Author: Mike Rothschild

Writer and researcher specializing in conspiracy theories, politics, history, and fringe beliefs.

Eaton Fire #17: A Year of Swimming Up a Waterfall

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Rebuilding from the Eaton Fire is a full-time job. But it also makes my actual full-time job, writing about disinformation and conspiracy theories, nearly impossible. Your Patreon subscriptions help me carve out the time to write and research, so I can stay ahead of the madness while I deal with the madness. Thank you!

It’s been a year since we lost our home and our neighborhood in the Eaton Fire. What began as desperate hours become a few days of panicked flight, which turned into weeks of slow-rolling horror as the new reality settled in. Then it became months of exhausting struggle, endless frustration, gallows humor, tree-destroying notetaking and list-making, and a seemingly never-ending supply of walls to bang our heads into.

And that’s just been our experience with our mortgage company.

Every survivor of the Eaton and Palisades Fires has that one company or entity that’s made their post-disaster life a bureaucratic hellscape. For many, it’s been their insurance company holding up rebuilding payments or refusing loss of use money with demands to move back into an unlivable house. For others, it’s been a contractor suddenly not showing up. Or FEMA not paying out a grant. Or the city of LA dragging its feet on permits or making unreasonable planning demands about drainage other some other dumb crap.

One thing you’ll find with survivors is that we all have different nightmares, but we all have nightmares.

Ours is our mortgage company. If anything symbolizes our year of struggle and strife, of uncertainty and frustration, it’s been our multi-front war with the massive corporation that holds the note on our no longer extant house. Rather than go into the litany of battles we’ve fought this year, I want to explore this one particular battle. It symbolizes with ruthless efficiency not just how difficult rebuilding is, but how soul-sucking and dispiriting it is to be an American in search of answers and help from a major corporation, and to get nothing back but busy work and delays delivered with perky hold music.

Writing about our struggle as homeowners does not invalidate the experience of renters, who are going through their own horrific battles against landlords and property managers. Being able to own any kind of home in LA is a privilege I don’t take lightly. But as much as a privilege as it is, you’ll forgive me if I’ve come to think of it more as a millstone – or maybe an empty string that once held a millstone, but which still weighs a ton. Metaphors fail me.

Please also note that this is not a comprehensive listing of every contact we’ve had with the mortgage company, but a summary of the madness of the last year. I’ve spared you all every single detail, because many are too boring or stupid to recount. Or they’re lost in the haze.

One of the first things we had to do when we lost the house was figure out if we had to actually pay the mortgage. Do you still send in payments on a home that doesn’t exist anymore? As it turns out, you do. The bank is not going to let you off the hook that easy. But they will work with you, because ultimately, they’d rather have your money than have you default.

So we went into forbearance with our mortgage company, which I’m calling Bob, because I don’t want to publicly light up a company we’re still doing business with. Despite our ordeal, we still need to work with them, and to do that, some details have to be held a little closer than I might like.

Bob wasn’t the first company to hold our mortgage, ending up as its administrator after it bought or absorbed or consolidated with some other mortgage company. But Bob is our current mortgage holder. So we called Bob a few days after the fire to talk about what we could do while we figure out what to do.

Bob, or one of the many people who work for Bob, told us we could put our payments on pause for a year in order to save money and simplify our financial life as we tended to other matters. Ultimately, of course, we would have to decide how to make up those payments. There were three options we could pick: a balloon payment in a year, tacking the payment on to the very end of the loan, or a loan modification that restructured the entire loan with the same interest rate.

But that was a problem for down the road, we thought. In the first few months after the fire, we had to figure out much more basic and elemental things. So forbearance it was.

Oh, and would we keep accumulating interest on our unmade payments, thereby actually increasing the amount of money we’d owe Bob over the life of the loan?

After about six or so months, it was time to decide if we wanted to start making the payments again, and how. We’d been getting letters the entire year that we were past due on our mortgage, but Bob told us that they were just form letters sent automatically by their system, and that they could be ignored. Could Bob just not send them? Of course not, but they didn’t matter. We were squarely in forbearance. And we knew from our earlier conversations with Bob that we’d be able to do the loan modification, so there was nothing to worry about. As planned, we called in October to set it up. We were told we could essentially modify our loan to a 40 year term starting now, and keep our low interest rate – thank you to COVID for that one. So we waited. And we waited. And heard nothing.

We called Bob again, and spoke to someone completely different (which we’d done every time we’d called). After again explaining what we’d been told, we were kicked to a different department, and were told that Bob doesn’t do loan modifications without an application – though we’d been told earlier we didn’t need to fill out anything to apply for one, because the government had declared the fire as a disaster. Then we called again, spoke to someone new again, got kicked around again, this time to something called “loss mitigation,” and were told that Bob doesn’t do loan modifications AT ALL, and we weren’t eligible for one anyway because there’s no home to collateralize against the loan.

Got that? No, you don’t.

Since that call completely contradicted everything we’d been told, we called again. We again spoke to someone different in a different department, who told us we are eligible, and don’t need to apply, but need to get approval from Fannie Mae as the actual funder of the loan – and that Bob would call us when they had it. So again, different people tell us different things that contradict each other. But at least someone would call us this time.

So did they call us? They did not. We called again. And again talked to someone new. And explained it all again. The trauma, the loss, the uncertainty. Then that person told us that Fannie Mae doesn’t make loan modification approvals on a property that doesn’t have a home. While at the same time, our forbearance had been extended in anticipation of us getting a loan modification, because we need to be in forbearance to get the loan modification.

Which they don’t do. Except when they do?

We called again. Swimming in contradictory information and demands, we went through our whole sad story. Again. Then we essentially begged a call center employee to speak to someone in management after this person told us flat out, in a charming southern drawl, “I don’t know what to do with you.” Again, this is their “loss mitigation” department, which apparently does not know how to handle loss mitigation. Ultimately, we were connected to a VP. This VP is now personally handling our case. Except it’s not being handled, because we are still getting letters from Bob telling us that we are not only delinquent in our payments, we are in default. And we get these letters at the exact same time we get letters telling us we have gotten another three months on our forbearance.

Finally, this VP told us that we have to get the default letters as a matter of federal law, even though we are not in default. I don’t know what kind of madness it is to tell people they are in default despite not being in default, and to not tell people that the letters telling them they’re in default can be discarded. But that’s Bob for you. Or maybe it’s the system that keeps Bob and his brothers fat and satisfied on our interest payments.

It should not have to take a senior manager, dozens of letters, and entire reams of paper to tell us that we are where we thought we were. Nor should it have taken us entire days spent on the phone with a dozen or more people in four different departments, none of whom were able to tell us anything consistent until we threw ourselves down and begged. It should not be like this. But none of this should be like it is.

If this Kafkaesque nightmare was our only interaction with Bob, maybe that would take some of the sting out of our relationship’s disarray.

But it’s not by a longshot. Bob has several more attack surfaces on which to bombard us with nonsense, and I’m going to go into them here, because they are insane.

One of these is homeowners insurance. Did you know that you don’t actually need to insure a home that doesn’t exist? We didn’t, until our insurance company (who we like a lot) called us to help us cancel ours because they don’t insure land. We’d be able to buy more when we had a new home, but until then, we could just pay renters insurance on where we’re living. Sounds great! Winning!

Then came Bob. Bob sent us a letter telling us they had been informed we had cancelled our homeowners insurance, and that despite having no home to insure, we had to have homeowners insurance because our home is “vacant/abandoned.” So they would be buying us something called Lender Purchased Insurance unless we prove the land itself is vacant. And naturally, LPI is more expensive than what we had before and we’d have no choice on who they bought it from. But we didn’t need a choice, because we didn’t need it at all. There was nothing to insure.

So we sent proof in the form of our Army Corps of Engineers confirmation that our land was cleared and there is no home to be “vacant/abandoned.” After sending this proof, we were again told we needed to send proof. Then we sent proof again, and were told the LPI was being canceled. Except we then got another call asking for more documentation, even though the person calling us was able to see in our file that the LPI was canceled and said so!

This is another “feature” of Bob. The people who call us don’t appear to have read our file, and the people we talk to when we call don’t appear to be able to read other departments’ files. So by design, or by dint of incompetence, nobody at Bob has any idea what anyone else at Bob has done. We get conflicting calls and letters from different departments. We get conflicting calls and letters from the same department. We get them on the same day.

Then there’s the escrow debacle, proving not only that these companies don’t work in the best interests of their customers, but that they don’t seem to understand or feel like they have to follow the laws that govern the rest of us.

When your house burns down and you file an insurance claim, you get back a Very Large Check from your insurance company to rebuild or repair your dwelling. Except this Very Large Check isn’t made out to you. It’s made out to you and your mortgage holder. You just get it first, sign it, and send it via certified mail to the mortgage holder. They sign it and deposit it in an escrow account, making payments to you when you hit certain milestones in your rebuilding.

“Wait, this means your money isn’t actually yours?” you ask? That’s exactly what it means, because the mortgage company holds your debt. But they’re nice enough to manage it for you, at least. Right?

We were fortunate enough to have an overage between what we still owe and what the Very Large Check was made out for. Bob told us that the overage was our money, that they had no right to it, and that they’d send it to us right away. The rest of the money would be paid out when we made progress on the new house, such as sending in a materials list and blueprints. Even though we were months away from any such documents, at least we’d get the overage and could keep it under our control, right?

Clearly not. Instead, we had to fight Bob every step of the way to get our money, which they told us was not their money. After multiple calls (with the usual explanations every time of what we were going through,) Bob flat out told us that they’d release the money, but they were making an “exception” and had to go through multiple legal steps to release the funds. After months and numerous calls, they were nice enough to send us our overage, after making sure we knew what a wonderful and outsized thing they were doing for us.

We fought the battle again a few months later, trying to get a release of funds after we’d sent in our plans. We didn’t get 1/3 of what was left, which is what we’d been told we’d get, but one third of the total amount of the Very Large Check minus the overage that we’d already gotten. Building a home in LA is really expensive, and we needed what we needed when we were supposed to get it. When we called Bob (naturally speaking to someone new) they told us that Bob never releases a third of what’s left after the overage. And an exception would have to be made.

Again, two people telling us totally different things that totally contradict each other. And we have to jump through hoops inside hoops to get any kind of satisfaction, costing us hours of time and unmeasurable anguish.

But hey, at least that Very Large Check is earning some sweet interest in Bob’s escrow account, right? You bet it is, after California passed a bill requiring insurers to pay 2% interest to the homeowner on insurance payouts. A little help for us fire survivors, right?

Nah. Bob couldn’t tell us what kind of interest the money was making, how much it had made, when we’d get it, or where we could see it. When pressed, Bob told us that “things are handled on a case by case basis.” Which is not actually how law works. There is no law that says white-bordered stop signs are optional after 9pm, nor is there a law that mortgage companies can follow if they feel like paying escrow, but only on a case by case basis.

We have deployed every weapon in our limited arsenal to fight back against Bob. We’ve asked for a case manager to be assigned. They don’t do that. We asked to be conferenced in to calls with multiple departments at once, so we could all be on the same page. They don’t do that. We have filed several complaints with state offices, only to have those complaints be sent to different offices, and then be told by Bob that our complaints had been resolved, despite them not being resolved in any way.

We have taken so many notes that we had to buy more notepads. Recently we were called by a client advocacy officer to tell us a new complaint had been opened up based on a very long email we sent where we included the CEO of Bob, because why not. When we asked the client advocate what the status of the complaint was, he said he had no update. When we asked if he’d called us to update us that he had no update, he said yes and sounded annoyed we’d asked the question.

Bob has us in his grasp. We can’t pay off our mortgage and also build a new house. Psychologically, we don’t want to pay a mortgage on a lost home, but we want to work with Bob to figure out a way to eventually pay what we owe on a new home. Bob tells us that customers are their top priority, but Bob’s top priority appears to be nothing more than confusing and traumatizing us. The people at Bob are mostly nice, many express genuine condolence on our loss. It’s just that they don’t know how to help, and don’t seem to have any system in place that would let them.

Meanwhile, our trauma is unearthed time and time again. A year of loss and uncertainty is packed into every call, every frustrated question, every demand to speak to a supervisor. Bob tells us they want to help, and does nothing to help. And we start over every time.

If I’ve learned anything this last year, it’s that corporations have so much power over us that they don’t need to do anything to solve the problems they’ve created. They have so much money and sway that all they know how to do is increase their money and sway. All we want is a house to call our own, but that’s not in Bob’s plan for us. These monoliths of commerce are dehumanizing centers of confusion and delay, where speaking to a person is akin to swimming up a waterfall and where getting results is like pushing a boulder up a hill while being chased by wolves who bombard you with conflicting letters.

Through it all, we are not okay. Nobody in Altadena or the Palisades is okay. We are exhausted. We are demoralized. We are just fucking tired of everything being so hard.

But we go on. Even though we can’t go on, we go on. And we go on because of people, not companies. Our community has been our saving grace. Our friends have been our lifeline. Our neighbors have been our safe havens. Our family has been our resting place. We are still here because of that. And only because of that.

Not Bob, though. Bob can sit on a tack.

Trump’s Third Term Scare

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was nine months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

Every so often, the three-shirt-wearing human blister known as Steve Bannon emerges from his podcast studio to interact with human beings who occasionally wash their hair.

In one recent occurrence, Bannon sat down for an interview with the editors of The Economist, a magazine not generally known for platforming incoherent rants by lunatics, yet laboring under the incorrect assumption that “liberalism demands dialogue with those who oppose it.”

It does not. And yet, in the middle of an otherwise anodyne chat about whatever bullshit is on his mind, Bannon uncorked this meatball of crazy:

“Well he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28.”

Strictly speaking, unless Father Time decides to speed up the inevitable, Trump will be president in 2028, because his term doesn’t end until January 20, 2029.

But that’s not what Bannon meant. What Bannon meant was that Trump will circumvent the 22nd Amendment, run for an unconstitutional third term in office thanks to some nebulous “plan”, win that election, and be president until 2033, whereby his followers believe he’ll just do it again and again. So that’s great.

Trump, of course, has been talking about a third term on and off for years. He’s selling “Trump 2028” swag on his website, and was “not joking” when he claimed “a lot of people want him to” throw out the Constitution and make a grab for an eternal presidency.

He’s been doing that same “joking/not joking” dance since 2018, where he’s claimed that he might give a lifetime presidency a shot, and other times where he said he was going to run for four terms, deserved “extra years” because he was impeached, and even hinted at constitutional loopholes that would allow him to serve as a VP or Speaker for one day, then have everyone above him resign to be an unelected president. Hey, if Gerald Ford could do it…

On the flip side, he’s also said that he also has no intention of trying for a third term, and that he only sells 2028 merch and hints at another run to “drive the left crazy.” Which…works? Witness the absolute furor over Bannon’s remarks, which is the only reason why anyone outside the subscriber base of The Economist knew they’d spoken to Steve Bannon. The guy knows what makes the left insane and terrified, and damn if he isn’t going to provide it.

Now we’ve had days of the news cycle hijacked by this nonsense. The government is in shutdown mode, health insurance premiums are about to explode, and federal law enforcement is turning cities into war zones. But we’re talking about Steve Bannon and about Trump running for a third term, not anything that’s actually possible or legal.

Of course, when has Trump ever been stopped by something being impossible or illegal? Dude just does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants – and knows his retinue of bootlickers and apologists will go along with it. He wants us afraid and believing he is unstoppable and inevitable, so why bother trying?

Tear down the East Wing? Incite a mob to sack the Capitol? Kill random fishermen and kidnap people off the streets for not being white? Deploy troops in the streets? Fuck you, try to stop me.

And so back we go to the prospect of a third term. It’s only illegal if laws mean something. It’s only impossible because nobody has tried it since the 22nd Amendment was passed. Trump might not always mean what he says, but he never says anything he doesn’t mean. Right?

It’s a losing game to try to deduce what Trump “really” is talking about at this point.  The whole “take him seriously/take him literally” thing has been a bust since 2016. But it’s been helpful to me to think of Trump running again as a type of invasion scare.

England in both the 19th and 20th centuries has been seized by stretches of terror that an invasion fleet was about to land on its shores. From Napoleon in the 1810s to Hitler in 1940, Britons were hunkering down, digging in, and preparing for the transports to appear on the horizon.

Both times, the threat was real, but it also wasn’t. Napoleon had no way to stop the Royal Navy from intercepting and destroying a potential invasion fleet, even though he had the men and transports to land in southern England, destroy the Channel ports, and possibly march on London.

Hitler didn’t even have that – he was hoping that repurposed river barges would be enough to land troops and tanks in England, and that the Royal Navy and Air Force would just politely allow it to happen.

In hindsight, the threats were massively overblown. But at the time, nobody knew that, or at least nobody could say it with 100% confidence. The fear was real, and it was enough to drive British policy, military deployment, economics, and psychology to the brink of mass panic. If either Napoleon or Hitler had even tried to invade England, it would have been a disaster and a total failure. But try telling that to someone in the path of a possible invasion. You don’t know until you know.

Like a cross-Channel invasion, an attempt by Trump to run for a third term would be a disaster for him. It’s probably not even physically possible. Trump is exhibiting clear signs of physical and cognitive decline, including taking two annual exams this year, admitting to having an MRI and swelling in his ankles, and exhibiting at least some signs of a stroke. It’s hard to get riled up by the possibility of Trump 2028 when Trump might not actually make it to 2028 in any kind of shape to govern.

Beyond that, the longer Trump and his enablers muse about various plans for 2028, the harder it makes things for actual 2028 candidates like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. If Trump keeps hinting at a 2028 run, what is the rest of the GOP going to do? Sure, they’ll probably go along with it, but what if they don’t? There’s no reason for these people to shackle their political futures to an 82 year old man who thinks he’s the King of Israel and brags about acing a test where you identify an elephant. They have careers, too.

If Trump spends half of 2027 kicking around the idea of going for it, nobody else will be able to fundraise, hire staff, or lay the groundwork for an announcement. He would be kneecapping his own succession. Maybe that’s why he’d do it, because nobody else can do the job but him, even if he can’t do the job.

So what if he does go for it? What if he announces the day after the midterms that he’s running again? Fuck you, try to stop me.

Absolute chaos for the GOP, and the fundraising haul of the century for the Democrats would be among the first two things to happen. And there would probably a blizzard of lawsuits that keep Trump off the ballot in any state with a Democratic legislature or governor. Because the president doesn’t put himself on the ballot, states do. Elections are run by states. And many states are going to refuse to have anything to do with this nonsense. Because it’s unconstitutional and insane.

Imagine the GOP trying to hold a primary while Trump has announced a fourth run for office. How does that work? Trump declines more and more, while shoving anyone else out of the way, and destroying anyone who dares to try to mount a legitimate campaign. Meanwhile, various courts spend months kicking lawsuits around, and Trump is disqualified from appearing on ballots of states that he won in 2024, but that have Democratic governors – states the Republicans would need, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Taking this ludicrous scenario to its conclusion, 2028 sees Trump running a fake and illegal primary campaign against real Republicans. The party is split in two with Trump “winning” states he can’t win, while a legitimate contender finds himself iced out of ballots on red states that would allow Trump to actually compete.

Could we have a Democrat win some states, Trump “win” others, and a different Republican win a few? How does any of this work? Why would anyone be okay with it, when Trump is declining so fast he might not even be coherent by then?

Sure, maybe the GOP just lets him do it, but even if it’s guaranteed to lead to a Newsom or Pritzker presidency? It seems unlikely. We have courts and laws, and while Trump can just do a lot of things by himself as president, running for a third term is not one of those things. It would take a massive buy-in by his entire party, and as his polling and health decline, the prospect of that buy-in declines just as quickly.

Ultimately, the third term can be effective as a scare tactic, but it’s not a real political strategy. Neither are even goofier scenarios, like Trump running as Vance’s VP and then Vance resigning on day 1, or exploiting slight differences in the wording of Constitutional amendments about presidential eligibility, or some magical amendment reversing the 22nd. Those things might be theoretically possible, but they aren’t practical or feasible.

The most likely scenario is that Trump ultimately tells himself and the country he could run for a third term and win if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to. That lets him save face, play kingmaker for 2028, and still keep liberals scared and conservatives in line with the prospect of a sudden about face. He’s not a lame duck, he can convince himself, just a man who has Made America Great Again, and can go back to doing what he loves. Whatever that is.

Invasion scares fizzle out when the invader can’t run away from the reality of their situation anymore. Napoleon and Hitler both called off their invasions when it was clear they had no chance of success, and even trying to do so would be a complete disaster. Trump is almost certain to do the same, given the enormous opposition and low probability of actually accomplishing anything other than a humiliating defeat.

Trump 2028 might be a useful piece of trolling and a way to get attention and scare enemies, but that doesn’t mean the fear of it happening isn’t real.

It’s also not inevitable.

When the President Lies About You

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was nine months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

A lot has happened since we lost our home – to us, to our community, to our country. Rebuilding is a full time job, one that pays in exhaustion and crushing lows. And it doesn’t help anyone when the President of the United States lies to the entire country about what happened to you, and how he could have stopped it if only someone had let him.

Even with the relentless lying inherent to Donald Trump’s political rise, it’s still somewhat disconcerting to have the most powerful man in the world specifically making up an entire fiction about what happened to you and your community. And it’s even stranger that he does it in the service of making himself the real victim of the disaster, as opposed to the people whose lives were devastated and remain in perpetual limbo.

Over and over, in dozens of press conferences and public remarks, Trump has created a fantastical and fake version of the LA fires.

In this bizarre fantasy, the fires started because of Governor Gavin Newsom refused to allow water into California from Oregon in order to protect an endangered fish. They destroyed far more homes than they actually destroyed, and were only contained because Trump (who was not president) “broke into” the water supply of various Pacific Northwest states and funneled it through a “giant faucet” to put out the fires.

If you go by statements like these, he’s a hero, and also the real victim:

March 13: “A place called Los Angeles almost burned to the ground.  By the way, I broke into Los Angeles.  Can you believe it?  I had to break in. […] And we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down.  They have so much water, they don’t know what to do.  They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons.  Okay?  Can you believe it?  And in the meantime, they lost 25,000 houses.  They lost — and nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

May 6: “I always liked Gavin. I have a good relationship with him. I just got him a lot of water. I sent in people to open up that water. We just got him a lot of water. If they would’ve had that water and done what I said to do, they wouldn’t have had the fires in Los Angeles.”

June 10: “Look at the fires he had. He had fires where half the city it seemed burned down. What was it? 25,000 houses, all because he wouldn’t take water. I released the water from the Pacific Northwest and it came down, millions of gallons a day. And it’s right there, right now. They’d like to send it back.”

August 25: “They did lose 25,000 houses to a fire that should have never occurred. Because they didn’t let the water come down from the Pacific Northwest, which you guys don’t want to write about. I had to break into the water supply to let the water down. And even now we want more. We can have much more. Less than half of what should be coming in.”

September 3: “Newsom didn’t allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. I demanded that to be open. If that were open. You wouldn’t have had the fire because all the sprinklers would’ve worked in the houses.”

September 12: “They lost 25,000 houses to fires because they didn’t have the water come down from the Pacific Northwest. They have a lot of water but they send it out into Pacific to protect a little tiny fish which did very badly when it didn’t have any water, by the way.”

October 14: “They already lost 25,000 houses to fire because they wouldn’t let the water come in from the Pacific Northwest. They didn’t do it and we had 25,000 homes where they had no water in the sprinklers, they had no water in the fire hydrants. We broke in and had the water come down.”

If someone you loved were rambling this kind of relentless nonsense, touting himself as the victim of a disaster that only he could have stopped, you’d start looking at websites for memory care wards. But since it’s Trump, he has a cult of personality that holds up his every word as gospel, and a press that either just goes along to get along, or amplifies his lies. So he gets away with telling the same lie over and over again – he stopped the fire he didn’t stop, and could have stopped it sooner had Newsom, who did not start the fire, not stopped him from stopping it.

Obviously, this is very stupid. But it’s also incredibly dispiriting and depressing. It does nothing to help survivors, and instead kicks them while they’re down.

I lived through what he’s talking about, as did the tens of thousands of people in West Altadena who have been displaced by the fires. Naturally, he does not care. He hasn’t visited Altadena, he hasn’t mentioned it as far as I can tell, and has actively hindered our recovery process. In his first days in office, he repeatedly claimed that the fires happened because of an endangered smelt, and ordered the state to reroute water from the north to Southern California. There was no way to do this quickly or cheaply, and it wasn’t needed, because the fires had been almost entirely contained by the time he was inaugurated.

Since then, his administration has gutted the federal workforce, including the Forest Service and federal wildland firefighters. He has turned US relief agencies into shells of themselves, while threatening to all but close FEMA. And he has, again and again, threatened to withhold federal aid from the state if the government doesn’t meet a set of ridiculous conditions. We haven’t received billions in promised assistance for reasons Trump and his minions in the GOP won’t articulate.

Fire survivors in LA expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting of rebuilding without help from a Trump administration that has always spoken of Southern California as some kind of Satanic dumping ground. But the lying has become so pathological that one begins to wonder if he actually thinks it’s real – that he really believes he saved Los Angeles weeks before he became president, and we should thank him for it by arresting immigrants and giving him money.

He did not “break into” anything to release any water, nor did he have any ability to do anything of the sort before he was inaugurated again. A week after taking office, Trump ordered the opening of two dams in Central California, flooding unneeded and destructive water into Central Valley farmland owned by the farmers who have supported him election after election. It did nothing to help anyone, and was nowhere near LA. He called it a victory, when it was literally nothing but a cheap stunt and a knife in the back for his loyal farmer voters.

There is no “giant faucet” and Trump’s understanding of water on the west coast appears to be cribbed out of things he heard from donors and mixed with things he made up. It is an infantile flight of fancy to believe that a huge pipe can just be opened up to allow limitless “water from the Pacific Northwest,” because it doesn’t flow to LA, and the infrastructure to make that happen would be ludicrously expensive and inefficient. Nothing he’s talking about would have stopped the fires, and his relentless destruction of the federal government is all but ensuring that future fires will be worse, and that survivors will have fewer resources at their disposal to recover.

Trump is even lying about the number of homes lost in the fires, exaggerating it by almost half. About 13,000 homes were lost – a far cry from the 25,000 he keeps repeating.

Everything he has said about the fires is a lie, and it’s a lie that continues to turn the loss and devastation of thousands of families – people who live in the country that he is president of – into a cheap punchline. He doesn’t care about us, I get that. But he doesn’t even care to know what happened to us. He doesn’t care that he’s wrong. He doesn’t care that the fiction he’s created doesn’t help anyone and mocks our pain.

If you want to know what happened in Altadena and Palisades, ask someone who survived it. Talk to us, get our stories from the people who lived them. Trump’s ridiculous fiction is just that, a story he tells himself and his fans to make himself part of a story he wasn’t part of, and absolve him of giving a damn about the survivors. Because he doesn’t have to care.

We don’t have that option.

The Performative Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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In the days after Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, the conservative activist has been compared by fellow conservatives to Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Moses, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even steel-skeletoned X-Men character Wolverine. He has been lionized as a hero, a martyr, a warrior for God, a prophet, a revolutionary, and potentially a future president cut down in his prime.

He has been memorialized with a vigil at the Capitol, a funeral with federal security held at a football stadium with the president and virtually the entire cabinet in attendance, and talk of statues on multiple campuses. Tucker Carlson compared his death to the Crucifixion. Flags were ordered flown at half-mast. There were rumors Kirk would lie in state at the Capitol, an honor usually reserved for presidents and other figures of national importance. Those who took any kind of joy in his death, or even people who simply quoted verbatim the horrifying things he said about Black and transgender people were hounded with threats and often fired from their job.

Though the 24th anniversary of 9/11 took place just a day after Kirk’s death, its coverage was virtually consumed by that of Kirk. It was as if an entire nation had lost a national hero, with the expectation that the displays of mourning would be commensurate. The September 11th attacks were so forgotten in the rush to anoint Kirk with sainthood that Kirk’s body was flown back to his home state of Arizona on Air Force Two at taxpayer expense, escorted by JD Vance, who skipped New York’s 9/11 memorial ceremony in the process. When it came to public displays of lionizing Charlie Kirk, nothing was too much, and too much was not enough.

Charlie Kirk was a podcaster whose claim to fame was showing up at colleges and daring overmatched students to “prove me wrong” in debates. He was not a war hero, or a statesman, or the inventor of a cure for a deadly disease. He was not a figure on par with history’s prophets and martyrs. He said things about Black people, Islam, and women that were reprehensible. He believed in no separation between church and the state, explicitly wanting a Christian nationalist government that would put the Bible and the Constitution on an equal footing.

One can be upset that a public figure was shot dead while exercising his right to free speech. One can mourn for his children, who will grow up not remembering their dad. One can shake their heads at how easily the shooter obtained a rifle. But this? Congressional resolutions? Vicious attacks on those not mourning him hard enough? State-enforced tributes? The entire cabinet gathered together in a way they only do for the State of the Union? Comparisons to Lincoln and JFK and the Lord and Savior of billions of Christians? What are we doing here?

A cult of personality grew around Kirk so quickly and so completely that it almost dares one to see it as insincere and hyperbolic. Kirk’s martyrdom has taken on the aura of a public performance, done for the cameras and the clicks, and to stoke more of the fear that Kirk specialized in stoking. The language around his death is messianic and hyperbolic, but it also includes a word not usually found in public expression of grief: they.

Time and again, we’ve been told “they” killed Kirk. The left, the radicals, the Christian-hating lunatics. It’s the same “they” who we are told by the far right over and over are the enemy, the ones to fear. They are coming after your job, your money, your women, and your freedom. They control the media, they control the universities, they control banking. They must be stopped at any cost. After all, look what “they” did to Charlie Kirk. They can do it to you, too.

“They,” of course is one guy – alleged shooter Tyler Robinson. But while it took three days for Christ to rise from the dead (if you believe that sort of thing) and about two days to find Robinson, it took seconds for Kirk’s personality cultists to determine who killed him and why.

The moment Kirk died, his killer was deemed a transgender lunatic, hopped up on antifa and liberal hate, driven to kill a beloved conservative because of their words. Seconds after Kirk’s death was confirmed, countless right-wing influencers began baying for blood. It was war, with Kirk killed by the first shot. It was open season on America’s violent liberal lunatic enemies. After years of forcing pronouns and land acknowledgements and transgender everywhere on us, the gloves were off and the guns were locked and loaded. It was the last act of a holy struggle that would end either with the right victorious or the death of freedom.

Never mind that this was almost the same reaction many of these people had to Cracker Barrel changing its logo, to Black stormtroopers in the new Star Wars movies, and to the Green M&M not being “sexy” anymore. Some of that was obviously performance, but this was the real thing. A guy was dead. And it was easy to imagine a massive and organized spasm of violence against the groups linked to the shooter.

Except it got a lot harder once the shooter was found. Tyler Robinson had nothing to do with antifa, which is not a real group in any sense of the word. He wasn’t a left-wing activist in any meaningful sense of the word. He wasn’t transgender. He was a mostly politically-apathetic gamer who might have started to lean more left, and who was in some kind of romantic relationship with his transgender roommate. The slogans etched on his bullets were mostly internet brainrot from the gaming world. He’s never voted, was raised in a MAGA family, and went to one semester of college before dropping out and going to trade school.

He was not who Kirk’s cult of personality needed him to be. He was not an antifa trans activist who killed Kirk to advance the far left’s war on traditional culture. Like Oswald, like James Earl Ray, like would-be Trump killer Thomas Crooks, he was just a guy with a rifle who will be forever remembered only as someone who shot someone else. His motive increasingly appears to be murky, just like his politics and online life. Like many other assassins and wannabes, he did it for reasons that don’t make sense, don’t fit into neat boxes, and might even contradict each other. Robinson may have “hated” Kirk, but the hate was born out of complex and inscrutable reasons that haven’t been fully revealed.

But Kirk couldn’t just be killed by a sort-of left-wing loser with a gun who did it for no real reason. He had to be martyred by a hard left psycho in a culture-war driven killing that must be avenged. He had to die for us, and we have to carry on his work. Like JFK. Like MLK. All killed by supposed conspiracies led by nefarious actors or because they got too close to the truth. “They” killed him – a trope uncomfortably close to the deicide accusation levelled at Jews, which Tucker Carlson leaned especially hard on during his bizarre eulogy at Kirk’s funeral event.

This is the essence of conspiracy theories – that something unexpected had to have happened for a reason we aren’t being told. When we don’t get a reason, or the reason is dumb, we make one up. We give meaning to what seemed random. And we tell ourselves that whoever did it will come after us next. Right wing influencers excel at taking this fear and turning it into cash. And they’re doing it again.

Kirk’s death appeared to be completely meaningless. A life seemingly imbued with holy purpose ended for no purpose. But that couldn’t be allowed, not when there was an opportunity to use it to crush Kirk’s enemies, build brand extensions, make liberals cry, and get on TV. Some of the grief is clearly real, but much of it is almost hilariously over-the-top, like an Italian movie where the widow hurls herself into her husband’s grave. Kirk’s widow wasted no time sending out fundraising emails, taking over as the public face of Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization, and posting somber videos of her tenderly touching her husband’s corpse, while declaring war on those who killed him.

Whoever they were.

The Kirk cult of personality likely has limits. People have short memories and will move on to the next tragedy (trust me on this one.) And for as much hyperbolic praise has been heaped on Kirk, it can never surpass the hyperbolic praise heaped on Donald Trump. That is THE cult of personality, all others are subordinate. Trump himself moved on rather quickly, from giving a somber (and some speculated AI-created) tribute in the White House on Wednesday, to dancing at a Yankees game on Friday. Even Trump’s headlining eulogy at Kirk’s funeral had little to do with Kirk and everything to do with Trump’s usual basket of twisty grievances and bizarre lies. It felt like a campaign speech, not a farewell to a friend.

And nobody on the right will say anything about it because Trump is the leader, and the leader can’t be questioned. So while the grief might be real, the mourning is a performance – carried out for both a mass audience and for the Audience of One. And when he gets bored and moves on, there’s a pretty good chance the mourners will too.

It’s tempting to look at Kirk’s funeral as a harbinger of what’s to come with Trump’s movement once Trump is gone. Maybe Kirk could have been the person to take control of it, but it’s far more likely that nobody is that person. Dictators don’t generally name successors, and those that are named often pay a heavy price. Building an instant cult of personality is one thing, sustaining it is another. Trump will always be the center of MAGA world. Kirk can never be, and no amount of ridiculous genuflection and hyperbolic martyrdom can change that.

Trump is their God, everyone else just floats in and out of his good graces.

This is How Stupid They Think You Are

Mike Rothschild

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Donald Trump began his rise to political prominence with his enthusiastic embrace of a conspiracy everyone could see was absurd and fake. So it’s fitting that exactly ten years after the 2016 Republican primary field began to disintegrate around Trump, we’re doing it again. Only this time it’s so much dumber.

Before he was the Daddy God King of the Republican Party, Trump was a blustery TV businessman who was Just Asking Questions about where Barack Obama was actually born. Trump took birtherism, which had mostly been the domain of desiccated far right fossils or crank perennial candidates and made it mainstream and hip. In doing so, he normalized the conspiracism that the “square” conservative movement had mostly attempted to push away, starting us all down a deep dark hole of lunacy and contrarianism that would lead to Pizzagate, QAnon, COVID denialism, January 6th, and Trump winning two presidential elections.

Birtherism depended on a vast conspiracy to fake Obama’s citizenship, train him in the ways of Marxist Muslim terrorism, install him in government, and pull all of the strings and levers exactly how they needed to be pulled in order to elevate him to the presidency. It would have required hundreds or even thousands of people to be in on the plot, none of them to reveal any of it and all of them to execute it perfectly, and forged documents done so perfectly that nobody could ever determine if they were real or fake – except for a few truth-seekers who immediately determined they were fake, and nobody cared.

Also, it would have required time travel. Birth announcements in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, both based on information provided by the Hawaii Department of Public Health, proclaimed the arrival of a son to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama on August 4, 1961. Various conspiracy theories would try to work around this by claiming that the elder Barack Obama was not the president’s father, and that he had changed his name from “Barry Soetoro” or some such. But the announcements themselves were impossible to fake. They were found in decades-old archives. Unless someone had the forethought to plant them in local papers as part of a half-century conspiracy to elevate a non-citizen usurper to the presidency, that should have been the end of the matter.

And yet, it wasn’t. And logic never dictates how conspiracy theories end, only their usurpation by other conspiracy theories.

A decade later, Trump is now asking America to believe that the crude cartoon and bizarre poem he wrote for sex trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50 year birthday book is just as fake and planted as Obama’s birth certificate. Trump and his mouthpieces want us to think the drawing wasn’t his and that he’s never drawn a cartoon, despite his long and well-documented history of drawing cartoons. He wants us to think the signature on the cartoon isn’t his, despite looking exactly like his signature looked from 20 years ago, and matching up perfectly to other verified signatures from the time. And he wants us to think that despite being handed over to Congress by Epstein’s estate, and despite being in a disgusting book full of obnoxious praise and sexual innuendo written by people who have confirmed they contributed to it, that he had nothing to do with it and it’s not from him.

Essentially, just like the Obama birth announcements of 1961, Trump wants us to believe that someone planted that cartoon and signature 22 years ago just so it could be unearthed by Democrats and the media to smear him. It’s all a conspiracy – hopelessly convoluted, entirely pointless, and defying all available facts and logic. It requires nothing other than belief, and will be believed only by those who wish it to be true.

This is how stupid Trump and his minions in the White House, GOP, and right wing media arm all think you are. They need you to believe that the thing for which overwhelming evidence exists and which has no conceivable way to fake does not exist and is fake. Trump’s denial does nothing but bring up more questions, none of which have good answers. If Trump didn’t do it, who did? Was it faked two decades ago or now? Why would Epstein’s estate hang on to a fake? Or conversely, why would someone put a fake into a birthday book which was exceedingly and disgustingly real?

There will never be any answers to these questions because they aren’t real questions that anyone would ask. The only evidence the card is fake is that Donald Trump keeps saying it’s fake. For most, that will never be enough. For a few, it will be the only thing that matters. So you keep saying it’s fake, keep changing the subject to literally anything else, and repeat it often enough to ride out the controversy.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is whether conspiracy gurus actually believe the things they say, or whether it’s all part of their grift. It’s always hard to answer, and I usually say that conspiratorial beliefs are often an extension of things the person already believes, just taken to irrational extremes. Those extremes are often driven by commerce, since conspiracism is a lucrative industry. But sometimes they’re driven by self-preservation.

Trump, presumably, knows that he drew and signed that card for Jeffrey Epstein. And while the people around him are dimwitted, incurious, sycophantic, and fairly evil; they’re not complete idiots. They almost certainly know that the simplest explanation for the cartoon isn’t a decades-long conspiracy, but that Trump drew a doodle of a naked young woman with no arms and wrote a poem about the “wonderful secret” he and Jeffrey Epstein share.

And that’s why they’re saying it’s fake. Because if they admitted it’s real for any reason then they have to answer the next logical questions. Even Trump’s usual pivot of “yeah I did it, so what” can do nothing other than harm him and the GOP, and open up glaring weak spots to be pounced on.

What is the “wonderful secret” Trump and Epstein shared? What were the “things they have in common?” What does “enigmas never age” mean? What happened “the last time” Trump saw Epstein?

Those are questions Trump and his bunker-mates would rather eat glass than face up to. Their answers might reveal truly horrifying things about the relationship the two men had, what they did together, and what they knew about each other. They might cast the President of the United States in such a foul and sick light that it might not be recoverable for the GOP.

Sure, Trump has survived everything anyone has ever thrown at him, but the rest of the Republican Party don’t have that invisible shield. What Republican member of Congress wants to face their constituents and have to answer questions about potential horrible acts their leader did to children alongside a billionaire pedophile two decades ago?

There is nothing to be gained for anyone around Trump in telling the truth about Epstein.

So they just lie. Over and over and over. And they think you’re dumb enough to either believe it, or be so frustrated with their lies that you drop the matter and move on.

Conspiracist belief flourishes when the lie becomes more palatable than the truth. And there is no truth less palatable to Donald Trump and his acolytes than Trump being close friends and sharing “wonderful secrets” with Jeffrey Epstein. And so the lie will flourish. Because the truth can never be acknowledged by the people who need to hold Trump up as a paragon of virtue and success. They need the lie.

Even if we all know it’s true.