Category: 2024 election

Are the Conspiracy Theorists Still Winning?

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!

Using the 100 day mark of a presidency as a measuring stick for accomplishments only dates back to the first FDR administration, when Roosevelt mentioned it during a July 1933 radio address. Nonetheless, it’s become the marker to measure how much a president has gotten done in their first 3+ months in office – or, if you’re Donald Trump, how much you’ve broken and gutted.

Trump has been doing a blitz of incoherent and insane interviews to mark his first 100 days in office, which I won’t bother rehashing. But I did think it was a good opportunity to follow up on the first piece I wrote after he won the 2024 election, called “The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now.” In it, I wrote about how the right wing cranks and influencers who propelled Trump to a second victory should be prepared for some amount of disappointment as Trump loses interest in their desires to “reveal everything” and bring “the bad guys” to justice.

I made a few broad predictions of what I thought might happen in those spheres in a second Trump term, so I figured 100 days was a good time to check in and see what I got right and wrong. I generally am not the biggest fan of trying to predict what’s to come with Trump, since it’s so often impossible to get any handle on what he’s serious about and what’s just his verbal broke fire hydrant of nonsense. But having lived in these worlds for a while, I feel like I have a decent sense of what matters and what’s just wishful thinking when it comes to conspiracy theorists and Trump.

So how’d I do?

Trump won by exploiting the Appeal to Fear and Appeal to Tradition

This wasn’t a prediction as much as it was a statement on the logical fallacies and psychological triggers Trump exploited to win the election. And given Trump’s relentless fearmongering about Venezuelan gangs, MS-13, immigrant terrorists pouring over the border in carbombs full of fentanyl, and the completely ridiculous idea that if we don’t launch some sort of insane trade war with China then our economy is doomed, I’d say we’re in for a lot more of this.

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

Once again, more of a statement than a prediction. And yeah, we’re all pretty much conspiracy theorists now – both left and right.

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

The biggest conspiracy theories come out of either unexpected traumas or personal/national failures. It’s harder to create conspiracy theories when everything is going great, eggs costs pennies, we’re all rich, and our enemies are quaking in fear. When that DOESN’T happen, you get conspiracy theories. Recall that QAnon only emerged in October of 2017, and gained popularity because it offered an explanation for why Trump wasn’t accomplishing what he promised he would – he was, it was just happening secretly.

What we have seen is the “big week ahead” relentless goalpost moving of QAnon applied to many of those lofty campaign promises Trump made. Sure, some of them he kept – but they were slam dunks that he could carry out via executive order, like slashing DEI or “getting boys out of girls sports,” whatever that means.

But many more have been retconned or can-kicked down the road, with lofty achievements meant to happen days or even hours after inauguration now on much longer timelines, with no explanation given for the change. Remember how Trump said he’d end the war in Ukraine before he was even inaugurated? Turns out he was “speaking figuratively” when he said that. Trump’s promise to enact massive, sweeping tariffs on day one? It’s been back and forth for months on who we’re slapping tariffs on, with a constant drumbeat of pauses and trial periods making it nearly impossible to know what’s happening. The promises of near-instant wealth and prosperity have been replaced with warnings of “short-term pain” while the “cheap wealth” of the Biden administration is replaced with…something? And Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has turned himself into a cottage industry of moving the goalposts a few weeks or months or “soon” for the the point when the riches are going to start pouring in.

And all those other promises about ending taxes on tips and overtime, cutting electric bills in half, immediately bring food prices way down, make IVF free, and everything else? Most have either made only incremental progress or have been airbrushed out of existence.

So who needs a new QAnon when you can just use the old QAnon to make everything seem like it’s going great?

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

I whiffed on this one, as Trump immediately pardoned all 1,600 January 6th participants. To add insult to national humiliation, he’s considering some sort of reparations fund for the “hostages” who were just peacefully protesting by smashing windows and beating up cops. I thought he’d pardon some, but that it wasn’t politically useful to issue pardons to some of the worst offenders of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. Many, naturally, have continued committing crimes, and one’s already been shot dead by police. Very fine people, indeed.

American will not be “made healthy again”

So far, so good. RFK Jr. has gone on a wild spree of undoing NIH recommendations, gutting government health services, touting useless alternatives to vaccination, promising that he’ll uncover the “real cause” of autism by September (which, of course, he’s already kicked down the road for another six months), and, most troublingly, has spoken of creating a national registry for autistic children. Because nothing bad happens when you put “undesirable” people on a list for a leader obsessed with genetics and eugenics.

Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk and RFK Jr. might splinter

Kennedy is still 100% licking the boot, but Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome and might be on the way out, as he looks to be leaving the administration soon to attempt to prop up the flailing husk of his car company. Stories have broken of shouting matches in the Oval between Musk and various Trump officials, and Musk was all set to get a classified briefing on China before Trump stepped in. The days when Musk followed Trump around like a puppy, while wearing his young son as a hat, seem to have ended.

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

Too early to tell, though I’m noticing a distinct lack of “Trump is going to prison” wishful thinking on liberal social media, which is a good sign.

Trump will disappoint his followers by not releasing any information of value about Epstein or JFK

This wasn’t on my initial predictions list, but I did write another piece about Trump keeping his conspiracy theorist followers on the hook with lofty promises to release classified information about some of the most hot-button plots in the conspiracy sphere, as well as unspecified “UFO videos” and 9/11 files.

Trump did release a large tranche of files on the Kennedy assassination, though JFK scholars immediately pointed out that they revealed little of note that was new about the assassination itself, only illuminating some minor mysteries about Oswald and CIA methods.

But UFO videos? Nothing. 9/11 files? Nothing so far. And the purported release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein was a total disaster, with a splashy event where MAGA influencers were given binders supposedly full of the darkest secrets the financier kept turning into a meme-generating farce. It took hours for MAGA-world to declare the binders had nothing of value in them, accuse AG Pam Bondi of running a coverup, and mocking the redacted and useless documents they got. Despite Bondi claiming to have thousands of agents working 24/7 redacting and digitizing Epstein docs, nothing has come out since then.

Maybe it’ll all come out in September along with the real cause of autism and halved electric bills.

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.

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.

The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Ooh baby, that’s hard to change
I can’t tell them how to feel
Some get stoned, some get strange
But sooner or later, it all gets real
Walk on, walk on – Neil Young, “Walk On” (1974)

We had a presidential election. Donald Trump won. Again. This time, by a lot.

I’m not an expert in political trends and forces, and I don’t have the training to dig through the data and explain why it happened or what Democrats could have done to stop it. The country has veered hard to the right for a lot of reasons, some economic, some based in fear, and some just because America veers to the right when things get tough. Books will be written about why Trump won and Harris lost, and I’m not the person to write them.

But I am something of an expert on disinformation and conspiracy theories. This was an election that was utterly infused with them, just as Trump’s entire political persona is based in them. I’ve written a lot, and will write more, about how we got here. But I want to take a little time while my mind is still a sleep-deprived jumble to write about what might happen in the conspiracist sphere during a second Trump term.

Trump won by exploiting the Appeal to Fear and Appeal to Tradition

While Trump’s 2024 campaign was sloppy, undisciplined, and borderline incompetent at times; he had a message and he stuck to it. The message was that bad people are out to get you, things used to be better, and I will fix it. He appealed to the fear and nostalgia of his audience, and it worked. Migrants will rape you unless you vote for Trump. Want eggs to be cheap like they used to be? Vote for Trump. It’s simplistic, but it works. And it will always be more compelling than trying to explain that no, you won’t be raped by a migrant and eggs are more expensive for a variety of complex reasons. Fear and nostalgia are always going to be powerful weapons to use against people looking for answers and certainty. Which, to be fair, can be pretty much everyone.

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

I don’t know that conspiracy theories have ever not been part of our life, but the public’s acceptance of them and feeling of safety in spreading them is a Trump-era phenomenon. The few Republicans who openly embraced conspiracy theories usually lost badly in elections, and became figures of mockery. With Trump in office again, and taking a host of conspiracy theorists and disinformation peddlers with him, we will be inundated with lies, garbage, hoaxes, fakery, and conspiracy theories. It’s never going away, and it’s going to keep getting worse. We have to know how to spot it, how to push back, and understand why it’s so powerful for getting a message across.

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

Having said all that, I can see a falloff in content from some of the big names in the conspiracy world. The reason is that inherently, conspiracy theories come from people who don’t have power. Trump has power, and will likely be surrounded by toadies who will do whatever he wants. Not only that, but Trump is entering office a second time in a very different environment than 2016. That was an election he squeaked his way to winning, against an opponent who had a thirty year industry of bullshit working against her, and with a cloud of scandal due to Russian interference. This time, Trump is coming to office with something close to a mandate, including a likely win in the popular vote. There’s no “steal” to stop, no “Russiagate” to engineer disinformation about, and no need for something like QAnon to explain why Trump isn’t “locking her up.” The deep state, it would seem, has been broken. The urgency for creating conspiracy theories won’t be there – unless Trump’s agenda bogs down and he doesn’t do certain things his conspiracist followers expect. Then the conspiracy theories will flow.

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

One thing his flock absolutely expects are large scale pardons of those in prison or with felonies for their actions on January 6th, 2021. Obviously, Trump will make the federal charges against himself go away. And he’s said he was going to pardon the “political prisoners” of January 6th and do it on “day one.” But why bother pardoning people like Proud Boys head Enrique Tarrio or chief Oathkeeper Stewart Rhodes? He has no use for these people anymore, there’s nothing they can do for him, and he never lifted a finger to defend them or pay for their defense in the first place. All they can do is eventually turn on him or blab to the media, becoming one more nuisance to deal with. Ultimately, Trump doesn’t need the Oathkeepers or Proud Boys anymore. He has a mandate from the American people, so why bother cleaning up any loose ends from the past election? Don’t be surprised if Trump lets these people rot.

American will not be “made healthy again”

Trump has promised to allow unelected bureaucrat health czar Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to “go wild” on lunatic public health initiatives that come straight out of InfoWars: removing fluoride from tap water, “banning” vaccines, and presumably waging a holy war against seed oils. I don’t expect any of this to happen in a meaningful way. Kennedy himself has merely said he would “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” a recommendation that said water systems would likely be free to ignore. It’s also fairly ludicrous to imagine Trump “banning” vaccination, given that there are no federal vaccination mandates for school attendance. It’s entirely a state issue. The best Kennedy likely could do is try to countermand CDC recommendations on vaccination – which is certainly bad, but nothing that’s going to send parents over the Canadian border looking for bootleg polio shots. Of course, another global pandemic could hit, and Kennedy could be right there making sure to hamstring vaccination efforts for that, but he’s already been doing that for COVID.

Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk and RFK Jr. might splinter

It might be a long time before we know how important Elon Musk’s money and disinformation spreading were to getting Trump back in office. But while Trump has touted Musk as a czar of cutting the government’s budget to go along with RFK Jr. being the czar of making us healthy again, don’t be surprised if this strange alliance shatters fairly quickly. These are three men with huge egos who are used to getting what they want – and only one will be the president. Trump has feuded with both before, and if things go south with “banning vaccinations” or Musk’s “Department Of Government Efficiency,” the knives might come out. Like the J6ers rotting in prison, Trump finds people useful until they’re no longer useful. Or Musk might just get bored and wander off to go dig tunnels or play video games.

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

This is more of a personal grievance for me, but my sincere hope is that if there is a “resistance” to a second Trump term, it’s based on facts and organizing, and not unbridled hopium and grift. Any liberal content creator who spent the last eight years screaming about how “the walls are closing in” on “the former guy” who is “going to prison” because “Mueller’s got this” should be shamed and mocked to the point of digging a hole and crawling into it. Sure, I believed Harris would win and that Trump was running a tired and sloppy campaign. She didn’t win, and I can own it. We move forward in the world that exists. The idea that magical sealed indictments will finally send Trump to oblivion should be well-understood by now to be fiction. It always was.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a dark and strange time for America. We have to stick together, stick to the facts, and try to stay as hopeful as we can. Every day he’s in office is one day closer to him no longer being in office.