Category: History

11 People Who Were Literally This Close to Becoming President

Mike Rothschild

American history is chock full of near-misses, twists of fate, lucky breaks, and obscure politicians who almost became leader of the free world. The vice presidency has been vacant 18 different times, sometimes for years at a time.

Every one of those vacancies represented a constitutional crisis that wasn’t dealt with until the passage of the 25th Amendment in 1967. There was no way to fill a vice presidential vacancy, and it’s not clear whether Congress has the authority to call off-year presidential elections. With no president or vice-president, the very legitimacy of our government could have been put to the test.

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Crisis Actor? False Flags? Answering Basic Questions About Conspiracy Theories

Mike Rothschild3 Comments

There has been an avalanche of conspiracy theories regarding the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida. Many revolve around concepts like false flags and crisis actors – terms that are familiar to those who study and write about fringe culture, but are new to the populace at large.

This can lead to an air of authoritative knowledge by those who decidedly do not have it. And unfortunately, they seem to come up for every tragedy – be it a shooting, terror attack, or even a deadly accident.

In the case of Parkland, Douglas High School student David Hogg has been described as a “crisis actor” paid to espouse gun control views. The whole thing has been called a government-perpetrated “false flag” by prominent conspiracy theorists and conservative infotainment figures. Rumors are flying that the shooting was covered up by an active shooter drill that “went live.”

But what does any of that mean? Are these real concepts? Have these things been done before – and could the shooting in Parkland be the next iteration?

While these concepts are mostly unknown to the public (who are then appalled to hear them), I’ve been writing about them for years. On Skeptoid Blog, I wrote posts diving into each one of these ideas, and am extremely familiar with how they work – and don’t work.

This piece summarizes what I wrote there, and if you want more information, feel free to read the original posts. They have crazy comments!

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Why the JFK Files Release Will Not Prove Your Conspiracy Theory

Mike Rothschild

10/26/17 Edit: On Thursday, the day the final Kennedy Assassination files were meant to be released, President Trump ordered 2,800 JFK records be made public. The rest are subject to a six month review. So we get to do this again in April.

Over the weekend, President Trump continued his practice of taking something that has nothing to do with him and making it entirely about him. In this case, it was the last of the classified files on the Kennedy assassination being released later this week after decades of being held secret.

While Trump is insinuating that he’s making some kind of out-of-the blue decision to blow the doors off the cover-up of the JFK assassination, in reality, it’s been in the works since 1992.

Naturally, people had questions. What’s in the JFK files? Why is the government releasing them now? Why were they kept secret for decades?

And then there’s maybe the most important question: will they prove that Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy?

Anyone looking for the smoking gun that proves we’ve been lied to for 50+ years is likely to be severely disappointed by the new files. Because it’s almost certain they won’t change any of the fundamental facts about President Kennedy’s assassination.

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The World War II Myth That Will Never Die

Mike Rothschild

78 years ago today, the military of Nazi Germany crashed across the border of Poland and began the Second World War.

On that first day of battle, a skirmish took place between German and Polish troops that would become mythologized as an example of both Polish stupidity and the awesome power of the German war machine.

In what became known as the “Charge at Krojanty,” a group of Polish mounted cavalry supposedly rode headlong into German tanks, either because they’d been tricked into thinking they were fake, or because they simply weren’t smart enough to fight a modern mechanized war.

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The Shape of Pardonpaloozas to Come

Mike Rothschild

A “constitutional crisis” is generally defined as a problem for which a country’s founding documents don’t contain a solution, or they do, and the solution is ignored.

Five Thirty Eight breaks down this concept even more, delineating four types of American constitutional crises: when the Constitution doesn’t say what to do, when it does but in an unclear way, when it does but it’s not feasible or possible, and when it does and the institutions meant to enforce that solution are bypassed.

Pundits have been predicting a Donald Trump administration constitutional crisis since day one, from his flouting of the emoluments clause to his firing of former FBI director James Comey, to the potential firing of Robert Mueller.

But with Trump’s pardon of loathsome former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted of contempt of court for refusing to stop violating the constitutional rights of Latinos, we likely got a glimpse of the constitutional crisis to come.

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