If something real occurs in this timeline, but no conspiracy theorist is there to FUBAR it, does it actually happen?
An old man, weakened by COVID, picks up an old-timey phone handset on a Delaware Saturday to tell a childless cat lady that the reins of destiny are now in her hands.
A staffer clicks “post” at 1:46pm, and X lights up with something real… that throws an instant shadow of insanity.
Biden is too sick to have posted, they say. He’s dead, they say. He has staged or suffered a coup. And Kamala Harris? A DEI bimbo flashing esoteric Marxist hand signals. The DNC is fraudulently transferring the campaign war chest. They couldn’t kill Trump so now they’re playing dirty with the nomination. Biden’s brother is stepping in, Biden’s body double is 8 inches too tall. Dudes who made too much “Let’s Go Brandon” merch are launching lawsuits and crying in their beer.
We run down the most cursed Kamala conspiracy theories, how they distort the real questions about her, how being a childless cat lady is her superpower, and whether the ghouls that dream them up really matter.
Show Notes
Vivian Wilson on Threads: There’s a lot of stuff I need to debunk
Elon Musk's transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child
J.D. Vance’s Hatred of Cat Ladies Is Weirder and More Dangerous Than You Think
J.D. Vance Really Is the Key to Understanding the American Right
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The misogynistic labeling of women who don't want to or can't have children fits very well into the pronatalism movement championed by Silicon Valley elites, which of course also finds a home in blood and soil nationalism and in eugenics.
So putting these pieces together, Vance derides women who don't want to have children, Wow, talk about gatekeeping, right?
IVF and he doesn't consider step parents or gay parents as being actual parents.
Wow. Talk about gatekeeping, right? Holy mackerel.
Comedy fans, listen up.
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue.
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When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
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Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler Podcast.
The Amateur Traveler Podcast is about the love of travel.
It's about where to go and why you should go there.
We're going to open up to you different destinations you haven't heard of or places you have heard of but things you didn't know to do while you were there.
Each episode is about 45 minutes long and it's typically an interview with someone who wrote the guidebook on that destination or who has been there or who's a local tour guide or someone who is an expert on that destination and knows how to tell you what to do to get the most out of your precious vacation time.
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Amateur Traveler has almost 900 episodes talking about different destinations, so if there's a place you want to go, odds are we've already covered it and can help you plan a trip there.
Amateur traveler subscribe today Hey everyone, welcome to conspirituality where we
investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults
pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon.
You can also grab our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
And before we get going today, a quick correction.
Thank you to David Galloway who emailed us telling us that J.R.R.
Tolkien did not name Narya, which was the VC company that J.D.
Vance headed up, for Arian.
I had heard that on Rachel Maddow and I've read it online, but I am not a Tolkien expert by any means.
And so when those people who are really into authors can provide that information, that is wonderful.
So just wanted to clarify that.
I never thought that he named it that because it was some secret white supremacist message on Tolkien's part.
I just thought it might've been a wordplay he did, but apparently I apologize to the Tolkien community.
You know, while we're on the subject of corrections, a couple of weeks ago in the brief, someone pointed out, Derek, you and I spent a lot of time talking about Kevin Roberts, who's the head of the Heritage Foundation.
And we were talking a lot about Project 2025.
And at the end of the episode, I referred to him as Chief Justice Roberts.
Well, you might as well.
Because I was just thinking so much about the Supreme Court.
So someone pointed that out and I went, oh, that is embarrassing.
So, thank you for keeping us humble.
Thank you.
If something real occurs in this timeline but no conspiracy theorist is there to foobar it, does it actually happen?
An old man, weakened by COVID, picks up an old-timey phone handset on a Delaware Saturday to tell a childless cat lady in a wheezy voice, sputtering with emotion, that the reins of destiny are now in her hands.
A staffer clicks post at 1.46 p.m.
and X lights up with something real that throws an instant shadow of insanity.
Biden is too sick to have posted, they say.
He's dead, they say.
He has staged or suffered a coup.
And Kamala Harris?
A DEI bimbo flashing esoteric Marxist hand signals.
The DNC is fraudulently transferring the campaign war chest.
They couldn't kill Trump, so now they're playing dirty with the nomination.
Biden's brother is stepping in.
Biden's body double is eight inches too tall.
Dudes who made too much Let's Go Brandon merch are launching lawsuits and crying into their beer.
I mean, no, it's not Bud Light.
Today, we run down the most cursed Kamala conspiracy theories, how they distort the real questions about her, how being a childless cat lady is her superpower, and whether the ghouls that dream them up really matter.
But first, this week in spirituality.
This past week saw a momentous meeting of conspiracy big minds.
The ultra-conservative Daily Wire hosted a two-hour conversation between Jordan B. Peterson and Elon Musk that was live-streamed on Twitter.
It's hard to know how accurate their metrics are, but Twitter, or X as we're supposed to call it, shows the video in Peterson's feed at around 40 million views.
And once again, alternative media really is now mainstream.
I'm going to share a few short clips in a bit.
But first, here's why I found this interesting.
When Elon and Jordan sat down at Tesla's Gigafactory in Texas, Peterson started off by saying he'd been preparing to talk to Musk for a long time.
But I don't think this went as planned.
You see, Peterson came prepared to dig into his talking points, like how large language models are really tapping into Jung's collective unconscious, which is in turn a doorway into confirming the truth Wow, that is quite an arc.
Judeo-Christian God.
Wow. That is quite an arc. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, he's been doing, he did that with Russell Brand. It's like, it's a topic
he likes to bring up. And when he tried to go there with Elon, he mostly just got awkward
laughter or random tangential bluster because Musk just doesn't know what to do with that.
Undeterred, Jordan soldiered on with his well-practiced rhetoric about how the wokeness-threatening
Western civilization has flourished in the supposedly nihilistic and decadent space left
open by the loss of religious faith and traditional family values.
And this is an important hot topic that's trending in the group of heterodox podcasters who revere Peterson's pseudo profundity as kind of like the gospel truth.
So this is what it is.
Saving the West and its Enlightenment values really means returning to a pre-Enlightenment mingling of Christianity and politics, including pre-feminist gender roles.
Because, you see, that's what gives life meaning and purpose.
And you just can't get it anywhere else.
Chaos ensues otherwise, obviously.
And then parallel to that is the conspiracy theory.
The political progress of the 20th century That I would point out was a further extrapolation of actual Enlightenment values, you know, civil rights, gay rights, women's lib, has somehow actually been a corrosive and illiberal Marxist conspiracy all along.
So to that point, Jordan has another hobby horse he loves to bring up these days, which is supposedly that, and this is based on some early poetry and like a play I think that Marx wrote that recently were Talked about by someone that Peterson follows.
Karl Marx was really a Satanist.
And this explains a lot.
You see, it connects the dots on Peterson's corkboard.
Marxism, Satanism, wokeness.
Musk's response here is actually golden, though.
I talked to this gentleman who'd done a biography of Marx.
And he went and looked at Marx's poetry and drama that he wrote before he wrote the Communist Manifesto.
And he found out something very interesting.
He found out that Marx's favorite quote from Goethe was a statement by Mephistopheles.
It's a very specific statement and it's a very key statement.
Mephistopheles' motivation, so Lucifer's motivation, He is predicated on this argument.
He said, Consciousness is nothing but consciousness of pain and misery.
Life is short and brutal and pointless.
Therefore, it would be better if consciousness itself was eradicated.
Sounds like Hobbes.
I had a little Yorkshire Terrier who was Nasty, brutish, and short, so I named him Hobbes.
Perfect!
Perfect!
So we get a sense here that a meme-able dog name is about as deep as Elon could go in response to this.
Now, next he makes the common sense observation that, contrary to Hobbes, and perhaps contrary to the Buddha... Yeah, I was going to point that out, right?
Like, this is not a unique thought.
Yeah, obviously life isn't characterized by suffering because people experience joy too.
And then he makes this joke about a chronic injury that actually does cause him back pain.
And this is where Jordan got quite excited.
There are a limited number of things that are undeniably real and pain is one of them.
Yes.
Okay.
Like my back hurts a little.
Yes.
That's because you're up till five in the morning.
No, I just have some injuries, whatever.
Carnivore diet will fix that.
The what, sorry?
The carnivore diet will fix that.
Look, I like meat.
I'm pro meat.
I don't think a carnivore diet is going to fix this particular issue.
My wife had an injury of 40 years and it resolved in two years on a carnivore diet.
If you just eat steak or something?
Yeah.
All beef.
Sure, sure, sure.
I'm a pro carnivore.
I like meat.
But I think I'll probably need an operation or something.
I'd try the carnivore diet first.
Anyways, that did happen to her.
She couldn't lift her left arm above here.
It took 40 years and in two years it resolved.
Yeah, so that was something to see.
It also rejuvenated her physically in a variety of different ways that were quite miraculous to watch.
And that hasn't stopped.
So that's a weird thing, and I would have never believed it if I hadn't seen this because it's so preposterous.
It's like a bit.
Yeah, totally.
I don't think that Musk actually knows that he means just beef, actually.
Just beef, water, salt.
I think that's it, right?
He hasn't kept up on the alternative health advice that is an inevitable go-to amongst a lot of people in this set.
Just optimize your well-being by eating only meat.
It turns out it's the cure for what ails you.
It'll fix absolutely everything.
Okay, last clip here.
Jordan has just asked Elon about his familiarity with religious texts.
Musk's response, and then where he ends up, is really telling.
He starts by talking about having an existential crisis at the age of 11.
I actually read, tried to read all the religious texts.
At that age?
Yes.
So, I was a voracious reader as a kid.
So, I obviously read the Bible, I read the Koran, the Torah, the various, but on the Hindu side, just trying to understand all these things.
And obviously, as a 12-year-old, you're not really going to understand these things super well.
Well, you understood it well enough to have an existential crisis when you were 11 or 12.
Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out, does anyone have an answer that makes sense?
And I read quite a bit of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which is quite depressing to read as a kid.
Yeah, you might say that.
That's depressing as an adult.
But then I read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is really a book on philosophy disguised as humor.
The point that Adams tries to make there is that we don't actually know all the answers, obviously.
In fact, we don't even know what the right questions are to ask.
That's where he has, if you read the book, Earth is actually a giant computer to understand the answer to the question, what is the meaning of life?
Yeah.
And comes up with the answer 42.
It's just, you know, he goes from reading all of the religious texts that the world has to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by the time he's 12.
But then he finds the real big guns, Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Yeah, right.
So despite being frequently frustrated by Musk's odd humor and obtuse conversational style, turns out he and Peterson did actually agree on some key culture war topics.
For example, environmental alarmism and concerns about population growth are not only wrong scientifically, They're anti-human.
We're actually in a low birthrate crisis.
And this is a trope that's increasingly gotten spread around, especially in the heterodox sphere, but it plugs very nicely into anti-abortion arguments.
Like because of all the abortion and contraception, and because women are no longer in their appropriate gender roles, we have this crisis where we have this low birthrate and it's below replacement levels, which also has some interesting Possible multivalent interpretations.
On this point, Peterson shoehorned in this amazing analysis about how cultural images, which celebrate the feminine without also including children, serve to underline the anti-family agenda of the supposed authoritarian left.
Now the takeaway here is that Musk had two real key moments in the conversation and these have now been widely publicized so we won't clip them.
The first is that his political transformation is driven by a conviction that the woke mind virus must be destroyed.
His personal turning point on this is having a child who turned out to be transgender.
He said that he was tricked into agreeing to his child's medical transition and that his son is now dead.
And the second is that despite now being a Trump supporter, Elon actually contradicted the claim made on television by Trump himself that he, Elon, had pledged $42 million a month to his campaign.
Oh, was it 45?
Okay.
The second is that despite now being a Trump supporter, Elon contradicted the claim made by Trump himself that he, Elon, had pledged $45 million a month to his campaign.
So I guess even a billionaire dedicated to destroying the woke mind virus has his limits.
Thanks, Julian.
That's a good setup for my This Week in Conspiratuality, which really centers on Elon Musk's trans daughter.
So, Vivian Jenna Wilson has stayed out of the public sphere for the most part, except for this blip following a California court filing to change her name in 2022.
And in that filing, she wrote that she wanted to be free of him altogether.
I wonder why.
Now, after the Peterson interview, I guess she just had enough with his anti-trans BS.
And what she called his fake memory of her childhood with him.
So she took to threads and she focused on a July 22nd X post from Musk in which he says that she was born, quote, gay and slightly autistic, two attributes that contribute to gender dysphoria.
I knew that from when Vivian, now he's not using her name in the post, was about four years old and Vivian would pick out clothes for me to wear like a jacket and tell me it was fabulous, as well as Vivian's love of musicals and theater."
Now Vivian says that he's lying basically on every point and we'll post her response on threads in the show notes because it's really cool to read.
So too is the interview that she then gave to NBC.
She describes Musk As largely absent when she was little, but also cruel about her queerness whenever he was around.
So basically, the energy of the typical right-wing divorce dad on X. And she rejects his complaint that he was tricked into consenting to starting gender-affirming care at the age of 16, which was required under California law.
You were just mentioning that, Julianne.
She told NBC that they actually texted about it for months and then they met in person.
And, you know, even though they're estranged, he read the forms and waivers about the side effects of puberty blockers and HRT twice.
He read the forms twice before signing off.
But what I find striking about this story is that it really shows the collision of two internets.
And this is a theme I'm gonna return to for our main story about the difference between trolling Kamala Harris and actually working for her or behind her.
If Wilson's account is accurate, and my gut says it is, but we can't be sure, like, we're talking about a kind of he-said-she-said account of hidden family dynamics, but he hasn't responded to her clapback, so that says something, I think.
We get an even clearer picture of a musk-zone internet that's governed by grievance, self-mythologization, and conspiracy theorizing, all derived from personal hurt and the toxic masculine armoring that tries to soothe it without healing it.
Like, some guys will create a virtual hell for the entire planet instead of going to therapy.
And as you mentioned, Julian, Musk is openly admitting that this humiliation has driven him to crusade against the woke mind virus, and it's transparent that he grasps at anything for support, including the discredited rapid-onset gender dysphoria theory, which I tagged as an online conspiracy theory in the episode about Steve Hasen, who was asserting that trans activists are in a cult because of social contagion, he says, being the primary driver of transition, which it's not, or at least we don't really have the evidence to say that.
But Musk is all in on that.
And I only hope that Hassan isn't emailing him to offer his services.
So, Musk's macro view of the trans cabal has spun out from this micro instance of familial tension.
His daughter conspired with her doctors against him, and therefore the entire world is going to pay and fall back into line, like he's become the conspiracy theorist about his own life.
And, you know, it's commonplace to wonder about how trans politics, which in reality impact around 1% of the population and their families, becomes a central political battleground.
And I think here we have to consider just plain old shit luck that it became the obsession of a wounded media oligarch.
But contrasted with Musk's intranet of grievance and retribution, we have Vivian Wilson's intranet of protest, fact-checking, fuck-you-dad energy, and solidarity.
And I think we should remember that in the shadow of Musk, which, you know, we all live in, I have to say, going back to Tumblr and even farther, It's mainly been through social media that queer, trans, autistic people have organized their solidarity, their self-identification processes, their battles with conventional healthcare and legal discrimination, and also their responses to cruelty.
They have found family there, and I think Vivian's post is a peak moment of that general movement, and I think that's also...
In that movement is where the heart of anti-conspiracism thrives, because it's about people talking to each other about their lives and dispelling myths, if they can.
And so we have the top enabler of social media bullshit called out by their own kid through a tech modality that he'd love to control completely, but he can't, because screenshots of Vivian's Threads post are all over XNow, so she has disowned him.
but she's also haunting him through his own algorithms.
♪ So, as we close in on the main story this week,
I want to take a moment and give a round of applause to the childless cat ladies out there.
Yay!
Yeah, you've got to do the sound thing, the applause thing for that.
I'm actually married to one.
I mean, true story.
After our first date 10 years ago, I invited my now wife over to meet my two cats.
I had met hers earlier that morning.
So after our respective meetings of the felines in our first 24 hours together, we knew that it was a match.
Whirlwind.
So fuzzies aside, J.D.
Vance does not like cats, although he did recently apologize to cats and not women.
He called Kamala Harris a childless cat lady, but that is not new.
That turns out to have been from 2021 when he also called the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman a weird cat lady.
Vance also used that charge against climate change activists.
He used it against the former head of Planned Parenthood, Leanna Nguyen.
And in 2021, he defined what it meant by using that term to Tucker Carlson, basically using the trope, you can find it online everywhere, that the corporate oligarch ruled Democrats are just ruining our lives in every capacity and they're run by childless people like Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC.
He said that the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.
So, this recent comment, as well as it coming out that he believes that people with kids should have more voting power than us childless citizens.
One vote for kid, right?
And then, but the parents should be in control of the votes.
Yeah, that would turn out really well.
Right.
So even then, Vance was wrong.
Kamala was a stepmother to two children at the time, and Mayor Pete and his husband were trying to adopt children then, and they did so a month after Vance appeared on Carlson's show.
So once again, we find that Vance's definition of family is extremely narrow.
So, it turns out that the usage of Cat Lady dates back to at least the 18th century to promote the patriarchy.
There are old school cartoons that show women with cats being childish as being the bane of existence.
It reemerged in the last decade because of incel culture with young men blaming their inability to get dates on the women that they were unable to date,
and they derided them as cat ladies for supposedly not wanting to sleep with those men.
And from there, of course, it ascended to right-wing punditry.
So as The Nation points out, Rod Dreher, who is a friend of Vance's,
started using it in an online conservative publication about a decade ago.
But here's where it gets more troublesome.
The misogynistic labeling of women who don't want to or can't have children fits very well into the pronatalism movement championed by Silicon Valley elites.
Which of course also finds a home in blood and soil nationalism and in eugenics.
So putting these pieces together, Vance derides women who don't want to have children, he opposes IVF, and he doesn't consider step parents or gay parents as being actual parents.
Wow.
Talk about gatekeeping, right?
And you land in a pretty limited worldview about what parenting and family actually is.
And these pieces do fit into the larger goals of Vance, and by extension, his sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, which is a return to the single-income family championed by the man, as laid out in Project 2025, Plenty of fresh young blood for the corporate workforce, and they all have a particular gender identity.
So I'm personally glad that the Childless Cat Lady memes have taken off, and we've dedicated our episode this week to that title, because this is something worthy of fighting for.
Yeah, I agree with all of that, Derek.
I'm just going to add that on Saturday, I'll be dropping a brief analysis on another layer to Vance's comments that I think is important, because as bizarre as they are, I also think he's tapping into something that is powerful because it's shameful.
Like, his shtick is that, partly, childless cat ladies are miserable in their lives, which is a ridiculous thing to project.
I mean, you know that thing about every accusation being a projection.
I think that's what's going on here.
That there's a rich vein of parents out there in general, and perhaps more on the right even, who are actually miserable in their lives, regretting their choices, wondering why God saddled them with four, five, six fucking kids.
But of course, it's illegal to say any of that.
because children come from God.
They have to disown it.
They have to pretend that the conservative hetero family is as perfect as the Christmas cards
with the photo around the tree where they're all holding AK-47s.
I just want to add too that it's kind of weird that there were two examples in there
of him referring to men as childless cat ladies.
So there's an extra layer there of a kind of homophobic, you know.
Absolutely.
You're just like an old woman, right?
Yeah, Vance is looking at you, Derek, and your IG feed.
And then someone like AOC.
So like, what do AOC, Kamala, and Pete Buttigieg have in common?
Like these, you couldn't find, in terms of identity and stage of life, three more different people, and yet he's gonna bundle them all together as childless cat ladies.
It's pretty lazy.
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Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Megha's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Megha is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find Megha on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
If you're a fan of workplace comedies like The Office or satire like The Onion, then I have a podcast that I know you'll love.
It's called Mega.
Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Megha's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Megha is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find Megha on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Boca del Toro, Panama.
A secluded seaside hideaway, Scott Makeda has no idea that his tropical haven is about to become his personal hell.
A serial killer pretending to be a therapist.
Holbert rents a room and that's where he set up his business as a fake shrink.
Accusations of a gringo mafia.
Gun running, drugs.
A slaughtered family.
And then he goes back and he plants another bullet.
A killer on tape.
Hey man, I'm guilty.
Everybody knows I'm a monster.
The law of the jungle is simple.
Survive.
I'm your host, Candace DeLong, from Treefort Media and Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.
This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill.
Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes drop weekly.
I'm exhausted.
What a year this past month has been.
Yeah, you know, I was watching Spider-Man 2 with the eight-year-old, and there's this big set piece where Tobey Maguire is trying to stop the runaway subway train.
And he's literally doing it with his heel that's breaking all of the ties.
And he's got his webs out, and he's holding on, and the webs are pulling down the bricks.
It's kind of like that with Musk as Doc Ock speeding everything up.
But yeah, the Biden debate disaster.
Like, it was only a month ago.
June 17th, right?
Yeah, it feels so much longer ago.
Then there was the NATO summit speech that he gave.
It was supposed to be kind of like his his comeback.
And then a couple of terrible high stakes interviews, which we all groaned through.
And it led to more and more Democrats calling for him to stop running.
And there's the shot at Trump on July 13th.
So recently.
And then that allowed him to show up like a war hero and start this weird ear bandage fashion trend at the massively confident and celebratory Circus Republican National Convention just two days later.
Yeah, you know, per our assassination episode a couple weeks back, there is some BS going on with this.
Like, I went on this whole thing about how it's reasonable to have a few moments as a progressive to wonder, huh, what's going on with this lifelong showman who lies about everything?
Well, it turns Turns out, I mean, with regard to the ear,
we still don't have a clear medical picture.
Like the FBI is saying maybe it's a bullet, maybe it's shrapnel.
And then his old doctor, who I think doesn't have his medical license anymore,
Ronnie Jackson, describes a two centimeter wide wound in his ear.
And that doesn't seem to be there.
So anyway, I don't know.
A couple of days later, like this, this stuff never stops, right?
Biden gets COVID.
He self-isolates.
And then he posted that he couldn't wait to get back to campaigning.
And with that, I thought, oh, there's something really haunted about COVID being the final straw for like, Joe, the pandemic is over Biden.
Totally.
And then the next day he announces he's withdrawing and he endorses Kamala Harris as his successor.
And then speculation keeps swirling about, hey, maybe there's going to be an open convention.
Kamala says she doesn't want to just be coronated.
She wants to earn the nomination.
We're not sure if Harris is going to have challengers.
I actually was thinking, oh, there's probably that's probably what's going to happen here.
There'll be a few people who step up.
But the next few days, as we all know now, saw this huge wave of both unparalleled fundraising and enthusiasm for her as a candidate.
And for her part, Kamala stepped up to the plate.
She seemed warm and confident and charismatic and completely prepared to do verbal battle with Donald Trump.
Yeah, and she had to, I think, overcome a little bit of, you know, instability in that charisma because, you know, she does have this backlog of cringey clips, the coconut tree comment coming from her mom, the tipsy aunt circular philosophical statements.
But I think the best internet thing about this moment has been seeing, like, particularly Gen Z and, like, the gays just reclaim Harris' cringe as somehow cool, something they're gonna stand behind.
Yeah, that's something that's refreshing to see because I think anyone who is on the left or progressive side who would go back and look at these brief moments in our history is really missing the larger point.
So I'm glad fewer people are doing that now.
Yeah, yeah, and there is this thing happening online where it feels like people on the left have learned how to do trolling through memes in a way that was exclusively the province of the right for a long time, and the right is kind of short-circuiting.
Like, we don't know how to deal with this.
Trolling through memes and trolling through just being fucking honest, just straight up.
Like there's just some people I follow on threads who just besides pointing out the ridiculousness of the rights attacks, but also just being brutally honest for the first time, what I feel is like in a long time.
Yeah.
So meanwhile, Donald's VP pick, as we know, J.D.
Vance announced at the convention in this like month that we're talking about, Was hardcore flopping on the national stage and all of that cocky confidence from just a week previous was suddenly curdling into anxious misogyny, racism and conspiracism.
Because what else are you going to do?
In the midst of it all, Trump started making excuses for not wanting to debate Kamala in September.
It was very telling.
Some of the right-wing reaction to the Kamala transition was easy to predict.
Republican politicians and pundits started referring to Harris as the DEI hire, implying she'd only risen to being a presidential candidate due to special treatment for her race and gender, overshadowing her lack of personal merit.
Never mind the facts.
Two years as a San Francisco District Attorney, three years as the California State Attorney General, and then serving as a U.S.
Senator for four years before becoming Vice President for four years.
Somehow, the paths of these two schmucks, the fortunate son of inherited wealth, the failed real estate developer, the reality TV star, and now convicted Donald Trump, And J.D.
Vance, a two-year senator with no prior political experience, this somehow makes them exemplars of actual white male meritocracy.
Now, after the attacks on her as a DEI hire, really the new code for being a dumb N-word, the rights started turning a spotlight on Kamala's year-long 1995 relationship with then-Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown.
Because Brown at that time appointed the 29-year-old prosecutor in Harris to two different bureaucratic boards during the period in which they were dating.
The narrative then becomes that she slept her way to the top, because how else does a woman of color have her kind of powerful career, and because we live in this weird, cursed digital timeline, a live Fox business guest named Alec Lace referred to Kamala as the original Hawk Tua girl, which is a reference to a young woman who went viral from a Drunken Street interview video clip in which she onomatopoeically mimed her sex secret to driving men wild.
Yeah, that totally backfired because you really can't slut shame a successful black woman by comparing her to a blue-collar white girl from Tennessee because according to Fox's own faux populist rules, you're supposed to like that girl.
Anyway, to save you all from Googling, the woman's name is Haley Welch.
She's 22, she worked in a bedspring factory, lives with her granny, very winning personality.
And she was demonstrating in this video how she spits on the dick of her lover during oral sex.
And then Lace gets shunned by Fox viewers.
Not out of any concern about disrespecting Kamala, but for the opposite, for realizing that Welch is actually becoming popular, like a big enough hit for Rolling Stone to call her a, quote, charming Gen Z Dolly Parton, which I think is a bit of a stretch, but, you know, she's on the way up.
It's a lot of a stretch.
I'm sorry, I like Rolling Stone for the most part, but that was a major fail.
I think the point is that this is somebody that we pull for.
These are our people, right?
She's a red state girl.
And it's like, we're not going to shame her.
Watch the Dolly Parton documentary and what she had to go through in terms of misogyny and becoming a successful business lady.
I'm not even a huge fan of her music, but as a person, she is such a stellar human being who has put up with so much.
So that's why that comparison falls flat to me.
Yeah, yeah.
And part of the reason why I'm calling it this cursed timeline is, look, I have no problem with Hayley Welch whatsoever.
More power to her.
That's a funny moment.
And she totally owned it.
And she's on the street, drunk, being approached by some guy with a YouTube channel.
But the fact that that turns her into someone who is now internet famous and is selling merch, and that people are trying to sell merch off of her, you know, for the thing that she said in a quotable moment, and then the fact that that gets turned into a way of trying to slut shame Kamala, that is just like... Yeah, that's weird.
What are we doing here?
Many of these same right-wing commentators accused Kamala of staging a coup.
Because, you know, no one on their side has ever staged a coup, an actual coup.
And maybe the Democrats had undemocratically installed a candidate, they wondered, like they do in communist countries.
That means that they think that Biden was legitimate, right?
Doesn't that undo the rest of that stuff?
Well, the most unhinged so far to me is Tim Pool, if you're on his Twitter feed.
The coup is definitely already happening.
But Julian, what about the people who intersect more with our domain and conspirituality?
Okay, so let's come to our wheelhouse here.
You know, as a quick tie-in to Jordan Peterson's attempts to connect the Democrats, both to Marxism and Satanism.
Conceptual James, which is the Twitter handle for one James Lindsay, who's most famous for claiming to have coined the online slur, OK Groomer, for adults who have empathy for gay and trans kids.
He just came right out and told his 1.5 million followers that Kamala's oft-repeated line about seeing what is possible while being unburdened by the past is somehow really both a Marxist and a Luciferian incantation coded to speak to those in the cabal who know what she really means.
He even posted evidence of her raising her right hand when saying this phrase, which is supposed to be reminiscent of depictions of the occult deity Baphomet.
So yeah, the brain worms are strong with Conceptual James.
And he publishes it on X, where Elon Musk has himself dressed in cosplay as Baphomet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was one really good response.
And then the best response I saw to this particular thread was a guy named Bruce Wilson, who's a journalist who covers Christian nationalism.
And he tweeted, I'm sure this seems quite reasonable while tripping on mushrooms.
To which I will add, as my own reply to James Lindsay, who I just found out has me blocked on Twitter.
Okay, shroomer.
Ah, badum ching.
So next up, everyone's favorite, Russell Brand.
He published the absolute longest tweet I've ever seen to his over 11 million followers.
I mean, I guess blue checks on Twitter can do entire blog posts if they like.
I miss this.
But he got roundly mocked for what, in fairness, was probably an autocorrect typo and he was moving too quickly.
It was still funny, though, because he shot himself in the foot by trying to do his word salad version of what we've already been discussing.
So here's the quote.
If Kamala Harris is to be the new pick in the bait-and-switch, find-the-lady, cup-and-ball trick that we're being offered in lieu of democracy, we already know she's a socially inept and empty instrument of intransigent institutional power, solely offering cutaneous and genetic novelty to a famished pack of secularist devotees so bewildered that melatonin and an X chromosome could represent to them some kind of pyrrhic victory.
Yeah, so he meant to say melanin and an X chromosome.
He's getting confused with his supplement sales.
And so yeah, so here's Russell Brand using word salad to actually say the quiet part out loud that all of the people that are on the side that he now identifies with are saying out loud anyway.
Melanin and an X chromosome, melatonin.
Seculous devotees.
Of course, now Russell's every criticism of the left has to include the fact that they're not Christian.
This is no doubt in contrast to the noble people of faith he now pals around with, you know, like Carrie Lake and Jim Jordan, with whom he did a live stream on Wednesday called Let's Take Our Country Back, or Candace Owens from the day before.
Or Rudy Giuliani recently.
That was a special interview.
I've got to go watch that or do I?
No, no, I did.
You don't.
These are all people he likely would have sneered at as recently as 2020.
The trouble is like, you know, and this is he's completely full of shit, but he will have one or two lines that are going to prick up the ears of people who have legitimate concerns or questions about Kamala Harris.
And the one that stood out to me is like empty instrument of intransigent institutional power, which sounds like Yeah, this is part of the problem.
of center criticism of Harris. So we're going to get to a little bit more of that later.
Yeah, I mean, this is part of the problem. He can weaponize that vocabulary that he learned
from a very particular kind of canon. Now to these right wing talking points. He also posted
a rambling video in which he opined disparagingly about the flexible morality of the Democratic
Party. And for this, he was justifiably mocked as someone with questionable morals,
as well as for misusing the word garrulous.
So in the video, he said Kamala was not a garrulous and easily political figure, but that she's someone who does not seem at ease with public speaking.
As if garrulous might mean eloquent or fluent, but the irony here is that if you look it up, it actually means excessively talkative about trivial things.
And you're right, Russell, she's not that.
But we know someone who is.
I should say here, too, that on YouTube, Brand and his friends, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, all stoked conspiracy claims about Joe Biden's voice when he called in to Kamala live on TV as being an AI deepfake.
His signature on the announcement was obviously forged, and no one has seen him in public.
But the 81-year-old was self-isolating with COVID, so perhaps he was dead, they said, and the Democrats are hiding it.
Now, as Derek and I discussed in our last brief, Dark Horse podcast co-host Brett Weinstein, who's always fun, He added his 5D chest spin on these apparently suspicious details by posting a video to his 1 million followers on Twitter saying that the mysterious they were probably luring public figures opening to examining real conspiracies to go ahead and connect the dots to eat up the delicious breadcrumbs they'd left there.
He actually even said it was kind of like a van with a guy saying, I've got candy.
So that they would then look foolish when Biden emerged actually healthy.
And this would result in followers withdrawing their trust on other conspiracies, like what really happened with the attempt on Trump's life, as well as, I think it's safe to assume, the lab leak and vaccine injuries, etc.
So in terms of this elaborate idea that Weinstein has about how The Deep State is really trying to get people to make up conspiracies so that they will look foolish.
He says, we're up against an enemy with a very deep toolkit going back at least as far as 1963.
This refers, of course, to the JFK assassination.
Let's move on from Weinstein.
LA spiritual comedian and emotional healing coach, who used to live here but now has moved
to Austin, of course, JP Sears, was quick on the draw from his heavily armed Austin
studio and he actually did the video in like a like a flak vest, you know, that has little
little pockets for him to put his his replacement ammo magazines.
And he did this just a couple days after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump because
he was ready to launch a T-shirt that had the black and white version of the already
iconic image of Trump with a raised fist and blood streaked face rising out of the huddle
of Secret Service agents.
Unfortunately, you know exactly the one.
The words under the image on the shirt, truth conquers.
Then JP Sears did one of his standard satirical disheveled newscaster sketches.
And in that video, which he sent to his 1.3 million Instagram followers, he called Biden's withdrawal a coup.
He settled Kamala as responsible for the crisis at the southern border, which is one of the tactics we haven't covered yet.
He whined about Instagram fact-checking a post he created that featured footage which had been doctored to make Kamala look incoherent and like she was just sort of talking in circles.
He also praised Alex Jones for his accurate predictions, because he had said there might be a cyber attack, and then there was a cyber attack.
And he skewered the mainstream media for disparaging him as a conspiracy theorist.
Hudson Poole, who you mentioned a moment ago, Derek, you know, the beanie-wearing ultra right-wing podcaster.
Did this over-the-top tweet in which he tried to parody Democrats for calling Trump a threat to democracy by calling Kamala Stalin and Hitler combined times 200 and then commenting underneath, am I doing it right?
And the real story for me here was actually how many much more recent bizarre conspiracy theories I had to scroll through that he had re-shared to his two million followers about how the Olympics opening ceremonies were filled with supposedly blatant satanic symbols and anti-Christian gay and trans inclusivity.
All right, I'll close here in my survey of what the real nuts are saying with some gems from Daily Wire host and creator of the so-called documentary film that we remember called What is a Woman, Matt Walsh.
He tweeted on Friday to his almost three million followers that Republicans need to stop being shy about appealing directly to white men.
White men are the forgotten voters, I'm quoting here.
But they will decide if Republicans win or lose.
You mean they're shy about that?
They're shy about courting white men?
Apparently.
Yeah.
Well, because they're trying to be woke.
Right.
He also repeated the trope that Democrats had enacted an internal coup.
And up next in his Twitter feed came these two gems that I'll ask Derek to If you're a woman voter, there's one party that rejects and denies your biological existence.
You would be insane to vote for that party.
it's really not a difficult choice. Followed by, just a quick question for any Democrat
celebrating the fact that Kamala could be our first woman president, what is a woman?
And then in a segment for Matt Walsh's YouTube show on Wednesday, he parodied Vance's argument
to his almost three million subscribers there on YouTube that not having biological children
of her own meant that Kamala has no stake in the future of the country.
free.
And he claimed that any concern she has for the country, presumably including wanting a happy future for her stepchildren, is merely an abstraction.
He accused her of being childless precisely because this is a woman who cares only for her own ambition.
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention.
And then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
So we get a lot of DMs and sadly, even the three of us can't monitor them all.
But I happen to be on Instagram posting something when someone sent a link over to Gabby Bernstein's
endorsement of Kamala Harris.
They were sharing it not because of the endorsement, but the comments.
And I want to share a few here because they really point back not just to an original thesis of this podcast, but something the three of us have known for a very long time.
Which is that the spiritual and wellness communities are woefully politically disengaged.
So first off, most of Gabby's recent posts get 1 to 2,000 likes and a few dozen comments.
This one has 30,000 likes and over 4,000 comments, so it's not all shade.
But a lot of the comments highlight a long-standing phenomenon in spiritual circles.
The idea that politics don't really matter.
It's really about the cultivation of your own personal spiritual prowess.
Politics is low vibrational.
And if you're in a position to claim such a thing, you likely have the privilege to not be bothered by the reality of politics A really good example of this is in this week's John Oliver's HBO show, where he does a whole section on West Bank and how some of the settlers moving into the West Bank say, this isn't a political thing, when Oliver goes to great lengths to say, oh yes, everything here is political.
Now, there was truly a mix of negative comments on Gabby's post, including a lot of support for Trump and RFK Jr.
Now, Julian went through what some of the bigger name influencers have said, but the comments section is where you find people without large followings engaging with larger names.
And some of the comments I chose did come from people with like 50 or 60,000 followers, but I'm more concerned with the sentiment rather than the person, so I'm not going to call out anyone individually.
I did filter for people who are either just trolling or who have explicitly political accounts, and trace back the comments to people who generally post spiritual or self-help messages, which is more in the vein of what Gabby Bernstein posts.
So let's go through a sample.
Quote, forcing your politics onto your spiritual followers shows total lack of respect for
your position and for us.
I guess you too have been blinded by the media and their lies.
As a spiritual leader, I would assume you would have the ability to discern truth from
lies makes me so sad.
As a longtime Miracle member, I'm guessing that's one of Gabby's communities, I guess this is where we part ways.
And while I know you don't care and live in your little bubble, many of us out here know the truth.
Maybe check out Naomi Wolf or Tulsi Gabbard.
They used to think like you, but awoke out of their bubbles of lies and comfort.
Yeah, I mean, this person is wrong about both of those people.
Naomi Wolf was not a New Age influencer.
Tulsi Gabbard is from like an offshoot of an ISKCON cult, and I suppose she might have been sort of in that general philosophical category, but that wasn't her living at all.
They didn't used to think like Gabby Bernstein.
I don't know.
It's just, it's incoherent.
I think what the person is saying is, we want you to politicize in the opposite direction.
Yeah, and Tulsi Gabbard's dad is actually a successful politician in Hawaii, and their family and the cult that they grew up in all have a history of being incredibly homophobic, and they're part of a fundamentalist religious cult that just happens to not be Christian.
Okay, next comment.
I just think as a motivational speaker, politics should not be expressed.
I personally follow you to get away from all this and gain clarity with what matters.
I'm just here for God and the entertainment.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, again, if what matters isn't political to you at this stage of where we are as a society, that's an extremely privileged position to take.
Next up, what this demonstrates, a lack of discernment and an inability to see TRUTH, all capital, as it is, not as you wish it was.
OMG, Gabby.
Seriously, coming from someone who is so spiritual, I am surprised you are not awake to it all.
I love the awake to it all and then no further commentary.
And this is the thing, like we definitely, this is a throwback.
It shows the longevity of the phenomenon that we reported about in the first year, where
both Yoga Journal and Sean Corn experienced a similar kind of wave of thousands of intense
critical comments, some of which were favorable on QAnon, some of which were favorable on
Trump and many of which were linking being spiritually awake with being politically red
Right.
And so it's still going on, right?
And great work here, Derek, on trying to figure out, okay, what is a really good sampling that will be an accurate reflection here of this overlap, once again, between yoga, wellness, New Age platitudes, and this kind of weird either rejection of politics or saying that Essentially, conspiracist and right-wing tropes are the more spiritually enlightened position.
Yeah, and it gets back to what I've long said, because I started my career as a local news reporter covering zoning board and school board meetings, and politics happens all the time.
Everything about anywhere that you live is political.
Does your road not have potholes?
Do your lights work?
Do you have an appropriate amount of water flowing into your house?
All these things are political.
So, it's really frustrating when people say, what matters is this spiritual ideology, like is your soul going to ascend?
I'm a little bit more concerned about not hitting a pothole when I'm riding my bike around town, for example.
I think that's something that should concern us all.
And so, when a spiritual leader comes out and acknowledges that, I think that's a good thing.
So, I have one more, and it's this.
If we zoom out, this is about authentic and genuine souls.
And the liberal party is connected to extremely dark energy.
This isn't even about our country.
It's about recognizing an individual's true soul essence, frequency, and knowing they have a good heart.
They do not carry light.
Very, very convinced, very dramatic.
Yeah, I appreciate this sample too, Derek.
They're solid examples of bypassing from the right.
I did pick out a couple more complicated positions that call out Bernstein's content-free and vibes-based post, which is kind of the other side of this, is that she doesn't really say much, and that's its own problem.
All the OP said was, I'm with her every step of the way.
And a number of commenters were saying, okay, if you're gonna endorse her,
that sounds like an endorsement, then be specific.
Like, what positions do you actually support?
And that's gonna be really sticky for any new age influencer to wade into,
because what side of anything do you want to be on in a universe of miracles, right?
There were a couple of comments on her high, on Harris' high incarceration record as California AG,
and at least two comments that questioned Harris' position on Israel, which to this point,
hasn't really differentiated itself from Biden's position.
But before we get into that, That high incarceration record is wrong, and this is one of the problems with what the right's been doing.
She had the lowest incarceration record out of California AGs stretching back decades before her, but the right has positioned her for years since becoming VP as if she were jailing more people, when the reality is she jailed fewer people than all of her predecessors.
That's what's really frustrating about what the media system does is it just bludgeons this message, which is completely untrue.
So the image that they're using of the law and order prosecutor that's being generated, you're saying that's overplayed?
Well, it's an interesting dichotomy because they're the party of law and order, but they're all actually trying to play against it as if the right's taking the side of black men who were incarcerated for marijuana.
What I'm saying is that the Attorney General is going to incarcerate in any state.
That's part of their job.
She had a lower number of incarcerations than a number of her predecessors before her.
So the idea that she has this extremely high incarceration record looked at relative to her position is wrong.
Well, OK, so the other two comments that I that I picked out questioned Harris's position on Israel, and they're from private accounts.
But given the page they're on, they could be coming from the spiritual left.
So one of them says, no qualms over her unwavering support of the genocide in Palestine.
Wow, so you support the killing of innocent children and babies in Gaza.
So thrown into the mix here are questions that left-leaning Democrats have about the carceral state, questions about the Middle East.
I think questions that are crucial not only to the future of that region, But also to whether Harris will or can distinguish herself from that Democrat position there in terms of foreign policy.
I think it's completely fair to question her on her stance of Israel and Palestine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But what frustrates me about the way that these are positioned and some of what I'm seeing, at least, Is that there's a difference between a good faith debate and really trying to hold her to the fire to come out and say what the policies are going to be, whether or not she's going to provide arms as president, all fair game.
But we know what Donald Trump's position is on Palestine.
He has explicitly said he's going to give Netanyahu whatever he wants.
So this framing of it is just really short-sighted because Regardless of your feelings on this topic, it seems to be like we're going to have a pretty binary choice coming up in the next month and you can have someone who can actually criticize Israel and possibly move the needle in a direction that might appease some of the left.
Or you can have someone who moved the embassy to Jerusalem and will do everything possible to give Netanyahu a victory, who has said on record he's not that concerned about the genocide.
And if you're really weighing that moral choice and you're going to hold Harris to the fire like that, I think that is extremely shortsighted.
Yeah, who moved the embassy to Jerusalem, says he'll give Netanyahu whatever he wants, And is also backed by billionaire donors, a significant number of whom believe in the kind of end times prophecy where they actually want a war to break out between Iran and Israel.
So yeah, it's like, you know, Kamala's in a stage of the political campaign where she's going to have to walk a tightrope.
And I think she did that quite well a few days ago when she came out and basically said the tired thing, Israel has a right to defend herself.
But then she also said, we want to bring this to an end.
She made other kinds of noises about how this is a really terrible predicament for the people in Gaza.
What she ends up doing as a president, I don't think we know where her policy decisions are going to end up.
Well, isn't that why this is the time to apply pressure before the coronation actually happens?
I mean, when else are people going to have the leverage from the left?
Like, I pulled these comments out because they signify that at least there's some people on that page who recognize the actual gravity for the left wing of the party, like whether or not people are going to come out to vote in places like Michigan.
again, there's 200,000 Arab Americans who are going to want to see something more than
better language on Biden's policy.
And that's in order to get them out.
Right?
We live in we live in the world we have.
And we have a political process that is what it is.
If we could completely change it, I would be in favor of it, to make it closer to what we would think would be more ideal.
But applying pressure now, I wonder if it's counterproductive when, you know, what she will end up I think that she, you know, I don't know what she's going to end up doing.
Well, isn't that the problem?
Isn't that the problem?
Isn't that why you want to throw your throw your values in the ring?
Because you don't know.
And so now's the time to say it.
I mean, party line Democrats are always making it sound like they're doves and not hawks.
I mean, Biden in that speech to NATO made his withdrawal announcement,
or sorry, before he made his withdrawal announcement, and it was all about like, is he too senile to continue?
He stands up in NATO, he says in a speech, hey, we haven't sent, or we're not sending
2,000 pound bombs to the IDF, right?
Because that hurts too many people.
Well, actually, they've given them 14,000 bombs.
And so we've got a left wing of the Democratic Party that's listened to this for years and years
and years and years.
And no, they're not going to go vote for Trump.
I don't buy that, Derek.
That's not the choice.
We're talking about, do you have the political capital right now before everybody just decides that she's going to be the one to take it over the finish line?
And then after that, what kind of leverage do people have?
I think this is exactly the time for those comments to shine forth.
I think your positioning this as having leverage is unrealistic.
What?
It's just his comments on IG.
People should say that, like, there's unwavering support for the American position in Palestine.
And that's been true.
She's had some softer language, but basically there's no material change, right?
I think that's what people are asking for.
Kamala coming out and making statements that would please the left wing of the party, Damage her in terms of getting a chance to get into power and do actual things that would please the left wing of the party.
That's the reality.
Possibly.
You've got to talk to Gen Z and you've got to talk to Arab Americans in Michigan who may not show up unless they see more.
The right would like nothing more than to paint Kamala with the brush of the pro-Hamas left.
Sure they would.
And that's what they would do if she came out and appeased an actually quite small group in terms of like what happens in the election. The approval
ratings for Israel, of policy towards Israel are in the tank, right? We all know that. We all
know that. It's not a small issue. It's not a small number of people. We're just talking about
Instagram comments. Well, exactly. So being able to, being able to tell how they would vote.
Like, we can't say whether or not they would vote for Trump or come out and vote at all.
They're talking about unwavering support of genocide in Palestine, and you're saying, oh, they might vote for Trump if they don't get what they want from Harris?
I don't see any evidence for that.
Absolutely.
Read the comment.
Read the comments.
Read their hardline stance.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about these two comments.
I'm talking about these two comments.
Yeah, I mean, I think Yeah, the people making those comments probably are not about to vote for Trump.
The fact is we have a binary choice, we have the political system we have, and whoever gets in power is going to be able to make the decisions.
So getting the person in power who's going to do the less harm and who may have some possibility of moving in the other direction, who's not funded by billionaire Christian fundamentalists who are cheering on the apocalypse, makes a lot more sense to me than You know, going after her for not being as left as we would like.
And the idea that they will not change once in office is just provably false, because Obama changed his position on gay marriage once he got into office.
Yep.
Biden has changed his position on abortion, being a long-time Catholic and has done more to try to protect abortion rights, even though he doesn't personally believe in it.
So that notion is just false.
You can move people once you're in Congress, once you're in power, especially if you have control of Congress.
So I agree with Julian here that get to the finish line first and then start to chip away and try to move the needle in the direction you want it to go.
I think it's going to be hard to get to the finish line if you paint comments like that as being misinformed or naive.
They're certainly not disengaged.
I mean, part of the reason I pulled them out is that they're probably more engaged than Gabby Bernstein herself is, right?
And I found that really interesting.
And I think it says something maybe surprising about the mixture, the mixed demographic that we study.
No, that's absolutely fair comment there.
I just want to say that the obvious thing, which is that during primaries and during the general election, and then after the general election is over, all politicians play the game of figuring out what to say to try to gain the kind of advantage that they need in that phase of the process to be able to get to the place where they can do the things we want to do.
The things Kamala wants to do, including in relation to Israel, I believe are going to
be better overall for humanity than the things Trump wants to do.
I want to round out by looking a little bit more closely at what happens in the hours
after 1.46 p.m.
on that Saturday when Biden's team puts out his stepping down statement and how we might see something deeper than just all of these sparks of bullshit flying.
Sometimes to me it feels easy to lose touch with the fact that BS is just BS in contrast with something else that might be happening, like there's this breathless and frictionless thrill and dread of posting that seems to lift the whole world away from itself, but like the actual world is still there.
And so what I saw in this moment, I mean, you know, childless cat lady, Biden is dead.
Biden has COVID.
He didn't really, you know, step down.
All of this stuff emerges from this moment at 146, where we have these two streams of like meaning production, but only one really has any grounding its shoulder to the wheel.
Like, on one side, we have this digital meme machine, and on the other, we have the physical assets of the DNC, you know, where they're, like, busting out the Rolodexes, the mailing lists, the admins are scheduling Zoom calls with tens of thousands of people at a time.
They're raising hundreds of millions of Ground War dollars in just a few days for Harris.
You know, so on one side you have the split-screen meme of Harris laughing beside a laughing hyena, and on the other side you have like 40,000 black women logging into a fundraising call.
Like, these are different categorical events.
You know, they're trying to make fun of the coconut tree comment, and it's backfiring because Gen Z loves that confusion between cringe and riz.
And then on the other side, labor unions, teachers unions, nurses unions, they're getting pinged through their reps.
They're saying, this is what we're doing.
You got to be on this call.
They are caucusing.
So on one side you have hamsters treading digital water, and on the other you have the printing shops getting lawn signs and t-shirt orders through the night, you know, and Harris 2024 signs, and the t-shirts are showing up on like Monday or Tuesday.
They're being shipped overnight and people are wearing them on the A train in Manhattan.
And this split seems to peak, but I don't think it's letting up, when Musk, just a few days ago, literally posts a deepfake of Harris with an AI voice, validating all of the conspiracy theories against her, confessing to them in an AI voice.
So, what I see is this paradox of two realities in which the action and the weight of one thing seems to outpace the other, but I worry about how it skews our perspective on things because what, in fact, has more gravity and how do we measure it?
Like, we have that insane tweet from Russell Brand I tried to do in his dumb voice or the thing from James Lindsay.
Versus, you know, 40,000 black women on a conference call voting to endorse Harris.
But these things appear in the feed in the same format, in the same tweet form.
Russell Brand posts one tweet, totally insane drivel, and then the report on tens of thousands of people on an actual call.
And there have been larger calls too, like the white women call was 200,000 people.
I read somewhere that it broke Zoom.
All of those events take a single tweet to report.
Now, are we gonna criticize those 200,000 women and the 40,000 black women, et cetera, et cetera,
as all just being okay with Kamala supporting genocide?
Well, hopefully they're on the call and invested enough to actually have a say on it, right?
I mean, they're participating, that's my point.
Yes, I would wonder if at this stage of the game, they're trying to figure out how to get Kamala into power
for their own interests, because they know that it will make their lives better.
And then as part of that, they can start having the very, very difficult conversation
of how she deals with the most intractable conflict probably in the history of the world.
Yeah, sure.
So that makes those comments on Instagram even more important.
If you're saying that there's a bunch of, there's 200,000 white women on a Zoom call and they're actually just sort of vying for their own personal interests and they want her in power first.
And 40,000 black women.
Right.
If all of those people are on calls and they're just all surging for their own interests, For their own interest and for the interest of the people that they support within the country.
Yeah, some of whom might be Arab Americans in Michigan, right?
Sure, sure.
Okay, my point is that we report on insanity, right?
And it takes up as much space and arguably captures more attention than actual in real life consequential action.
But does that in real life stuff have more sustainable material results?
I have a gut feeling that it does because the investment level is higher.
Consuming content is easier than making the time to log into a Zoom call or start rallying your caucus.
And most importantly, it's easier than having substantive debates over how you want to pressure the candidate you're crowning.
Like, it's risky, as you both are suggesting, to press Harris on Gaza before she has it locked up.
But when else do you have the leverage to do it?
Like, there's a real difference in investment.
The meme can't dialogue.
It can't explore difference.
It can't follow Roberts' rules for meetings.
Like, the meme is powerful, but it's low effort, it's loud, it's lazy, but political action is doing something else.
So, I don't know.
Like, I'm left with these questions.
Like, to what extent is the fake-ass meme world that we traffic in impactful in a moment like this.
How do we measure it, except in its own terms?
Its own terms of engagement numbers.
Like, do Brand and Lindsay change anyone's minds?
Do they raise any money for anybody other than themselves?
Do they switch any votes?
Are we covering them as viable, real political actors when maybe they're only media parasites?
And if they are media parasites, The danger in paying them too much attention is that we are parasites on the parasites, right?
Well, I know that as a writer, I would love for everyone to appreciate the tens of thousands of words that I pour into the books that I've written.
But the reality of the media environment is that more people are going to remember a meme
that I make than writing 80,000 words in a book.
So I wouldn't discount the memes because people are not going to forget the dolphin and the
couch from this week.
And when you're in the voting booth, that might push people over.
As someone who takes a lot of time and effort in their craft, of course, I would love for
the world to be what it isn't.
But I think that people are worried about her being a meme candidate.
And right now, I'm all for it.
Yeah, and in terms of like, you know, Russell Brand, James Lindsay, these different people that we've been talking about, yeah, I really take your point, Matthew.
They are expressions of the ephemera of just like the digital fever dream, and they're They're just spewing stuff into the void with consistency that allows them to generate revenue through clicks and advertising and to form alliances with people who will help advance that career move that they've now made.
But, you know, they have millions of followers and they have We've successfully turned repeating right-wing talking points and outrageous conspiracy theories that 10 years ago would have been considered absolutely insane to repeat in polite company into normal parts of the discourse.
And to that extent, yeah, I think they have influence on our political landscape.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
We'll see you here Saturday for a brief or next Thursday for a main feed episode.
