JD Vance Takes a Hard Stance on Drugs. What Does His Adviser's Past Mean for His Campaign?

On Wednesday, a WIRED exclusive revealed that one of J.D. Vance’s financial policy advisers has posted a lot on Reddit about illicit substances. Given Vance’s hard stance on drugs, WIRED’s Tim Marchman and Makena Kelly join Leah to discuss why it matters that a member of his staff seems to have been using them.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

Mentioned this week:
JD Vance Adviser Posted on Reddit for Years About Use of Cocaine, ‘Gas Station Heroin,’ Other Drugs by Makena Kelly

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. In January, a Reddit user posted a video under the name PsychoticMammal. It showed JD Vance in a senate hearing talking about the rising threat of synthetic drugs called nitazenes or manufactured opioids.

JD Vance [Archival audio]: I've even talked to people just in the past few days who've been able to order this stuff on the internet, comes directly to their door, and they're dealing with a street drug that is substantially more powerful than what we give pregnant women in a hospital who are about to deliver a baby. This is extraordinarily potent stuff for people to just be able to order via mail. I want to sort of start out...

Leah Feiger: One user commented on PsychoticMammal's post pointing out that one of Vance's staffers sitting right behind Vance looked like he was high. That staffer's name is Aaron Kofsky. He advises Vance on financial policy. PsychoticMammal agreed that Kofsky looked high. "Maybe snorted some ole white girl beforehand," they wrote. "I'm sure half of congress rails lines." The PsychoticMammal account has posted a lot about drugs and following PsychoticMammal's trail from Reddit to Blogspot, to Tumblr, to Poshmark, a WIRED investigation has found that the PsychoticMammal account is actually Aaron Kofsky, that same Vance adviser. Through the PsychoticMammal account, Kofsky has commented a lot detailing his drug use and even instructions on how to hide drugs from TSA while traveling. JD Vance and Donald Trump have taken a hard stance against drug crime in the past, and Kofsky is a key part of Vance's team and potentially really close to working in the White House. Joining me today to talk about why these revelations matter are WIRED senior reporter, Makena Kelly who wrote this story. Hey, Makena.

Makena Kelly: Hey, it's good to be back.

Leah Feiger: So happy you're here. And Tim Marchman, WIRED's director of science, politics, and security. Hey, Tim.

Tim Marchman: Hey, I'm so glad to be here.

Leah Feiger: I am so glad that you are both here today. We have so much to discuss. Makena, you wrote this piece, which our listeners can check out on WIRED.com. It's in the show notes. But let's start with the basics here. Who is Aaron Kofsky and what does he do for JD Vance?

Makena Kelly: Aaron Kofsky is a financial adviser for JD Vance. Vance, of course, is on the Senate Banking Committee, so he does a lot of work on crypto policy, banking policy. When Silicon Valley Bank failed, Politico wrote that Kofsky was very key to Vance's thinking when it came to new regulations in that space. Before joining Vance's staff, was on Pat Toomey's staff, and then before that he was at the SEC as well.

Leah Feiger: And it goes without saying that should the Trump-Vance ticket win, he would very possibly very likely be following Vance straight to some more senior policy positions.

Makena Kelly: Right. The SEC commissioner that he worked for, Mark Uyeda, he is being talked about and is seen amongst some Bitcoin folks as being at least a temp SEC chairman if Trump were to win.

Leah Feiger: Wow. So why do we care about this guy? Why are we talking about Kofsky today?

Tim Marchman: Well, as Makena's investigation shows for over a decade, he's been posting on Reddit about his use of a genuinely staggering range of drugs, including cocaine, various opiate derivatives, MDMA.

Leah Feiger: I mean a whole host of drugs that we were not even familiar with when this story began.

Makena Kelly: Research chemicals.

Leah Feiger: Research chemicals.

Tim Marchman: One is tianeptine which is also known as gas station heroin. It's illegal in 12 states. It's an unscheduled, an unregulated antidepressant that you can buy in convenience stores and creates an opioid-like effect and has a reputation for causing really nasty withdrawal symptoms. And the other drug is kratom, which is again, a bit of... It mimics the effect of opioids. It's very lightly regulated, unregulated, commonly bought in convenience stores. I'm sure a lot of people have seen it when they just go to the gas station in some parts of the country. So over this period of time, he wasn't just writing about how he had maybe done some drugs here and there. He was writing in detail and as recently as three months ago about how to smuggle them through TSA, about their effects on him, about how he was experiencing withdrawal and in general writing as if he was addicted to gas station heroin and kratom. And the point of this reporting isn't to judge him for what he does recreationally. The point is that this is someone who is in a very powerful and fairly senior position. So this raises serious questions about, among other things, Vance as a manager and he's a very, very inexperienced politician. And here he has a very key staff member who's posting all over the internet, all sorts of things that led a breadcrumb trail that Makena was able to connect to Kofsky personally. There are a lot of questions there about how this could go on for so long.

Leah Feiger: So, Makena, what did Kofsky say when you presented him with all of your findings?

Makena Kelly: He gave us a statement in which he said, "Like millions of Americans, I've struggled with drug use, which in my case was mostly an attempt to self-medicate against the effects of epilepsy and epilepsy medication. I deeply regret posting these comments. I'm not proud of this and I'm embarrassed it's being publicized in this way, but I am thankful to say that that part of my life is behind me."

Leah Feiger: Okay. So I think I really want us to get into some of the specifics here. That comment sounds clearly like someone who is struggling. I'm not going to ascribe any motivations to that comment, but some of the posts that you found online that the PsychoticMammal account, as Kofsky was saying, were pretty specific and really intense. Take us through some of those.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. One post that I just recall off the top of my head is when he mentions that he loves doing cocaine along with other opiates. That is his favorite mixture of drugs. And then again, too, not only is he talking about this drug use but instructing other people on how to get these drugs through TSA. And it's not just like a passing mention, it is a very detailed description.

Leah Feiger: Well, this is the post that you'd found. Let me read it out for us. "Putting a bag in between pages of a book or in your wallet is also a safe bet. TSA x-ray machines just show different types of material as different colors. What they're looking for is metal. Since most book covers also have plastic in them, it'll just all show up as the same color. I've never had an issue." That is so specific. He is giving people instructions on Reddit.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. And it's very clear by saying that, "I've never had an issue with this," it's something that he's done before at least once, if not multiple times.

Leah Feiger: And also in his posts, he connects himself a little bit to Vance. Can we get into that a little bit here? In January, the PsychoticMammal account posted a video from a senate committee hearing where Vance was questioning a former drug enforcement administration agent on the use of nitazenes.

Tim Marchman: That video that was mentioned at the top, there were a few weird things about that. One is that he was talking about himself in the third person and whether or not he appeared to be on drugs. But another one was that he posted it to a bunch of subreddits. There was the research chemical subreddit, the drug subreddit, the opiates subreddit, the obscure drugs subreddit, and the opioid underscore RCs, meaning research chemicals subreddit. And it got pushed out to all of those and pretty much no one had seen it. It had, at the time it was posted fewer than two dozen views. So it appeared to be some sort of digital astroturfing of this specific exchange in which he was seen. I don't want to get into what the motivations were behind that, but it's an instance of him mixing up his personal pastime of posting on the internet and his career. I want to emphasize, I will take a statement at face value. I hope all this is behind him, but this behavior continued until relatively recently, a couple of months ago. And previously, a couple of years ago, he wrote, "Kratom is the one drug that really tripped me up and I found myself addicted to." And then in that really recent post three months ago, he's asking for advice on finding constituent compound, which just means one of the chemicals in Kratom. He was looking for a source for it, which does not suggest that this was entirely behind him.

Leah Feiger: Right. And in another post he mentions Vance again, responds to a user and ends up calling Vance a Trump bootlicker. It's one thing to say, "Look, let me keep my personal life personal," except that he was mixing these things online. He is talking about these roles and perhaps talking about himself as separate from them and not revealing exactly who he is, but it's a little weird. It was weird to look through all these posts.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. I mean if you wanted to look at it in the most generous way, it's him trying to distance himself from these statements, but thinking like going so many layers behind the onion and playing...Oh my God, the right term is not playing like Remy from Ratatouille, but...

Leah Feiger: But a little bit.

Makena Kelly: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: So let's talk a little bit about how you reported this story out. Walk me through the steps that you took to actually confirm that this was Kofsky who was posting this stuff.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. So when you look at the Reddit account, the username is PsychoticMammal. And one of the easiest things to do is just kind of do a back search on this username and if it's been registered on any other platforms. There's a series of breadcrumbs that help to identify this, but I think the main point was Kofsky's Poshmark account where it is using-

Leah Feiger: The Poshmark account was key.

Makena Kelly: Right. Where he's using an image of himself under the screen name PsychoticMammal. And from there you can basically assume that a lot of the accounts using this screen name, whether they are on Tumblr like we found, or on Reddit of course, or Blogspot, places like that, you can go there and search and find the accounts and then look at what he's posted and compare that to his personal history, his work biography. And that's basically how we did it was going through that Reddit account, noting that he mentioned working for a ski resort and being a ski instructor on the Reddit account. He had that on his LinkedIn. And then also describing that he did Model UN in high school and then he was participating in Model UN subreddits. So there was a lot of different...

Leah Feiger: Hand on my heart with that one.

Makena Kelly: I know. There were a lot of different things that he said on this Reddit account that were supposed to be private and not... It's not like he was using his name. He was hiding these things, but he gave away too many details.

Tim Marchman: One that I would also throw in there is that he linked to an Instagram that is maintained featuring photos of him in preppy outfits, and he posted a link to this Instagram, which has about 150 followers. So when this account is linking out to a very small account that entirely consists of photos of this guy, it's a bit of a tell. And it's all around just for the listeners in case they're thinking about how they should post online, this is spectacularly bad operational security because you're posting personal details that can be cross-checked and you're using the same screen name in different places. I'm not going to say that makes it easy to discover, but once someone is onto you, it makes it easier to start picking up those breadcrumbs that Makena is talking about.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And I guess with all of this, you went through so many hoops and then obviously Kofsky came back with comment all confirmed, et cetera. But why do we even really care who this is? Is he a big fish, small fish? He's not a household name. Why does this story really matter?

Makena Kelly: Yeah. He's in his late 20s, so he's still relatively young, but he has spent many years now at this point working in Washington like we mentioned at the SEC and for other senators and has a reputation as being someone who is smart on crypto. He's known in the crypto community, and if he played his cards right along working for Vance, if Trump were to be elected, he would definitely be in that bucket of people who would have some kind of job, whether that is advising the future SEC chairman or continuing to be a financial adviser for JD Vance. He would have a lot more power than he does now to instruct policy decisions in the upcoming administration.

Tim Marchman: So one of the things this points up to me for people who are familiar with Washington, this isn't going to be much of a surprise... For people who aren't, it might be a surprise how much of policy is made up by very young people who are making very little money and don't know what they're talking about. They're really-

Leah Feiger: Tim's take on DC. Right here, you heard it, folks.

Tim Marchman: … at an age where-

Makena Kelly: Child labor.

Tim Marchman: At an age where you would expect someone to maybe be in grad school or working in a record shop or something. There are people who are getting down into the nitty-gritty-

Leah Feiger: No, that's true.

Tim Marchman: ... of our actual laws, and it's not probably an ideal system, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that for political reasons, nobody wants to pay aid's living wages. Most of these aids, they're not making enough money to live in DC so it limits the pool to people who have family money or are willing to just starve to do this. And when you have that many young people in these positions of enormous responsibility, I think you're going to get people who aren't making the best decisions at that point in their life, as many of us did not make the best decisions in their life when they were in their 20s. Of course, most of us don't have enormous authority over the banking sector, for instance, and that's something everybody should be thinking about and concerned about, I think.

Leah Feiger: Makena, talk us through some of his crypto policy.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. Well, I think piggybacking off what Tim just said, I think you can also argue that Kofsky has already had an effect on Vance's crypto policy thinking.

Leah Feiger: Say more.

Makena Kelly: The video that he posted of Vance was specifically on these kind of research chemicals that he himself said that he was taking, and Vance made a statement on them drilling a former DEA agent on these drugs. And the people in the Reddit thread here were saying like, "Crazy that JD Vance even knows about these drugs. Crazy that he's commenting on them at all." And when your chief policy adviser is someone who uses these drugs, you can argue... I don't want to assume, but you can argue that he probably in some way, instructed or educated Vance on-

Leah Feiger: At least discussed it.

Makena Kelly: He discussed it on these types of drugs. Now, the specific crypto policies Vance has supported when Vance first ran for Senate to over two years ago now, which is crazy to think as saying-

Leah Feiger: I can't believe 2022 was so long ago.

Makena Kelly: He's only really been in politics for a little over two years, officially.

Leah Feiger: Yes, he went Hillbilly Elegy and then all of a sudden, here we are.

Makena Kelly: Yeah. So he, when he was running for Senate, said that he had over a hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin. He really reached out to the crypto community as a source.

Leah Feiger: The crypto community loves him.

Makena Kelly: They love him. And when you go to one of the top crypto packs, Stand with Crypto, they give him 100 thumbs up.

Leah Feiger: Sure.

Makena Kelly: He is one of the most supportive crypto politicians in office right now, and he has written assumingly with the help of Kofsky legislation that is some of the most industry-friendly legislation when it comes to the crypto industry, trying to roll back any authority, any teeth, the SEC has to regulate the industry. The CFTC similarly a bill that if you compared it to a bill introduced in the house by representative Mike Flood and a bunch of Republicans, this Vance bill was even more friendly to the industry than that.

Leah Feiger: I mean, it sounds pretty clear that at the very least, he has a pretty big megaphone while talking to Vance. Let's take a quick break and when we're back, how Kofsky's posts undercut Vance's statements on drug policy. And the possible fallout from the story. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. In one of his posts, Aaron Kofsky says that he's been addicted to Kratom, which is a drug derived from a plant from Southeast Asia and has often been described as similar to a mild opiate. Makena, you found that he was searching for kratom on Reddit as recently as three months ago. Meanwhile, Kofsky's boss, JD Vance has been very outspoken about drugs and drug addiction. He brought up his mother's addiction during the Republican National Convention speech, and he's used the opioid crisis as a talking point against Democrats even saying that they're letting drugs come across the border from Mexico. It's come up a lot. Does Kofsky's behavior undercut Vance's statements on drug policy? How do we make sense of all of this together?

Makena Kelly: Well, it seems a little hypocritical, of course. You have someone who is in your office abusing drugs assumingly, and then you're going in getting on the Senate Banking Committee or giving speeches on the floor of Congress and either not being able to notice that this person needs help or ignoring it. And if you're turning that into your main policy initiative and then turning a blind eye, it's not really the best look.

Leah Feiger: What do you think, Tim?

Tim Marchman: I agree. One thing that I think Vance's office deserves credit for is that we didn't get a statement saying, "This guy has been fired. We've never heard of him. We got a statement just talking about how he's been struggling and he's moved past this, and that's what he has to say about it. We don't know what's going to happen here, but that at least suggests to me that they're taking what most experts in this area would say is the right approach, which is not stigmatizing, which is dealing with this as a medical issue." Meanwhile, Vance is running with somebody who's calling for the death penalty for drug dealers and otherwise going with methods of approaching this that have failed, that are just known not to work, and that are increasingly being turned away from across the country and around the world.

Leah Feiger: It's pretty wild. I have now watched so many different speeches where Vance is up there citing every conspiracy about Democrats and the Mexican border.

JD Vance [Archival audio]: If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?

Leah Feiger: And he brings up drugs all the time. He brings up fentanyl and trafficking all the time, and he has literally cited conspiracies about Democrats bringing in Fentanyl to cause a crisis in the Midwest. It is all so nonsensical to then have someone so senior and so key to a really big policy area for you, be engaging in this and posting about it. And obviously there's the part where we're like, "This is heartbreaking. This guy appeared to have had an addiction or multiple addictions." He's also telling people how to get their drugs through TSA. There's a lot here.

Tim Marchman: There's a lot going on. And to take a step back from Kofsky particularly, I would hope people would look at this and consider the JD Vance either doesn't know what he's talking about or is just lying. The whole reason fentanyl is so dangerous is because it's so much more potent than heroin. The whole point is that it can be easily smuggled in ways that absolutely cannot be detected whether or not there's a border wall. It's just the two things have nothing to do with one another. The problem is real. What's not real is the idea that these policy solutions, he's proposing giant border walls and invading Mexico or whatever nonsense comes about, these have nothing to do with the actual problem at all. And I think that the presence of someone like this in his office is another data point suggesting that he either doesn't know what he's talking about or doesn't really care about this and probably just shouldn't be listened to on it no matter how heartrending his own personal story is.

Leah Feiger: I mean, at least indirectly as we've been chatting about conspiracies about the border have become a cornerstone of the GOP campaign this cycle and drugs getting trafficked across the border is a huge part of that. This is not, "Oh, we found this guy doing this other thing online." No, this is a key part of what Trump and Vance have been discussing for a long time now, and it's been showing that it's a key part that's actually resonated with a lot of voters. This is causing people to vote red. Then you have Kofsky.

Tim Marchman: And the same thing with Crypto, Makena, very ably laid out the policy implications here, but also as a pure matter of politics, I'm personally unconvinced of this, but both campaigns are certainly acting as if the 15% or so of Americans who hold crypto are a key swing constituency. You have Kamala Harris coming out as part of her core pitch to get black men engaged. She's saying that she'll protect their crypto assets. This is a policy area that is directly translating into electoral politics right now, and this guy is right at the center of it. It's weird. These are not fringe areas that we're talking about with crypto, with banking regulation, with drug policy, and with personal drug use. It's just there's a lot happening here.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And, Makena, I feel like you and I have talked about different parts of this over the cycle, so now with your reporting coming out, there's this super weird thing about projection and politics. Trump and his allies have been doing this for years. They're always accusing their enemies of what they're actually doing themselves. What can we take from this? What does this say about the state of Vance's office of the Trump campaign? Is there any larger message we can find?

Makena Kelly: Well, as we're recording this, I am waiting to see if the Trump Vance campaign even has a statement on it, and I think, A, if we do get something that will probably likely give me some kind of insight.

Leah Feiger: Sure.

Makena Kelly: But at this point, looking at it now, I mean, like you mentioned, immigration is their winning issue. And drug trafficking is one of the main reasons why it's being sold to parts of the country like Ohio, like West Virginia, Midwestern states, rust belt states. For some reason, it's reminding me of Trump's interview with Theo Von, the conversation that they had on addiction.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: My brother was incredible. He would tell me... Because he knew he had a problem and he'd say, "Don't ever drink, don't ever smoke." He'd always add smoking because he did smoke a lot. He'd tell me every time I said, "Don't ever drink," because he knew he had this addiction and I never had a glass of alcohol. Never, ever did I have-

Theo Von [Archival audio]: Wow.

Donald Trump [Archival audio]: ... a glass of alcohol because of him.

Makena Kelly: It was one of the more emotional interviews he's done, but it still felt very distant and he wasn't really educated on it at all, or that he really knew much about addiction issues.

Tim Marchman: And that distance goes a little bit about to what we were talking about earlier about policy solutions here. We know what the policy solutions are. It's to decriminalize. Fentanyl is killing people because it's used as a bulk filler or because underground chemists are using it in to high concentrations. There is no fentanyl problem if these other drugs are decriminalized, if they're available, if they're regulated, if their purity is controlled for as other kind of drugs are this badly outdated image of the street corner dealer who's selling kids dime bags of heroin is like the dominant paradigm in the mind of Trump and the mind of other policymakers and potential policymakers, and it's tragic because it's completely averting attention from the real solutions here, which are there to be had. This isn't a big mystery.

Leah Feiger: Right. And I think one of the most cunning parts of all of this policy-wise as well, is all of the conspiracies about the border and the people that it's affecting. Vance has had an incredibly successful argument at bringing border issues or what he deems border issues and border conspiracies to the Midwest in that way. He directly connects it to the people of Ohio. He says, "You know someone that suffered from an overdose," so he has made it national.

Tim Marchman: Yeah. I don't think Democrats should be let off the hook here. Part of the problem we're talking about here in this specific case is drugs that are not scheduled, not regulated. There's no federal framework for these. A lot of that is under Obama is under Biden. I don't think the Democratic Party has a particularly compelling set of solutions here as far as making sure that your local gas station isn't selling what is effectively heroin for three bucks. And by saying three bucks, I should say, I don't know, maybe more than that, I don't buy it.

Makena Kelly: Well, and to talk about young people getting duped, right, or taking drugs that are tainted with fentanyl or other things that can cause, if not sudden death, but really terrible addiction issues, a lot of the kratom that you find at convenience stores is in a little drink form that looks like a health supplement that I've seen people on TikTok receive comments from people being like, "I'm drinking this and it makes me feel really good." They don't even know that they're taking kratom. They don't even know that this is an issue.

Leah Feiger: Very scary.

Tim Marchman: It's a complete failure of the regulatory state. It really is. This stuff is just being sold. You don't know what's in it. You don't know what the effects are. It's really bad. This really should be up at the top of the policy agenda.

Makena Kelly: And while we're worried about smuggling drugs over the border, it's so easy if we want to talk about talking about things being right under someone's nose. It's really just at the counter of your corner store.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. I'm really interested to learn how the Trump fans campaign reacts both to your story, Makena, and also drug policy going forward. I think there's a lot of questions still remaining. Thank you both so much. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, it's time for Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. It is time for Conspiracy of the Week, my very favorite part of our show where our lovely guests bring me their favorite conspiracies that they've come across recently, and I pick my favorite. Tim, what do you have for us today?

Tim Marchman: I felt it was time to share my theory that fashion designers have brought down the popularity of the type of preppy, trad, and ivy clothing that Aaron Kofsky favors because it makes men seem too powerful, too cool, too savvy, and too sophisticated.

Leah Feiger: I wish we were filming right now. My mouth is open. Tim, did you just bring me your own personal conspiracy theory?

Tim Marchman: I think many people are talking about this and many people are asking for more information on it and looking for investigations.

Leah Feiger: Okay. I wasn't going to reveal this in the rest of the show, but for our listeners that have made it this far, I feel comfortable doing so now. When we were going through all of the fact-checking and confirming all of these details for the Aaron Kofsky investigation, one note that Makena and I just kept coming up against is that Tim loved this man's style. He loved his clothes. He wanted to know where he bought his vintage polo blazers. I had to out you, Tim. I can't believe that this was your fake conspiracy this week.

Tim Marchman: I just want people to have the information they need to make sense of the world around them.

Leah Feiger: Okay. Makena, what do you have?

Makena Kelly: Sure.

Leah Feiger: Tell me that this isn't a personal Makena Kelly conspiracy.

Makena Kelly: No. It is one of my favorite genres of conspiracy theory though, which is looking at Google Maps and pointing at something random that you find and being like an alien thing, or they're hiding this from us.

Leah Feiger: Ooh, okay. I like this. Say more.

Makena Kelly: So I found this and I thought specifically of you because people-

Leah Feiger: I love that I remind people.

Makena Kelly: Conspiracy theorists online have found something on Google Maps that they think is a doorway somewhere in the Antarctic.

Leah Feiger: Oh, fantastic. Oh, I'm honored that you thought of me, yes.

Makena Kelly: And the conspiracy isn't necessarily that it's one thing. There's still discussions being had. The New York Post mentioned that they saw someone discussing that it was like Bigfoot's vacation home, which is maybe a bit sillier, but then another person suggesting that this was a crashed alien aircraft.

Leah Feiger: Where is this located?

Makena Kelly: It's in Antarctica.

Leah Feiger: Okay. It's in Antarctica and it's a doorway to who's to say.

Makena Kelly: Who's to say. And we need to get someone down there immediately to figure it out.

Leah Feiger: I volunteer. Tim, send me tomorrow. Election be damned.

Tim Marchman: I will do so if I can.

Leah Feiger: I love that. I really love that. I mean, I will say that every once in a while you do see something on Google Maps and you go, "What is this? Is this real?" Not to give it too much credence. Okay. That was a fun one. Tim, yours was weird. Makena, you win this week.

Makena Kelly: Yay.

Leah Feiger: Congratulations. We're not validating your conspiracy theory, Tim. The conspiracy that would result in Tim just having more availability of clothing he enjoys.

Tim Marchman: That's right.

Leah Feiger: Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. And Makena, thank you so much for your incredible reporting. Listeners, go and have a read at WIRED.com and we have the link again in our show notes. Thanks for coming.

Tim Marchman: Thank you.

Makena Kelly: Bye.

Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and give us five stars. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you'd like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please, please write to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. We're so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. And I'm your host, Leah Feiger. We'll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.