Tag: conspiracy theories

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:

The Chemtrail Conundrum

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!

The past decade in general, and the past six months in particular, have seen a rise in conspiracy theories that spread with such ease that by the time you’ve fully understood them, the believers have moved on.

At the same time, it’s also a bonanza for the revival and repurposing of older conspiracy theories. Since they all build on each other in a ladder of grift and paranoia, understanding the older ones is often a key to understanding the newer ones. In an example I wrote about in The Storm is Upon Us, the crackpot Omega Trust scam begat the even more crackpot NESARA scam, which begat the Iraqi dinar scam – and all three are both the building blocks of QAnon and still possession small sects of believers today.

In this way, conspiracy theories take on an evolutionary feel – some evolve into more advanced forms, while also continuing to exist in some way. It’s why “if humans evolved from apes, why do apes still exist” is such a dumb creationist argument. This is how evolution works, it’s not a transformation, it’s a growth that some members of the genus exhibit and others don’t.

Ergo, chemtrails can be a conspiracy theory with decades-old roots that has been debunked time and time again, while also finding new adherents and ways to spread on social media.

Like a volcano of stupid, chemtrails mostly lay dormant as a conspiracy theory until suddenly being picked up as a cause by members of Donald Trump’s orbit. Just in the last few months, HHS Secretary and professional antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the defense research agency DARPA was spraying chemicals on the American population through jet fuel, bathroom gadfly and sometime politician Nancy Mace claimed she would ban chemtrails if elected governor of South Carolina, and eight other states have actually taken some legal steps to ban them.

Like banning dragons, time portals, or a Bears quarterback throwing for 4,000 yards; banning chemtrails is impossible. None of these things exist. Chemtrails are not real. The government is not using jet planes to spray anything on anyone, and despite nearly 30 years of conspiracy theories about them, not a single chemtrail has ever been proven to exist.

Of course, airplane contrails are real, and have been photographed since the early 1940’s. Fleets of Allied bombers left the sky full of contrails behind them, and Londoners with the courage to go outside during the Battle of Britain could see the sky full of the condensation trails left by fighters and bombers going after each other. They are the natural result of hot exhaust from engines hitting cold air and instantly freezing. If you go outside on a cold day and breathe, you will create steam – essentially an unfrozen contrail. You are not a government chemical experiment, you are a person engaged in basic science. Congratulations!

Contrails have nothing to do with mind control, earthquakes, fires, mass shootings, brainwashing, transgender people, or any of the other ridiculous things people blame them for – because they are just lines of frozen water vapor. Chemtrails also don’t have anything to do with these things – because they don’t exist.

I have no idea whether the politicians touting their tough-on-chemtrail records know they aren’t real. But they know that their constituents believe they’re real. This is the only meaningful currency in conspiracism – knowing whether people will believe something or not. And chemtrails have many believers. I saw this firsthand when I made a simple post about Mace’s “chemtrail ban” proposal and got thousands of responses.

Conspiracist responses to my simple, absolutely true statement essentially fell into four overlapping categories:

  1. “oh, so you’re saying cloud seeding/weather modification isn’t real?”
  2. “I saw them, so they’re real”
  3. “If they’re not real, why not ban them?”
  4. “shut up, Jew”

Obviously, these are all bad responses, but they’re bad for different reasons. If I debated conspiracy theorists, which I don’t, this is what I might say back:

  1. Mace didn’t mention cloud seeding or weather modification, both of which are real, but fairly limited in use and application. She mentioned chemtrails – specifically that, and only that. Defending something that someone didn’t say is like a reverse strawman argument, and has no relevance. Nancy Mace likely knows little about the complex history of weather modification, but she knows that when she says “chemtrails” her fans will start foaming at the mouth.
  2. Claiming that “I know what I saw” is a classic crackpot crutch, and is usually followed with “are you calling me a liar?” No, I’m saying you’re wrong. What you are seeing is either a contrail or a cloud. They have existed for a long time, and just because they look sinister or mysterious doesn’t mean they are. We are gullible and fallible, particularly in regards to seeing something we don’t understand and thinking we do.
  3. Because laws that ban things that aren’t real based on conspiracy theories and bad science are not only useless, but potentially harmful. They waste time, money, effort, and can be applied in any number of ways that might cause pain to other people. Remember when conservatives wanted fewer laws? It wasn’t that long ago. Laws against things that don’t exist can be warped and twisted to use against things that do. What if a “chemtrail ban” was used to justify bans on flying in general? Or research on weather or climate change? Things that aren’t real don’t need to have laws applied to them like they are.
  4. You’d be surprised (or not) how many conspiracist arguments just start and end with the person making them being Jewish. Judaism and airplane contrails have nothing to do with one another. And yet, I got dozens of responses saying as such, or just declaring that I can’t be trusted because I’m “a Rothschild.” I wrote a book about that.

The real questions about chemtrails aren’t “what are they spraying” but “after 80+ years of contrails, why has nobody proven they’re actually chemicals?”

We should be asking believers for proof. For actual video of chemicals being loaded into planes – or some idea what these chemicals even are. We should demand scientific answers as to how a thin trail of something 35,000 feet up in the air can have any effect on anyone on the ground. We should ask for testimony or depositions or notarized statements from pilots who have sprayed chemtrails, ground crews that loaded them, or chemtrail bosses who ordered them to be sprayed. Believers should know exactly what it is they’re claiming is happening, how it works, who is doing it, and why. These are fairly simple questions that believers should be desperate to answer.

But they don’t want answers, they want fear. None of it is real, and those who tout chemtrails as a tool of globalist control don’t want to hear the reasons they’re being lied to by their gurus.

Politicians looking for easy wins with conspiracy theorist voters will keep trotting this nonsense out, knowing few people have the time or interest to really go up against it. And knowing that some people will always be scared of things they don’t understand but can see happening in front of them.

Chemtrails aren’t real. But sadly, the pointless fear of them is.

“Little Deuce Coup” and Other Conspiracy Hits

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When You Don’t Care About Being Wrong

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!

As part of my post-fire mental health, I’ve been trying to stay off social media on the weekends. I’m also trying to avoid getting too wrapped up in debunking instant conspiracy theories about tragic events, preferring to wait a day or two before really diving into what fringe communities are claiming. The positive side of this is that I’m generally less frantic and glued to my phone. The vulnerability is that if a bunch of things happen over the weekend, or a major event spawns a deluge of disinformation, by the time I jump back into the fray, I’m already behind.

So after the horrifying shootings of multiple Minnesota lawmakers on Saturday spawned countless conspiracy theories minutes later, I was way behind.

By the time I had popped onto social media Saturday afternoon, the worst people on the internet had long ago flooded their readers with conspiracy theories and false claims that the alleged killer was a radical leftist Marxist, that the shootings had been revenge by the state’s Democratic party for the two lawmakers voting against a bill to fund healthcare for undocumented immigrants, that the shooter was friends with MN governor Tim Walz, and that he’d been planning to attend the No Kings protests scheduled for that day.

All of these theories either lacked evidence or took real things out of context. They weren’t true, and when they were first posted, nobody could have actually known if they were true, because for at least the few hours immediately after the shooting, the suspect hadn’t been publicly named and little was known about him. How could anyone know that the shooter was a “radical Marxist” or “friends with the governor” if we didn’t actually know who he was?

None of this kept these theories from immediately going viral, driving traffic and merchandise sales to their creators, and confusing the issue for people who are not dialed into internet culture. Of course, you didn’t need to be an expert on conspiracy theories to know this would happen, because it’s happened already – countless times.

The facts and details about the MN shooting didn’t matter, because the people who create these theories have developed a template for every single mass shooter, would-be assassin, tragic accident, mass casualty event, or any other unexpected and traumatic event. The perpetrator is always a far-left deep state assassin with links to antifa, Black Lives Matter, George Soros, liberal political figures, or transgender activism. The details and nouns vary a bit, but the gist is the same – a deranged hyper-liberal who acted out their violent ideation on innocent people, either because pig pharma made them insane, or because they’re working for the deep state.

The early “reporting” on these incidents is always the same, following the same outline and making the same accusations. And it’s always wrong. Trump’s would-be assassin in July? He was a “deep state hitman” and dedicated Democrat – until it turned out he had no known motive and had debated shooting at both Trump and Joe Biden. The horrifying mass shooting in Uvalde, TX in 2023? The shooter was immediately “identified” as both transgender and an illegal immigrant – except he was neither. The 2022 Highland Park, IL shooter? The far right media immediately claimed he was linked to antifa and transgender. He was neither. The 2017 Las Vegas massacre? Alex Jones immediately ran with conspiracy theories that the shooter was both a member of antifa, and linked to ISIS – except he had nothing to do with either, and local police and federal officials disclaimed both accusations. I could find dozens more examples.

Claims about mass shooters “actually” being transgender and part of an “epidemic” of trans massacres are so common that Jones, in a Twitter post after the 2024 Madison shooting, claimed “there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.” In reality, the number of mass shootings carried out by trans individuals is 0.11% – or about one out of a thousand.

Even disasters beyond shootings are fodder for the “deranged leftist” template. Recent helicopter crashes, train derailments, and even the fires in Los Angeles that burned down my home and thousands of others have all been blamed on some form of mutated leftism, usually DEI hiring practices. And it’s entirely without evidence, and done only to inflame people who are already inflamed about DEI hiring practices. The facts don’t matter, and they’ll never be applied.

As it turned out, the MN shooter was a hardcore Trumper, a right-wing evangelical, and a domestic terrorist with a list of dozens of Democratic lawmakers he wanted to murder. The “No Kings” fliers in his car were likely there because he was going to attempt to murder people at one of the events in Minnesota. But even now, the influencers cling to the idea that he was actually a radical leftist with close ties to Tim Walz – despite no evidence that they’d ever met, and their only link being that the shooter had served on a non-partisan business commission rubber-stamped by the governor.

But conspiracy theory gurus dropped him into their template of radical left-wing transgender antifa abortionist the moment the news of the MN shootings broke. They seeded the ground first, and the narrative was set. And it’s not a narrative that started with Alex Jones or Trump’s election – merely one that’s changed shape to comport with the times.

In the Before Trump days, mass shootings and violent incidents were blamed on the looming specter of gun confiscation and mass arrests of patriots. In the wake of Sandy Hook and other massacres, the far right media immediately saw whatever was going on as some form of a staged false flag or targeted hit, always carried out by either multiple shooters or a drugged-up government patsy, with the purpose being an excuse for harsh gun control measures, the taking away of 2nd Amendment rights, and the incarceration – or elimination – of those who resisted.

Ultimately, the far right media machine switched out the “staged false flag” template for the “deranged antifa trans” template for a couple of reasons. One was that after Sandy Hook came and went without the dreaded Great Gun Grab, it became clear that if the massacre of 20 6-year-olds didn’t motivate Congress to do anything about gun control, nothing ever would. The second was that Trump was elected, and the conspiracy theories about tyrannical government overreach suddenly became wishful thinking. Conspiracy influencers who turned their paranoia about the federal government into full time jobs suddenly became Trump’s biggest fans and apologists. No government he controlled would ever carry out staged false flags to take away our gun rights, because Trump was only going to use the hammer of government to get rid of bad people, not patriots.

And yet mass shootings kept happening. So rather than engage in any kind of introspection about why mass shootings keep happening and what can be done to curtail them, they just switched out the conspiracy theory. False flags were out, deranged leftists were in. It didn’t make anymore sense in its new form than its old form – and even Jones continued making contradictory claims that the shooter was both anti-Trump and a hired stooge of the government. But overall, it became a way to excuse why the thing Trump should have stopped – the federal government killing people in preparation for martial law – kept happening.

The sad truth is that none of the influencers making these theories up care about whether they’re true or not. The only thing that matters to them is building out and monetizing their endless narrative that “the left” – whoever that is – wants to kill them, take their freedom, and transgender them. Create the fear, spread it without consideration, sell them the cure. Do it again, and again, and again. And when you’re proven wrong, the only thing you do is push the lie harder. As it became clear that the MN shooter wasn’t any of the things that early conspiracy theorists claimed he was, they just kept saying he was those things.

When you don’t care about being wrong, you don’t care about continuing to be wrong. Being right takes time, and these people don’t have it. Not when there are ad buys and clicks and podcast subscriptions at stake.

There will be more violent incidents in America, not just because of Trump and the general ratcheting up of tension between Americans, but because America is a violent country where guns are easy to access and mental health is always the first thing to run out of funding. The people who rely on making money off disinformation about these incidents will stick to their pre-written narratives until the time comes for them to swap the template out again, once Trump is out of office and presumably the “deep state” takes the White House again. Then we’ll likely be back to false flag gun grabs, rather than transgender Marxists.

It won’t matter. When you don’t care about being right, it never does.