Tag: conspiracy theories

Trump’s Third Term Scare

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was nine months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

Every so often, the three-shirt-wearing human blister known as Steve Bannon emerges from his podcast studio to interact with human beings who occasionally wash their hair.

In one recent occurrence, Bannon sat down for an interview with the editors of The Economist, a magazine not generally known for platforming incoherent rants by lunatics, yet laboring under the incorrect assumption that “liberalism demands dialogue with those who oppose it.”

It does not. And yet, in the middle of an otherwise anodyne chat about whatever bullshit is on his mind, Bannon uncorked this meatball of crazy:

“Well he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28.”

Strictly speaking, unless Father Time decides to speed up the inevitable, Trump will be president in 2028, because his term doesn’t end until January 20, 2029.

But that’s not what Bannon meant. What Bannon meant was that Trump will circumvent the 22nd Amendment, run for an unconstitutional third term in office thanks to some nebulous “plan”, win that election, and be president until 2033, whereby his followers believe he’ll just do it again and again. So that’s great.

Trump, of course, has been talking about a third term on and off for years. He’s selling “Trump 2028” swag on his website, and was “not joking” when he claimed “a lot of people want him to” throw out the Constitution and make a grab for an eternal presidency.

He’s been doing that same “joking/not joking” dance since 2018, where he’s claimed that he might give a lifetime presidency a shot, and other times where he said he was going to run for four terms, deserved “extra years” because he was impeached, and even hinted at constitutional loopholes that would allow him to serve as a VP or Speaker for one day, then have everyone above him resign to be an unelected president. Hey, if Gerald Ford could do it…

On the flip side, he’s also said that he also has no intention of trying for a third term, and that he only sells 2028 merch and hints at another run to “drive the left crazy.” Which…works? Witness the absolute furor over Bannon’s remarks, which is the only reason why anyone outside the subscriber base of The Economist knew they’d spoken to Steve Bannon. The guy knows what makes the left insane and terrified, and damn if he isn’t going to provide it.

Now we’ve had days of the news cycle hijacked by this nonsense. The government is in shutdown mode, health insurance premiums are about to explode, and federal law enforcement is turning cities into war zones. But we’re talking about Steve Bannon and about Trump running for a third term, not anything that’s actually possible or legal.

Of course, when has Trump ever been stopped by something being impossible or illegal? Dude just does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants – and knows his retinue of bootlickers and apologists will go along with it. He wants us afraid and believing he is unstoppable and inevitable, so why bother trying?

Tear down the East Wing? Incite a mob to sack the Capitol? Kill random fishermen and kidnap people off the streets for not being white? Deploy troops in the streets? Fuck you, try to stop me.

And so back we go to the prospect of a third term. It’s only illegal if laws mean something. It’s only impossible because nobody has tried it since the 22nd Amendment was passed. Trump might not always mean what he says, but he never says anything he doesn’t mean. Right?

It’s a losing game to try to deduce what Trump “really” is talking about at this point.  The whole “take him seriously/take him literally” thing has been a bust since 2016. But it’s been helpful to me to think of Trump running again as a type of invasion scare.

England in both the 19th and 20th centuries has been seized by stretches of terror that an invasion fleet was about to land on its shores. From Napoleon in the 1810s to Hitler in 1940, Britons were hunkering down, digging in, and preparing for the transports to appear on the horizon.

Both times, the threat was real, but it also wasn’t. Napoleon had no way to stop the Royal Navy from intercepting and destroying a potential invasion fleet, even though he had the men and transports to land in southern England, destroy the Channel ports, and possibly march on London.

Hitler didn’t even have that – he was hoping that repurposed river barges would be enough to land troops and tanks in England, and that the Royal Navy and Air Force would just politely allow it to happen.

In hindsight, the threats were massively overblown. But at the time, nobody knew that, or at least nobody could say it with 100% confidence. The fear was real, and it was enough to drive British policy, military deployment, economics, and psychology to the brink of mass panic. If either Napoleon or Hitler had even tried to invade England, it would have been a disaster and a total failure. But try telling that to someone in the path of a possible invasion. You don’t know until you know.

Like a cross-Channel invasion, an attempt by Trump to run for a third term would be a disaster for him. It’s probably not even physically possible. Trump is exhibiting clear signs of physical and cognitive decline, including taking two annual exams this year, admitting to having an MRI and swelling in his ankles, and exhibiting at least some signs of a stroke. It’s hard to get riled up by the possibility of Trump 2028 when Trump might not actually make it to 2028 in any kind of shape to govern.

Beyond that, the longer Trump and his enablers muse about various plans for 2028, the harder it makes things for actual 2028 candidates like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. If Trump keeps hinting at a 2028 run, what is the rest of the GOP going to do? Sure, they’ll probably go along with it, but what if they don’t? There’s no reason for these people to shackle their political futures to an 82 year old man who thinks he’s the King of Israel and brags about acing a test where you identify an elephant. They have careers, too.

If Trump spends half of 2027 kicking around the idea of going for it, nobody else will be able to fundraise, hire staff, or lay the groundwork for an announcement. He would be kneecapping his own succession. Maybe that’s why he’d do it, because nobody else can do the job but him, even if he can’t do the job.

So what if he does go for it? What if he announces the day after the midterms that he’s running again? Fuck you, try to stop me.

Absolute chaos for the GOP, and the fundraising haul of the century for the Democrats would be among the first two things to happen. And there would probably a blizzard of lawsuits that keep Trump off the ballot in any state with a Democratic legislature or governor. Because the president doesn’t put himself on the ballot, states do. Elections are run by states. And many states are going to refuse to have anything to do with this nonsense. Because it’s unconstitutional and insane.

Imagine the GOP trying to hold a primary while Trump has announced a fourth run for office. How does that work? Trump declines more and more, while shoving anyone else out of the way, and destroying anyone who dares to try to mount a legitimate campaign. Meanwhile, various courts spend months kicking lawsuits around, and Trump is disqualified from appearing on ballots of states that he won in 2024, but that have Democratic governors – states the Republicans would need, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Taking this ludicrous scenario to its conclusion, 2028 sees Trump running a fake and illegal primary campaign against real Republicans. The party is split in two with Trump “winning” states he can’t win, while a legitimate contender finds himself iced out of ballots on red states that would allow Trump to actually compete.

Could we have a Democrat win some states, Trump “win” others, and a different Republican win a few? How does any of this work? Why would anyone be okay with it, when Trump is declining so fast he might not even be coherent by then?

Sure, maybe the GOP just lets him do it, but even if it’s guaranteed to lead to a Newsom or Pritzker presidency? It seems unlikely. We have courts and laws, and while Trump can just do a lot of things by himself as president, running for a third term is not one of those things. It would take a massive buy-in by his entire party, and as his polling and health decline, the prospect of that buy-in declines just as quickly.

Ultimately, the third term can be effective as a scare tactic, but it’s not a real political strategy. Neither are even goofier scenarios, like Trump running as Vance’s VP and then Vance resigning on day 1, or exploiting slight differences in the wording of Constitutional amendments about presidential eligibility, or some magical amendment reversing the 22nd. Those things might be theoretically possible, but they aren’t practical or feasible.

The most likely scenario is that Trump ultimately tells himself and the country he could run for a third term and win if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to. That lets him save face, play kingmaker for 2028, and still keep liberals scared and conservatives in line with the prospect of a sudden about face. He’s not a lame duck, he can convince himself, just a man who has Made America Great Again, and can go back to doing what he loves. Whatever that is.

Invasion scares fizzle out when the invader can’t run away from the reality of their situation anymore. Napoleon and Hitler both called off their invasions when it was clear they had no chance of success, and even trying to do so would be a complete disaster. Trump is almost certain to do the same, given the enormous opposition and low probability of actually accomplishing anything other than a humiliating defeat.

Trump 2028 might be a useful piece of trolling and a way to get attention and scare enemies, but that doesn’t mean the fear of it happening isn’t real.

It’s also not inevitable.

The Performative Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was eight months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

In the days after Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, the conservative activist has been compared by fellow conservatives to Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Moses, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even steel-skeletoned X-Men character Wolverine. He has been lionized as a hero, a martyr, a warrior for God, a prophet, a revolutionary, and potentially a future president cut down in his prime.

He has been memorialized with a vigil at the Capitol, a funeral with federal security held at a football stadium with the president and virtually the entire cabinet in attendance, and talk of statues on multiple campuses. Tucker Carlson compared his death to the Crucifixion. Flags were ordered flown at half-mast. There were rumors Kirk would lie in state at the Capitol, an honor usually reserved for presidents and other figures of national importance. Those who took any kind of joy in his death, or even people who simply quoted verbatim the horrifying things he said about Black and transgender people were hounded with threats and often fired from their job.

Though the 24th anniversary of 9/11 took place just a day after Kirk’s death, its coverage was virtually consumed by that of Kirk. It was as if an entire nation had lost a national hero, with the expectation that the displays of mourning would be commensurate. The September 11th attacks were so forgotten in the rush to anoint Kirk with sainthood that Kirk’s body was flown back to his home state of Arizona on Air Force Two at taxpayer expense, escorted by JD Vance, who skipped New York’s 9/11 memorial ceremony in the process. When it came to public displays of lionizing Charlie Kirk, nothing was too much, and too much was not enough.

Charlie Kirk was a podcaster whose claim to fame was showing up at colleges and daring overmatched students to “prove me wrong” in debates. He was not a war hero, or a statesman, or the inventor of a cure for a deadly disease. He was not a figure on par with history’s prophets and martyrs. He said things about Black people, Islam, and women that were reprehensible. He believed in no separation between church and the state, explicitly wanting a Christian nationalist government that would put the Bible and the Constitution on an equal footing.

One can be upset that a public figure was shot dead while exercising his right to free speech. One can mourn for his children, who will grow up not remembering their dad. One can shake their heads at how easily the shooter obtained a rifle. But this? Congressional resolutions? Vicious attacks on those not mourning him hard enough? State-enforced tributes? The entire cabinet gathered together in a way they only do for the State of the Union? Comparisons to Lincoln and JFK and the Lord and Savior of billions of Christians? What are we doing here?

A cult of personality grew around Kirk so quickly and so completely that it almost dares one to see it as insincere and hyperbolic. Kirk’s martyrdom has taken on the aura of a public performance, done for the cameras and the clicks, and to stoke more of the fear that Kirk specialized in stoking. The language around his death is messianic and hyperbolic, but it also includes a word not usually found in public expression of grief: they.

Time and again, we’ve been told “they” killed Kirk. The left, the radicals, the Christian-hating lunatics. It’s the same “they” who we are told by the far right over and over are the enemy, the ones to fear. They are coming after your job, your money, your women, and your freedom. They control the media, they control the universities, they control banking. They must be stopped at any cost. After all, look what “they” did to Charlie Kirk. They can do it to you, too.

“They,” of course is one guy – alleged shooter Tyler Robinson. But while it took three days for Christ to rise from the dead (if you believe that sort of thing) and about two days to find Robinson, it took seconds for Kirk’s personality cultists to determine who killed him and why.

The moment Kirk died, his killer was deemed a transgender lunatic, hopped up on antifa and liberal hate, driven to kill a beloved conservative because of their words. Seconds after Kirk’s death was confirmed, countless right-wing influencers began baying for blood. It was war, with Kirk killed by the first shot. It was open season on America’s violent liberal lunatic enemies. After years of forcing pronouns and land acknowledgements and transgender everywhere on us, the gloves were off and the guns were locked and loaded. It was the last act of a holy struggle that would end either with the right victorious or the death of freedom.

Never mind that this was almost the same reaction many of these people had to Cracker Barrel changing its logo, to Black stormtroopers in the new Star Wars movies, and to the Green M&M not being “sexy” anymore. Some of that was obviously performance, but this was the real thing. A guy was dead. And it was easy to imagine a massive and organized spasm of violence against the groups linked to the shooter.

Except it got a lot harder once the shooter was found. Tyler Robinson had nothing to do with antifa, which is not a real group in any sense of the word. He wasn’t a left-wing activist in any meaningful sense of the word. He wasn’t transgender. He was a mostly politically-apathetic gamer who might have started to lean more left, and who was in some kind of romantic relationship with his transgender roommate. The slogans etched on his bullets were mostly internet brainrot from the gaming world. He’s never voted, was raised in a MAGA family, and went to one semester of college before dropping out and going to trade school.

He was not who Kirk’s cult of personality needed him to be. He was not an antifa trans activist who killed Kirk to advance the far left’s war on traditional culture. Like Oswald, like James Earl Ray, like would-be Trump killer Thomas Crooks, he was just a guy with a rifle who will be forever remembered only as someone who shot someone else. His motive increasingly appears to be murky, just like his politics and online life. Like many other assassins and wannabes, he did it for reasons that don’t make sense, don’t fit into neat boxes, and might even contradict each other. Robinson may have “hated” Kirk, but the hate was born out of complex and inscrutable reasons that haven’t been fully revealed.

But Kirk couldn’t just be killed by a sort-of left-wing loser with a gun who did it for no real reason. He had to be martyred by a hard left psycho in a culture-war driven killing that must be avenged. He had to die for us, and we have to carry on his work. Like JFK. Like MLK. All killed by supposed conspiracies led by nefarious actors or because they got too close to the truth. “They” killed him – a trope uncomfortably close to the deicide accusation levelled at Jews, which Tucker Carlson leaned especially hard on during his bizarre eulogy at Kirk’s funeral event.

This is the essence of conspiracy theories – that something unexpected had to have happened for a reason we aren’t being told. When we don’t get a reason, or the reason is dumb, we make one up. We give meaning to what seemed random. And we tell ourselves that whoever did it will come after us next. Right wing influencers excel at taking this fear and turning it into cash. And they’re doing it again.

Kirk’s death appeared to be completely meaningless. A life seemingly imbued with holy purpose ended for no purpose. But that couldn’t be allowed, not when there was an opportunity to use it to crush Kirk’s enemies, build brand extensions, make liberals cry, and get on TV. Some of the grief is clearly real, but much of it is almost hilariously over-the-top, like an Italian movie where the widow hurls herself into her husband’s grave. Kirk’s widow wasted no time sending out fundraising emails, taking over as the public face of Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization, and posting somber videos of her tenderly touching her husband’s corpse, while declaring war on those who killed him.

Whoever they were.

The Kirk cult of personality likely has limits. People have short memories and will move on to the next tragedy (trust me on this one.) And for as much hyperbolic praise has been heaped on Kirk, it can never surpass the hyperbolic praise heaped on Donald Trump. That is THE cult of personality, all others are subordinate. Trump himself moved on rather quickly, from giving a somber (and some speculated AI-created) tribute in the White House on Wednesday, to dancing at a Yankees game on Friday. Even Trump’s headlining eulogy at Kirk’s funeral had little to do with Kirk and everything to do with Trump’s usual basket of twisty grievances and bizarre lies. It felt like a campaign speech, not a farewell to a friend.

And nobody on the right will say anything about it because Trump is the leader, and the leader can’t be questioned. So while the grief might be real, the mourning is a performance – carried out for both a mass audience and for the Audience of One. And when he gets bored and moves on, there’s a pretty good chance the mourners will too.

It’s tempting to look at Kirk’s funeral as a harbinger of what’s to come with Trump’s movement once Trump is gone. Maybe Kirk could have been the person to take control of it, but it’s far more likely that nobody is that person. Dictators don’t generally name successors, and those that are named often pay a heavy price. Building an instant cult of personality is one thing, sustaining it is another. Trump will always be the center of MAGA world. Kirk can never be, and no amount of ridiculous genuflection and hyperbolic martyrdom can change that.

Trump is their God, everyone else just floats in and out of his good graces.

This is How Stupid They Think You Are

Mike Rothschild

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Donald Trump began his rise to political prominence with his enthusiastic embrace of a conspiracy everyone could see was absurd and fake. So it’s fitting that exactly ten years after the 2016 Republican primary field began to disintegrate around Trump, we’re doing it again. Only this time it’s so much dumber.

Before he was the Daddy God King of the Republican Party, Trump was a blustery TV businessman who was Just Asking Questions about where Barack Obama was actually born. Trump took birtherism, which had mostly been the domain of desiccated far right fossils or crank perennial candidates and made it mainstream and hip. In doing so, he normalized the conspiracism that the “square” conservative movement had mostly attempted to push away, starting us all down a deep dark hole of lunacy and contrarianism that would lead to Pizzagate, QAnon, COVID denialism, January 6th, and Trump winning two presidential elections.

Birtherism depended on a vast conspiracy to fake Obama’s citizenship, train him in the ways of Marxist Muslim terrorism, install him in government, and pull all of the strings and levers exactly how they needed to be pulled in order to elevate him to the presidency. It would have required hundreds or even thousands of people to be in on the plot, none of them to reveal any of it and all of them to execute it perfectly, and forged documents done so perfectly that nobody could ever determine if they were real or fake – except for a few truth-seekers who immediately determined they were fake, and nobody cared.

Also, it would have required time travel. Birth announcements in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, both based on information provided by the Hawaii Department of Public Health, proclaimed the arrival of a son to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama on August 4, 1961. Various conspiracy theories would try to work around this by claiming that the elder Barack Obama was not the president’s father, and that he had changed his name from “Barry Soetoro” or some such. But the announcements themselves were impossible to fake. They were found in decades-old archives. Unless someone had the forethought to plant them in local papers as part of a half-century conspiracy to elevate a non-citizen usurper to the presidency, that should have been the end of the matter.

And yet, it wasn’t. And logic never dictates how conspiracy theories end, only their usurpation by other conspiracy theories.

A decade later, Trump is now asking America to believe that the crude cartoon and bizarre poem he wrote for sex trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50 year birthday book is just as fake and planted as Obama’s birth certificate. Trump and his mouthpieces want us to think the drawing wasn’t his and that he’s never drawn a cartoon, despite his long and well-documented history of drawing cartoons. He wants us to think the signature on the cartoon isn’t his, despite looking exactly like his signature looked from 20 years ago, and matching up perfectly to other verified signatures from the time. And he wants us to think that despite being handed over to Congress by Epstein’s estate, and despite being in a disgusting book full of obnoxious praise and sexual innuendo written by people who have confirmed they contributed to it, that he had nothing to do with it and it’s not from him.

Essentially, just like the Obama birth announcements of 1961, Trump wants us to believe that someone planted that cartoon and signature 22 years ago just so it could be unearthed by Democrats and the media to smear him. It’s all a conspiracy – hopelessly convoluted, entirely pointless, and defying all available facts and logic. It requires nothing other than belief, and will be believed only by those who wish it to be true.

This is how stupid Trump and his minions in the White House, GOP, and right wing media arm all think you are. They need you to believe that the thing for which overwhelming evidence exists and which has no conceivable way to fake does not exist and is fake. Trump’s denial does nothing but bring up more questions, none of which have good answers. If Trump didn’t do it, who did? Was it faked two decades ago or now? Why would Epstein’s estate hang on to a fake? Or conversely, why would someone put a fake into a birthday book which was exceedingly and disgustingly real?

There will never be any answers to these questions because they aren’t real questions that anyone would ask. The only evidence the card is fake is that Donald Trump keeps saying it’s fake. For most, that will never be enough. For a few, it will be the only thing that matters. So you keep saying it’s fake, keep changing the subject to literally anything else, and repeat it often enough to ride out the controversy.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is whether conspiracy gurus actually believe the things they say, or whether it’s all part of their grift. It’s always hard to answer, and I usually say that conspiratorial beliefs are often an extension of things the person already believes, just taken to irrational extremes. Those extremes are often driven by commerce, since conspiracism is a lucrative industry. But sometimes they’re driven by self-preservation.

Trump, presumably, knows that he drew and signed that card for Jeffrey Epstein. And while the people around him are dimwitted, incurious, sycophantic, and fairly evil; they’re not complete idiots. They almost certainly know that the simplest explanation for the cartoon isn’t a decades-long conspiracy, but that Trump drew a doodle of a naked young woman with no arms and wrote a poem about the “wonderful secret” he and Jeffrey Epstein share.

And that’s why they’re saying it’s fake. Because if they admitted it’s real for any reason then they have to answer the next logical questions. Even Trump’s usual pivot of “yeah I did it, so what” can do nothing other than harm him and the GOP, and open up glaring weak spots to be pounced on.

What is the “wonderful secret” Trump and Epstein shared? What were the “things they have in common?” What does “enigmas never age” mean? What happened “the last time” Trump saw Epstein?

Those are questions Trump and his bunker-mates would rather eat glass than face up to. Their answers might reveal truly horrifying things about the relationship the two men had, what they did together, and what they knew about each other. They might cast the President of the United States in such a foul and sick light that it might not be recoverable for the GOP.

Sure, Trump has survived everything anyone has ever thrown at him, but the rest of the Republican Party don’t have that invisible shield. What Republican member of Congress wants to face their constituents and have to answer questions about potential horrible acts their leader did to children alongside a billionaire pedophile two decades ago?

There is nothing to be gained for anyone around Trump in telling the truth about Epstein.

So they just lie. Over and over and over. And they think you’re dumb enough to either believe it, or be so frustrated with their lies that you drop the matter and move on.

Conspiracist belief flourishes when the lie becomes more palatable than the truth. And there is no truth less palatable to Donald Trump and his acolytes than Trump being close friends and sharing “wonderful secrets” with Jeffrey Epstein. And so the lie will flourish. Because the truth can never be acknowledged by the people who need to hold Trump up as a paragon of virtue and success. They need the lie.

Even if we all know it’s true.

Jade Helm 15, Ten Years Later

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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If you weren’t plugged into conspiracy theories in the pre-Trump years, it’s hard to overstate what a big deal the military exercise Jade Helm 15 was. Or rather, it’s hard to overstate what a big deal conspiracy theory influencers and gurus wanted you to think Jade Helm 15 was.

An anodyne military exercise not unlike dozens of others turned into a magnet for conspiracism and paranoia, as old-school fears of martial law and FEMA camps fused with Obama conspiracy theories and nascent social media. For months, Americans traded rumors of abandoned Walmarts turned into prisons, missile batteries and “death domes” going up in pastures, maps being distributed to troops showing how the US would be divided up, fears of Islamic terrorism and alien intervention, Chinese soldiers flooding into the country, Texas put under federal control, and martial law declared for the entire country. Troops would be on the streets of every major city, America would be divided into UN-approved fiefdoms, and personal property and firearms would be confiscated.

It was the founders’ worst nightmare come true. And all of it, as Alex Jones claimed in a May 2015 broadcast, was to prepare us for a “conversion to tyranny,” turning our military into a police force trained for “domestic operations against American people.”

Though it was fully embraced by Texas Republicans, members of Congress, and militia groups alike, the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory complex turned out to be vapor. The majority of the paranoia was idle chatter, but there were multiple arrests made of patriots planning to “resist Jade Helm” with pipe bombs, and one rancher who allowed the military to use his land was deluged by harassing calls and emails. But for those looking at Jade Helm as the opening shots of a UN takeover, only disappointment could be found. The exercise passed with none of the worst case scenarios traded by people like Alex Jones and his acolytes coming true.

Except, of course, when it did come true.

Ten years after Jade Helm, there were indeed armed American soldiers patrolling the streets of our cities for no reason, people being pulled out of cars and workplaces for random questioning and arrest, citizens disappeared into networks of prisons and extradition sites, and a president using the justification of “a lot of people wanting a dictator” to sign off on executive orders giving the military unprecedented police powers over Americans.

So were the Jade Helm paranoiacs gloating at seeing their predictions come true? Were they declaring their independence from government gone wild and locking and loading? Of course not. In fact, many were either denying any of this was happening or outright celebrating it.

Jade Helm landed right before the Trumpificiation of the far right, as Trump struggled to stand out in a crowded field of Republican candidates in 2015. With hindsight, it seems like the last gasp of the old-school anti-government conservative who talked endlessly of their preference to die on their feet rather than live on their knees. To them, the president – every president other than maybe JFK and Reagan – was a figurehead for the power-mad military industrial complex. They were all the same, interchangeable in every way that mattered, working together to keep our taxes high, our borders open, our working men down, and our government chained to special interests and gridlock.

Some even believed that it was only a matter of time before they shed the cloak of democracy and ordered their enemies rounded up. Freedom was always just one globalist machination away from being stripped for good.

Designed to simulate a military scenario requiring large scale special forces intervention, Jade Helm 15 was sponsored by the US Special Operations Command, and involved small military units operating in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Utah. Using about 1,400 Green Berets and other special operations troops, the exercise involved one side simulating an occupying force, and the other an organized resistance force. Most troops wore civilian clothes, and some even used civilian vehicles. And the exercises took place mostly in small towns and farmland. It’s not hard to see why a military that had spent over a decade fighting both the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgency would want to improve its anti-resistance training, and the exercise only different from other similar ones of the Iraq War era in its size and length,, going for two months from July to September.

The conspiracy theories started well before that. It’s hard to pin down who shared the first rumors about Jade Helm being carried out for nefarious purposes, but it’s easy to see when they went mainstream: March 19, 2015. On that day’s episode of Infowars, Alex Jones was joined by former soldier and future Proud Boy and convicted insurrectionist Joe Biggs, who had become a regular correspondent for Jones’ media empire. Biggs told Jones all about the pending “realistic military training” psyop Jade Helm, using a leaked map showing “permissive” and “hostile” states in red and blue.

In just a short conversation with convicted seditionist Biggs, who claimed he had been leaked information about the true purpose of the exercise, Jones essentially set the tone for an entire year of Jade Helm conspiracy theories. He declared it a “PSYOP in plain view for the troops to brainwash them, the local police and the citizens” and being done “in preparation for the financial collapse and maybe even Obama not leaving office.”

“This is just a cover for deploying the military on the streets, “Jones declared before launching into an ad for oregano oil.

Jones would make over a thousand references to Jade Helm in the coming months, essentially using everything he had spouted to future convicted seditionist Joe Biggs as the foundation for a vast network of interlocking theories. He would add even more details as he went, claiming that “Jade Helm” was actually an acronym for “Joint Assistance for Development and Execution, Homeland Eradication of Local Militias” Jones and other hosts and callers would claim the exercise would lead to large scale roundups, multiple states would be taken over, false flag attacks would be carried out through Jade Helm and blamed on patriot movements, and even that the plot was a ruse to allow a Chinese invasion of the US and the replacement of the dollar with the yuen as the global currency of business.

Other conspiracy theorists tied Jade Helm to classic 90’s conspiracy theories about black helicopters and global government, or claimed it was preparation for martial law due to an upcoming comet strike. And unlike future large scale conspiracy theories like QAnon, which had no real Russian disinformation component, it came out a few years after the exercise that Russian bot networks had worked hard to push Jade Helm conspiracy theories, possibly in a trial run for the 2016 election.

Once September 2015 came and went without martial law or mass executions in abandoned Walmarts, Jones quickly shifted his narrative. Jade Helm was never more than a “conditioning exercise” to get Americans used to troops on the streets – never mind that the actual exercise specifically did not involve large numbers of troops on the streets of major cities. Any mention of martial law or gun confiscation or government takeover came from other people putting words in his mouth, not him. Having failed to end with martial law and mass slavery, Jade Helm couldn’t be the thing that Alex was warning us about, because that would mean Alex was wrong. It was merely setting up the actual thing that Alex was warning us about.

Except then the thing that Alex was warning us about happened. In response to non-existent “riots” after ICE raids in LA, Trump federalized and deployed the CA National Guard and a contingent of Marines. Then he did the same to Washington DC, under the guise of “stopping crime” after a DOGE staffer was beaten up. Trump is now threatening to do the same thing to other cities – send in troops whether they’re wanted or needed, keep them there for however long he wants, arm them with loaded weapons, and give them unprecedented and likely illegal policing powers.

Moreover, Trump has acted like the worst caricature of what the far right feared from a president run amok. The election of Donald Trump inverted everything that the far right believed about government overreach and executive power. Government being the “problem” and not “the solution to the problem” was usurped by a egomaniacal huckster who claimed he was “the only one who could fix it” and “right about everything.” Increasingly, he demanded more public and obvious displays of praise and tribute, shaking down colleges and companies for payments and holding cabinet meetings where his secretaries would go around the table and one by one slather him with obnoxious devotion.

It was everything the right once hated about the Soviet Union and China and even their perception of the UN – a central leader making the nation revolve around him, suppressing dissent, taking control of agencies and corporations, and elevating himself to a nearly godlike figure. This wasn’t what presidents did, and it’s not what Americans wanted from their president. It demanded a response in keeping with how Americans respond to tyranny.

Or not.

Jones has been all over the place about Trump, veering from unquestioned support to accusations of failure, and back again. But Jones has celebrated Trump’s military deployments, extolling the “troops in the streets” that he once decried with Jade Helm. Trump’s possible military takeover of Chicago is “his duty,” as he put it in his August 22nd show, where he even admits it’s a slippery slope to gun confiscation, but also necessary because of a tortured logic involving fake crime stats and “the left.” Trump’s troop deployments are “liberation day” from drugs and the homeless and gangs.

“Thank God for Trump,” Jones declared a few days earlier. “He’s doing the right thing and it’s beautiful., and it’s all constitutional.”

Ultimately, the far right wanted Jade Helm, they just wanted it on their terms and to be rolled out in the way they wanted. They wanted it arresting the “deep state” and “making the streets safe again” from the people they deemed to be dirty and dangerous. They can easily rationalize their worst fears coming true, because they were never really afraid of it in the first place. All they wanted was someone they like to be in power, and then that person can use and abuse any lever of government or the military they want. Their fear always stemmed from them being rounded up – not undocumented immigrants and peaceful protestors. They always wanted those people rounded up.

It’s not clear if Trump will actually deploy troops to more cities, and if he does, that those troops will do anything other than what soldiers in LA and DC have done, which is snarl traffic with checkpoints and make videos for the White House’s social media accounts. Some are now picking up trash in DC, because there was nothing else for them to do. There’s no indication there will be large-scale roundups, nationwide martial law, suspended elections, or any of the other worst case scenarios offered up for what Jade Helm was “really” about.

But the fact that we’re even seriously talking about any of this, rather than dismissing it as paranoid conspiracy fodder, shows how far we’ve fallen and how perilous these times are. Not that the conspiracy influencers who pushed Jade Helm fear for a year care. What matters to them is selling t-shirts and making sure their audience knows how much they love Trump. Principles and democracy can’t hold a candle to that.

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: