Tag: deep state

QAnon vs. Infowars, Part One

Mike Rothschild

It’s purely a coincidence that this piece about the early days of QAnon is coming out a few days after I learned about the death of 8chan founder turned 8chan opponent Fredrick Brennan. Fred was omnipresent in the first year of organized pushback against Q, including appearing with me on the first big podcast I did about Q, Reply All.

Those first months of Q were frenetic because it was rapidly growing with little understanding of who was behind it, or what they wanted from it. Making matters worse was that for Q’s first year, the mainstream media wanted nothing to do with it. To most news outlets, this was just more dumb Pizzagate crap, irrelevant to only a few hardcore conspiracy theorists, and too weird to waste time on.

Obviously, that wasn’t true. We learned the hard way that ignoring rapidly growing fringe movements doesn’t make them disappear – it only ensures they gain strength with nobody paying attention. And they gain strength because of early promoters who legitimize and spread them, either because they believe they’re real, or because they can see dollar signs. Or both.

Jordan Sather was one of those early promoters, a conspiracy theorist who has touted a variety of false claims and fringe beliefs to a steady audience. Some are harmless, like his belief in a “secret space program,” a notion that’s been around for decades. Some are extremely harmful, like his shilling for medical bleach as an alternative treatment for COVID-19. Sather was in the trenches from almost the start of QAnon, and still somehow believes that the “military intelligence team” of Q was leaking clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state that has not actually happened.

I was curious when I found this piece from Sather about Alex Jones’ early links to Q, from promoting it, to trying to co-opt it, to turning against it – and doing it again and again. As I read it, I was pulled back into a world of competing grifters, a growing mythology, and my unease that you can’t be bombarded with unfulfilled promises that the bad guys are finally going down without eventually trying to do it yourself. We’re getting a lot of that these days, and it’s worth seeing where it all came from.

Here’s my response to the first part of this very lengthy piece. The second part will be out next week, for paid subscribers.

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“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.

Are the Conspiracy Theorists Still Winning?

Mike Rothschild

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

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

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

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

So how’d I do?

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

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

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

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

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

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

American will not be “made healthy again”

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

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

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

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conspiracy Contradiction

Mike Rothschild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if it’s not true.