Tag: conspiracy theories

The Fireworks Conspiracy Theory is Ridiculous and Totally Unnecessary

Mike Rothschild16 Comments

If you live in any kind of major city, small city, suburb, or area that could in any way qualify as “urban,” you’ve been hearing them.

Booms. Loud, repetitive booms. Bone-ratting explosions, nerve-shredding pops that maybe could be gunshots and maybe aren’t. They start as soon as the sun goes down, and they stop hours later. They can turn any street into the Green Zone in 2004.

They’re fireworks. And since mid-May, they’ve been going off all over the country, in almost every neighborhood, almost every night. The uptick in fireworks happens pretty much every summer, since Americans love blowing stuff up to celebrate freedom. Even in past years, Americans have shot off hundreds of millions of pounds of fireworks to celebrate the holiday.

But it really, truly has been much louder and more intense this year with high-grade pyro that’s usually only seen at county fairs or baseball games getting launched in the middle of big residential clusters – sparking online complaining and endless calls to the police. Unlike so much of what I write about, this is not a conspiracy – it’s a thing that’s happening. Or as Slate put it on June 10, “Yes, You’re Hearing Way More Fireworks Than Usual.”

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“Help Me, Obi-Wan Durham…You’re Our Only Hope”

Mike Rothschild2 Comments

The QAnon conspiracy theory is a road that leads nowhere, with the only off-ramps leading to other roads that lead nowhere. It’s a constant stream of lofty promises and predictions that fizzle out, constantly kicking the can of a “great awakening” or “storm” of mass arrests down to another day – a day always coming “soon” or “next week” or some unspecified time that’s “about to happen.”

How much longer can this go on before a disgruntled Q believer decides to start the “great awakening” themselves? I have a feeling we’re about to find out, thanks to the one last reasonable hope that the QAnon movement has of the “deep state” being swept aside: the investigation by US Attorney John Durham into potential abuses by the FBI and DOJ during the Mueller investigation.

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Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting Conspiracy Theories

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Late afternoon on Sunday, news broke that America did that thing America does so well: walked into a peaceful crowd of celebrating people and started shooting them.

From the details we have, about 16+ hours after the shooting, 19-year-old Santino William Legan decided he wanted to be a martyr for a cause existing entirely in his head, and cut the fence of the Gilroy Garlic Festival carrying a semi-automatic rifle. He opened fire, shooting approximately 12 people, killing three – including a six-year-old boy. Legan was then shot and killed by Gilroy police, ending the rampage.

As used to these horrible shootings as we’ve become, so too have we become used to the fusillade of conspiracy theories that follows each one. The one you’ll hear the most is the one you always hear the most, and the one that pisses you off to the greatest degree: that it was a “false flag” staged by (INSERT PRESIDENT HERE) to serve as a distraction from (INSERT NEGATIVE NEWS STORY HERE).

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Payseur As You Go

Mike Rothschild8 Comments

The modern conspiracy theory movement revolves around a small cadre of ultra-powerful families controlling political, social, and economic events.

Some of these families will be familiar to longtime conspiracy theory readers: the Rockefellers, the Kennedy’s, the Astors, George Soros, and of course, the Rothschilds (to whom I am not related.)

But deeper down, in the even danker and more shadowy parts of the “citizen researcher” movement is the name of another powerful and royal family, one passed around among a small number of woke anons, with its claws in every aspect of American society – banking, energy, transportation, manufacturing, communications, and food.

Yet even the deepest of research digs brings up almost nothing about them. And almost nobody knows who they are. That name: Payseur.

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How to (Not) Talk About QAnon During the Holidays

Mike Rothschild4 Comments

During my normal dredge through conspiracy theory social media, I stumbled on this tweet from a diehard QAnon believer detailing all of the people she claims to have told about the anonymous conspiracy avatar.

Assuming this is true (and it’s Twitter, so you never really know), I can only imagine all of the blank stares that greeted this person as she ambushed random strangers with her enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s supposed plan to purge America’s enemies in a spasm of extra-judicial violence.

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