Bulwark Takes - Trillions Spent on Bunkers? The Elites Are Hiding Underground!

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Two wild stories: a viral conspiracy claiming elites built bunkers with trillions in stolen funds to survive an apocalyptic “geophysical event,” and a failed follow-up to a racist fundraiser, where the organizer got fired and rejected by the far right after posting his own slur-filled video. Are You Prepared for the ‘Geophysical Event’?

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This has been your Wayfair style tip to keep those interiors superior. Wayfair, every style, every home. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Bulwark YouTube page. We are talking today with Will Sommer about his newsletter, False Flag. If you're not subscribed to False Flag, you should be because it's the absolute best way to keep track of all of the insanity that's going on in the right wing media ecosystem. There's a lot of it. But Will, today we have a very important topic, very troubling topic. Frankly, I'm a little bit worried that I have not properly prepared for the oncoming geophysical event. What what do I need to do to get ready for that?

Yeah. So this is a phrase I started seeing more and more over the past couple months on the right, the geophysical event. And they were saying, you know, every time, you know, Trump might meet with a world leader, there'd be a summit, they'd say, I think they're talking about the geophysical event. And so I looked into this, and really kind of like the big moment for the end, I should say, what is the geophysical event? Well, we don't really know. Maybe it's that the magnetic poles will switch. Maybe it's that Antarctica will blow up, something like that, or a huge volcano. But point being, it's a big, you know, mega extinction event. This all comes up because on Tucker Carlson's show, he interviewed a nice, a nice lady who informed us that the government has siphoned

off trillions of dollars, not billions with a B, not millions with an M, trillions with a TR of dollars of taxpayer money to build underground bunker cities for the 1% to survive the geophysical event in. That's right. I mean, the big boom moment, if you will, for the geophysical event in? That's right. I mean, the big boom moment, if you will, for the geophysical event was this April Tucker Carlson episode starring a woman named Catherine Fitz, who was an assistant secretary of HUD in the George H.W. Bush administration for a year and a half. So not exactly necessarily the person you'd think would have all the secrets about the government. But basically, when she was at HUD and afterwards, she looked into contract malfeasance. She got accused of a little contract shenanigans that she was cleared of. But basically, she was very interested in HUD contracting. And this evolved into this kind of obsession. And now

she claims that $20 trillion has been stolen from HUD and other agencies. And her theory is that this was built to use bunkers underground across the world to prepare for this geophysical event, this huge Earth cataclysm. We should clarify, because I said in America, but it is a global bunker city. It is not located just in Washington, D.C. for our elites. It is a global elite program. That's right. I mean, she says there are 170 bunkers in the United States alone, some of them underwater. So, you know, it's not just

underground. And so I'm sorry, I can I need to interrupt you here under under the ocean or under like lakes? How far underwater? She doesn't specify, right? I mean, I probably a mix, you know, I'd assume if you have that many. And so her idea is that all of these elites around the world know that this, whatever it is, this big volcano or an earthquake or something is coming. And if you're not underground, you're going to be dead. And this gets into your area of expertise because this is a plot line that we're seeing repeated a lot in entertainment right now. Sure. Well, the apocalypse always sells. You can't go wrong with the apocalypse. The Last of Us, of course, is very popular on HBO.

Walking Dead was a huge hit for AMC for many years. The movie 2012, which, of course, was tied to the ancient Mayan prophecy of the, uh, the, the end of the world happening in 2012 from reason for reasons, uh, you know, climate shifting poles, whatever. Uh, no, the, um, I do find it, look, I find this all very, very, uh, interesting because it's clearly insane. I do want to get the, ask about the Tucker Carlson portion of this, because, you know, there's, when I, when I watched clips of this, and I watched some clips of this when it first circulated, you know, a month or two back, I was, I was, I was kind of struck by it because Carlson himself, it's hard to tell how seriously he takes any of this. He's got that kind of smirk,

you know, he's, he's always got that smirk. He reminded me of Bill Murray at the start of Ghostbusters 2. Do you remember Ghostbusters 2? Well, there's this Bill Murray is Peter Bankman is working as a like kind of fake local news show guy who's like interviewing crazy people. One of them's a psychic, you know, one of them, Ben Spoons, whatever. But he has this kind of like grin on his face the whole time that he's not taking it seriously. Do we think Tucker really buys into the trillions of dollars on underground bunkers? You know, it's a good question. I can't speak to his, you know, certainly the demeanor he presents is that he believes it or at least finds it a viable theory.

I mean, on this interview, he also talks about, you know, things he's heard about underground bunkers in D.C., which, of course, you know, is not hard to believe. But but he I mean, he's playing into it here, I would say. I mean, and there are look, there are right out in West Virginia, we have or the eastern part of or the western part of regular Virginia. There there are bunkers where the government is supposed to go to in case of nuclear attack, right? There are these things, but the idea of a massive sprawling, you know, trillions of dollars that have just disappeared, that strains credulity a little bit. Yeah, I mean, and specifically her claim here is that there is something that's going to happen to the earth that people in power know about. And so they're building these bunkers and they're not telling the rest of us to avoid causing a panic,

which I would note is also literally the plot of paradise on Hulu this year. So, so they are, you know, I don't know if she's cribbing a little from there, you know, taking some inspiration, but that's her claim. You know, she claims that she sort of refused to join the council of foreign relations, which is, you know, kind of a big player in the imagined cabal. And as a result, she says she will no longer be on the bunker list. Great. Well, that makes you don't want to you don't want to have a non-believer on the bunker list. So that makes sense. Use of HUD contracts to hide all of this money is a very interesting facet to me, again, because it echoes some plot lines from TV shows like The Sopranos, where they were doing millions of dollars in fraud at the Esplanade to, you know, get all this HUD money.

They were refurbishing houses. They were they were scamming the government. They were. Is Tony Soprano in on the government bunker business? You know, it's funny you say that. I mean, do they have a some no show jobs at the bunker construction site or what have you. I mean, it is, I guess, diagnosing this former HUD official. It seems like she just became obsessed with missing money. And rather than saying, well, are we paying too much to the developers of this HUD property or something, she jumped to the bunker, which I think is a bit of a leap. But now, I mean, it's catching on. There are geophysical event X accounts that are kind of diagnosing or saying, you know, maybe it's this ancient Mayan prophecy mixed up in there. So this

is, I would say, sort of the conspiracy theory with really a lot of movement on it on the right. And this is like kind of the root problem here, is right. One crazy thing goes viral and then all of a sudden you have dozens of other other accounts piggybacking on this and doing the same thing and aiming to enter the algorithm the same way and get audience and, of course, revenue sharing that way. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what's refreshing about this, maybe for the right and the people getting onto it, is that it's actually a concrete conspiracy theory. It's a thing that you're saying, even if they aren't saying, well, this volcano is going to do it or what have you, but that

they're saying something is going to happen. And, you know, for the past few years, we've been dealing with a lot of kind of nebulous conspiracy theories. It's sinister forces, shadowy agendas. You know, someone killed Jeffrey Epstein, but maybe we're not going to say exactly who, but this is this is putting it out there, which I appreciate as well. Yeah. All right. The second item in your newsletter this week is a follow up, kind of a follow up to an earlier story for background here. There was a woman who used the N word against a child and it was on videotape and she did a GoFundMe or whatever, whatever the racist version of GoFundMe is. She did that and then raised a bunch of money. And there we have a we have a follow up to that story, a less successful race slur fundraising effort. Yeah, this was a huge cause celeb on the right a few weeks ago.

This woman called a five year old the N word. And rather than being exoriated or what have you, the right turned her into sort of a cancel culture hero. And she raised seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. And so then, you know, I figured, you know, someone's going to try to repeat this. As it turned out, it was the guy who, this sort of racist Twitter guy who had started her fundraiser in the first place. A week later, he posts a video of himself as a rideshare driver calling a passenger the N-word. He posts the video himself. So there's a key difference-word he posts the video himself so there's a key difference there he posts the video and then lyft says i guess you're not going to work for lyft anymore and he goes oh no i need money and so he's trying to raise all this money all these other racist accounts are saying

well but in this case you posted it yourself right like there seems to be like maybe you set this up you did this deliberately and he said well you know i who's to say you know exactly how it got posted it's you know either way i'm really like a martyr here for cancel culture just like this previous woman so it wasn't it's and and he has not been as successful right there this this has this has kind of crashed and burned yeah he's raised a one one hundredth of what she has. I think he's at 7000 at this point. I mean, he really he's kind of been banished from the white

supremacist movement in part because they found out he was Jewish and he was saying, you know, come on guys. I'm like he goes into this whole discourse. This was very I should say this is like a very hot debate in like real far right Twitter the past few days. He's saying, come on guys, you know, I get a sunburn too. That means I'm white. All this stuff, really pathetic stuff.

But at least for me, it was heartening. I found the original playground story was so depressing that this woman could call a child the N-word. Totally terrible thing to do and then become a near millionaire. But at least maybe it's not that easy to repeat. Yeah, it seems, though, his biggest crime was being stupid. Well, in addition to being Jewish, just just doing this stupidly. That was his his in front of my job and stood out there with a sandwich board with a slur on it and got fired, I wouldn't be surprised that that happened. Well, there's one other line from the end of this piece that I just was hoping you might clarify for me. So the woman, this Shiloh Hendricks separate she she removed herself from the

situation she denounced this ratchlin fellow uh and said um as soon as we found out the truth about all that i severed ties with him immediately hendrick said this is you now while also stressing for some reason that she wasn't married to ratchlin either is it was there a question about that was there some some suggestion that the two of them were a couple? I think there have been a lot of allegations about like how was this the original playground thing all set up, which I don't think is true. But basically, what was this guy's role? He described himself as the mastermind behind the original fundraising campaign. And so ultimately, you know, she to me, you know, this guy helped her raise nearly a million dollars. And suddenly you can see how quick she throws him under the bus and says, by the way, you know, I'm not, not romantically involved with him either.

You know, it's adding insult to injury. That's a, yeah, that's a real kick in the pants. Uh, well, thank you for keeping an eye on all this for us. Uh, I love, I love talking about this stuff. It just makes my, it makes my whole day brighter. Um, uh, even when it's horribly depressing, but, uh, thanks for, thanks for chatting. Yeah. Thanks for having me.