Category: 2024 election

Eight 2024 Election Catchphrases I Never Want to Hear Again

Mike Rothschild

The 2024 election has been going on for about 300 years, and also for two months. It will never end, and it will also end, but in a way that might never end. If that doesn’t make any sense, welcome to the 2024 election. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

As elections drag on, they tend to pick up certain catchphrases or ideas that define them in the years and decades to come. Long after we forget how many electoral votes the candidates won, or where their polling outpaced or underestimated their final outcome, we remember a few things they said, or something that happened that defined the race in its final moments.

There was the “giant sucking sound” that Texas billionaire Ross Perot claimed Americans would hear as our jobs fled south to Mexico due to the NAFTA trade agreement. Al Gore claimed up and down that Social Security would be protected by a “lockbox” if he won in 2000, with George W. Bush’s equally memorable reply that Gore’s lockbox was comprised of “fuzzy math.” You could gab endlessly about Mitt Romney’s car elevator and “47% tape,” Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, Bill Clinton not inhaling while wearing “usually briefs,” and on and on. Some memorable election catchphrases weren’t even things the candidate said – like Sarah Palin cheerfully declaring that she could “see Russia from my house,” which Tina Fey actually said on Saturday Night Live.

Because Donald Trump has been running for president for over a decade, and this election for two years, and because every moment of the campaign is captured and distributed on social media, we have an endless stream of such phrases and moments – things that will define the 2024 election and which will make little or no sense in the future. And since the election has become all-consuming and endless, we’re all getting sick of them and will never, ever want to hear them again.

Here are some 2024 election catchphrases and memes that nobody will ever want to hear again.

“They’re Eating the Dogs!” – the moral panic that Haitian asylum seekers living in Springfield, OH were stealing and eating the cats and dogs of local residents went from something you’d see in a chain email to being screamed at maximum volume by Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris. Yes, it’s funny and insane, but it’s also a deeply racist and harmful trope that evokes past canards like the blood libel. This isn’t happening, it never happened, it’s hurting the people of Springfield, it was always a racist accusation made to make the Biden administration look like it was importing criminal lunatics, and we should stop talking about it after the election.

“The Weave” – In September, as it started to become clear that Trump was having difficulty sustaining coherent thoughts and speaking in complete sentences, he tried to rebrand his incoherent rambling as purposeful. He even gave it a name, calling it “the weave.” He would then work in a mention of “the weave” as part of his style, veering from topic to topic because he had a lot of wisdom to impart and couldn’t be constrained by the usual way losers finished one thought before starting another.

“I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,'” he told a rapt audience in Pennsylvania. It’s not brilliant, nor is it a way that people talk when they want to convey something important. It could be a sign of encroaching cognitive failure, though Trump refuses to release any sort of medical records to confirm it. And it’s not especially endearing in someone who is supposed to negotiate with high-level leaders and keep America’s nuclear arsenal safe.

“Make America Healthy Again” – remember when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump and it was supposed to be a “unity ticket” meant to rid the country of toxic food and chemicals? Yeah, nobody else does either. The “Kennedy bounce” didn’t materialize, and the “MAHA movement” lasted about three minutes before everyone remembered Trump is a fast food addict who thinks humans are born with a finite about of energy.

“Kamala’s internals are cooked” – During the final stretch of the election, every time the Harris campaign would announce an endorsement, event, or new policy; a legion of Elon Musk bootlickers with 300 followers and a paid-for check mark would emerge declaring that her handlers had secret internal polling that showed she was losing badly. It’s certainly possible that she has internal polling that shows her losing, but if she does, I wouldn’t count on “MaximusMAGA2323493” with 167 followers and paid verification to know about it. Polling has gotten fairly unreliable in general, and claiming you know anything about proprietary polling a candidate has done for themselves is just stupid.

Betting markets – Betting markets like Polymarket that let you place wagers on who will win the election are not polls. They are easily manipulated and unregulated dark money black holes where anonymous figures can dump crypto into changing the public perception of a race by making it look like one candidate is doing well, and another is crashing. They are not polls, and they probably shouldn’t be legal in the US.

“Dark MAGA” – Please, God, enough.

“She never even worked at McDonalds” – Trump has spent months obsessing over Kamala Harris claiming to have worked at McDonalds in her youth. Like most short-term teenage jobs from decades ago, there’s little evidence of her having worked there, but she talks about it a lot, and there’s no reason to think she’s lying. I’ve worked in jobs as a high-school and college student where there’s probably no evidence I was ever there, and nobody I worked with would remember me. I still worked those jobs. And Americans struggling to pay their bills don’t give a damn what Trump thinks about Kamala’s summer gig working the french fry machine.

“The Former Guy” – this one started well before the 2024 election as a nickname that Joe Biden gave to Trump in February 2021. It’s understandable that Biden would want to put distance between his new presidency and the Trump years, choosing to focus on his own accomplishments rather than simply talking about Trump. And it makes sense that the nickname, often written just as “TFG” would take off on social media. After all, who wants to talk about “the former guy” when we can talk about the current guy? The problem is that Trump was never actually “the former guy.” Even after leaving office, he was the de facto head of the Republican Party, orchestrated the acts of Congressional Republicans from far away, and was always the presumptive nominee to run again.

Even if he loses, there’s a decent chance he runs yet again in 2028. And even if he doesn’t, he’s still going to exert total control of the Party until he’s no longer among us. So calling him “former guy” is not actually accurate or amusing. Sadly, until further notice, he’s just “the guy.”

Or at least until we come up with another annoying nickname for him.

We’re Drowning in a Deluge of Nonsense, So Let’s Buy a Rope

Mike Rothschild

Hurricane Milton has died off after heading out into the Atlantic Ocean and dissipating. The damage appears to be bad, but not quite as bad as a category 5 hurricane might have inflicted, because people had time to prepare. Those in the path of the monster had time to flee, while those outside it had time to stock up on the supplies they’d need to ride it out.

The damage in North Carolina and Georgia from Hurricane Helene is far worse than Milton, at least so far, due to the storm maintaining it power while moving inland after striking Florida. But at least some people there had some time to do what they could to evacuate or get ready.

In the midst of these two awful storms there was another deluge. Not one that destroyed property or flooded homes, but one that imperiled people and hampered the response and recovery nonetheless. It imbued many survivors with a sense of hopelessness, and inflamed their paranoia and suspicion. And despite the certainty that it would take shape in at least some form, virtually nobody was ready for it.

We weren’t ready for the storm conspiracy theories, outright lying, grift, emotional manipulation through AI, antisemitic bullshit, and misleading viral nonsense that followed just behind the two hurricanes. We weren’t ready for people invent new realities out of thin air, realities where FEMA was blockading aid and confiscating property, where terrified little girls were left adrift with their puppies, where government weather machines were steering the storm into its most destructive path, and where the executive branch was too busy vacationing and appearing on sex advice podcasts to do anything to help the desperate Americans screaming for a lifeline.

That’s the reality that hit America and the world like a ton of storm-tossed bricks over the last few weeks. Never mind that none of this happened, and all of it was inflammatory bullshit spread by right wing politicians and social media influencers to help get Donald Trump over the finish line. For so many desperate Americans it felt true. It was true to them. So it was true.

After spending a decade writing about conspiracy theories at a time when conspiracism has become a primary driver of politics and commerce, it wasn’t surprising to me why this happened.

Some of it is definitely because of the election, given that Helene hit two swing states that Trump desperately needs to win. So if it takes exploiting the damage done by a storm to make Kamala Harris look out of touch and unsympathetic, then that’s what it takes, casualties be damned. It’s also about climate change denial, something that the far right has practiced for decades and that’s increasingly hard to maintain as the climate quickly and drastically revolts against us.

But more than that, I wasn’t surprised it happened because it happens every time. And it happens for the same reasons that drive conspiracy theories about everything else: from mass shootings and disasters to COVID and 9/11, all the way back to the Great Fire of Rome. Something outsized and destructive happens, and we grope in the darkness for information. Rapidly moving events defy easy explanation, and we’re desperate to know why it’s happening, what’s really going on, and who did it to us. Social media and the internet didn’t create any of this, it only sped it up and lowered the cost of entry. So the new problem is the same problem as the old problem, just faster and dumber.

That said, if the new problem is the old problem, why was nobody ready for the old problem? We know it’s going to happen because it always happens. So why were we unprepared for it happening? Why were the government agencies, news outlets, social media giants, state and local officials, and weather experts all so completely blindsided?

FEMA wasn’t ready to counter the fake our out of context AI slop images and stories showing it not only wasn’t doing its job, but actively making recovery worse.. Politicians at every level weren’t ready to counter the claims that they were heartless and cruel in leaving victims to die. Social media wasn’t ready to counter the insanity coming from its owners and and most prolific users. Media outlets weren’t ready to talk clearly and accurately about the deluge of conspiracy theories and the danger they presented. First responders, being a little busy doing their jobs, understandably weren’t ready or able to deal with the onslaught of nonsense about what they were or weren’t doing.

Obviously, you can’t prepare for what you don’t know is coming, or what you can’t conceptualize. But by now, can’t we see this coming? Why can’t we look at a looming event and ask ourselves “how can this be misinterpreted and weaponized against us?” It happens over and over, with every disaster and mass shooting, every “once in a century” event and election.

So why aren’t we ready?

For one, disinformation will always travel faster than information. It takes no time to make something up and share it, but it takes time to prove that the made up thing is made up. And at that point, it’s already out there. Beyond that, some people and industries still exist in a world where things on the internet aren’t part of the real world and don’t matter, and if you ignore them and don’t give them oxygen, they’ll die off. We know by now that this isn’t true, and that conspiracy theories allowed to fester with nobody paying attention will just grow in darkness. But this is a big shift for many longstanding industries, particularly government, to make. And some people may not want to seem overly approving of what looks like censorship. Government can’t even begin to play a part in solving the problem until it’s done in a way that doesn’t seem like an Orwellian disinformation ministry that wants to control your thoughts. Somehow, we’ve managed to regulate TV and radio, but the internet continues to be the Deadwood of media – no law at all.

Obviously, we’re weeks away from an election that has already seen a frenzy of lies unlike any other election in world history. And it’s only going to get more insane, an opera of countless voices all screaming lies at the top of their lungs into giant microphones that drown everything else out. We have no idea what exactly is going to drive the bullshit purveyors and their legions of believers, because it hasn’t happened yet. But it will happen – and it will be outrageously bad.

What can we do to prepare? And what can we do to prepare for what happens after that, for what can’t be known or even reliably imagined?

The first thing is that we, as people, can take ourselves off the chessboard. Don’t share bullshit. Don’t share it even to call it bullshit. If you have to, at least take a screenshot and mark clearly that it’s bullshit. Nobody’s perfect, but we can all do more of this. Call out your friends and loved ones sharing bullshit, quietly and in a way that’s firm but not insulting. Be the firebreak.

But this is a much bigger problem, one that has infected every industry and profession. So a big problem takes a big solution. And big solutions cost big money.

Every industry should know that disinformation and lies are a threat to their existence, and open their wallets to fight back against it.

Government agencies should have people on staff who understand how this stuff works, how to push back against it in a way that doesn’t infringe of free speech, and why it’s so bad for public health. Law firms and courts should hire journalists or experts (many of whom are out of work due to the proliferation of AI slop stories) to point out instances of defamation and harassment in the aftermath of epochal events, and be prepared to move against them quickly. Every news outlet everywhere of any size should have someone whose job it is to immediately point out when something viral is false and what’s true instead, and spend the money to get it out there fast.

And private citizens should have the resources and education to understand how conspiracy theories function, why they are effective, and what to look for when someone is attempting to manipulate them with bullshit. Yes people want the truth, but they don’t want to be lied to or made to feel stupid. And nobody wants to feel like they’re a potential victim of going down a rabbit hole and never coming out – which virtually everyone, regardless of party affiliation, is.

All of this is time-consuming. It’s not all going to work, and some conspiracy theories will always get through. And of course, all of it costs a lot of money to do it well and professionally. The far right is excellent at spending money on and making money off disinformation – and we have to get as good at doing it for the truth. If we want to be prepared for the next storm of bullshit, we have to spend some money on supplies. We have to be ready for what’s going to happen, even if we don’t know exactly what form it will take or where it will come from. When a hurricane hits, do you buy bottled water or do you put out a bucket and hope for the best?

You buy bottled water. You make the investment. We are drowning in a deluge of conspiracism, paranoia, and absolutely untethered realities. Let’s buy some rope and pull ourselves out.

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Trump and the “Everything Must Go!” Campaign

Mike Rothschild

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I have a theory about Donald Trump and the 2024 election.

In his roughly 700 years of presidential campaigning, Trump has always done things a little differently. He shunned the retail politics and door knocking of past establishment campaigns in favor of a media strategy that revolved around building himself up as a cult of personality figure. That means countless rallies where he offered up his rambling thoughts to adoring crowds, fawning interviews from bootlickers about how great he is, and opening multiple revenue streams to keep his flock sending in the cash to help fund either the campaign or his own legal issues.

It worked in 2016 because nobody had ever seen anything like it, the media had no idea how to cover it, and because he was running against a candidate in Hillary Clinton that the far right hate machine had spent three decades claiming was the spawn of Satan. It didn’t work in 2020, and the Trump inner circle was so shocked that they took their disbelief and used it to fuel a coup attempt.

There are still six weeks until the election, but from most of the evidence we’re seeing, it’s not going to work this time either. Kamala Harris is polling well nationally, and has small but consistent leads in the states she needs to have leads in. She’s crushing Trump in fundraising, Trump’s get out the vote strategy is negligible, numerous high-profile Republicans have either failed to endorse Trump or outright endorsed Harris, he’s getting dragged down by horrible down ballot candidates in states he needs to win, he’s doing far fewer rallies and far more podcast interviews to a walled-off constituency of young men, his lackies are laying the groundwork to contest close elections and convince Nebraska to pull a last second rule change that would net him one electoral vote, and his fundraising efforts are much more centered around filling up his own coffers rather than anything to do with the Republican Party.

These are not the actions and attitudes of a campaign that believes it’s going to win. And my theory is that everyone in the Trump campaign, including Trump himself, have given up on believing they’re going to win. Instead, they’re running the “everything must go” campaign, hoping to wheeze over the finish line by making grandiose promises Trump can’t possibly keep, making as much money for themselves as possible, and sewing the seeds of doubt over Harris winning fairly. A Harris win might not result in another January 6th, but it could definitely be the foundation of a lucrative next stage for the MAGA movement – one not built around Trump as a politician, but as the elder statesman of a Republican Party built in his image, and one that features any number of acolytes fighting it out for his approval to take the mantle in 2028 and pretend that the last two elections were stolen.

Trump himself has more or less given up on campaigning with any kind of rigor or consistency. Whereas in 2016 he was having rallies once a day, sometimes twice, he’s barely having them twice a week now. His campaign has said that they aren’t necessary at this point, and his supporters will point to him nearly having been assassinated at one in July. But the decline started before then, and it’s easy to see why he’s no longer having many – he’s considerably older and less energetic, they aren’t as well attended, aren’t covered with the attention they used to draw, and Trump supporters who do attend tend to leave early. Why wouldn’t they, given that he’s been running for president for a decade and has nothing left to say.

More and more, Trump’s campaign rhetoric depends on making either ridiculous accusations (“Haitian immigrants are eating pets,” etc) or more recently on him promising truly ludicrous things that are never going to happen. Recent Trump rallies and interviews have promised 50% cuts to peoples’ energy bills and car insurance, food prices dropping from massive taxes on imported food, child care costs dropping through tariffs, IVF being free, removal of taxes on tips and overtime, credit card interest rates capped at 10%, restoring the uncapped state and local income tax deduction that Trump himself capped with his 2017 tax cuts, and most recently, a manned mission to Mars by 2028.

While a few of these are decent ideas – the no tax on tips thing has been kicked around Republican circles for a while – most of them are impossible because Trump has no power to enact them. Moreover, these are the sorts of “free goodies” giveaways that Mitt Romney built his 2012 campaign around fighting against, and which Republicans in Congress would fight to their last breath. Trump loses nothing by promising them, because they’re impossible promises to keep.

But they’re a way to get people who don’t understand how anything works interested in Trump, because hey, who doesn’t want their credit card interest rates capped? The credit card industry doesn’t want it, and that’s because it would essentially destroy anyone’s ability to get credit unless they already have sparkling credit scores. But if it’s never going to happen, who cares?

While the bossman is out promising every Trump voter a free TV and a subscription to Sports Illustrated, the rest of his core ticket is out there hitting the bricks and winning hearts and minds, right? No. JD Vance is still embroiled in the Haitian pet eating hoax fiasco while continuing to humiliate himself in TV hits. Melania Trump is focused solely on shilling her memoir, and has made just a few appearances for Trump, at several of which she was personally paid for. And Usha Vance? Never heard of her.

But if Melania is getting paid for the campaign, then it’s peanuts compared to what Donald is taking in personally. And that’s where the other part of the “everything must go” campaign really comes into play. Trump has spent an extraordinary amount of time shilling products with his name and face on them, with the money going not to the campaign, the RNC, or anyone else who might use it to help get Republicans elected. Instead the money just goes to him, presumably to spend on legal fees, or whatever else he feels like buying.

Just in the past few weeks, Trump launched a crypto currency that his two adult sons will run, announced $100 Trump-branded silver coins that are only worth $30, and published a glossy photo book of his time in the White House that includes a disturbingly high number of pictures of Trump with Kim Jong Un. All of this goes on the same groaning merch table that features Trump Bibles, Trump sneakers, and all of the other Trump branded products that the man has sold over the years. Not to mention Melania’s memoir, which is currently in the top 100 of books on Amazon ahead of its publication date in October.

None of the money from any of this shit is going to the campaign. Trump’s revocable trust owns the coins and sneakers, the photo book is being published by Don Jr.’s company, and the crypto is the product of a fly by night company called World Liberty Financial, about which nobody seems to know anything. While Trump has, in the past, claimed his campaign is self-funded, that’s never really been true, and he didn’t even make the same pledge for 2024. And there’s no indication that any of the money from any of these ventures is going to his cash-strapped and increasingly doomed bid for another term.

Beyond the low-effort campaigning and obvious last-second cash grabbing, there’s just the fact that none of these people seem confident at all. Trump allies are already screwing around with vote counting and election administration laws, while Trump has relentlessly whined that undocumented immigrants are going to vote in massive numbers to get Harris over the top and that mail in voting is going to be rigged. In a recent interview with a fawning antivaccine sycophant, he seemed positively morose as he declared that if he lost again in 2024 he wouldn’t run for a 4th time. Where is the fight from Mr. Fight Fight Fight? Where is the confidence from the world’s most insanely overconfident man? Nowhere.

Sure, maybe all of this doesn’t mean anything and Trump will pull the same inside straight he pulled in 2016 and win. The polls are still close in every swing state, and it’s not as if anyone in Trump’s core of cultists is going to walk away from him. Hell, they love the grift and the scamming and the ridiculous promises. Trump could win the most low-effort and scam-laden campaign in history simply because the Electoral College is stupid and overvalues some voters and undervalues others.

But that’s starting to look slightly less likely. And Trump and his people aren’t stupid. They have access to internal polling and proprietary data, and if they really are losing ground in key swing states, they’ll know it. And rather than fight for it, they seem to have resigned themselves to this being their last grab at the wingnut welfare spout. So you can promise people Mars and free stuff if you don’t ever intend to keep it. And you can sell coins and crypto if you have fans who don’t care where the money goes.

Ultimately, an “everything must go” campaign ends with everything having gone. And when it does, when there are no more coins to hawk or crypto to shill, you can always just light a match and burn it all down.

What Will the 2024 Big Lie Look Like?

Mike Rothschild

No matter the outcome of the 2024 election, Donald Trump won’t accept it. If he wins, he’ll claim he won more states and votes than he actually did. We know he’ll do this because he already did it in 2016. And if he loses, he’ll claim he won more states and votes than he actually did. We know he’ll do this because he did it in 2020, and hasn’t shut up about it since, even claiming in the recent debate with Kamala Harris that his admission that he “lost the election by a whisker” was “sarcasm.”

So no matter what happens, Trump will set himself up as the victim of a vast conspiracy to cheat and defraud him. But what will the 2024 stolen election industry look like if Trump loses to the vice president? Who will be its major players? How will it take root in the fever dream imagination of the MAGA movement, and how long will it take? And who will be the unfortunate victim of their unhinged and violent conspiracy theories?

Obviously, we won’t know most of the answers to this until it already happens. But there are many reasons to believe that whatever form the Big Lie of 2024 takes, it will look somewhat different and have at least some different players than that of 2020. Of course, the optimal outcome would be that Harris wins so convincingly that other than a few Trump bitter-enders, most of the influencers and election officials who pushed the 2020 Big Lie will decide it’s not worth it and move on. Ideally, there would be no Big Lie.

But that’s probably not going to happen. So here are some ways the stolen election discourse of 2024 might be different from 2020:

Donald Trump won’t be in power

This is the most obvious change from 2020 to 2024. Taking power is harder than keeping power, and Trump doesn’t actually have any legal power right now. Yes, he commands a cult of personality that has millions of members who will be angry and spoiling for a fight should he lose the election. But the Stop the Steal movement was hatched and plotted at the White House. It had the force of the office of the president behind it. Trump had the right as president to speak to the rallygoers on January 6th. And if he wanted to, he could have invoked the Insurrection Act and ordered armed soldiers into the streets.

Other than Secret Service protection, Trump is a private citizen right now. He can’t call up the National Guard, he can’t declare martial law, he can’t use federal officials as weapons, and he can’t just jump on the phone with anyone he wants and expect them to do his bidding. Trump can complain all he wants, he can rally armed MAGA lunatics to DC, he might even be able to benefit from sympathetic officials at some level – but ultimately, he has the same official power that most of the rest of us do, which is nothing.

Nobody will be surprised

America had never had a transfer of power from one party to another disrupted the way it was in 2020. When Trump disputed the results and his supporters started the legwork of trying to find which states had cheated, it was genuinely shocking for people who hadn’t been paying attention to conspiracist movements and media, because it was so novel. And Democrats were slow to react, feeling like much of the complaining was sour grapes or designed to make money for influencers. They were, of course. But they were also a concerted effort to throw out the votes of the people – which hadn’t happened in modern American history.

This time, nobody will be surprised. We will all be able to see it coming, know exactly what Trump’s inner circle will be doing, and try to put roadblocks in front of them. The Harris campaign has already added a slew of top-tier election lawyers to prepare for the bogus audits, phony lawsuits, attempts to get fraudulent slates of “alternate electors” sent to Congress, challenges to voter rolls, and intimidation from Trump loyalists. Dozens of lawsuits have already been filed either challenging eligibility or fighting back at those challenges, and Democrats are doing well in them. Nobody will be surprised this time when the peaceful transfer of power is threatened.

States where stolen election claims were loudest were flips in 2020

Looking back at 2020, the loudest outcries of fraud came in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. While there were also efforts to overturn the election in states like Colorado and Nevada, those five were the focus of more lawsuits, audits, conspiracy theories, and threats than any others. Why? because they all flipped from Republican to Democratic. Nobody should be shocked if those states go for Harris the same way they went for Biden. The only state with a real chance of flipping to Democrats this time is North Carolina – a state that’s already trending away from Republicans and where the GOP is running a Holocaust denying lunatic in a gubernatorial race they’re losing by as many as ten points, according to current polls. Certainly there will be audits and lawsuits and bellyaching if Harris wins North Carolina, but it’s not going to be shocking.

Polls are tightening in a few other Republican-dominated states, including Florida, but it’s unlikely they’ll go for Harris. If they do, expect a slew of false claims and conspiracy theories.

Many prominent stolen election advocates were ruined by lawsuits or indictments

Despite all of the noise and chaos of the Big Lie, the Stop the Steal movement really didn’t accomplish anything. It made some influencers a lot of money, but far more of them were ruined by it – and Trump still left office.

Close to 1,400 January 6th rioters have been charged in connection with the insurrection, with hundreds more likely to be charged. Many have gone to prison, and some still are there. Dozens of others, including Donald Trump himself, have been indicted for election fraud, tampering with voting machines, hacking, fake elector schemes, and other Stop the Steal related crimes. People have lost their jobs and their careers over their devotion to this dead-end movement. And many of the figureheads and funders of the movement have been financially ruined. Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones, and Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft have all declared bankruptcy. Mike Lindell is broke, while Fox News had to pay out three quarters of a billion dollars in damages to Dominion Voting System, and several other defamation lawsuits have settled as well. John Eastman and Lin Wood were disbarred for their roles in election fraud schemes, with many other attorneys who took on doomed election fraud cases sanctioned.

How many of them will take the risk this time? What news network will platform insane conspiracy theories about 2024 voting machine companies knowing years of litigation likely await them? What lawyer will file a bogus lawsuit in the service of Trump knowing they might lose their license because of it? Some will, of course. And there will likely be new Stop the Steal acolytes in 2024, looking for a chance at money and right wing fame by taking up Trump’s lost cause. But it seems reasonable that some of the figures who tried to undo Biden’s win in 2020 won’t want to take the professional and personal risk this time around – or if they want to, they won’t be able to.

Trump will be a two-time loser

Ultimately, the Stop the Steal movement was driven by the certainty that Donald Trump never loses, and when he does, it’s because someone else cheated. He’d spent a year preparing the ground to contest losing the election due to supposed fraud, cheating, dead voters, illegal immigrants voting, massive numbers of fake mail-in ballots, and a conspiracy by the Democratic Party. The QAnon movement had spent 2020 doing the same thing, and even using the same reasons. But if Trump loses again, he’ll have dropped (or been cheated out of) two elections in a row. At some point, you can only get fooled so many times. For a movement that extols winning, they will be a movement that can’t win anything.

Finally, Trump himself is diminished, a rambling and shambolic figure who can’t hold a crowd’s attention, can’t debate, can’t communicate clearly, and who is losing support even from fellow Republicans. His stories are boring and rote, his nicknames and attempts at humor are pathetic, and his entire affect is one of a man slowing down and losing the ability to command an audience. Stop the Steal was a concerted effort to put a losing president back into office using extralegal means and violence. The second time around, a lot of people just might not bother trying to prop up a guy who is so clearly on the downslope of life. Some will, of course. There are always those who prefer the park bench and the cyanide capsule to surrender and humiliation when the dictator falls. But it’s entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that much of the GOP will be glad to be rid of Trump – even if they can’t publicly admit it.

If that’s how it all plays out, we’ll all be better for it.

Busy Days at the Crap Factory

Mike Rothschild

To be on social media in the runup to the 2024 is to be engulfed in an ever-expanding extended universe of conspiracy theories, moral panics, culture war minutiae, disgusting accusations, and slow-rolling public breakdowns. And all of it is pushed by a rotating cast of grifters, influencers, pundits, politicians, and professional insane people. Many of them are being directly or indirectly paid by Russia, and they are designed to both terrify you and sell you various Trump-branded products.

Think of it as a giant factory that makes two things: things to be afraid of and things you can buy to deal with the things to be afraid of.

And the factory is busy. At this moment, right wing social media is in absolute lather about a couple of phony stories about Haitian immigrants in Ohio either killing and eating someone’s cat or grabbing random ducks and murdering them. There are memes all over nutjob twitter, and the insane story has moved all the way up the conservative grifter ladder to the point where vice presidential candidate JD Vance – no stranger to being the subject of false accusations – is sharing it. Obviously, they’re pinning the whole thing on Kamala Harris, because as vice president she’s made the horrific mistake of advocating for the humane treatment of Haitian refugees resettling in the US. What a monster.

The claim started off as two separate stories, one involving a random person at a city council meeting claiming he saw Haitians kidnapping (ducknapping?) local wild fowl and barbecuing them, the other a bizarre story about a Black woman being arrested for publicly killing and eating a neighborhood cat. From there, they got run through the crap machine to become two parts of a single story – one of Kamala-sponsored Haitians rampaging through Ohio killing and eating animals with impunity.

The story is absolute nonsense. The ducknapping hasn’t been proven to have taken place, and local police have said they have no evidence of it. And the cat-murder, while real, had nothing to do with a Haitian immigrant, and the woman involved is American – as proven by her voter registration records.

Nothing about this is true. It’s not even new to blame migrants for allegedly killing and/or eating pets. Almost exactly two years ago, not coincidentally right before the midterm election, Fox News breathlessly ran stories about migrants murdering pets in a Texas/Mexico border town – stories that local law enforcement confirmed were bogus. And every so often moral panics about Asian immigrants killing and eating American dogs “because they don’t know better” would make headlines, often turning isolated incidents into cultural-wide assaults on American values.

Fortunately, these sorts of folk devil outbreaks tend to sputter out as quickly as they arise. It’s like that by next week, this entire ridiculous story will have been forgotten. What’s not so fortunate is that it will have been replaced by something else just as horrible and racist and stupid. Probably multiple things.

Here is just a tiny sampling of the moral panics and conspiracy theories coming from the Fox News Cinematic Universe over the last few years, involving any number of absolutely dreadful and not real things like:

“Democratic states are passing laws that allow doctors to execute newborn babies if the mother decides to have a ninth-month abortion”

“Schools are performing gender transition surgery on minors without parents knowing it.”

“The state is going to come into my house and rip out my gas stove.“

“Heavily armed Venezuelan gangs are taking over entire apartment complexes and the liberal woke governments are just letting them do it – and your block is next!”

“You will be forced to drive an electric vehicle after the government mandates the confiscation of all gas powered cars.”

And on and on. These are just a few, if I go back even further, I could find dozens of examples of culture war nightmares and imaginary feuds that the crap factory has churned out, popularized, then watched disappear. Over the past few years, the list of things the far right has hated, feared, boycotted, demanded be stopped, cancelled, or demonized has gotten longer than a CVS receipt. Bud Light, the NFL, the Dr. Suess estate, Taylor Swift, Barbie, Black hobbits, Kathy Griffin, the green M&M putting pants on, Netflix, rainbow endcaps at Target, Starbucks, the hate and fear and panic never stop.

Some of them are laughable, like when Sean Hannity fans all decided that they had to destroy their expensive Keurig machines because of something about Roy Moore. But others are deadly serious, and two months before what promises to be one of the most contentious and potentially violent elections in US history, we have to err on the side of serious.

Like most conspiracy theories in general, culture war moral panics aren’t exactly made up, but based on real things that are then distorted and twisted into something totally unrecognizable. If something is entirely fake, it’s easy to poke a hole in it. But if it’s 2% real and 98% fake, then the believer can always rely on the 2% that’s real and demand “oh, so you’re saying {fill in the blank} isn’t real!?! DEBATE ME, BRO!” So many of these things have some foundation in reality, but not in the way far right media is claiming.

No, Haitian immigrants are not eating pets. But they’re coming to the US in larger numbers than some people are comfortable with, and provide the same easy scapegoat for racists that immigrants have always provided, from the Irish and Germans of the Civil War to Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. And in doing so, they’re taking dangerous journeys to come to a nation where many people don’t want them, to do the jobs those people don’t want to do.

No, doctors who provide abortion are not murdering newborn babies because the mom decided she’d rather keep living the single life. But they are providing a necessary and sometimes life saving form of medical treatment at their own legal and physical peril, while also helping council parents who have to make the unimaginable decision to remove life support for a newborn who can’t survive on their own. And in the incredibly rare cases where a doctor has killed a newborn baby, they’ve been prosecuted for murder.

No, schools are not doing transition surgery on kids, but LGBTQ kids are finally getting the support they’ve needed from trusted adults as they navigate an incredibly difficult stage of their lives. At best, the of schools performing “gender reassignment surgery” was cooked up in Donald Trump’s brain based on a 2024 law passed in California that doesn’t require schools to notify parents if a child has changed their pronouns, not their gender.

No, the feds aren’t taking away your gas stove at gunpoint, some states are mandating new buildings be built with alternative forms of heating that are less damaging to the environment. A federal law to mandate more efficient gas stove construction was blocked by Republicans, because obviously.

No, you will not be “forced” to drive an electric vehicle, some states are mandating large percentages of new cars be built to powered by electricity, but gas cars will still be made, driven, and sold. The federal “phase-out” of gas-powered vehicles was limited to half of all new cars and trucks by 2030, while California’s mandate of 100% of all new cars being electric vehicles by 2035 is teetering. Also, I thought all these people loved Elon Musk and wanted their own Cybertrucks.

And no, “Migrant gangs” aren’t executing armed takeovers of apartment buildings, the tenants in those buildings are speaking out against the inhumane conditions their slumlord building owners are keeping them in. And as a result, the landlord has agreed to give up control of the building and pay substantial fines for the decrepit condition of the complex.

The right wing crap factory is going to be a very busy place over the next few months. And even after the election, no matter who wins, the crap will still be made. There will always be fearmongering, always be a population in need of it, and crap makers ready to sell it to them.

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