Year: 2024

Droning On and On

Mike Rothschild

In 2016, Americans suddenly and somewhat hilariously became terrified of killer clowns. The creepy mirthmakers were spotted in South Carolina luring children into the dark woods, in Green Bay handing out black balloons, skulking around cemeteries in Chicago, randomly knocking on doors, intimidating residents, and approaching young girls in the open. The creepy clowns made their way to the UK, where they intimidated and pulled pranks on people in car parks and streets. One even ran for president.

Four years later, with the world on lockdown, boredom and fear walked hand in hand. That summer, full of tension and dread, people started to notice that every night in big cities, huge numbers of fireworks were going off in the middle of the night. Nerves were rattled and people were frustrated – and scared. Immediately, panic set in that this was a military exercise designed to rob us of our sleep, police activity designed to spur arrests, or even a Trump-ordered test to immunize the population into becoming accustomed to the sound of explosions and artillery.

Cut to 2024, another presidential election year involving Donald Trump. And sure enough, there’s another panic spreading through the plugged-in population over social media: drones. Thousands of drones, all the size of large cars, flying in straight lines and coming out every night (and only at night), hovering over population centers and military bases, and scaring the crap out of us. Is it a false flag to prepare us for alien invasion? A military exercise that Trump will use an excuse for martial law? An attack on American from Iran or China? Proof that nuclear weapons are being trafficked by nefarious forces and the government is desperate to find them? It’s now the Drone Panic of 2024, and it’s spread from news of drones over New Jersey to drones over everywhere.

Taken together, it seems like these three panics prove one of two things: either every presidential election now comes with a deep state engineered panic meant to distract and exhaust us in the face of the oncoming horror, or that Americans are nuts.

Of course, neither of these are the sole explanation. Societal panics are nothing new, and take place all the time fueled by new technology and collective unease. And many Americans, like people of every nationality, are conspiratorial and fueled by fear of what they don’t understand.

In the face of calls for the government to “do something” or “be more transparent” or “shoot them down,” it’s important to realize that what people are pointing out as drones are not actually drones.

They’re airplanes coming in for a landing, stars, planets, satellites, helicopters, optical illusions, deepfakes, hoaxes, and maybe a few commercial drones. They’re the same specks of light that have been in our sky for generations. There might be more of them now, thanks to outfits like Starlink and the revitalizing of commercial aviation post-lockdown. But at any time since the advent of the passenger jet, if you look up at night, you’re going to see something bright and flickering moving across the sky, or maybe appearing to hover, or maybe not moving at all. Isn’t it strange how the “drones” never seem to appear during the day? Or how countless SUV-sized craft are flying around and none have crashed, hit each other, or just stopped working over a busy city? Don’t expect answers from those panicking.

So why did the Great Drone Panic of 2024 happen, and what can we learn from it?

Panics rarely start over things that never happened, they start over isolated incidents that are blown massively out of proportion

In the case of recent past panics, they started with something real that spread over social media because it was equal parts absurd and terrifying. Clowns occasionally go about town in their clown getup, and scare the hell out of people in the process. (Incidentally, if I get a few new Patreon subscribers, I’ll post my own story about being at an event in Los Angeles with a clown that was very much not an event for clowns. It’s wild.) The fireworks panic was the same thing, at first – the nightly fireworks bombardments were real, but there was never any evidence that “the government” or “the cops” were behind them, other than unverifyable social media posts. It turned out that fireworks companies were desperate to unload excess product that wasn’t going to be used for 4th of July shows because of lockdown. No conspiracy required, just one made up to fit the facts.

Drones have become omnipresent, especially in war, but few people know what they really look like

Even just the term “drone” has scary connotations, especially for anyone who watched the Great War on Terror unfold live on cable news every night. It conjures up sinister forces using cryptic orders to fire missiles at weddings, killing you before you even know you’re a target. But drones can be anything – from hobbyist quadcopters to commercial drones delivering packages to lights flying in formation to create a nightly show to military grade missile carriers. Some drones are tiny. Others, like the Shahed 136 drones hammering Ukraine on a nightly basis, are 11 feet long, nearly the length of a compact car. There are over a million of them registered with the FAA, and there’s no doubt that at least a few of the “drones” are actually drones. Because there are so many different types of drones, it’s easy to look at something in the sky and tell ourselves it must be a drone. We don’t have to know what type of drone, or who launched it. It’s a drone. And drones can kill us.

Panic spreads because when we go looking for things, we find them

If you go outside on a cold night with the intention of seeing a drone, you’re probably going to see a drone. Why? Because why would someone go outside to see something and not see it? We like to find the things we’re looking for, and to not be disappointed. We want to be able to tell our friends and social media followers that we saw a drone, not that we saw a plane or a star. Ultimately, “I saw something” is a more compelling – and potentially viral – story than “I didn’t see anything.” That’s boring.

It’s a weird time where not much is happening

Americans have been on a relentless run of breaking news for years, and maybe no year more than 2024. We had stretches where absolutely insane and game-changing things were happening every day, and with Trump’s election, that seems to have calmed down. Yes, his cabinet nominations and goofy lawsuits are news, but they don’t the heady high-wire thrill of assassination attempts or last minute candidate changes. People are a little bit bored at the moment, and when people get bored, conspiracy panics start. When we lack danger and thrill in our lives, we find ways to make them up.

A lack of basic understanding about physics makes us turn the ordinary into the extraordinary

If you’ve ever driven across Los Angeles at night going north from LAX, you’ve seen a line of what look like floating blobs of light just hanging in the air. And because you’re at one of the busiest airports on the planet, you know they’re planes coming in to land, and not UFOs or drones or whatever. But if you’ve never lived near a major airport or flown into a big city at night, you might not be familiar with why descending airplanes look like they’re floating. So when you see it for the first time, your mind assigns meaning and danger to it. For the record, there’s a name for why descending airplanes appear to be floating. It’s an optical illusion called the parallax effect, It’s a difference in how the brain perceives rates of motion when moving, which is why closeup objects look to be moving quickly, while faraway ones look to be moving slowly or stuck. Parallax is a critical depth perception tool, not a deep state conspiracy. It’s basic physics – but a lot less entertaining and alluring than the unevidenced alternatives.

The “I know what I saw” fallacy

So many of the claims of drone sightings ultimately fall into some version of “I saw three lights in the sky forming a triangle. Triangles in the sky are UFOs. Therefore, I saw a UFO. And I know what I saw.” We aren’t interested in other explanations, such as the three lights being the lights on the wings and nose of a plane. We know what we saw. Except most of the time we don’t know what we saw, only that we saw something, and decided we knew what it was. Our brains have a remarkable ability to create stories out of things that didn’t happen, or that we only saw a glimpse of and filled in the rest. Maybe the best example of this is the numerous witnesses to TWA Flight 800 exploding who claimed they saw and then immediately heard a missile hit the plane, despite the laws of physics making this impossible. The people who told the FBI this weren’t lying, they were just convinced they saw something that they could not have experienced. And the more you tell them they’re wrong, the more they believe they’re being called a liar.

We’re just really into conspiracy theories right now

This might be the simplest explanation of them all for why drone panic hit so hard and so fast. Americans, just like all humans, are innately prone to pattern-seeking and making meaning out of randomness. But 2024 has seen the continuation of conspiracism and paranoia creeping into our everyday lives in a way that was never even possible just a few decades ago. Our political leaders and cultural titans spread disinformation the way a knife spreads butter. Even Donald Trump has stoked the drone panic, claiming without any evidence that the government “knows what they are” and telling his followers to shoot them down. Other influencers have claimed, also without evidence, that the drones are part of a desperate attempt to find a nuclear warhead, or a Russian disinfo op, or a secret coup plot. This used to be the stuff of rambling drunks at bars and your weird uncle at Thanksgiving. But it’s everyone now, and it’s everywhere we look. And that now includes the sky at night, once a place of awe and wonder, but now cluttered up with planes and satellites and ever-present low light blotting out the glory of the stars.

So what can we do to abate drone panic? Like all pushback against conspiracy theories, think micro and not macro. Stop sharing random videos that “saw a drone” flying somewhere, because absent other evidence, it’s not a drone. If you go looking for drones, expect not to find them. If you see a blob of light floating in the air, think about airports near you, not motherships and aliens. Get familiar with the stars and planets at night in your area, so you know what they are and are not. They’re pretty cool to look at.

And disabuse yourself of the notion that you are a player in a secret nighttime war between good and evil, being played out through drone swarms and viral panic. Take the opportunity to become acquainted with something bigger than your own life – in this case, the very cosmos that made us. It’s a hell of a lot more breathtaking than panicking over nothing.

Rothschild Central Banks – Syria’s Version

Mike Rothschild

Extraordinary events are almost always catalysts for conspiracy theories – often providing more “acceptable” explanations for something that wasn’t “supposed to happen.”

And what could be more unexpected than the sudden and stunning collapse of the Assad regime in Syria? Rebel forces undid well over 40 years of rule in an offensive that took less than two weeks, and saw the Syrian armed forces collapse and even change sides. Watching it happen live was almost unbelievable, and many people indeed did not believe it. Or at least, they believed a different version of it. And of the many “more acceptable” explanations for what was going on in Syria, a familiar one that took hold early was that Syria was one of the only countries on earth without a “Rothschild Central Bank,” and the cabal finally took action to correct this half-a-century long oversight.

I’ve written extensively about the “Rothschild Central Bank” conspiracy theory, and why it’s incorrect on multiple levels. I spend a great deal of time on it in my book on the Rothschild banking family myth, Jewish Space Lasers.

But the situation in Syria is extraordinarily precarious and complicated. Even with Assad deposed, there’s no guarantee that the country will be able to develop a functional democracy, correct the previous regime’s human rights abuses, or not become a battleground for proxy groups and terrorist spillover.

With so many moving parts, it’s easy to imagine alternative stories emerging about how the Assad collapse was a Jewish plot, perpetrated by Israel and funded by the depravity of the Rothschilds, all to get their claws into yet another nation’s banking system. So with that in mind, here’s why the “Rothschild Central Bank” theory, and in particular its relation to Syria, is false and should be completely ignored.

There are no “Rothschild central banks”

A central bank is, by its very definition, a governmental entity. Central banks control money supply, print money, set interest rates, and manage the financial policy of a nation. And every country has one, other than a few tiny microstates that use the money of larger countries. In the US, we have the Federal Reserve, while the UK has the Bank of England, and so on. The nations of the European Union have individual central banks that are all members of the European Central Bank. Even North Korea has a central bank.

None of these central banks are owned by private investors, and certainly none of them are owned by the Rothschild banking family. Before the era of nationalized central banking, many wealthy banking dynasties owned shares of stock in national banks, including the Bank of England. But that era ended long ago, and for the Rothschilds, it saw a general decline in their wealth and power. Central banks are now owned and operated by their parent governments, not by decrepit tycoons in castles.

Why the Rothschilds in particular are linked to large scale ownership of central banks has a lot to do with their longevity and history. The family once did have business holdings all over the world, and had the ear of royalty and prime ministers. And the myth that Nathan Rothschild made so much money off the Battle of Waterloo that it allowed him to take control of the British money supply started in 1846 and has proven durable enough to fire conspiracism in everyone from French antisemites of the 1890s to Nazi propagandists of the 1940s to Alex Jones today.

But it’s not true, and never has been true. As I write about in Jewish Space Lasers, the myth of the Rothschilds and Waterloo spread decades after the battle, and we know for a fact that the family made little off the outcome of the battle itself – though they did make much of their fortune off loans and gold sales during the Napoleonic Wars.

The list of “Rothschild Central Banks” dates back to a 2012 blog post, and has been repurposed by countless bad actors and cranks, including finding a prominent place in the QAnon conspiracy theory, where it’s eagerly passed around by “truth seekers” who don’t understand how banks work. But why is Syria lumped into this nonsense? Haven’t its people suffered enough?

The Central Bank of Syria began operating in 1956, succeeding the previous French-run central bank that had administered the country since 1919. It didn’t retain its independence by keeping the Rothschilds out, it did because it was run by a brutal dictatorial family. And even its status as “non-Rothschild” varies depending on which internet meme you get your information from. Some cranks claim there are only three independent central banks in the world, others claim five, others claim nine. Sometimes Syria is on those lists, sometimes it’s not. Other lists have North Korea, Iran, Russia, or even Iceland as not being controlled by the Rothschilds – when in most cases, they’re controlled by repressive regimes. Or in some cases, like Iceland, they were nationalized due to financial crises.

All of this is lazy and nonsensical antisemitism. Blaming the Rothschilds for things going wrong in a country you support is the bedrock of anti-Jewish sentiment. Tyrants, cranks, crackpots, and conspiracy grifters have been doing it has been for millennia. If you’ve been a die-hard Assad supporter and you’re watching his regime collapse, it’s easy to point to Jewish power and control as the cause.

None of this means you’re a truth seeker or alternative journalist. It makes you a crank and an antisemite. The Rothschilds have no central banks, aren’t installing one in Syria, and have nothing to do with the bravery and tenacity of the Syrian opposition. They’re the real story, not the phone string pullers of meme-making nightmares.

To support my work on conspiracy theories, disinformation, and the people who spread them, check out my Patreon page, or my profiles on Bluesky and the website formerly known as Twitter. Thank you!

Who Was William de Rothschild?

Mike Rothschild8 Comments

The deaths of the eccentric scions of the wealthiest families in the world tend to make the news. And the more eccentric and wealthy, the bigger the news stories. While not especially eccentric, unless you count conspiracy theories, the death of Lord Jacob Rothschild in February was a major story. Even long-faded fortunes merit obituaries when one of their heirs dies – such as the death of Rockefeller heir David Kaiser in 2020.

On Wednesday, November 27th, another Rothschild heir, William de Rothschild, met an untimely end in a house fire in the Hollywood Hills. Naturally, there was a flood of stories about the elderly scion’s death and his apparently eccentric life full of classic cars and even possible hoarding, with the LA Times leading the way. The story seemed to confirm his identity, with neighbors talking about how he freely spoke of his status in one of the wealthiest families, and how he owned two properties on Lookout Mountain, one of the wealthiest streets in LA.

But a few days later there are no obituaries in the New York Times. There aren’t any stories about his philanthropy and largesse, or even reminiscences from other members of the Rothschild family. William de Rothschild simply vanished from the news.

There are a lot of reasons why that could be. His death broke on Thanksgiving, and during a frantic stretch of news when President-Elect Trump is nominating a clown car of conspiracy theorists and grifters to his new cabinet. William had little public footprint, and seemed almost totally unknown outside his neighborhood. Maybe it just wasn’t newsworthy past the first day.

Or maybe it’s because William de Rothschild likely had no actual lineage in that famous family, and wasn’t one of those Rothschild at all.

In the LA Times story, William’s identity as a member of the banking family comes entirely from neighbors. Certainly William has the trappings of wealth – the story talks of his love for classic cars, including a Porsche once owned by Michael Jordan, as well as busts of “great thinkers” in front of one of the two properties he owned on Lookout Mountain.

But just because someone says they’re a Rothschild doesn’t mean they are. And as I write about in JEWISH SPACE LASERS, my history of the myths and conspiracy theories about the family, numerous frauds and grifters have made hay off pretending to be a Rothschild, from Mar-a-Lago crasher “Anna de Rothschild” who was actually a Ukrainian scammer, to NYC art world grifter and investor “Paul-Kyle de Rothschild Deschanel.”

And while it’s hard at this point to rule out that William isn’t a distant relative or in-law who took the name, there’s also no compelling evidence he has any link to the family beyond him claiming to have one. And from what I’ve been able to piece together, both the Times piece and the stories that followed, which were mostly based on the Times, simply took the neighbors’ claims as truth.

To be clear, there is no “William de Rothschild” or any version of that name in the official Rothschild Archive’s genealogy, meaning William isn’t a direct relation to Mayer Amschel Rothschild or any of his ten children. (I reached out to a contact at the family Archive in London to confirm if William was a family member, and received no reply). There’s no reporting anywhere about anyone named William with a direct lineage to Mayer or his family, and keep in mind that this is one of the most well-known families in the world.

The only William listed in the Rothschild archive is someone who married into the family, the former husband of Lord Jacob Rothschild’s daughter Hannah. But William Lord Brookfield is an actual person, a screenwriter and producer who is also nearly two decades younger than the 87 years old given for William de Rothschild.

Or maybe he was 77. It’s hard to tell, because even as the Times story admits, property records for the two houses on Lookout Mountain give different ages for “William de Rothschild” as well as at least one different name.

And there’s where things start to get even weirder. The initial press release from the LAFD about the fire gives the address as 8551 Lookout Mountain Road. Both property records and public listings for that property given the owner’s name not as William A. De Rothschild, but as William A Kauffman, Jr. This matches the CA Unclaimed Property website, which also lists William A. Kauffman as living in the house at 8551.

Such records are not always accurate, but this one has some clues that point the way toward it being correct, including one very big one: the ownership of two properties on Lookout Mountain, with the other being 8582.

Sure enough, 8582 Lookout Mountain lists a William A. Kaufman, age 77, as a former owner along with a “Wm Derothschild” and several other names. And Kauffman is also listed as a former owner of 8551 Lookout Mountain, where “William de Rothschild” met his unfortunate fate.

One of the names listed as an owner or the trustee of 8582 is Margaux Mirkin, the daughter of Budget Rent-a-Car founder Morris Mirkin and a minor celebrity in LA in the 1980’s who apparently once made an appearance on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

There are plenty of other tangents to go down here – such as 8582 seeming to have a lot of former owners or residents, or William Kauffman owning what appears to be an office complex in Chatsworth, CA. But William Kauffman is a pretty common name, and a pretty thorough search didn’t turn up anything more about his life, much less his death.

I couldn’t find any biographical information on who he is or how he ended up on Lookout Mountain in a house fire. And I found nothing that corroborated the existence of anyone named “William de Rothschild” with a link to the Rothschild banking family.

At least one conspiracy blog thinks it uncovered a marriage listing for William de Rothschild and Margaux Mirkin, but again, online property records and genealogy listings are extremely inaccurate. It’s also not proof that “William” is a Rothschild, merely that he used the name at one point. And William de Rothschild has no social media presence, except for a few Twitter accounts that are obvious fakes, full of nonsense about the Illuminati and using the image of an Italian fashion designer for their profile picture.

And with nothing else to go on, conspiracy theories are a natural way to fill in the many blanks in this story. Blogs and social media posts are full of accusations that “de Rothschild” was in hiding under the name “Kauffman,” that he faked his death, that he was murdered by anti-Rothschild forces, that “Kauffman” was a master Mason, or that it took the LAFD 33 minutes to extinguish the fire due to ritual purposes. Even other folks named William Rothschild have been pulled into the mess, including an unfortunate resident of South Carolina whose image is being used by conspiracy theorists, despite looking 50 years younger than the fire victim.

All of this is typical of the nonsense spewed about the Rothschild family – even those who simply share the name. And at this point, without some other evidence or confirmation from the family archive, I’m pretty certain that whoever William A. Kauffman was, he might have used the name “de Rothschild” at some point, but he wasn’t related to Mayer Amschel’s descendants.

Not that any of the reporting on the fire cared to look. All of the stories about the Lookout Mountain fire, from Newsweek to the New York Post, relied on the initial LA Times story as their source. And the Times relied on neighbors’ testimony, a magazine found at the scene with “Wm. Rothschild” as its subscriber, and conflicting property records as evidence. This all points to nothing other than Kauffman using the name or claiming he shared lineage with the family. It also fits with other phony Rothschilds who have eventually been uncovered – they act the part by throwing money around, and because the Rothschild name has so much mythos and aura attached to it, nobody bothers looking into who the person actually is.

And I have no idea who William Kauffman was. I’m certainly not accusing him of anything untoward. It’s clear from the reporting that he was an elderly man, and may have had at least some trouble with hoarding according to reports after the fire. Why he used the name, when he started, or what caused the fire are all unclear right now. Was he a relative by marriage? A distant relation who played up his connection? Or did he simply pretend to be part of the descendants of “money’s prophets” for personal gain? I don’t know, and we might never know.

But whoever Kauffman was, it’s fairly clear that he wasn’t a Rothschild, or at least there’s no public record of him being one. I hope his family can find some peace in the year ahead.

The Humiliation Ritual Strikes Again

Mike Rothschild

To be in Donald Trump’s inner circle requires a few traits that most people don’t have, some people have one or two of, and only a few people have all of. You have to be able to do something for him, of course. You have to be unstintingly loyal, willing to do anything and everything to advance his aims or simply amuse him. You have to look good on TV. And more than anything, you have to take your dignity and sense of shame, ball them up into the tiniest fraction of their normal size, and hide them away deep in a part of your soul that you will forget exists.

Trump rules the GOP the way autocrats rule nations. He shapes them into his image, and never lets the people forget that they serve him, not the other way around. No matter what baubles and titles Trump deigns to hand out to his bootlickers, they will always be just that. But even a dictator needs acolytes, and if you degrade yourself enough, you can be one too. Nobody should feel sorry for anyone who chooses degradation over dignity, and for the participants in Trump’s ritualized shaming, what they get out of it is far more important than what Trump puts them through.

As much as any other right wing troll, Trump loves to humiliate his enemies. That’s to be expected from someone who has built a brand around being America’s ultimate winner – everyone else is a loser and should be treated as such. But for as much time as Trump spends rubbing it in the faces of defeated electoral opponents, he is more devoted to publicly shaming and degrading those who support him. And the more you support him, the more he will shame and degrade you.

The worst of the humiliation is reserved for those who once opposed him, but then bent the knee to him for various political and financial reasons. The past few years have seen a flood of public embarrassment and shaming so pronounced that it even has earned a nickname – the humiliation ritual.

Ironically, the term “humiliation ritual” has a slightly different context in conspiracy theorist circles, that of an Illuminati rite designed to break down the dignity of celebrities who wish to join the inner ranks of the puppet masters, or who have run afoul of them. This version often involves cross-dressing, men publicly appearing naked, or celebrities suffering a public and embarrassing loss because they dared speak out. The Trump humiliation ritual is different – it’s not about literal embarrassment, but about a spiritual kind of shame. It’s about Trump breaking the GOP to his will, humiliating those who dared to question him, and letting them know that no matter what, he owns them and they are beholden to him. If Trump tells them to jump, their only acceptable response is “off what?”

There was a devil’s bargain that the more moderate, once firmly anti-Trump right made with Trump after he won the nomination in 2016. Yes they complained about him, insulted him, and scored him. But once he’d won the primary no matter how coarse or crude or embarrassing Trump was, he was the only one who could beat Hillary Clinton. And nothing no Access Hollywood tape or bizarre outburst would be more humiliating than allowing that woman to become the president. Then he won the election, and to stay in his good graces, it made more sense to heap praise upon him than to criticize him and face his wrath. Opponents who had once vocally opposed him, including former 2016 primary rivals Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, all became some of his most vocal bootlickers, bending over backwards to defend him, praise him, and extol his qualities – often at their own expense. Other detractors, like Mitt Romney, were simply humiliated, forced to sit through dinners and slap shit-eating grins on their face to match Trump’s perpetual expression. Such is the price of Trump taking control of the GOP.

Of course, the humiliation of Trump’s early years in office pales in comparison to what we’re likely to get in a second term. Just like 2016, the 2024 election saw Trump save his deepest and starkest humiliations for those who once opposed him, like Nikki Haley, who sat through countless insults from Trump about her heritage and husband, and yet immediately supported Trump once her primary challenge fizzled out; and Tim Scott, a Republican senator who utterly debased himself at Trump rallies, smiling through endless Trump insults to the point where some commentators thought it smacked of self-hatred.

When Trump posted a picture from this weekend of him, his son, Elon Musk, and HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. all eating McDonalds on Trump’s plane back from watching a UFC fight in New York, it wasn’t just a way to engage with fans. It was a direct form of revenge against Kennedy for a comment he’d made about Trump earlier in the week, that flying with Trump meant eating the “poison” that he eats on the road – almost all of which was fast food. That wasn’t very obedient. So Trump broke him, and broke him publicly. It was his way of telling both Kennedy and the world at large that if you want a seat at the table of power, he had to eat what the powerful people were eating – which apparently was the same fast food you can get in every major city in the world. Naturally, Kennedy wants power more than he craves dignity, so he ate the poison with a smile that looked something like the face you make when you’re passing a kidney stone. Kennedy even followed up his shame with a pathetic tweet about how he “couldn’t wait to eat McDonalds again!”

At this point, it’s a fair question to ask whether these people allow Trump to debase them for reasons other than craven lust for power. Does he have financial or sexual blackmail on them? With Lindsey Graham in particular, there’s been a tendency on the left to ascribe the sheer volume of obnoxious praise and bootlicking to “kompromat” – the Stalinist slang term for “compromising material,” and a constant feature of the coverage of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. Could Trump have such material on his former foes? Is that why they’ve all bowed so deeply and so completely perverted their own values in his service?

It’s certainly possible, though not at all necessary. Trump doesn’t need lurid photos or “pee tapes” of his rivals, because he has the thing they all want and need to stay close to: power. Trump runs the GOP, has broken and rebuilt it in his image, and seeks to do the same to the country. While some Trump opponents have stayed on his bad side, many others have accepted that if they want any kind of role in the new administration or the GOP as it currently stands, they have to eat the poison. After all, it’s a two-way street. Like any abuser, Trump might hit you, but he only does it because he loves you.

So the humiliation rituals go on, because those who endure them have decided that the loss of dignity is worth the gaining of clout. RFK Jr. might have to cram some dreaded seed oils down his gullet, but he’s in line to have one of the most powerful cabinet positions with a vast swath of the American health system under his thumb. Once derided by Trump as “liddle Marco,” Rubio is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State – a level of power that he never could have achieved in any other administration. Tim Scott might have soft-shoed his way through some humiliation, but was picked to lead the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz get to be on TV all the time, because they spend their appearances praising Trump and extoling his leadership. Even Nikki Haley, who has been totally iced out of the incoming administration, gets to pretend that she’s a kingmaker, whose supporters flocked to Trump and put him over the top, rather than staying on the anti-Trump side and voting Democratic.

And no politician more exemplifies the flip side of the humiliation ritual than vice president-elect JD Vance. The Ohio senator had once been a vocal Trump hater, to the point where after Vance asked Trump to campaign for him in 2022, Trump vociferously insulted him from the stage in his home state. But two years later, Vance is the closest one can get to Trump and the presumptive nominee for the 2028 Republican primary. It’s a mighty reward for a little bit of embarrassment.

There’s no reason to feel the slightest sympathy or cringe for Republicans who have embraced Trump’s humiliation ritual. They’ve chosen to lick the boot. Nobody forced any of these people to line up for embarrassment, they did it because power is more valuable than dignity. As America slides into autocracy, kissing the leader’s ass is just the cost of doing business.

In Trump’s America, the business of bootlicking is good.

Stop the “Stop the Steal”

Mike Rothschild

In the wake of the 2024 election going for Donald Trump, social media has become overrun with conspiracy theories about the results being rigged, stolen, and the product of a vast plot by Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions.

Obviously, this is a repeat of the 2020 election, except with the parties reversed – and at a much smaller scale. But while conspiracy theories about the rigged election aren’t coming from the top, and won’t end in a violent riot, they’re still a problem and not good for how people are processing the events of last week.

Election fraud conspiracy theories are negatively impacting how we think about the results, and how we’ll move forward as a country. They’re feeding paranoia and delusion on both the left and right – with one side claiming they prove 2024 was stolen, and the other claiming that they prove 2020 was stolen. Denial is not a good place to be, and conspiracy theories about a Democratic version of “stop the steal” are no more helpful or productive than the Republican one was last time. Many of these will burn out once Trump takes office, but for now, they’re driving much of the discourse about the aftermath of the election, and they deserve to be addressed.

Musk hacked the election with Starlink, then destroyed the satellites to cover his tracks!

In the earliest hours after the election, the biggest conspiracy theory going around was that there were tens of millions of “missing votes” between 2020 and 2024, and a full audit of every state would make them turn up.

This was easy to falsify, since California had only just begun to count its millions of votes, and the “missing votes” dwindled from 20 million to 15 million to 5 million. As the vote total ticked up toward 2020 levels, the big conspiracy theory changed – from votes being “eliminated” to votes being “hacked” or “changed,” with the most likely culprit being by Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system.

What else could explain the vast difference between what Trump got in 2020 and in 2024? Couldn’t Musk, who became Trump’s biggest funder and cheerleader, use his near-monopoly on private space travel and communication to harness Starlink to rig the election for Trump? Isn’t that the ultimate return on investment?

Proponents of the conspiracy theory tended to share the same few pieces of evidence: a thread on social media from a self-proclaimed election hacking expert, a snippet of video of an official in rural Tulare County, CA claiming election officials “used Starlink technology” to improve access to connectivity, and claims that Musk himself said Starlink could be hacked. There were even claims floating around that Musk bragged about using “an app” that gave him the final results four hours early.

Given the deluge of right wing conspiracy theories about voting machine technology in 2020, it’s not a surprise to see them from the left this time around. And just like those theories then, there’s no evidence Starlink was used to change anyone’s vote, or any real theory of how that would actually work. Satellites don’t count votes, can’t access voting machines, and can’t change votes. The vast majority of ballots are still filled out on paper or with a paper backup – it’s tabulator machines that count them and add up the numbers for each candidate.

Electronic voting machines themselves are never hooked up to the internet due to the potential for hacking, but vote tabulators can be in certain cases, usually in remote areas to directly transmit results once polls close. Final totals are mostly transmitted via secure transfers to election offices, and then are sent out to news outlets as they come in. Starlink can be used for this transmission, just as any other internet provided by Verizon or AT&T can, but the votes have already been counted and recorded. And since, again, the vast majority of ballots are filled out on paper, there’s no way for Starlink, or any other internet service provider, to change them. Any audit would immediately find massive discrepancies in vote totals that would immediately point back to Elon Musk. It takes specialized equipment to actually communicate with satellites beyond just using them for internet connectivity, and this is far beyond the scope of what county electoral offices can provide.

As for Musk “destroying evidence,” Starlink is a vast network of satellites, and they crash or burn up pretty regularly. SpaceX satellites “de-orbit” almost daily, and YouTube constantly lights up with videos of satellite burn ups or crashes. Sometimes they even crash in batches, to the point where space experts are concerned about the lasting impact of satellite debris on both the planet and its atmosphere. The idea that Musk “knew the results of the election four hours early” is a third-hand quote from Joe Rogan, who said on his show a few days after the election “I was texting people like Tulsi and JD Vance. And apparently, Elon created an app, and he knew who won four hours before the results were called.” Nobody knows what this app is, who Musk told that told Rogan, or if any of this is actually real. And Tulare County has reliably gone for Trump in three straight elections, meaning no cheating was required to keep it in the red column. But it makes sense that election officials would use Starlink in lieu of poor broadband quality to transmit the results – results that were counted and recorded elsewhere.

Ticket splitting proves the election was rigged – who would vote for Donald Trump AND Democrats?

The fact that Democrats retained Senate seats in four states (and maybe five, depending on the outcome in Pennsylvania) that Trump also won doesn’t prove fraud or cheating. It proves that voters aren’t monolithic, and that while social media makes it easy to think of every single Trump voter as a Nazi, plenty of people wanted Trump, and also either didn’t vote down ballot, or wanted more progressive candidates in other offices. Pro-choice ballot measures did well, there was no great red wave in state and local legislature races, and as of this moment, Republicans look to have expanded their control of the House by a grand total of one seat.

Split ticket voting ebbs and flows with various elections – look at 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon won 49 out of 50 states, while Democrats retained control of both the House and Senate. It’s rarer now to split voting between the parties, but clearly not unheard of. Democrats not getting clobbered down ballot, particularly in the House, isn’t a sign of cheating, it’s a sign of hope that people might want Trump, but they don’t want Republicans quite as much.

Ultimately, voters are people, and people sometimes do things that we personally don’t like or approve of. That includes voting for both Trump and Democrats – trying to understand why people did this is much more useful and impactful than pretending they only did it because of a conspiracy to steal the election.

Russian bomb threats swayed the election!

Obviously, no threat of violence against a polling place is acceptable. But there’s no evidence that the spate of bomb threats called into polling places in swing states, particularly Georgia and Arizona, had any influence on the final outcome. Seven states in total received bomb threats, with polling hours extended due to disruptions. Many other states Trump won received no threats at all. Small scale acts of electoral terrorism did not throw entire states to Trump, and to think they did is simply to live in willful denial. It’s not clear whether Russia was involved in these threats, of whether those who sent them in only used spoofed Russian email addresses. And hopefully, a Trump-staffed FBI will still take the threats seriously and investigate them.

Trump repeatedly told rally crowds “I don’t need your votes” which is proof he cheated!

I don’t know how many times we’ve heard Trump say something stupid that has no relation to reality, only for detractors to use it as proof of a vast plot to overthrow democracy and make himself president for life. Trump spent an endless campaign rambling about Hannibal Lector, windmills killing whales, immigrants eating dogs, and how Christians would “never need to vote again.” Obviously, some of this stuff is troubling and way outside the bounds of what any normal politician would ever say.

But Trump isn’t a normal politician! That’s what so many people gravitated toward about him! He promises things that he’ll never deliver, makes claims he never proves, and says things that make no sense and that are immediately forgotten. How many times has Trump promised to reveal a plan or a policy or evidence of something in two weeks, only for it never to materialize? Hell, the entire premise of QAnon began with Trump claiming a gathering of military officers “could be the calm before the storm,” with nobody knowing what he was talking about, and it never came up again. That’s not to say that his alarming statements shouldn’t be taken seriously, but random stuff Trump said during rallies is not evidence of a conspiracy.

Liberals are still shellshocked about Trump winning, and it’s not like anyone is planning to storm the Capitol. Let people vent and conspire, it’s a form of coping!

I actually agree with this. Conspiracy theories stem from unexpected events scrambling our sense of reality, and Trump winning another election after everything that’s happened is a massively unexpected event. It’s still shocking that the man who led an insurrection to retain power was handed power back four years later. People need time to process it, and to figure out how and why it happened. Conspiracy theories that it was all rigged are a form of bargaining, and an appropriate place in the stages of grief. Eventually, reality will set in, but for now, the mourning continues.

But conspiracy theories are not evidence. Feeling it’s “wrong” in your gut that Trump won is not evidence. Nor are viral threads about Starlink, memes about missing votes, or accusations by liberal influencers. Trump won the election, not because he seized power in a coup, but because the voters chose him. As stunning and strange as it is, that’s the system we live in. There’s a lot of blame to go around for Trump being allowed to run again and to win, but he did win.

We get to mourn now, but pretty soon, we have to take the black garb off and get back to work. A midterm election looms, and it presents a major opportunity to take control of Congress back. Or at the very least, to generate a new round of conspiracy theories about what “really” happened to the losing side.