Are You Prepared for the ‘Geophysical Event’?

Plus: The failure of a copycat cash grab.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Stoking fears of a looming ‘near-extinction event’

A LITTLE-KNOWN OFFICIAL from the George H.W. Bush administration has become the face of a growing conspiracy theory on the right: that some sort of “geophysical event” will soon kill off most of humanity, and world elites know about it and are stealing our tax money to prepare to live underground.

In April, Tucker Carlson interviewed Catherine Fitts, who served as an assistant secretary of housing and urban development in the first Bush administration. The interview covered a wide range of conspiracy theories, from secret forms of energy to an attempt by shadowy forces to control world currencies.

But the claim that has really taken off is Fitts’s belief that trillions of dollars are being siphoned out of the federal government through HUD’s budget to build bunkers to protect the global 1 percent from an impending world-shattering event.

“Where’s all this money going?” Fitts said. “And one of the things I’ve looked at in the process of looking where all this money is going, is the underground base and city infrastructure and transportation that’s been built.”

“I’m sorry?” Carlson said.

Fitts said that roughly 170 bunkers are being built underground and even under the ocean because world elites are preparing for a “near-extinction” event, perhaps a shift of the magnetic poles.

She claimed that Barack Obama hinted at the impending geophysical catastrophe in 2017, when, days before leaving office, he recommended the Chinese science-fiction book The Three-Body Problem.

“Obama made some cryptic comment about, ‘People oughta read this book,’” She said. “It was like, ‘Hint hint, these are the problems I’m dealing with.’” In fact, Obama said exactly the opposite: He explained that he enjoyed the novel because its vast interstellar tale of an alien invasion made “my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty—not something to worry about.”

Fitts also showed confusion about the novel’s plot, claiming that it is “about other bodies that come into the solar system and you, it’s, they’re—it’s impossible to predict their trajectory and then when they do they create this catastrophic flooding and earthquakes and all this other stuff.” In fact, the part of the book she’s referring to involves an imaginary alien planet with an unstable orbit around three suns that causes randomly timed climate disasters.

In other words, it has nothing at all to do with our planet. And this work of fiction in no way supports Fitts’s theory that Earth undergoes a “near-extinction event” every 10,000 to 12,000 years.

Fitts, who lasted only eighteen months at HUD and whose tenure there may be best remembered for her attempt to change the scandal-plagued agency’s name from HUD to the cozier-sounding “HOME,” might not seem like the kind of person who’d be clued-in to a conspiracy of international elites. But she’s been fascinated for decades by money transfers at the agency, and now claims that’s where the bunker-cash came from.

Fitts told Carlson she believes she lost her own spot in the future troglodyte elite when she refused to join the Council on Foreign Relations, a popular bogeyman in conspiracy theories.

“I saw in my mind a locker in the underground base, and they were taking my name off of the locker,” she said.

If you’re thinking Fitts’s theory sounds like the plots of recent streaming hits—including Amazon’s Fallout, Apple’s Silo, and especially Hulu’s Paradise—you’re not wrong. Maybe she’s been watching too much TV—or maybe they’re trying to tell us something!

A popular X account called “Open Minded Approach” that’s supportive of Fitts’s vision nicknamed the coming crisis the “geophysical event.” Now the account’s anonymous operator (or operators) pumps out videos about our future extinction, with every meeting between world leaders cast as a summit to prepare for the impending armageddon.

As for the actual impending geophysical event, climate change, Fitts feels confident it’s fake. As both Carlson and Fitts laughed, she explained that it’s an “operation” meant to fool the public.

“It’s just an op!” she said.

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Lightning fails to strike twice in burgeoning racial slurs industry

I WROTE EARLIER THIS MONTH about the troubling good fortune of Shiloh Hendrix, a Minnesota woman who called a child the n-word on a playground, then became a right-wing cause célèbre for it. As of this morning, she has raised more than $785,000 in a crowdfunding campaign.

Hendrix’s financial windfall was bound to inspire copycats. But in a twist, the most prominent copycat was the person already running Hendrix’s own fundraiser, and his own slur-based crowdfunding scheme has blown up in his face.

A week after Hendrix raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, racist activist Avi Rachlin tried to get in on the action himself. Rachlin, who has described himself as the “mastermind” of Hendrix’s successful fundraising campaign as a sort of anti–cancel culture hero, posted a separate video of himself working as a rideshare driver and berating a black customer with the n-word.

That video gained some popularity in far-right circles, but naturally, Rachlin was fired from the rideshare service. So he immediately launched a crowdfunding page of his own—suspiciously quickly, with one racist X account complaining Rachlin had the fundraiser “cocked and loaded.”

In a contentious livestream on May 12, various white-supremacist social media bigwigs accused Rachlin of grifting them. A far-right figure who goes by the name “Wurzelroot” complained that Rachlin was doing “essentially a rerun a week later” of Hendrix’s effort.

“But you’re the guy who gets the money now,” he said.

Much of the backlash to Rachlin focused on the fact that, unlike Hendrix, he had posted the racist video himself. How could he now complain that he had lost his job?

“You posted the video, what did you think was going to happen when you posted the video?” Wurzelroot asked.

On Monday, Hendrix—already flush with hundreds of thousands of dollars Rachlin helped her raise—denounced him in a video.

“As soon as we found out the truth about all that, I severed ties with him immediately,” Hendrix said, while also stressing, for some reason, that she wasn’t married to Rachlin either.

The situation was made worse when Rachlin’s extremely antisemitic erstwhile allies realized that he’s Jewish. In response, Rachlin issued a long statement claiming that he’s still white, in part because he has to wear sunscreen.

“I have to wear SPF 50 when I’m out in the sun for more than 30 minutes, or I’ll burn,” he wrote in an X post.

As of this writing, Rachlin has raised just $7,000—not anything close to what he made for Hendrix, but it’ll buy a lot of sunscreen.