Today on WIRED Politics Lab, how Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley are showing their support for Vice President Kamala Harris now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the race. Plus, why posts from the far-right and Republican lawmakers calling Biden’s exit a “coup” have exploded online.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
Mentioned this week:
Silicon Valley Donors Bailed on Biden. Kamala Harris Is Winning Them Back, by Makena Kelly and Lauren Goode
The Right Reacts to Biden’s Withdrawal: It’s a ‘Coup,’ by David Gilbert
The Far Right Is Already Demonizing Kamala Harris, by David Gilbert
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for WIRED Politics Lab. We’re on Spotify too.
Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED.
[Archival audio]: President Joe Biden has just announced that he is dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.
[Archival audio]: I’ve been processing this for five hours already, and it still gives me chills to say it.
[Archival audio]: And it comes after a morning in which we heard more calls for the president to step down.
Leah Feiger: Today on the show, President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and fully endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
[Archival audio]: He also thanks Vice President Kamala Harris for, quote, “being an extraordinary partner in all of this work.”
[Archival audio]: With Vice President Harris confirming immediately that she is running, saying, “We have 107 days until Election Day, together we will fight, and together we will win.”
Leah Feiger: Fundraising for Democrats had reportedly slowed since the disastrous presidential debate a few weeks ago. Then the assassination attempt on Donald Trump brought some right-wing Silicon Valley donors into Trump’s camp, but with a new candidate set to take Biden’s place, will left-leaning Silicon Valley donors open their checkbooks again? Later in the show I’ll talk with David Gilbert about how the right wing is calling this an unlawful coup. But first, I’m here with WIRED senior writers Makena Kelly and Lauren Goode, who have been reporting on the Democratic fundraising situation in Silicon Valley. Makena, welcome back.
Makena Kelly: Hi.
Leah Feiger: Lauren, it’s your first time on the show, and we’re so happy to have you. How’s it going?
Lauren Goode: It’s early here in Silicon Valley, but I figured that if all the venture capitalists are already up drinking the blood of young interns, I have to be up too, so I’m thrilled to be here.
Leah Feiger: So, so happy you’re here. And I mean, you were both working pretty late on Sunday. You’ve been calling people nonstop since this news broke. Who have you been talking to, and how did they feel about Biden dropping out of the race?
Makena Kelly: I think one of the most major mega donors in the Democratic Party is Reid Hoffman, who is a cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn. He has been donating millions and millions and millions over the last year to the Biden campaign, and he, of course, over the last couple of weeks since Biden’s terrible debate performance has continued. When you reached out to him, he has continued to say that he is supporting the president. But on Sunday afternoon, shortly after the news broke, he came out in support of Kamala Harris and mentioned that he supported a lot of what the president did, but maybe this was the best decision at this point in the race.
Lauren Goode: Well, one person who I spoke to who’s a Democratic organizer said that this not only might open the floodgates for donations again, but also helps kind of close the enthusiasm gap around the Democratic Party. This was Manny Yekutiel. He runs a café here in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco that has basically become kind of a political salon. He has a lot of high-ranking Democratic politicians come through his doors, he hosts events with them, and he basically said that, “Look, it’s been really hard for me to organize in recent weeks. Democratic donors were feeling a little bit skittish before the debate; after the debate, after Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, the fundraising had kind of fallen off a cliff.” And now he said with Harris having gotten the nod, and Yekutiel himself is a fan of Harris. Of course, he, like a lot of other people, was posting the photo he had with her on Instagram yesterday, big day for Kamala Harris photos on Instagram. But Yekutiel was saying, “Look, this is going to make my organizing a lot easier now because people are just generally more enthusiastic in this moment.”
Leah Feiger: And it’s so wild because all of these people that you spoke to in your piece, check it out on WIRED.com, it’s linked in the show notes. Everyone you spoke to talked about how unenthusiastic people had been. I mean, Makena, you spoke to Reid Hoffman a couple of weeks ago, who said that support was drying up. And so the idea that there was such a quick turnaround for support was kind of wild to see. It felt like a waterfall of support last night on X just piling in.
Lauren Goode: Sure. So I think over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been hearing a lot about what could happen, what will happen, will Joe Biden drop out, who will be lying in wait to take on that top of the Democratic ticket. So I think, (A) it gave donors a lot of time to look into what they think would be the best thing. They’ve been having their calls of their own, where they’ve been talking to Kamala, talking to other Democratic donors and bundlers, and setting up a better idea of what they think the post–Joe Biden era of this election is going to look like. And so, I mean, there were a lot of statements that came out on Sunday. I think it was Chris Murphy, who’s a senator, he was saying, “Oh, this wasn’t all organized. People just really like Kamala and everyone …” So we could think that as much as we want, but it does seem like there is a lot more excitement, and I think you can look at that in the fundraising numbers. As of the time that we recorded this podcast, ActBlue reported that the Kamala Harris campaign has raised close to $80 million in the few short hours since she announced that she was seeking the nomination.
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Makena Kelly: ActBlue, of course, is the platform that most Democratic candidates use to raise money from grassroots donors, and it’s small-dollar donations. And when we talk about small-dollar donations, that is anything under $2,000.
Leah Feiger: And obviously we’re going to be waiting on these big-ticket donations from Reed Hoffman, et cetera. But it’s been so interesting over the last few weeks that while left-wing donors have seemingly dried up, the right-wing absolutely swooped in. You had Elon Musk pledging $45 million a month to Trump. You had David Sacks just coming out fully, fully in support. It sort of felt like there was this huge groundswell, which I know again, Makena, you’ve reported maybe wasn’t exactly the case, but now that we have Harris on the Democratic side, and you have all of these people that pledge support to Trump, what’s the mix in there? How much money are we actually talking?
Makena Kelly: Kamala, you got to keep in mind, she was a big California senator. She knows California. She knows Silicon Valley. She knows people in that area incredibly well. And so she has her own group of donors, of course, who came out and supported her in 2020 when she was running for the nomination herself against Joe Biden. So she has the infrastructure set up for this already I’m sure. When it comes to people—
Leah Feiger: I mean, we have to add that Trump actually donated to her however many years, 10 years ago. I hope they continue hitting back.
Makena Kelly: Waiting to see what the Dems were going to say. Everybody was posting that little check that was signed by him to her campaign.
Leah Feiger: Oh, so good, so good.
Makena Kelly: But yeah, no, with Trump, I think after the alleged assassination attempt, after the indictment and things, there was a lot of confidence in the campaign that I think that excitement also just triggered a ton of people who maybe wouldn’t normally announce all this stuff about being supportive of Trump. They’ve just decided to come out and do it. They’re meeting this moment where there is a lot of excitement and trying to be a part of it, I think as well. And then also to gin up additional support from people in their circles. So when you look at David Sacks, he wants to get more people in his Silicon Valley donor circles excited about Trump. I think he’s done that a little bit, but like I reported earlier this month, it’s not like all of these donors were like, “Biden sucks, I’m donating to Trump.” That’s not really the case. They kind of just hit the brakes on how much money they were giving to Biden, and basically it sounded like they gave him an ultimatum until Sunday to make some kind of decision and drop out before they were going to pause, what was it?
Leah Feiger: $90 million.
Makena Kelly: $90 million.
Leah Feiger: $90 million. I mean, that’s huge.
Makena Kelly: I mean, they could give that to Harris right now, and we won’t know those numbers specifically until the beginning of next month, but I imagine it is going to be a lot of money.
Leah Feiger: Wow. It’s wild to watch that all unfold. I want to get into a couple of the people, a couple of the names that you were just mentioning, David Sacks, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, with the JD Vance connections here. Who is this small but influential group of people from Silicon Valley that’s coming out for Trump right now?
Makena Kelly: Sure. So a lot of them have always been a little right-wing. I was talking to Reid Hoffman and Keith Rabois, who’s another Republican donor. He mentioned that these people who are coming out in support, really announcing the strong support of Trump-Vance, that ticket have been Republicans for a really long time and they’ve been donating to Republicans as well. It’s just that they’ve been a bit louder about it, and I think that kind of just has to do with the environment that people are in right now with the Trump ticket and where they’re trying to gin up more support for it. But these people, they’re kind of contrarian. They’re the same kind of ideological type of people. They align in some ways with extreme nationalists. When you look at Musk and Thiel, Sacks a little bit, they’re in this ecosystem of people who, when you look at them, they support a lot of Republican policies. They want more H-1B visas to be approved, they want interest rates to be cut.
Lauren Goode: I would also add that Silicon Valley is often perceived as Democratic by outsiders. And I mean that’s for a few reasons. One is that it’s seeded in the extremely liberal San Francisco Bay Area. Silicon Valley is, of course, not a monolith, and it includes other companies too, like Microsoft, which is up in Seattle. But geographically, the Bay is Silicon Valley’s soul. Another reason why it’s perceived as Democratic is because of these mega donors that we’re talking about, but also there’s a really strong libertarian strain here in Silicon Valley, and there has been for a long time. It’s a bit of techno-libertarianism, and it’s this idea that all these super, super smart guys—and yes, a lot of them, the most vocal ones, are guys—think that they can do a better job than the government does at establishing policies. And that’s something that’s been running strong throughout Silicon Valley for a long time. And I think someone like Peter Thiel in the past has been identified as a libertarian. But what’s happened is, over the past few years we’ve seen this shift toward more conservative, far-right Republican policies that has sort of shifted the narrative in that direction. And to Makena’s earlier point, it’s not like there’s necessarily been this huge red wave going on throughout Silicon Valley lately, it’s that there’s this extremely vocal and influential group of people, big-money people who have been coming out thumping for Trump.
Makena Kelly: What was it that Tim Alberta was reporting earlier on Monday as well? That the JD Vance pick was supposed to be this pick to gin up the base. It really wasn’t anything targeted towards winning over any swing states. It was kind of just lapping the Democrats.
Leah Feiger: And they might regret it, in fact.
Makena Kelly: And now they might regret it.
Leah Feiger: Well, so I’m really interested, as we’re talking about … I think it’s so easy to think like Silicon Valley, you have these billionaires, these companies that do they touch the people there, but in so many ways, I’m starting to look at this campaign as almost the war of the platforms. That’s part of what makes Elon Musk’s endorsement so powerful is the platform that’s backing Trump behind him. And I guess you have Meta with Facebook and Instagram, you have TikTok. How are these other platforms going to be able to compete in this way? I mean, I can’t forget that a couple days ago, a week was it now that Zuckerberg said that the photo of Trump post-assassination attempt looked quite badass. Where are we falling in this war of the platforms and the CEOs and founders holding them?
Makena Kelly: I was in a car ride back home to the city on Sunday because I was upstate, I was on a call with a Dem digital strategist who I really respect. He does a lot of smart work, and what he was telling me is that Biden lost Twitter, and his campaign did not realize how important Twitter would be. And so the politics of the platforms, I think you still look at Instagram, Biden does really well on Instagram. There’s a lot of young people there. He didn’t really do that well on TikTok, and I think it’s just because a part of his character and aesthetic isn’t very TikTok-y. Look at Kamala now, she is just popping off.
Leah Feiger: I mean, even just in the last 24 hours, Charlie XCX has said that Kamala is “brat,” which brat summer … brat summer’s over now because it’s gone political and mainstream, here we are, but the memes have such potential, and it was very fun to see that all come last night. I’m ready for the coconut trees. I’m ready for the coconut fans.
Lauren Goode: I have to say, when Zuckerberg said “badass,” I was like, I’m sorry, that sounds like an endorsement. One, it just sort of distilled—
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I agree.
Lauren Goode: … the political process down to something that feels like a UFC fight. I actually feel on some level it was practically irresponsible. And two, he has to know the kind of influence that he has. So when you say something like that, and it was in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. “I’m not endorsing anyone, but boy, when I saw Trump rise up from the ashes and raising his fist in the air and the American flag behind him, like, boy isn’t that badass?” I mean, come on, you’re painting a picture of something as though it’s like this completely objective experience and not a decision that’s going to affect the lives of millions of people, whatever the outcome of this election is. Honestly, it was very strange to me.
Leah Feiger: I agree. I don’t think that Mark Zuckerberg can really say that they’re going to be sitting this one out. I mean, we’ve had a ton of reporting over the last couple of weeks, months showing how militias are organizing and recruiting on Facebook. And for Meta to say, “Oh, we weren’t able to find them. Oh, this is just cropping up.” They’re taking a stance by not taking a stance. And I agree. I think the “badass” comment said exactly that. So I have to ask, how much of all of this do we think is a calculated move on the part of the billionaires? Musk’s companies make a ton of money from government contracts. Is this real support, or were people just kind of getting on the Trump train because they thought he was likely to win or just getting on his good side for business prospects?
Lauren Goode: I think it’s primarily for business reasons. It’s a way to influence regulatory policy if Trump were to take office again. Some of the manifestos that people like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who run the famous venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, have written in recent weeks indicate that they really feel that there’s this kind of bottleneck right now to ensuring that startups, which they call little tech, are successful. They invest in startups, they want some kind of return on their investments, they want some kind of successful exit as it’s known here in the Valley, right? Everyone wants to have this big … I call it the big liquid love fest. They all want some liquidity. It’s like the new cuddle puddle, right?
Leah Feiger: I hate all of these terms, just so you guys know. I hate them so much.
Lauren Goode: We don’t ever have to say it again, Leah, but yes, welcome to Silicon Valley, and I think they see what’s happening right now, scrutiny on Big Tech (and little tech to an extent), some of the regulatory proposals and actual regulatory actions that have come down on new and emerging technologies, they see that as all counterproductive to their end goals. And so if they can get in there and get into the ear of the most influential politician, the leader of the free world—who by the way, Trump has said that he would dismantle a lot of the government and regulatory bodies that we’re all used to at this point, that would benefit them in some way. Honestly, it’s a lot of self-interest.
Makena Kelly: Yeah, and a lot of … It’s not even just the candidates, right? It’s also who they will appoint in really important positions that these companies will interface with, whether that’s the DHS and immigration policy with H-1B visas, or of course the biggest villain in the government right now is Lina Kahn for these folks too.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Lauren Goode: Except for JD Vance apparently, who in the past has made statements of support for Lina Kahn, but he changes his mind, we think.
Leah Feiger: Like every five minutes, basically. We have so much more to get into, and I have no doubt that we’re going to hopefully have you guys on again to keep talking about Silicon Valley and its influence on this race. But Lauren and Makena, thank you so, so much for joining us for now. We’ll talk to you later for Conspiracy of the Week.
Makena Kelly: Thanks.
Lauren Goode: Sounds great. I can’t wait.
Leah Feiger: After the break, David Gilbert on how Republicans are calling Biden’s exit from the race a “coup.”
[break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. So Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 election at around 2 o’clock on Sunday. Immediately the far right and mainstream Republican lawmakers jumped on the news to call it a “coup.” Joining me from Cork, Ireland, to talk about the right-wing reactions he’s been watching online is WIRED reporter David Gilbert. David, hi. How’s it going?
David Gilbert: It’s going good. Good to be here.
Leah Feiger: David, you started seeing this coup language far before Biden actually dropped out. When did you first pick up on it?
David Gilbert: I suppose it was probably maybe a week, two weeks before the announcement on Sunday. It had been building for a while, this idea that Trump was kind of set up to campaign against Biden and wanted to campaign against him because of how successful he had been in the debate or how poor Biden had been, I guess. So in the weeks between the debate and when Biden dropped out, we’d seen this idea from the right that the efforts being made on the Democratic side to effectively push Biden out were part of a so-called coup. I think it was last week in The Babylon Bee, this satirical right-wing online website, had a headline saying, “Democratic Party leaders vote to save democracy by overruling voters staging coup.” Dan Bongino, the right-wing commentator, he was talking about a coup on Twitter last week. So it was definitely building in the days and weeks leading up to Biden’s departure.
Leah Feiger: And how did things develop once Biden dropped out?
David Gilbert: Well, it was instant. It was within minutes of the announcement being made that Biden was going to step down. We saw GOP lawmakers come online, and just basically these claims of a coup or that he was forced out have just exploded on social media.
Leah Feiger: So you said that it was within minutes that people were responding online. Who specifically are these people?
David Gilbert: So that’s I think a key part to this, is that this isn’t some fringe far-right troll who’s posting this. This is coming from within the House. This is coming from GOP lawmakers, members of Congress. I think we’ve seen now a dozen members of Congress at least, who are kind of framing Biden’s decision to drop out of the race as undemocratic or as a coup. We’ve seen 15 members of Congress who are saying that Vice President Kamala Harris has perpetrated a coverup to get to the point where she’s now the person who is leading the race to become the nominee. And it’s incredible how many of the mainstream Republican lawmakers, like for example, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who is coming out and saying that this is effectively part of a coup, that Biden was forced out. We saw Senator Tom Cotton who wrote as well that this was a coup, and we’re just seeing more and more Republican lawmakers pushing these conspiracies kind of consistently now. It’s not a one-off anymore. This is happening every time there’s a major breaking news situation. We saw it last week with the Trump conspiracies about Biden or the Democrats being behind it. So this is happening all the time now.
Leah Feiger: Right. And to be totally clear, this isn’t a coup. As Republicans have been trying to build this language over the last week or so, legal experts have been pointing out that the Democratic Party’s nominee actually has yet to be decided, and the final decision is going to be made at the Democratic National Convention in August, but the right is pushing it anyways. What is Trump saying? What is the Trump campaign saying in response to all of this?
David Gilbert: So Trump is clearly angered or frustrated by this, because he’s been on Truth Social pretty consistently since the news broke yesterday. And instead of attacking Kamala Harris, he is kind of pushing these conspiracy theories that Biden either was forced out or was not capable of knowing what he was doing, and therefore someone in his immediate circle kind of perpetrated this and signed a letter for him and published it. So he is upset it seems that he won’t be facing Biden anymore. He’s come out and said that they’ve spent … the Trump campaign is saying that they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars campaigning against Biden, that’s all wasted. I think Trump called it a fraud at one point yesterday, because they’re going to have to restart. And this goes back to this idea that the Trump campaign has, from the start, been set up to laser focus on attacking Biden and his age, and that’s how they were going to win, and that was succeeding because what we saw in the debate and the fallout from that, they were definitely succeeding. And at the RNC last week, they were basically celebrating, taking a victory lap, thinking the election had already been won.
Leah Feiger: Oh, absolutely.
David Gilbert: It was incredible. And now that they have to face someone else, most likely Kamala Harris, they don’t really have a game plan it seems on how effectively to attack her, and that’s seen in Trump’s posts on Truth Social, because he’s not attacking her. He’s trying to get this nickname of Laughing Kamala to stick, but it’s just not really working. And he’s fallen back on calling out Crooked Joe Biden again and the Biden crime family and all those other tropes that he’s relied on over the last four years. So it seems that Trump is frustrated because he doesn’t have a direct attack line on the vice president right now, and he’s just blasting out all these other conspiracies about how Joe Biden was forced out.
Leah Feiger: It definitely seems like they’re backed into a corner, and I’m really interested in the strategic part of all of this. We talked last week about how militias and far-right groups were using the Trump assassination attempt as a recruiting tool to get more people signed up and involved. It sort of seems like calling this a coup is in line with that strategy. Why are they calling this a coup, and who does it appeal to?
David Gilbert: It appeals to their base, it appeals to the people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen. They believe that there are some elites, because you see the word elites being used again in relation to this coup. They’re not just saying that it’s the Democratic leadership. They’re also mentioning Hollywood and they’re mentioning Silicon Valley and they’re mentioning people like the billionaires who are helping force this and to get Joe Biden out and get Kamala Harris to replace him. And so this idea of a coup speaks to this idea that kind of became mainstream orthodoxy among a lot of Republican supporters over the last eight years, that there is this deep state or some sort of secret cabal of people who are orchestrating things, pulling the strings in the background, and that they are going to continue to do that until someone like Donald Trump is back in office and can defeat them once again.
Leah Feiger: Right. One of the things that you wrote about in your piece that was really interesting to me, and everyone, go check it out on WIRED.com, it’s linked in the show notes, but you wrote about how the people that are calling this a coup were also comparing it to January 6th. Why make that comparison?
David Gilbert: I suppose it’s the idea that they have been attacked for the last four years about January 6th, and hundreds of people have been put in jail as a result of it, and that it’s this thing that they can’t say never happened, because it did happen, and there are images of it there and the people attacking police officers and breaking down doors and breaking windows and going into the Capitol. We’ve all seen those videos, and so it’s very hard to deny that that happened. Now, they tried their best, and they call the people who have been prosecuted “hostages” and everything like that. So they’ve been waiting, it seems, for this Democratic version of January 6th, and for some of them at least, they seem to see that this is a comparable event, which is obviously ridiculous, but it was striking to see how many people were mentioning January 6th in relation to saying that July 21st is the real insurrection, which just boggles the mind and makes no sense on a logical level, but we’re not really playing with logic here, we’re well beyond that at this point.
Leah Feiger: These posts are all over. Like you talked about, they’re coming from politicians, they’re coming from far-right influencers on X and Telegram channels. I want to read one of these posts that a far-right influencer wrote on X. They wrote, “First, Biden received the votes to be the candidate. Second, the elite is worried he’ll lose so they ask him to step aside. Third, Biden refuses to drop out, and fourth, the media donors and politicians pressure him out. This is a coup, not democracy. They’re afraid to lose power.” This seems like an incredibly effective argument for people that want to be believing this anyways. And as of this recording, this post has been viewed more than 125,000 times on X, and that’s just one post. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with these conspiracy theories if you’re a Democratic candidate coming in to challenge Trump?
David Gilbert: It’s incredibly difficult because, especially on X, where that post was made, the platform has been designed to allow those kind of conspiracies to flourish. And we saw Elon Musk doing his best to push that over the last 24 hours from when Biden posted a statement on X that gave his platform more credibility. According to Linda Yaccarino, the CEO, she said, “This is where history happens,” even though it was also posted on Instagram, but obviously that doesn’t matter to them.
Leah Feiger: Sorry, Zuckerberg.
David Gilbert: Yeah. The point is that it is virtually impossible to break through on X the barrier, the flood of conspiracy and disinformation posts around what’s happening right now in politics. We barely had finished dealing with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in terms of conspiracies, and then this came along, and it’s just starting up all over again. It’s very difficult to try and counter that on a platform where the platform is effectively set up just to incentivize exactly this type of post.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely, and I mean, like we talked about earlier with Lauren and Makena about X, of course you’re going to see these posts picking up when someone like Elon Musk is at the top perpetuating it, especially now that he’s come out with a full endorsement of Trump, and this platform can no longer even pretend to be nonpartisan. He is very excited that these conspiracies are spreading, and he’s spreading them himself.
David Gilbert: He is, and he’s totally supporting Trump, but he’s trying to get other people to support Trump as well. He’s actively campaigning for Trump on X, talking to all the people who are on the platform, all the people who he thinks he can convert, and that’s in public. We don’t even know what he’s doing in private. And I think as Lauren or Makena were saying, X is, despite the fact that its user base is much smaller than Instagram or Facebook, it’s still incredibly important and powerful in terms of the messages that it gets across and the people who use it and the ideas that generate from there and are then spread to other platforms.
Leah Feiger: For sure. I think that’s absolutely right. I want to end on something you said earlier, how in all likelihood, and there’s been a lot of reporting on this, but Trump and his campaign are coming off right now as quite unsure how to run against Harris. They had prepped to run against Biden, they had prepped to run against an incumbent president. And in some ways we are in this just absolutely chaotic moment right now. You and I can attest, I don’t think that there has been a weekend where we have not been working for quite some time. I see the eye roll right now, and it’s truly a chaotic moment. And even right now, it still feels like a chaotic moment. But there is something here, and I’m wondering, dare I say that it kind of already appears like Harris and the Democrats are officially finally after three weeks of figuring out who it’s going to be, is it going to be Biden, is it going to be Harris, is whoever else they pick, it sort of feels like for the very first time in a while that they have a bit of hope, that they have a bit of momentum. And this is arguably the first time in a while that I’m thinking that the Dems aren’t totally out of this. What do you think?
David Gilbert: It just does seem like something has switched. And when I scrolled through Trump’s Truth Social feed this morning and I just saw these rambling posts and it just wasn’t there, the attacks weren’t there. He did not know how to effectively attack Harris. He was saying, “Oh, we’ll beat her again.” And if you look at the conspiracies, there is no substance to them. The attacks are based on decades old innuendo about her relationships with a former mayor of San Francisco or these wild basis allegations that she’s ineligible for… Even though they’ve been debunked so many times, they’re still trying to rely on them because they have nothing else. And I think that will be a huge source of hope, I guess, for the Democratic side that they will now be able to kind of get on the front foot and maybe go on the attack for what seems like the first time in a very long time in this race.
Leah Feiger: David, thank you so much for joining us.
David Gilbert: It was my pleasure. It was great.
Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, it’s time for Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. It is time for Conspiracy of the Week, my absolute favorite segment of this show where our guests bring to me their favorite conspiracies they’ve come across this week, and I pick my favorite. David, what do you have for us today?
David Gilbert: So my conspiracy this week relates back to 2016 when the DNC was hacked and information leaked. And at the time, a company called CrowdStrike, who you may have heard of in the last week, was hired to investigate the break and decided that Russia was to blame. But at the time, Donald Trump came back and said that no, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, had told him that it wasn’t Russia, it was Ukraine. What a surprise. So this week we heard much more about CrowdStrike because they basically gave us a little break from talking about politics when they grounded all planes around the world because an update to Microsoft that they had pushed made all computers fail utterly across the world. But that wasn’t enough for the conspiracy theorists out there. They had to take it a bit further. And because the CrowdStrike issue happened during the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump was being hailed as this returning hero, this godlike figure, a lot of conspiracy theorists decided that coincidence just it couldn’t happen naturally. So they decided to conclude that instead, CrowdStrike had deliberately pushed out this update in order to take away some of the glory from Donald Trump, and ignoring the fact that update has wiped billions off their market value, these conspiracy theorists decided that CrowdStrike were so in bed with the Democratic Party and the left that they decided that they would take that hit for the goal of undermining Donald Trump. And lots of people seem to believe that for some reason.
Leah Feiger: That’s a pretty good one. And I love a harken back to 2016. How can you beat that?
David Gilbert: Yes, it’s a long time ago.
Leah Feiger: Makena, what do you have for us?
Makena Kelly: Okay. So the past couple of weeks have been insane to the point that I feel like my entire news feeds everywhere is conspiracies all the time. But one I saw crop up this morning was very funny to me. I saw Charlie Kirk and some people asking, where is Joe Biden? Why haven’t we seen Joe Biden to gin up people…
Leah Feiger: Oh, my God.
Makena Kelly: …in the comments to be like, has he disappeared? What has happened? Is he murdered?
Leah Feiger: No. Are they claiming a Weekend at Bernie’s-ing of Joe Biden right now?
Makena Kelly: It seems that they are at least alluding to it. I saw some crypto guy saying that he was desperately ill and he’ll be thrown out of being the president and we won’t know. So yeah, basically Weekend at Bernie, when really the answer is that Joe Biden has COVID and his voice probably sucks.
Leah Feiger: He’s hiding out at his beach house right now.
Makena Kelly: He’s truly just chilling out with a sore throat, and we just need to give him a couple days. There isn’t something mysterious and crazy going on in the background.
Leah Feiger: Okay, that’s a pretty good one. Lauren, what do you have for us this week?
Lauren Goode: It’s a little unusual. I’m not sure that I would call it quite a conspiracy theory, but since this is my first time on the show and I’m coming from San Francisco, I feel like this one is only fitting. There is an internet astrologer who’s quite well known named Amy Tripp. Her handle is starheal. That’s-
Leah Feiger: Yes. Wait, I’m so happy. I’m so happy this is what you’re bringing. Oh, my gosh, continue.
Lauren Goode: You know where I’m going with this. Okay, so admittedly I was not super familiar with her beforehand, but after the news broke this past Sunday, she kept coming up in my feed because people were retweeting or resharing her predictions. And so what she had shared on Twitter back in 2020 was that Kamala Harris will be 60 in four years. I see her running for president in 2024 since this coincides with her Saturn return. I don’t know what that means, but I like it. And then, because I really don’t follow astrology, but you have to respect it. And then she said-
Leah Feiger: And after this, we may start.
Lauren Goode: Exactly. July 11th of this year, Amy tweeted, if Biden is made to step down, and then in parens, because he won’t on his own, it will be at the Capricorn full moon at 29 degrees Capricorn. Capricorn rules the government and old age. Like what? Who knew this? 29 degrees is an ending. And someone replied, any date? And she replied, July 21st. So whether or not you believe in astrology…
Leah Feiger: Amazing.
Lauren Goode: …this person on Twitter and Instagram, she has a pretty healthy Instagram presence, has predicted that the stars would align and this would happen folks.
Leah Feiger: I unfortunately have to add a little extra tidbit to your conspiracy.
Lauren Goode: Please do.
Leah Feiger: …conspiracy-ish, Lauren, which is later in the comments yesterday when she was getting a lot of praise for getting everything right and everyone was like, “Starheal’s the best. Starheal’s the best.” Someone asked who was going to win the election, and she replied, Trump. So that is the prediction.
Lauren Goode: Well, it sounds like if we’re going to go all in on the astrology, then yes, we have to prepare ourselves for that. But I’m not saying that I believe in this astrologer now. I’m just saying that it was my favorite, quote-unquote, “conspiracy” of this past week.
Leah Feiger: All right. These are some great ones. I think I’m going to have to go with Makena. I love the idea of Weekend at Bernie’s-ing Biden throughout this entire thing. Harris with her little meat puppet Biden suit is just a great image, and I really hope that Charlie Kirk gets more evidence that he needs to keep pushing that out there. But for our listeners, no, I do not think that’s happening. Poor guy’s recovering from COVID. Let him be. This was such a good show you guys. Thank you all so much for joining us this week.
Lauren Goode: Thanks, Leah.
Leah Feiger: Bye.
David Gilbert: It’s great to be here.
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, please write to [email protected], that’s [email protected]. We’re so excited to hear from you. This episode of WIRED Politics Lab is produced and mixed by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I’m your host, Leah Feiger. And we’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.
