Weekly Roundup: The Government Controls the Weather
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In this episode, we take a closer look at the conspiracy theories circulating around hurricanes Helene and Milton, particularly the claims that the government is controlling the weather for political purposes. We discuss how this kind of misinformation distorts public perception and disrupts emergency responses. From there, we shift to Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign of fear, examining his controversial interactions with Vladimir Putin and his targeted efforts to appeal to disaffected young male voters. We also explore the broader challenge of addressing real crises in a world filled with disinformation, and offer insights on gender dynamics in voting, drawing from Barack Obama’s perspectives.
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AXIS MOONDY 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 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?
That's the good liars interviewing folks at a Trump event.
And this woman in particular espoused a conspiracy theory that is now, unfortunately, incredibly popular across the country.
The idea that the government can control the weather.
The idea that the government had a hand in the devastation of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
Today we break down why those conspiracy theories are so deletrious to our public square.
The ways that they harm people in real crisis.
The ways that they make it impossible for actual alerts about actual crisis.
And the ways that they play into a larger framework of Donald Trump's attempt to win this election by fear and catastrophe, By menace and anger.
By a campaign that is not about wooing a majority, but about scaring enough into succumbing to a dictator.
All that, plus the bro vote and the breakdown of gender in the 2024 election.
I'm Brad O'Neeshy and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
It's Friday, Dan Miller.
It's the Weekly Roundup, Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi. Who are you?
How are you doing? Did you spill jelly beans in your car before we started recording?
Thanks for that setup.
Yeah, I am Dan Miller.
I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And I say that there's nothing cool about me.
And this is like proof. I like, you know, I do this drive back and forth.
And so sometimes, you know, I'm bad and I like want a snack.
And I bought this like at TJ Maxx.
Everybody knows TJ Maxx.
We like this giant bag of jelly bellies.
And I was like, I'm going to have jelly beans.
I open my bag.
Like I said, so I'm pulling out of the parking lot.
Yeah, the bag tips over and just empties out like between the seat and the door.
So like after we're done, because like I go straight from campus to here, I need to like go get like a bag full of jelly bellies out from under my car.
So that's the wild and crazy life that I live.
I will tell you that I have young children and sometimes I don't sleep a lot.
And I did not sleep a lot this week because one of them was really sick.
And I bought yogurt that is triple zero, Oikos Yogurts.
Everyone, you know, no sponsorship, I'm just saying.
No sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no fat.
So, Dan. Yep.
Yep. Yep.
Yep. I want to say at the top, we're thinking about everyone in Florida and in that region, folks in North Carolina recovering from Helene, folks all over the South, including South Carolina and other places, and also Florida just being rocked by another massive hurricane.
I want to talk about the misinformation, disinformation campaigns there.
I want to then get into how this kind of plays into a sense of apocalypticism, and I will say, Dan, a sense of not being able to tell what is an actual emergency, because we do have a climate emergency.
But we also have those saying that we have another kind of emergency apocalypse, and it's sometimes hard to tell which one is real and valid.
And then we'll get into more Gen Z stuff and the concerted effort on the Trump campaign's part to win the bro vote in a week in which Kamala Harris appeared on several really popular Gen Z podcasts and millennial podcasts, went on Colbert had a beer, was on Howard Stern, was on the podcast, Call Her Daddy.
So we'll sort of contrast all of that and see what it means.
Let's start here. Hurricane Milton descended upon Florida over the last day and a half.
Dan, there's been just a concerted campaign on the part of some, and then there's just been widespread sharing of misinformation by many others surrounding the hurricane and the weather.
Give us some of what's happening there and we'll try to break it down.
Yeah, so a lot of pieces we can get to, and I think some that we'll circle back around to, but specifically a lot of things related to FEMA, if we want to start there, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, I guess is what the A stands for, you know, that helps provide relief in times of natural disasters and so forth.
And of course, FEMA is a beleaguered agency.
It's, in my view, underfunded.
It's also, you know, it's like every big agency had its scandals of like, you know, mismanagement and funds not being well spent.
So there are valid critiques to make.
Of FEMA. But this week, the GOP, and we say the GOP, we mean the GOP, but we also mean Trump, in particular, as the mouthpiece of the GOP, has been just putting forward lots and lots of disinformation about FEMA for political gain.
So just for example, saying that FEMA is running out of money because it gave it all to migrants.
There's no money left for people who are experiencing the effects of these hurricanes.
Saying that the Biden administration is only giving out aid totaling a few hundred dollars.
Like, yeah, it's a few hundred bucks.
That's all they got left. That's all that they're giving out.
That North Carolina aid, this is one that I came across, that aid to North Carolina is being denied so that the feds can basically claim the land and mine lithium there, so that they can take land and mine lithium.
Heavy metals. And we could go on and on and on.
We can get into Marjorie Taylor Greene and the stuff about, like, literally can't make this up, the conspiracy that the federal government is controlling the weather, has the ability to control the weather, and is targeting Trump-leaning districts and parts of Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, and so forth, in an effort to undermine the vote.
And I think part of this, the key to know is, you know, the intention behind this.
As I say, and this, because this is how it gets twisted.
You're talking to Uncle Ron, and he brings out some article from, you know, who knows when or where that says that, yeah, there was some group of migrants who, you know, capsized in a boat somewhere, and they were rescued offshore and brought to shore, and FEMA was involved in, like, providing stuff for them.
So, see? See, all the funds are going to migrants.
There are elements of twisted facts in this, but the point is the aim is to discredit FEMA, to discredit the federal government, to discredit Biden and Harris.
And I think the real issue that makes this so problematic is it's not intended to help
people.
I'm all for criticizing federal agencies and federal responses when there's a natural disaster
and they're like, it's been 48 hours and like, where is FEMA?
Or why don't they have enough water bottles to give out?
Or why didn't they think of this or that?
Cool, fine, because it's about helping people.
This is not.
And the cynicism and nihilism of the right-wing politics to try to discredit FEMA for just
political gain at the cost of real human lives and well-being is what stands out.
And the last point to make is that, yeah, there have been some in the GOP trying to
push back on this.
Representative Carlos Jimenez of Florida called out Marjorie Taylor Greene for the conspiracy
theory about controlling the weather.
Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina had to send like a fact sheet basically to
constituents saying things like, The federal government isn't doing this.
You should trust FEMA and the federal government and so forth.
Mitt Romney, we know Mitt, attacked Trump for the misinformation.
And one of the takeaways for me, and we've talked about this for years, you don't get to put the Trump genie back in the bottle.
You've hitched yourself to this wagon.
You've stayed there for the better part of a decade.
And now when your misinformation comes back and threatens to hurt your own constituents, you don't get to just wave it off and say, nope, nope, just kidding, don't listen to Trump on this.
You can listen to him on immigration, listen to him about Springfield, listen to him when he says things about Detroit this week, but don't listen about this.
So a lot of elements to this.
I'll throw it over to you for sort of your thoughts, other examples, wherever you want to go with that.
There are just so many aspects of this.
So, one of the things that we have talked about for years is that the Trump phenomenon is a symptom of a longstanding kind of set of cultures and mores in the Republican Party and on the American right.
One of those, I think, comes to a head here with Marco Rubio, senator from Florida.
And Brian Selter said this on CNN, and I think others have said it, but I think it's worth saying it here, which is, you know, Marco Rubio, when the jobs report came out a couple days ago, last week, he was saying, oh, it's fake.
The Biden administration's job numbers aren't as good as it says.
Don't believe it. And then he comes out and he's trying to get Floridians to evacuate because the hurricane is going to be so catastrophic.
And it's one of those things where you have the situation where a sitting senator three days ago is like, don't trust the government and what it says.
And then he is a voice of the government, along with, as you say, the head of FEMA, representatives from Congress, state representatives are like, please leave your home.
This is not going to be good when it comes to Milton descending on the state.
What are people supposed to do?
You just said it with Trump.
It's the same with Rubio, but it goes all the way back.
To Sarah Palin, to the Tea Party, to 15 and 20 years ago of, you can't trust the government.
The government is utterly corrupt.
And then when it's time, To help save lives, to actually help people, you can't do that.
I'll give you a quote from the head of FEMA, or actually, excuse me, it's an administrator at FEMA named Deanne Criswell said, if it creates so much fear that my staff doesn't want to go out into the field, then we're not going to be in a position where we can help people.
What she's talking about there is like FEMA officials and workers and others are being harassed when they go into places like North Carolina and Florida because of the kinds of, you know, misinformation that people now hold about what's happening.
They think FEMA's the enemy.
Think about that situation where you work for FEMA, you're going into a disaster site trying to help people who've dealt with overwhelming, life-threatening flooding, flooding that has taken the lives of their neighbors, and you're seen as the enemy because you've been told by Alex Jones or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump that the government controls the weather and so on and so forth.
So I think that's a big part of this.
I want to make one more point that is obvious.
I am the millionth person to make it, but I do want to make it, and that is...
So, you know, Dan, we could play the clips of Donald Trump saying...
Climate change is a hoax.
We could play the clips of the gray-haired boomer Republican senators throwing snowballs in the Senate chamber saying, what global warming?
We could play all the clips.
We could go through all of the language in Project 2025.
That says that the US government, the federal government, should basically strike any language in its documents by any federal agency about climate change.
And then we get the government controls the weather.
That is just worth staying on and analyzing.
You're not willing to believe The 99.9% of the scientific community that says we are undergoing climate, we are in a climate crisis.
That we had Helene destroy and ravage Asheville, North Carolina.
A place that is not a place that is supposed to be susceptible to this kind of hurricane catastrophe.
Asheville, North Carolina is not like a place that you think of as in Hurricane Alley or is susceptible to this kind of disaster.
And here we are. And then two, three days later comes Milton.
So you're not willing to believe that we're in that kind of climate crisis.
We could talk about drought.
We could talk about water. We could talk about my home state of California and fires.
We can talk about the raising temperatures, the record heat, whatever you want to do.
And it's no, no, no, no, no, no.
But then, whether it's rank and file folks like the clip I played at the top or Marjorie Taylor Greene or anyone else, it's, you know, I kind of think the government aimed this tornado at red counties so they couldn't vote for Trump and they want to harvest the lithium and Doug Eamhoff, Kamala's wife, is going to make $18 billion off this deal.
And like, what is that?
I have thoughts about why people engage that way, but I'll throw it back to you for more reflections on this whole phenomenon.
So, yeah, I mean, a few things.
One, to go back to what you said a few minutes ago, one of the things I think is worth thinking about is, you know, in the changing rhetoric on the right is if we remember, you know, or look back, for those of us who don't maybe directly remember, The Reagan years and the emphasis on small government and the evils of big government or whatever, but I think that there's been a shift.
And I couldn't tell you—you highlighted some steps on this.
I don't have it in front of me to think about exactly when this happened.
It's a slow evolution. But the evolution from government is big and it's inefficient and it wastes money and it doesn't know what local needs are to government is corrupt and it's full of bad people who are doing bad things to you.
Those are— Those are not the same message, and I think that that's one of the things that we find in the contemporary GOP that is different, right, from what that so-called small government message or the anti-government message of, say, a Reagan-era GOP was.
I think it ties into the conspiracism.
And I've brought up this point before that the thing about conspiracism generally, and if we're talking about in the U.S. context, in the GOP anti-government conspiracism, As you say, the same government that is supposed to be completely inept, they can't do anything. It can't close the border.
It can't stop inflation.
It can't, you know, any number of things that are on a political wish list that, you know, the government can't do this.
But it can, you know, the classic one was, you know, 9-11 conspiracy theories.
They could bring down these two buildings and create, you know, get thousands of people to be silent about it and so forth.
It's COVID conspiracies.
It's vaccination conspiracies.
It's stop the steal conspiracies.
And now it's literally that the contrails from aircraft somehow control the weather and Marjorie Taylor Greene is willing to double and triple down on this and so forth.
The conspiracism, as you say, it doesn't make logical or rational sense.
I think that's a key part about conspiracy theories.
But what I feel like that should alert us to is that that's not what it's aiming to do.
I think that there's value in factually debunking conspiracies.
I think you have to be able to do that.
I think to avoid being accused of having your own conspiracy theory, I think you need to be able to show and say, look, no, here's real stuff.
You can go look at.
But I think it's also important to ask, okay, but if it's so resistant to factual disconfirmation, what's it doing?
What's the point? And I was thinking about this, you know, Trump generally is full of conspiracy theories and tied in with all of this, you know, and the weather stuff, and we've talked about the stuff with Haitian immigrants in Springfield.
This week, you know, he's talking, you know, bad-mouthing Detroit and saying it's like a third-world nation, like while he's in Detroit trying to get people to vote for him and so forth.
It's literally an apocalyptic maneuver.
And that might sound, somebody might be like, oh, come on, that sounds a little bit big.
But a good article in USA Today this week talked about how Trump's rhetoric, which is always really dark, which is always really threatening, which is always really scary, is getting sort of darker and more threatening.
He said, he was talking to a crowd of supporters in Wisconsin, and he was talking about violent crimes committed by immigrants, telling these stories.
And as they put it in USA Today, they say he interrupted himself to tell attendees that
he would get back to talking about making America great again, but he needed to digress
for a minute.
And this is what he said.
He said, we're going to do that.
Don't worry.
We haven't gotten to that part yet.
No, I'm just saying this is dark.
This is a dark speech.
Like, he just comes out and says, this speech is dark, and I'm going to go in dark directions.
And we've talked about some of why.
I think this is like his security blanket.
This is what has worked for him in the past.
And when he feels threatened or squeezed, as he does by Kamala Harris— He goes in this direction.
But one of the things I was thinking about—I was talking with some students the other day—you're sort of asking about conspiracism, and how does it work, and why do they do it, and if it's not about facts, what is it about?
And one of the things I was thinking about is—so the book of Revelation, the book at the end of the Bible, the apocalypticism book—and I promise for folks I'm going to land this plane, promise— It tells a story of Roman persecution of Christians.
And never mind whatever you think you know about, like it's about the future and the end of time and whatever.
Like when it was written, it's for Jewish Christians who are, it's a letter to them or a book written for them.
And it basically says, Rome is the tool of Satan.
Rome is oppressing Christians.
It's killing everybody. And God is going to come back in great power and like wipe out the Romans and destroy the Roman Empire and institute a kingdom and all this other stuff.
And scholars for years and years and years, hundreds of years, have puzzled over this because when the book was written, there was no widespread Roman persecution.
And so they've always been like, what is this referencing?
What is it talking about?
And I remember I was reading some stuff on this once.
I wanted to do one of my comp exams for my PhD in Revelation, so I had to read a lot about it.
And one of the lines of inquiry I find really convincing is it said, the point wasn't that that actually happened.
The point of the description was to create a sense of crisis.
To create a sense of crisis in the readers so that they would see that Rome is the tool of Satan, that Rome is the
enemy of God, and so forth.
And this is what we have to understand, I think, that ties together so many strands of what we talk about.
Trump's dark rhetoric, all the GOP conspiracism, all the fear-mongering, it's not about the facts.
It's not about believing that that's happening. It's that whoever the enemy is, and it is people of color, and it is
immigrants, and it is women who want access to abortion, and it is Democrats generally,
and it is kids who are transgender, it is all of these people, they are the enemy, they need to be seen as the enemy, and we have to create a sense of crisis.
So that those that we want to motivate will be motivated against them.
And I think that that's the key.
So I think if you're on the GOP or you're one of these people, the way this works is the deep truth is that these people are dangerous.
They're bad. And this ties in everything that you talk about, everything, all the Axis Mundy work that other people do about spiritual warfare and, you know, Charismatic and Pentecostal strands of this and all these things come together.
It is this sense of spiritual warfare.
There are secret forces at work and those people that we don't like are part of that secret cadre of forces, which justifies anything we say.
Because the idea is there's a deeper truth here, which is that this needs to be opposed, and this is a threat.
I feel like all of that comes into play when we've got Ron DeSantis saying, this has nothing to do with global warming.
It's just hurricane season.
It just happens. Denying climate science as a kind of conspiracy, or whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene saying they control the weather, or it's all the preemptive work that's going into discrediting an election that has not happened yet, and so forth.
And there are lots of reasons to oppose that, but as you're highlighting, I think one of them is that we come full circle and people are dying and suffering because the same elected leaders who are busy doing this, who are busy to use the old model of the person who cries wolf, Are now saying, nope, nope, nope, you need to evacuate.
This is going to be really dangerous.
You need to get out, and people aren't listening.
So just a lot of levels to that, but it's a pattern that I see, and for me there's a deep-seated, long-standing Christian tradition there of casting somebody as a kind of spiritual enemy and then being licensed to say anything.
If it can communicate the real threat that that person or group poses.
I agree with all that. I want to stay on this.
Let's take a break and come back and we'll go from the kind of response to the hurricanes to what this means for the public square and how apocalypticism is quite toxic in our political landscape at the moment.
We'll be right back. So, building off what you just said there, Dan, a couple things.
Number one, Richard Stengel tweeted this the other day.
The Trump candidacy is not so much a political campaign as what intelligence services call an influence operation.
A coordinated effort to use mis- and disinformation to undermine democratic institutions and processes.
I want to go to Trump and I want to go to the way he uses these things and what the goal is.
But I also want to point out something that we did do on Access Mundi and that is a series called Misinformation.
And it's by Susanna Crockford, an anthropologist at the University of Exeter.
And one of the things I learned from Susanna doing that project is that, you know, there's a difference between misinformation and disinformation.
Misinformation is sharing things that are not true, not because you have some nefarious goal, but because you think they're true and you want other people to know them, okay?
So that's one. Disinformation is a strategic and intentional effort to share information that is not true in order for some sort of political gain, some sort of economic gain, some sort of leverage or advantage.
So I think what we have are both, in this case, we have people sharing misinformation about the government, but we also have disinformation from those who want to gain leverage in the public square, Donald Trump being a principal representative of that.
However, what Susanna taught me in that project, and if you haven't listened to it, y'all should listen to Misinformation this weekend, is a lot of people want misinformation.
And even when you tell them what they believe is not true or they see that it's not true, They still want it because it does something for them.
It does something that they want.
So here's Richard Warzold writing at The Atlantic this week about this.
Such was the case last week when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image Of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene.
Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant.
Y'all, I don't know where this photo came from, and honestly, it doesn't matter.
Amy Kramer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image.
I'm leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through.
Right now. And there were so many others.
Parker Malloy compiled so many of this, and it basically was like, this is not real or true, but it speaks to the inner truth.
It speaks to what I'm feeling.
It speaks to something I want to be true.
So I'm going to hold on to it.
So one of the things Susanna Crockford taught me is that you can get rid of all the misinformation in the ether.
It will always come back because people want it to activate certain biases, certain prejudices, certain beliefs they have about the government or about powerful people, about whatever.
And so that's one. Number two, I think, just going back to Trump, that he's not running a political campaign as much as an influence operation, and he's doing that by doing everything you just talked about, Dan.
Here's David Korn writing at Mother Jones.
The overarching goal of Trump's disinformation efforts is to persuade voters that they should live in fear.
And that only he can save them.
At a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump said of migrants, they will walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat.
Elsewhere, he prayed, they're conquering your communities.
In Aurora, Colorado, where they're taking over with AK-47s.
Elsewhere, they're going to take over a lot more than Aurora.
They're going to go through Colorado.
They're going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish, unless I become president.
And he does this with migrants.
He does this with crime.
He does this with economics.
Oh, you know, the country's in free fall economically and so on and so forth.
This is what leads to depicting Democrats as baby killers or as groomers or as pedophiles.
It's the things that lead to all those outlandish conspiracy theories you sort of mentioned in passing about, you know, Democrats eating children and being demon-possessed.
Trump, you know, says stuff like they're coming for your children.
They're going to go to school one day and get a sex change operation or transition genders.
So I'll just say, Dan, and I'll throw this back to you after this thought, is like, Why?
What does that do? If you live in such fear, and let's just think through times when we've all had to work with a group to make decisions quickly.
When you live in fear and you're dealing with emergency and a need to react quickly, otherwise survival will be threatened.
Democracy is not often how we work.
And let's just be honest about it.
Like, Dan, there's often times when you're in a situation with three, four, five, six people, and there's an emergency, and someone makes a decision, everyone goes along with it, but for the most part...
What gets suspended are the normal negotiations.
When I give talks across the country, I often say like, look, I have two kids.
When I try to leave the house and go to Target on Saturday, just to have a kind of a crazy wild Saturday, Dan, just get the kids to Target, you know?
It's wild. It's fabulous.
My life is really glam.
It takes me like 47 minutes to get out the door.
I got to get diapers and I got to get snacks and somebody threw up on me.
And then, you know, I get to the car and I'm not wearing a shirt somehow.
And it's just like a mess.
And then, you know, we go to Target and it's just, it's super fun.
If there's an earthquake, because I live in California, like I just run out of the house with the kids.
Or I just, like we just, the normal operations are suspended when you're in an apocalypse or in a crisis.
If Trump can get you into total apocalypse such that you believe the government controls the weather, the government stole your election, the government is allowing criminals and migrants to come across the border to slit your throat, that they are not human, that they don't have good genes, that they are not actually like you, blah, then you know what you'll do?
You'll say democracy is not the answer.
Democracy is the problem.
We need you to be president and leader and autocrat and dictator.
We would rather a dictator protect us from that than a democracy that won't.
That's the goal.
How does that fit into your references there to revelation and apocalypse and so on?
I think it absolutely fits.
And I think that what you're saying, you know, another way that I put this oftentimes is that democracy moves slowly.
But, you know, like I was thinking of just a completely mundane example.
If you've ever had a like, you know, we go to academic conferences sometimes and you see friends that were in grad school with you or, you know, maybe somebody that's done a series on Access Mundi or something, you're seeing them in person, you know, there's a big group of people and you decide to go out to dinner.
And anybody who's ever had to have, like, ten people, and everybody's trying to be fair and deferential and, like, whatever, and give everybody a hearing, and, like, after half an hour, everybody's still standing around in the lobby of the hotel trying to figure out where they're going to go for dinner.
And you just get to the point where when somebody says, you know what, there's this Thai place over here, let's just go.
And you're like, fine, let's go.
Like, you don't even like Thai food, maybe?
Like, that's not your thing? Maybe you're allergic to peanuts, and you're like, oh, this place is full of peanut sauce.
But you know what? I'm just ready to go.
Like, I'm ready to go. A silly, mundane example, but it just highlights that, like, deliberation takes time.
Democracy is inefficient.
It's slow. And so you're right.
When you have crisis, it legitimates the circumventing of all of that.
And so, yeah, it's absolutely about creating a sense of crisis, which means you cede your authority to somebody else.
That's basically what that is.
And in politics, that's, you know, we call it the state of emergency or, you know, the state of exception, different models of this.
Where some crisis legitimates the suspension of deliberation, of greater participation.
And I think the other sort of more emotional piece of this also just kind of normalizes that.
That becomes a normal response.
That becomes, if there really is a crisis, the rational response.
The natural response.
So if we can get everybody's bodies and nervous systems and brains and communities and churches convinced that there's a crisis, it's only logical to hand over that decision-making and that authority to somebody.
The same way, if you were like, well, you know, there was an earthquake and I lost my family because we just talked about leaving the house for too long.
Somebody would be like, that was irresponsible.
You just grab your kids and you go, man.
That's what you do. So I think it radically transforms the situation, and that's a piece of it.
I think one more on kind of a flip side.
It's related, but not necessarily the crisis piece, but the other piece that you're getting to about wanting misinformation is an idea that I've been toying around with is we often, when it comes to things like conspiracy or misinformation, we say that people don't listen to evidence.
And I actually think that that's a little bit too simplistic because here's how I think it works.
I just throw this out there. This is not a well-thought-out thing, but it's an idea I've been toying with.
Sometimes it feels really good.
It feels better for some things to be true than not.
If I can't stretch my paycheck the way that I used to, I can't, you know, the co-pays on my
drugs or prescriptions for my kids are going up, I can't buy enough food, electricity is expensive,
it feels better to think that it's because the Democrats hate me than maybe it does that there
are these big impersonal economic forces that I don't understand and can't do a damn thing about
that are shaping that. And what I think is that that emotional response becomes evidence.
I take it as true because it wouldn't hit me the way that it does. It feels true,
and so it becomes true. And I think when you take that piece and you bring the crisis piece together,
lack of a really maybe too appropriate metaphor, you have a perfect storm.
You have a perfect storm of ceding authority and misinformation and everything that that does that we're watching happen around us all the time right now.
This leads to something that I get asked so often, which is this, hey, you talk a lot about a crisis of democracy.
And we do, and I do.
I do think that if Donald Trump becomes president again, we may see the fall of American democracy in any kind of viable form.
We've said that. Stand by it.
When it comes to climate, I do think, Dan, we are in a climate crisis.
We are in a climate catastrophe right now.
It is hard to get home insurance in Florida.
There are places in California where it is hard to get home insurance.
How can you have An economy based on, you know, home ownership and all this other stuff.
If you can't get insurance to own it because there are so many natural disasters, it kind of says something that the insurance company is looking ahead at like the next, you know, two, three, four, five decades and going, yeah, we know what situation we're in, even if everyone else, not everyone, but a lot of other folks won't agree, whatever. What this also does, and what I mean by it, is the lying, the conspiracy, the disinformation from Trump, from Rubio, from the American right, from climate deniers, from conspiracy theorists, from so on,
is when someone does show up and says, we actually have a legitimate crisis, we have something you might actually characterize as apocalypse.
I get questions all the time that are like, aren't you just doing what they do?
Aren't you just like them? And it's like, you know what?
I don't think I am. Because one group is denying evidence to build a conspiracy.
Another is saying, I've taken an unflinching look at the evidence and all that stuff you just said about feeling and emotion, it actually feels terrible.
It feels... So I was going to say, there is no positive emotion that comes from talking about the climate crisis or the undermining of democracy.
There's nothing that makes me feel good about any of that.
Nothing. I'm a Californian, and I love my state.
I love... I mean, everybody has their opinions about California, but...
My heart is here. I love everything from getting to surf in Santa Cruz to take my kids to Yosemite to going down to see my Japanese American family in LA. I can give you all the things I love about my state and all the things that are really hard about it.
I talk with my partner all the time about like, I don't know if we can stay here because the climate stuff scares me so much.
And even just real quick, even if the climate stuff didn't scare you, as you say, just the concrete financial elements of, you know, insurance prices and all of that, which is related.
Yeah, it's a real thing.
So when you show up and you say, I've looked at the evidence and it feels terrible.
I didn't get anything good out of it.
I didn't get any new friends.
In fact, I went to the barbecue the other day and my friends were kind of mad at me for being a downer.
And every time I bring this up with my partner, she's like, hey, we talked about this last night.
I'm with you.
I agree. I just don't want to talk about it again right now because it's not fun.
It sucks. It's when your partner's like, this is why you do the podcast.
Save it for that. Go talk to them.
Don't bring it to the cook. Can you call Dan?
Is Dan around? Here's my point.
You guys need to have a play date.
Go do a play date with Brad.
The apocalypse stuff, it's not the same.
Because one is a denial of evidence for conspiracy and an emotional kind of shortcut.
The other is an unflinching look at evidence that says, we are in a situation that should alarm all of us.
So I'm not going to accept that they're the same.
And I'm also going to say this is one of the deletrious effects of conspiracy and disinformation that often goes overlooked is that when there is a real apocalypse, it's incredibly hard to kind of get that through to anyone who will listen.
So I think that's also part of this.
I want to get to two other things today.
Final thoughts on this before we kind of jump around a little bit.
I think that's the key.
And when I say that there is value to having the facts, this is why.
I think sometimes people that I get is, well, Dan, you say that it's not really about the facts and the fact-checking, so should we even bother?
And I'm like, yes, we should, because it's part of the conversation.
It doesn't do everything, but I think it's important.
Because I have the same conversation. I'm like, well, here's the stuff I'm looking at.
And as you say, I'm trying to take myself out of it.
I'm not Doing this because I feel good or whatever.
Here's the evidence I have.
And I think it's important.
And I think that's the trick, is that sometimes there are real conspiracies.
Sometimes there are real threats.
Sometimes there are real crises.
And that's exactly why we need to be critical of the creation of a false sense of threat, a false sense of alarm where it's not warranted.
So I think something that's related here, just before we go to break, is that if we've established that Trump is running an influence campaign, an influence operation, not a political campaign, and I've said this on the pod before, I've said I think he's running for a tie.
I think the focus is on gumming up the system in state legislatures, in the House of Representatives, in local uprisings.
I do think that's the strategy.
Then we've got to look at what else's Trump is doing.
And I just want to notice these things because, Dan, these are huge scandals that no longer even register at all.
So, like, we learned this week, Donald Trump stopped the Brett Kavanaugh investigation at the FBI. He basically said, stop looking into the 4,500 tips you got about Kavanaugh and sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior.
That's like...
Dan, imagine Reagan.
Telling the FBI, don't look into my Supreme Court nominee and the FBI listening, okay?
We learned that Donald Trump sent Russia Putin COVID testing machines for hospitals.
That is a big, like Russia, I just want to make it clear.
I think most people listening to this podcast know this, but like Russia is a geopolitical adversary of the United States.
I'm not going to say enemy, but there are very tense relations.
And the leader of Russia does not look upon our country favorably, certainly not as an ally and certainly not NATO, which are our formal allies, as any kind of Thing that he wants to have normal diplomatic relations with.
And yet, not only does Putin get COVID testing machines, but we learn that Donald Trump has talked to him seven times since leaving the White House, at least.
Amy McGrath, who is Marine F-18 pilot.
Sorry, I'm reading Amy McGrath's bio.
I messed this up. It's somebody who's enormously popular on Twitter as a commentator and is in Kentucky, has 500,000 followers on Twitter, and is a former Marine.
I'll just leave it there. Great tweet.
Imagine Eisenhower secretly calling Khrushchev while Kennedy was in office or Hoover chit-chatting with Hitler behind FDR's back.
Can you imagine if during the Cold War, Kennedy's doing everything he can to deal with Khrushchev and all of the crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis and so on, and Hoover was just calling him?
Can you imagine if a former American president was calling Hitler during World War II? And then add in, I just want to add in something that is forgotten, is lost, That the man calling him, Donald Trump, has classified documents behind his toilet.
That if we went to the right bathroom in Mar-a-Lago like 24 months ago, we might have found British naval secrets.
We might have found sensitive information about US spies.
Like, I don't know what we would have found in that guest bathroom.
You know, you go to someone's guest bathroom.
It's kind of a chance to do some judging.
Am I right, Dan, you know? Oh, what do they got in here?
A little basket of seashells. Yeah, is there any hint?
Like whatever, all the weird stuff they've got.
Not that I would ever look in somebody's medicine cabinet, but you could.
And you just don't know.
No. You just don't know. No hand soap in here?
Oh, okay. Good one.
Don't like the color scheme.
That's an outdated aesthetic.
Yeah, if we went to the right guest toilet at Mar-a-Lago, we'd just get to read about, I don't know, sensitive naval British operations.
So the man who's talking to Putin, and by all accounts is a Putin lackey, submissive something, is calling him seven times and he's got classified documents all over the place.
Dan, Dan, it's just like, if this was Reagan, if this was Nixon, if this was Carter, if this was Clinton, it's over.
You can't even go another day.
And we're not talking about it.
We're talking about so many other things because that's the stupid world we now live in.
I just want to point out, it's the same Trump who, in a debate, would not commit to standing up for Ukraine and says he's going to make a great deal and end the fighting, and everybody's like, oh, that sure seems like he's soft on Putin and Russia, and then...
Guess who he's been talking to?
Guess who he's still buddies with is one of the people directing that conflict.
To your point, I think if it's any political actor but Donald Trump, it's a death knell to a candidacy.
It's cries for investigations and so forth.
On all sides, the people who support Trump will support Trump no matter what, and that includes the GOP. And the people who oppose Trump or fact-check, it's been like a decade of this stuff.
And so it just doesn't even resonate, as you're saying, despite the fact that it's huge information.
According to Bob Woodward's new book, Trump was talking to Putin and asked him, should I be arming Ukraine?
And Putin, of course, was like, no.
And then Rex Tillerson. Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Putin didn't even give a tasteful delay in his...
Do whatever you think is best.
Yeah. Like when someone asks you, like, oh, have you considered yourself for the position?
Or have you considered that you deserve a raise?
And you give a little tasteful, like, hmm.
I really hadn't thought of that, but it's interesting you bring that up.
That is something we could explore here.
Yes. So Rex Tillerson, who's then Secretary of State, if everyone remembers Rex Tillerson, runs out and tells all the other White House officials and other people on the...
On the trip, we've got a major problem.
I'm just saying, this is where we are now.
Not to mention the fact that, and I want to fit this in, we'll go to break, and we'll get to the bro vote, as Dan is calling it.
All North Carolina House Republicans voted no on allowing hurricane victims a five-day extension to register to vote and a three-day grace period for mail-in ballots.
So, hey, we feel so bad.
The state's in crisis. Y'all are trying to recover from something that was a once-in-a-millennium kind of storm in certain parts of North Carolina, but yeah, you don't get any more time to vote, sorry.
Okay? But at the same time, remember that the same people who are voting against this are the same ones that are saying the Democrats are the ones who directed the storm against GOP-leaning districts.
Again, just to put the pieces together and how ridiculous this is and just on and on and on.
Let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about the bros for Trump.
Long sigh. Be right back.
All right, Dan, tell us about the bros for Trump.
Yeah, just, I mean, the long and short of it is Trump is very actively trying to win young men, the votes of young men, the Gen Zs, young millennials.
And you ran through a litany of the kinds of sort of social media and, let's say, new media mechanisms that Kamala Harris has been on.
Trump's been doing the same thing.
He's shown up on lots and lots of Podcasts aimed at primarily male audience, young male audience.
He's been attending events.
This is since the last election.
Not just now, but this is a campaign that he's been running.
Insiders say that he's sort of Trying to tap back into and capitalize on that pop culture status that he had, you know, and has had as a pop culture figure, and trying to get those same sometimes disaffected young men, the same ones that are more likely to go to church now, the same ones that are more likely to identify as evangelical, the ones who now are more likely to have less education than women of the same age.
All those demographic things come together I think we're good to go.
But ideologically lean toward Trump to go to the polls.
And I think a lot of people see this as a piece of this.
A lot of those same younger men, primarily white men, but not only white men, they don't vote in huge numbers.
They tend not to be all that civically engaged.
he's trying to do that. But the gender dynamics are there.
We know that the gender gap is real.
We know that Kamala Harris has got a huge lead, you know, among Trump, from Trump, among women.
We know that Trump has a lead among men. And it just feeds into that. But it's this very explicitly
concerted campaign to bring out the younger male vote in favor of Trump. I think what's
interesting about this, you know, potentially long term, we'll see how this goes and how it plays out,
is, I don't know, bringing into view or hardening, you know, sort of solidifying a kind of
politicized gender dynamic that is maybe more pronounced than we've seen in recent years.
And we've seen this already with things like abortion and different issues like that.
But again, it's Trump playing on divisiveness and trusting that.
Curious to see if it works here.
I hope it doesn't, obviously.
And also curious about the long-term effects of this.
But it's another one of these issues that's sort of coming to light as young men in particular become a really, really sort of focal point of this campaign.
As you said, there's a whole campaign, so he is going to do things like, and he's done a lot of this already, he's going on the Nelk Boys show, which is called Full Send.
It's a big thing with young men.
He's appearing with Jake Paul.
He went on The flagrant podcast the other day, and it was sort of mixed because it's one of these moments where Trump was just rambling so much that the hosts were actually kind of laughing at him.
It wasn't a great look, but nonetheless, there's a promo going out by the person, Hayley Welch, who's colloquially known as the Hawk Tua girl.
So that's where we are in American society.
Good stuff. Glad I had to say that on this podcast, but there you go.
Now, one of the folks who's leading this, the president of Full Send and one of the NELC boys associated with them, John Shahidi, says, the question is, well, that podcast fan, that college game day fan, that USC fan, will they actually get up on November 5th and go vote?
And so, you know, we imagine, Dan, you and I have been around college campuses enough, the kind of The frat guy whose life is basically going to school, being a business major, drinking beer, playing beer pong, going to frat parties.
You go to the house where this person lives and it's like eight dudes living in this place that looks like a video game den of red cups and pizza boxes and that kind of stuff.
So, you know, here's the gamut you're running.
If you're Kamala Harris and you're appealing to young women, you have a direct thing to say to them.
Like, whether or not you love Kamala Harris, I don't know, this and that.
Reproductive rights. Contraception.
Your body. Your choice.
Your autonomy. Is that important to you?
Then go vote. With these young men, you have to, and this I think plays into everything you said earlier, you have to appeal to that dire rhetoric that like, A sense of crisis.
There's a crisis threatening you and your masculinity and you as a man.
And I think this plays in, and I'll sort of lead this into my reason for hope, into something Barack Obama said last night.
And I actually want to play the clip for everybody right now.
So here it is.
So Obama's hitting at something that I think, Dan, you and I sometimes don't consider, and I'm curious whether you do or not, is I'm just not the kind of person, I'm not the kind of man, cis man, etc., who blinks when it comes to voting for a woman.
It doesn't cross my mind of like, oh, could I really vote for a woman?
And I'm not trying to sound enlightened.
I'm not trying to pat myself on the back.
I'm honestly saying that thought has not crossed my mind Whenever.
Maybe since I was an evangelical 25 years ago.
But what Barack Obama is saying here is something that needs to be, I think, brought to light, which is there's a lot of men out there who may not be the, like, really gross misogynist Nick Fuentes, Charlie Kirk, Andrew Tate types, who are finding reasons to say, I'm just not sure I can vote for Kamala, and it's because she's a woman.
We need to, and I know all the women out there are like, no shit, dude.
You know, like, you know, thanks a lot.
And you're right. And I'm saying this just because I think we can't miss it on this podcast, which is 2016, Hillary Clinton.
Was that a different campaign?
Yes. Is Hillary Clinton, like, worlds different from Kamala Harris?
Totally. But the amount of men out there that will find a reason that they cannot vote for a woman to be president is not something we should ignore.
And it is something that I think Barack Obama is addressing.
He was addressing specifically black men, but I think this pertains to all men and all people.
And I'm curious about your thought.
And that is my kind of reason for hope is Obama was speaking in a way that's not normal for Obama.
He didn't sound like Professor Obama.
He sounded like angry Barack Obama.
And I think we needed that, and I think that that's something that actually could use more of here.
But I'm glad he did it, and I'm glad that he said it directly, because I think that's something a lot of men need to hear.
There's a lot of cultures, Dan, and I think you can remember being an evangelical where Doing something like voting for Trump just feels so natural and so given and so presupposed that to even consider voting for Kamala Harris.
And that takes root not only in those churches we were part of, but in those bro cultures where you're a 19 year old dude who hangs out with 50 other 19 year old dudes.
In a frat and you all play beer pong and play video games and what's cool is talking about how Kamala Harris is this and Donald Trump is so badass and this and that and it just becomes one of those moments where like either you don't vote or voting for Harris seems like something you're not going to do just based on culture, based on influence, based on osmosis.
So final thoughts for you today on this or anything else?
Yeah, I think that's true, what you're saying about the culture and the way that that does that.
And I think it's also telling a lot of good things, I think, about Obama doing this.
But I remember when Obama was running for president, and there'd be people like, I just don't feel like I know enough about Obama yet.
I just don't feel like I know who he is.
And a lot of us at the time said, hey, that's just code for racism.
That's code for he's black and I'm not comfortable with that and so I'm not going to vote for him.
And at the time, I remember just butting my head against walls saying that.
People were like, no, no, no.
And of course now every analyst in the world looks back and says, hey, you know what?
I think that was coded language.
And we're seeing the same thing now, but it's about gender.
I'm just not sure I know enough about Kamala Harris.
I'm just not sure I'm comfortable.
And so I think calling it out is key, I think, for a lot of people for whom, yeah, they're not in that culture, or they've been enculturated a different way, or it's just like, well, yeah, of course.
I was thinking about this in the lead up to this.
In my professional teaching life, which now is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years as a full-time instructor, I have never had a male supervisor.
I've only had, like, women department chairs, deans, what have you.
And I only, I had never kind of thought about that, but I'm like, you know, that's the culture that I'm in professionally.
So when somebody, you know, and like, well, of course, like, why would that be an issue?
But as you say, for a lot of people, it is.
And I think it's important to name it and put it out there.
Also, some other important pieces of pop culture coming out there challenging that notion in different ways.
And so I think it's really important. I'll dive into my reason for hope as long as I'm here, and it's different, but the Nobel Peace Prize was just awarded to a grassroots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors who have been advocating for decades for the eradication of nuclear weapons, anti-nuclear weapons group.
And I just thought that was like the coolest story and made me feel great and hopeful and all kinds of good things.
So that's what stood out to me this week.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm glad about that too.
I also want to say that if anybody ever has jokes about like bombs and Hiroshima and stuff, you know, you and I are done.
Like people make those jokes so casually.
And I just, this group winning that prize is a reminder of that's not a casual event that happened.
And I can talk to you about, you know, family and others that were, you know, it's a big impact.
So that's good stuff.
Alright friends, let's make sure you know about this.
Our San Diego event is live and you can buy tickets right now.
You can buy tickets for online.
You can buy tickets for in person.
We would love to hang out with you in San Diego November 22nd at 7pm at the convention center.
Dan and I will be there.
We'll be talking. Dan is considering whether or not he's going to wear cargo shorts.
We have Matt Taylor, who you all know, coming to give some remarks and talk about Christian extremism in the 2024 elections.
We also have Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba.
We have Ahmaud Green-Hayes and Yi John Lin, the latter from Yale, the former from Harvard.
So it's a great lineup.
You should be there, and we are all going to go out afterwards.
Dan will probably have a beer.
I will have like six or seven Diet Cokes.
It's going to get hella weird.
It's going to be a party.
So come hang with us and it'll be really fun.
Our LA event is happening.
It's November 21st.
We have some last-minute adjustments we need to make to venue and other things, but we promise that event is going to go live as soon as we can get it there.
And if you're in LA or around LA, November 21st, you should come see us and hang.
We've got, again, me and Dan.
We've got other folks like Andrew Seidel and Rachel Lazar.
The event is sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And Kyati Joshi and a bunch of other good and amazing folks.
Be there. All right.
That'll do it for us today. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back next week with It's in the Code, with a great interview, with Spirit and Power, and everything else we're doing.
