Tag: 2024 election

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.

Eight 2024 Election Catchphrases I Never Want to Hear Again

Mike Rothschild

The 2024 election has been going on for about 300 years, and also for two months. It will never end, and it will also end, but in a way that might never end. If that doesn’t make any sense, welcome to the 2024 election. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

As elections drag on, they tend to pick up certain catchphrases or ideas that define them in the years and decades to come. Long after we forget how many electoral votes the candidates won, or where their polling outpaced or underestimated their final outcome, we remember a few things they said, or something that happened that defined the race in its final moments.

There was the “giant sucking sound” that Texas billionaire Ross Perot claimed Americans would hear as our jobs fled south to Mexico due to the NAFTA trade agreement. Al Gore claimed up and down that Social Security would be protected by a “lockbox” if he won in 2000, with George W. Bush’s equally memorable reply that Gore’s lockbox was comprised of “fuzzy math.” You could gab endlessly about Mitt Romney’s car elevator and “47% tape,” Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, Bill Clinton not inhaling while wearing “usually briefs,” and on and on. Some memorable election catchphrases weren’t even things the candidate said – like Sarah Palin cheerfully declaring that she could “see Russia from my house,” which Tina Fey actually said on Saturday Night Live.

Because Donald Trump has been running for president for over a decade, and this election for two years, and because every moment of the campaign is captured and distributed on social media, we have an endless stream of such phrases and moments – things that will define the 2024 election and which will make little or no sense in the future. And since the election has become all-consuming and endless, we’re all getting sick of them and will never, ever want to hear them again.

Here are some 2024 election catchphrases and memes that nobody will ever want to hear again.

“They’re Eating the Dogs!” – the moral panic that Haitian asylum seekers living in Springfield, OH were stealing and eating the cats and dogs of local residents went from something you’d see in a chain email to being screamed at maximum volume by Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris. Yes, it’s funny and insane, but it’s also a deeply racist and harmful trope that evokes past canards like the blood libel. This isn’t happening, it never happened, it’s hurting the people of Springfield, it was always a racist accusation made to make the Biden administration look like it was importing criminal lunatics, and we should stop talking about it after the election.

“The Weave” – In September, as it started to become clear that Trump was having difficulty sustaining coherent thoughts and speaking in complete sentences, he tried to rebrand his incoherent rambling as purposeful. He even gave it a name, calling it “the weave.” He would then work in a mention of “the weave” as part of his style, veering from topic to topic because he had a lot of wisdom to impart and couldn’t be constrained by the usual way losers finished one thought before starting another.

“I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,'” he told a rapt audience in Pennsylvania. It’s not brilliant, nor is it a way that people talk when they want to convey something important. It could be a sign of encroaching cognitive failure, though Trump refuses to release any sort of medical records to confirm it. And it’s not especially endearing in someone who is supposed to negotiate with high-level leaders and keep America’s nuclear arsenal safe.

“Make America Healthy Again” – remember when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump and it was supposed to be a “unity ticket” meant to rid the country of toxic food and chemicals? Yeah, nobody else does either. The “Kennedy bounce” didn’t materialize, and the “MAHA movement” lasted about three minutes before everyone remembered Trump is a fast food addict who thinks humans are born with a finite about of energy.

“Kamala’s internals are cooked” – During the final stretch of the election, every time the Harris campaign would announce an endorsement, event, or new policy; a legion of Elon Musk bootlickers with 300 followers and a paid-for check mark would emerge declaring that her handlers had secret internal polling that showed she was losing badly. It’s certainly possible that she has internal polling that shows her losing, but if she does, I wouldn’t count on “MaximusMAGA2323493” with 167 followers and paid verification to know about it. Polling has gotten fairly unreliable in general, and claiming you know anything about proprietary polling a candidate has done for themselves is just stupid.

Betting markets – Betting markets like Polymarket that let you place wagers on who will win the election are not polls. They are easily manipulated and unregulated dark money black holes where anonymous figures can dump crypto into changing the public perception of a race by making it look like one candidate is doing well, and another is crashing. They are not polls, and they probably shouldn’t be legal in the US.

“Dark MAGA” – Please, God, enough.

“She never even worked at McDonalds” – Trump has spent months obsessing over Kamala Harris claiming to have worked at McDonalds in her youth. Like most short-term teenage jobs from decades ago, there’s little evidence of her having worked there, but she talks about it a lot, and there’s no reason to think she’s lying. I’ve worked in jobs as a high-school and college student where there’s probably no evidence I was ever there, and nobody I worked with would remember me. I still worked those jobs. And Americans struggling to pay their bills don’t give a damn what Trump thinks about Kamala’s summer gig working the french fry machine.

“The Former Guy” – this one started well before the 2024 election as a nickname that Joe Biden gave to Trump in February 2021. It’s understandable that Biden would want to put distance between his new presidency and the Trump years, choosing to focus on his own accomplishments rather than simply talking about Trump. And it makes sense that the nickname, often written just as “TFG” would take off on social media. After all, who wants to talk about “the former guy” when we can talk about the current guy? The problem is that Trump was never actually “the former guy.” Even after leaving office, he was the de facto head of the Republican Party, orchestrated the acts of Congressional Republicans from far away, and was always the presumptive nominee to run again.

Even if he loses, there’s a decent chance he runs yet again in 2028. And even if he doesn’t, he’s still going to exert total control of the Party until he’s no longer among us. So calling him “former guy” is not actually accurate or amusing. Sadly, until further notice, he’s just “the guy.”

Or at least until we come up with another annoying nickname for him.

What Will the 2024 Big Lie Look Like?

Mike Rothschild

No matter the outcome of the 2024 election, Donald Trump won’t accept it. If he wins, he’ll claim he won more states and votes than he actually did. We know he’ll do this because he already did it in 2016. And if he loses, he’ll claim he won more states and votes than he actually did. We know he’ll do this because he did it in 2020, and hasn’t shut up about it since, even claiming in the recent debate with Kamala Harris that his admission that he “lost the election by a whisker” was “sarcasm.”

So no matter what happens, Trump will set himself up as the victim of a vast conspiracy to cheat and defraud him. But what will the 2024 stolen election industry look like if Trump loses to the vice president? Who will be its major players? How will it take root in the fever dream imagination of the MAGA movement, and how long will it take? And who will be the unfortunate victim of their unhinged and violent conspiracy theories?

Obviously, we won’t know most of the answers to this until it already happens. But there are many reasons to believe that whatever form the Big Lie of 2024 takes, it will look somewhat different and have at least some different players than that of 2020. Of course, the optimal outcome would be that Harris wins so convincingly that other than a few Trump bitter-enders, most of the influencers and election officials who pushed the 2020 Big Lie will decide it’s not worth it and move on. Ideally, there would be no Big Lie.

But that’s probably not going to happen. So here are some ways the stolen election discourse of 2024 might be different from 2020:

Donald Trump won’t be in power

This is the most obvious change from 2020 to 2024. Taking power is harder than keeping power, and Trump doesn’t actually have any legal power right now. Yes, he commands a cult of personality that has millions of members who will be angry and spoiling for a fight should he lose the election. But the Stop the Steal movement was hatched and plotted at the White House. It had the force of the office of the president behind it. Trump had the right as president to speak to the rallygoers on January 6th. And if he wanted to, he could have invoked the Insurrection Act and ordered armed soldiers into the streets.

Other than Secret Service protection, Trump is a private citizen right now. He can’t call up the National Guard, he can’t declare martial law, he can’t use federal officials as weapons, and he can’t just jump on the phone with anyone he wants and expect them to do his bidding. Trump can complain all he wants, he can rally armed MAGA lunatics to DC, he might even be able to benefit from sympathetic officials at some level – but ultimately, he has the same official power that most of the rest of us do, which is nothing.

Nobody will be surprised

America had never had a transfer of power from one party to another disrupted the way it was in 2020. When Trump disputed the results and his supporters started the legwork of trying to find which states had cheated, it was genuinely shocking for people who hadn’t been paying attention to conspiracist movements and media, because it was so novel. And Democrats were slow to react, feeling like much of the complaining was sour grapes or designed to make money for influencers. They were, of course. But they were also a concerted effort to throw out the votes of the people – which hadn’t happened in modern American history.

This time, nobody will be surprised. We will all be able to see it coming, know exactly what Trump’s inner circle will be doing, and try to put roadblocks in front of them. The Harris campaign has already added a slew of top-tier election lawyers to prepare for the bogus audits, phony lawsuits, attempts to get fraudulent slates of “alternate electors” sent to Congress, challenges to voter rolls, and intimidation from Trump loyalists. Dozens of lawsuits have already been filed either challenging eligibility or fighting back at those challenges, and Democrats are doing well in them. Nobody will be surprised this time when the peaceful transfer of power is threatened.

States where stolen election claims were loudest were flips in 2020

Looking back at 2020, the loudest outcries of fraud came in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. While there were also efforts to overturn the election in states like Colorado and Nevada, those five were the focus of more lawsuits, audits, conspiracy theories, and threats than any others. Why? because they all flipped from Republican to Democratic. Nobody should be shocked if those states go for Harris the same way they went for Biden. The only state with a real chance of flipping to Democrats this time is North Carolina – a state that’s already trending away from Republicans and where the GOP is running a Holocaust denying lunatic in a gubernatorial race they’re losing by as many as ten points, according to current polls. Certainly there will be audits and lawsuits and bellyaching if Harris wins North Carolina, but it’s not going to be shocking.

Polls are tightening in a few other Republican-dominated states, including Florida, but it’s unlikely they’ll go for Harris. If they do, expect a slew of false claims and conspiracy theories.

Many prominent stolen election advocates were ruined by lawsuits or indictments

Despite all of the noise and chaos of the Big Lie, the Stop the Steal movement really didn’t accomplish anything. It made some influencers a lot of money, but far more of them were ruined by it – and Trump still left office.

Close to 1,400 January 6th rioters have been charged in connection with the insurrection, with hundreds more likely to be charged. Many have gone to prison, and some still are there. Dozens of others, including Donald Trump himself, have been indicted for election fraud, tampering with voting machines, hacking, fake elector schemes, and other Stop the Steal related crimes. People have lost their jobs and their careers over their devotion to this dead-end movement. And many of the figureheads and funders of the movement have been financially ruined. Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones, and Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft have all declared bankruptcy. Mike Lindell is broke, while Fox News had to pay out three quarters of a billion dollars in damages to Dominion Voting System, and several other defamation lawsuits have settled as well. John Eastman and Lin Wood were disbarred for their roles in election fraud schemes, with many other attorneys who took on doomed election fraud cases sanctioned.

How many of them will take the risk this time? What news network will platform insane conspiracy theories about 2024 voting machine companies knowing years of litigation likely await them? What lawyer will file a bogus lawsuit in the service of Trump knowing they might lose their license because of it? Some will, of course. And there will likely be new Stop the Steal acolytes in 2024, looking for a chance at money and right wing fame by taking up Trump’s lost cause. But it seems reasonable that some of the figures who tried to undo Biden’s win in 2020 won’t want to take the professional and personal risk this time around – or if they want to, they won’t be able to.

Trump will be a two-time loser

Ultimately, the Stop the Steal movement was driven by the certainty that Donald Trump never loses, and when he does, it’s because someone else cheated. He’d spent a year preparing the ground to contest losing the election due to supposed fraud, cheating, dead voters, illegal immigrants voting, massive numbers of fake mail-in ballots, and a conspiracy by the Democratic Party. The QAnon movement had spent 2020 doing the same thing, and even using the same reasons. But if Trump loses again, he’ll have dropped (or been cheated out of) two elections in a row. At some point, you can only get fooled so many times. For a movement that extols winning, they will be a movement that can’t win anything.

Finally, Trump himself is diminished, a rambling and shambolic figure who can’t hold a crowd’s attention, can’t debate, can’t communicate clearly, and who is losing support even from fellow Republicans. His stories are boring and rote, his nicknames and attempts at humor are pathetic, and his entire affect is one of a man slowing down and losing the ability to command an audience. Stop the Steal was a concerted effort to put a losing president back into office using extralegal means and violence. The second time around, a lot of people just might not bother trying to prop up a guy who is so clearly on the downslope of life. Some will, of course. There are always those who prefer the park bench and the cyanide capsule to surrender and humiliation when the dictator falls. But it’s entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that much of the GOP will be glad to be rid of Trump – even if they can’t publicly admit it.

If that’s how it all plays out, we’ll all be better for it.

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.

To support my work pushing back against right wing crap, please check out my Patreon, and consider subscribing for just $8/month. Once I get enough subscribers, I’ll start making exclusive content that will make your friends jealous.

Disunity Ticket

Mike Rothschild

If you believe a small, mostly-Trump worshipping part of social media, dead bear-planting antivaxxer and brain worm guardian Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump represents a massive blow to the Democrat [sic] Party establishment that will propel Trump to victory as part of a historical unity ticket when all of Kennedy’s voters embrace Trump and vote for him.

If you believe pretty much everyone else who knows anything about polling, elections, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump, or brain worms; then Kennedy dropping out will have almost no effect on the race. It might even hurt Trump in the long term by saddling him with Kennedy’s considerable baggage.

I’m certainly not an expert on presidential polling, but I am something of an expert on brain worms and antivaxxers. So I can safely say that the real effect of RFK Jr. dropping out is almost certainly going to be closer to zero than the 50 STATE LANDSLIDE being predicted on MAGA social media. Numerous polling firms have already given pretty good reasons why Kennedy’s departure won’t boost Trump much, if it all.

Trying to apply trends in niche social media groups to the population as a whole is always tricky. Most people, Democrats and Republicans alike, think Kennedy is an irrelevant weirdo, to the point where the Harris campaign wanted nothing to do with him. There might be some crossover between the two in the health freedom/Tucker Carlson community, full of people who think vaccines are poison, seed oils are worse than Hitler, an all meat diet will keep you alive forever, skin cancer isn’t real, and the medical establishment’s job is to keep you fat and sick. Some might even believe Trump is going to declassify all the files about the assassinations of both JFK and RFK – though, of course, Trump could have blown the doors off the “deep state” conspiracy any time while he was already president, and never did.

The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd is loud, but small – and while they might like both Trump and RFK, they were already overwhelmingly going for Trump. And again, most other people think these folks are creepy weirdos who are obsessed with meat, genitals, seed oils, and assassinations.

So I wanted to focus specifically on the conspiracist community’s reaction to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, and why a Trump/Kennedy marriage is much more likely to end in disaster than in triumph. Putting the two together might seem like a thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party establishment, but in reality, Trump and Kennedy are a poor fit, with fan bases that want different things and don’t especially like or trust each other. And Trump and Kennedy themselves were sniping at one another on social media as recently as a few weeks ago. So here’s why a Trump/Kennedy match is more likely to be a disunity ticket than a magical rocket ride for Team Humanity:

Kennedy’s campaign was already toast: Joe Biden dropping out and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris had already taken almost all the wind out of Kennedy’s sailboat, picking up scores of disaffected Democrats who mistakenly believed Robert F. Kennedy’s son was the next great Democratic standard bearer. Kennedy’s polling cratered, and Harris’s rose almost exactly as much. Beyond that, Kennedy’s campaign was broke, and had struggled to attract anything but negative attention for his bizarre antics. There’s just simply not many people in his camp to actually flip from him to Trump, and as we’re about to see, most aren’t going to do it anyway.

Most RFK Jr. voters supported him because he WASN’T Trump: the biggest reason so many people got behind Kennedy in the first place is that he was supposedly fighting back against the idea of the “uniparty” – a Democratic and Republican establishment that had total control over elections, politics, and governing. While he was nominally a Democrat and was trying to get into Democratic primaries, he was much more anti-establishment (or as least as anti-establishment as a Kennedy can be) in general, not conforming to the rigid doctrine of either party and making no secret of his displeasure with what used to be the part of his father and uncle.

And his supporters have acted accordingly – RFK Facebook groups and Reddit threads have been full of Kennedy voters declaring how they feel betrayed, lied to, used, and incredibly confused. Many are already saying they’ll still vote for him (which he had asked voters to do in states where the winner is all but assured), while others are declaring they’ll vote for other third-party candidates, or just not vote. And every single influencer who has proclaimed Trump/Kennedy to be a “unity ticket” was already a Trump supporter, and is basically wishcasting. A few are saying they’ll go over to Trump, but it’s hard to tell if they weren’t already going to vote for Trump anyway, they just liked what RFK had to say about vaccines. Speaking of which…

Operation Warp Speed should be a red line: This, at least to me as someone who follows the “health freedom” community, should be the ultimate deal breaker. Donald Trump has claimed he is the “father of the COVID vaccine,” and has taken credit for the speedy development and availability of COVID vaccines just a year into the pandemic. Truth be told, it’s the only thing he got right about COVID, and it’s probably just because it had a cool name.

Kennedy, on the other hand, has made a career out of selling false and dangerous claims about inoculations, and called the COVID shot “the deadliest vaccine ever created,” among other insane conspiracy theories about the virus being “engineered” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy-funded activist groups were taking vaccine challenges to the Supreme Court as recently as June. The vaccine was becoming a sticking point for Trump supporters who ALSO believe it’s a poison death shot, as evidenced by the many times people like Alex Jones twisted themselves into knots defending Trump while “being concerned” about the shot.

Kennedy is already touting Trump as the candidate who can “make America healthy again.” Given that Trump is one of the most physically unhealthy presidents in American history, that seems unlikely. But ultimately, this should strangle any sort of Trump/Kennedy union. If you back Operation Warp Speed, you can’t support Kennedy, and if you support Kennedy, you can’t back Operation Warp Speed. We all know conspiracy theorists excel at finding space in these sorts of logical nightmares, but if Trump is behind a genocide jab, and Kennedy endorses Trump, what does that say about Kennedy? Nothing good, I’d imagine.

Kennedy has nothing to offer Trump except baggage: given that Kennedy has no real base of supporters other than people who mostly already hate both parties and won’t vote, what value add does he represent? It gets him a little bit of media coverage, and maybe a fraction of his voters, but the cost is going to be high: Trump is now saddled with a ton of baggage he’s not going to want, related to Kennedy’s past drug use, erratic behavior, insane statement, and conspiracy theories. Any major right-wing influencer who had expressed support for Kennedy, most notably Joe Rogan, has already been batted down by angry MAGA believers and browbeaten into submission.

And Trump endorsing Kennedy on social media is raising some really uncomfortable questions about the Vice Presidential candidate he already picked, who has a massive train of weird baggage himself. There’s pretty much no chance Trump admits the Vance pick is a disaster and drops him, and Kennedy would be a massive drag as a VP for Trump anyway, putting an unstable weirdo front and center in a race where there already too many unstable weirdos. So what are we even doing here?

Ultimately, listen to what Kennedy supporters are telling us – they almost entirely hate both parties, hate Big Pharma, hate the vaccine, and hate how a few groups control the media and politics. There’s nothing antiestablishment about Trump at all, other than the fact that Trump supporters think everyone hates them. Maybe Kennedy brings a few people over with his new message of “Make America Healthy Again,” though even that’s as cynical and see-through as it gets. And any Kennedy supporter who believes that Trump would “pay back” Kennedy for his support with a cabinet post is kidding themselves.

So no, there won’t be a “unity ticket” running on making seed oils illegal and nut-sunning mandatory. Trump will trot Kennedy out as a prop a few times, then the uncomfortable questions will start coming, and Trump will pretend he’s never met Kennedy. And the final act of a long, strange, and increasingly tragic story will have been written.

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