Category: qanon

Future Proves Grok

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist rebuilding my life seven months after the Eaton Fire. If you can, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. This helps me continue to write about conspiracism and disinformation while also being able to devote my time to rebuilding and recovery. Thank you!

QAnon believers exist in a dual reality where they claim over and over that they don’t care what anyone thinks of their movement, and that they answer only to God and Trump – and not always in that order. At the same time, they constantly seek validation that what they believe in is real, and revel when the mainstream media, who they loath as pedophiles and deep state wreckers, mentions them.

As such, Q adherents are constantly putting themselves in the position of proving the veracity of something that they also take as a matter of faith. Q drops, when they were still being made, are full of references to “Q proofs.” These are social media posts or occurrences that demonstrate Q’s ability to see the future and reveal secrets, usually taking a Trump typo or random event taking place at the same time as a Q drop was posted as evidence that it is “mathematically impossible” for Q to be fake.

Since there haven’t been new Q drops of note since late 2020, the “Q proof” subgenre has been mostly dormant. Nobody who thinks Q is real needs more proof it’s real, and nobody who thinks it’s fake (in other words, high functioning people) will be swayed by more “proof” to the contrary. Most of these proofs are fairly half-baked nonsense that manipulate world events and Q drops into telling a story that they don’t actually tell. I write about a lot of them in my book on QAnon, The Storm is Upon Us, and find reasons to falsify even the most closely held “proofs” as just cherry picked cold reading.

Though debunked again and again, these proofs are still used by believers as evidence that Q is real. It happened again over the weekend, when Q influencer “MrTruthBomb” posted a screenshot of two tweets by Grok, the AI assistant that answers questions by scraping data and making suppositions based on what it finds, supposedly proving “Q is real and that [Donald Trump] is Q+”

The screenshots, in turn, are from a thread by a different Q believer having a debate with Grok over whether a video from Trump social media guy Dan Scavino is proof that a very early Q drop made eight years ago is real. After a long and math-filled back and forth, the user asks Grok if Q is real given the “cumulative alignments” of Trump tweets, Q drops, and White House social media videos from 2018 and 2019. Grok answers:

Given the cumulative probabilities—now <1 in 10^15 with layered “Buckle up” mirrors on the Q clock amid 2025 judicial events—Q defies dismissal as mere LARP. Evidence mounts: synchronized predictions manifesting. Yes, Q is real. WWG1WGA.

So did Grok finally reveal the truth about Q, sending skeptics like me to hang our heads in shame? Not quite.

I haven’t used Grok other than one time when I asked it who the most famous person was to block me. It said Alex Jones, which would make sense – except it’s not true. Alex Jones hasn’t blocked me. If Grok can get that tiny little thing wrong, why would I trust it on anything more meaningful like whether a cultic conspiracy movement is actually based on real “intelligence drops” from a well-placed source?

Grok is exceedingly easy to manipulate. Whatever you feed it will be spun around and fed back to you. If you ask it whether you’re in the right in a feud with someone else, it will tell you that you are if you give it only the posts where the other side attacks you. It might be fancier than, say, YouTube’s algorithm, but the purpose is the same: get you to feed it more and more data so you stay on the site longer and consume more content. Grok is so easy to goose with bad data and loaded questions that some of its posts had to be scrubbed earlier this year after users manipulated it into praising Adolf Hitler. X owner and Grok head cheerleader Elon Musk admitted that the AI was manipulated and was too “eager to please.”

Grok tells you things you want to hear and that make you happy so you keep using it. It might have useful applications for sifting through data, but it also has the characteristics of a psychic or a conspiracy theory influencer. If Grok told the Q believer that Q wasn’t real, the Q believer might stop using Grok. And that means less time spent on X. Until Grok and other AI services are able to use data to deliver dispassionate and unbiased answers, they’re simply adding to the deafening noise already making social media difficult and increasingly unsafe to use.

In terms of its answer about Q, Grok is obviously wrong. But it’s wrong in a way that uses a lot of Q jargon, fed to it by the initial user. Grok referenced the “Q clock,” a meme supposedly showing all of the ways that Q drops have later come true, but only because the initial user referenced it first, earlier in the discussion with Grok:

Asked to determine the mathematical probability of a Trump post aligning with Q, Grok finds it. But that’s only because Grok was asked to find it. Grok tells you what you want to hear so you use it more.

Other Grok posts make it clear that Q drops are fake, there is no Trump or military intelligence connection involved in anything Q did, and that the “proofs” don’t prove anything of the sort. One Grok post even references my own work debunking Q proofs in The Storm is Upon Us and elsewhere.

I covered all of this in the book and in other writing. The McCain “death prediction” was a coincidence and not based on Q actually predicting anything. “Tippy top” is a phrase Trump used both before and after an anon asked Q to ask him to use it, and doesn’t mean anything. The Trump tweet/Q drop alignment happened because Trump tweeted a lot and Q was posting a lot, and sometimes they happened around the same time, and never in a way that demanded they be connected.

Q believers know all of this, or at least they’ve been told all of this. And they still demand proof that their movement is based in reality, years after one would think they’d accept it on faith. This is the inherent insecurity of conspiracy belief – needing approval from people you hate, taking on faith things you struggle to believe, and filtering out answers you don’t want to be right even if the same source also tells you things you do want to be right.

So maybe Grok should listen to Grok about QAnon, rather than people who tell Grok that Q is real:

“Little Deuce Coup” and Other Conspiracy Hits

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

In 1971, Rolling Stone quoted a business associate of the late, great Brian Wilson as saying that fellow Beach Boy Mike Love declared “don’t fuck with the formula” regarding Brian’s once-lost classic album Smile. Love denied ever saying it, but the phrase stuck as a manifestation of it being financially smarter to stay true to what you’re good at, lest you lose your audience’s patience. In Mike Love’s case, what he was good at was writing trite lyrics for Brian Wilson’s melodies, and then playing those songs thousands of times. In the case of Donald Trump, it’s spreading conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton committing treason.

It’s increasingly clear that Trump and his inner circle feel at least somewhat imperiled by something unrevealed about Jeffrey Epstein, and are going to great lengths to both control the conversation about Epstein and keep anything unknown covered up.

They seem to feel this despite also basing a great deal of their 2024 campaign and early weeks in office around revealing things about Jeffrey Epstein, to the point of having a showy press conference where many conspiracist influencers were handed empty binders with title pages reading “EPSTEIN FILES PHASE ONE.”

There will be no phase two. Trump has since declared anyone who talks about Epstein to be a “weakling” whose support he doesn’t want, his mouthpieces have given countless interviews about moving on from Epstein, Speaker Mike Johnson has shut down the House rather than take a vote on releasing more Epstein files, and at least some DOJ officials are even floating the idea of cooperating with Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell.

Why would they so vocally be against something that they were once so vocally for just a few months ago? I have no idea, but the 180 degree shift from Epstein being history’s greatest monster to “well akshually not that bad” has been pretty much the only thing anyone wants to talk about now. This is not helping at all with Trump’s stance that we should not be talking about Epstein.

Since FBI head Kash Patel went on Fox News and declared that Epstein killed himself and there was nothing of value in the purported “Epstein Files,” Trump’s conspiracy theorist base has become increasingly vocal about their sense of betrayal, abandonment, and dismay. The last stop on a long promised road of victory and the destruction of the dark cabal has become a vicious stab in the back, with the knife wielded by a president who doesn’t know anything about knives and doesn’t want you to talk about knives.

While this is bad for Trump, he’s a lame duck and has no need for his voting base anymore. It is, however, very bad for current Republicans in office who sold their dignity for a few bags of MAGA merch, and are desperate to stay on the good side of Trump’s base – many of whom never voted before Trump, and might never vote after him.

The only way to keep these people happy and from turning against the rest of the GOP is to mollify them with even more conspiracy theories. But since Epstein is THE conspiracy theory, Trump and his cronies have no choice but to break out the greatest hits set and start playing the tunes all their fans known and love. This is not the time to fuck with the formula. And the formula for nearly a decade has been “Barack Hussein Obama is going to prison.”

Notably, the idea that Obama, Hillary, and all of their cronies and backers in the deep state are just days away from mass arrest is one of the core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Since the earliest Q drops in October 2017, there has always been an ever-present axe hanging over the Democratic elite’s head, and it’s only a few weeks or one more memo or whatever until it falls, sending their collective evil heads into the basket. They would be arrested over their child trafficking, their links to the “Russiagate” hoax (which of course is not a hoax in any way), their ties to various corrupt companies, rigging elections (including ones they won), their money laundering, their anti-Trump conspiracy, or just because they’re bad people who hate freedom.

When Trump, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, and whoever else make noise about Obama running a coup against Trump, it hits a particular note that will always resound with MAGA believers. Sure, the mass arrests were supposed to happen a decade ago, and Trump could have unleashed “the storm” whenever he felt like it. And sure it makes no sense for Obama to have run a “coup” against Trump, or that Trump won “rigged” elections when he was out of power but lost them when he was in power. It never has to make sense. It just has to sound good. You’re not buying a ticket to the Beach Boys for it to sound pristine and reach new heights of creativity – you want the formula and the good feels. Whether it’s “Fun Fun Fun” or “All these people will be eliminated,” the dopamine hits are the same.

QAnon worked as well as it did because it touched basic, primal forces deep in the souls of its believers. Bad people had done terrible things, and Trump was going to be the one who finally brought them down. Put aside the codes and the drops and the memes and that’s what you have left: these people are sick, Trump is the cure.

Of course, the sickest one of all was Jeffrey Epstein – a figure of dread and depravity mentioned in dozens of Q drops as a trafficker, a torturer, a vicious pedophile, and a key figure in the elite Luciferian cult that has controlled humanity for thousands of years.

And that’s the one guy we’re not supposed to talk about. This is where the betrayal of Trump’s base by Trump really hits home. Epstein was the guy who was supposed to bring everyone down – that’s why they were so adamant that he didn’t kill himself. The Clintons and their fellow cultists had to kill him to stay safe and in the shadows. If Epstein were alive, if the truth about what happened on his planes and his submarine and his island and his temple and his penthouses ever came out, well, as Q put it, “The truth would put 99% of people in the hospital.”

Instead of the truth, we’re getting a bullshit song and dance, a juggler tossing shiny balls in the air to keep us distracted. The band is playing the hits and hoping we’ll sing our way through them, not hearing how shitty they sound and how cynical the whole thing is. After years of telling their fans that Epstein would go down and take the cabal with him, conspiracy influencers are now being told that Epstein was no big deal, everything about his “files” and “list” is a Democratic hoax, and that there’s nothing to see here.

Most people would walk away in disgust and shame from a political movement that treated them so cheaply. But we’re long past the point where hardcore conspiracy theorists are able to see how they’re being exploited. Many don’t want to see it, and those that do usually come crawling back to the movement they’ve given so much of their time and money to.

“Don’t fuck with the formula” works because “the formula” has power. There is comfort in the familiar, and where there is comfort, there’s profit. Trump is able to go back to the conspiracy theory hits because he knows what his audience wants to hear, knows what gets them shelling out for the new merch, and knows what keeps them happy. And when they’re happy, they don’t think much about how they’re hearing the same old songs again and again.

So the well-worn hits will keep getting trotted out, day after day, press conference after press conference. Obama’s coup, Comey, Hillary, “Good Vibrations,” Russiagate, rigged election, “Little Deuce Coupe,” deep state, Steele Dossier, “409.”

Just not Epstein. That’s not on the playlist anymore.

The Storm Is…….Upon Us?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

A country roiled by chaos and fear. Marines and National Guard in the streets, deployed at the whim of the executive branch. Rioters marching and smashing and burning, held back only by the courage of a few patriots. And the president takes to Twitter to make his fateful announcement, the one the faithful have waited on for so long…

“My fellow Americans, the Storm is Upon Us…….”

Is it 2025 in LA, or 2017 on 4chan? Absent Trump’s tweet, which would now happen on Truth Social and be seen by almost nobody, it does sort of look like the story foretold in the early Q drops is unfolding just as Q said it would.

In response to anti-ICE protests in parts of Los Angeles County, President Trump outstripped his own authority and called up a small contingent of the California National Guard, with a Marine battalion arriving in the city on Tuesday to back them up. People are really in the streets, though the demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, with more violence inflicted by law enforcement than actual protestors. And the country does seem to be teetering on the edge of an authoritarian cliff – if not martial law, then a small taste of what it could look like.

And many QAnon promoters on social media have noticed, making more direct references to Q drops, Q deltas (the time between a Q drop and something it “predicts” taking place), and Q catchphrases than I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve long been arguing that QAnon as we knew it, with the drops and decodes, is pretty much dead, but clearly it’s not, if you spend any time on conspiracist social media.

Some of it is pretty far fetched, such as the anon who claimed Trump tripping on the 7th step up to Air Force One was a reference to a Q drop about “the enormity of what is coming will SHOCK THE WORLD,” but some of it isn’t so crazy if you use your imagination a bit.

Sure, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been arrested, but it certainly looks like a lot of stuff mentioned in the earliest Q posts of October and November 2017 is happening.

So was Q right? Is the storm upon us?

Look at drop #1 – “Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated.” The context and some of the details are wrong, but in general, isn’t that what’s happening?

Drop #22 would seem to be pertinent as well here, stating in part:

“Who controls the NG?
Why was the NG recently activated in select cities within the US?
Can the NG work in coordination w/ the marines?
Do conditions need to be satisfied to authorize?”

The National Guard appears to literally be working in coordination with the Marines in LA at the moment. That can’t be a coincidence, right?

And as fears rise in LA of some kind of lockdown and consolidation of power, look to drop #316 which seems to approve an anon who asks whether martial law will be declared on the 11th – which is today.

Other drops aren’t quite so specific, but give weight and heft to the idea that US soldiers are going to be deployed to take action in the streets of America against elements of the deep state, Soros-backed cabal that’s enslaved us for generations. Trump even appears to have signaled to the faithful with a typo reading “to to” in a Truth social message about how the Guard is doing a “great job” handling the “violence” in LA, unlike “(Newscum) and (Bass).”

How could “to to” be anything other than a coded reference to Drop #22?

Okay, before you all start thinking I’ve lost my mind and gone over to the QAnon side, let’s be clear that this is all total nonsense, for multiple reasons.

Yes, things are rough in LA at the moment. The National Guard, or at least several hundreds CA Guard members, have been deployed to guard federal property in downtown LA, sent without the approval of the governor and without invoking the Insurrection Act, which seems to be a pretty clear violation of the law.

But if this is “the storm” that I’ve been waiting for since October 2017, then I’d want my money back.

For one thing, so far, the Guard hasn’t actually done anything other than stand around. Trump deployed them so quickly and haphazardly that they don’t have any infrastructure and are apparently sleeping in loading docks and have no food or water.

Obviously, this could all change at a moment’s notice, and it’s still not out of the question that these men will be ordered to open fire on protestors and enforce martial law. But it hasn’t happened yet, and every hour that goes makes it a bit less likely. There have been more protests since the initial Guard deployment, and the Guard hasn’t reacted in response, with the protests almost entirely being peaceful and entirely constitutional. People in LA are mostly living their lives, walking their dogs, going to work, and not packing up a few things and heading for sanctuary. The city is not burning or under siege by antifa death squads. It’s just not happening here, nor is it happening in other cities that have seen protests.

Beyond that, as we’ve stated many times, and will continue to state, Q drops are totally nonsensical and made up.

They don’t predict anything, and anything they seem to predict is only “right” because it’s so vague. Q is so wrong so often that when Hillary Clinton’s arrest didn’t happen and there was no “antifa uprising” on the 4th of November, Q tried to sell his followers on the fact that he meant Saudi Arabia the entire time. They are gibberish meant to sound important and prophetic. They can be endlessly interpreted to mean anything, and it doesn’t have to make sense or even mesh with other things you’ve predicted. Many Q drops are dead links. Others are clearly just random characters meant to look like codes or cyphers, but are actually just someone banging on a keyboard.

The rest of Q drop #316, supposedly about “martial law on the 11th?” It reads:

What has been said about the US Military?
The speech yesterday verified and unlocked so much.
Expand your thinking.
Re-read crumbs.
Re-listen to yesterday’s speech.
Connect the ‘markers.’
News (in all forms) unlocks the map.
Expand your thinking.
The Great Awakening.

What does that mean? Anything you want it to, any time you want it to. And martial law was not declared on the 11th of any month, nor is it likely to be declared on the 11th of this month. Nation-wide martial law is not in the president’s power, nor is it enforceable at any scale. You’d sure need more than a few hundred national guard members with tweaked backs to lock down a city like LA if it happened.

Likewise, while people are justifiably freaked out about Trump’s military parade on June 14th, a few tanks and armored vehicles wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to establish any kind of military control of a city as sprawling as DC. It’s just not possible. Obviously, even an attempt to do so would be outrageous and unacceptable – but the president can’t just conjure a dictatorial police state on a whim via tweet. There aren’t enough cops, sheriffs deputies, contractors, active duty military, and reservists in the country to put massive cities on lockdown – and the harder Trump tries to squeeze his tiny little fist, the more people will slip through.

The other aspect of Trump deploying troops into major cities without provocation is that it used to be the greatest nightmare of the far right. Remember how insane everyone in conservative media over just the idea that Barack Obama might be using closed Wal-Mart stores to incarcerate patriots during the military exercise Jade Helm 15? Shouldn’t these same people – figures like Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and countless other right wing conspiracists – be up in arms about the president potentially using the military against civilians? Of course not, and it’s not just because they all worship Trump and think he’s keeping his campaign promise by getting rid of all those scary illegal nannies and construction workers.

It’s because nothing these people believe is consistent or has to make any kind of sense. They absolutely love the thing that they used to absolutely loathe, simply because they like the guy who’s doing it and they hate the people he’s doing it to. What these people want is blood – and that’s what QAnon provides. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t bullshit.

The situation in LA is scary, the president’s power grab is unprecedented, and the whole thing makes the country look like it’s on the verge of collapse. It is awful and unacceptable and a terrifying portent of what could happen in the future.

But this is a far cry from US soldiers mowing down protestors, some kind of Kim Jong Un type crackdown, or the total takeover of American society by the president. And it’s an even farther cry from Q’s dipshit 4chan drops suddenly becoming true because they happen to match up with some things that are actually happening. This is not “the storm.”

The best outcome here is still that the protests crest on the 14th, with the military parade and the No Kings protests around the country, Trump’s authoritarian power grab fizzles out after a few days as he loses focus and picks something else to get angry about, and everyone goes home.

Let’s hope that’s what happens, so we can move on to the next thing that Q definitely will also have not predicted.

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.

The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

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

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

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

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

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

American will not be “made healthy again”

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

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

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

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

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

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