Chapo Trap House - PANIC WORLD: The Big Dumb Weather Conspiracy with Chapo Trap House

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

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!

All right, let's try not to think about the current horrors for a minute. Well, we'll get to them. But just to start, this is a weird question that we wrote before, obviously, all this happened. What's your favorite insane right-wing conspiracy theory, mis-info kind of thing? What's your favorite right-wing meltdown of the last decade or so? God, I like the ones that sort of veer. into what would be a plot in a Philip K. Dick novel.

I like the ones about how 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 trans investigations to include every human being who's ever been born but particularly celebrities. And I just think there's like sort of a skin or darkly situation going on here where these 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. I actually saw a really good transvestigation post a couple 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. The skull ratios never lie. There's a there's a divine mathematics to this. And basically any prominent, any prominent person, any person you see on TV, the movies, the news, the news. 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. have you come across any sort of right-wing conspiracy theories about the climate about weather weather machines poisoning the air chem trails any you know anything like that yeah i'm a big fan of of chem trail stuff and then like i think like a more recent vintage like a more recent

variation on chem trails is people who just say like the sky is wrong like i love those The sun didn't used to be this color or, you know, like, or 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. I don't think so either, yeah. 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 disc Antarctica is a giant ice wall but like kind of similar to the chem trail 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 of when you think of the earth you're thinking of the wrong shape right 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. I want to see where the giants live, yeah. 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 disc world, whether it's a sphere or a disc, is going to proceed pretty much a pace. Yeah. And like, similar to the chemtrails, it's just sort of like, okay,

the con trails that you see coming out of airplanes, they're actually like spraying the world with mood-altering chemicals, which I, you know, Once again, if that's true, tight, I hope they're doing that. But the, 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 of the government spraying on me? Like, what can be done?

Got to get rid of planes. And like, just got to get rid of planes. I hate airports. The reason I ask is because we hear Panic World H-Q and wondering how the rights 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 with 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 to show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. Sometimes we'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.

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. I mean, you see that one about that, like the mesa that's in Wyoming that was featured in Steve's Wilburneberg's close. encounters with a third kind I mean can't lie kind of looks like a giant tree trunk 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's it's just it doesn't bother me

one way or another. 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 the ever-changing weather patterns of the Earth right now? 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 to like it because it's it's the planet it's everything yeah 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 right 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. 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 in street corner. So at one time, you don't really notice it, but then if you think about it, it's quite upsetting and frightening to think about. 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 that the air. So she's in on the flat earth insurance. She does the chemtrails. She does the chemtrails. She does the hose.

She plugs it in. But also the flat earth because you look out the window of a plane. I don't see a sphere. I don't see a curve. 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 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. We're at, 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 really freaked me out. I remember that.

And I posted a photo like it looked like outside my living room window. And it was like, yeah, the sky was just orange. It looked totally apocalyptic. But to me, I was like, this kind of cool. Sometimes put this on the gram. And my cousin, who lives out West, pointed out that I had all my windows open. So I'm unprepared for these kind of things. And, yeah, I was going to say Hurricane Sandy was the other big one because 9-11 didn't even shut down in 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. I was living in a story at the time. And I went to, like, a story apart 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 I've never seen anything like it since it and then you 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 agency management agency in 1979, and they've regularly faced criticisms for how they respond to natural disasters. So we start our story in 1989. Hurricane Hugo devastates the southeast and the Caribbean, South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings, calls FEMA the sorriest bunt 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. 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. And essentially, in the movie, FEMA will be the government agency that will carry out the alien colonization. of our planet.

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. 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 H-A-A-R-P, 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, and that H-A-A-A-R-P may be part of this technology.

Have you ever heard the acronym HARP? Certainly, but like only within the last five or ten years. Can you define it for our audience? It's the government weather machine. Yes. It's the machine that the government, it's in Alaska, I believe, and it's what the government does to control the weather. Right.

It stands for high-frequency active, a rural research program. It was a Navy project in the mid-90s to improve transmission signals by using a layer of the atmosphere itself is 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. Why don't you let me in? I have the documents right here. Let him see the weather machine. God bless Jesse. Yeah, 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. And another X-Files connection, Jesse Ventura. That's right. I mean, in a lot of ways, like, I did X-Files rewatch a couple 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? 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 it to be essentially abandoned by their own government or like for like a week while thousands died. But 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 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 stole it. But, 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, it's, 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. 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 is 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. climate change. I mean, there's in, 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 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. Well, yeah. Because, like, this idea that, like, outside threats, if they are fermented 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.

You can wrap your head around. Yeah, exactly. 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 like that

and also just like makes people question or begin to like demand like well why aren't we protected from that threat 100% 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 so yeah i'm glad you brought this up because 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 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 a Republican Party that did not want to invest the money to protect the city like New Orleans. That's what I would sort of argue. But also, like, when you get into conspiracies about, like, the government control of the weather, I'm 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, conceiving of a threat of that magnitude or, like, destruction rot 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 in some time soon insurance companies are just going to stop insuring construction they're going to stop giving home and homeowners insurance for floods and things like that in florida and what's going to happen to the state of florida 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 right because like this

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 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 company's 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. It's a lot. 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. They're 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. 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 part of the New York Times at writing at the time, the 17th Street levy 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 underfinanced 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 in to how the government responded. The Huffington Post Road at the time, this I thought was really interesting.

Yahoo.com's page provided one of those blatant examples of the racial bias. The website featured a photo of two white residents wading through the water with food. The caption read, two residents waved 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 waiting 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 in the show before, which is when Kanye West tells all of America that George Bush doesn't care about, black people. I remember seeing that live on TV, too, man. That was, it was like a moon landing. It was amazing. It bought Kanye so many years of goodwill from so many of us. He could have gone so far

And he still managed to go too far To voice it I mean my favorite part about that moment Was Mike Myers standing next to him Like his look when he said it was like Yeah It's like one of the greatest faces ever made on television Yeah

But we're going to throw to a break And after the break We're going to be talking about How a little show called Info Wars gets in on the mix But first a word from our sponsors Info Wars 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 yeah there was it was a it was an established like offshoot of the info wars network before paul joseph watson took it over which i didn't realize so the prison planet is sort of like the dalai lama it's just sort of like yeah you have to be reincarnated exactly That's prison planet. So at the time, Info Wars is Prison Planet. They publish a post that reads, in this exclusive interview for Prison Planet TV subscribers, Ben Livingston explains how for decades, the U.S. 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 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. 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 dock did cover the bomb theory, so we can flag

this slowly inching more into the mainstream. This stuff lands to people, and like even to a certain extent lens in my own psyche like in my own heart because like I like I I I don't know if the lefties were intentionally blown up or not my suspicion is that like you know if I had to like guess my I think 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 your imagination

and like are never conclusively resolved in a way nor is anyone really ever held accountable the obvious questions and 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 the matter is like they're there so it makes it hard to like conclusively make any strong definitive statement because like I said like I should be clear 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 I so you tell me 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 charler the kirk stuff where like i was like real far down some rabbit holes where i'm like these guys are making some sense um 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 where yeah we never get conclusive answer for anything or one that satisfies everybody 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 real 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 which is terrifying and that life and human history is just like a series of increasingly interconnected

and 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 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, all right, I'm going to go see

what all the whack jobs say, and then I'll just like, chill out. I feel like as a treat. 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 feel like that we should be protected from. We should be protected from things like,

I don't know, like Stephen Paddock, shooting 600 people from a hotel room in Las Vegas for seemingly no reason which we've never heard anything about ever again like what like what happened with like why did he do that like what's going well and I and I think the the internet has maybe not made this worse but at least change the nature of it and so I want to move to the next disaster in our timeline here because I think this is the first one that is truly shaped by the internet and understood via the internet and we mentioned at the top of the show Hurricane Sandy, it is an interesting example compared to Hurricane Katrina because for the most part, it's managed by the government decently well. In fact, the FEMA director

at the time who was hired by Bush criticizes Obama for being too on top of it, which is very funny. And it's a moment where stuff like InfoWars breaks containment because now everyone's online. So InfoWars is publishing all kinds of stuff about Hart claiming that Obama is controlling the West. other. Obama, I was not familiar with your game. Yeah, pretty good. 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 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. Yeah, it was amazing. I remember being, like, pretty much content with how the government responded to Hurricane Sandy. Yeah, and a lot of the right-wing spin on this, they didn't have a lot of teeth. I mean, the drudge report speculated that the storm was going to be used to hide bad job reports. Like, okay. That's great.

Like you said about, like, the only conspiracy being, like, incompetence. Like, imagine the work. They were like, Mr. President, the Q2 job numbers are slightly lower than expected or projected. And they were like, boot up the harp system. We're going to destroy lower Manhattan again. Please do, though. I mean, there are a lot of... We're going to flood the financial capital of the planet.

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. when Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico in 2017, the government response is completely incompetent. It's a disaster. And it's also now a Republican administration at this point. And Trump, you know, he's bragging about the death toll. I remember him throwing like paper towels, 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 and storm victims 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 left wing Latinos to use Hurricane Maria tragedy as anti-Trump midterm message claim that the quote leftist Latino advocacy groups were playing 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 well this gets this gets back into like the uh the looter slash food finder dichotomy 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. Yeah. They speak Spanish. Even though I know you're making a joke here, but like 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, look how injustice 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 injustice is where is our government like you know how could they how could they do this to us

which they can never admit that it's like the government they vote it like and I think that there's a cognitive distance here 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 happen under Trump. And it's a nightmare. And so you have to explain that. And 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. Well, I mean, like, that gets into the other, like, meta-conspiracy, like, QAnon. I'm so glad you brought this up, because that's where we're headed next. Right.

Q&ONM emerge 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, 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 good 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 just just like, wait, I thought we had all the evidence. Why aren't these people being arrested? And they're like, aha, but they are and what you're seeing are clones. But like, even if you don't believe 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. And I'm glad you brought up QAnon

because that is, I think, the biggest change between how right-wing conspiracies dealt with something like Katrina versus how they deal with natural disasters now. Because by 2018, not only is Q&N thriving, but Q&N 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 Green, who is absolutely cooked in Q&ON radiation, do you remember what she said about the wildfires in 2018? I do not. Was this the space lasers comment? Jewish space lasers. That's right. Yep. In November, post 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 Q and on followers falsely posits that a nefarious entity use 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 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 baking firm was somehow involved by beaming the sun's energy back to Earth, which could start a fire.

That's interesting because the sun already does that. It does do that by definition. Like, yeah, that's what we use it for. That's what we like it about it. 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 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. it again 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've sort of kind of replaced that with technology and the government as like as a stand-in for what would otherwise be like a wrathful or judgmental God and that 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 man has usurp the power of God and is now using

it for himself. No, I think you're right where 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, we have not really changed the shape of them. we have just replaced like they have replaced the evangelical god with other institutions with Donald Trump with Donald Trump yeah like that's another that's a fascinating thing to me because 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 figure surrounding him and you see that in attempt to like kind of make charlie kirk into a christian martyr or saint well 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 the evangelicals didn't like them the alex jones of the world were in the basement with the ham radio. It was not like that. But you watch 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. 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, a magical thinking that could replace the biblical flood and explain it even better, perhaps, for the purposes of the modern Republican Party. 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. 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, Ross Childs, Inc.

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 hyper object that like we just don't have the space for it. But as COVID is happening in 2020, we do get more wildfires. 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, you know, blaming Jewish space lasers in 2020, they just blame Antifa. 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 run at the time. On the September 17th edition of the Joe Rogan experienced, 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 claim 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. 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?

That's a good question. I think there's probably less of a need for a QAnon, because the character of the second Trump administration is 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 he had running the Pentagon, people who are, 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. Right. 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 like empowered 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 true and I just think it's like an ever stronger cult of personality around Donald Trump as the leader and any frustrations with like a

a lack of success, you know, in terms of like the economy, jobs, people's daily lives, how clean they're safe their communities are, how safe and dignified they feel in their own lives. 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 the 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 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 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

oh man we covered that story can you talk a little bit about it because yeah this is something that it just keeps happening. 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 just like local TV stations 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.

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. 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 response should be, it's all totally skipped over because these guys just dangle bait for the culture war. In January 9th of this year, Elon Musk retweets a post that says, DEI means people die. Megan Kelly does a whole video with over 200,000 views. 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. And Don Jr. on true social rights, can we rename D.E.I. to D.I. 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 they have no preparations for it. 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 going to wait until after hurricane season. And he's given Pete Higgsworth the purview to get rid of them. And where we are most recently is that. There's an open letter that was signed by FEMA employees 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. 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 can add the CDC is like 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, they

served 30 days and then they fired her because apparently she was actually trying to do her job. Right. And we're going to let her get away with that. that like the idea that like oh we're like it's the it's the pharmaceutical companies and like it's the food you're put like they're 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 it's your environment it's it's what you it's it's what you it's It's what you eat. It's the products that you buy when you should be prying 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 where which as we've been talking about like the last 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, 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. Yes. 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 health care education how sounds like socialism to me and it's just like why would anyone yeah well why would anyone but you know 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, it's savage day new moment. And I think, like, whether it is diseases, like, universal human experiences, like, disease, death, ailments, aging, these things that horrified. and plague humanity, 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 going to put after a novel pandemic is going to come mutating across our mucus 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. 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. It's funny you bring up 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 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, 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 going to be fine. And he was fine. But the local news, which obviously like some fucking Sinclair broadcaster was like, see, you can just put your house in a fucking inflatable, like an inflatable inner tube. It'll be totally fine from floods. And I want to, 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 want to make it really clear for our listeners. So basically, there were cooks 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 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 fold and use those conspiracies to 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 their, you know, whatever it is. It's trans-leftist activists burning, you know, forests in Portland. And it allows for them to continue deregulating.

They did the thing with a magnifying glass on some dry leaves and some dry leaves. 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 it 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 event. 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 the people, now the very top of our government, weaponizing conspiracy theories, using them to groom future politicians of America, all as cover for you are 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. that that is what i think has really happened in america over the last you know 30 years or so it's like what you were seeing now is the fruits of a totally market dominated society well 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 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 country are essentially irrelevant to the market and in capital i think 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% yeah so like 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% what are they buying what are they buying we always need people to like essentially like do the jobs that keep like the 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 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 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 that is i think in short like the sum total of this ideology and like where the culture and civil like american life is going and and and i 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 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 a way to bring it up because I just think it's really important that everyone on earth hears it reads it I know which I know what you're already going to say I think about this all the time too you can also just take the word climate change now. It 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. the mass shooting filming it until you are the one at the climate change incident filming it until you're the one you know uh being shot at by the jewish space laser like there's there is a a feeling that you are just going to see this stuff online and and then it exists online but it is very real and and when you talk about the end of the neoliberal project like to me that is very much uh the idea that you are helpless you are you are not active you are not an active participate in reality you're you're an individual node in like in like the economy yes exactly

human civilization is like 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 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 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 an individual video game in which you have one life and no saves. I 100% agree. I want your perspective on this. When I was putting together this timeline, my kind of assumption,

was that we would see 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 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 going to fucking skip trying to like handle this efficiently,

and we're just going to instead immediately point to Antifa or whoever the boogeyman is at the moment, and that's only accelerated. Yeah. 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? Well, it's because Obama made everything political grant. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for asking such a stupid question, obviously.

How dare he wear a tan suit? 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 going to 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. DEI fireman, right? It's D.E.I. Fireman. It's always been DIAI firemen.

Yeah, trans people. I also just think like around 2017, 2018, a lot of people at the center of Trumpism were like, we're going to go for a permanent government. and so they don't have to pretend anymore. Yeah. 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've mistaken 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 still feel embarrassed or they still feel judged to say most of the things that they believe publicly because most people are weirded out by it or if not actively repelled and I think that like they've like they've mistaken political success for like the final cultural victory that they're always like just

so desperately grasping. So you're saying things are going to be fine. Thank you. Thank you. What a Great, right a great way to end it. Yeah, it'll be fine. Everything's going to be fine. They're going to learn their lessons. Yeah, 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? My favorite thing about climate change, I think it's probably like all the new animal species that are like invasive animal species. Cool. Like Lantern flies and stuff? Yeah. Oh, my fucking, like, I see Lantern flies every day. out here and I do my part to kill him. I waves more on these bugs, but like, you know, pythons consuming Florida.

Hopefully we'll get some, like, charismatic megafauna in the Northeast sometime in my life. 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. Yeah. And so, like, I love jackets and sweaters. So for me right now, I'm okay with the New York weather. I mean, I'm not so sure about that.

I mean, I think fall is going to way, too. I think there's just going to be summer and winter in the future. Yeah. And then increasingly, just summer. It's going to be six months. We'll have one week on either side of the year where we can go outside. You don't want to know my favorite thing about climate change? What's your favorite thing about climate change?

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 first step steel underpants, second step, profit kind of logic. So what's an example? We're going to bring back the woolly mammoth was that was used where like,

woolly mammoths are going to stomp down roots or something that is going to like, like they're just 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 hutspe of the laziness of it. Yeah, and independent of how it will affect climate change or whatnot, I think we should bring back Willie Mammis. If I'm going to get stomped out by something huge, like be it a wave, fire, or Rolly Mammoth, I would prefer Wully Mammoth. 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 yourself, but do you have anything else you want to plug? Where should I send people? Let's see, we got movie mindset coming back in October for some horror movies coming up. Oh, yeah, buy our comic book.

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