After President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate, speculations that Vice President Kamala Harris may fill the void are everywhere. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, how the far right is already pushing racist and misogynistic conspiracies that question Harris’ ability to be president. Plus, why RFK Jr. is looking to capitalize on the moment.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: Welcome to WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED.
[Archival audio]: We needed a great night. We got a great disappointment instead.
Leah Feiger: In the two weeks since President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, political pundits and even some Democrats have called for him to step aside.
[Archival audio]: I am not really quite sure that Democrats can do any worse than they are doing with Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.
[Archival audio]: Step down, and let someone else do this.
Leah Feiger: And while Biden insists he won’t quit ….
Joe Biden [Archival audio]: If the Lord Almighty came out and said, “Joe, get out of the race,” I’d get out the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.
Leah Feiger: Everyone is looking closely at Vice President Kamala Harris.
[Archival audio]: I think he should step aside. I think it’s become clear that he’s not the best person to carry the Democratic messaging.
Leah Feiger: That, of course, includes the far right on the internet, who are doing what the far right does best, spreading disinformation, and they’re doing it to discredit her hypothetical presidential run before it even begins.
[Archival audio]: She might not have, obviously, cognition problems, but she’s just not that capable.
Leah Feiger: Later on, we’ll also talk about where RFK Jr. is on all of this, but first, joining me from Cork, Ireland, to talk about the VP disinformation he sees swirling around on social media, is WIRED reporter David Gilbert. David, hello, welcome.
David Gilbert: Hey, Leah.
Leah Feiger: How’s it going over there? Are people really excited post-Biden debate? Is anyone still talking about it?
David Gilbert: People were very excited, but maybe “excited” isn’t the right word.
Leah Feiger: Fair enough.
David Gilbert: People were interested over here about the debate. It definitely was something people were talking about, and mostly agog at the fact that these two old men are the only options that the US has to run their country.
Leah Feiger: And Biden has vowed to stay in the race, despite all of the critiques, and at least publicly, Harris continues to support the president’s choice.
Kamala Harris [Archival audio]: Let us not decide the outcome of who’s going to be president of the United States based on a 90-minute debate.
Leah Feiger: But from what you’ve reported, it also looks like the right has already latched on to the idea of her as the replacement nominee. How did that start?
David Gilbert: It started, I suppose, in typical fashion, really, because it attacked her gender and her race. So pretty much straight after the debate, we started seeing these conspiracies filter through on fringe message boards. We saw claims that she was only in her position because she was a DEI hire. We saw them attacking her parents’ nationality and claiming inaccurately, once again, that she was ineligible to be president. And so we saw these in more fringe areas of the internet initially. Then there was a New York Times article that came out claiming that Biden had told someone that he was maybe considering stepping down, and that bumped things up again. And then it really, really kicked off properly once the video of Trump speaking on the golf course talking about Biden and talking about Harris leaked and was posted online, first by the Daily Beast and then by Trump himself.
Donald Trump [Archival audio]: He just quit, you know. He’s quitting to race.
[Archival audio]: Is that right?
Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Yep. I got him out of the race, and that means we have Kamala. She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic.
Leah Feiger: And that really just, in your reporting, showed that it just set off a waterfall of people going after her.
David Gilbert: Yeah, Trump is their leader. They take their lead from him, these far-right communities, these extremists online. They’re looking at him and seeing what he does, and then just ratcheting it up a notch all the time. So the minute that video came out, they were promoting it on message boards, on Telegram channels, and then adding their own twist to it, and usually in a misogynistic and racist way.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, let’s get into some of the specifics here. So in this post that he wrote on Truth Social, he gets into the whole Willie Brown thing. “She did poorly in the Democrat nominating process, starting out at number two, and ended up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa. But that doesn’t mean she’s not a, quote, ‘Highly talented politician.’ Just ask her mentor, the great Willie Brown of San Francisco.” Break that down a little bit for me. Remind us who Willie Brown is and why Trump is bringing him up in connection to Harris.
David Gilbert: Willie Brown is a former mayor of San Francisco, and back in the mid-’90s, he and Kamala Harris had a relationship. He was the speaker of the California Assembly at the time. It was open, it was reported on in newspapers, it was in magazines. But four or five years ago, when Harris was running for president at the time, this relationship was brought back up again by conspiracy theorists, by far-right groups, who claimed that it was this illicit, or secret, or grubby affair, and said that at the time, Willie Brown was a married man, and therefore, this was Harris, who was trying to use Brown’s political cachet to get ahead. But the truth is that Brown had been separated from his wife for about 13 years at that point, and there was nothing illicit about the affairs. It was, in fact, just a normal relationship between two people.
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: And we saw when Trump mentioned it in that comment that you read, the same thing happened again. It was as if it was just history repeating itself, and the insinuations in the comments posted online, once again, was that Harris had kind of slept her way to the top, effectively, that she had used Willie Brown to get ahead, and that she had been doing that effectively ever since.
Leah Feiger: Right, which is just truly the oldest thing in the book. This is a rumor and conspiracy from literally the ’90s that just keeps coming up. You can feel whatever way you want to feel about Harris, but she is a truly accomplished woman. Her legal career, her political career, insinuating that she slept to the top, it’s so boring. It’s so overused. They couldn’t find anything else?
David Gilbert: It also speaks, I think, to the fact that these guys just, and I say these guys, there’s obviously women involved too, but it’s mostly white males who are involved in these communities, they can’t attack her, as you say, on her experience because she is highly experienced, highly skilled, she has held elected positions for decades.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, and also, of course, as a Black woman.
David Gilbert: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: There’s so many layers of this that are horrible. And as you said, Trump is clearly just repeating these old lies, but obviously, people online love to react and run with anything he has to say. Who else has gotten involved in pushing disinformation about Harris, and what are they saying?
David Gilbert: It’s kind of these groups that have grown up in more fringe aspects of the internet, but it soon then moved from there onto more mainstream platforms, like X, and that’s where it kind of quickly became much more popular, and we saw widespread allegations that Harris would be promoted to be the Democratic nomination because she’s Black, and she’s a woman, and therefore it’s DEI or diversity.
Leah Feiger: Well, yeah, no, in your reporting, you shared posts of people calling her the DEI candidate. That’s what’s going around, and it’s not just Trump in the public sphere sharing this. These were conspiracies that were being repeated on Fox and all over the place.
David Gilbert: After those fringe platforms, we saw people like Laura Loomer, who would typically be called fringe normally.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, a very fun pipeline from the Republican nominee in Florida for a Congressional district to becoming an American far-right activist.
David Gilbert: But she’s become kind of more mainstream now because she’s got links to the Trump platform. She …
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God, the idea of calling Laura Loomer mainstream actually gives me full body chills.
David Gilbert: I know, but I think we have to because she’s just integral now to the discourse online in the Republican Party that, from my point of view, at least she’s mainstream GOP now, rather than some fringe character we can ignore.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I mean …
David Gilbert: But yeah, you were saying about Fox News, it very quickly moved from private Telegram channels to fringe message boards to X to, as you say, Fox News.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
David Gilbert: I think it was on a show called Outnumbered, which I’d never heard of before, but it was a host called Julie Banderas, and she was talking about how her daughters speak more eloquently than Harris, before adding that, I think she said, “I’m sorry, just being a minority does not make you fit for president.” I think a day later, New York Post posted an op-ed saying, “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.”
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: So this is a narrative that is being spread overnight, practically, from very fringe, pro-Trump, extremist message boards to the front pages of newspapers and on mainstream TV.
Leah Feiger: Is there any content moderation at all? I mean, in your reporting, and we should talk about this, these posts were not small. This really, as you said, went from fringe to mainstream pretty fast and millions and millions of views.
David Gilbert: Yeah, so as I said earlier, the platforms like Gab and Telegram, none of the racist or misogynistic content is taken down or was taken down. In fact, that’s why people go there, because they can post that stuff.
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: On X, there is kind of this veneer that it is a mainstream platform, in that there is some sort of rules, and there is some sort of content moderation in place. But as you said, some of the posts around this, and one of the conspiracies that really took hold on X more than anywhere else was that she’s ineligible to be president because both her parents were not born in the US. Now, this has been debunked so many times.
Leah Feiger: Which also, your parents not being born in the US has nothing to do with you being born in the US or not being allowed to run for president.
David Gilbert: You and I know that, Leah.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I know you know that.
David Gilbert: OK.
Leah Feiger: For our listeners, Harris was born in the United States, and she is very eligible and qualified to become president of the United States.
David Gilbert: She is. Everyone knows that, except for this cohort of people, and I think they know it too. They just want to push these conspiracies for engagement, for clicks. So on X, this is what took hold, and we saw a number of blue check accounts who are there just to get engagement, so that they can try and monetize their accounts. They posted these kind of doctored images of her birth certs to try and claim that she was not eligible, even though she is, and they got millions of views. Now, just before I came on, I checked again today to see if those posts were still up there, but it seems that most of them have now been removed. But we don’t know whether they’ve been removed by the accounts themselves, or Twitter took them down. They’re just disappeared. It doesn’t say.
Leah Feiger: That’s so interesting.
David Gilbert: So my sense is that they took them down themselves because they had got the engagement that they were going to get, and why bother getting the attention from people who are calling them out on it? So I think the moderation on X just does not exist. These posts were up there for days, they received millions of views, and therefore, the damage was done.
Leah Feiger: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, as we’ve talked about, this conspiracy content has spread to these mainstream outlets. In many ways, it almost feels like these corners of the internet, Trump himself, are priming the party that this is the fight that we’re going to have to enter now, putting out pieces about Harris and resurfacing past conspiracies, almost seemingly vetting her, in case she ends up in the race. And she’s polling really well in comparison to Biden. We have to talk about that. These polls have Harris doing decently well since the debate.
David Gilbert: These attacks are not coming from nowhere. They probably saw victory against Biden as a relative certainty, from their point of view, whereas against Harris, it’s much more unknown. So rolling out these attacks in such a coordinated, and fast, and speedy fashion just shows that there is concern there. They didn’t have time to come up with any new attacks, or attacks on what she’s been doing over the last four years, or calling out policies, or her experience, or any substantial attacks on her. So instead, they just fell back to the old tropes of attacking her race or attacking her gender. So I think you’re right that it’s coming from a place of worry, or concern, or maybe just not knowing how to deal with it, so their first reaction is just attack, attack, attack.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, no, I mean that makes sense to me. And especially post-debate, Trump was really given a gift with all of Biden’s gaffes as well, but Trump had a bad debate. He sounded bananas. He totally cleared himself from all January 6th wrongdoing. All of the above. It was not a good debate for anyone, but the fact that these attacks haven’t even touched on her pretty incredible record on pushing for abortion rights over the last couple of years, that should be an easy gimme for their base.
David Gilbert: Well, to give Laura Loomer credit, she did mention that …
Leah Feiger: Oh, no. I missed that.
David Gilbert: … Kamala Harris loves killing babies.
Leah Feiger: Oh, good. Well, all right.
David Gilbert: So if Harris does eventually become the nominee and Biden bows out, then that’s probably one of their main attack lines.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I know we’re not in the business of predicting the future, but David, based on your reporting, and you’ve done so much reporting on things like this in the past, what happens next for these Harris conspiracies circulating?
David Gilbert: One of the things I have learned over years of reporting on these groups is that they constantly surprise me in terms of their creativity and their resourcefulness in coming up with new and outlandish claims about the people that they’re attacking.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
David Gilbert: Despite the narrative moving from “Biden is going to drop out” to “Biden is more likely to stay in,” there’s still a huge uncertainty there about what’s going to happen. And so I think these groups will be spending time digging into Harris’ background, pulling out things that they can kind of twist, and coming up with new lines of attack that they will then have ready to roll out if and when she’s named as the Democratic nominee.
Leah Feiger: Thanks so much, David, for coming on.
David Gilbert: You bet.
Leah Feiger: When we come back, how RFK Jr.’s campaign is capitalizing on all this chaos, with WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliot.
[break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. Most of the presidential coverage talks about Biden versus Trump, but of course, as we’ve talked about multiple times on this podcast, there’s another third-party candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s a noted vaccine conspiracist and has had a pretty wild campaign so far, and as you’d expect, RFK is using the debate to his advantage too. David and I are joined now by another WIRED senior reporter, Vittoria Elliot. Hi, Tori. How’s it going?
Vittoria Elliot: Hello.
Leah Feiger: Tori, you’ve got a story out today on RFK Jr.’s maneuvers since the debate. He’s been pretty busy. Most people seem to think that Harris would be the one to step into the vacuum left by Biden’s departure from the race, if that were to happen, but RFK is currently saying that he thinks he has a shot. Tell us about that.
Vittoria Elliot: Well, yeah, so actually, last week, I talked to one of the campaign spokespeople, Amaryllis Kennedy, who for the purposes of talking, there’s two Kennedys here. She’s his daughter-in-law. And what she told me was that polling suggests from their end, and obviously, every campaign interprets the numbers differently, every poll is a little bit different, that if he were to run as a Republican, he would beat Biden, and if he were to run as a Democrat, he would beat Trump. And obviously, Kennedy is running as an independent, but he was a Democrat for a very long time. And she said that if the DNC were to offer the nomination, if the nomination were forthcoming, that he would seriously consider it.
Leah Feiger: Which no way. That seems incredibly far-fetched.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, I don’t think that we’d see the DNC offering that, but he is popular amongst a particular subsection of people who don’t feel really heard by the party. Last week, Edward Snowden, known whistleblower, on July 4th, very ironically tweeted, “It’s darkly amusing to watch panicked Dems suddenly searching under the couch cushions for a candidate when Kennedy is literally standing right there.”
Leah Feiger: Oh, God. I mean, just the crossover this is.
Vittoria Elliot: But I think one of the things, and obviously, our colleague, Makena Kelly, has covered this extensively, one of RFKs strengths is that he’s really willing to talk to anyone. He’s willing to go on a podcast, he’s willing to talk to people on TikTok, he’s willing to do a livestream. He is really willing to show up wherever he is being offered space.
Leah Feiger: And that’s been his team’s entire campaign strategy, which is just, “Get in the room, talk about it, say absolutely bananas things half of the time, but you’re there, you’re in the room,” and it’s very online. He is truly the WIRED candidate in that way. And so specifically, how has his team been capitalizing on the debate? What are they up to right now?
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, during the debate, RFK Jr. actually hosted a parallel debate that was streamed online and on X.
Leah Feiger: Which I have to say for our listeners, obviously, the team of WIRED Politics was watching the debate very closely, and sweet Tori over here was actually watching both debates simultaneously, popping notes into Slack that just felt like fever dreams. It was a lot.
Vittoria Elliot: I literally was with my roommates and we had the regular debate on the screen that all three of us were watching, and then I had my computer open with the RFK debate and one headphone in. It was like living in two different universes.
Leah Feiger: And David got to miss all of this because you were asleep in Ireland, David. You just got to wake up to the great news the next morning.
David Gilbert: I went to bed kind of debating whether I should stay up until, I think it was 2:00 am, but I think I made the right decision in going to bed and watching it at 8:00 the next morning.
Leah Feiger: Well, then you got to just put out that great piece we had the next day, which was, “The Republicans aren’t even creating fake clips about the debate. They’re just literally printing and using videos verbatim from Biden.”
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, it was not great.
David Gilbert: Tori, the stream on X, did it work well? Because we’ve seen X before collapse when big streams like this happen, but I’m just wondering was it kind of working OK?
Vittoria Elliot: So we didn’t see a full-on DeSantis moment, which for those of you who were around last year, when Governor Ron DeSantis announced his brief presidential run, he did so on X on a sort of live audiostream, and it crashed the platform. Very messy. So we didn’t necessarily see that, but I watched the majority of the debate on the separate website that they had set up for it to stream on, just in case something happened.
David Gilbert: So what else has the campaign been doing?
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, so I talked to Tony Lyons, who’s the treasurer of the American Values PA, which is a pro-RFK PAC.
Leah Feiger: Our listeners might remember them from the very notable Superbowl ad, where this PAC repackaged an old JFK ad.
[Archival audio]: Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy for me! Kennedy! Kennedy! Kennedy!
Leah Feiger: And it was like, “Kennedy, Kennedy,” and just totally pretended that it was about RFK, obviously playing on the nostalgia here, which is such a big part of the Kennedy playbook.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, and so both he and Amaryllis Kennedy said that the platform that they really feel comfortable investing in right now is X, and that’s because they feel that the candidate has been censored on other social media platforms. And just to give some background, in 2021, RFK’s Instagram account was banned by Meta for spreading false information about the efficacy of the Covid vaccine, and that was against Meta’s health policies. And they reinstated his Instagram in 2023 when he announced he was running for office because they allow public figures, people who are running for office, to have public accounts, but this led to RFK, along with several other entities, trying to sue Meta. And they were party to a Supreme Court case where the ruling actually came down right around the same time as the debate, the Murthy v. Missouri case that alleged that social media companies, particularly Meta and Twitter pre-Elon, were censoring them, were taking down their content under pressure from the Biden administration.
Leah Feiger: Right.
Vittoria Elliot: And the Supreme Court said, “This case doesn’t have standing to proceed,” but that narrative that RFK has been unfairly censored on other platforms is still very salient to him and his supporters, and so they feel that X is the platform where that’s least likely to happen.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
Vittoria Elliot: They see Elon as a bastion of free speech, and the day after the debate, his campaign dropped nearly $20,000 in a single day on ad buys on X, and that’s the most they’ve spent on X in basically any ad buy since they’ve started last year.
Leah Feiger: Wow. David, I’m curious about your thoughts on this, especially on X, formerly Twitter. We’ve talked before about how X has totally transformed under Elon Musk’s ownership. Less content moderation, more disinfo, declining user base, conspiracies for all. Why do you think Kennedy is putting in so much effort there, and why is he so successful there?
David Gilbert: I suppose it’s because, for Kennedy, what Elon Musk has created is a platform that is perfectly suited for him, where he is getting feedback from all of these blue check accounts who are worshipers of Elon Musk, but also will share many of the viewpoints that Kennedy holds. And I think it’s the perfect place for him to receive the kind of feedback that Elo … The reason I think Elon Musk bought Twitter is because he wanted to kind of get validation from his people, and he does. When you see him post something, he gets this kind of echo chamber of people praising him and telling him how great he is. And that’s, in a sense, what Kennedy gets too. He gets a lot of engagement from people who are just sharing his ideas and saying, as Tori mentioned, “Why aren’t Democrats looking at RFK Jr. as a potential replacement for Biden, rather than Harris?” You said that’s not going to happen, but from their point of view, this is the logical conclusion of what should happen.
Leah Feiger: And all of this is also happening where this actually shouldn’t be that good of a week or a moment for RFK Jr. I mean, there was that bombastic article from Vanity Fair that went everywhere about really serious allegations of sexual assault, the photo of him allegedly eating a dog. It should not have been that good for the campaign, but he’s obviously been able to really capitalize on this moment. Trump has been staying a little bit more quiet, kind of letting Biden and the Democrats eat each other alive, and Biden has his own thing going on, and RFK is like, “I’m going to make a TikTok, and hopefully, you’re going to all forget about my controversies.” And it kind of appears to be working for him. I mean, the polls have him doing decently.
Vittoria Elliot: I think the other thing is that because both of the candidates have stayed really quiet, it’s, again, created a vacuum for people that want to engage in these conversations, and he’s willing to go wherever that conversation is.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
Vittoria Elliot: And I think our colleague Makena covered his TikTok town hall right before the debate, and I spoke to one of the people who participated in that and the woman who organized it. And what she said to me was that of the candidates, because she’s done TikTok town halls with every third-party candidate, with Jill Stein, with Chase Oliver, and she said they have seen 400 percent more interest in Bobby than in other candidates, in terms of people who attended the livestreams. And so I think what we’re really seeing here is that as the Biden campaign is attempting to really stage-manage how the president is appearing, where he’s appearing, what he’s talking about, and what those environments are, RFK has said, “I’ll go off the cuff on your TikTok live. I will go on your podcast,” and really using those mediums, and finding … This is such a weird thing. In theater, when I was a kid, we used to do this walking exercise, where you weren’t supposed to look at other people. You were just supposed to find the empty space in the room and go towards it, and that’s what his campaign is doing.
Leah Feiger: So I’ve said for a while now, as you guys know in all of our Slacks and everything, but I’ve said for a while now that I thought RFK would pull more votes from Biden than from Trump. And I still think that that will happen. We have seen RFK’s poll numbers jump. Are there any other signs that his recent ad spending could or will translate into actual votes? Are we seeing an actual impact from this blitz from the campaign over the last week and a half?
Vittoria Elliot: I think it’s still too early to know. The campaign told me they just hired a new surrogate director, which is the person who works with representatives of the campaign, finds people who are very into the campaign, and makes them informal spokespeople or formal spokespeople across different communities. And the fact that they just hired that person, and now, they’re like, “All right, how do we start building out our network of people who are going to represent us?” I think in the next month, we’re going to see a lot more about how much they’re actually able to capture and start pushing their message. But I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the summer, we’re seeing them make a real dent if Biden is still the nominee.
Leah Feiger: All right, can’t wait to keep following this one. Let’s take a quick break, and when we’re back, it’s time for Conspiracy of the Week.
[break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to Conspiracy of the Week, the segment where our guests bring me their favorite conspiracies they’ve come across recently, and I pick my favorite. David, what do you have for us today?
David Gilbert: I’ve got a great one for you today.
Leah Feiger: Amazing.
David Gilbert: And I hope you do not, or anyone listening has no plans for September 23rd this year because something big is going to happen.
Leah Feiger: God, what is this?
David Gilbert: So this is a predictive programming conspiracy. Predictive programming is where conspiracists believe that the media hides messages in movies, songs, TV shows, whatever. You’ve heard about how The Simpsons has predicted everything from Donald Trump becoming president, whatever.
Leah Feiger: Yup.
David Gilbert: So this one is all about September 23rd, and in a video that’s been circulating on Telegram this week, the guy presenting the video says that there is predictive programming in a number of movies, everything from Ghostbusters, where evil is released on the 23rd of September, to Little Shop of Horrors, where humans encounter a threat to their existence on the 23rd of September, to Knowing, which is a Nick Cage film, where a solar flare happens on the 23rd of September.
Leah Feiger: Oh, God. I knew Nick Cage had to be involved in this.
David Gilbert: Of course. There’s about a dozen movies listed. What’s going to happen? Well, according to this video, it’s going to be Project Blue Beam. And obviously, I know you know what Project Blue Beam is, Leah, but just for our listeners who may not be up-to-date on the latest conspiracies, this is a conspiracy that was dreamed up by a Canadian poet and conspiracist, Serge Monas, in 1994. And it claims that a totalitarian world government would be brought about by the destruction of traditional religions, replacing them with a New Age belief system using NASA technology. In this case, holograms, apparently. One of the people who has been promoting it to his followers is the QAnon influencer known as QAnon John.
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God.
David Gilbert: He’s not saying anything is definitely going to happen on or around the 23rd of September this year, but, “If I had to guess, this year would certainly be the year. Just an educated guess.”
Leah Feiger: OK, September 23rd, I’m going to mark it in our calendar. David, I honestly think that you may have to keep an eye on it for us. I’m going to give you the whole day to worry about it.
David Gilbert: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: All right, Tori.
Vittoria Elliot: That’s really rude because it’s near my birthday. Please don’t end the world.
Leah Feiger: It’s not the end of the world, Tori. It’s replacing all religions with holograms. Tori, what do you got?
Vittoria Elliot: Well, our producer, Jake, gave a mandate that we should try and stay away from a political conspiracy this week, so I went into …
Leah Feiger: Don’t know why. I have no idea.
Vittoria Elliot: So I went back into the annals of TikTok and pulled … Initially, I, because I am nominally Catholic, was looking for some good Catholic conspiracy theories because there’s good ones.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
Vittoria Elliot: And that led me down a rabbit hole to the ye old conspiracy that the Titanic never sank.
Leah Feiger: Wow! Wait, that’s actually kind of new to me. I don’t think I knew that one.
Vittoria Elliot: OK, well, this is so exciting. So the theory is that actually, it was all an insurance fraud scheme.
Leah Feiger: Oh, OK, sure.
Vittoria Elliot: And that the ship that we now know as the Titanic was actually another ship that was owned by the same management company called the Olympic, which had an accident a year or two before the Titanic sank, and that it did not actually sink, that the company was able to salvage it and fix it up, but wanted to keep collecting the insurance payment on having lost this ship.
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God.
Vittoria Elliot: So they masqueraded the Olympic as the Titanic, and that the plan was to sink that ship, like, you know, you get rid of this damaged ship, and that it wasn’t to kill anyone. The plan was to sink it near another ship that could rescue everybody, but the plan went awry because the ship hit one of those supposed rescue boats that was supposed to be nearby …
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God.
Vittoria Elliot: … and sank and killed all these people by mistake, and people thought that rescue boat that the ship hit in the dark was actually an iceberg, but it wasn’t.
Leah Feiger: So the conspiracy is not that the Titanic didn’t sink; it’s that it was all done as a total insurance scam?
Vittoria Elliot: Basically, the Titanic never existed, that it was this other ship, the Olympic, masquerading as this thing, so the company could collect insurance on this other ship.
Leah Feiger: Was James Cameron in on this? Leo? Kate?
Vittoria Elliot: I don’t know, man. Anyway …
Leah Feiger: They’re still getting the payouts. These conspiracists are like, “You know what? I know for a fact.” I mean, the recent submersible, it all continues.
Vittoria Elliot: Yeah, it’s why they have to kill the billionaires down there. They’ll find out the truth.
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God. How terrible.
David Gilbert: That’s dark.
Leah Feiger: Very, very dark. Guys, these are really, really good. I’m … Oh, I am struggling. I think it’s a tie. I think it’s absolutely a tie this week. These are really, really good ones, and I have a lot to do today, but I’m definitely going to go down the Titanic rabbit hole in T-minus 10 minutes. Thank you both so much for joining us this week.
David Gilbert: Yeah, it’s been great.
Vittoria Elliot: Thanks so much.
Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.
