People will reach for anything to relieve the stress of climate anxiety.
There’s outright denial: this can’t be happening. It doesn’t fit in with my understanding of the world. The science must be wrong. During Milton, Catturd wonders why the wind speed keeps changing on the weather reports. They must be making it up. Or the guy in Galveston, TX, posting that he can’t see any hurricane from his Gulf view.
When denial is impractical, there’s political displacement: our enemies are responsible. They’re seeding the clouds, they’re spewing the chemtrails. The Democrats are sparking tornadoes with invisible drones over swing states. They’re using radio waves to steer the hurricane’s eye. They’re clearing land for lithium mining so they can take our gas hog pickups away.
But when the storm surge is just too high to attribute to Jewish space lasers, there’s also good old spiritual displacement: God is punishing our enemies for their sins. We didn’t stop all their abortions and anal sex, and now we are caught in the crossfire of God’s just vengeance.
Today we look at the distortions and disruptions, the fallacies and fables—and not all of them from the right—that keep people locked in climate paralysis.
Show Notes
Food Babe misinformation carousel
Wigington v. MacMartin, 2:21-cv-02355-KJM-DMC
Record Hot Water Is Fueling Hurricane Milton
Hurricane Milton: what causes such intense storms?
What Big Oil knew about climate change, in its own words
Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming | Nature Climate Change
Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models
No obituary for Earth: Scientists fight climate doom talk
Guy McPherson and Near Term Human Extinction - The Mike Nowak Show with Peggy Malecki
Arctic News: It’s time to pursue hospice, by Guy McPherson
Statement on Guy McPherson - Eugene
The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation -
Ecological Grief as a Response to Environmental Change: A Mental Health Risk or Functional Response? - PMC
The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of 'Deep Adaptation' | openDemocracy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'd recommend our listeners check out his Skeptical Sunday episode on hydrotherapy, as well as Jordan's episode about Tarina Shaquille, where he interviews an ISIS recruit's journey and escape.
There's an episode for everyone, though, no matter what you're into.
The show covers stories like how a professional art forger somehow made millions of dollars while being chased by the feds and the mafia.
Jordan's also done an episode all about birth control and how it can alter the partners we pick and how going on or off of the pill can change elements in our personalities.
The podcast covers a lot, but one constant is his ability to pull useful pieces of advice from his guests.
I promise you, you'll find something useful that you can apply to your own life, whether that's an actionable routine change that boosts your productivity or just a slight mindset tweak that changes how you see the world.
We really enjoy this show.
We think you will as well.
There's just so much there.
Check out jordanharbinger.com slash start for some episode recommendations or search for The Jordan Harbinger Show.
That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Music 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 Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
You can also access all of our episodes ad-free plus our Monday bonus episodes at Patreon.com slash Conspirituality.
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episode 228 hurricane trump People will reach for anything to relieve the stress of climate anxiety.
There's outright denial.
This can't be happening.
Doesn't fit in with my understanding of the world.
The science must be wrong.
During Milton, CatTurd wondered on Twitter why the wind speed kept changing on the weather reports.
They must be making it up.
Or there was a guy in Galveston, Texas, posting that he can't see any hurricane from his Gulf view.
When denial is impractical, there's political displacement.
Our enemies are responsible.
They're seeding the clouds.
They're spewing the chemtrails.
The Democrats are sparking tornadoes with invisible drones over the swing states.
They're using radio waves to steer the hurricane's eye.
They're clearing land for lithium mining so they can take our gas hog pickups away.
But when the storm surge is just too high to attribute to Jewish space lasers, there's also good old spiritual displacement.
God is punishing our enemies for their sins.
We didn't stop all their abortions and anal sex, and now we are caught in the crossfire of God's just vengeance.
Today, we look at the distortions and disruptions, the fallacies and fables, and not all of them from the right that keep people locked in climate paralysis.
This Week in Conspirituality We have one This Week in Conspirituality, and it is a bit of an update.
As the influence of MAHA, which is Make America Healthy Again for the Uninitiated, that we've been covering lately, it continues to spread.
So in the last week, Eva Mendes, the actor, and the former model Cindy Crawford, have both shared posts by Vani Hari, who is known as the Food Babe, about America's toxic food system.
And in doing so, they've perpetuated grievous errors.
I'll again caveat this story with the fact that I'm not defending large food manufacturers, nor am I advocating for a diet rich in ultra-processed foods.
But I'm also not going to demonize processed foods or ultra-processed foods and remind listeners that the intent here is to point out how Maha continues to focus solely on individualized health solutions while barely paying lip service to systemic problems and also never actually offering solutions to the real problems here.
So I was reading Laurie Garrett's 2001 book recently.
It's called Portrayal of Trust, the Collapse of Global Public Health.
And I was reminded how common this technique is on the right.
She writes that during the Bush and Reagan administrations, health problems were always framed as moral failings so that leaders wouldn't have to address policy changes.
Then, as now, the deregulation of agencies is the actual goal.
And so you get to food babe and her myopic focus on a few ingredients as being indicative of this issue.
So what misinformation is Mendez and Crawford helping to perpetuate?
Well, Food Babe pins food addiction on cereal manufacturers, yet studies show that sugar addiction is largely conducted on rats, the studies that supposedly show it, and addiction research on humans is very complex.
Hari doesn't account for the social, environmental, and biological factors that produce binge eating and food addiction, and she puts the onus entirely on the product, which is not supported by research.
Second, the Fruit Loops banner that Hari has been waving, she did in front of Congress, in front of Kellogg's headquarters recently, and this was shared by both Mendez and Crawford, is demonstrably wrong.
Hari claims that BHT is banned in Canada and the EU, but it's not.
It's just called E321 there.
They have a different coding system.
And this also goes for all the other dyes, Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1, and Yellow 6.
None of them are banned in the EU, but Hari continues to say they are.
And finally, she also claims cereal manufacturers use safer ingredients overseas.
So first off, they're using some of the same ingredients as I just said, but she also fails to note that some of those dyes that are used overseas in the EU and Australia are actually banned in the US for safety reasons.
Now this is just the Fruit Loops graphic, and I'll include a link in the show notes to an excellent infographic carousel that Dr.
Andrea Love and dietitian Danielle Shine created detailing all of Hari's misinformation.
So this is such a powerful example, Derek, because when she uses the visual aids, it's so compelling for people, right?
right?
And it's probably why these celebrities are sharing it because she can hold up one bag of Froot Loops that is brightly colored, fluorescent, right?
And then hold up another bag that looks kind of boring and is dull in its coloring and say, this is what they're selling to us in America, to American kids.
And it's horribly toxic compared to this, right?
How do we sort of account for the difference in her visual aids?
The visually that I'm talking about right now is the actual ingredient list.
It's on a graphic that she's been using.
She has also held up products in front of Congress, but what Mendez and Crawford shared were the ingredient list.
And so in the EU, you see a different ingredient list that says things like beet dyes and things of that nature.
The broader point is that a diet high in sugar and fats and eating mostly processed foods as your diet or ultra processed foods is not healthy, but she's disambiguating all of the information that you would need to understand and look at different coding systems and just presenting it as if the obesity and the toxic food problem is purely on Kellogg's.
And that's what flattens the argument right now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so the difference in those ingredient lists as well as the coloring of the products that she holds up comes down to variation in terms of how things are regulated and even the classification and the names that they give to different ingredients in different parts of the world.
But they try to pin that Yes, exactly, Julian.
I just want to reiterate, if you can afford to buy whole foods and cook them every day, that's awesome.
Fear-mongering around processed foods and ultra-processed foods when influencers like Hari sell processed foods like protein powders and energy bars is the real problem here.
That still kills me.
That still kills me.
You said that last week.
It's like you go to a website and it's like, all packaged, processed foods.
Nothing that you would pull out of your garden or anything like that.
No, not at all.
And her buddy, Jason Karp, who sold Human Co.
or Hugh Co.
his chocolate company to Mondelez for $375 million and now sells frozen pizza bites.
He's out there.
He was the one holding up the Froot Loops bag in Congress while Holly was talking.
Do you know what we should do is we should get together with Mallory and we should grab some of Hari's products and we should mimic those graphic memes where we hold up her packages and we sort of circle the ingredients on the back and we point out whatever we want to point out.
I think that would be great.
I have been thinking about that, so you preempted it.
Oh, okay.
All right.
It's going to show up on Derek's TikTok soon.
All right.
So thinking that some foods are inherently toxic or addictive can easily lead to disordered eating.
And again, I'll caveat that some foods are manufactured to be addictive.
That is not false.
I'm really drilling down on their techniques here.
Because systemic problems need to be addressed through regulations, yet you'll never find Hari advocating for that.
Here's the thing.
What Love and Shine did is checkable by anyone on the internet.
You can easily find the information that shows Hari spouting bullshit here.
And all this reminds me of a recent interview with Colin Holbeck, who we covered on episode 44 for his HBO documentary on QAnon, which was called Q Into the Storm.
So in that series, he tried to reveal who Q was, but in his new HBO doc, which is called Money Electric, The Bitcoin Mystery, he tries to reveal the identity of Bitcoin's creator, who is known as Satoshi Nakamoto.
He talked to Hard Fork last Friday, and he mentioned a similarity between Q and Nakamoto.
And it's this.
Their followers, their hardcore followers and accolades, are not interested in facts, but the feelings that they get believing the conspiracies.
And Hoback said a number of people in both documentaries knew what they were saying is not true, but they actually just did not consider it.
You know, I love Colin Hoback's work, but I think he really has to understand that Bitcoin is all about the Bored Monkeys friends that we made along the way.
The Bored Apes?
Did you mean Bored Apes?
Bored Apes?
Oh man, I can't even do the joke.
I can't even do the joke.
Nice try, nice try.
I know, right.
So this same thing is likely true for fans of Maha.
Confronting systemic problems that lead to health problems is overwhelming.
But an evil group of men intentionally injecting dangerous chemicals into breakfast cereals to control the population, well, that's something they can fight, even if the fight only amounts to trolling social media accounts, which is most of it right now.
And as we're about to get into now with the main part of the episode, this is also a piece of the puzzle in understanding the belief that the government is spinning up hurricanes in red states.
As Hurricanes Helene and Milton delivered back-to-back devastation, my inbox told me that RFK Jr.'s Children's Health Defense streaming TV's Good Morning show had a new segment up called Geoengineering Controlling the Weather.
Now, this had second billing on the show in the video thumbnail to the main story, which was about the latest in the anti-vax movie trilogy, Vaxxed 3, Authorized to Kill.
I think it stars Jean-Claude Van Damme.
I mention this because Children's Health Defense sends out at least one email every day that links to new articles and videos on pages of the website where you can donate to the organization.
Like many independent digital media channels, the style of their content demonstrates how conspiracism and pseudoscience become the context for an expanding circle of nonsensical claims, all delivered with breathless urgency.
They just sent out an email this morning about a fucking holistic veterinary book that they're releasing.
I'm just going to say this now.
You've been fucking with human health for a long time.
You are not coming for our pets.
For Derek's cats.
No, no, no.
The dogs on the cover, my wife and I are going to be getting a Rhodesian Ridge back soon.
Really?
Yes.
So we're reading all these books, puppy training, and we talk to a trainer that's a block away from us.
And the most important thing is that when we get this dog, which is probably going to be next summer, we have to wait for the vaccinations before letting him mingle or her mingle with other They're dogs because there are so many deadly diseases they can get.
So this fucking holistic veterinarian, if they're saying not to vax your animals, no.
Oh, it's a thing.
It's a thing.
Antivax for pets is already a thing, yeah.
So sometimes on this show, we talk about algorithms, right?
And it can sound a little abstract and nerdy.
But basically, this logic that I'm observing about children's health defense and that you just pinged as well, Derek, it's the same logic that suggests to you on Amazon or Netflix or Spotify that, hey, if you like this thing, there are 10 more similar ones that we think will be a good fit.
So, as I said, Children's Health Defense has this streaming TV service.
I didn't know that until recently.
And they have a good morning show, like a lot of TV networks do.
And I want to just set the stage here with a little audio featuring one of the hosts.
Her name is Mary Holland.
And here's how she introduces their coverage of hurricane season.
So we've all been hearing for the last several days about the devastation in North Carolina and Tennessee and also in other places in Florida and other southern states from Hurricane Helene.
And we've been very fortunate in recent months to have Dane Wigington of Geoengineering Watch with us and giving us regular segments.
And so we thought we'd bring on Dr.
Wigington and also Josh Stileman, Welcome
to my show!
Panels after panels.
So who is this guy, Dane Wigington?
He's their expert they're bringing on to talk about geoengineering.
He's an amateur enthusiast.
He runs a website called Geoengineering Watch.
They start the segment by playing, and I found this is one of his favorite reference points here, this excerpt from a Lyndon B. Johnson speech in which he predicts how new technology could create satellite telecommunications And help humanity to control the weather.
And that clip ends with him saying, he who controls the weather will control the world.
He who controls the weather will control the world.
So Dane, speak to us about that.
Of course the hurricanes are being steered.
There's no rational denial of that.
We've recorded the frequency transmission manipulation of these storms.
And if we go back all the way to 1947, Project Cirrus, the U.S. military's launch into hurricane manipulation, even with very, very minimal interventions at that time, they had catastrophic results so much so that That they went back into the shadows after that.
There were lawsuits pending and so forth because of their redirection of a hurricane with very minimal efforts and resources.
Of course they're steering these storms.
We can speculate about the agendas and objectives.
This is always the case with Dane Wigington.
He speaks very fast and he jumps all over the place.
Who is this guy?
He's the owner of a wildlife preserve He's a former solar energy contractor.
I think that's his real claim to some kind of qualification.
He's the author of a 2017 book titled Geoengineering, A Chronicle of Indictment.
You probably heard Mary Holland calling him a doctor in her intro, but there's no evidence that that means anything.
We couldn't find anything on that.
He plays one on streaming TV. He does live in a renewable powered home in the spiritual vortex land of Shasta, California, however.
Is he a chiropractor?
He might be.
I don't know.
What else do you need?
So those are his actual qualifications, which of course led him to make a 2021 documentary film called The Dimming, unpacking the same government weather conspiracy allegations that we're going to hear him continue to offer us.
Wigington was also a leader.
He's been at this for a while, back in 2015, of a group claiming that the California drought was caused by particles secretly sprayed into the air by planes trying to block the sun's rays.
I just checked, he's a YouTuber, so that gives him his doctor qualifications.
I think that the particles were also maybe messing up his solar panel efficiency, because that's his real passion, maybe.
But this guy can also behave in a super fragile and not very smart way.
There was this lawsuit when legitimate Cornell climate scientist Douglas McMartin fact-checked the dimming, the documentary, for a website called Climate Feedback, which is used by Meta and TikTok to assess climate claims on their platforms.
And Wigington got his posts dinged with misinformation notices.
Now, in his review of the film, McMartin said that, quote, all of these claims are pure fantasy.
We also know with 100% certainty that A, the aircraft contrails they see aren't geoengineering, and B, no one is doing geoengineering, unquote.
He then did that whole science thing of explaining by citing peer-reviewed research, you know, why the documentary was bullshit.
And Wigington was outraged and sued McMartin personally for $75,000 in reputational damage and lost income, presumably from YouTube, in the California Superior Court.
But then he lost because he was wrong and the court upheld McMartin's slap countersuit so Wigington had to pay legal fees as well.
Wow.
His website is amazing.
I mean, do you have to go through this, Julian?
I mean, it looks like it was built on Geocities in 1998.
That's the most environmentally friendly website, actually.
Geocities.
There are very few web designers where he lives out in Shasta.
Yeah.
So the response that we just heard him starting to give, probably listeners were just like, what the hell is he talking about?
He goes right to the origin point, right away.
So we're talking about Hurricane Helene, and he goes right to the weather control conspiracy theory, Project Cirrus that General Electric ran in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force from 1947 to 1952.
And part of the objective of Project Cirrus was to weaken hurricanes, to experiment with trying to weaken hurricanes using cloud seeding techniques.
This line of research, which also included something called Project Storm Fury, which is tailor-made for conspiracists, turned out to be abandoned as fruitless.
It didn't really do what they wanted it to do.
But in the melted conspiracy mirror world, it merely went underground.
And they're still doing it, and it's being used to control hurricanes for ulterior motives.
As we continue, Wiginton goes on to describe a problem of alternative media denying climate Wiginton goes on to describe a problem of alternative media denying climate change altogether and mainstream media and academia denying the climate engineering that is actually causing climate change.
He says we are statistically and mathematically headed toward an omnicide.
There's a lot of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, he says, because we aren't going to be around for very much longer.
Yeah, so this is a mirror world form of something called Doomerism, which I'm going to get to later as a kind of uber conspiracy theory.
But in real life Doomers, these are people who respect the science enough to be able to read it.
them the worst possible data from it, and then they fixate on it.
They talk about things like omnicide, and you're going to hear the phrase near-term human extinction.
And they will say that this is being caused not by governmental engineering, but by governmental inaction in the face of the oil economy, which itself is engineering endless profits.
So the targets are different, but the ideas and the vibes are the same.
Yeah, yeah.
So we're going to get a little more into that in a bit.
To her credit in this interview, the host really does try to nail Wigington down on the facts and the data.
Like, does he have any specific evidence about how Hurricane Helene might have been manipulated?
There's no might.
We recorded the frequency transmissions that did manipulate this storm.
And we can speculate as to what they're going to do with Milton.
But again, with all these factors, it's part of the endgame that's playing out, and we have insect populations completely crashing around the globe, wildlife populations crashing, fisheries crashing, oceans dying, forests completely imploding all over the globe, and we have the vast majority of the human race ignoring that, and climate engineering, of course, fueling all of that, making it far worse, not better, in the attempt to hide it, Mary.
just like the pharmaceutical, quote, treatment for a symptom in the human body, and you listen to the side effects and you wonder who would take that, but people do.
It's the same mentality now.
And frankly, for us at geoengineeringwatch.org, it is baffling that the vast majority still, mainstream and alt media, are ignoring the fact that statistically, mathematically, on this trajectory, short of a complete course correction, none of us are going to be here that long ago.
And that's not centuries.
That's not decades.
We're facing a much nearer term still, and that's not even taking into account the power structure, triggering a nuclear war.
Right.
Right.
She's really trying to get in there.
You know, you can hear all of the hooks, right?
because he's right on the wildlife collapse theme.
But, you know, as with COVID contrarians who imagine that the mitigation strategies, the vaccines, the masking are somehow worse than the disease, he's not actually talking about climate change itself, but the ostensible attempts to but the ostensible attempts to fight it, which in this case aren't actually real.
Yeah, and so that deluge actually kept going for another full minute, because it turns out that that kind of Gish Gallup is all he's got.
Strong declarations, nonspecific references to recorded frequency transmissions, and then connecting to whatever other conspiracy theories, and, of course, some legitimate, scientifically-based causes of anxiety.
But we heard even the Children's Health Defense host was getting impatient there.
Let's see what he says next.
But I'm trying to focus right now on Hurricane Helene, if I might.
You said that there's no might and that you have transmission data.
What is that data that you're referencing, Dane?
Uh-oh.
The next red network of frequency transmissions, the frequency transmissions manipulate the storm.
They have a repelling effect on an atmospheric System air mass that's been saturated with electrically conductive particles.
We've recorded this in real time painstakingly.
It's on geoengineeringwatch.org.
We recorded Hurricane Harvey.
What you see right there on that screen, you can see the transmission energizing to the west of Hurricane Helene, which keeps it from migrating in that direction and corrals it more or less.
And then on the east, you see where it's So for those of us who are ignorant, how is that being done?
How is that being steered, as you said?
Okay, well, we just saw the film, and when you see all those little blue circles energized, those are separate transmission facilities.
They have a repelling effect on the storm and the air mass, so they can prevent it from migrating in certain directions and thus push it in other directions.
So again, these are patented technologies.
This is nothing new.
Yeah, as he's describing this, we're seeing meteorological thermal images that he thinks support his claim of hurricanes being stared Wherever a nefarious they wants them to go, he's referring to NEXRAD, or the Next Generation Weather Radar System.
It's a network of 160 high-resolution Doppler weather radars.
They're used to detect wind and rain patterns and gather climate data.
So yes, As you watch the screen, that system is measured as being active during a hurricane because it is sending out transmissions in the form of radio wave pulses that then come back as part of how they measure weather events.
So he is seeing something happening on the screen.
There's no evidence that this is or even could be used to control the hurricane.
Even though other ways of impacting rainfall and to a less successful extent, weakening hurricanes have been explored scientifically in the past.
There's something unclear to me about this, though, because he's saying that the NEXRAD radars are sending out the blue swirls and forming a barrier line to the western sort of contour of Helene's remnants as it swirls over North Carolina.
But also, blue swirls are often part of NEXRAD weather maps themselves.
He's saying that some of the images on this map are of the weather, and other images are the mapping instruments taking images of themselves.
When I, as an amateur, look into the meaning of the blue swirls on a storm map...
There are a lot of possible meanings.
Most of the sources suggest various forms of precipitation because they're on the edge of a hurricane, maybe.
It's very, very odd that he thinks this is proof of anything.
But he's speaking to Mary Holland from his home office and it feels very officious and he's sitting up very straight and he has this robotic urgency and certainty.
And his pseudoscience flow is really good.
And it reminded me about how, you know, politicians and influencers can get training.
You know, like when Tim Walls came into the scene, there were all of these stories about how he'd come up in politics through Camp Wellstone in Minnesota.
That's the political boot camp named after the late senator.
So they gave leadership.
The great Paul Wellstone.
Yeah, they gave leadership workshops and organizing and stumping.
I am starting to wonder whether Bobby has a similar boot camp, like maybe on one of his Falcon ranches, where like underlings, they can go and they can do gish gallop drills.
They can bring in the Maha version of Harry Mack.
Maybe it's somebody like Sasha Stone.
and they can learn how to take three random terms, like vaccines, 5G, and chemtrails, and just freestyle on them.
Well, you said 5G. This morning on our Instagram, I posted an advertisement Russell Brand did for an EMF blocking device, an amulet, that he's working with.
So maybe that would work to help combat the people who are fucking with the weather.
Yeah, and Russell definitely has the sort of freestyle Gish Gallup training module down.
He could do an online course, Masterbind or something.
I want to go a little into the history of this idea of controlling the weather because the idea itself is not created in a vacuum.
But I want to take a moment to consider the impact that these sorts of interviews that you've clipped from here, Julian, have on people.
So the good liars are political comedians Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler.
And they got their start cosplaying investment bankers during Occupy Wall Street.
They have a great social media presence.
I love following them.
And they've built a following doing these sorts of man-on-the-street interviews at political rallies that are quite common now, but they were very early with this.
So I want to play a clip from a woman that they talked to a few days before Hurricane Milton hit, because it's kind of the perfect representation of how these conspiracy theories infect the public mind.
What do you think happened with the hurricanes?
I think there was an upcoming storm and then I think government set in with whatever it is that they do.
I don't know all the specifics about it.
I'm not an expert in cloud seeding or whatever it is that they use to magnify the storm to a higher degree to disturb a land that may be wanted for lithium that Harris's husband is partaking in.
You're implying that the government made a hurricane stronger to hurt its own country, the United States of America?
Correct.
And what would be the gain of that?
There's been people out there, if they have an Alexa, I don't know if you've heard that, and they've asked, what caused Milton?
You can go on there now.
It's already predicted the number of deaths and the amount of deaths.
It's already predicted it.
On Google, it won't do that.
If you ask it about Helene, it'll tell you the government actively used seed clouding.
Why would a country want to have a hurricane be strong and hit its own country?
Because they want to control certain places.
And if you're looking at where the hurricane's going, it's a lot of red states.
If you're looking at the counties in North Carolina that were hit, there were all of them, 26 out of 28 of those counties were for Trump.
They're doing whatever they can because they can't rig the election.
Even control the weather?
Yes.
So just to point out, she's pinging the conspiracy theory that Helene was manipulated to clear land in North Carolina for mining the lithium that prospectors have recently detected there.
So that's about the very expensive and rare mineral that's essential to electric car production, which itself would be an attack on the American way of life if it was set into motion or something like that.
But you know, I find this type of interaction kind of tough to read because it's a very strange, charged, performative scenario.
Like, she's at a rally, she wants to contribute, she's with friends or family, she probably doesn't know it's a hostile microphone.
I think the main thing she wants to communicate is concern over government neglect.
And of course, that's what red states are all about.
And so the discourse is always about externalizing blame for that.
So she's there to make a general statement in support of her network, of people, but she doesn't know anything about the hurricane itself.
And so all she can do is really turn it into a metaphor for...
For how everything is being mishandled.
And I think that's often what we're seeing.
She'd probably give the same answer about COVID or immigration.
These become metaphors that then get translated into policy projects by Project 2025.
Yeah, and then at the same time, you have someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is tweeting about this and saying, if you don't think the government can control the weather, you're an idiot, sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's a mixture of those things, right?
It's like she doesn't know enough to be able to say—you can hear that she doesn't know enough to be able to back up what she's saying.
But to Derek's point, she's heard enough of these kinds of interviews that she has a general sketch of how to connect the dots on this bullshit.
Yeah, I guess the interview data has hooked into some earnest feelings that she has about peril in her home country, in her home county.
And that's just so tragic to me.
I also don't want to take away agency from her, though.
I'm going to give her the agency to have an emotional response without having the data or the intellectual framework to actually back it up, which she clearly doesn't because the guy keeps asking her, why would this happen?
She doesn't have an answer, but she does have the emotion behind it.
That's what I want to point to.
That's where I think her agency is.
Well, that's the entire project.
I mean, vibes over data is pretty much everything that we cover.
So if we take that sort of argument, which I'm not entirely disagreeing with, but then you can apply it to a Marjorie Taylor Greene as well, whether or not they're knowingly exploiting people.
In this case, I don't think she's intentionally exploiting someone.
I would put that more on a Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it's all coming from a Marjorie Taylor Greene can't back up what she says either.
No, no.
She can only go out and win votes and money with it.
Yeah, and there's two feelings there, Matthew, right?
One feeling is about neglect.
And actually, if she dug deeper into the facts behind that feeling, she would find some things that might make her less of a Republican.
But the other feeling is that the Democrats are evil and nefarious, and they would do anything to try to steal the election.
Right.
So this idea that humans influence the weather goes back to at least the 18th century.
During the Seven Years' War, soldiers believed that firing cannons prevented hail.
During the American Civil War, soldiers made a connection between the end of major battles and the rain that would precede them.
Yeah, this was a really amazing blend of science and religion that some thought that the artillery had catalyzed rainfall, but also then some others thought that God was cleansing the battlefields of blood and the sin of war.
From there, our government really started to try it.
So near the end of the 19th century, the U.S. Department of War spent $9,000 on explosives to try to induce rain in Texas.
That project was unsuccessful.
But in 1948, Dr.
Ervin Langmuir successfully seeded clouds in New Mexico.
And these programs picked up with both the U.S. and Russia seeding clouds during the Cold War.
So changing the weather is not completely false.
And right now, the largest weather modification system in the world is in Beijing, in China, and it employs 37,000 people.
Yeah, and they're really doing it there.
They use it to temporarily clear skies of pollution.
The CCP has their annual meeting, or the Olympics come to Beijing, and they can clear the pollution a little bit.
They've also been able to reduce the damage of hail in certain areas.
All right, so we need to figure out the different sources that we're looking at here and what it all nets out to, because when I look at I see that the scientific consensus is that after over 50 years of research, cloud seeding has very small effects, if any, that it's not particularly reliable.
It may work under certain environmental conditions to increase precipitation by a few percent over an entire season.
That's from the National Academy of Sciences.
Most of the data seems to be in that range, with some outliers providing enthusiasts with reasons to be more optimistic about how reliable and how big the effects are.
Yeah, I think those sources are all on point.
What I'm pointing to are the very limited applications, as have been described in CNN and The Guardian and Bloomberg and so on, of these very sort of small attempts to clear the cloud cover over Beijing when there's excess pollution.
So yeah, different tasks, but definitely no mass-scale agricultural application yet.
As with everything with a little bit of truth, this is where the conspiracy theories enter.
In 1996, the Air Force published a paper that was called Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025.
And this speculated about future weather modification capabilities.
Now, despite being clearly labeled as speculative, it became the proof that conspiracy theorists needed to confirm that the government is already controlling the weather.
Now, shortly after this came chemtrails.
And this was the idea that condensation trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents.
And so you have former Air Force medic and conspiracy-friendly radio host Art Bell pumping the chemtrail conspiracy theory in 1999.
He was sort of a harbinger to Alex Jones, although not nearly as extreme in some of his views.
Now, given the existence of legitimate cloud seeding and weather modification research, conspiracy theories easily evolved from that, especially in a country that's so distrustful of institutions like the United States.
Yeah, and chemtrail rumors take off on the back of those attempted tweaks of weather patterns by the military, which, you know, even if they were to work, they would be invisible against what it took to heat up the Gulf waters last week to fuel Hurricane Milton.
where, you know, ocean waters are two to three degrees hotter than average in layers that go hundreds of feet deep.
But what is incredible to me is that Art Bell and other people like him are overlooking in the 1980s, which is a crucial time for climate awareness, or maybe he just didn't care about it, is that the actual weather modification caused by carbon emissions...
At a scale that can heat up oceans was a known fact going back to at least 1959, when the H-bomb co-inventor Edward Teller told a gathering of oil executives that whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide.
Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect, unquote.
Teller went on to talk about the threat to coastal cities.
Then in 1965, Frank Icard, who's the president of the American Petroleum Institute, quote, Quoted a Lyndon Johnson ordered report on environmental risk to his colleagues at their annual meeting, spotlighting that the current emissions rate would cause temperatures to rise by the year 2000.
And so the API kept a research team tracking this for years, but they also kept the findings secret.
And then Exxon started its own Hidden research project in 1982 after an internal memo the previous year said that the company's long-term business plans could, quote, produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic, at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth's population, unquote.
Exxon's 1982 report accurately predicted our current emissions and temperature impacts, but it stayed buried while they kept selling oil for ever-larger cars until ecojournalists dug it up in around 2015.
15.
So it's amazing how people can always be tricked into looking the other way.
You think of the millions of miles driven by guys listening to Art Bell on the radio go on about chemtrails, you know, while their big ass cars are belching tons of carbon.
So he misses the actual conspiracy at the heart of this episode that nobody's really changing the weather directly.
But we have a small number of oil barons who have known for 65 years that their products would make enthusiastic consumers complicit in the heat death of the planet while they rake in more money than God.
And just for anyone who doesn't know, Art Bell had this radio show called Coast to Coast, It started in 1978.
It was at one point the most popular overnight radio show in the country.
It had around 10 million listeners, and it was all conspiracies, paranormal, UFOs.
It's actually a precursor to what we understand as conspirituality today.
And it just hits me again, going back to my This Week in Conspirituality, how much this lines up with what Maha is doing.
It's like they get the basics right.
We have health problems in America, but they can never identify what would actually lead to the solutions.
And it's the perpetual issue with knowingly spreading conspiracies or withholding information, or even unknowingly, there's always collateral damage.
And nowhere is that on display more right now than in Trump's hurricane disinformation campaign.
So as soon as Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina, Trump and his acolytes claimed that FEMA wasn't doing anything and that Biden was refusing to fund FEMA to help out those areas.
And the same thing happened to a lesser degree on Milton because the damage wasn't as extensive.
But Trump said money earmarked for FEMA was given to illegal migrants by Kamala Harris.
And none of this is true.
FEMA was on the ground directly after the hurricane struck, and they even fought the disinformation on their website.
Republican governors and mayors pushed back against Trump saying they were getting everything they needed from the federal government.
And even though Ron DeSantis refused to take a phone call from Harris leading up to Milton, he did acknowledge that the federal government was in touch and providing everything that they needed to prepare.
But this assumes that people will go to FEMA's website and then believe what they say instead of Trump.
So instead, what you get is an email to FEMA about an armed militia roaming North Carolina's Rutherford County that was hunting aid workers and causing delays in their work.
Now, this turned out to be one man who's...
So bad.
Now, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell denounced this situation as well as Trump's disinformation.
She stated, frankly, that type of rhetoric is demoralizing to our staff that have left their families to come here and help the people of North Carolina, and we will be here as long as they're needed.
So what were the downstream effects of this disinformation?
Well, on Monday, the wellness company sent out an email discussing how FEMA is running out of money and people need to rely on their own health with a link to their supplements and antibiotics emergency kit, naturally.
And this links back to what I've been on about with Maha for weeks in terms of like you have these wellness people and Kennedy linking up with these far right figures in the government as if they're going to solve the health crisis if Trump is reelected.
But in September, 100 Republicans voted against a bill that included FEMA funding in Congress.
You also had 11 Florida Republican representatives in the state voting against the state bill doing the same thing.
And some of these politicians are also involved in the FEMA money is going to illegal migrants camp.
And in fact, if you look at Project 2025, which some of these Republicans are on board with, there's a chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, and they advocate for shifting money out of FEMA and into state funds.
And then in the very next paragraph, they say that the Department of Homeland Security needs to focus more on securing and controlling the border than worrying about emergencies.
Now, the chapter actually concludes the Secretary of DHS, the Secretary should direct FEMA to ensure that all FEMA-issued grant funding for states, localities, and private organizations and private organizations is going to recipients who are lawful actors, can demonstrate that they are in compliance with federal law, and can show that their mission and actions support the broader Homeland Security
and can show that their mission and actions support the broader Homeland Security mission.
And in Project 2025, that mission is predominantly focused on kicking immigrants out of the country.
While the advice is given throughout that terms like climate change or other related terms be just expunged from all government documents, right?
Yeah, that is some legit Civil War bullshit there.
Yeah.
FEMA funds should only be given to people who are on board with our ideological program.
And this is why I get so frustrated on our social media channels and in general with people who are all on this Maha train right now, like Ron Johnson and the rest of our Republicans, are actually going to do something about our health when you read their fucking plans and you see they are not interested.
Their only interest is deregulation.
All right, so we started to touch on chemtrails a little bit here.
We lost the trail there.
It's fading in the sky.
It's dispersed.
For a moment there, there was a con trail, which we decided to call a chem trail, and then it got blown away by all of the hot air of these wild and disgusting conspiracies.
But let's go back to Dane Wigington.
Because it turns out this is not the first instance of him being handed the mic by RFK Jr.
or his proxies.
And in fact, in 2023, Bobby himself hosted the man on his podcast for an episode titled, Are Chemtrails Real?
Climate engineers themselves...
Have stated their goal of putting tens of millions of tons of aluminum nanoparticles into the atmosphere annually as part of solar radiation management to block some of the sun's incoming thermal energy with no consideration of the consequences whatsoever.
So, okay, you know, this is a classic conspiracy theory, right?
Chemtrails.
People who talk about chemtrails are, you know, are regarded as tinfoil hats.
So tell us, you know, what proof do we have that chemtrails are happening and who is doing it?
Because you see, you know, I'm on a flight path coming into LAX and I see commercial aircraft with contrails coming out of their tails.
And that's not, those aren't chemtrails, you know, I assume.
Are chemtrails, are they putting the aluminum particulates in commercial aircraft?
Or is this all military aircraft or civilian contractors?
And what kind of evidence do we have that it's going on?
Unless you're seeing a plane landing with perhaps a wing vortex, which is certainly...
A benign phenomenon or a fuel dump.
If you're seeing an aircraft emitting a trail at altitude, even a commercial aircraft, the chances are almost certain that that is a sprayed dispersion or a fuel additive happening in that aircraft, which is also part of climate engineering operations.
The chances are almost certain.
You know, you really have to wonder what Bobby's editorial policy is on guests that they keep asking, so what's the evidence for this?
And the guest gives them none like over and over again.
Like, is he really the best they have?
Like, it's funny to hear them be frustrated by it.
I do appreciate that Bobby shows a smidge of concern and self-reflection here by wondering whether the commercial and domestic flights he's taking all the time are actually part of the problem.
Because, in fact, they are.
They're just not the chemtrail problem type.
You know, I couldn't find exact data on Bobby's flying frequency.
I'm going to guess that especially during campaigning, he was easily taking 100 flights per year.
That's two per week.
That's got to be a conservative estimate.
But the average U.S. citizen flies domestic only two to three times per year.
That's an average.
Some fly a lot, some fly not at all.
But his carbon debt is massive compared to everybody else.
I'm going to guess the biggest problem with RFK Jr.
flying is when he walks around barefoot on the planes.
Well, there's that.
He also gets busted in the washroom with heroin.
But anyway, I think this is a perfect snapshot of what the culture does.
You're doing this visible, obvious, shameful thing in broad daylight and while you are doing it, you really have to wonder what that other guy off in the distance might be doing that's worse than you.
Okay, guys, so those were all disruptive, but also very predictable diversions from the right.
And they all wind up, I think, in the same place, which is that nature is good.
God will protect us.
We can't or we shouldn't do anything about climate change, which we're not sure is really real.
But if it is, then maybe it's good.
But I kind of want to take a turn here to underline that climate terror is vast and equal opportunity enough that paralysis and spiritual bypassing can come really in any political flavor.
I think we haven't really dealt with a similar issue in the sense that there's this general vulnerability to really bad thinking because the stakes are so high and there are so many unknowns.
Yeah, and I'll just note here, you know, my sense is that one thing conspiracy communities and cults, and I would even argue traditional religions and wellness companies all have in common, is that they provide fantasy-based solutions for searing existential anxieties.
And this is no different.
They exploit our need to have silver bullet answers, to identify and then punish or sacrifice scapegoats, to enact magical rituals, to anticipate special saviors who are to come, or slather ourselves in snake oil remedies.
And this is all an antidote against the unknown, against loss of control, against the mortal and vulnerable realities of a world that we find unbearable at times.
Yeah, and there are people who seem to have a more realistic approach to this than others.
There are a lot of folks who know that the climate science is legitimate.
They watch the models soar out of control.
They hang out with older activists who have worked their entire lives and they've seen everything get worse.
And a segment of these folks spiral into what's called climate dumerism.
There's another word out there.
It's collapsology, which is an apocalyptic mindset that echoes religious positions that go way back, but it also has echoes in more modern crackpot theories like the black-pilled point of view that was presented in 1968 in the population bomb by Paul and Ann Ehrlich, which predicted global starvation and social collapse by the 1980s.
Of course, that didn't happen.
Welcome to my show!
Now, the first thing that they do is, and this is, I don't think it's, it's not unlike the vaccine alarmists, is that they cherry pick the worst possible combinations of outlier studies to drive their predictions of doom.
Secondly, they share a loathing for what they call hopium.
They believe that when people like Naomi Klein or Rebecca Solnit attempt to rally and support climate activists, they're actually suppressing the austere truth that only the real Doomer ascetics are brave enough to tolerate and for which only they have authentic spiritual answers.
So I've got two examples.
The first one is he's on the extreme end, and he's a little bit fringe, but very influential.
Guy McPherson.
63 years old.
He's a professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.
He's known by his critics now as Dr.
Doom for crackpot predictions, such as in 2007, he predicted the peak oil collapse of trucking and the interstate system by 2012.
He said that civilization was going to end by 2018 from peak oil.
The climate was going to boil us all on our skins by 2020.
In 2016, he gave all life on the planet 10 years.
So we've got a few years left on that one.
He also coined the phrase near-term human extinction.
This was back in the early 2000s.
And serious sounding phrases like this, morbid sounding phrases like this, have had, in my experience, a profound impact on the emotional landscape of the climate movement.
So Extinction Rebellion, for example, uses that stylized hourglass as their logo, and they'll put on these theatrical performances where they dress up like the goddesses of the earth and elements, and they'll say things on their website like, we are on the brink of a global catastrophe.
They'll warn of threats like crop failure, social collapse, and mass extinction events.
All things to be very aware of.
And Wigington is picking up on some of this stuff.
In his Gish Gallup, he's referencing all of this.
He even used near-term human extinction or some sort of variant.
Oh, did he?
He said something very similar.
Yeah.
McPherson has been economically off-grid, or so he says, since leaving the University of Arizona many years ago.
He now survives off of donations.
He's moved...
Into the role of grief counselor for those who get overwhelmed by doomerism.
So there's kind of like a supply and demand thing here going on.
And predictably, for someone with extreme views who has come to reject his actual discipline in favor of pseudotherapy, he has gained a following around him and has also been accused of power abuses within that following, which have not been tested in court, which he denies, but I'll link to in the show notes.
Now, given McPherson's faith in near-term human extinction, does he have any advice?
He went to a hearing held by the New York City Council Committee on Environmental Protection in June of this year, and he said this.
Julian, do you want to read what he says?
I'm often asked for advice about how to live during these tenuous times.
In response, I recommend living fully.
I recommend living with intention.
I recommend living urgently with death in mind.
I recommend the pursuit of excellence.
I recommend the pursuit of love.
Each of us was born into a set of living arrangements over which we have no control.
The scorched earth policies we have adopted and implemented during the last two centuries have led to the expected outcome, a scorched earth.
The time for blame has long passed.
The time for shaming others has long passed.
No blame, no shame.
At the edge of extinction, only love remains.
Let's pursue hospice as one expression of our love.
Yeah, so imagine being in a mood like that all the time, and then counseling people you influence with it.
Would you be surprised to know that he's got suicide hotline numbers up on his website?
He's not sounding like a scientist anymore, but people are only listening to him because he was a scientist.
Well, and this is a really fascinating variation, Matthew.
It's almost akin to how Kali Yuga fatalism, right?
We live in the darkest of times based on an inevitable cosmic cycle of ages, how this is then exploited by ultra-right accelerationists like Alexander Dugan, but without the promise of a return to a golden age.
You know, I hear that The quote I just read from him, and some of it is somewhat appealing.
It has shades of this existentialist humanism in it.
Like, this is our predicament, and so let's live fully with eyes open to what's coming.
Yeah, I can see how it would actually appeal to an atheist, right?
It's like, well, there's nothing to do but love each other at the end, because there's nothing that's coming afterwards.
But Julian, this is the atheist who's saying this is happening in 2026.
Yeah, it's an atheist with a prophecy.
Yeah.
Right.
So, one of the ways, this is really interesting, in which Doomers bootstrap the discussion of climate science into the spiritual realm is that they focus on two subjects that have a similar epistemological profile to quantum science in physics, quantum mechanics.
Real climate scientists will speak of non-linear changes.
They also speak of tipping points.
Now, these are real phenomena, such as the albedo effect of disappearing ice in the north, leading to greater absorption of solar heat by the oceans.
But these are notoriously difficult to predict, and to take strong positions on them really requires an overweening sense of confidence, which is exactly what people who are beginning to run charismatic projects will tend to emphasize.
So as soon as you start making predictions about tipping points and nonlinear effects, you're going to sound like an Old Testament prophet.
Or, you could sound, this is my second example, like a galaxy-brained, black-pilled Dharma teacher who resorts to Buddhism as her final answer and offers counseling services by phone.
And I'm talking here about Catherine Ingram, who dropped a 13,000-word essay in 2019 called Facing Extinction, which was downloaded over a million times.
It's an essay that cherry-picks every terrible stat in every cursed category.
It's not just climate, it's everything.
She's kind of like RFK Jr., but she has this gentle and loving apocalypticism.
Hold on, you're blowing my mind here.
Is this the same fair-faced and eloquent, poised Catherine Ingram whose satsang dharma talks on non-dual awakening I used to go to at YogaWorks in the late 90s?
That's amazing.
So she was a fixture there at YogaWorks?
Yeah, she would come and visit and the room would be packed and we all wanted to hear her wisdom.
She studied with Punjaji.
It's funny because I couldn't figure out what the spiritual lineage was from her bio notes, but I'll have to look farther into that.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it's all the way, it's Ramana Maharshi non-dualism, yep.
Yeah, that's the feeling that I get.
That's the affect that I get.
But she has now this, I would say, it's not a non-dual position at all.
She has an absolute certainty that climate collapse is imminent.
And the fact that she holds that is really crucial to what she's doing because it allows her to turn her attention to the spiritual resources she says can only be really unlocked when you accept the absolute hopelessness of the situation as she's described it.
And she's got a really good reading list of people that she points to.
Maybe she referenced some of these people before, Julian.
She talks about Leonard Cohen being her good friend, W.S. Merwin's poems, Ernest Becker, many Buddhist aphorisms about how we distract ourselves from reality.
We're like little children playing at a burning house.
We don't know what we're doing.
But the thing that got me most was her incredibly morbid discussion on parenting and children.
And I want to ping it here because this will bend us back towards the election discourse.
Julian?
It is hard to celebrate the arrival of newborns when one is aware of the deadly pressures of overpopulation, climate chaos, and collapse of our life support systems.
It is sad to think of what a new little being is likely to endure, and as his or her parents awaken to the global reality, they will likely face increasing anxiety and sorrow.
Once you come to know a child, whether your own or anyone else's, your love for the child makes for a heart-wrenching worry, especially if you are responsible for bringing that child into this world.
I encourage people to save a baby, not have a baby.
Consider adopting one of the millions of children in need of a loving parent and give that child a happy home for as long as possible.
You know, there are some good points here, and absolutely there are real and painful discussions that many millennials and younger folks are having about the wisdom or their capacity or desire to create space for children amidst so many uncertainties.
But she begins with the morning of births after they've happened.
Plus the assumption that parents haven't already had throughout all of history and will forever have heart-wrenching worries as though somehow we become more aware over time to how anxious we are about children.
And you could substitute any number of concerns that any number of parents and societies and sages have had about whether or not it's a good idea to bring a child into this cursed world.
It's not a new line of thinking.
So I thank you for your indulgence, guys, on this, because I think it's an important angle to look at.
I'm going to do a bonus episode on Ingram's essay at some point.
I may be also going to track the evolution of Jem Bendel's deep adaptation, which has a lot of overlaps.
But for now, I want to leave it at three final points that will bend us back to MAGA and MAHA. There is a feedback loop between MAGA denial paralysis and doomer paralysis.
The doomers are where they are in part because the right wing has done everything it can to suppress climate activism and realization.
But Ingram's discussion of the hopelessness of parenting really adds a new depth of nausea to whatever is driving the incessant pronatalism of the J.D. Vance side of the MAGA movement.
The desire to have 10 homeschooled children in Amish overalls is like literally insane at this point.
But I think arguing for that right might be a reaction formation against the guilt of having children at all when part of you must know that we're stretched so thin.
And I think it's extremely significant that Guy McPherson, Catherine Ingram, Jen Bendel, Derek Jensen, Lear Keith, and the leaders of Extinction Rebellion, none of them have children.
In Vance's view, they're like the ultimate childless cat ladies.
And when I think of them, I can make a point that sounds like Vance's, but it goes in the other direction, which is that if you're going to be a minister of doom, you have to be able to look in a child's eyes every day and ask yourself, what is the most useful thing to say about the future?
Not how am I going to shut everything down around you.
Not how I'm going to transfer my anxiety onto you as my only inheritance.
So, climate can be a spiritual bypassing gravity well for people of all political persuasions.
And ironically, I would imagine that some rational and productive climate thinking does require something akin to spiritual hope, given just how bad the data is.
Now, what does that sound like?
I just talked to Rebecca Solnit recently for the Conspirituality Relief Project, and she told me about meeting with these activists from Samoa where the coastlines are being battered.
And they have this slogan they bring to their community meetings, and they're full of song at these meetings.
And the slogan is, and they've publicized this all over the world, we're not drowning, we're fighting.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here on the main feed next Thursday over the weekend for briefs.
