March 23, 2025 • 33 mins
The first two months of Trump's term have been a tour de force of chaos, bizarre hires and indecipherable decisions. Conspiracy theories operate on both sides of the equation. They are attempts to find an underlying rationale for moves by Trump and Musk, often presuming nefarious motivations of self-interest. Conspiracy theories are also being used as a tool to justify actions that are unpopular or destructive. From USAID to Fort Knox to anything "deep state," are these false conspiracy theories deliberately fabricated as misinformation or are they the convictions of True Believers?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So it's really great to have Mike Rothschild on again.
Mike is a journalist, published author, and a foremost expert
in the ever changing Quanon conspiracy thing. Moreover, Mike explores
the intersections between Internet culture and politics through the lens
(00:52):
of conspiracy theories. He's a subject matter expert in the
field of fringe beliefs really important right now, and Mike
is a veteran Mission Implausible guest here with us for
the second time.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
So Mike, welcome, Thank you for having me back. I'm
very excited, Mike.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
So there's so much to start with, and so let
me start in the middle when we can work our
way around writers. This USAI D for me. I've got
a lot of friends in USA I D I think
John does two and it's destruction, taking it like Christy
Nome's dog, taking it down into the pit and shooting it.
All started out with a video falsely claiming that USAI
(01:32):
D paid Ben Stiller and Angelina, Joe Lee and other
actors millions of dollars to travel to the Ukraine. And
this was in an a clip that appeared to be
on entertainment news News And as it turns out, this
clip was actually Russian disinformation. And yet this didn't prevent
(01:52):
Elon Musk and President Musk President.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
One, No, you were write the first time.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Co President Musk from using this as a pretext for
one of the pretexts for dismantling usa D, along with
another false claim that it provided fifty million dollars to
Hamas in Gaza for condoms, And of course the actual
answer was a little more complicated, but it did involve
aid to Gaza for people who were impacted, who were impactedgmatically. So, Mike,
(02:25):
where is the difference now between disinformation and conspiracy theories?
They have they melded into one, And how does if
the president can't keep it apart, how do we there
is no difference at this point. There really is no
separation between conspiracism, disinformation, politics, popular culture, internet culture, news
(02:46):
dissemination is it has all become the same thing. And
of course, so much of that really happened at light speed.
Really during the first Trump campaign he rose to political
prominence not because of his brilliant ideas there's tax pol
his plans for the EU. It was because he was
screaming about how Barack Obama wasn't born in the United
(03:07):
States and had the Hawaiian health official with the copy
of his birth certificate killed in a plane crash, and
how you know, Antoine Scalia was smothered by a pillow
and Hillary Clinton was part of a secret cuple. That's
the stuff that really got through to people, and it
had this patina of oh, he says the things that
the rest of us are just thinking.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Well, the rest of us are not just thinking it.
It's only a small number of people thinking, but that's
a very politically active group. So really, that rubicon was
not crossed last month. It was crossed in twenty sixteen,
and unfortunately, we're just getting further and further away from
the last bridge back to the same place. At this point,
our government and the very levers that control how money
(03:50):
is collected and spent in this country are being controlled
by conspiracy adult lunatics. It's its federal law enforcement is
being controlled by conspiracy adult lunatics. Is the worst nightmare
of everything journalists and researchers have been writing about for
the last decade.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Mike, I think we should have probably known that some
of these things were false. Fifty million dollars on condoms.
I haven't even spent that in a last year on condoms,
and that doesn't make sense. Yeah, it seems in college.
But yeah, what I wanted to go quickly to something
very personal with you, as we understand that your house
was lost in the fires and Alta, Dina and so
and I understand that the conspiracy theories have built up
(04:28):
around some of the fires and obviously the federal government's
response to the fires. And first of all, we feel
terrible for what's happened to you, but we've been to
send your thoughts on what you experienced and what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Yes we did, we lost our house in the eating
fire in Altadena. We're safe, got the family out, got
the dogs out, got a few really important documents, lost
everything else, But we are doing better than a lot
of people. And as soon as it the initial gut
punch of losing the house subsides and you start to think, Okay,
what's going to happen next? My first thoughts go to, Okay,
(05:01):
how is this going to drive online insanity? Because that's
what I think about, that's how I interface with the world.
And I knew that because disasters bring conspiracy theories, and
particularly fires have been bringing these directed energy weapon conspiracy theories,
I knew that would be a big part of it.
And of course, the fire takes place two weeks before
(05:23):
the second Trump inauguration, and he's already talking about all
the ways he's going to gut the federal government and
stick it to the deep state. So I immediately knew
that this would all get wrapped up in the sort
of the plastic cellophane of politics and conspiracism and tribalism
and this sort of weird Trump cult stuff. So immediately
you've got Trump blaming Gavin Newsom saying that, oh, they
(05:46):
didn't turn on the water spigett if they just opened
up the water and let it flow south and trucked
it down there, none of this would have happened. I'm like, you,
guys don't understand how any of this works, Like you
don't understand what happened that night and all of the
fact that went into the fact that there wasn't enough
water pressures because the whole city was on fire. The
idea that one house is destroyed while another house is standing, oh,
(06:10):
it means it was hit by a laser. I've seen
this in my own neighborhood. My neighbor two doors down,
her house is still standing, the house behind us is
still standing. Everything around it is destroyed. That's just the
way fire works. It's very mysterious and it's complicated. But
that doesn't mean it's a conspiracy, except we seek easy
explanations through conspiracies. Hence everything about this fire has become
(06:34):
grist for this endless mill of paranoia.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, it's the same paranoia. So, Mike, I lived in
Hawaii and there was It started out with Marjorie Taylor
Green and the Jewish space lasers starting the fires in
California earlier, and then when there was the fire here
on well but on Maui, the Lahinea fire. It was
very quickly after that pictures started coming out of laser
(06:57):
beams coming out of the sky after pictures, and it
was the same set of conspiracy theories. And now with
the California fires, it's again the same set of conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
It's yeah, yeah, you're seeing a lot of the same stuff,
but then there's variations on it. So the one thing
that we've had that other fires haven't had. There's been
a couple of things. There's the delta smelts that all
the water was like siphoned off to protect this endangered fish.
I mean, it's not true. But the other one that
was really hyperculture were driven is the DEI firefighters. The
people who were fighting the fires. They weren't qualified, they
(07:29):
were diversity HighRes It's ridiculous. I've watched the firefighters fighting
burning houses and you're not going to find people who
are more devoted to their community and more selfless about
risk than firefighters. Like blaming firefighters for this is a
level of insane that even I never thought I was.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Going to see. Douglas MacArthur had this famous quote that
old soldiers never die, right, they just fade away, And
so his QAnon died and faded away, or his transmographied
into the conspiracy theories that we're seeing now around USAID
and the deep State and all the rest. Is the
QAnon DNA still there, or the conspiracy theory is just changed.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah. I think in terms of q andon, I kind
of look at it like a butterfly. It is left
the chrysalis. It does not need the codes and the
riddles and the message board stuff and the mysterious military
intelligence avatar. The people who either believe this stuff or
have no trouble monetizing it off. The people who do
(08:34):
believe it, they're running things now. Cash Patel has promoted qwanon.
He is running the FBI. We don't need the riddles
and the codes and the choose your own adventure stuff anymore.
They moved way beyond that. There's never going to be
a need for another q drop because Donald Trump tweets
this stuff every day. Now, also there's QAnon, and it
(08:58):
is transformed into something so much bigger and so much
more mainstream and more palatable than I think really anybody
could have imagined even a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
You're one of the foremost experts on conspiracy theories, and
since we last talked We've been through a political campaign
and we have a new administration, and we've already mentioned
some of the names of the people there who are
conspiracists or conspiracy theorists. Cash Pttel and he just put
in as a deputy, Dan Bongino, TLCA Gabbert is over
at the Director of National Intelligence. How has your life
(09:30):
changed and how do you find yourself talking about these
people and politics more and what's your view of those
specific people and any others you might think of.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think all of these people are grossly unqualified for
the jobs they have. Ian Robert F. Kennedy Junior running
Health and Human Services is just mind boggling. This is
a guy who thinks that COVID nineteen was engineered to
avoid Ashkenazi Jews. This is ridiculous. It has taken over
every aspect of our lives, of our commerce, of our culture,
(10:00):
of our medicine. And now you've got these people who
are making these massive cuts to government, who are cutting
things like researching ways to defend against the next pandemic,
because then they're going to turn around and sell like
supplements and raw milk on their podcasts. That are the
things that are going to help you actually fight it.
You've got the ameshment not just of sort of crank ideas,
(10:22):
but of crank commerce being pushed by the people at
the very top of this. It has changed everything about
our government and our culture and our politics. And we're
at the very beginning of this. I think the real
horrors of how this is all going to unfold are
really just ahead of us. You know, I was thinking
the other day about how we're cutting the FAA. I mean,
(10:44):
air traffic controllers are being fired. What happens when we
get to May and families start flying around the country
on summer vacations and this gutted FAA is trying to
control all these planes in the air. What if a
bird flu epidemic crosses over into humans at that except
I mean, the ways that this could go wrong are
just mind boggling. And they are inescapable. And it used
(11:05):
to be you could compartmentalize some of this stuff. You know,
QAnon was bad and it was kind of everywhere, but
at least it wasn't like like Trump would talk about
it like once, but it wasn't running things. And now
these people are running things, and it's a whole new
level of bad and we're really just at the very
beginning of it.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
More of this after a quick break.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
All right, let's get back into it.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So I thought it was interesting that James Carr will
come out recently and said he predicts or hopes amps
that the chickens will come home to roost soon. Right,
that if you have your health policy where you don't
accept the germ theory of disease, or if you think
the Russians are your realize you destroy your alliances, that
(11:53):
there's real consequences to this, and when they hippen that
people will get it the vast majority and turn again
the conspiracy theorist because they because it's not working. I'm
not sure that's the case. So when conspiracy theories don't
come to pass, how do conspiracy theorists explain this away
(12:13):
like none of the q Andon stuff happened.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
I certainly hope the chickens come home to roost in
a way that is not horribly destructive for the country
and the world. I really hope there's not another pandemic
to prove how wrong they were. Nobody needs that. But
conspiracy believers have a remarkable way of taking the failure
of their prophecies and of their plots as confirmation that
(12:36):
the plots are actually true. They're just coming true in
a different way. There's the famous book for the nineteen
fifties when prophecy fails that it's a book that everybody
should read. It's the Study of a UFO cult. And
it's a very small group. But they go out of
the streets of Chicago and I'm freezing Christmas Eve, waiting
for the saucer to come down and take them away. Well,
the saucer doesn't come down and take them away. What
do you do? Then a few people drift away, but
(12:58):
the rest of these people go own away everything in
my life. I've left my family and my job to
live at the house with the great mother who gets
the automatic writing messages from the aliens. What am I
gonna do? I can't go back. And if I leave
and the saucer comes tomorrow, I'm gonna feel really stupid.
So you stick with it, and you rationalize it, and
(13:19):
you find ways to make yourself believe that it's still
gonna come true. It's just gonna happen in a different way.
So I think you saw that constantly with QAnon, with
these very very specific predictions that Hillary Clinton is going
to be arrested on October thirty first, twenty seventeen. Obviously
that didn't happen, and they rationalized it by saying Q
(13:41):
was actually talking about Saudi Arabia, not Hillary Clinton. I mean,
never mind that he literally said Hillary Clinton will be arrested.
It doesn't matter. Once you have talked yourself into believing
something outlandish, you will continue to believe that outlandish thing
because the alternative is saying I was wrong, I got fooled,
and now I have to go back to all the
(14:02):
people in my life and tell them I was wrong
and they were right. I mean, very few people really
have the ability to do that. Conspiracy theorists will come
up with new justifications, new causes for why the thing
either didn't happen or why it was actually a good thing.
You're starting to see that already with this measles outbreak
in Texas. You're seeing wellness, people going, well, measles is
(14:23):
actually good. We all got measles when we were a kid,
and we were just fine. Well, like lot of people
weren't actually just fine when they got measles. But more
than that, like measles is the harbinger for things like polio.
I mean, my god, can you imagine a polio outbreak
in this country right now? It's unfathomable. They'll find a
way to justify it and blame somebody else for it,
(14:44):
even when it happens to them.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
It's going to be very interesting to see how this
works out. So since Jerry and I worked in a
large organization, it was complicated. So Telsea Gabert is going
into the Director of National Intelligence Kesh Pttel and Dan
but Gino are going into the FBI. It's gonna be
really interest to see when they're in charge because they
are going to be responsible for a huge workforce with
lots of things happening, and they're going to be brief
(15:08):
every day. They could be brief. There's could be things happening.
It's things in the world. Is going to be arrest
there's going to be problems. There's gonna be and somehow
it's easy if you're on the outside, you can just
say crazy things because you're never held accountable or responsible
in any way. And now you're inside and at some
level you have to accept these people as your your
people who work for you, because you want your organization
(15:31):
to succeed. You want to come out and say I've
made the FBI stronger and now we're doing all these
better things. Are they just going to say, oh, well,
we got rid of all the bad people. Now these
are all geniuses and they work for me, and so
everything's good because it's easy from the outside to say
dumb stuff. When you're responsible for it.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
It's going to be different, right, you know, show us
the aliens. If they don't show us the aliens, then
they're also part of the deep state. They're captured by.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah, if Trump had four years to you know, tell
us who really killed JFK and show us the saucers
from Roswell and it was always like, wow, I'm going
to release it in two weeks and it's going to
be mind blowing. And we got to just get these
couple of things out of the way. That's really where
QAnon came from. Is you get into kind of Trump's
first year in office, and he hasn't locked up Hillary Clinton,
(16:16):
he has not built the wall, he has not declassified
all the JFK documents and exposed Barack Obama as being
a Kenyan Muslim. You got to find some way to
justify why he hasn't done it. If you're a Trump devotee,
you can't say he hasn't done it because he's useless
and it was never going to do it. As an idiot,
you say, well, there, the deep State is stopping him
(16:37):
from doing it, but we're on the inside, and we're
going to show you how it's really happening in a
way that can't be traced back to us. So you
get the codes and the riddles and the prophecies of QAnon,
and it's a way to continue to push conspiracy theories
even when theoretically you have the power to make all
these things go away.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
I think one of Trump's gifts is this ability to
pretend he's on the outside even when he's on the inside.
And so he created the deep state and he's doing
it now, like all of a sudden, he'll be like,
we don't know what's in Fort Knox. You're the president
of the United States. You work the frut, You can
go there any time you want. You could you get
the people who are there can show you what's in there.
Like that stuff works for him with a public who
(17:17):
doesn't understand the stuff either, so he can pretend like
he's one of them, even though he's actually in charge
of these things.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
People want to be told what's happening, and they want
an explanation. And when you have the president saying we
don't know what's in Fort Knox, you're the president, you
were already the president. You could have gone there at
any time, like you could have proven the gold was
or wasn't there eight years ago? What is taking so long?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
So, like you've done a lot of study of cult
leaders and how they message and how they controlled their followings,
and I'm curious as to what you think speculation about
this messaging now coming you know directly from the president
that joking but it's not really joking, and joking about
a third term and also calling himself king increasingly now
(18:05):
when a cult leader starts giving themselves complete control, where
the laws of political laws, in the laws of gravity,
by economics don't apply to them, they believe. So what
do you think is going on there with that?
Speaker 3 (18:19):
If you watch these speeches? I mean, remember those cabinet
meetings from Trump's first term where you just go around
the table and every single person there would just lavish
him with praise. And those were sort of the non
Trump outsider people. Now he's nominating people who are just
conspiracy podcasters who just worship the ground he walks on.
(18:40):
You know, I know that there's always been this thing
of like, oh, do we take Trump seriously? Do we
take him literally? Is it just a joke? Is he trolling?
First of all, the guy has no ability to be funny,
so he's never it's hard to tell sometimes what he
means in the moment, and he's always been like that.
But when he talks about himself like a king, nobody
would say that unless they believed at least some part
(19:02):
of it. I think he really does believe he is
the king of America. I mean, do I think he's
going to try to run for a third term. I
honestly have no idea. I don't know if he's going
to be coherent in four years. But just the fact
that he continues to talk about this and he continues
to rile up his fan base to believe that he
has the ability to do this. The law just does
(19:24):
not apply to him. But you also fear for the
next iteration of Trump and whether that's jd Vance and
I don't think it is, but somebody may be a
decade or two down the line. Who takes the techniques
that Trump was able to use in his decades of
being on TV and being a tabloid fixture and actually
apply them to a coherent, competent version of fascism in
(19:47):
a way that really hasn't even presented itself yet.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Hold on just a second, Well we take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Let's get back into it.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Jerry and I want to take advantage of your expertise here.
You can maybe help us with this as podcasters. Can
you help us monetize what we're doing, Like what conspiracies
can make us the most money? What should we jump
on where there's some money that we can sort of
go after.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Wait, I wish I knew, you know. I've had people
who've been like, oh, you know you understand conspiracy theories,
so well, why don't you start like an alternate, you know,
anonymous version of yourself pushing this stuff and you can
cash in on Like, I guess I could do that,
but I just to be able to sleep at night.
There is so much money in the fear mongering and
the plot creation that these guys are able to do.
(20:33):
Bongino was able to do it because he was a
secret Service agent for a little bit of time, and
he parlayed that into this sort of screaming incoherence about liberals.
And it really is just taking the most hateful, most
paranoid stuff that really dials into the fear that has
been on the far right for a long time. And
(20:54):
there is just a limitless pool of money to be
able to fund stuff like that. I just think you
have to not have a soul or a conscience to
be able to tap into it.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
The way we can monetize this, John is not to
create our own conspiracy theories, but to sell our souls
exactly as you say, Yeah, I don't know how much
my soul can be monetized as But like jd Vance,
who was calling Trump Hitler two years ago, or Mark Rubio,
I think what we need to do is we need
to like become turncoats to reality and rationality, and we
(21:25):
need to like buy in. So people like Mark Rubio,
who I've briefed in the past, right, I have at
least a sort of an understanding of how he operates.
He's an intelligent guy. I got to assume that he
knows that this shit isn't true. And Jady Vance too.
I don't know. I don't have any interactions with him.
The problem, of course, is around Trump now, no one
(21:46):
will say no to him when he says I'm king.
They all have to say yes or they're gone. Right,
there's no guardrails anymore.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, it's been really fascinating watching Congressional Republicans stand there
as Elon Musk and his doze door go in and
essentially take control of federal spending, which is the thing
that the House is supposed to do it. Why would
House Republicans, who presumably have fought so hard and work
so hard to get this power, why are they just
giving it up? Why are they just standing there? Is
(22:15):
it fear? Is it just laziness? And you just don't know.
And I think for a lot of the especially the
really vociferous anti Trump Republicans who have licked the boot
and gone in, people like Rubio, people like Lindsey Graham,
I think for them, it's this is what's happening, and
I can either be part of it, or I can
get cast out and I can either be ostracized by
(22:36):
the President, or I can play golf with him, and
I can either be banned from Fox News or I
can be on Fox News whenever I want. So you
just go along to get along, and you realize that
Trump is not going to be president forever, this will
end at some point. Then you can, you know, make
your big Maya culpa and go, oh, I had to
go along with it because somebody had to be in charge,
(22:58):
somebody had to be the adult in the road. Complete nonsense.
But if you can get some people in your district
to go along with it, then you can have played
both sides. Or you just take your big payoff, maybe
sign a book deal and get on the speaker's circuit
and just right off into the sunset once this is
all over. So I think for a lot of these people,
it's just self preservation. It's just a way to continue
(23:20):
to have the status that you have, continue to have
the access that you have, continue to be invited to
the important parties, and you get to play golf with
the president and the prime ministers and whatever, and if
you have to eat some crap for a while to
do it, that's just part of the thing. And I
think that's probably the simplest explanation. It's the most craven
(23:40):
and cowardly one, but a lot of these people are
just craven cowards.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Yeah, so as long as you have no prior conscience,
that way to go.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, having lived in places with dictators, iconography is really important.
Go to any Soviet Union, ay of those countries. The
picture the leader is there, right, the picture of Hitler,
the picture of Stalin. And yet now, at least for
me and for a lot of people I know, the
iconography of Trump is Trump sitting behind a desk, saying nothing,
(24:09):
as a man in a black jacket and black shirt
with a black who feels so comfortable that he can
bring his kid to run around inside of them. What's
your what's your sense? Elon? The unique feature of Elon Musk.
He seems to be the perfect person to build conspiracy
theories around, and yet I don't see a lot of
(24:30):
him being the center of conspiracy theories right now.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
The Trump people, they all love Musk because I think
they see Musk a lot like they see Trump, and
the way they see Trump is an extension of themselves.
The Trump and Musk are the guys they want to be.
They are rich, they're powerful, They've got lots of kids,
There's lots of different beautiful women. They can do whatever
they want, They can say whatever they want. That's the
(24:53):
image that a lot of these people have created for themselves.
Of course, they'll never get there, because Trump and Muscle
were both into money, and they both got very lucky
in a lot of different ways, and they've created this
image for themselves. I think with Musk and this sort
of dominance and this kind of relationship with Trump, it's
it's a kind of a wild card because you would
think that Trump's ego is so gigantic and his need
(25:17):
to be the guy and the center of attention is
so all consuming that like, how could he sit there
and have Elon Musk howering over him and letting his
kid like talk smacked him? Like what dictator with total
control over his image would allow that to happen. And
I do start to wonder, and I hate speculating about
(25:37):
these people's like mental states or physical states, but you
do kind of wonder how much is Trump actually there?
How with it is he is he really realizing that
he looks like a letting himself be physically dominated by
Elon Musk and like doing co interviews with Sean Hannity
with Elon Musk, he's the president he's the king. The
(25:58):
King doesn't do co interviews. It's like Woodrow Wilson after
his stroke in nineteen eighteen, when it was like, oh,
his wife is actually kind of running things. You could
do that in nineteen eighteen because there was no real
mass media and there were no nuclear weapons. I mean,
the things moved slowly then. It's hard to do that
now and the stakes are a lot higher, and I
do wonder how long this can continue.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
I'm of the view that Trump has always been not
very smart and becoming less so whether he's there or not.
But he does have incredible animal instincts, and I think
Musk serves a purpose for him because when anything really
goes wrong, he can just throw him under the bus
and blame Musk, not himself. He can say, well, a
Musk is doing that, I'm not really paying attention. He's
(26:43):
deflecting any accountability from himself, and he has a real
gift for that. But there are in terms of Musk,
are there conspiracies that were starting to see there with
the tech bros And Silicon Valley and Elon Musk and
a number of these people who came from South Africa.
Musk wants to send people to Mars. There's been some
interesting interviews lately with Kara Swisher, who wrote reports on
Silicon Billy, talking about this sort of view that the
(27:06):
present order needs to be destroyed and government needs to
be destroyed so that we can prepare to go to
Mars and all these other kind of things that Muskt,
you know, and wants to destroy things to benefit himself,
and in the process he's involved in things that are
helping his companies at the same time. And so there's
enough things floating around there that if the Left wants
(27:26):
to create conspiracy theories, there's plenty there. And maybe in
fact there's a little bit of conspiracy there too. I
think there's a lot of truth in a lot of
these things. I think Musk is enormously a megalomaniacal. I
think he is someone who really.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Wants to have everything. He wondered, like, why would the
richest man in the world need to ruin the United
States government so that SpaceX can get a leg up
on its competitors. It makes no sense to the vast
majority of us. But if you've got that kind of
instinct to gather so much money that no one else
has more money than you. Then you're never gonna stop
(27:59):
you never going to stop gathering money, You're never going
to stop destroying your competitors until it's just you at
the end. And then you're like sitting alone on your
Marcian colony and no one else is there, and you're going, oh,
maybe this wasn't a great idea. I think that's a
kind of greed and a kind of megalomania that we've
never seen in our government. I mean, we've obviously seen
sort of heady grift in governments, but never like this,
(28:23):
I mean, never this kind of messianic desire to destroy
everything and take everything.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
People think it can't get that bad. You need to
look at history a little bit. Look at what Mao
did with a Great leave forward. He destroyed the Chinese
economy for for thirty years, what Stalin did during the
purges and the Great Famines, what pot and khmar resotion
was going to be my lands one, but I was
going to go with Argentina, with Juan Perill right, who
(28:49):
completely destroyed the Argentine economy, which was one of the
richest economies in the world in the nineteen forties. And
so yeah, it can get way worse. Unless we like
were together and try to establish this.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
But one of the things that I think sometimes we say, oh,
these people around Trump there, they're crazy, of they're conspiracy theorists.
We call them lutex some of them Trump himself and
I think Musk too, are good at weaponizing conspiracy theory.
So they did this. They decided they were going to
kill the USAID, which is actually not a big powerful organization,
and they immediately created stories that are insane that that
(29:24):
is the biggest criminal organization ever, that these people are lunatics,
left wing lunatics. Marxist is maybe the biggest fraud ever
put on the American which is just like, it's so
not it's just a small organization that money from Congress
and often from our farmers to places overseas that we
(29:45):
need to believe help. So like they spread those conspiracy
theories so that when people see this happening, they're like, like,
by thank God that they're dealing with these horrible things
that have been happening in our government. I'm like, how
do you start with that. It's like they've created a
fake conspiracy theory and they pump it and and they
have the soapbox and I just put.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It up in and say, if USAID was a criminal organization,
why didn't Trump get rid of it when he was
there for four years? Has over the Congress have been
overseeing it since it's inception? That's right. And Ivanka Trump
was part of it, right, She was involved in a
number of USAID initiatives and made money off of it.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Yeah, it's a really classic logical fallacy. It's the straw
man argument. You create a villain or an argument, and
you are the one who then solves. You're the one
who solves the problem that you created, or you win
the argument against the thing that you made up. It's
a really easy way to look smart and look like
you're doing something and look like you're getting a big win.
(30:42):
I think in terms of these very early days of
Trump and these giant government cuts, they needed a win.
They needed something that they could look at and publicly
point to as the That is an example of how
the Democrats and the other Rhino Republicans were wasting your money.
They were taking your hard earned tax payer dollars and
giving it to Hamas to you know, have sex, or
(31:03):
giving it to some study of the Botswana fruit fly.
And they're giving it to our enemies, and they're taking
away from they're taking food from the tables of Americans
and giving it away. Never Mind that it's not true.
Never mind that this is a program that really has
a lot of really important functions in terms of projecting
US power around the world in terms of like feeding children,
(31:25):
which you would think that we would all be okay with,
in particularly the Republicans who were all marching in the
streets to save the children four years ago. But people
don't understand it, and they've never heard of it. And
if the first thing they've heard of it is it's
bad and it's run by evil people and we're stopping it,
you go, oh, thank god. This thing that i'd never
heard of until five minutes ago that was ruining my life,
(31:47):
apparently now it's being stopped. I mean, you've got food
that Congress had appropriated the money for that is just
sitting there rotting that could have gone to help people,
and it's not because Elon Musk has cooked up conspiracy
theory about Ben Stiller getting paid to go to Ukraine's.
It's crazy, but it's also it fills that need that
(32:07):
all conspiracies fill for a villain for a bad guy
and for a secret plot that your friends and the
people you respect are exposed.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Mike, we could speak to you for a much longer
on these kind of things, but we want to have
you on again absolute because we're gonna need There's going
to be continued conspiracies in our government and around our lives.
But thank you again for spending so much time with us,
and what you're doing on our political front is very helpful.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Thank you, guys, this is great.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is Mission Implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So it's really great to have Mike Rothschild on again.
Mike is a journalist, published author, and a foremost expert
in the ever changing Quanon conspiracy thing. Moreover, Mike explores
the intersections between Internet culture and politics through the lens
(00:52):
of conspiracy theories. He's a subject matter expert in the
field of fringe beliefs really important right now, and Mike
is a veteran Mission Implausible guest here with us for
the second time.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
So Mike, welcome, Thank you for having me back. I'm
very excited, Mike.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
So there's so much to start with, and so let
me start in the middle when we can work our
way around writers. This USAI D for me. I've got
a lot of friends in USA I D I think
John does two and it's destruction, taking it like Christy
Nome's dog, taking it down into the pit and shooting it.
All started out with a video falsely claiming that USAI
(01:32):
D paid Ben Stiller and Angelina, Joe Lee and other
actors millions of dollars to travel to the Ukraine. And
this was in an a clip that appeared to be
on entertainment news News And as it turns out, this
clip was actually Russian disinformation. And yet this didn't prevent
(01:52):
Elon Musk and President Musk President.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
One, No, you were write the first time.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Co President Musk from using this as a pretext for
one of the pretexts for dismantling usa D, along with
another false claim that it provided fifty million dollars to
Hamas in Gaza for condoms, And of course the actual
answer was a little more complicated, but it did involve
aid to Gaza for people who were impacted, who were impactedgmatically. So, Mike,
(02:25):
where is the difference now between disinformation and conspiracy theories?
They have they melded into one, And how does if
the president can't keep it apart, how do we there
is no difference at this point. There really is no
separation between conspiracism, disinformation, politics, popular culture, internet culture, news
(02:46):
dissemination is it has all become the same thing. And
of course, so much of that really happened at light speed.
Really during the first Trump campaign he rose to political
prominence not because of his brilliant ideas there's tax pol
his plans for the EU. It was because he was
screaming about how Barack Obama wasn't born in the United
(03:07):
States and had the Hawaiian health official with the copy
of his birth certificate killed in a plane crash, and
how you know, Antoine Scalia was smothered by a pillow
and Hillary Clinton was part of a secret cuple. That's
the stuff that really got through to people, and it
had this patina of oh, he says the things that
the rest of us are just thinking.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Well, the rest of us are not just thinking it.
It's only a small number of people thinking, but that's
a very politically active group. So really, that rubicon was
not crossed last month. It was crossed in twenty sixteen,
and unfortunately, we're just getting further and further away from
the last bridge back to the same place. At this point,
our government and the very levers that control how money
(03:50):
is collected and spent in this country are being controlled
by conspiracy adult lunatics. It's its federal law enforcement is
being controlled by conspiracy adult lunatics. Is the worst nightmare
of everything journalists and researchers have been writing about for
the last decade.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Mike, I think we should have probably known that some
of these things were false. Fifty million dollars on condoms.
I haven't even spent that in a last year on condoms,
and that doesn't make sense. Yeah, it seems in college.
But yeah, what I wanted to go quickly to something
very personal with you, as we understand that your house
was lost in the fires and Alta, Dina and so
and I understand that the conspiracy theories have built up
(04:28):
around some of the fires and obviously the federal government's
response to the fires. And first of all, we feel
terrible for what's happened to you, but we've been to
send your thoughts on what you experienced and what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Yes we did, we lost our house in the eating
fire in Altadena. We're safe, got the family out, got
the dogs out, got a few really important documents, lost
everything else, But we are doing better than a lot
of people. And as soon as it the initial gut
punch of losing the house subsides and you start to think, Okay,
what's going to happen next? My first thoughts go to, Okay,
(05:01):
how is this going to drive online insanity? Because that's
what I think about, that's how I interface with the world.
And I knew that because disasters bring conspiracy theories, and
particularly fires have been bringing these directed energy weapon conspiracy theories,
I knew that would be a big part of it.
And of course, the fire takes place two weeks before
(05:23):
the second Trump inauguration, and he's already talking about all
the ways he's going to gut the federal government and
stick it to the deep state. So I immediately knew
that this would all get wrapped up in the sort
of the plastic cellophane of politics and conspiracism and tribalism
and this sort of weird Trump cult stuff. So immediately
you've got Trump blaming Gavin Newsom saying that, oh, they
(05:46):
didn't turn on the water spigett if they just opened
up the water and let it flow south and trucked
it down there, none of this would have happened. I'm like, you,
guys don't understand how any of this works, Like you
don't understand what happened that night and all of the
fact that went into the fact that there wasn't enough
water pressures because the whole city was on fire. The
idea that one house is destroyed while another house is standing, oh,
(06:10):
it means it was hit by a laser. I've seen
this in my own neighborhood. My neighbor two doors down,
her house is still standing, the house behind us is
still standing. Everything around it is destroyed. That's just the
way fire works. It's very mysterious and it's complicated. But
that doesn't mean it's a conspiracy, except we seek easy
explanations through conspiracies. Hence everything about this fire has become
(06:34):
grist for this endless mill of paranoia.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, it's the same paranoia. So, Mike, I lived in
Hawaii and there was It started out with Marjorie Taylor
Green and the Jewish space lasers starting the fires in
California earlier, and then when there was the fire here
on well but on Maui, the Lahinea fire. It was
very quickly after that pictures started coming out of laser
(06:57):
beams coming out of the sky after pictures, and it
was the same set of conspiracy theories. And now with
the California fires, it's again the same set of conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
It's yeah, yeah, you're seeing a lot of the same stuff,
but then there's variations on it. So the one thing
that we've had that other fires haven't had. There's been
a couple of things. There's the delta smelts that all
the water was like siphoned off to protect this endangered fish.
I mean, it's not true. But the other one that
was really hyperculture were driven is the DEI firefighters. The
people who were fighting the fires. They weren't qualified, they
(07:29):
were diversity HighRes It's ridiculous. I've watched the firefighters fighting
burning houses and you're not going to find people who
are more devoted to their community and more selfless about
risk than firefighters. Like blaming firefighters for this is a
level of insane that even I never thought I was.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Going to see. Douglas MacArthur had this famous quote that
old soldiers never die, right, they just fade away, And
so his QAnon died and faded away, or his transmographied
into the conspiracy theories that we're seeing now around USAID
and the deep State and all the rest. Is the
QAnon DNA still there, or the conspiracy theory is just changed.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Yeah. I think in terms of q andon, I kind
of look at it like a butterfly. It is left
the chrysalis. It does not need the codes and the
riddles and the message board stuff and the mysterious military
intelligence avatar. The people who either believe this stuff or
have no trouble monetizing it off. The people who do
(08:34):
believe it, they're running things now. Cash Patel has promoted qwanon.
He is running the FBI. We don't need the riddles
and the codes and the choose your own adventure stuff anymore.
They moved way beyond that. There's never going to be
a need for another q drop because Donald Trump tweets
this stuff every day. Now, also there's QAnon, and it
(08:58):
is transformed into something so much bigger and so much
more mainstream and more palatable than I think really anybody
could have imagined even a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
You're one of the foremost experts on conspiracy theories, and
since we last talked We've been through a political campaign
and we have a new administration, and we've already mentioned
some of the names of the people there who are
conspiracists or conspiracy theorists. Cash Pttel and he just put
in as a deputy, Dan Bongino, TLCA Gabbert is over
at the Director of National Intelligence. How has your life
(09:30):
changed and how do you find yourself talking about these
people and politics more and what's your view of those
specific people and any others you might think of.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think all of these people are grossly unqualified for
the jobs they have. Ian Robert F. Kennedy Junior running
Health and Human Services is just mind boggling. This is
a guy who thinks that COVID nineteen was engineered to
avoid Ashkenazi Jews. This is ridiculous. It has taken over
every aspect of our lives, of our commerce, of our culture,
(10:00):
of our medicine. And now you've got these people who
are making these massive cuts to government, who are cutting
things like researching ways to defend against the next pandemic,
because then they're going to turn around and sell like
supplements and raw milk on their podcasts. That are the
things that are going to help you actually fight it.
You've got the ameshment not just of sort of crank ideas,
(10:22):
but of crank commerce being pushed by the people at
the very top of this. It has changed everything about
our government and our culture and our politics. And we're
at the very beginning of this. I think the real
horrors of how this is all going to unfold are
really just ahead of us. You know, I was thinking
the other day about how we're cutting the FAA. I mean,
(10:44):
air traffic controllers are being fired. What happens when we
get to May and families start flying around the country
on summer vacations and this gutted FAA is trying to
control all these planes in the air. What if a
bird flu epidemic crosses over into humans at that except
I mean, the ways that this could go wrong are
just mind boggling. And they are inescapable. And it used
(11:05):
to be you could compartmentalize some of this stuff. You know,
QAnon was bad and it was kind of everywhere, but
at least it wasn't like like Trump would talk about
it like once, but it wasn't running things. And now
these people are running things, and it's a whole new
level of bad and we're really just at the very
beginning of it.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
More of this after a quick break.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
All right, let's get back into it.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
So I thought it was interesting that James Carr will
come out recently and said he predicts or hopes amps
that the chickens will come home to roost soon. Right,
that if you have your health policy where you don't
accept the germ theory of disease, or if you think
the Russians are your realize you destroy your alliances, that
(11:53):
there's real consequences to this, and when they hippen that
people will get it the vast majority and turn again
the conspiracy theorist because they because it's not working. I'm
not sure that's the case. So when conspiracy theories don't
come to pass, how do conspiracy theorists explain this away
(12:13):
like none of the q Andon stuff happened.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
I certainly hope the chickens come home to roost in
a way that is not horribly destructive for the country
and the world. I really hope there's not another pandemic
to prove how wrong they were. Nobody needs that. But
conspiracy believers have a remarkable way of taking the failure
of their prophecies and of their plots as confirmation that
(12:36):
the plots are actually true. They're just coming true in
a different way. There's the famous book for the nineteen
fifties when prophecy fails that it's a book that everybody
should read. It's the Study of a UFO cult. And
it's a very small group. But they go out of
the streets of Chicago and I'm freezing Christmas Eve, waiting
for the saucer to come down and take them away. Well,
the saucer doesn't come down and take them away. What
do you do? Then a few people drift away, but
(12:58):
the rest of these people go own away everything in
my life. I've left my family and my job to
live at the house with the great mother who gets
the automatic writing messages from the aliens. What am I
gonna do? I can't go back. And if I leave
and the saucer comes tomorrow, I'm gonna feel really stupid.
So you stick with it, and you rationalize it, and
(13:19):
you find ways to make yourself believe that it's still
gonna come true. It's just gonna happen in a different way.
So I think you saw that constantly with QAnon, with
these very very specific predictions that Hillary Clinton is going
to be arrested on October thirty first, twenty seventeen. Obviously
that didn't happen, and they rationalized it by saying Q
(13:41):
was actually talking about Saudi Arabia, not Hillary Clinton. I mean,
never mind that he literally said Hillary Clinton will be arrested.
It doesn't matter. Once you have talked yourself into believing
something outlandish, you will continue to believe that outlandish thing
because the alternative is saying I was wrong, I got fooled,
and now I have to go back to all the
(14:02):
people in my life and tell them I was wrong
and they were right. I mean, very few people really
have the ability to do that. Conspiracy theorists will come
up with new justifications, new causes for why the thing
either didn't happen or why it was actually a good thing.
You're starting to see that already with this measles outbreak
in Texas. You're seeing wellness, people going, well, measles is
(14:23):
actually good. We all got measles when we were a kid,
and we were just fine. Well, like lot of people
weren't actually just fine when they got measles. But more
than that, like measles is the harbinger for things like polio.
I mean, my god, can you imagine a polio outbreak
in this country right now? It's unfathomable. They'll find a
way to justify it and blame somebody else for it,
(14:44):
even when it happens to them.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
It's going to be very interesting to see how this
works out. So since Jerry and I worked in a
large organization, it was complicated. So Telsea Gabert is going
into the Director of National Intelligence Kesh Pttel and Dan
but Gino are going into the FBI. It's gonna be
really interest to see when they're in charge because they
are going to be responsible for a huge workforce with
lots of things happening, and they're going to be brief
(15:08):
every day. They could be brief. There's could be things happening.
It's things in the world. Is going to be arrest
there's going to be problems. There's gonna be and somehow
it's easy if you're on the outside, you can just
say crazy things because you're never held accountable or responsible
in any way. And now you're inside and at some
level you have to accept these people as your your
people who work for you, because you want your organization
(15:31):
to succeed. You want to come out and say I've
made the FBI stronger and now we're doing all these
better things. Are they just going to say, oh, well,
we got rid of all the bad people. Now these
are all geniuses and they work for me, and so
everything's good because it's easy from the outside to say
dumb stuff. When you're responsible for it.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
It's going to be different, right, you know, show us
the aliens. If they don't show us the aliens, then
they're also part of the deep state. They're captured by.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah, if Trump had four years to you know, tell
us who really killed JFK and show us the saucers
from Roswell and it was always like, wow, I'm going
to release it in two weeks and it's going to
be mind blowing. And we got to just get these
couple of things out of the way. That's really where
QAnon came from. Is you get into kind of Trump's
first year in office, and he hasn't locked up Hillary Clinton,
(16:16):
he has not built the wall, he has not declassified
all the JFK documents and exposed Barack Obama as being
a Kenyan Muslim. You got to find some way to
justify why he hasn't done it. If you're a Trump devotee,
you can't say he hasn't done it because he's useless
and it was never going to do it. As an idiot,
you say, well, there, the deep State is stopping him
(16:37):
from doing it, but we're on the inside, and we're
going to show you how it's really happening in a
way that can't be traced back to us. So you
get the codes and the riddles and the prophecies of QAnon,
and it's a way to continue to push conspiracy theories
even when theoretically you have the power to make all
these things go away.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
I think one of Trump's gifts is this ability to
pretend he's on the outside even when he's on the inside.
And so he created the deep state and he's doing
it now, like all of a sudden, he'll be like,
we don't know what's in Fort Knox. You're the president
of the United States. You work the frut, You can
go there any time you want. You could you get
the people who are there can show you what's in there.
Like that stuff works for him with a public who
(17:17):
doesn't understand the stuff either, so he can pretend like
he's one of them, even though he's actually in charge
of these things.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
People want to be told what's happening, and they want
an explanation. And when you have the president saying we
don't know what's in Fort Knox, you're the president, you
were already the president. You could have gone there at
any time, like you could have proven the gold was
or wasn't there eight years ago? What is taking so long?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
So, like you've done a lot of study of cult
leaders and how they message and how they controlled their followings,
and I'm curious as to what you think speculation about
this messaging now coming you know directly from the president
that joking but it's not really joking, and joking about
a third term and also calling himself king increasingly now
(18:05):
when a cult leader starts giving themselves complete control, where
the laws of political laws, in the laws of gravity,
by economics don't apply to them, they believe. So what
do you think is going on there with that?
Speaker 3 (18:19):
If you watch these speeches? I mean, remember those cabinet
meetings from Trump's first term where you just go around
the table and every single person there would just lavish
him with praise. And those were sort of the non
Trump outsider people. Now he's nominating people who are just
conspiracy podcasters who just worship the ground he walks on.
(18:40):
You know, I know that there's always been this thing
of like, oh, do we take Trump seriously? Do we
take him literally? Is it just a joke? Is he trolling?
First of all, the guy has no ability to be funny,
so he's never it's hard to tell sometimes what he
means in the moment, and he's always been like that.
But when he talks about himself like a king, nobody
would say that unless they believed at least some part
(19:02):
of it. I think he really does believe he is
the king of America. I mean, do I think he's
going to try to run for a third term. I
honestly have no idea. I don't know if he's going
to be coherent in four years. But just the fact
that he continues to talk about this and he continues
to rile up his fan base to believe that he
has the ability to do this. The law just does
(19:24):
not apply to him. But you also fear for the
next iteration of Trump and whether that's jd Vance and
I don't think it is, but somebody may be a
decade or two down the line. Who takes the techniques
that Trump was able to use in his decades of
being on TV and being a tabloid fixture and actually
apply them to a coherent, competent version of fascism in
(19:47):
a way that really hasn't even presented itself yet.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Hold on just a second, Well we take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Let's get back into it.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Jerry and I want to take advantage of your expertise here.
You can maybe help us with this as podcasters. Can
you help us monetize what we're doing, Like what conspiracies
can make us the most money? What should we jump
on where there's some money that we can sort of
go after.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
Wait, I wish I knew, you know. I've had people
who've been like, oh, you know you understand conspiracy theories,
so well, why don't you start like an alternate, you know,
anonymous version of yourself pushing this stuff and you can
cash in on Like, I guess I could do that,
but I just to be able to sleep at night.
There is so much money in the fear mongering and
the plot creation that these guys are able to do.
(20:33):
Bongino was able to do it because he was a
secret Service agent for a little bit of time, and
he parlayed that into this sort of screaming incoherence about liberals.
And it really is just taking the most hateful, most
paranoid stuff that really dials into the fear that has
been on the far right for a long time. And
(20:54):
there is just a limitless pool of money to be
able to fund stuff like that. I just think you
have to not have a soul or a conscience to
be able to tap into it.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
The way we can monetize this, John is not to
create our own conspiracy theories, but to sell our souls
exactly as you say, Yeah, I don't know how much
my soul can be monetized as But like jd Vance,
who was calling Trump Hitler two years ago, or Mark Rubio,
I think what we need to do is we need
to like become turncoats to reality and rationality, and we
(21:25):
need to like buy in. So people like Mark Rubio,
who I've briefed in the past, right, I have at
least a sort of an understanding of how he operates.
He's an intelligent guy. I got to assume that he
knows that this shit isn't true. And Jady Vance too.
I don't know. I don't have any interactions with him.
The problem, of course, is around Trump now, no one
(21:46):
will say no to him when he says I'm king.
They all have to say yes or they're gone. Right,
there's no guardrails anymore.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, it's been really fascinating watching Congressional Republicans stand there
as Elon Musk and his doze door go in and
essentially take control of federal spending, which is the thing
that the House is supposed to do it. Why would
House Republicans, who presumably have fought so hard and work
so hard to get this power, why are they just
giving it up? Why are they just standing there? Is
(22:15):
it fear? Is it just laziness? And you just don't know.
And I think for a lot of the especially the
really vociferous anti Trump Republicans who have licked the boot
and gone in, people like Rubio, people like Lindsey Graham,
I think for them, it's this is what's happening, and
I can either be part of it, or I can
get cast out and I can either be ostracized by
(22:36):
the President, or I can play golf with him, and
I can either be banned from Fox News or I
can be on Fox News whenever I want. So you
just go along to get along, and you realize that
Trump is not going to be president forever, this will
end at some point. Then you can, you know, make
your big Maya culpa and go, oh, I had to
go along with it because somebody had to be in charge,
(22:58):
somebody had to be the adult in the road. Complete nonsense.
But if you can get some people in your district
to go along with it, then you can have played
both sides. Or you just take your big payoff, maybe
sign a book deal and get on the speaker's circuit
and just right off into the sunset once this is
all over. So I think for a lot of these people,
it's just self preservation. It's just a way to continue
(23:20):
to have the status that you have, continue to have
the access that you have, continue to be invited to
the important parties, and you get to play golf with
the president and the prime ministers and whatever, and if
you have to eat some crap for a while to
do it, that's just part of the thing. And I
think that's probably the simplest explanation. It's the most craven
(23:40):
and cowardly one, but a lot of these people are
just craven cowards.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Yeah, so as long as you have no prior conscience,
that way to go.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, having lived in places with dictators, iconography is really important.
Go to any Soviet Union, ay of those countries. The
picture the leader is there, right, the picture of Hitler,
the picture of Stalin. And yet now, at least for
me and for a lot of people I know, the
iconography of Trump is Trump sitting behind a desk, saying nothing,
(24:09):
as a man in a black jacket and black shirt
with a black who feels so comfortable that he can
bring his kid to run around inside of them. What's
your what's your sense? Elon? The unique feature of Elon Musk.
He seems to be the perfect person to build conspiracy
theories around, and yet I don't see a lot of
(24:30):
him being the center of conspiracy theories right now.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
The Trump people, they all love Musk because I think
they see Musk a lot like they see Trump, and
the way they see Trump is an extension of themselves.
The Trump and Musk are the guys they want to be.
They are rich, they're powerful, They've got lots of kids,
There's lots of different beautiful women. They can do whatever
they want, They can say whatever they want. That's the
(24:53):
image that a lot of these people have created for themselves.
Of course, they'll never get there, because Trump and Muscle
were both into money, and they both got very lucky
in a lot of different ways, and they've created this
image for themselves. I think with Musk and this sort
of dominance and this kind of relationship with Trump, it's
it's a kind of a wild card because you would
think that Trump's ego is so gigantic and his need
(25:17):
to be the guy and the center of attention is
so all consuming that like, how could he sit there
and have Elon Musk howering over him and letting his
kid like talk smacked him? Like what dictator with total
control over his image would allow that to happen. And
I do start to wonder, and I hate speculating about
(25:37):
these people's like mental states or physical states, but you
do kind of wonder how much is Trump actually there?
How with it is he is he really realizing that
he looks like a letting himself be physically dominated by
Elon Musk and like doing co interviews with Sean Hannity
with Elon Musk, he's the president he's the king. The
(25:58):
King doesn't do co interviews. It's like Woodrow Wilson after
his stroke in nineteen eighteen, when it was like, oh,
his wife is actually kind of running things. You could
do that in nineteen eighteen because there was no real
mass media and there were no nuclear weapons. I mean,
the things moved slowly then. It's hard to do that
now and the stakes are a lot higher, and I
do wonder how long this can continue.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
I'm of the view that Trump has always been not
very smart and becoming less so whether he's there or not.
But he does have incredible animal instincts, and I think
Musk serves a purpose for him because when anything really
goes wrong, he can just throw him under the bus
and blame Musk, not himself. He can say, well, a
Musk is doing that, I'm not really paying attention. He's
(26:43):
deflecting any accountability from himself, and he has a real
gift for that. But there are in terms of Musk,
are there conspiracies that were starting to see there with
the tech bros And Silicon Valley and Elon Musk and
a number of these people who came from South Africa.
Musk wants to send people to Mars. There's been some
interesting interviews lately with Kara Swisher, who wrote reports on
Silicon Billy, talking about this sort of view that the
(27:06):
present order needs to be destroyed and government needs to
be destroyed so that we can prepare to go to
Mars and all these other kind of things that Muskt,
you know, and wants to destroy things to benefit himself,
and in the process he's involved in things that are
helping his companies at the same time. And so there's
enough things floating around there that if the Left wants
(27:26):
to create conspiracy theories, there's plenty there. And maybe in
fact there's a little bit of conspiracy there too. I
think there's a lot of truth in a lot of
these things. I think Musk is enormously a megalomaniacal. I
think he is someone who really.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
Wants to have everything. He wondered, like, why would the
richest man in the world need to ruin the United
States government so that SpaceX can get a leg up
on its competitors. It makes no sense to the vast
majority of us. But if you've got that kind of
instinct to gather so much money that no one else
has more money than you. Then you're never gonna stop
(27:59):
you never going to stop gathering money, You're never going
to stop destroying your competitors until it's just you at
the end. And then you're like sitting alone on your
Marcian colony and no one else is there, and you're going, oh,
maybe this wasn't a great idea. I think that's a
kind of greed and a kind of megalomania that we've
never seen in our government. I mean, we've obviously seen
sort of heady grift in governments, but never like this,
(28:23):
I mean, never this kind of messianic desire to destroy
everything and take everything.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
People think it can't get that bad. You need to
look at history a little bit. Look at what Mao
did with a Great leave forward. He destroyed the Chinese
economy for for thirty years, what Stalin did during the
purges and the Great Famines, what pot and khmar resotion
was going to be my lands one, but I was
going to go with Argentina, with Juan Perill right, who
(28:49):
completely destroyed the Argentine economy, which was one of the
richest economies in the world in the nineteen forties. And
so yeah, it can get way worse. Unless we like
were together and try to establish this.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
But one of the things that I think sometimes we say, oh,
these people around Trump there, they're crazy, of they're conspiracy theorists.
We call them lutex some of them Trump himself and
I think Musk too, are good at weaponizing conspiracy theory.
So they did this. They decided they were going to
kill the USAID, which is actually not a big powerful organization,
and they immediately created stories that are insane that that
(29:24):
is the biggest criminal organization ever, that these people are lunatics,
left wing lunatics. Marxist is maybe the biggest fraud ever
put on the American which is just like, it's so
not it's just a small organization that money from Congress
and often from our farmers to places overseas that we
(29:45):
need to believe help. So like they spread those conspiracy
theories so that when people see this happening, they're like, like,
by thank God that they're dealing with these horrible things
that have been happening in our government. I'm like, how
do you start with that. It's like they've created a
fake conspiracy theory and they pump it and and they
have the soapbox and I just put.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
It up in and say, if USAID was a criminal organization,
why didn't Trump get rid of it when he was
there for four years? Has over the Congress have been
overseeing it since it's inception? That's right. And Ivanka Trump
was part of it, right, She was involved in a
number of USAID initiatives and made money off of it.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
Yeah, it's a really classic logical fallacy. It's the straw
man argument. You create a villain or an argument, and
you are the one who then solves. You're the one
who solves the problem that you created, or you win
the argument against the thing that you made up. It's
a really easy way to look smart and look like
you're doing something and look like you're getting a big win.
(30:42):
I think in terms of these very early days of
Trump and these giant government cuts, they needed a win.
They needed something that they could look at and publicly
point to as the That is an example of how
the Democrats and the other Rhino Republicans were wasting your money.
They were taking your hard earned tax payer dollars and
giving it to Hamas to you know, have sex, or
(31:03):
giving it to some study of the Botswana fruit fly.
And they're giving it to our enemies, and they're taking
away from they're taking food from the tables of Americans
and giving it away. Never Mind that it's not true.
Never mind that this is a program that really has
a lot of really important functions in terms of projecting
US power around the world in terms of like feeding children,
(31:25):
which you would think that we would all be okay with,
in particularly the Republicans who were all marching in the
streets to save the children four years ago. But people
don't understand it, and they've never heard of it. And
if the first thing they've heard of it is it's
bad and it's run by evil people and we're stopping it,
you go, oh, thank god. This thing that i'd never
heard of until five minutes ago that was ruining my life,
(31:47):
apparently now it's being stopped. I mean, you've got food
that Congress had appropriated the money for that is just
sitting there rotting that could have gone to help people,
and it's not because Elon Musk has cooked up conspiracy
theory about Ben Stiller getting paid to go to Ukraine's.
It's crazy, but it's also it fills that need that
(32:07):
all conspiracies fill for a villain for a bad guy
and for a secret plot that your friends and the
people you respect are exposed.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Mike, we could speak to you for a much longer
on these kind of things, but we want to have
you on again absolute because we're gonna need There's going
to be continued conspiracies in our government and around our lives.
But thank you again for spending so much time with us,
and what you're doing on our political front is very helpful.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Thank you, guys, this is great.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Ceipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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