I often wonder why critical thinking skills are so poor these days. But maybe they always were, and thanks to the magic of the Internet we're just seeing more examples. It used to be that if a lawmaker said something stupid and/or prejudiced, it might get reported in their district and/or be seized on by an opponent. Nowadays, the world sees everything, and that brings us to Trayvon White Sr., a member of the Washington D.C. city council. During the latest D.C. snowstorm, White blamed the bad weather on "the Rothschilds controlling the climate." Seriously! White later apologized for his remarks, but the damage was done.
D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) posted the video to his official Facebook page at 7:21 a.m. as snow flurries were hitting the nation’s capital. The video, shot through the windshield of a car driving west on Interstate 695 through downtown Washington, shows snowy skies while White narrates.
“Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation,” he says. “And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city.’ And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”
The Rothschilds are a famous European business dynasty descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, an 18th-century Jewish banker who lived in what is today Frankfurt, Germany. The family has repeatedly been subject over the years to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories alleging that they and other Jews clandestinely manipulate world events for their advantage.
One of the easiest ways to identify somebody who is an anti-semite is to look for references to how "the Rothschilds" control finance, business, trade - or for that matter the weather. They don't. Today we have a whole new set of rich douchebags running the show.
The reason people keep coming to back to this is that in 1903 when the anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax was published, the Rothschild banking family was much richer and more powerful than their descendants are today. In the nineteenth century, the Rothschilds were bankers to the great colonial powers of continental Europe and the British Empire. But in the twentieth century, the fall of colonialism and two world wars rendered them far less significant. At the same time, America's rich natural resources were exploited to create families with more wealth than the Rothschild banking families had ever seen, like the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans, and so forth.
The richest family in the world today is probably the Waltons, who built their fortune on Bud and Sam Walton's Wal-Mart corporation. They continue to profit from paying many workers such low wages that they are forced to turn to government welfare programs. According to estimates, the family is worth almost $150 billion, which is a lot. Still, the Waltons are Christian, so you don't see them regularly showing up on lists of finance douchebags and American oligarchs. When you see that meme posted above about the Rothschilds being worth five hundred trillion of dollars, don't believe it. It was created by taking the combined wealth of the family at its peak in the nineteenth century, applying over a hundred years of compound interest, and then converting to today's dollars. So nothing to factor in the effects of two world wars, the end of colonialism, and the distribution of what was left among hundreds of heirs.
Now as for that whole "weather control" thing - what these conspiracy idiots never can come up with is "why." Let's say that an evil cabal of the Rothschilds and Waltons, and maybe Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, has the technology to make it snow in Washington D.C. They don't, by the way. So far we have yet to come up with weather control tech that works better than spells. But let's say they were desperate and hired a wizard. Why would they do it? One of the things you learn when you study rich people is that they are entirely motivated by self-interest, often to a fault. A recent study talked about how having vast wealth changes your brain so that it's harder for you to think of the effects your decisions have on others. But where's the self-interest in making it snow?
Off the top of my head, I can really only think of two people who are both super-rich and might want to make it snow in Washington D.C. - the Koch brothers. I realize that they figure prominently in a lot of left-wing conspiracy theories due to their involvement in conservative politics, but Koch Industries makes much of its money off fossil fuels like petroleum and would be harder hit than many other companies by legislation to limit carbon emissions. Legislation limiting carbon emissions would be put in place to limit climate change. And one of the best arguments against the popular acceptance of climate change is getting people to conflate climate and weather. "So much for climate change. It's snowing!" The best place to do that to influence national politics? Washington D.C, of course!
To be clear, we don't have that sort of weather modification technology so I don't believe any of that is true. My point is just that it's a whole lot more plausible than postulating that the Rothschilds did it because they're evil! Evil for evil's sake is something that you find in low-budget melodramas and old cartoons, not in the real world. The evil that we see caused by finance douchebags has nothing to do with evil itself, and everything to do with making a buck at the expense of a bunch of people they just don't care about. It's just that banal.
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