A Few Lines About “Cocaine-Gate”

Mike Rothschild

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!

It often takes just one offhand remark, misinterpreted picture, or joke that doesn’t land to start a conspiracy theory that subsequently never goes away. We’ve seen it happen time after time – World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein’s comment that the firefighting team working to save WTC 7 should be “pulled” serving as “proof” that the building was a controlled demolition, John Kasich mistakenly saying John McCain was “put to death” rather than “laid to rest” being “proof” he was executed, a very stupid joke by Joan Rivers about Michelle Obama being transgender sparking over a decade of conspiracy theories that she’s actually a man, and so on.

Sometimes this happens organically, but many times it stems from a conspiracy influencer seeing or hearing something and deciding it’s something else – usually something they can use to drive traffic to their website or product.

So it went on Sunday May 11, when Alex Jones announced on Twitter that he had broken a “DEVELOPING SCANDAL,” which was a short snippet of a video that he claimed showed three world leaders getting blasted out of their minds on cocaine.

The text with the tweet, accompanied by a short video, reads:

DEVELOPING SCANDAL: Macron, Starmer, and Merz caught on video on their return from Kiev [sic]. A bag of white powder on the table. Macron quickly pockets it, Merz hides the spoon. No explanation given. Zelensky, known cocaine enthusiast, had just hosted them. All three of the “leaders” look completely cracked out.

Jones followed up his “scandal” with a video titled simply “BREAKING: It’s Coke” where the inexplicably slimmed down Jones rambled for over four minutes, followed by several minutes of ads, about how the leaders of France, Germany, and the UK were “lit up like Christmas trees” while reiterating that Infowars is one of the most accurate media sources in the world.

It’s not. The the three leaders on the train back from Kyiv were not feverishly trying to hide their Bolivian marching powder from the press, and a cursory analysis of the video showed that the “bag of coke” was a tissue that Emmanuel Macron hid because he probably didn’t want to look like one of those people who blows their nose and leaves the tissue out. And the “coke spoon” was obviously not that, likely either a stirring spoon or a Bamboo Knot cocktail pick. It doesn’t actually matter, because the “bag of coke” is so clearly not a bag a of cocaine and actually a crumpled tissue that it immediately renders the rest of Alex’s conspiracy moot.

But we all know that conspiracy theories like this aren’t designed to stand up to scrutiny. They’re designed to be shared in anger and disgust, which generates income for their originators. And this one was shared big time, getting over ten thousand retweets in its first day of existence.

Jones spent most of his Sunday show touting his “discovery” as proof that the European leaders trying to drum up support and sympathy were Ukraine were nothing but blasted out druggies. Still, the story started to draw pushback from skeptics who pointed out that Macron was clearly hiding a tissue, and even from other conservatives who claimed Jones was making them look like fools. For his Monday show, Jones mentioned “cocaine-gate” only once, but when other conspiracists starting turning against him, he went back on the offensive, structuring much of his Tuesday show about the non-scandal, and declaring “of course that’s cocaine on the table” and that they’re so drugged up that they’re going to start a nuclear war and we’re all going to die.

In the case of “cocaine-gate,” it’s too early to tell if this is a conspiracy theory that will stick. Given the trajectory of other instant-boil conspiracy theories of the past few years, it likely won’t. Stuff like “Michelle Obama is a man” sticks because it came from an earlier time when there weren’t as many theories like it popping up every day, nor were there as many vectors for these theories to find new audiences. It used to take time for a conspiracy theory to worm its way into our brains, but that timeline has now crunched years into days, and we are hit with so many of these things that many never get a chance to really take root before they’re replaced by something equally absurd.

But “will anyone remember this in a week” might not even be the right question to ask. The right question, like most other conspiracy theories, is why did people believe this in the first place? How stupid do they think the leaders of three of the most powerful countries in the world are to leave evidence of their drug usage out for the cameras of numerous news outlets to see? Surely, some people were sharing the video out of curiosity or disgust. But it’s clear that many people believed that the most powerful politician in France was hurriedly hiding a bag of blow that he’d accidentally left out – just one thread on r/conspiracy on Reddit has hundreds of affirmative comments agreeing with the hypothesis.

And yet…it’s clearly a tissue, and also very stupid. So what are we doing here?

The idea of the leaders of Europe being blasted on cocaine while making life-and-death decisions fits in with the general idea that Jones and other far-right propagandists have been pushing for years: these are elites who live and pleasure themselves in worlds of decadence that the rest of us will never set foot in. It’s a huge part of what made QAnon take off: it promised the downfall of the power brokers who waste our money on weird rituals and Satanic ceremonies and drug-fueled anti-family mayhem while the rest of us suffer and fight over scraps.

(Why did these same conspiracists fall in line behind Donald Trump, who has made a career out of professional displays of obnoxious opulence while philandering his way through three marriages and multiple sexual assault accusations? Don’t ask for it to make sense, it never will.)

This one “works” in particular because Jones and his ilk have spent years alleging that Vladimir Zelenskyy is some kind of drug addict who’s “obviously on methamphetamine and so many other drugs,” flying into Hitlerian meth-fueled rages where he orders more helpless Ukrainians to die in his Satanic war on the Christian bedrock of the west. It’s a huge part of the opposition to western funding of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and is all over the media output of conspiracy influencers. To these people and their fans, Putin is the bulwark against evil, and the decadent west is the evil – though it’s fascinating that all of the references to Zelensky being a drug addict come after Russia had invaded his country. It’s almost like they didn’t know anything about him, then all decided they knew everything about him.

So in the Alex Jones/right wing conspiracy universe of leaders who answer to Satan and get hammered all the time, the idea of three of Europe’s heads of state all doing coke while on a goodwill tour for a fellow cokehead makes perfect sense. Of course they all get together and do blow and shoot meth and hunt children while they conspire to push their transgender Magog nuclear war agenda. Why wouldn’t they all be on drugs?

And he’s instilled his value system into his fans, pumping out hours-per-day of paranoia and conspiracism, all meant to explain why the have nots have nothing and the haves have everything, how they’re trying to destroy the west and the family and freedom, and how you can stop it by sharing Alex’s videos and buying Alex’s products.

That is literally what a huge part of his show is about – buying supplements and shirts and survival equipment. Just the 2024 episode where he claims Zelensky is “obviously on methamphetamines” features Jones mentioning his “products” dozens of times, overprices wellness shit like “nano super blue toothpaste” and “Ultimate Turmeric Formula” and “Immune Gargle Mouthwash.”

So when people get agitated about the “drug use” of European leaders, they’re really just serving themselves up as marks for the long-running con game of the far right influencer sphere: come for the outrage, stay for the products. In that sense, it doesn’t matter at all what Starmer and his cohorts were doing or not doing. As long as you’re angry about the potential of them doing something, you’re in the right spot to mainline more Infowars and purchase more Infowars swag.

All that super immune gargle mouthwash isn’t going to buy itself, you know.

Are the Conspiracy Theorists Still Winning?

Mike Rothschild

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!

Using the 100 day mark of a presidency as a measuring stick for accomplishments only dates back to the first FDR administration, when Roosevelt mentioned it during a July 1933 radio address. Nonetheless, it’s become the marker to measure how much a president has gotten done in their first 3+ months in office – or, if you’re Donald Trump, how much you’ve broken and gutted.

Trump has been doing a blitz of incoherent and insane interviews to mark his first 100 days in office, which I won’t bother rehashing. But I did think it was a good opportunity to follow up on the first piece I wrote after he won the 2024 election, called “The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now.” In it, I wrote about how the right wing cranks and influencers who propelled Trump to a second victory should be prepared for some amount of disappointment as Trump loses interest in their desires to “reveal everything” and bring “the bad guys” to justice.

I made a few broad predictions of what I thought might happen in those spheres in a second Trump term, so I figured 100 days was a good time to check in and see what I got right and wrong. I generally am not the biggest fan of trying to predict what’s to come with Trump, since it’s so often impossible to get any handle on what he’s serious about and what’s just his verbal broke fire hydrant of nonsense. But having lived in these worlds for a while, I feel like I have a decent sense of what matters and what’s just wishful thinking when it comes to conspiracy theorists and Trump.

So how’d I do?

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

This wasn’t a prediction as much as it was a statement on the logical fallacies and psychological triggers Trump exploited to win the election. And given Trump’s relentless fearmongering about Venezuelan gangs, MS-13, immigrant terrorists pouring over the border in carbombs full of fentanyl, and the completely ridiculous idea that if we don’t launch some sort of insane trade war with China then our economy is doomed, I’d say we’re in for a lot more of this.

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

Once again, more of a statement than a prediction. And yeah, we’re all pretty much conspiracy theorists now – both left and right.

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

The biggest conspiracy theories come out of either unexpected traumas or personal/national failures. It’s harder to create conspiracy theories when everything is going great, eggs costs pennies, we’re all rich, and our enemies are quaking in fear. When that DOESN’T happen, you get conspiracy theories. Recall that QAnon only emerged in October of 2017, and gained popularity because it offered an explanation for why Trump wasn’t accomplishing what he promised he would – he was, it was just happening secretly.

What we have seen is the “big week ahead” relentless goalpost moving of QAnon applied to many of those lofty campaign promises Trump made. Sure, some of them he kept – but they were slam dunks that he could carry out via executive order, like slashing DEI or “getting boys out of girls sports,” whatever that means.

But many more have been retconned or can-kicked down the road, with lofty achievements meant to happen days or even hours after inauguration now on much longer timelines, with no explanation given for the change. Remember how Trump said he’d end the war in Ukraine before he was even inaugurated? Turns out he was “speaking figuratively” when he said that. Trump’s promise to enact massive, sweeping tariffs on day one? It’s been back and forth for months on who we’re slapping tariffs on, with a constant drumbeat of pauses and trial periods making it nearly impossible to know what’s happening. The promises of near-instant wealth and prosperity have been replaced with warnings of “short-term pain” while the “cheap wealth” of the Biden administration is replaced with…something? And Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has turned himself into a cottage industry of moving the goalposts a few weeks or months or “soon” for the the point when the riches are going to start pouring in.

And all those other promises about ending taxes on tips and overtime, cutting electric bills in half, immediately bring food prices way down, make IVF free, and everything else? Most have either made only incremental progress or have been airbrushed out of existence.

So who needs a new QAnon when you can just use the old QAnon to make everything seem like it’s going great?

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

I whiffed on this one, as Trump immediately pardoned all 1,600 January 6th participants. To add insult to national humiliation, he’s considering some sort of reparations fund for the “hostages” who were just peacefully protesting by smashing windows and beating up cops. I thought he’d pardon some, but that it wasn’t politically useful to issue pardons to some of the worst offenders of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. Many, naturally, have continued committing crimes, and one’s already been shot dead by police. Very fine people, indeed.

American will not be “made healthy again”

So far, so good. RFK Jr. has gone on a wild spree of undoing NIH recommendations, gutting government health services, touting useless alternatives to vaccination, promising that he’ll uncover the “real cause” of autism by September (which, of course, he’s already kicked down the road for another six months), and, most troublingly, has spoken of creating a national registry for autistic children. Because nothing bad happens when you put “undesirable” people on a list for a leader obsessed with genetics and eugenics.

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

Kennedy is still 100% licking the boot, but Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome and might be on the way out, as he looks to be leaving the administration soon to attempt to prop up the flailing husk of his car company. Stories have broken of shouting matches in the Oval between Musk and various Trump officials, and Musk was all set to get a classified briefing on China before Trump stepped in. The days when Musk followed Trump around like a puppy, while wearing his young son as a hat, seem to have ended.

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

Too early to tell, though I’m noticing a distinct lack of “Trump is going to prison” wishful thinking on liberal social media, which is a good sign.

Trump will disappoint his followers by not releasing any information of value about Epstein or JFK

This wasn’t on my initial predictions list, but I did write another piece about Trump keeping his conspiracy theorist followers on the hook with lofty promises to release classified information about some of the most hot-button plots in the conspiracy sphere, as well as unspecified “UFO videos” and 9/11 files.

Trump did release a large tranche of files on the Kennedy assassination, though JFK scholars immediately pointed out that they revealed little of note that was new about the assassination itself, only illuminating some minor mysteries about Oswald and CIA methods.

But UFO videos? Nothing. 9/11 files? Nothing so far. And the purported release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein was a total disaster, with a splashy event where MAGA influencers were given binders supposedly full of the darkest secrets the financier kept turning into a meme-generating farce. It took hours for MAGA-world to declare the binders had nothing of value in them, accuse AG Pam Bondi of running a coverup, and mocking the redacted and useless documents they got. Despite Bondi claiming to have thousands of agents working 24/7 redacting and digitizing Epstein docs, nothing has come out since then.

Maybe it’ll all come out in September along with the real cause of autism and halved electric bills.

Conspiracy Contradiction

Mike Rothschild

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!

It was easy to miss in the normal chaos of weeks under the Trump Administration, and the particularly newsworthy death of Pope Francis, but last week, the White House entirely changed the contents of its COVID response page to a massive conspiracy theory touting the “lab leak” hypothesis as the origin of the pandemic.

The evidence touted by the White House is basically that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Hunan Seafood Market are seven miles apart, along with a bunch of statements backed up with phrases like “most likely” and “nearly all measures of science.” The only real evidence provided is a link to a House Select Committee report, made up of Republicans who are totally under the thumb of Trump.

The “lab leak” scenario has always seemed woefully under-evidenced and based on wishful thinking, so I’m not going to debate it here. But I thought it was worth sharing that the official stance of the US government appears to now be that COVID was a genetically engineered bioweapon that escape from a lab in China only to infect and kill millions – and we’re not doing anything to punish China for its depravity.

Of course, that seems at odds with the other mainstream conservative stance, which is that COVID, while bad, is basically just a cold that can be warded off with vitamins and ivermectin. As such, the massive number of deaths during the pandemic was hugely over-reported to include deaths “with” COVID rather than deaths “from” COVID, based on the deep state wanting to make the pandemic seem worse than it actually was so they could take our freedom away (note that substantial evidence shows COVID deaths were actually undercounted, particularly during the worst of the pandemic).

And both of those things seem at odds with the OTHER mainstream conservative stance, which is that COVID was a planned bioweapon attack on the west, which the deep state conditioned us for and practiced using tests like the 2020 Rockefeller document and the mysterious 2019 drill “Event 201.” In this scenario, the COVID release was planned to cull the population and put the rest of us on permanent lockdown, stealing our freedom and our money to keep us as slaves. And it only didn’t work because…

Sorry, I got a bit lost in my scenarios. How could COVID be planned AND a leak? How could it be just a cold AND a population culling bioweapon? How could the COVID lockdown be a tool of the cabal when it was launched during the administration of the president who dedicated his life to taking down the cabal?

Welcome to the world of conspiracism, where nothing makes sense because nothing has to make sense.

All of these things should, in theory, contradict each other. But somehow, in the conspiratorial mind, they all fit together on a timeline that gets more convoluted and absurd the more you try to make it all work. It doesn’t have to work. It just has to give the appearance of being complicated and long-planned by the most evil people in the world, but also easily discoverable by amateur sleuths doing internet research.

Every major conspiracy theory is riddled with these types of contradictions that are blindly accepted and worked into an incomprehensible world view that actually explains everything if you just don’t think about it at all.

Trump’s assassination attempt? Planned by the deep state to kill Trump, using literally the most incompetent assassin they could find, who utterly failed at his job.

Mass shootings? False flags perpetrated by gun-grabbing presidents in order to take away our firearms, even though they never do it, and numerous mass shootings took place under Trump’s first administration which were actually real mass shootings caused by SSRI’s and carried out by antifa.

Barack Obama? He was incompetent and an idiot, but also all-powerful and pure calculation – while also being both a communist and a Muslim, while secretly gay and married to a man pretending to be a woman whose children just appeared out of nowhere.

9/11? A controlled demolition planned in meticulous detail as a way to take away our freedom, while also being figured out that same day by multiple major figures in the conspiracy world.

The JFK assassination? Oswald was a patsy who never fired a shot, despite the rifle he was known to have owned being found at the exact spot where Oswald worked, and a Dallas police officer also being definitely shot and killed by Oswald, who just happened to kill a cop for no particular reason.

Some conspiracy theories rely on things that might not be contradictions if you use enough wishful thinking and sculpting of the facts to make them fit what you believe – COVID could have leaked from a lab and be planned if you assume that the leak was accidental, AND the deep state was making plans for a fake pandemic that would be activated when a REAL pandemic started. If you squint enough, it makes sense – even if the amount of squinting you’d need would make your face implode.

But some conspiracy theories rely on believing two things that literally can’t be true at the same time. Princess Diana was murdered by British intelligence AND she faked her death to escape public scrutiny. Osama bin Laden was already dead by the time of the US Special Forces raid on his compound AND he’s still alive and in hiding. How is that possible?? It doesn’t matter, don’t ask.

Such cognitive dissonance, the discomfort felt by holding two contradictory positions at the same time, has long been a recognized part of the phenomenon of conspiracism. But this kind of mental plate spinning was always the domain of cranks and fringe authors, not the White House. Of course, that was the before time. Now the President puts out a conspiracy theory that literally depends on contradicting things he’s already said and done, and millions of people simply put all those things together in a way that fits – even if it definitely doesn’t fit and stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Most people struggle to understand conspiratorial beliefs because ultimately, most of us want to have belief systems that make sense. We disregard the things that don’t fit the evidence, and act on the things that do. A controlled demolition on 9/11 or mass shootings being cooked up by powerful forces don’t fit the evidence, only belief systems that want them to be true. But when things they WANT to be true run into things that ARE true, and only one can be the real thing, then reality warps and we’re faced with confronting our own false beliefs.

That’s a line many conspiracy believers won’t cross. So the rest of us scramble to find ways to understand and react to the things that our conspiratorial friends and family believe, when really, the things they believe can’t be understood. The details of the conspiracy theory don’t matter and are entirely malleable depending on the circumstance. COVID is real and fake, it’s harmless and genocidal – whatever you need in the moment.

If the details of the conspiracy theory don’t matter, why bother debunking it?

For one, many people will come to the conspiracy theory as outsiders, not believers. And it’s important that the first time someone encounters a theory, they should also be given the information required to know it’s false. But more than that, conspiracy belief stems from a real psychological need to make sense out of things that don’t make sense, to find answers to questions that don’t seem to have answers, and to find order in chaos.

We ALL have those needs. We all need reasons why things happened, who did them to us, and what we can do to push back. That’s why we’re all vulnerable to conspiracy theories if they hit us in the right way at the right time. Maybe it’s not COVID or 9/11 or false flags – maybe it’s why did my house burn down, or why did I get hit with this medical bill, or why are things so hard and shitty?

That’s not political or historical, that’s human. So understanding the contradictions of conspiracism helps us understand the appeal of conspiracism. It doesn’t need to make logical sense. It just needs to FEEL like it makes sense. If it’s not THE truth, at least it can be MY truth.

Even if it’s not true.

Eaton Fire #15: I Don’t Live Here Anymore

Mike Rothschild3 Comments

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!

It’s an overcast April day in Los Angeles, and I’m staring at the hole in the ground where my house used to be.

It burned down in the Eaton Fire of 2025, one of thousands of homes in Altadena that were destroyed by a fastmoving wildfire that overwhelmed everything around it and sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing. It once was a house full of love, the accumulation of 40+ years of stuff, of memories. The first birthday parties for the kids. Watching the Dodgers win two World Series titles. Spending months isolated during lockdown having impromptu stuffie tea parties and making convoys with toy cars that are all gone. Holidays and parties and long nights when I felt like nothing was going to work out and great days when it all worked out.

Now it’s a hole in the ground.

If one wanted to be pedantic, it’s not really a hole, per se. It’s too wide and not deep enough – only six inches below the ground, just enough to take away the topsoil rendered toxic by the polluted slurry of ash and dust the fire left behind. It’s more of an indentation, really, roughly in the shape of a foundation where a house used to be. A depression, perhaps. Not a pit, though. Nor a trench. And really, not a hole.

If there’s a technical term is for what I’m staring at, I can’t immediately think of it. It’s hard to think or feel anything.

Mostly what I’m feeling is dizzy. There’s nothing to orient myself to, nothing that serves as a marker for where things start and end other than a few fenceposts. It feels like looking at a distant and blank horizon on the water, disconcerting and unsettling. Or maybe that’s the feeling you get when you’re looking at what used to be your house and now is just…nothing.

We lived here for seven and a half years, planning to spend far longer in it. Then came the Eaton Fire, and whatever we had planned and dreamed would have to be put on hold. That blaze, when paired with the Palisades Fire in Malibu, destroyed 18,000 single family homes and apartment buildings.

18,000 depressions in the ground, full of dirt that once held up homes. 18,000 families who are on a long road of recovery and rebuilding, who are asking themselves every day how this happened and what they do next.

The ground is rough and uneven. Half the driveway is gone, cut up to ensure access to the footers of the house. It’s all beaten up from the massive excavator that the Army Corps of Engineers’ contractors used to scoop up the remains of our lives and drop it into a dump truck.

Watching the excavator a few days earlier as the debris removal began was truly one of the more bizarre moments of life since the fire. It would pick up something that was once meaningful to us – our grill, the bathtub where we bathed the kids when they were little, the dishwasher I loaded the night of the fire – then move it to the center of the debris pile, then rear back and smash it flat, like Godzilla stepping on a tank. Then the flattened piece of debris is scooped up and dropped in a plastic-wrapped flatbed for eventual disposal somewhere far away.

Eventually, it’s all gone except the dirt.

Looking at the ground, hearing the endless convoy of trucks and excavators going up and down our once-quiet street, and seeing the other cleared plots of land, I’m thinking more than anything of what it took to get from where we were three-plus months ago to where we are now. From a burned out ruin to a plot of land, in a neighborhood once full of burned out ruins that will slowly become habitable again.

Certainly, the effort to remove all of this debris was massive, requiring a huge amount of both high-level coordination and work on the ground. Most of the workers we’d spoken to hadn’t had a day off since the beginning of February. Multiple agencies had to put together a plan for how to remove the contents of both Palisades and Altadena in a way that was both safe and didn’t drag on for years. The EPA had to inspect every lot for hazardous and toxic materials. Contractors had to be hired, systems had to be designed, pathways mapped out, dump sites figured out, procedures codified. You need a lot of guys, a lot of equipment, and a lot of material – and you don’t have a lot of time to do it. And someone had to figure out who was paying for it.

It took dozens, maybe hundreds of people working madly to just get to a point where there was a plan to take our debris pile and turn it into the depression in the ground I was looking at. The process still has some creaks to it – the “72 hour call” you get from the Corps to let you know your debris removal is imminent is actually a “couple of days or two weeks” call. Ours came late on a Friday, and we didn’t get an update for another week, when we were told the walkthrough of our property might happen the next day – and it actually happened late the day after that. But it did happen.

Before the debris could be removed, it took heroic efforts by first responders to put the fires out in the first place. A level of courage that most people – i.e., me – will never have or need to summon up. And it will take an equally massive effort by thousands of other builders working for other agencies and companies to ensure that this block of Altadena full of depressions in the ground doesn’t stay looking like this. As much as we’d like our old homes back, we’d also like new ones, thank you very much.

That doesn’t just happen. It takes designers and architects, contractors and subcontractors, specialists and inspectors, countless tons of wood and metal and whatever insulation is made out of. And it will not happen quickly, or cheaply.

Then there’s what happened before the fire itself. The sequence of events that played out not just on the day of the fire, but in the decades and centuries before it. Hundreds of years of a slowly changing climate that’s not slowly changing anymore. A hundred-year-old town built from wood and full of drying out greenery, where homes were passed down through the decades but rarely brought up to code. A megacity built in a desert and stuffed into the crevices between cliffs. A land of milk and honey where the ground shakes and the sky burns. A water system stretched beyond its limits and battered by a 100 year wind storm happening for the second year in a row. Officials out of their depth and early warning systems that didn’t work and electrical lines that should have been off but weren’t.

So many failures. So much accomplishment. No wonder I’m a little dizzy.

I stepped back from the driveway onto the back patio, or what’s left of it. The pavers are loose and cracked, so I quickly stepped back off. Trucks rolled by and I worried that my car was too far from the curb because of the sandbags. The horizon was too long, too unobstructed. After a few minutes at the depression in the ground, I walked back to the car, and drove back from my scraped-up old life to the work-in-progress of my new one.

How did this happen? I thought to myself. What do we do now?

It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself this. And it wouldn’t be the last.

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.