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