things in American life, I guess, beginning with 9/11 in my lifetime, but you could go back further than that. Are these like, I was talking about on the show the other day, like in the context of the Charlie Kirk assassination, but like, you could take any one of a dozen examples of these like terrifying sort of meta-events in American life that are like, sort of blinker to your imagination and like are never conclusively resolved in any way, nor has anyone really ever held accountable.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  The obvious questions that I think a lot of people have about these events are just left out there to linger. And whether they are, you know, reasonable questions or suspicions or not, the fact of the matter is like, they're there. So it makes it hard to like conclusively make any strong definitive statement because like, like I said, like I should be clear here, I don't think the levees that sunk New Orleans were blown up. But like, would I put it past our government or the people in charge of it to like destroy an American city for some nefarious purpose? I don't know. You tell me.

• 27:02Ryan Broderick?

  It's funny, it's funny you bring this up because like, I mean, I've said this before, I sort of always adhere to the idea that stupidity and negligence are the true conspiracy. Like, I just don't think you can get enough people to stay quiet to do some sort of mass action like 9/11 ahead of time. That said, my, my thinking has become a lot more conspiratorial since Trump took office the second time. Specifically with the Charlie Kirk stuff where like, I was like real far down some rabbit holes where I'm like, these guys are making some sense. And like, I get the impulse, especially because we, there is so, there are so many examples of this, as you said, throughout American history, especially modern American history,

• 27:44Ryan Broderick?

  where yeah, we never get a conclusive answer for anything, or one that satisfies everybody.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  I try to remain skeptical of my own urge and instinct to indulge that part of myself because it is so satisfying to do, and it's so easy to do, and it's kind of thrilling to do. But I think it goes back to like this idea about, the, the pleasure of conspiracies is that they provide, true or not, they provide a, like essentially what is at the end of the day, a reassuring narrative. It sort of protects us, protects your own psyche and your own identity from the idea that like, nobody is really in charge of anything.

• 28:21Ryan Broderick?

  Which is terrifying.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  And that life and human history is just like, a series of increasingly interconnected and, you know, cascading violent catastrophes and disasters, of which no one can really conclusively said to be the author of, or like, could have been prevented, had someone done something differently.

• 28:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's a, I'd much rather just, I like to, I like to take, like, maybe an hour, every week, every month, and just totally indulge in conspiratorial thinking, and then just sort of turn it off. I'd be like, alright, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go see what all the whack jobs say, and then I'll just like, chill out. I feel like, as a treat.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  I think, I think that's a good way to do it, but like, these baffling and terrifying events that like, sort of keep happening, and people like, feel like that we should be protected from. We should be protected from things like, I dunno, like, Stephen Paddock shooting 600 people from a hotel room in Las Vegas for seemingly no reason.

• 29:19Ryan Broderick?

  Which we've never heard anything about, ever again.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, what, like, what happened with, like, why did he do that? Like, what's going?

• 29:25Ryan Broderick?

  Well, and I, and I think the, the internet has, maybe not made this worse, but at least changed the nature of it, and, so, I wanna move to the next disaster in our timeline here, because I think this is the first one that is truly shaped by the, the internet, and, and understood via the internet. And, we mentioned at the top of the show Hurricane Sandy, it is an interesting, uh, example compared to Hurricane Katrina, because, for the most part, it's, it's managed by the government decently well. In fact, the, the FEMA director at the time, who was hired by Bush, criticizes Obama for being too on top of it, which is very funny. Um, and it's a moment where stuff like Infowars breaks containment, because now, everyone's online. So Infowars is publishing all kinds of stuff

• 30:10Ryan Broderick?

  about HARP, claiming that Obama's controlling the weather.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Obama, I was not familiar with your game.

• 30:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, pretty good.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  I simply must respect. Yeah, I remember, I remember, like, Sandy being like, a moment of collective cooperation. And solidarity among New Yorkers and I never remembered anyone being furious at the government, state, city, or federal. Many, many fewer people died during Hurricane Sandy than

• 30:33Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Hurricane Katrina. So like, that's understandable. But I just remember being like, this is like a once in a century event. Like, it's literally an impossible situation. I'm shocked that they got the subways up and running in like, a week.

• 30:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was amazing.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  I remember being like, pretty much content with how the government responded to Hurricane Sandy.

• 30:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and a lot of the right wing spin on this didn't have a lot of teeth. I mean, the Drudge Report speculated that the storm was gonna be used to hide bad job reports.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 31:01Ryan Broderick?

  Uh.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Like.

• 31:02Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Uh, that's great. Look, you said about like, the only conspiracy being like incompetence. Like, imagine the world, they were like, "Mr. President, the Q2 job numbers are slightly lower than expected or projected." And then they were like, "Boot up the HARP system. We're gonna destroy Lower Manhattan."

• 31:22Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Please do, though. I mean, there are a lot of-

• 31:25Speaker 02

  We are going to flood the financial capital of the planet.

• 31:30Ryan Broderick?

  So that pretty much sums up normal responses to natural disasters and mainstream and conspiratorial responses. And now, unfortunately, it's time to jump to the Trump years. Uh, when Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico in 2017, uh, the government response is completely incompetent. It's a disaster. Um, and it's also now a Republican administration at this point. And, uh, Trump, you know, he's bragging about the death toll.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  I remember him throwing like, paper towels-

• 31:58Ryan Broderick?

  Towels.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Toilet paper.

• 31:59Ryan Broderick?

  Toilet paper, exactly. It becomes a total political quagmire. San Juan Mayor Carmen Julian Cruz says, "If anybody out here is listening, we are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency." That's when Trump throws paper towels at storm victims, um, and denies death toll numbers. And he'll just continue to deny that approximately 3,000 people died, thousands more than those that died in Katrina. And he can do that because in 2017, the online right becomes much more organized. So you have conservative publications, conservative Twitter accounts, you know, YouTubers. Claiming that the death toll numbers are faked. From NBC at the time, they write another Breitbart article from August 20th titled,

• 32:41Ryan Broderick?

  "Left-Wing Latinos to Use Hurricane Maria Tragedy as Anti-Trump Midterm Message", claimed that the, quote, "leftist Latino advocacy groups were planning to use the federal government's disaster response for, quote, 'an anti-Trump campaign'". And that is, I think, that solidifies the playbook, the one that we're still seeing.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Well, this gets, this gets back into like the, uh, the looter slash food finder that caught me here and how that plays out because like it happened to Puerto Rico. That's, that's Puerto Ricans who are suffering. Like, they're not even American. They're foreigners.

• 33:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  They speak Spanish. Even though Puerto-

• 33:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I know what you're saying.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  I'm making a joke here, but like the, the horrible floods that happened last year in like North Carolina, the whole valleys got washed away and that was mostly like rural white people suffering from it. Then you get all the stuff about how like the government's doing it to them. Like, you know, this how, look how unjust this is. Where's the federal government? And it's just like, well, I mean, in the same situation, like you can point to like an inadequate response by the federal government to a natural disaster. But like, once it becomes times like, who is, who is suffering? Like, who is the, whose homes are being washed away here? And if they're Puerto Rican or they're not white, well, then they're lying about it. They're whining, they're complaining, this is fake, the death toll is exaggerated. And, but then when it's your people doing it, you're like, look at this, look at, look at these people, they've lost everything, look how unjust this is, where is our government?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Like, you know, how could they, how could they do this to us?

• 34:03Ryan Broderick?

  Which they can never admit that it's the, like, the government they voted. I, I, I think that, I, there's a cognitive dissonance here that, that a lot of the right wing is trying to constantly deal with, which is, a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy happens under Obama. It's pretty good. People remember it as actually, as you said, a moment of solidarity. The trains are up and running, way less few people die. Natural disaster happens under Trump, several happened under Trump, and it's, it's a nightmare. And so you have to explain that. And I, and I, I think there is like a psychic damage that, like conservatives take where they can't face the fact that like they voted for this level of response.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, like that gets into the other, like meta-conspiracy, like QAnon.

• 34:44Ryan Broderick?

  I'm so glad you brought this up because that's where we're headed next.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Right? QAnon emerged right at the beginning of the first Trump administration. And it was like at the moment of their like unprecedented- Victory in, you know, become, you know, like, they're an unprecedented political victory. Like, upended, like, all political conventional wisdom, every poll, they won. They're in charge of the federal government. And then I just think it's like, it's interesting that like, that is the moment when this like, grand meta-conspiracy begins to gel, that like, seems to like, more than anything, function as a narrative that explains why all of the bad people are still doing

• 35:22Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  bad things, and your life still sucks, and it's like, there's been no improvement in the conditions of your life. And then also, all of the evil people that are fucking like, eating and raping children, you still see them walking about, walking around Martha's Vineyard on TV, being interviewed, and it's just like, wait, I thought we had all the evidence. Why aren't these people being arrested? And they're like, aha, but they, but they are, and what you're seeing are clones. But like, even if you don't believe like, like, that element of it, it's this whole idea of like, there's like, the deep state, and there's like, the white hats and the black hats, and there's this like, invisible war going on, and like, who's in charge of the federal government doesn't really matter, because like, the bad people are still there, preventing Donald Trump from doing all the good things that you think of, when like, you're like, yeah, that's my president.

• 36:03Ryan Broderick?

  And I'm, yeah, I'm glad you brought up QAnon, because that, that is, I think, the, the biggest change between how right-wing conspiracists dealt with something like Katrina, versus how they deal with natural disasters now. Because by 2018, not only is QAnon thriving, but QAnon-influenced politicians are winning positions of power. And so, when the California wildfires break out in 2018, it is completely mismanaged. It's the worst wildfire in California history to that point. Trump withholds relief funds, it's a total disaster, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is absolutely cooked in QAnon radiation, uh, do you remember what she said about the wildfires in 2018?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  I do not. Was this the space lasers comment?

• 36:48Ryan Broderick?

  Jewish space lasers, that's right, yep. In November, posts on Facebook, obviously, of course, that she's just asking questions about space layers. She doesn't say the Jewish part, but she singles out the involvement of Rothschild Incorporated, with a company making solar power generators. The media writes at the time, "One theory which has been promoted by QAnon followers falsely posits that a nefarious entity used laser beams or a similar instrument to start the fire for financial profit." And then she writes, "Because there are too many coincidences to ignore regarding the fire, including then California Governor Jerry Brown, who wanted to build the high-speed rail project, and quote, 'Oddly, there are these people who

• 37:30Ryan Broderick?

  have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.'" And then she speculates that the vice chairman of Rothschild Incorporated, international investment banking firm, was somehow involved by beaming the sun's energy back to Earth, which could start a fire, she claims.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  That's funny. That's interesting, because the sun already does that.

• 37:50Ryan Broderick?

  It does do that, by definition. Like, yeah, that's what we use it for. That's what we like it about it.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Think about this, like, natural disasters. And I just think about like, how throughout so much of human history and religion, like, natural disasters are such a, so deeply ingrained in our mythology, like, in the stories we tell ourselves. Like, so many religions have, like, a flood narrative. Like, you know, obviously, like, in our tradition, there's Noah's Ark, right? That, like, God, like, basically, like, wiped out the earth and, like, was like, "Start over." Noah, you and your family, and all the animals, where a flood is wiping it clean. Like, they've always kind of stood in as, like, a representation of everything that human beings can't control. Even with our, you know, extraordinary cooperation, our large brains, our technical mastery of our physical environment, our, like, interventions

• 38:40Speaker 02

  in the natural world, in terms of, like, agriculture and infrastructure and things like that. Still, like, all it takes is one big storm to just lay waste to all of that. And it's always stood as kind of like a testament to, remind humanity to be humble in the face of the natural world, or, i.e. God, right? Like, God can just flood the planet. And, like, he's done it before, he'll do it again.

• 39:06Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  And what's interesting to me about these, like, these contemporary conspiracy narratives around the weather and natural disasters that you're talking about, is that, like, In place of God's judgment, or man's need for humility in the face of God, we have sort of kind of replaced that with technology and the government as like, as a stand-in for what would otherwise be like

• 39:25Ryan Broderick?

  That's true.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  a wrathful or judgmental god. And that we, we need to like, appeal to this god, government, or the people in charge of the weather machine, either to, I don't know, smite us, or save us, or that it's like, an evil god that's doing to us, or that, or that man has usurped the power of God, and is now using it for himself.

• 39:44Ryan Broderick?

  No, I think you're right, where, a, a thing that, honestly, Grant, you and I should talk about doing an episode on, which is like, within the secularization of right-wing politics in America, it, we have not really changed the shape of them. We have just replaced, like, they have replaced the evangelical god with other institutions, other ideas.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  With Donald Trump. With Donald Trump. Yeah, like, that's, that is a fascinating thing to me. Cause like, you're like, talking again about the Charlie Kirk assassination, like, the, the sacralizing of like, political figures, they have just replaced God, or Jesus Christ, or any sense of Christianity, with Donald Trump himself, and the figures surrounding him, and you see that in the attempt to like, kind of, uh, make Charlie Kirk into a Christian martyr, or saint.

• 40:34Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I, I think you and I are similar here, where we both still have a soft spot for the total off-the-rails, wackadoo conspiracy theories. Because like, growing up, like, they were not really part of the larger umbrella of republicanism. Evangelicals didn't like them. The Alex Joneses of the world were in the basement with the ham radio, it was not, it was not like that. But you watch the politi, the conservative politics of America over the last 30 years, Those guys have become louder and louder and more and more influential as the parties become more secular, and I think that's not an accident.

• 41:13Ryan Broderick?

  It's it's effectively creating the superstructure that allows them to replace God in the evangelicalism with Trump. It's to create a belief system and they need them. You need a guy to say, actually, there's a laser pointed at California, run by the Rothschilds or whatever, because that is, you know, magical thinking that could replace the biblical flood and explain it even better, perhaps, for the purposes of the modern Republican Party.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like, at the end of the day, like, the myth is the same, like, that civilization is, our culture and our civilization is fallen evil and corrupt and that, like, needs to be sort of purged, wiped away, and like renewed through disaster or like the deaths of millions, like, in some sort of apocalypse to create, like, a new, perfect, God-centered society.

• 42:09Ryan Broderick?

  And we're going to be talking about that apocalypse, which happened in 2020, right after the break, but first, an ad from our sponsors, Rothschilds Incorporated.

• 42:19Speaker 00

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• 42:51Ryan Broderick?

  So, all of this stuff basically permanently becomes a part of the American psyche after 2020. We're not going to be talking about COVID in this episode, which I do include as an example of climate change, but it is such a massive hyperobject that, like, we just don't have the space for it. But as Covid is happening in 2020. We do get more wildfires, this time in Oregon. Imagining a better world for a second, this seems like it could have been a good wake up call to take climate change seriously. But instead, the playbook to distract from the existential threat and government failure worked like a charm. Instead of blaming Jewish space lasers in 2020, they just blame Antifa.

• 43:36Ryan Broderick?

  Conspiracies are floating around right wing media and who else, but Joe Rogan could make the claim as mainstream as possible. This is what Media Matters wrote at the time. On the September 17th edition of the Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan repeatedly and falsely said that they've arrested left wing people for lighting these forest fires in Portland, Oregon. He added that there was a madness going on there and claimed that these people want your head and they want blood and they don't seem to be willing to settle for anything less. They really fixate on this stuff and it becomes, I think, the go to reaction for climate disasters post 2020 is now it is the left who did it somehow and we'll figure it out. Rather than obviously what is reality, which is that we're just not prepared for anything like this at a federal level.

• 44:20Ryan Broderick?

  My question is, from your perspective, at this point, they are running our institutions and they are crumbling and climate change is obviously making it worse and they have to constantly run cover. But I don't get the sense that QAnon is as popular as it once was. So like what has replaced QAnon at this point? From what you've seen.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  That's a good question. I think there's probably less of a need for QAnon because the character of the second Trump administration is

• 44:47Speaker 02

  different than the first. Like I think like in the first administration, he was still constrained by the people he appointed in his administration, guys like Steve Mnuchin or whoever. Whoever he had running the Pentagon, people who like still at the end of the day were smart enough to know that he was a bad guy and an idiot. And that the country essentially still needed to be managed by people who knew what they were, knew anything.

• 45:08Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Anyone in the government who knows anything about their field of management or like area in which they work is essentially an existential threat to their ideological mission. And they have been empowered to pursue that and they have been. And I guess. We'll be living with the results of that for quite some time. So I don't know what's going to replace Trump. I just think it's like an ever stronger cult of personality around Donald Trump as the leader. And any frustrations with like a lack of success, you know, in terms of like the economy, jobs, people's daily lives, how clean their safe their communities are, how safe and dignified they feel in their own lives.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  It doesn't seem like like anything is going to happen to comfort or provide any kind of dignity or security for people in the coming years. And I think that's why like there's ever more of a need to find, isolate and eliminate enemies. Like enemies inside the United States of America. Like it used to be like it's the deep state. And like Donald Trump is fighting them into the first Trump term. And like, we're fighting them, we need your help. But like, there are still so many bad actors like deeply embedded in the government and the media that are holding back the truth and are holding back this like this great renewal of America and its promise. In Trump too, it's like, no, we've gotten rid of all those people.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  But like, there are still people in this country, just civilians, just people living, being born in this country or visiting the country, that they're the fucking enemy. They're the problem. They're like, they're what's stopping this great national renewal, this great purification of the country.

• 46:47Ryan Broderick?

  The easiest way to comfort people right now is to send death threats to your local meteorologist, which is exactly what people have been doing for the better part of nine months.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man, we covered that story.

• 46:59Ryan Broderick?

  Can you talk a little bit about it? Because yeah, this, this is something that it just keeps happening.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Oh, this is like the guy who broke into like, like he like, just basically took some bolt cutters and like, cut through like a chain link fence that was like protecting this like a local TV station's like weather antenna. And he just smashed like the circuit box for it and was like, they were like, this is us, we did it. They're like WKCRS, Kansas City is controlling the weather.

• 47:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it's happening like all over the country and it has been since Trump's campaign last year. And what we are seeing is a lot of the people who have spent, you know, the first Trump administration getting on board. With the conspiracy theories, understanding the power, you know, you get from wielding them and using them to impact politics. And there's been enough conspiracy theories eroding our norms that we now just completely shrug off the possibility of FEMA having a competent response. For example, in the face of another devastating fire in January of 2025, the new establishment just blamed the fires on DEI firemen. And so all the conversations about what is happening to our planet, what a good government

• 48:05Ryan Broderick?

  response should be, it's all totally skipped over because these guys just dangle bait for the culture war. And January 9th of this year, Elon Musk retweets a post that says, "DEI means people die." Megyn Kelly does a whole video with over 200,000 views.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  As if all of this is not enough, it turns out that in recent years, LA's fire chief has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity. Diversity is at least among the top priorities for the department.

• 48:37Ryan Broderick?

  And Don Jr. on True Social Rights, "Can we rename DEI to DIE?" They really thought they were cooking with this, since that's what seems to happen to the people downstream of those who place woke virtue signaling far above competency. And then when Trump enters office in January, you know, he floats the idea of eliminating FEMA in January. In the spring, 200 FEMA employees are fired by Doge cuts and they're told to get rid of anything about climate change or DEI from official literature. Two months later, over 1,000 employees, 20% of the staff are fired again. In May, hurricane season starts and FEMA basically says like they have no preparations for it.

• 49:20Ryan Broderick?

  And then on May 7th, Cameron Hamilton, the acting FEMA head, testifies saying, "It's insufficient, but would be bad to eliminate it." You know, hoping to keep his job, he's then fired the next day. His replacement is a DHS guy with zero emergency experience. And in his first meeting with staff, he says, "Don't get in my way, I'll run right over you." And then in June, Trump says he wants to eliminate FEMA again, but he's gonna wait till after hurricane season. And he's given Pete Hegsworth the purview to get rid of them. And where we are most recently is there's an open letter that was signed by FEMA employees

• 50:01Ryan Broderick?

  called the FEMA Katrina Declaration, and 20 of the 35 public signers were put on leave. So we effectively have no disaster relief anymore. And the majority of the Republican Party are either pretending to believe in anti-climate change conspiracy theories, or just genuinely do believe them. So yeah, that's where we're at right now.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  I've been thinking about this along the lines of Robert F. Kennedy and like his tenure at Health and Human Services, like the Make America Healthy Again agenda. And you could add the CDC is like another, another organ of like disaster response and management that is like, you know, being eviscerated right now. And like, the person that they appointed to run the CDC, she served 30 days and then they fired her because apparently she was actually trying to do her job.

• 50:53Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  And they weren't gonna let her get away with that. Like, the idea that like, oh, we're like, it's the pharmaceutical companies and like, it's the food, you're like, we're being poisoned. And it's the vaccines, it's the medicine, and if you just maintain a healthy lifestyle, and like, eat the right foods, and follow the right health fads, and like, you know, purchase the right supplements from your favorite media figures, then like, your immune system will be fine. Like, there's no reason for you to ever get sick. But it's just like, it's your environment, it's what you eat, it's the products that you buy when you should be buying other products. But what I mean is like, I think this is all part and parcel of an attempt to like, at the very moment, which as we've been talking about, like, the last

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Just threads that are keeping any kind of like social welfare in this country, or public health, or like, anything that the government does for you, or like, to help you, is being eviscerated. Like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, you can bet that's next. Along with it, the CDC, the FEMA, and like, the response to, you know, plagues, disasters, things like that. All of this is to say, it's very clear that the attitude that they're trying to like, inculcate in the American people is that you are on your own.

• 52:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  I think people already sense that. They already like, and that's why I don't think like, it's so hard to sell something like, something better, because it involves telling people that like, oh, like, the government can like, take an act, the government and the economy should be about the quality of your life. That like, that you are the economy, you are the government, and it should work for you. And that like, the incredible wealth of our society should be managed in a democratic way to like, make your life easier, to make, to make, to give you healthcare, education, housing.

• 52:44Ryan Broderick?

  Sounds like socialism to me.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  And it's just like, why would anyone? Yeah, well, why would anyone, but you know, why would anyone believe that? Why would anyone believe that the government can or wants to do any of these things if you've been alive anytime in the past 40 years of this country's history? Or even further back than that? Like, the New Deal, like, you know, I was born in 1983. Like, the New Deal consensus was like, already coming apart. Like, we were firmly in the neoliberal era, and now it's coming to its like, its savage denouement. And I think like, whether it is diseases, like, universal human experiences, like, disease, death, ailments, aging, these things that horrify and plague humanity,

• 53:26Speaker 02

  but are essentially the most shared human experience imaginable, that like, nothing can be done for you about that, except what you do personally. And I think it is about like, whether it is having your house washed away by a hurricane. Or having your house be unable to be insured because of where it was built, or whatever next disease is gonna put after a novel pandemic is gonna come mutating across our mucous membranes sometime in the future. I think the answer, like what they're trying to create is a situation where everybody is on their own, and therefore, the responsibility for your welfare is entirely yours. But you're not, you're not like, we're not totally just throwing you to the wolves because we're giving you the right information about the things you should buy.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  And so that like your survival and that your quality of life essentially becomes a matter of personal choice and judgment in the consumer decisions that you make. And that there is no collective responsibility whatsoever on behalf of the government, or even yourself, to anyone else.

• 54:26Ryan Broderick?

  It's funny you bring up like the products you buy because I remember there was a flood in the American South, I want to say it was maybe Texas or something, in the last couple of years, and the local news had an entire segment on a product this guy bought to seal his house. And so his neighbors were like in kayaks, like going up the street by boat, and he was like, "I'm safe because I bought this sealant for my house." It was like a, it was like an inflatable, like thing you put around your house and then you seal the doors and windows, and he's like, "I'm gonna be fine." And he was fine, but the local news, which obviously like some fucking Sinclair broadcaster

• 55:11Ryan Broderick?

  was like, "See, you can just put your house in a fucking inflatable, like inflatable inner tube, and it'll be totally fine from floods." And I want to, I want to summarize kind of the story that we've been trying to tell today and get your thoughts on it, because I, I want to make it really clear for our listeners. So basically, there were kooks and crazies, you know, all throughout the 80s and 90s, who were, at least on some level, noticing climate change. And they were telling all kinds of conspiracies about it, and they were, they were fringe, you know, people weren't really paying attention. But as the Republicans, especially post Obama, become more obsessed with maintaining power and deregulating the state. They start to bring them further into their their fold and use those conspiracies to

• 55:54Ryan Broderick?

  explain to people exactly what you're talking about, which is these things that are the direct result of us deregulating, you know, the federal government, the social safety net and enriching ourselves. Well, actually, no, they're not our fault. They're Jewish space lasers, or they're, you know, Obama, or they're, you know, whatever it is. It's trans leftist activists burning, you know, forests in Portland. And it allows for them to continue deregulating.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  They did the thing with the magnifying glass on some dry leaves.

• 56:27Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Yeah. And it's like, okay, so you believe that and we'll continue enriching ourselves and continue deregulating the social safety net and destroying and dismantling it. And if you get in trouble, if your house washes away, if you get a measles outbreak in your school that kills your kid, if you get COVID, if you fall into the fucking mega quake that eventually separates California from America, well, that's because you didn't buy the right product. And those products are actually being sold by our friends in, you know, at this company or that company. And that is what we're seeing. It is that people at the now the very top of our government weaponizing conspiracy theories, using them

• 57:07Ryan Broderick?

  to groom future politicians of America, all as cover for you're on your own, good luck. And if you get mad at us, actually, here's some insane thing I found on YouTube that somebody made up that you can believe that and not get mad at us instead. That is what I think has really happened in America over the last, you know, 30 years or so.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  It's like what you were seeing now is the fruits of a totally market dominated society. It is like God in a way, that like that man should not question God, you know, it's like the Old Testament, like, who are you? You know, like, who the fuck are you? You're just Job, you know? I created the universe. And like, and that is essentially how the market functions in the ideology that governs this country and in like, and you see that in the fabric of American life. And what I mean by that is that, like, of course, To markets, human life are increasingly inconsequential. And that larger and larger swathes of humanity, and indeed of our fellow citizens in this

• 58:06Speaker 02

  country, are essentially irrelevant to the market and in capital.

• 58:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think literally as of this week, a report came out that over 50%, if not more, of all spending in the market is by like the top 20%? Top 10?

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Oh, the top 10%.

• 58:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  So like, yeah, the consumer spending, like, basically, like, is the consumer spending spent by 10% of the people in this country? So what does that say about the other 90%?

• 58:33Ryan Broderick?

  What are they buying? What are they buying?

• 58:36Speaker 02

  We always need people to, like, essentially, like, do the jobs that keep, like, the functioning of the economy continuing, right? But like, as we see now with AI, like, these people could not be more thrilled at the prospect of rendering more and more of human life just irrelevant, or like, human labor irrelevant. Because like, why would you have to, why would you pay someone to do something if you didn't have to? Matt said this on our show, like, a long time ago, about like, the rise of fascism in this country. And I think, like, in a market-dominated society, where like, human life is increasingly cheap, if not worthless, you're going to need ways, and you're going to need stories to tell people, and you're going to need like, a kind of moral architecture in place

• 59:17Speaker 02

  to convince the people that are like, within the walls of the gated community, that it's just essentially okay what happens to people who aren't them. And that it's not your responsibility, and in fact, their existence is a threat to you and your little gated community. And like, that is, I think, in short, like, the sum total of this ideology, and like, where the culture and American life is going.

• 59:42Ryan Broderick?

  And I think to sort of bring it back around to technology, and you know, we've been talking about the evolution of these narratives online, but the current technological landscape helps this to a huge degree by adding to the voyeurism of it. And there's a tweet that I always, I, whenever I talk about climate change in any capacity, I always try to figure out a way to bring it up, because I just think it's really important that everyone on earth hears it, reads it.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  I know what you're already gonna say, but I think about this all the time, too.

• 1:00:10Ryan Broderick?

  You could also just take the word "climate change" out, and kind of put in anything you want here at this point. But "climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it." And I do think that- When we talk about conspiracy theories, we talk about internet discourse around something like climate change, there is this, not helplessness, not powerlessness, but almost sort of like a passivity to watching it through feeds and sort of abstracting it, until, yeah, until you are the one at the mass shooting filming it, until you are the one at the climate change incident filming it, until you're the one, you know, being

• 1:00:49Ryan Broderick?

  shot at by the Jewish space laser. Like, there is a feeling that you are just gonna see this stuff online and that it exists online, but it is very real. And when you talk about the end of the neoliberal project, like, to me, that is very much the idea that you are helpless, you are not active, you are not an active participant in reality.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  You're an individual node in like, in like, the economy.

• 1:01:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Human civilization is invented to like, to share the burdens of things like natural disasters, because like, by ourselves, we are totally naked in the face of like, you know, like I said, like, the everyday and spectacular catastrophes that like, you know, are a fabric of this, of nature, of reality, of human life. And that like, whether it be disease, or floods, or things like that, that like, the project of human civilization, like, there are shared lives on this planet, organized into nation-states, towns, cities, whatever, like, hopefully getting to like, a broader, larger human species, is that like, it is only through collective and cooperative coordinated effort and planning,

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  that like, we are able to like, not worry so much about these things as we used to, or like, feel safe from them, because of like, the efforts that have been taken collectively to mitigate these effects, or to like, vaccinate ourselves against diseases. And I think we're just experiencing the breakdown of the idea that like, the country, the nation, that human life in general is anything other than like, like, an individual video game in which you have one life, and no saves.

• 1:02:36Ryan Broderick?

  I 100% agree.

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  I want your perspective on this. When I was putting together this timeline, my kind of assumption was that we would see...

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  The like, the title in my head was like, what do we talk about when we should be talking about climate change? And I thought we would see more efforts to distract us sooner. But what this timeline showed us was that it was like, only after normally Republican incompetence in response to a natural disaster, did then they kind of pivot to making it about race, or like, a divisive issue to stop us from talking about their their failure to handle the situation. But it wasn't until 2018, 2020, with the forest fires that we started to just go like, you know what, we're gonna fucking skip trying to like, handle this efficiently. And we're just going to instead immediately point to Antifa,

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  or whoever the boogeyman is at the moment. And that's only accelerated.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Does it surprise you that this was an advent of like, dangle keys so late in this process? Or does that make sense to you?

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's because Obama made everything political, Grant.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for asking such a stupid question. Obviously. How dare he wear a tan suit?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Republicans used to like, kind of like, pretend. I mean, like, I know it was always a politicized issue, but like, they had to kind of pretend that like, oh, like, we care about climate change, too. And like, you know, like, maybe it won't be so bad. But like, now, I think they're like, they've made it official that like, not only are we like, going to like, stop doing anything, even symbolically to cut carbon or anything like that. We're just gonna like, it's all made up. It's a hoax. And like, any bad thing that you see happening, well, it's not our fault. And here's who it is. Here's whose fault it is.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  D I fireman, right? It's D I fireman. It's always been D I fireman.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, trans people.

• 1:04:29Ryan Broderick?

  I also just think like, around 2017, 2018, a lot of people at the center of Trumpism were like, we're gonna go for a permanent government. And so they don't have to pretend anymore.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, yeah, I think that's what they're expecting. You know, like, I think like, yeah, like, I think they're I think a lot of the frustration that you see on the right is coming from the fact that like, okay, like, they've won, like, Trump is president again, like, he did the impossible thing twice, and like, obviously, like, obviously, like, that is evidence of, like, the total, total failure of liberalism. But I think they mistake that failure for, like, the defeat of liberalism, and I think that they're like, they still can't really force most of the people in this country to, like, have the same basic values and programming that, like, they, they still feel embarrassed or they still feel judged to say most of the things that they believe publicly, because

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  most people are weirded out by it, or if not actively repelled. And I think that, like, they've mistaken political success for, like, the final cultural victory that they're always, like, just so desperately grasping.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  So you're saying things are gonna be fine? Thank you, thank you, what a great, what a great way to end it.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be fine.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  Everything's gonna be fine, they're gonna learn their lessons.

• 1:05:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it'll be fine, it'll be fine. I know this episode has been very dense, it's been very heavy, so I wanted to end with a final question, just to lighten things up, which is, what's your favorite thing about climate change?

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  My favorite thing about climate change, I think it's probably, like, all the new animal species that are, like, invasive animal species.

• 1:06:03Ryan Broderick?

  Cool, like lanternflies and stuff?

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, there's, I, my fucking, like, I see lanternflies every day out here, and I do my, I do my part to kill them. I raise the war on these bugs, but like, you know, pythons consuming Florida, like, hopefully we'll get some, like, charismatic megafauna in the northeast sometime in my life.

• 1:06:21Ryan Broderick?

  It does, my favorite thing is that it does feel like we've settled into a moment where, like, it's almost permanently fall in New York, except for, like, two months on either side that are so extreme you can't go outside.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Ryan Broderick?

  And so, like, I'm, I love jackets and sweaters, so for me, right now, I'm okay with the New York weather.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  See, I mean, I'm not so sure about that, I mean, I think fall is going away too, I think there's just gonna be summer and winter in the future.

• 1:06:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  And then increasingly, just summer.

• 1:06:51Ryan Broderick?

  It's gonna be six months. We'll have one week on either side of the year where we can go outside.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  You don't want to know my favorite thing about climate change?

• 1:07:00Ryan Broderick?

  What's your favorite thing about climate change, Grant?

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  I like that every like seven months, we get a new huckster who has some idea that's obviously a grift, but they can say that it's going to help climate change through like, like first step, steal underpants, second step, profit, kind of logic.

• 1:07:18Ryan Broderick?

  So what's an example?

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  We're going to bring back the woolly mammoth was, was, that was used where like woolly mammoths are going to stomp down roots or something that is going to like, like, like, they're just like, like whatever. Like, I mean, we see it all the time with AI. They're like, like, sure, it's killing everything right now. But if it gets super enough, it will solve it for us without us having to do anything. It's become the elixir of like, we just got to invent the crazy thing. And then the crazy thing will somehow solve climate change. I appreciate the chutzpah of the laziness of it.

• 1:07:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And independent of how it will affect climate change or whatnot, I think we should bring back woolly mammoths.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  If I'm going to get stomped out by something huge, like be it a wave, fire, or woolly mammoth, I would prefer woolly mammoth.

• 1:08:05Ryan Broderick?

  I agree. I agree. Yeah. I want big, I want big elephants. I want to thank you for coming on the show. I usually ask our guests, where can they follow you? I assume everyone knows where to check out your stuff, but do you have anything else you want to plug? Where should I send people?

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Let's see, we got, we got movie mindset coming back in October for some horror movies coming up. Oh yeah. Buy our comic book, Year Zero, badegg.co.

• 1:08:31Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you again. Oh yeah. And before you log off, why not help us out? Panic World was nominated for two Signal Awards for the category weird and the category conversation starter. If you want to support us, just head to vote dot signal award.com and make sure to vote for Panic World in both weird and conversation starter categories. It only takes a second. It would help support the show. It also means I get a free dinner if we, if we win, I think. I think I get to go to the award show and that would be really nice. I need an excuse to leave the house. So please head on over to vote dot signal award.com.

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  Personally, I think we should be up for like most important show ever created, but

• 1:09:09Ryan Broderick?

  I that's too much pressure. I would, I would much rather sneak in with a nice little award and then get a free dinner. That's really what I'm about because I'm 35 years old. And so for me, that's really the focus of most of my life at this point is, is there free dinner?

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  Not me. I'm going to need somebody at Signal to look me in the eye and tell me what is weird about our show that talks about Gunning.

• 1:09:29Ryan Broderick?

  I think it would be easier to say what's not weird about the show.

• 1:09:34Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollis. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to.

• 1:10:15Ryan Broderick?

  You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.