This week, your favorite podcast is yapping about Kamala Harris, the 2020 Democratic National Convention, we debut the patent-pending, proprietary, and entirely made up and non-scientific Cast Iron Brains Election Forecast model, and we talk about the one conspiracy theory to rule them all, QAnon.

Here’s a rundown of this week’s Democratic Convention speakers.

The Leftists are not impressed by the Kamala Harris pick.

David Brooks, on the other hand, has long been impressed by Kamala Harris.

And here’s Brooks again, more recently, predicting that Biden, Harris, and their counterparts in Congress will, “if given power” “forge a new conservative radicalism.” (IF given power?!?!?!”)

Here’s video of John Kasich and a few other Republicans at the Democratic Convention on Monday night, offering their support for Joe Biden over Donald Trump—for whatever that’s worth to anyone who hasn’t already been convinced by the last four years that Trump shouldn’t be in charge of anything more consequential than his bowel movements. It’s actually pretty good! Not that it matters.

Here’s 538’s daily-updating election forecast, which debuted last week.

The patent-pending, proprietary, and entirely made up and non-scientific Cast Iron Brains Election Forecast also debuted this week, to great fanfare. We don’t have a fancy website, but you can go here to track Trump’s approval rating state-by-state, which is the only data point the CIBEF factors into its advanced modeling algorithms. Anywhere Trump has a net-negative approval rating of worse than minus-7, give the state of Biden. Otherwise, give it Trump. As of Monday night, the “model” suggests that Biden will win in November with 306 electoral votes.

Some QAnon links:

The seeds of QAnon were planted in 2016, with the PIZZAGATE conspiracy theory. https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/

Check out a good Frontline episode called “The United States of Conspiracy.”

The New York Times on QAnon. https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html

The BBC on QAnon. https://www.bbc.com/news/53498434

How online furniture sales company Wayfair got roped in, from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247

Media Matters is keeping an updating list of potential United States Congresspeople who have expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a bad person and a moron, is almost certainly going to Congress next year, representing Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Here’s the video we played on the show.

And here’s Meet the Press blaming all of this on SOCIAL MEDIA. Relevant segment starts at 41:45.

But this shit isn’t new! The following is from a famous 1964 essay called The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard Hofstadter in Harper’s. (https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/) Read the whole thing! It’s great!

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

(...)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. (…) Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”

Fair warning: the articles in this series from the New York Times are absolutely horrible to read, outlining the staggering spread of photographic documentation of child sexual abuse. Read as necessary. Everything is terrible.

Don’t forget to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, because we’ll be discussing what we think of the Kubrick masterpiece next time out. Talk to you soon!