Month: May 2025

The Gangstalking Delusion

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

I don’t know how I got added to the “gangstalking” digest on Quora, but however it happened, it occasionally sends me emails full of posts by “victims.” And those posts send me down rabbit holes of pain that rival anything I’ve ever read related to QAnon.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, consider yourself lucky. It gets pretty complicated, but gang stalking is essentially the idea that certain unlucky people have been targeted for large-scale harassment, surveillance, following, medical experimentation, defamation, or even physical torture – always by a massive group of anonymous “stalkers” whose goal is to inflict as much punishment as possible before the subject takes their own life. The “targeted individuals” subjected to gang stalking see their harassers everywhere they go and in every facet of their life – a New York Times story on the phenomenon, written almost a decade ago, has one TI describe seeing stalkers at church, her doctor, and the grocery store. The stalkers inflict their “touchless torture” with everything from late night door knocks and phone calls to sonic weapons and poison. And for the people experiencing the stalking, it’s the closest you can get to hell without actually dying. It causes physical wounds, leaves you with voices in your head screaming at you to kill yourself, takes away your sleep and sense of self, and often leads to isolation and extreme paranoia. Or even death.

For centuries, those believing they were the victims of organized persecution were isolated, left to rot, shunned, or simply committed to asylums. But in recent years, people who believe they are being gang stalked have come together to form associations, self-publish books, hold seminars, and increasingly to back up each others’ stories on social media. Hence the thriving gang stalking thread on Quora that I somehow got subscribed to.

The stories are horrifying, written by people desperate to share their journeys of being stalked, find relief, and get someone on the outside to listen to them. Because, as we’ll see, gangstalking is a little-studied phenomenon that, while real to its victims, does not actually have any evidence to support that it exists. And despite the vivid and harrowing stories of “targeted individuals,” gangstalking is considered by mental health professionals and the legal system to be a persecutory mental illness, on par with schizophrenia or delusional disorder.

Not that those who believe they are being stalked would agree.

“It is absolutely demonic,” one victim wrote on Quora. “[Stalkers] are always vile hateful beings void of empathy, boundaries! and respect. They come into your life when you are weak like a pack of vultures and swarm you constantly. “

“Gang stalking is the constant stalking, harassing, torturing, terrorizing a person by large groups of people, via all forms of methods. The intent is to destroy the person mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually and physically. It’s a very insidious and nefarious crime. It is very violent and difficult to detect,” wrote another.

Another victim on Quora described a constant hellscape that consists of, among a long list, “cars parked outside or at the end of the street, strangers brushing up against you at the store and asking how the children (using specific names) are doing on their science fair project (which they just started last night), every time you go outside or walk out of a store or church you hear the same double honk from a vehicle, your phone is hacked, computer is hacked, mail stops being delivered, bank account issues, slashed tires or any type of vehicle sabotage, neighbors and friends start to change, mobbing begins at work, etc. They will tell lies or slander you to your friends and neighbors.”

Quora has thousands of such posts stretching back years. Reddit does as well, as do Twitter and other social media sites. The stalking transcends political affiliation, race, class, career, or personal opinion. It happens under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Obama didn’t stop it, nor did Trump. Some even theorize the stalkers are so powerful that they are essentially above the law and can’t be stopped by law enforcement or any governmental body.

There is very little research on the psychological causes of the gangstalking, and no compelling evidence that any such organized large-scale “above the law” stalking exists. That’s not to say stalking itself isn’t real, because it obviously is. But the majority of these cases are individuals stalking other individuals, usually for romantic purposes, or to indulge in a personal vendetta. The only real psychological study of the phenomenon, published in 2015, examined 128 accounts of organized gangstalking and found every one to show signs of some kind of mental illness.

Most purported gangstalking victims struggle to articulate why they’d be chosen for as complex and expensive an endeavor as constant surveillance and harassment by dozens or hundreds of people. While they reject the notion that they’re making it up or “crazy,” they also rarely can identify any of their stalkers, explain what the stalkers would gain through their efforts, or what makes them so special and important so as to be “targeted” for stalking at all. They will deluge journalists or researchers with graphic depictions and even photos of their torture, often by what they claim are electronic or sonic weapons. But none of these claims can be verified, and what they describe can easily be attributed to late-developing mental illness, extreme stress, psychiatric disturbance, narcotic addiction, or something else that has nothing to do with large-scale gangs.

And yet, the insistence these people have that they are being targeted for systematic torture is real. And the pain and fear and helplessness they feel is also real. They truly believe these things are happening, any attempting to write it off to mental illness only reinforces the belief. This often takes the form of desperation. Many TI’s talk of spending thousands of dollars on useless anti-electromagnetic products, supplements, removal from non-existent “TI lists,” and anti-surveillance sweeps – only for the torture to continue. Inevitably, a few supposed targeted individuals have turned to violence to make the stalking end – including multiple mass shootings in a short stretch in 2013 and 2014.

As a society, we continue to struggle with how to treat and help those suffering from severe mental illness. And the internet hasn’t done anyone any favors there. Technology itself is seen by many as the enemy of sanity, with fear of radio waves transitioning to fear of wi-fi, 5G internet, smart meters, cell phones, and sophisticated new tech used to create fearsome weapons – see the endless debate over whether Havana Syndrome is a mass delusion caused by a mix of localized and psychiatric factors, or evidence of the large-scale use of sonic weapons cooking the brains of our diplomats. Both are bad, they’re just bad in different ways.

Invariably, my mind turns to the people accused by TIs of doing the gangstalking. Much of my work in conspiracy theories focuses on the loved ones left behind by those who have been sucked into the black hole of paranoia, and gangstalking is no different. While many purported victims believe their stalkers to be strangers or paid agents of a dark force, many others speak of their families and friends inflicting the worst of the horror on them. Or as one post on Quora put it, “What do I do about gang stalking when my family started it and then they lie to me about it?”

What do I do, indeed.

It’s a question I find myself asking a lot, because I’ve been loudly and constantly accused by several people on social media of being part of stalking gangs numbering in the dozens or hundreds, paid by anti-democratic forces to harass left-leaning researchers and journalists, cripple democracy on behalf of Russia, prop up and recruit for QAnon, and cause chaos and death. Several even accuse me of personally isolating them and attempting to drive them to take their own lives.

I won’t use their names here and give them attention, but their posts – all of which are false – about me are endless, done on social media and blogs since early 2021.

They have made similar posts and accusations about many other journalists, researchers, and even just people I’ve interacted with on Twitter. It takes little effort to find them, and I can speak more about it privately if anyone still has doubts. Multiple people have spent years obsessed with me, my work, the lives and work of other journalists in this field, and how we are all in criminal stalking gangs against them.

They have written hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets about my various crimes and misdeeds – which include treason, murder, and criminal computer hacking. Several have claimed I’m responsible for suicides and violence, have perjured myself to Congress, and have faked every aspect of my writing and research. They have physically threatened me, threatened to sue me, and claimed they would ruin my career.

I know none of what they accuse me of is true, just as the family members of “gangstalking” victims know the accusations made against them aren’t true. They attempt to intimately connect me to people I’ve never met, embroil me in schemes that don’t exist, and accuse me of crimes that I clearly had nothing to do with. I don’t know if the people doing it are mentally ill, but I suspect at least some are. Some of their vendetta is personal grievance, and some of it is bewilderment that I won’t engage with them. And nobody in any position of authority or whose work I respect has ever believed it. It hasn’t hurt me at all, at least as far as I can tell.

Of course, it’s extremely difficult to prove false allegations wrong, as opposed to them proving their allegations right, which they can’t do. So I mostly ignore it. I’ve pushed back before, when I feel it’s necessary and depending on the platform of the person making the accusations. But it does nothing to convince the people with the delusions. And most of the time, their posts and tweets get so little attention that talking about them publicly might actually encourage them. While “don’t feed the trolls” generally doesn’t work when dealing with large scale issues like QAnon, it feels right for smaller-scale problems like the guy who won’t stop tweeting about me, even though nobody who matters believes it.

Certainly it’s hard to feel any sympathy for the people making these accusations, and I deeply wish they’d stop. But I also know they believe them to be true – even if they aren’t. If I thought I’d pinpointed the person or group making their life a living hell while writing books and going on TV to monetize their fake expertise, I’d probably be mad too. Conspiracism often stems from personal failure, societal rejection, career setbacks, and a profound lack of understanding about the way the world works – and I suspect that’s what drives a large part of both my own harassment and the wider ethos of most TI’s.

Like TI’s, my sympathy is just as much for the people who have to deal with these folks in real life as it is for those enduring the delusions – many of whom refuse to get help or consider any alternative theory for their “stalking” beyond massive hoards of criminals paid by someone to eliminate someone who is not a threat to them.

Ultimately, harassing individual journalists is a choice, while suffering from profound mental illness is not. Gangstalking “victims” need support, treatment, and for psychology to catch up with the predicament they’re going through. Likewise, their victims need our sympathy and support. Their friends and loved ones didn’t choose this, nor are they responsible for it.

I can handle a few people trolling me on the internet. But as for living with someone who believed I was torturing them with a sonic weapon from the depths of hell? That would be a lot harder.

Ultimately, I could unsubscribe from the Quora gangstalking emails if I wanted to. And maybe I will if it ever gets to be too much. But for now, it’s important to me to recognize that no matter how much pain TI’s inflict on others, they too are in pain. Maybe they won’t get my undivided sympathy, but at least for now, they’ll keep my attention.

My serial harassers don’t even deserve that.

“Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself” and Other Acts of Apostasy

Mike Rothschild3 Comments

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

In conspiracism, what’s more important – the idea or the person who communicates it?

While it’s impossible to run every single conspiracy through the lens of this question, generally speaking, for the last two decades or so, the conspiracy sphere has increasingly created celebrities out of its biggest influencers. Crossover media and political figures like Alex Jones, David Icke, Andrew Wakefield, Naomi Wolf, Joe Rogan, Mike Flynn, RFK Jr., Lara Logan, and of course, Donald Trump, have all built brands as trusted communicators of fringe ideas and conspiratorial nonsense. If one of these people says something, a massive group of fans is poised to believe it, spend their money on it, and share it with others.

Notably, many of the ideas these people share are not only obviously false, but directly contradict other ideas they’ve shared. Conspiracy influencers are constantly touting things they used to oppose, opposing things that they used to support, opposing AND supporting things at the same time, and feuding with other people who say the same things they say.

These contradictions and inconsistencies would doom any legitimate journalist. But because contradiction is inherent to conspiracism, nobody minds if a trusted and cherished influencer says something wildly at odds with something they said another time. Sure, Mike Flynn can support QAnon while also saying QAnon is nonsense, or Alex Jones can get unreasonably excited about Trump seizing total power despite having spent years decrying presidents who sought total power. It doesn’t matter, because these people are trusted. And trust is everything among people who don’t trust anyone.

But that might be changing, and recent adventures in contradiction haven’t gone well for major figures in conspiracism. We might be going back to a time when certain ideas in fringe spheres are so ingrained and taken as infallible gospel to the point where even these trusted figures can’t go against them.

As Trump 2.0 grinds on, and the brain-rotting of the west accelerates at Ludicrous Speed, even major figures in the world of cranks and frauds are running up against the immovable object of their conspiracies moving past the need for the people who popularized them. The idea is starting to outweigh the person who communicates the idea. And it’s a shift that doesn’t bode well for many major figures in the intersection of politics, conspiracy, and commerce.

This is exactly what happened with QAnon. The Q drops created a real-time movement of decoders and proselytizers, influencers who would interpret the bizarre and meaningless utterances of “Q” by running them through the filters of news events and wishful thinking. Those interpretations – “crumbs” as they were called in Q lingo – would be “baked” into “breads” that could be shared with believers who weren’t as hip to the goings on of the deep state, lacked the prophetic dreams and visions that some gurus claimed to have, or just maybe had a life or a job or something normal occupying their time.

But once Q was totally consumed by the GOP at large, there was no need to go back to the drops looking for more conspiracy theories to bake. And there was certainly no need for new Q drops – when Q returned a few times in 2022, most believers shrugged. A few even called the new drops fake. To be fair, they were at least as fake as the old ones.

Q promoters who have stuck to the gospel of the drops now increasingly pick through them looking for new interpretations of old riddles. But while theologians can find new meaning in old Bible verses, the Q drops aren’t as well written or compelling. Most are pretty stupid. And so they get left behind. Whatever QAnon is now, it’s left behind many of its earliest promoters, who have faded into semi-obscurity. But it’s ideas live on in virtually every piece of wild bullshit Trump or his acolytes spread to the public.

The ideas became more important than the communicators of the ideas. And it’s happened not just to QAnon itself, but also to many key figures in that movement

There was a big stir in both conspiracy and legitimate media when FBI Director Kash Patel (I still can’t believe I have to write that) and his deputy, podcaster Dan Bongino, made it clear during a Fox News interview that Jeffrey Epstein, who their millions of followers believe did not kill himself, actually killed himself.

“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth,” Bongino said. And the truth was that after reviewing “all” the evidence, Epstein had killed himself in his prison cell. He reiterated it in both the interview and on social media afterwards.

The post received over 10,000 comments. The vast majority of them were some variation on calling Bongino a stooge or bought off. They were covering up why the security cameras were off around his cell. And they were lambasted again and again for not releasing the much ballyhooed “Epstein Files” that they had made a big deal out of making public just a few weeks earlier.

Major right wing content creators essentially took the same tack – attacking Patel and Bongino, begging them to stop saying things like “Epstein actually killed himself,” and calling them sellouts and disappointments. Nobody came around to their endorsement of the official story simply because they were well-liked figures who supported Donald Trump.

No matter how much the conspiracy faithful like or trust Patel and Bongino, it’s not enough to override their belief in the idea of Epstein being murdered (probably by the Clintons) and his death made the subject of a coverup. That idea is sacrosanct to them. It is unshakable. And it’s telling that even two of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories in American politics didn’t embrace it in an official capacity when they had the chance to.

And now they’ve lost the trust of their audiences, at least for now. They can probably recover from this and sweep it away with some kind of justification, but the two are finding that it’s a lot easier to spout nonsense from the sidelines than it is to have to deal with it personally – particularly when your boss is connected to the guy at the center of the conspiracy theory.

The same thing happened with RFK Jr. and the measles vaccine. When confronted with the growing measles epidemic spreading through Texas and the southwest, Kennedy first offered up a bunch of nonsense and unscientific quack treatments, such as megadosing vitamin A and taking a certain antibiotic – while also acknowledging the efficacy of the vaccine. Finally, in early April, when two children had died from the diseases, he admitted the “truth” – that the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly effective, and that measles didn’t stage a comeback until it began spreading in unvaccinated communities.

The fury of the antivax community was quick, sharp, and powerful. Kennedy was attacked by longtime allies, many of whom are similarly popular influencers. He was called a parrot of the pharma establishment, a shill, and complicit in the murder of children by medical doctors through inoculation. Sure enough, Kennedy was solidly back on the antivax train just a few days later, claiming the vaccine hadn’t been properly tested (as if half a century of safe usage wasn’t evidence enough of its safety) and that its immunity was short-lived. Less than a month after his endorsement of the MMR vaccine, he was making official plans to find “alternative” treatments for measles, rather than simply endorsing the vaccine that was overwhelmingly effective in the first place.

The Trump community adores RFK Jr., but not enough to absolve him of endorsing vaccines – because they hate vaccines more than they love either Kennedy or Trump. Remember when Trump got booed at a townhall with Sean Hannity in Dallas in 2021 after he admitted he got a COVID-19 booster? Now guess who is among the most virulently antivaccine politicians in America? The same Trump who championed the quick development of the COVID vaccine in the first place.

Trump himself isn’t immune to being thrown overboard – recall that QAnon started in the first place because Trump’s first term wasn’t seeing the results his supporters wanted in terms of locking up Hillary Clinton. There had to be a reason why this stuff wasn’t happening – and it turned out to be that it was happening, just in secret.

Certainly, the far right conspiracy world hasn’t broken entirely with Patel and Bongino, just as it didn’t break with RFK Jr. The reference to Epstein killing himself will likely be swept aside or justified as necessary for the greater payoff to come. But right wing influencers are learning that when they step afoul of the sacred ideas of their movement – ideas they’ve spent years touting – their status doesn’t give them a free pass to be contradictory.

Ultimately, the idea always wins.

A Few Lines About “Cocaine-Gate”

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

It often takes just one offhand remark, misinterpreted picture, or joke that doesn’t land to start a conspiracy theory that subsequently never goes away. We’ve seen it happen time after time – World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein’s comment that the firefighting team working to save WTC 7 should be “pulled” serving as “proof” that the building was a controlled demolition, John Kasich mistakenly saying John McCain was “put to death” rather than “laid to rest” being “proof” he was executed, a very stupid joke by Joan Rivers about Michelle Obama being transgender sparking over a decade of conspiracy theories that she’s actually a man, and so on.

Sometimes this happens organically, but many times it stems from a conspiracy influencer seeing or hearing something and deciding it’s something else – usually something they can use to drive traffic to their website or product.

So it went on Sunday May 11, when Alex Jones announced on Twitter that he had broken a “DEVELOPING SCANDAL,” which was a short snippet of a video that he claimed showed three world leaders getting blasted out of their minds on cocaine.

The text with the tweet, accompanied by a short video, reads:

DEVELOPING SCANDAL: Macron, Starmer, and Merz caught on video on their return from Kiev [sic]. A bag of white powder on the table. Macron quickly pockets it, Merz hides the spoon. No explanation given. Zelensky, known cocaine enthusiast, had just hosted them. All three of the “leaders” look completely cracked out.

Jones followed up his “scandal” with a video titled simply “BREAKING: It’s Coke” where the inexplicably slimmed down Jones rambled for over four minutes, followed by several minutes of ads, about how the leaders of France, Germany, and the UK were “lit up like Christmas trees” while reiterating that Infowars is one of the most accurate media sources in the world.

It’s not. The the three leaders on the train back from Kyiv were not feverishly trying to hide their Bolivian marching powder from the press, and a cursory analysis of the video showed that the “bag of coke” was a tissue that Emmanuel Macron hid because he probably didn’t want to look like one of those people who blows their nose and leaves the tissue out. And the “coke spoon” was obviously not that, likely either a stirring spoon or a Bamboo Knot cocktail pick. It doesn’t actually matter, because the “bag of coke” is so clearly not a bag a of cocaine and actually a crumpled tissue that it immediately renders the rest of Alex’s conspiracy moot.

But we all know that conspiracy theories like this aren’t designed to stand up to scrutiny. They’re designed to be shared in anger and disgust, which generates income for their originators. And this one was shared big time, getting over ten thousand retweets in its first day of existence.

Jones spent most of his Sunday show touting his “discovery” as proof that the European leaders trying to drum up support and sympathy were Ukraine were nothing but blasted out druggies. Still, the story started to draw pushback from skeptics who pointed out that Macron was clearly hiding a tissue, and even from other conservatives who claimed Jones was making them look like fools. For his Monday show, Jones mentioned “cocaine-gate” only once, but when other conspiracists starting turning against him, he went back on the offensive, structuring much of his Tuesday show about the non-scandal, and declaring “of course that’s cocaine on the table” and that they’re so drugged up that they’re going to start a nuclear war and we’re all going to die.

In the case of “cocaine-gate,” it’s too early to tell if this is a conspiracy theory that will stick. Given the trajectory of other instant-boil conspiracy theories of the past few years, it likely won’t. Stuff like “Michelle Obama is a man” sticks because it came from an earlier time when there weren’t as many theories like it popping up every day, nor were there as many vectors for these theories to find new audiences. It used to take time for a conspiracy theory to worm its way into our brains, but that timeline has now crunched years into days, and we are hit with so many of these things that many never get a chance to really take root before they’re replaced by something equally absurd.

But “will anyone remember this in a week” might not even be the right question to ask. The right question, like most other conspiracy theories, is why did people believe this in the first place? How stupid do they think the leaders of three of the most powerful countries in the world are to leave evidence of their drug usage out for the cameras of numerous news outlets to see? Surely, some people were sharing the video out of curiosity or disgust. But it’s clear that many people believed that the most powerful politician in France was hurriedly hiding a bag of blow that he’d accidentally left out – just one thread on r/conspiracy on Reddit has hundreds of affirmative comments agreeing with the hypothesis.

And yet…it’s clearly a tissue, and also very stupid. So what are we doing here?

The idea of the leaders of Europe being blasted on cocaine while making life-and-death decisions fits in with the general idea that Jones and other far-right propagandists have been pushing for years: these are elites who live and pleasure themselves in worlds of decadence that the rest of us will never set foot in. It’s a huge part of what made QAnon take off: it promised the downfall of the power brokers who waste our money on weird rituals and Satanic ceremonies and drug-fueled anti-family mayhem while the rest of us suffer and fight over scraps.

(Why did these same conspiracists fall in line behind Donald Trump, who has made a career out of professional displays of obnoxious opulence while philandering his way through three marriages and multiple sexual assault accusations? Don’t ask for it to make sense, it never will.)

This one “works” in particular because Jones and his ilk have spent years alleging that Vladimir Zelenskyy is some kind of drug addict who’s “obviously on methamphetamine and so many other drugs,” flying into Hitlerian meth-fueled rages where he orders more helpless Ukrainians to die in his Satanic war on the Christian bedrock of the west. It’s a huge part of the opposition to western funding of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and is all over the media output of conspiracy influencers. To these people and their fans, Putin is the bulwark against evil, and the decadent west is the evil – though it’s fascinating that all of the references to Zelensky being a drug addict come after Russia had invaded his country. It’s almost like they didn’t know anything about him, then all decided they knew everything about him.

So in the Alex Jones/right wing conspiracy universe of leaders who answer to Satan and get hammered all the time, the idea of three of Europe’s heads of state all doing coke while on a goodwill tour for a fellow cokehead makes perfect sense. Of course they all get together and do blow and shoot meth and hunt children while they conspire to push their transgender Magog nuclear war agenda. Why wouldn’t they all be on drugs?

And he’s instilled his value system into his fans, pumping out hours-per-day of paranoia and conspiracism, all meant to explain why the have nots have nothing and the haves have everything, how they’re trying to destroy the west and the family and freedom, and how you can stop it by sharing Alex’s videos and buying Alex’s products.

That is literally what a huge part of his show is about – buying supplements and shirts and survival equipment. Just the 2024 episode where he claims Zelensky is “obviously on methamphetamines” features Jones mentioning his “products” dozens of times, overprices wellness shit like “nano super blue toothpaste” and “Ultimate Turmeric Formula” and “Immune Gargle Mouthwash.”

So when people get agitated about the “drug use” of European leaders, they’re really just serving themselves up as marks for the long-running con game of the far right influencer sphere: come for the outrage, stay for the products. In that sense, it doesn’t matter at all what Starmer and his cohorts were doing or not doing. As long as you’re angry about the potential of them doing something, you’re in the right spot to mainline more Infowars and purchase more Infowars swag.

All that super immune gargle mouthwash isn’t going to buy itself, you know.