While it was almost inevitable that the right-wing outrage-industrial complex would make the Titan sub disaster yet another flashpoint in its never-ending culture war over “wokeness,” conservatives also found a way to add a Hunter Biden conspiracy theory into the mix.
And for good measure, at least one prominent far-right media personality has suggested the implosion of OceanGate’s tourist submersible was part of a bizarre conspiracy to cover up the real truth about the Titanic’s sinking—which has to do with the Federal Reserve and the Rothschilds.
On Thursday afternoon, after days of round-the-clock news coverage, officials confirmed that a debris field found near the wreckage of the Titanic belonged to the Titan. The submersible, which had five passengers aboard, had been missing since shortly after it began its voyage on Sunday. “We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost,” OceanGate Expeditions, the owner of the Titan, said in a statement.
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Initially, the search for the missing vehicle was seen as a race against time, as OceanGate stated that the sub had a 96-hour oxygen supply. However, after the debris was found on Thursday, those hopes were extinguished. It was revealed on Thursday evening that the U.S. Navy had detected signals “consistent with an explosion or implosion” soon after OceanGate lost contact with Titan.
At the same time, while that information was sent to the incident commander to help narrow the search, a Navy official said that it still would have been “irresponsible” at that time to assume all five people were dead from a disastrous failure. Therefore, the mission continued to be treated as a search and rescue through Thursday.
But even before it was revealed that the Titan was lost due to a “catastrophic implosion,” OceanGate and its founder drew criticism over the inadequate precautions that placed its passengers, who paid $250,000 apiece, at risk. Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron, an expert deep-sea diver, openly criticized the company for brushing off safety standards. Along with Cameron, other experts have said the Titan’s construction wasn’t designed to withstand the ocean pressure at the depth of the Titanic’s wreck.
Right-wing pundits, however, focused their attention on another factor they felt was responsible for the sub disaster: Wokeness.
Earlier this week, the Murdoch-owned New York Post reported that Rush once declared that he wasn’t interested in hiring “50-year-old white guys” with military experience to pilot his subs. “When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there, but they typically have, uh, gentlemen who are ex-military submariners, and they—you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush said in an undated Zoom interview.
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, but a 25-year-old, uh, you know, who’s a sub pilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” he added.
It should be noted that on the doomed mission, it was Rush—a 61-year-old white guy—who piloted the vessel. He had previously claimed that “anybody can drive the sub,” which was operated by a $30 PlayStation controller.
Since conservative media has been obsessed with raging against all things “woke”—now redefined as a catch-all pejorative centered on diversity and race—the Post’s Wednesday story was like catnip for right-wing infotainers.
“Woke CEO of company whose manned Titanic tourist submarine VANISHED didn’t want to hire ‘old white guys’ because they weren’t ‘inspirational 😳,” tweeted serial plagiarist and MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson.
Of course, since Johnson needed to monetize the outrage, he later shared a video on the subject captioned: “Lost Titanic Submarine Company Did Not Hire ‘WHITE MEN’ Because They're Not ‘Inspirational’ | WOKE!”
Ultra-conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk, a day before it was confirmed that the five-passenger crew had perished, outright blamed “wokeness” for their demise.
“If it is true, this person tragically passes away, the CEO of OceanGate and he says that he was choosing and selecting his personnel based on not wanting to have fifty-year-old white guys, then you could make the argument, albeit rather cruel and blunt, he killed himself and his customers with wokeness,” Kirk ranted, adding that the disaster should be a cautionary tale against diversity efforts.
“Let this be a warning when we say that, we want to hire more Black pilots. Hold on, slow down,” he groused. “People could die if you embrace the poison of wokeness.”
During Wednesday’s broadcast of Fox News’ most-watched show The Five, co-host Jesse Watters—who simply can’t stop whining about “woke”—seemingly caught himself mid-sentence while making a similarly bonkers connection to wokeness.
“He’s quoted as saying he didn’t hire a bunch of 50-year-old white guys with military experience because he didn’t want his vessels to be—not inspirational for a younger generation,” he proclaimed. “I don’t care who is in these vessels, I just want them to be experienced and safe. And if you’re gonna be woke, you might have to—I don’t want to say it because I don’t want to put these people’s legacies through that, but, I don’t see how they’re ever going to find this thing again.”
Over on Fox News’ wannabe rival Newsmax, cartoonishly MAGA host Greg Kelly—known for his over-the-top racist commentary—also got in the action Wednesday evening.
“Look, we are hoping and praying that this man, Stockton Rush, and all of his colleagues there and the customers are rescued and reunited with their families. And then once they're safely dry, we gotta yell at this guy a little bit,” Kelly sneered. “Sorry, but this woke routine he has been pulling lately about who should be on the submarine, the kind of people he hires, listen to this!”
However, after it was confirmed that the vessel was lost, the right quickly dropped “wokeness” as having doomed the Titan and instead focused their attention on a far more devious plot: An orchestrated cover-up by President Joe Biden.
According to this particular conspiracy, Biden purposely created a multi-day news cycle over the sub in order to distract from his son’s scandals. The claim centers around reports that the Navy detected a potential implosion as early as Sunday.
Not only did the media coverage of the Titan dwarf news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax charges, according to these tinfoil-hat conservatives, but the revelation that the sub was lost was perfectly timed to distract from the GOP releasing IRS whistleblower testimony in the Hunter tax investigation.
“So basically the 5 people on board died days ago, but Biden allowed for the story to dominate all news cycles as a way to distract from the news about Hunter Biden this week,” failed congressional candidate and anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer tweeted.
“They knew days ago that the sub exploded but kept it going as a tool of distraction to cover for Biden’s crack head son,” she added. “That is so sick and twisted when you think about how the media was doing an oxygen countdown and making the family members think there was still hope.”
Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who has recently tied her career to the Hunter Biden laptop case, also insisted this was part of a White House distraction plan.
“The Biden administration knew the Titan submarine imploded Sunday. But waited until today to make it public,” she asserted. “Convenient smokescreen for today’s House Ways & Means release of IRS whistleblower testimony of DOJ sabotage of the Hunter Biden investigation.”
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade amplified Devine’s unfounded theory on Friday morning, though he did note that he “was not sure” he saw a “relation between those two things.”
A cadre of other MAGA influencers also insisted that this was a “distraction to protect Hunter” and an attempt to “hide emerging evidence” of the president’s corruption, including a Senate GOP digital strategist who said the situation was proof this “is the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.” (While Republican lawmaker Dan Crenshaw didn’t go as far as claiming a Hunter-related cover-up, he still outright blamed the White House for the sub’s destruction and loss of life.)
And, of course, Johnson once again had to get in the mix—this time claiming it was part of a “psy-op,” which has increasingly become part of the right-wing media’s lexicon since “Chief Twit” Elon Musk began using the term to complain about stories he doesn’t like.
Hard-right podcaster Stew Peters, however, took the cake with his outrageous theory that the Titan was purposely destroyed to hide a secret plot that the Titanic was sunk in order for the Rothschild family—long the target of antisemitic conspiracies—to create the Federal Reserve.
Peters, who has been accused of peddling anti-vax lies and white-nationalist rhetoric, hosted a QAnon conspiracy theorist on Thursday to lay out this intricate plot.
“What if all of this is actually a ploy to keep people from visiting the Titanic wreckage? But if that's the goal, why? Maybe because if people explore the Titanic too much, they would discover that it wasn't an iceberg that sank the Titanic,” Peters said. “There's a lot of alternative theories about how that sinking occurred — that it was intentionally sunk as part of an elaborate insurance scam and even that it was sunk by a newly created Federal Reserve.”
Peters’ guest Zach Vorhies, meanwhile, claimed that “explosives were placed on the Titanic to blow it out” and that the OceanGate sub “was being funded by the Rothschild dynasty” because “they want to prevent people from visiting this Titanic.”
Just another normal week for the right-wing outrage-industrial complex.
