Category: conspiracy theory

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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The Golden Carrot

Mike Rothschild

I have spent way too much time thinking, writing, and talking about QAnon. And one of the reasons it took off in the way it did was that it offered an explanation – not for something that was happening, like most conspiracy theories, but for something that wasn’t happening.

Most conspiracy theories work because they attract people out of power looking for who actually has it. But QAnon was the opposite, it gave the extant most powerful person on earth – President Trump – even more power in the form of a secret military intelligence operation that would, on his command, go into action and rid America of all the evil doers. But it had to be done in a certain way: in secret, following certain rules, and only once certain conditions were set. Of course, those conditions were never actually set. The pieces were never in place. So Trump and Q never actually did rid America of all the evil doers. That seems like it should matter, but it never does.

When Trump lost the election, the appeal of QAnon as a “secret plot carried out at the highest level” disappeared immediately and Q stopped posting. But mostly, Q believers were so distracted by the stolen election discourse that it didn’t matter. How could Trump lose if Q was real? Why did the pedophiles and wreckers not get swept up if Trump was in power? Nobody asked. The two things just didn’t fit together.

In conspiracy world, things don’t ever actually need to fit. There’s always another great hope, a golden carrot to be dangled in front of the desperate digital soldiers that will reward all their patience and sacrifice. All those hours spent researching, those holidays spent alone eating baloney sandwiches while your family gets together and enjoys the seasons have to mean something – right??

So it’s no surprise that Trump has spent a great deal of campaign time promising various podcasters that he would finally reveal all of the nation’s secrets and the truth about the vast conspiracies at the heart of American life – but only if he gets another term.

Trump has recently promised to release a “client list” belonging to Jeffrey Epstein, something he describes as “UFO footage” along with proof of alien life, all the “remaining files” about the JFK assassination, and all the secrets of the US intelligence agencies as far as other assassinations goes – including the one he nearly fell victim to. These are the big secrets, the ones that will destroy the deep state and usher in the new era of peace and freedom.

Naturally, conspiracyland was ecstatic about Trump’s pledge.

These sorts of promises are incredibly alluring to people who base their lives around uncovering “secret knowledge” that “they don’t want us to know about.” And it’s not hard to see why. What could be more important that whether aliens exist and have been to our planet? What secret would be more powerful than at long last revealing who really killed JFK? It’s the final payoff for everything they’ve been working toward for years or decades.

In fact, these secrets are so compelling that one has to wonder why Trump didn’t do any of this in his first term. Why do you need to tell people all the hidden truths you’ll reveal in your second term when you didn’t reveal any hidden truths when you had the chance? What changed from then to now – other than needing to scrape together enough votes to win a few swing states?

This is the essence of how QAnon works, and why it doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny in any way. If the Q team was going to sweep up the deep state and save the millions of children being trafficked through their secret tunnels, why didn’t they, you know, do it? Why wait so long that you lose the power to enact these changes? Isn’t the blood of every child who is sacrificed on you, not the deep state?

If the “Trump reveals all the secrets of the Kennedy assassination” rap feels familiar, it’s because he already released a bunch of JFK files in 2017. Many offered intriguing depth to the swirl of insanity around the assassination, but didn’t change the “official story” in any way. Trump, of course, claimed when asked about the partial declassification that he wanted to release even more files, but was blocked by those evil dunderheads in the CIA. But he’ll definitely do it this time.

“It’s going to be done early on,” he told the Silicon Valley-themed podcast All-In. “A lot of people want to see that and whatever it may say – I won’t say it, I have an idea – but whatever it is it will be very interesting for people to see and we’re going to have to learn from it.”

It’s always something, right?

But why is it always something? Trump was the president. He could just declassify whatever he wanted. He’s already claimed he can declassify documents telepathically, just by thinking about it. Why not JFK? Why not Epstein? Why not UFOs? What’s the problem? And why do none of his followers hold him to any sort of standard. If he’d been sitting on these explosive secrets for years and didn’t reveal them, isn’t he just as bad as those who decided to keep them secret in the first place?

The problem with prophetic conspiracy theories is that eventually, something either has to happen or you need to come up with a convincing reason why it didn’t. Otherwise, people start to lose faith in the prophecy. Really talented gurus are good at coming up with such excuses – the UFO didn’t land because the aliens questioned our commitment, the Great Flood was delayed because I read one of the numbers wrong, etc. Q didn’t bother – whoever was making the posts just stopped posting. There was no need for any other cryptic riddles. Likewise, Trump hasn’t needed to come up with a reason he didn’t do any of this the first time, because nothing matters to him and his fans. He’ll do it now, they reason. This time it’s different.

So he can claim he’ll reveal all the secrets that he could have revealed at any time during his four years in office. This time, he’ll really do it. The pieces will all be in place. The timing will be right.

Unless it’s not. Maybe he’ll need a third term to really get all the files out.

There is No Couch

Mike Rothschild

JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Republican nominee for vice president in 2024 did not have sex with a couch and write about it in his book.

Moving past the idea that this is a sentence one has to write in the year 2024, we can start to talk about why anyone thinks he did, why some conservatives and journalists are getting upset about it, and what it all means for the strangest election of all time, or at least the strangest since the election or 2020.

In mid-July (or maybe it was sometime in 1887, it feels like it’s been that long), a Twitter user who goes by @RickRudesCalves tweeted the following:

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

Other than being named after the leg muscles of the late WWE Intercontinental Champion Rick Rude, there’s not much to go on about who this user is. They’ve chosen to stay anonymous, and there’s no reason to violate that. As for the tweet itself, Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy contains no such passage. People went through the book, quickly found that the reference to the latex glove wasn’t in it, and that should have been that.

But here we are nearly two weeks later, and the Vance/Couch story is pretty much everywhere. It’s been referenced on late night TV, It’s the fodder for more memes and jokes on social media than anyone could possibly count. It’s even jumped the firebreak of normie political speeches, something usually reserved for Trumpian insanity like QAnon, with Democratic vice presidential candidate, MN Governor Tim Walz dropping a “get off the couch” reference in his introductory speech at his first rally for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. When the crowd laughed, he exclaimed “see what I did there!”

We did.

Vance hasn’t responded to the couch allegation, except when he sort of did by making a remark about his wife making him sleep on the sofa if he asked her to come up and speak at a rally, which did nothing to defuse the joke because it was neither a denial nor him leaning into it and defanging it. Also, he used the word “sofa” not “couch,” thereby muddying up the wording of the joke, and proving again that MAGA people don’t know anything about comedy.

The Vance/couch meme has gone on for so long and gotten so far that even journalists and more respectable pundits have said it’s time to retire it, that it’s not funny, that passing it around is akin to spreading misinformation, and that it’s generally beneath the dignity of a presidential election to be discussing a candidate having sex with a couch.

The problem with approaching the Vance/couch story as an actual story is that the Vance/couch story isn’t a story. It’s a joke, intended by its creator to be a joke, and passed around as a joke. Imbuing it with serious solemnity as a piece of a disinformation to be batted down actually makes it funnier. Not only is there a viral joke about the potential vice president fucking a couch, people are actually taking it seriously as something that has to specifically be refuted. Other than maybe the first day when the joke was going viral and it wasn’t clear if the passage was in Hillbilly Elegy, nobody making jokes or sharing memes about it actually thinks he did it. It doesn’t even matter at this point, because the joke is out there, it’s still funny, and getting upset about it only makes in funnier.

But why did it go viral if the people spreading it knew it wasn’t true?

Again, I’ll go back it’s funny. The joke works, and the jokes about the joke work.

But more than that, it works because it fits in with what people believe about JD Vance. Because JD Vance is a weird, creepy, vaguely bizarre human being. He’s endorsed tracking women’s periods to determine if they’d have abortions. He completely flipped on his feelings toward Trump, going from calling him “America’s Hitler” in 2016 to serving as his #2 man on the campaign trail. He’s deeply linked to techno-libertarian weirdo Peter Thiel, who is hellbent on making the world less free and democratic. He’s said multiple times that women who don’t have children should have the power of their vote diluted. He wrote a memoir that was self-serving and full of omissions, about a life he doesn’t seem to have lived. He made a bizarre remark about his wife, who is Indian-American as being a good mother even though she “obviously isn’t a white person.” He’s good friends with a strange collection of racist weirdos and white nationalists, and has endorsed the explicitly racist and antisemitic Great Replacement theory.

And his newest thing seems to be following Vice President Harris around on the campaign trail, giving speeches in cities where she’s holding rallies, to the point of approaching Air Force Two and maybe trying to get on it in Wisconsin. The word you’re looking for there is “stalking.”

This is all very weird, creepy stuff that most normal people find repellent. It’s also the affect of a person who maybe, just maybe, would have sex with a couch and write about it proudly in his memoir.

Again, it’s not believable because it’s true. It’s believable because it seems like it could be true about this particular person, based on what you already believe about them. And the people getting upset about the joke, calling it dehumanizing or disinformation, or just grumping about “decorum” are not only missing the point, they are actively making the joke more alive and vital.

What’s worse than being the subject of a joke about fucking a couch? Being upset that someone else is the subject of a joke about fucking a couch.

Right wing social media has been full of such rumors and myths and conspiracy theories for years. They range from disgusting conspiracy theories like the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax to transphobic nonsense like Michelle Obama secretly being a man. Many of the same people who extol Trump have spread these rumors as fact, maybe because they believe them, or maybe because enough other people believe them that it’s advantageous to spread them. They’ve been dining off this memetic warfare for years, and now that it’s being volleyed back to them, they can’t handle it.

With the shoe on the other foot, and the Trump campaign unable to shake the label “weird,” these same guys are melting down, flailing in every direction looking for their own version of the couch joke, and failing every time because none of them are funny.

They’re calling Walz “Tampon Tim” because as governor of Minnesota, he signed a law mandating free menstrual supplies in public school. That’s a knee-slapper, for sure. They’re spreading insane conspiracy theories about Harris’s rally crowds being CGI, or echoing Trump’s unhinged claims that President Biden wants to “take back” his candidacy. They’re making up nonsensical nicknames for Kamala Harris that literally nobody other than Donald Trump thinks are funny. And Donald Trump doesn’t think anything is funny.

The couch cope has gotten so bad that it’s led to a pathetic attempt by right wing influencers to create a “Vance/Couch” meme for Walz, with the former president’s equally weird son spreading a limp rumor that the governor was caught drinking horse semen. It didn’t catch on, and the entire attempt smacks of “I know you are but what am I.”

You can’t make something like the Vance/couch joke happen. It has to happen on its own, with a unique combination of humor, virality, and believability. The couch joke was funny, it was written with a fake citation that gave it depth, and most importantly, it was about a guy who you could totally see doing it. And Vance’s lame attempts to run with the joke or the label of “weird” are only making it worse.

Because there is no couch. There is only a very creepy vice presidential candidate who you can totally see bragging about going to pound town with a couch.

The jokes and memes should not let up. Democrats should do more of them, bigger, and bolder. People upset about the joke should stop whining about it, because it makes the joke funnier. And JD Vance, stay the hell away from my sectional.

I Ranked 17 Songs With the Word “Conspiracy” In Their Title

Mike Rothschild

Conspiracy theories are an integral part of entertainment, from TV shows like The X-Files to countless movies. But what about music? Sure, there are lots of conspiracy theories about musicians dying before their time, or about secret love letters to Satan in songs – but what about songs about conspiracy theories? Musicians are just as paranoid and conspiratorial as anyone, plus when you throw in money, fame, drugs, and music industry weirdos, you should get a pretty good playlist, right?

It turns out there are quite a few, and I tried to rank them by how conspiratorial they are, and whether they’re worth your time and “research.” I stuck with songs that directly have the word “conspiracy” in the title (sorry, Black Sabbath fans, no “Paranoid”) by artists I already had heard of, since Spotify brings back a lot of songs simply titled “Conspiracy” by artists I can’t be sure aren’t just AI. And yes, in the spirit of conspiracism, there are 17.

17. “The Conspiracy Freestyle” – Eminem, 2002: Slim Shady spends three minutes lazily rapping about the Iraq War, Norah Jones, and doing ecstasy. A time capsule of early aughts nonsense, the track didn’t even make Eminem’s 2002 album The Eminem Show, and was only released twenty years later in an expanded edition. He shouldn’t have bothered.

16. “Conspiracy Theory” – Nick Jonas and the Administration, 2010: The erstwhile Jonas Brother tried his hand at making an early 90’s Prince heavy R&B record, helped out by having multiple members of the New Power Generation backing him. But he doesn’t have the gravitas to pull off singing about high-level cabals and plotting, and the track is more irritating than conspiratorial.

15. “A Conspiracy” – The Black Crowes, 1994: If you’ve ever, at any point in your life, heard a Black Crowes song, you’ve pretty much heard this song. Knockoff 70’s swagger with lyrics about an asking an unnamed lady to “be my conspiracy.”

14. “Conspiracy of One” – The Offspring, 2000: What’s a “conspiracy of one?” Don’t expect this middling pop-punk track to tell you. But the song is correct in that in a conspiracy, “nobody wins.”

13. “Conspiracy” – Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, 2007: The Cleveland rappers run down a litany of “government conspiracies”, but most of the song is a plot alleging their mentor Eazy-E was secretly murdered by NWA manager Jerry Heller’s doctor, who gave Eazy AIDS in a flu shot. Definitely not a government conspiracy, and the song drags on an interminable six minutes.

12. “Conspiracy Dirge” – Danzig, 1992: Two minutes of foreboding organ music. Not much conspiracy, plenty of dirge.

11. “Conspiracies” – Loudon Wainwright III, 1999: Wainwright’s album Social Studies is a time capsule of late 90’s current events, full of references to Tanya Harding, OJ, Jesse Helms, and Y2K. Here he tells a story about how belief in Santa Claus is basically a conspiracy theory. It’s fun, but there’s not much to it.

10. “Conspiracy” – Paramore, 2005: Catchy pop-punk that demands someone “explain this conspiracy against me” and how “I’ve lost my power.” Power going out is a hallmark of conspiracy theories, as is the general feeling that people who once had control and dominance no longer do.

9. “The Mirror Conspiracy” – Thievery Corporation, 2000: Remember chillout music – electronica with slow tempos and light beats with vaguely meaningless lyrics cooed over relaxed synths? If you do, then you probably remember Thievery Corporation. Whatever “the mirror conspiracy” is, you’ll be very relaxed when it comes for you.

8. “Conspiracy Theory” – Scarface, 2000: The venerable southern rapper spouts vaguely terrifying lyrics about the FBI being up on him with illegal wiretaps, surveillance, and being snitched on. It’s not a theory to Scarface, so you’d best stay out of his way.

7. “Conspiranoia” – Primus, 2022: Les Claypool and company run down the entire decade of conspiracism, from Betty White being killed by the COVID vaccine to chemtrails to the reptile elite to even JFK Jr. showing up in Dealey Plaza two decades after his “death.” If you can make it through 11 minutes of Primus being Primus, you even get a Jewish Space Lasers reference (sadly, not to my book of the same name.)

6. “The Conspiracy Song” – The Dead Milkmen, 1992: The comedy punkers run through everything “they” own, which is basically everything and everyone ever. They own the banks, our homes, our children, our pets, Dick Clark, all of it! Even the Jews! They own the Jews! And just for good measure, they put the holes in our socks. Those bastards.

5. “Kicker Conspiracy” – The Fall, 1983: Legendary curmudgeon Mark E. Smith’s rant about the “middle class takeover” of British soccer is so dense with references that even a Fall fan website admits that it’s essentially incomprehensible without annotation. Like every other Fall song, it sounds like every other Fall song – which is part of the appeal.

4. “Peanut Butter Conspiracy” – Jimmy Buffett, 1973: The Mayor of Margaritaville sings about his early days of stealing peanut butter and sardines from the local mini-mart before he and the Coral Reefer Band got big. The song is way more enjoyable than it has any right to be, though you do have to wonder how the mini-mart stayed in business given the sheer amount of peanut butter and sardines Buffett and his crew stole.

3. “Conspiracy” – Gang Starr, 1992: The early 90’s were a deeply conspiratorial time in America, and the foundational rap duo nails the unease and paranoia of a Black community where many were convinced AIDS and crack were CIA depopulation plots, and white record executives were stealing all the money from the burgeoning hip-hop industry. That last one is basically true.

2. “Conspiracy” – The Rentals, 2020: The Weezer side project The Rentals returned in 2020 with a record full of fringe goodness, right down to its title: Q36. The song runs through the laundry list of recent conspiracy theories from a believe who will “never know the truth,” including Princess Di and Elvis living in hiding, secret bunkers, the moon landing being faked, and even old Coast to Coast AM favorite Mel’s Hole. Fun stuff!

1. “Conspiracy Theory” – Steve Earle, 2002: The legendary outlaw country shitkicker wrote “Conspiracy Theory” as part of a concept album about the post-9/11 world, and it perfectly nails that combination of dread, fear, anger, and not knowing what the hell was going to happen next. The song is full of buzzy keyboards and paranoid lyrics about being quiet, going back to bed, and closing your eyes to the disaster all around you – all of which we wanted to do after 9/11.

If you got turned on to a song you’d never heard, or feel inspired to go down a rabbit hole of songs about weird stuff, please subscribe on Patreon. I’m trying to keep my content free for now, but every subscription helps me do more of this work. Thanks!

The Rothschilds and the Scofield Bible

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Greetings! This is the kind of research-intensive content I’ll soon be putting on my Patreon page. If you get something out of this and feel you can, I’d truly appreciate an $8 per month subscription. Thanks

Sometimes a conspiracy theory emerges that you immediately know is absolutely designed with just the right combination of stupidity and malice that you have to drop everything to debunk it.

On July 17th, I got a tip from Ben Lorber, co-author of the new book on antisemitism Safety Through Solidarity (which is great and you should read it) of a clip from Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show of him and country singer John Rich discussing how “the Rothschilds were connected” to the printing and distribution of what’s known as the Scofield Bible, an End Times-focused edition of the Bible published in 1909 that contained extensive notes and references written by American theologian CI Scofield.

One particular clip of the interview features Rich, who is not an expert on the Rothschilds, telling Carlson, who is not an expert on anything, that another preacher named John Darby, who popularized a concept called “The Secret Rapture” was connected to “the Rothschilds.”

“Interesting” Carlson intones, with the two discussing how this philosophy lead to the warping of US foreign policy and the deaths of “a lot of people.”

I am the farthest possible thing from an expert on Christian eschatology, the history of American charismatic movements, the growth of Christian Zionism and its relation to its Jewish counterpart, or the influence of the Scofield Bible on anything. But I am something of an expert on the Rothschilds, as my book Jewish Space Lasers is about the Rothschild myth and its role in antisemitism. And I am definitely an expert on how conspiracy theorists like John Rich and Tucker Carlson say stuff that doesn’t mean anything, put it behind a wall of creepy music and quick edits, and spread it around to their followers as gospel truth.

So why are we talking about the links between a wealthy Jewish family and an End Times Bible? Did the Rothschilds fund the Scofield Bible? Did they control John Darby?

With numerous references to the Book of Revelation and other End Times concepts, the Scofield Reference Bible was the perfect scripture for the upheaval and bloodshed of the Great War and later of World War II. It sold millions of copies and laid the groundwork for the “tribulation industry” of End Times preachers and evangelical personalities like the authors of Left Behind, Late Great Planet Earth author Hal Lindsey, and many others. These apocalyptic concepts continue to be a driving force in American evangelical Christianity, and numerous believers in the idea of a Rapture or dispensationalism (the idea that history is divided into “Eras” in which God has different plans for humanity) have risen to prominent positions in the US government. In this version of Zionism, Israel must belong to the Jewish people – so it can serve as the place where the Tribulation begins, presumably causing the deaths of countless Jewish people.

All of this is hopelessly complex, and could fill entire bookshelves with tomes I’m not educated enough to understand. But the Rothschild link is simple, so I’ll focus on that.

Scofield was an American preacher and author who lived from 1843 to 1921. Darby was a British author who first popularized the ideas of pre-tribulation rapture and dispensationalism that Scofield referred to, and lived from 1800 to 1882. In the research and writing of Jewish Space Lasers, I never saw any reference to Darby or Scofield having worked for or ever come across the Rothschilds. The family had no real presence in America in 1909, and its power in Europe had drastically waned. There’s no reason why the family would have invested in the funding or distribution of a New Testament that, as Jews, they wouldn’t have had any interest in. No edition of the Reference Bible I found had a reference to the Rothschilds, though I confess that I haven’t looked through every edition ever printed. And I can’t find any primary source that connects the Scofield Bible, Scofield himself, or Darby to the family.

Carlson and Rich’s claim that the Rothschilds helped create or fund “Christian Zionism” also don’t carry any kind of evidentiary weight. Many Rothschilds were Zionists, of course. Many also were not. The family is extremely large and varied in its beliefs and priorities, and so simply ascribing “the Rothschilds” as having done something is a meaningless statement that only serves to fuel antisemitic conspiracy theories. And again, we’re talking about Tucker Carlson, here. Similarly, trying to link the Balfour Declaration to Christian Zionism because it’s a letter written by Lord Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild is nonsensical.

The sources connecting all of this together are impossibly thin, mostly consisting of blogs and a few podcasts that throw the accusation out without evidence. The closest thing to a primary source connecting Darby to the Rothschilds and Christian Zionism is a reference to the family in a 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review claiming that 19th Century British aristocrat and pre-millennial Zionist Lord Shaftesbury “was instrumental in the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which brought the Darbyites and other evangelicals, wealthy Jews like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, together with the highest levels of English aristocracy, to officially claim Palestine for the Empire.”

It should be noted that Executive Intelligence Review is a publication of the crank conspiracy theorist and activist Lyndon LaRouche, and often published incomprehensible and antisemitic nonsense – including a 1996 article that was likely the first to connect the Rothschilds to future conspiracy theory magnet George Soros. So as primary sources go, EIR is firmly in the category of ones that can be ignored.

In digging around for something that connects Darby/Scofield to the Rothschilds, the only real link that makes any kind of sense is that the Scofield Reference Bible was published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, the prestigious academic house that’s been in business since 1586 and has become the largest university press in the world. A number of conspiracy theorists have claimed that the Rothschilds “own” or “control” Oxford University Press, and therefore were critical in the printing and distribution of the Scofield Bible.

But again, none of this is actually true. The Rothschilds don’t “own” Oxford University Press – the University of Oxford does. And Oxford has existed since around 1096, roughly 700 years before Mayer Amschel Rothschild rose to prominence as a banker and court Jew in the Free City of Frankfurt.

Simply put, if there’s a link between the Rothschilds and Darby, Scofield, the Scofield Bible, Christian Zionism, or its influence on American politics; nobody has bothered writing about it, documenting it, or exploring it in any way. But the trick about conspiracy theories claiming “the Rothschilds control ______” is that they don’t require evidence. The people spreading them have no interest in backing up their claims (tellingly, John Rich offers no evidence and Tucker Carlson asks for none), only in spreading them. And in going viral, which the claims did.

This unevidenced nonsense spreads because of generations of the similar spread of past antisemitic nonsense about the Rothschilds controlling banking, finance, politics, media, entertainment, global events, and medicine. Strip away all of the names and concepts unique to this one theory and you’re left with another version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document making grandiose claims of Jewish control while offering no evidence to support them. Over and over, influencers make these claims, spread them around without evidence, and reap the rewards. And Jews suffer the consequences of this hate and mythmaking.

Like The Protocols, the idea that “The Rothschilds” funded an End Times Bible to exert control over American Christianity is just as pernicious – and just as false.