I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'SHEF.
I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the.
World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible, you guys. I don't know if you're following it, but it's actually been really troubling. This Hurricane Helene, which has caused deaths in six or seven states in the Southeast, has created this torrent of false rumors and conspiracy theories and misinformation. But it's actually starting to impact lives. People are believing things and being told things that are very dangerous that are making them stay
at home. There's fault stories about that the government's going to steal and buy their houses, so people aren't leaving their houses when they need to and of course we're seeing this awful, obscene thing where former President Donald Trump is amplifying these false claims, claiming that the government is not doing any help, that they're giving money to migrants
instead of giving money to people who need it. We're used to talking about Donald Trump saying things that are untrue are troublesome, but this really hits close to home because people are really suffering here.
So I want to talk about who they is. When Marjorie Taylor Green, she writes, yes, they control the weather. It is ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done. And there's been in this there's been other quotes, not from her, but saying that this that Milton, the next storm coming in is being directed by them.
They to hit I think I get to say us.
There's one more very from Marjorie Taylor Green, and that is in April there was the large earthquake that happened, and she said that this was implied it was the government, but also said that this was God judging her political rivals. And so who are her rivals? The day them? And Adam is a representative. What's your initial take on.
Is I honestly I feel like the Vermonder Tisenal cheese community has just stood by.
Too long. We can't.
Yeah, no, it's Jews.
I don't know. I think it's Democrats more than Jews.
The first of all, I love it's very sweethet. You think she thinks of those as two separate groups. But the whole great Replacement theory is that Jews are controlling minorities and using the Democratic Party to replace white people. But there's something great about they because it gets to be anyone's day.
I have my own day.
It's a malleable. I mean, you look at all the Jewish Trump supporters, who Laura Luhmer is Jewish, and so she has a whole world of they that somehow doesn't include herself, even though most of her confederates think they is Jews. You know my degree's history of religion. When you look at the Bible, the Egyptian myths, the Sumerian myths, it is a lot about these forces floods and famine and heat that are hard to understand, these giant forces
that come in and wreak havoc on everyday life. And you read about the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Norse gods, Chinese gods.
I was reading about the Canadian gods.
Well, that's mostly about hockey, I believe, but it's a lot about controlling the weather. And more than that, it's about we have this chaos in our lives, this uncontrollable chaos, and there's this type of mentality that's like, I need to put order on that chaos. And as awful as it might be to think some small group of elites are destroying the world, maybe that's more pleasing to the brain in some way. Then there's just chaos.
Elon Musk labeled FEMA's actions quote treason and supported the view that Harris and Homeland Security majorcas quote should be jailed for life for spending FEMA money on illegal aliens and not Americans, which is just totally fun insane.
I want to go back to when John was young, the year eleven ninety. This is actually quite a sad and somber story, but the entire Jewish community of York in northern England was massacred. They were killed to the person.
So they all went to the tower in York and the local villagers besieged them and eventually murdered them all, and the reason for that, at least given was that there was a local drought going on and they needed someone to blame, and so they looked around and it was basically they blamed the Jews for stealing babies and witchcraft.
They brought the drought to northern England. And these are people who were desperate, afraid, hungry, looking at starvation, and they had an upper class who was pointing at the Jews. And I think your point about weather because it's existential. It's where food comes from, prices, everything depends on, you know,
the plants you grow for clothing and food. And yeah, back to today, rather than talking difficult conversations about climate change and the impact on hurricanes, which by the way, the Republican Party doesn't want to talk about Project twenty twenty five. Wants to get rid of Noah. They want to privatize it. So you got to pay to know where the hurricane's coming at your house or the flash flood. And Marjorie Taylor Green is touched on something that is really basic and core to human existence.
But that still doesn't like Fox News. And I mean, I was saying, Lawyer Ingraham going on and Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. They know better. They're using this deep well of human fear and hunger for some kind of rational explanation in a very targeted, weaponized way. It's disgusting.
Let's take a break. We'll be right back. And we're back.
So there is something called HARP, which is the High Frequency Active Oral Research program funded by the US Defense Department and the University of Alaska. And we here in the United States by and large have not heard of HARP or the HARP conspiracies. But as recently as this summer, the Russians have been claiming that HARP is responsible for
the drought going on right now in Crimea. I've got something that says as Mustavites suffer high temperatures this summer, Russian political scientists have claimed that the United States may be using climate change weapons to alter the temperature and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries, forcing up food prices and generally inflation, and only as opposed to the war.
What's happening here? There is a good article in the New York Times recently about geoengineering. So geoengineering is a real thing. It's about scientists are trying to inject aerosols into the atmosphere because scientists think they may be able to reflect some of the Sun's heat back into space. But then recently Republican lawmakers in Tennessee voted to ban solar geo engineering, and people are like, why the hell did they want to do that? No one's geoengineering in Tennessee,
and did these people even understand this? And so this New York Times reported dug into it and found out that the specific people pushing for this ban are like these conspiracy theorists and vaccine skeptics who are pushing to ban this across the country, and they're tying it to what we talked about in one of our episodes is the chemtrails conspiracy theory, saying that the government's using airplanes to inject dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere through chemtrails and
that's what geoengineering is, when, of course none of those things are true.
Every conspiracy theory has a grain of truth. And I think people will write in and say, aha, but what about Operation Popeye. Operation Popeye was not a CIO at CIA been involved, but it was US Defense Department, And this was in nineteen sixty seven and what it was basically cloud seating over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the motto was make mud not war. They wanted to make the trails money so that they couldn't bring in weapons to kill American servicemen in South Vietnam slow the
trail down. And my understanding is that Operation Popeye was a complete failure.
When you say real world impact, I mean that's what's happening right now in the South United States. There's viral things online, falsehoods that the government is bulldozing bodies under the rubble, and there was one claim that the government is doing secret lithium mining and pushing people out of their homes to try to buy the land. And this
is I think in North Carolina, Rutherford County. The commissioner said the only lithian for sale in Rutherford County is at the local lows in a nine volt battery you can buy there.
I've covered a lot of disaster. There's always chaos. I mean, by definition, it's really hard to figure out when powers down and people aren't there and roads are impassable, like it's just it's a hard job with the best of intentions and lots of resources, and I'm not here to say FEMA's done everything perfectly, although from what I understand and from the Republican governors in most of these states, they've done a fairly good job. I mean, I covered Katrina.
They really did a terrible job. I witnessed it. It was bad. But it sounds like they've done a fairly good job here. But what's amazing is the specific things Trump is accusing them of doing is what he did, Like they are not politicizing it, but he did. He did withhold resources from blue states, and he talked about that and that he would withhold resources from towns and cities and states where the leaders didn't suck up to him.
Remember Gavin Newsome kissing is But that kind of governance, which is what I saw in Iraq and elsewhere we're flattering the leader is the way to get resources, not needing the resources or justifying the resources is maddening. And then the fact that they can weaponize that And now I'm saying they, but I specifically mean the propaganda apparatus in support of Trump.
Yeah, so not only ad Adam, but Trump took millions and I'd have to look up the figure. But he took multiple millions of dollars from FEMA, and he put it toward incarcerating illegal migrants coming in over the border. So what he was accusing this administration of, he actually.
Did, which is often what happens. Isn't that the things that he accuses others of.
Is yeah, the accusations are confessed.
Yeahs.
You know, I like to quote, you know, like Schopenhauer and Grute, But there's the you know, there's the whole point of you know, he who dealt it smelter.
Is that Schopenhauer who said that?
I believe that was Kant.
There's a lot to laugh about here. But there's people potentially dying. There's people staying in their homes as this new hurricane comes because they've been told the government's going to seize their home and steal their land.
It is very shameful. But I will say, if I, like, if I had to come up with a conspiracy theory, like you said, got you have to. I think weather is a pretty good one. It's big, uncontrollable forces. You put a narrative on it, boom, you got it.
I want to quote Hannah Aren't for a second, and this is this constant lie is not she's talking about the Soviet Union here. This constant lie is not intended to make people believe a lie, but to make no one believe anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish distinguish between truth and falsehood, cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
Yeah, and that feels a little too relevant. Yeah, well you made me really depressed. No, next time we'll be one of the fun conspiracy things that lifts up this human spirit, and that's something we can all celebrate great.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Seipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.