Category: conspiracy theory

Everything is Just QAnon Now

Mike Rothschild2 Comments

I’m still rebuilding from the Eaton Fire and will be documenting that process, but I want to start wading back into the kind of writing I was doing before the fire. Please support this work through a subscription on Patreon, where you can give me the resources to keep diving into conspiracy theories and nonsense for as little as $5 per month. Thank you

One of the most unbelievable aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory isn’t that military intelligence officials would leak clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state, but that they’d use imageboards like 8chan to do it. Leaks have happened in many different guises, often with great secrecy. But what highly-ranked intelligence officer would leak on a board full of racist memes and child sexual abuse material, for an audience of angry losers who don’t have the power to do anything about whatever the deep state is doing?

After the “Signalgate” fiasco, where the highest-ranking officials in US intelligence and diplomacy accidentally invited a journalist into their Signal chat room where they discussed classified plans to attack Houthi targets in Yemen, and then gloated about their outcome, I might need to rethink exactly how stupid and sloppy our military leaders can get.

It’s highly doubtful there will be any consequences from the Signal fiasco, and Republican officials are furiously spinning it as both fake and real but not that bad and actually the fault of various Democrats and deep state aligned staffers. The various excuses and justifications are becoming more ridiculous and incoherent by the hour, but that’s not the point. They’re not meant to be believable, only to use smoke and noise to obscure the real point: that rather than simply admit they made a mistake and move on, the Trump administration is trying to dazzle us with nonsensical deflections, conspiracy theories, and reversals.

I see it as one more way QAnon and its tenets are becoming the bedrock of conservative politics and policy-making. Not QAnon itself, but the psychological techniques it uses to keep its believers on the hook for ever-more grandiose promises, and to avoid thinking for themselves. In movements like QAnon, making excuses and coming up with vast conspiracies to explain things that should be obvious are how you keep people from walking away – and from any sort of self-examination.

So too in Signalgate are the constant deflections and angry accusations a way to keep Republicans from having to admit just how sloppy their leaders were, and how posting extremely sensitive information in a channel where one of the people shouldn’t have been there could have ended in disaster.

QAnon worked because it provided an excuse for why Trump wasn’t accomplishing what he’d promised he’d do in his first term. It was because the deep state and its Satanic leaders were working in secret against him. Q was a way to push back against them, to fight a secret war revealed in cryptic riddles that proved Trump was way ahead of them, defeating them at every turn, and would soon go public with a great purge of the dark forces trying to stop America.

Q made vast promises, then when those promises didn’t come true, Q always had an excuse for why the failure was actually necessary for greater success down the road. Q even had a way to justify the failures – that “disinformation was necessary” at times. Essentially, some of what Q said was knowingly false – but there had to be traps built in to snare the deep state and keep them off balance. If some Q acolytes believed the lies, it was just necessary collateral damage.

Anxious to keep their movement from being thought of as a cult, Q promoters would sarcastically claim that QAnon was “the only cult that teaches you to think for yourself.” Never mind how cultish that statement is, it’s not actually true. Q believers were told over and over that Trump and Q had everything under control, to “trust the plan,” that everything would turn out all right, and to simply blast away their doubts and questions by doing more research.

In trying to spin their dangerous failure as everything from an honest mistake that can easily be fixed to a coordinated hit job by the Democrats and their media mouthpieces to actually Signal’s fault; Republicans are asking us to trust the plan – and to trust that they have a plan. Maybe this wasn’t intentional, but it’s not an indication that Trump’s most senior appointees are incompetent and out of their depth. It actually means they’re doing their jobs well, and the fact that the attack went off without a hitch is proof that they’re in control. Just believe them, they’ve done nothing wrong, and it’s their critics that are doing it wrong by daring to criticize them. Maybe it was even a plot by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to get classified information (which they totally didn’t have in the chat!!!) and use it against good patriots.

Leaking classified information and making all sorts of excuses about why their failures are actually successes? The details might vary, but that’s basically QAnon.

And it’s not even the only way the administration is essentially becoming the QAnon presidency. Their economic plan is entirely based on a little bit of short term pain that will be followed by long-term greatness. Trump’s entire MO in running for president was to make grandiose promises about all of the things he was going to immediately do to help the American people. Remember how grocery prices were going to plummet on day one? Or how he’d cut your electrical bill and gas prices in half? Or how he’d end the war in Ukraine the day after the election? Or how he’d eliminated taxes on tips and overtime as soon as he got in office?

Obviously, none of that has happened. In response, Trump officials have pushed their various deadlines and target dates further and further into the future. These things are still going to happen, it’s just going to take a little longer because of all the ways Democrats are obstructing him, or because the stock market actually has to go down before it skyrockets.

For most people, these absurd justifications and excuses are just proof they were never going to do any of this. But for believers, it’s all part of the plan. Things have to get bad before they get good – never mind all the times Trump has claimed Biden destroyed the country. This is just what needs to happen, and if you walk away now, you’ll miss out on the rewards. Again, this is exactly how QAnon works.

So we head for another day of Trump officials spinning, lashing out, making excuses, lying to the press, and pretending none of this matters, all to make sure their voters don’t realize just how badly they’ve screwed up. We have a plan, they’re screaming. Why don’t you trust it??

Given their reliance on prophetic conspiracy nonsense to keep their base in line, this is not a surprise.

Droning On and On

Mike Rothschild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a weird time where not much is happening

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

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

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

The “I know what I saw” fallacy

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

We’re just really into conspiracy theories right now

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

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

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

Rothschild Central Banks – Syria’s Version

Mike Rothschild

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

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

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

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

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

There are no “Rothschild central banks”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Who Was William de Rothschild?

Mike Rothschild8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.