Weather Modification, the Epstein List, and Bend It Like Beckham
The loose thread that binds is “stuff I’ve been thinking about.”
Before we get into it, the famine, violence, and death toll in Gaza is absolutely devastating. I don’t know what to say about it that I haven’t said already, but here is a list of ways to help, and here is a guide to calling your Representative and Senators to tell them that we should use every ounce of leverage and power we have to end Israel’s attacks on Gaza and begin the massive humanitarian project this crisis requires.
Conspiracy Theories
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has introduced legislation in Congress to block weather modification in response to the floods in Texas that left over 130 people dead.
Meanwhile, the country generally and the right more specifically, are fixated on the case of Jeffery Epstein, a wealthy financier who was arrested in 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking minors, and whose case is back in the news as Trump reneges on a campaign promise to release the full files relating to Epstein’s arrest.
Yes, I’m going to relate these two things - bear with me.
In this great overview of the whole weather modification conspiracy, Crooked Media’s What a Day newsletter traces it back to the idea of cloud seeding, which is the scientific process by which we can create very small amounts of rain or snow by introducing particles into clouds. My favorite tidbit is that “Russian authorities have been using this tech for years to give dictator Vladimir Putin sunny days for his military parades, by dissipating rainclouds outside the capital, Moscow,” because every impenetrable strongman dictator with violent tendencies is also the most spoiled toddler to ever demand a pony for their birthday.
Cloud seeding cannot create the amount of precipitation required to flood the Texas Hill Country. The weather modification that MTG alleges is not happening. But that’s sort of besides the point. Because every time I hear that MTG wants to pass legislation to ban putting chemicals or substances into the air to change the weather, all I really want to say is ma’am you are SO CLOSE.
In fact, MTG, you’re kind of right. There is a vast international conspiracy of extremely rich, selfish people who are changing our weather patterns! They are making storms and floods and fires worse for the express purpose of making themselves richer. It’s happening right before our eyes! They are modifying or changing the climate. They just also happen to be the oil and gas companies and Republican billionaires backing you and the rest of your House cronies in the Republican party so that you’ll let them keep doing it.
Now how does this connect to Jeffery Epstein, you might ask?
The fervor around the Jeffery Epstein case stems from the conspiracy theories surrounding his suicide after his arrest. Many people believe that Epstein didn’t die by suicide, but was instead murdered so that he wouldn’t reveal the names of the elite who allowed, facilitated, and even participated in his sex crimes against children. Those people believe that as part of the Epstein files, there is a list of Epstein’s clients that previous presidents had refused to release to protect their wealthy friends and possibly themselves (that Epstein was arrested in Trump’s first term is kind of besides the point). Trump promised to release the files, and his attorney general even said that she was reviewing the list for release, before Trump suddenly reversed course.
Once again, to these folks, I say: you are so close.
The rich and powerful who commit sex crimes are routinely protected by their wealth and their connections. And this has been happening for many, many years, though of course not just among the wealthy. Sex crimes are always about power, and we see them anywhere we see power imbalances abused by the people who benefit from them. A few years ago, we actually had a whole movement about it, called the #MeToo movement, and it sparked an enormous misogynistic backlash that we are still reeling from - a backlash that helped reelect Donald Trump, a court-adjudicated rapist whose wealth and power protects him from the consequences of his actions, and who many Jeffery Epstein conspiracy theorists voted for. And that’s all stuff we knew about him before his friendship with Epstein and evidence that Trump himself is in the Epstein case files made it into the mainstream conversation.
As Lyz Lenz said in her newsletter recently - we don’t need an Epstein list. We just need to believe women.
I have been thinking a lot about this pattern, wherein everyday folks (MTG and Tucker Carlson have no excuse) latch onto these vast, overly complicated conspiracies just a little bit askew from the truth. I don’t know whether it’s an attempt to evade their own guilt, or because it feels more empowering to continuously be digging for clues and doing your own research than to face the reality of a pervasive and overwhelming system that overtly props up those doing harm at the expense of those experiencing it, and the feeling that the odds of dismantling that system and building something better in its place are insurmountable. I suspect it’s a little bit of both.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how the trustworthiness of Democrats and our relentless communication problems have contributed to this. I feel like my whole life Democrats and folks on the left have been trying to expose the machinations of right-wing politics that attempts to obscure the feedback loop of wealth and power and influence that grows at our expense. But it’s hard to trust the messengers on that one when they have a tendency to at best unknowingly perpetuate that feedback loop and at worst overtly keep one foot in it. When Democrats try to follow the winds of political approval covertly instead of admitting when they were wrong (voting to invade Iraq, for example) or when they speak fervently about the importance of democracy and human rights and then vote to send military aid to a country that is denying both of those things, it makes Democrats, and those who campaign for them, seem like participants in, rather than revealers of a conspiracy.
This of course does not absolve Republicans who often use the conspiracy theories of their followers to elide their own vastly more obvious and harmful crimes. It’s just at this point that feels like well tread ground. I’ll be honest that I don’t really know what to do with this set of thoughts, but I think it starts with calling out hypocrisy in our own party, and supporting and campaigning for candidates who put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. And I think I think it’s worth thinking how we talk to our friends and family who are mired in these conspiracies by thinking about what might bring a person to the conspiracy when the truth is just next door, and to adjust accordingly.
Bend it Like Beckham
And now for something completely different.
A few days ago I was mindlessly scrolling Instagram, as one does when the world is falling apart and the apps on your phone have algorithms specifically designed to make you forget that and also buy stuff, when I happened across a post from Vogue that said “Bend It Like Beckham Is Finally Getting a Sequel.”
My first thought: oh no.
My second thought: make it gay.
For those who don’t know, Bend It Like Beckham is a sports-comedy movie from 2002 starring Parminder Nagra, Kiera Knightley, and Jonathan Reese Myers. In it, Nagra plays Jess Bhamra, the daughter of British Indian Punjabi Sikhs living in Hounslow, London. She’s great at soccer, and even though her parents want her to focus on her studies, she ends up secretly joining Jules’ (Kiera Knightley) soccer team, coached by Joe (Jonathan Reese Myers). Over the course of the movie she and Jules develop a deep friendship punctuated by both soccer and boy jealousy, and ultimately Jess gets to follow her soccer dreams with the blessings of her family and make-out with a deliciously hot Joe (notably after he’s no longer her coach), in spite of the sapphic undertones of her relationship with Jules.
This movie was, I cannot say strongly enough, very important to me as a kid. First of all, I played soccer, and even though I can’t say I was ever good enough to even dream about being a professional some day, I did really love it. Second, Jonathan Reese Myers is extremely hot in this movie and also very safe. And ultimately it’s my favorite kind of story, the aspirational kind about what could happen if we all made a little bit more of an effort to understand each other.
To address my first thought (oh no), however: stop making sequels to things I care about!!!! I actually wrote about this with Veronica Mars, but I feel like every time someone makes a sequel to something I care about they use it to undermine everything I loved about the original. It’s like they have to retract all the growth that the characters went through in the original story so that they can make it new again for a new audience, forgetting about those of us who loved the thing first. I don’t want them to tear the original Bend It Like Beckham to bits just to build something from the wreckage.
To address my second thought (make it gay): let me caveat this by saying I think they should make everything more gay. More gay stories! More gay people in stories! There’s about a gazillion different kinds of love in the world and we should show a lot more of them! But also specifically instead of making this sequel they should just re-make the original and fulfill it’s original queer promise - a promise I’m not the only one who sees. Vice has a piece headlined: “Bend It Like Beckham is the Gayest Love Story Never Told.” There are countless pieces about the queer subtext, about the role this movie played in queer journeys, and about Kiera Knightley’s queer haircut. And while in 2002 both Bend It Like Beckham and I were repressing our queerness, in 2025 we are ready for Jess and Jules to make out.
But why a remake, you ask, instead of a sequel where Jules and Jess realize their romantic love for each other? Classically bi, I just also love the love story between Jess and Joe in the original and I want to let it stand. There is literally no reason why I can’t have both.
Trump is president - I deserve this! But since Trump is president and I am cursed when it comes to television, let me present to you my third thought on this sequel: oh no.