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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The Flat Earth Movement Has Its Own Film Festival

Mike Rothschild

 

The Flat Earth movement is a loose coalition of those who believe that the Earth is actually a disc,  and that depictions of the planet as a globe are fake. It’s a small cadre of internet dwellers, but it punches above its weight in terms of how vocal it is.

It boasts several extremely active Facebook groups, some heavily-watched YouTube videos, prominent celebrity believers, such as rapper B.O.B. and NBA star Kyrie Irving, and maybe the most important thing you need for success on the internet, countless woke memes.

And now, it’s having a film festival, exploring the idea that science has literally been lying to us THIS WHOLE TIME.

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Every Trump Tweet With a Parenthesis: An Analysis

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

This post continues into April.

President Trump’s use of Twitter is an endlessly fascinating and terrifying subject. He uses it to communicate with his friends on Fox News, to poke his rivals, to announce wild swings in policy, and to pump up the brand of President of the United States.

Another subject of fascination is the language he uses when he uses it. Trump’s tweets are full of seemingly random capitalized words, tortured run-on sentences, short admonitions that sound like they’re commands to a dog (“NO!” “BAD!” “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”), and pictures from his travails pretending to lead the free world.

One of my personal favorite Trump Twitter Quirks is his use of parentheses. According to grammarbook.com, parentheses should be used “to enclose information that clarifies or is used as an aside.”

Most Trump parentheses are asides with no real reason for existing. He also clarifies information that doesn’t really need to be clarified, re-stating or contradicting information he’s literally just given us. There seems to be no real methodology to their use.

Because I love Trump’s scattershot use of parentheses so much, I decided to go through all his tweets for 2018 so far and take a quick look at each one. Was it needed? Was it helpful? Did it even make sense? What was he attempting to communicate in his usage of it? Was there a hidden meaning we just didn’t grasp? Read on, dear reader:

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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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We Were Sitting Ducks For Russian Trolling

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

In the wake of the surprising indictments of 13 Russians involved in the coordinated trolling of the 2016 election, online arguments raged as to what impact it had on Donald Trump’s win.

But the already-fertile ground that the misinformation landed on was left mostly unexplored.

We know how Russia trolled us. But we still don’t really know why. And given the fairly low amount of effort they put into it, we don’t know why it worked.

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