The real conspiracy behind the Texas floods

David Sirota can be a hard one to pin down. He’s a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. A onetime radio host. A co-writer of the Oscar-nominated “Don’t Look Up,” a dark comedy about the looming threat of climate change. (Spoiler: Most people do not, in fact, look up.) Today, Sirota is the editor-in-chief and founder of The Lever, an investigative news outlet that often reports on the pervasive and corrupting influence money can play in US politics.

But climate change—and our elected leaders’ persistent inability to address it—is never far from Sirota’s mind, especially following devastating weather events like the recent flooding in Texas, which has killed more than 130 people with dozens still missing. Scientists say climate change makes storms like the ones that pummeled Texas earlier this month wetter and more intense. To Sirota, the floods are not merely tragic, but highlight ongoing hypocrisy from those who deny climate change. 

“This is happening in a state that is the headquarters of the industry that has been the funder of all the denialism that’s fueling, quite literally, the crisis itself,” Sirota says.

On this week’s More To The Story, Sirota sits down with host Al Letson for a wide-ranging chat about the Texas floods being a wake-up call, how President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is “the class war in legislative form,” and why some Democrats still don’t know how to respond to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in New York City’s mayoral primary.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: I have to ask you about climate change because you co-wrote Don’t Look Up, a movie that is warning about climate change.

David Sirota: Yes.

When you witness the devastating floods in Texas and also just weather events happening throughout the United States and the world, what goes through your head?

Well, I saw some of the officials down there saying we never could have seen this coming. Nobody saw this coming. And I’m like, everybody saw it. At least this set of weather systems coming. That’s like saying in the movie, being in the movie, we never saw the asteroid, the comet coming headed at earth and it’s very frustrating to have made a movie with that metaphor. And actually what the movie ends up being is there’s an asteroid headed towards earth, nobody cares and everyone’s looking away. And so I feel like this keeps happening over and over again and I’m waiting for that moment where we can at least agree climate change is happening. It is making these weather systems, these disasters more prevalent and we have to actually get serious about at least defending ourselves from this. And the most tragic parts of this, this is happening in a state that is the headquarters of the industry that has been the funder of all the denialism that’s fueling quite literally the crisis itself.

And so you wonder people in Texas, it’s like is this a wake-up moment to say, hey, those oil companies, those fossil fuel companies in Houston are creating the environment that is fueling these more intense weather systems that are creating these kinds of disasters in our state. And you just wonder when that connection in the mass public consciousness is going to be made.

One thing I’ll add here is I think maybe part of the problem here is that the climate crisis feels so big, it feels so diffuse, there are so many factors that it feels like we can’t get our hands around it, that there’s really nothing we can do, even though that is absolutely not true. The programs in the big ugly bill that just passed, the United States was making real genuine actual progress on clean energy.

But that’s all gone now.

Much of it is absolutely gone. We made the decision for reasons that are still unclear other than Donald Trump paying back his fossil fuel donors. We made the decision … We were actually succeeding and our Congress made the legislative decision to repeal that progress at the same time that we’ve seen this flood, for instance, Congress passes this bill to repeal the clean energy programs and days later there is this flood disaster. It is like when are we going to look up? That’s not really an answer. That’s just my frustration speaking.

There’s a quiet disinformation thing going on. I’ve seen recently that people are talking about weather modification.

Oh my god. You know what the best response to that was? I’ve seen that. Like, oh, the government is secretly altering the weather. I’ve seen that. And it’s like actually there is a conspiracy to alter the weather. There’s a conspiracy by a group of very powerful corporations to pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as possible and to pretend that that’s not causing these weather … I’m being tongue in cheek here, but the point is, what’s incredible is instead of just saying, hey, all that science out there that’s telling us, that’s been telling us this, that this is happening, yeah, that’s actually what’s at issue. It’s like what about the conspiracy right in front of you? It’s right there.

Yeah.

One of the tragedies is how climate became a partisan topic. Because I think people can’t even remember. It didn’t used to be a partisan topic. It really didn’t. It wasn’t that long ago. It was in the late ’80s into the early ’90s. James Hansen testified on Capitol Hill. Republicans like George HW Bush, John McCain were saying, this is an emergency. The Pentagon, not exactly a left-wing organization was saying this is a huge problem. The scheme to turn climate change and to controversialize it and turn it into a partisan issue is one of the most dangerously successful political schemes that we’ve ever lived through and frankly, in a lot of ways, I’m not sure all of us are going to live through it. The climate casualties are mounting. I think one thing we have to do is try the best that we can to not depoliticize, but to make this less of a partisan issue. It is right there. That flood in Texas was not a Republican flood or a democratic flood. Climate change is not a Republican or democratic issue. It is a physical scientific fact.

So I want to move to what’s happening in Congress with Trump’s big beautiful bill. Tell me how you think this is going to play out politically because a lot of people are going to be affected.

It’s a real political quandary. My take on the bill is this, first of all, out of any bill that I’ve seen in my adult lifetime this bill is the class war in legislative form. Mathematically. The lowest income folks, according to the Republican-led Congressional budget office will lose … I think the estimate was somewhere between a thousand and $1,600 of income a year from this. The highest 10th of the income earners will gain … I think it was $12,000. So the point is this is literally taking from the poor and giving to the rich. I think the politics of it are confounding before we even get to the electoral politics. The politics of this are bizarre in this way. The Republican Party’s base of voters has become a more working-class base of voters. That coalition. This bill disproportionately harms working-class voters.

To put a more fine point on it, it arguably disproportionately harms Republican voters or at least Republican trending parts of the electorate. A Republican bill. And here’s the other crazy part, it helps affluent voters which are becoming more democratic. It is absolutely bizarre. And I think that the Democrat’s responsibility now is to make the point to Republican voters, the pain that you’re going to experience is because of this bill. There are complicating factors as you mentioned. That the seemingly good parts of this bill, or at least the bones that Donald Trump is pretending to throw to working class voters, the no tax on tips thing, the no tax on overtime, you can write off more of your car interest, these are relatively small things, but those things come before the election and the healthcare cuts come after the election. So there’s a political problem for Democrats that heading into the election, a lot of the healthcare cuts that are coming have not come into effect for Democrats to point to. They could point over the horizon to say they are coming. One other part of the political problem, it sounds so small, but the Medicaid cuts like the heart of the class war of this bill. Most states, the Medicaid programs are not called Medicaid. They have all sorts of different names. In Oklahoma SoonerCare. There’s all these different names and I think one of the political problems is-

They’ve disconnected. People don’t understand.

They’re like, oh, there’s Medicaid cuts over there. That’s not me. I’m on SoonerCare.

It’s the same problem with Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act. A lot of people realize that they think that they’re on the Affordable Care Act and they hate Obamacare and it’s the same thing.

Exactly.

Where do you see us as a nation right now, specifically through the lens of politics?

Look, in 2007, I wrote a book called The Uprising. It was my second book. And it was at a moment that feels like this moment does now. It was a moment where it was the second term of the Bush administration. We are now in the second term of the Trump administration. I think there’s a lot of dissolution and people feeling angry at the status quo by the way, on both the right and the left. And there felt back then there was an opportunity for this anger was going to go in one direction or the other. And my view is that what happened at that point back in 2007 was that the Obama campaign ended up successfully taking the anger on the center left and channeling it into the Democratic Party and really the Democratic establishment and the right ended up channeling the right of center anger into the Tea Party and the like. And I think what happened was that when Obama got in office and in my view really did not deliver on his populist campaign promises of hope and change. When he took that mandate and turned it into a mandate to essentially rescue Wall Street and the bankers who were foreclosing on millions and millions of people, that created a lot of, I think disillusionment and fuel for the right of center anger in the country among other things. And it created the conditions for Trump’s first successful run for president.

Forward to today, I think we’re in a similar situation where there is anger on both the right and left. And there is, once again, I think a potentially momentary situation in which the anger on the center-left can be channeled into something more like a so-called Tea Party movement. Not channeled into a particular political party for one particular politician, but into a larger movement to be more reflective of a populism, center-left populism that a lot of democratic rank-and-file voters want. That’s I think the moment that we’re in, but I’m not sure that what I’ve just laid out will play out. I thought back in 2007 it might play out that way and the premise was it’s going to go either in a right or left direction and back then it went in a right wing direction.

I think when you’re laying that out to me, the thing that comes to mind for me is that it feels like the Democratic Party is far too fractured for that to actually happen. That the Democratic Party gets caught up in arguing on things that … And I’m not saying whether they’re valid or invalid, but I would say that the Republican Party basically has a discipline that the Democratic Party does not have. And so I’m curious if you think that that’s going to get in the way.

Well, let’s take the historical view of that though. the Republican Party wasn’t always that way. If you go back to the mid-1970s, it’s incredible to imagine, but in the mid-1970s, 1976, you had a Republican primary where the incumbent non-elected president appointed president Gerald Ford, was in a presidential primary with Ronald Reagan where the primary was the liberal wing of the Republican Party and the newly ascendant conservative wing of the Republican Party. And they duked it out in that primary. Ronald Reagan lost very narrowly, of course, came back in 1980 and won the presidency. And I bring that up only to say that the Republican Party was fractured in a very deep way for a long time. And what ended up happening, I think over the course of decades was that the conservative movement through its organizing ended up unifying that party around its message.

Now, I think there are pitfalls to that. There’s a fine line between unifying a party completely around one set of ideas and creating essentially a cult. And I think today’s Republican Party 30, 40 years later from that 1970s moment, I think frankly does in some ways behave like a borderline cult, especially cult of personality when it comes to Donald Trump. But I guess what I’m saying is I think at the same time that happened with the Republicans, I think the work to actually unify the Democratic Party around a cogent economic message, a popular economic message and platform, I think that work really wasn’t done. I think a lot of work was actually done to divide the party. There was a lot of work done by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party to try to separate the party from its new deal, great society, legacy on economics. And I think that movement had great success in dividing the party, perhaps unifying the party only around so-called identity politics issues. My larger point is that I think this is a moment where the work to reunify the party around a set of popular economic policies where the diagnosis is that economic power, corporate power has become too concentrated in this new gilded age. That that work has an opportunity to happen in a real way and an accelerated way right now because we’re living in such an unequal moment.

Today’s Democratic Party is more of a cultural identity politics orthodoxy. You can be a corporate friendly corporate coddling Democrat and still be welcomed into the Democratic Party. It’s harder to be a Democrat who is a cultural moderate, who happens to be an economic populist. I bring that up because what it says is that’s where the real orthodoxy is. It’s on culture and identity and I think that you have to look at, so well then what happened? Well, when the Democratic Party became the party identified as the party that rammed NAFTA through Congress … Let’s take that as an example. There’s a lot of data out there to show that some of the most democratic districts, Congressional districts in the deep south quickly over eight years after that became some of the most Republican districts in the country. Now the question is why? One very interesting study said that because the culturally conservative voters in those districts who had been hanging on to the Democratic Party willing to overlook their differences with Democrats on cultural issues prior to NAFTA, were still willing to stick with the party because they felt that the party was at least on its side economically.Then NAFTA happens. Hugely high profile. And that cohort of voters culturally conservative, but still sticking with the Democrats, it’s like, you know what? The Democrats are now screwing me on economics. Fine, I’ll just go be a Republican. The supremacy of culture in our politics and that as a dividing force in our politics, I think comes at a time of mass disillusionment. When people say, “Okay. Listen, neither party is really on my side economically so politics is just a game, a contest of culture because both sides are not really delivering for me economically.”

I don’t think that either party is serving its constituents. I think that when you look at where Americans are, I think what we’re seeing in the voting booth and the lack of people at times coming out to vote is because they feel like no matter what they do, it doesn’t matter. The system is broken for both sides.

I absolutely agree, and I think that disillusionment serves, ultimately, it mostly serves or tends to serve anti-government conservatives who basically say, “Look, the government doesn’t do anything. It can’t do anything for you. It’s not even trying to do anything for you. So just keep voting for us. We’ll keep tearing apart the government.” It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. We’ll make the government work even worse, then, oh, that fuels our anti-government argument. Give them a credit, I guess as a political strategy, the right, and the Republicans have a self-fulfilling ideology here that works for their political project. And I think part of the problem here is that Democrats have done a bad job of … They are the party of government, but they have done a relatively bad job at governance and at selling and explaining what they are doing.

That’s the thing that I agree with you that Democrats do poorly. I also think that while Republicans are constantly talking about tearing the government apart and they have pushed this thought process in the American public that I feel like I’d never hear any pushback on, the idea that like, well, so-and-so’s a good businessman. The government should run like a business.

I’ve come around a little bit on this topic on the run government like a business. I absolutely 100% agree that when that phrase is invoked, it makes no sense. But here’s one nugget that I think is important in that metaphor. The government has not done a good job of making what it delivers clear, simple, and easy. Now, think about this. Here’s a stat that might blow you away. The American public, including Democrats, rank Amazon as one of the top institutions that they have confidence in. But why does the average person say they have trust in the institution of Amazon? My theory is because Amazon has invested … Whether you love it or you hate it has invested a lot of time and resources into making everything you do on that site easy. And my point is that that is the opposite of the experience of most people when they deal with the government.

When you deal with the IRS, you’re on hold forever. You can barely get through to anybody when you have to file your taxes, when you’re dealing with any government agency, typically the experience can be miserable, And unnecessarily miserable. So that’s a long way of saying, I do think there’s one thing … And this goes back to Democrats. If you’re the party of government, you better be making sure that the programs that you’re creating are delivering what you say they’re going to deliver in a really efficient, easy, pleasant way.

Let’s talk about the relationship and the Democratic Party between corporations and oligarchs. Is it fair to view the party as a clash between corporationalists and oligarchs?

I would say this, oligarchy is a term I think that has been used a lot lately as a catch-all for everything from the billionaire who inherited their wealth to the large Fortune 500 company, to the Washington swamp of lobbyists. It’s essentially the money power. And I think the Democratic Party’s fundamental conflict right now, and it has been this way really for 40 years, when that movement I just mentioned to take the Democratic Party away from its new deal roots. That the party is caught in a conflict that I think frustrates a lot of people. And I explain it this way. That on the one side you have what the public and democratic voters want. Things like universal healthcare, break up large monopolies, better regulate and limit the power of Wall Street private equity and the financialized forces of this country. That’s stuff that the public wants.

Over here is stuff that the donors want. The donors, the oligarchy want none of that stuff. So the Democratic Party is … The Venn diagram is what does the public want that the donor class can tolerate and accept? And what you end up with is a very narrow set of issues that typically do not challenge the power of the donor class, even if they are important causes. And I’m talking about reproductive rights, we’re talking about civil rights, we’re talking about things, again, not unimportant things, but in many ways, not things that challenge the fundamental economic and political power of oligarchy. And the problem is that for the party, is that what the public wants goes way beyond that. What a public wants in a time where of nationwide affordability crisis … I can’t afford healthcare, I can’t afford my electricity bills I can’t afford, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What the public wants are policies that the donor class does not want because the oligarchy is profiting off the current dystopian status quo.

So how does the Democratic Party get past that? Because if the donor class is actually paying for these campaigns and funding the party and politicians are listening to them, but the people disagree with those decisions, how does that pan out? I think a really clear example of this is the mayoral race in New York City. So the donor class does not want Zohran Mamdani to win, but everyday New Yorkers seem very much in favor of the policies he’s laying out.

Well, here’s why I think the oligarchy, the donor class in New York is freaking out so much. And by the way, let’s take a moment to note that this is not just a typical donor freakout. This is an epic nervous breakdown that we’ve seen. My view is they’re not really freaking out at Mamdani’s particular policies. His policies are not really radical at all. They’ve been portrayed as radical, but we’re talking about things like limiting rent increases. We’re talking about a couple of publicly funded grocery stores in food deserts. We’re talking about free buses.

Yeah. I would say they’re not radical for you because the way you think about democratic politics, I think most of the donor class would think that you’re radical.

For sure. Speaking in terms of the world-

I hear you. I hear you. I just wanted to frame that.

What major cities … No, that’s fair. That’s fair. I’m saying if you look at major cities … Look, Orlando, Florida has a free bus system. Orlando, Florida is not … And Mamdani’s proposal for some free buses was portrayed as this insane, crazy idea. So I’m just grounding it in the idea. Okay. He’s proposing policies that I think are far-reaching different for New York, but I don’t think the average corporate CEO in New York is like, I just can’t tolerate free buses in the city. I don’t think that’s what’s really at issue. What I think is really at issue here is that the oligarchy, the donor class has gotten so used to deciding elections, deciding political outcomes, that Mamdani winning was a situation, an election that they were prepared to fight. They fought really hard, they spent a lot of money, and they still lost.

I think what the freak-out is about is about a perceived or at least a fear of a loss of political control. A fear that democracy is actually working and it means they can’t decide every single political outcome. So we have to ask the question to go to your earlier question. Well, what about this conflict between the people who are paying for campaigns, what they want and what voters want? How does that circle ever get squared? Well, I think when you look in New York, how did Mamdani win? One of the big factors … It’s not very sexy, hasn’t been talked about. Guy has a great message, obviously great media savvy, good videos, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the factors that really hasn’t been talked about is New York City has a robust system of publicly financing campaigns. So Zohran Mamdani was able to raise …

The deal here is if you raise about a million bucks off of very small donations, the city matches that. I think it’s eight to one. So he raised a million dollars. You can’t really fully compete in a New York Mayor’s race with $1 million, but then you get $8 million. And so he had enough resources without having to go to big oligarch donors and beg them for money in exchange for legislative favors. He had enough public money to actually compete. And that’s what short-circuited, I think the typical formula where huge billionaire donors stomp in and just buy the election. And it’s no wonder that the oligarchy, the donor class is freaking out because all of a sudden, wait a minute, in the capital of global finance, you’re telling me that we can’t decide every single political outcome, and there’s a system here to allow people like Mamdani to be competitive. That must freak them out.

But that can’t be replicated on a national level though.

Well, look, it’s happening at the New York for the first time at the statewide level in New York. There are cities, and even in some state programs that have publicly financed campaigns. They haven’t been funded as well as they need to be funded. But a place like Florida, for instance, a deep red state has a publicly financed system of statewide elections. And the reason I spotlight this is because I think if people are looking for answers, how do we actually make the playing field more fair for democracy? One of the answers is, go to your town, go to your city, go to your state, start exploring how to replicate publicly financed systems of elections. I want to be clear, this is not a cure-all-

But it’s a step.

It’s a step. It is a step.