Tag: donald trump

The Storm Is…….Upon Us?

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!

A country roiled by chaos and fear. Marines and National Guard in the streets, deployed at the whim of the executive branch. Rioters marching and smashing and burning, held back only by the courage of a few patriots. And the president takes to Twitter to make his fateful announcement, the one the faithful have waited on for so long…

“My fellow Americans, the Storm is Upon Us…….”

Is it 2025 in LA, or 2017 on 4chan? Absent Trump’s tweet, which would now happen on Truth Social and be seen by almost nobody, it does sort of look like the story foretold in the early Q drops is unfolding just as Q said it would.

In response to anti-ICE protests in parts of Los Angeles County, President Trump outstripped his own authority and called up a small contingent of the California National Guard, with a Marine battalion arriving in the city on Tuesday to back them up. People are really in the streets, though the demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, with more violence inflicted by law enforcement than actual protestors. And the country does seem to be teetering on the edge of an authoritarian cliff – if not martial law, then a small taste of what it could look like.

And many QAnon promoters on social media have noticed, making more direct references to Q drops, Q deltas (the time between a Q drop and something it “predicts” taking place), and Q catchphrases than I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve long been arguing that QAnon as we knew it, with the drops and decodes, is pretty much dead, but clearly it’s not, if you spend any time on conspiracist social media.

Some of it is pretty far fetched, such as the anon who claimed Trump tripping on the 7th step up to Air Force One was a reference to a Q drop about “the enormity of what is coming will SHOCK THE WORLD,” but some of it isn’t so crazy if you use your imagination a bit.

Sure, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been arrested, but it certainly looks like a lot of stuff mentioned in the earliest Q posts of October and November 2017 is happening.

So was Q right? Is the storm upon us?

Look at drop #1 – “Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated.” The context and some of the details are wrong, but in general, isn’t that what’s happening?

Drop #22 would seem to be pertinent as well here, stating in part:

“Who controls the NG?
Why was the NG recently activated in select cities within the US?
Can the NG work in coordination w/ the marines?
Do conditions need to be satisfied to authorize?”

The National Guard appears to literally be working in coordination with the Marines in LA at the moment. That can’t be a coincidence, right?

And as fears rise in LA of some kind of lockdown and consolidation of power, look to drop #316 which seems to approve an anon who asks whether martial law will be declared on the 11th – which is today.

Other drops aren’t quite so specific, but give weight and heft to the idea that US soldiers are going to be deployed to take action in the streets of America against elements of the deep state, Soros-backed cabal that’s enslaved us for generations. Trump even appears to have signaled to the faithful with a typo reading “to to” in a Truth social message about how the Guard is doing a “great job” handling the “violence” in LA, unlike “(Newscum) and (Bass).”

How could “to to” be anything other than a coded reference to Drop #22?

Okay, before you all start thinking I’ve lost my mind and gone over to the QAnon side, let’s be clear that this is all total nonsense, for multiple reasons.

Yes, things are rough in LA at the moment. The National Guard, or at least several hundreds CA Guard members, have been deployed to guard federal property in downtown LA, sent without the approval of the governor and without invoking the Insurrection Act, which seems to be a pretty clear violation of the law.

But if this is “the storm” that I’ve been waiting for since October 2017, then I’d want my money back.

For one thing, so far, the Guard hasn’t actually done anything other than stand around. Trump deployed them so quickly and haphazardly that they don’t have any infrastructure and are apparently sleeping in loading docks and have no food or water.

Obviously, this could all change at a moment’s notice, and it’s still not out of the question that these men will be ordered to open fire on protestors and enforce martial law. But it hasn’t happened yet, and every hour that goes makes it a bit less likely. There have been more protests since the initial Guard deployment, and the Guard hasn’t reacted in response, with the protests almost entirely being peaceful and entirely constitutional. People in LA are mostly living their lives, walking their dogs, going to work, and not packing up a few things and heading for sanctuary. The city is not burning or under siege by antifa death squads. It’s just not happening here, nor is it happening in other cities that have seen protests.

Beyond that, as we’ve stated many times, and will continue to state, Q drops are totally nonsensical and made up.

They don’t predict anything, and anything they seem to predict is only “right” because it’s so vague. Q is so wrong so often that when Hillary Clinton’s arrest didn’t happen and there was no “antifa uprising” on the 4th of November, Q tried to sell his followers on the fact that he meant Saudi Arabia the entire time. They are gibberish meant to sound important and prophetic. They can be endlessly interpreted to mean anything, and it doesn’t have to make sense or even mesh with other things you’ve predicted. Many Q drops are dead links. Others are clearly just random characters meant to look like codes or cyphers, but are actually just someone banging on a keyboard.

The rest of Q drop #316, supposedly about “martial law on the 11th?” It reads:

What has been said about the US Military?
The speech yesterday verified and unlocked so much.
Expand your thinking.
Re-read crumbs.
Re-listen to yesterday’s speech.
Connect the ‘markers.’
News (in all forms) unlocks the map.
Expand your thinking.
The Great Awakening.

What does that mean? Anything you want it to, any time you want it to. And martial law was not declared on the 11th of any month, nor is it likely to be declared on the 11th of this month. Nation-wide martial law is not in the president’s power, nor is it enforceable at any scale. You’d sure need more than a few hundred national guard members with tweaked backs to lock down a city like LA if it happened.

Likewise, while people are justifiably freaked out about Trump’s military parade on June 14th, a few tanks and armored vehicles wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to establish any kind of military control of a city as sprawling as DC. It’s just not possible. Obviously, even an attempt to do so would be outrageous and unacceptable – but the president can’t just conjure a dictatorial police state on a whim via tweet. There aren’t enough cops, sheriffs deputies, contractors, active duty military, and reservists in the country to put massive cities on lockdown – and the harder Trump tries to squeeze his tiny little fist, the more people will slip through.

The other aspect of Trump deploying troops into major cities without provocation is that it used to be the greatest nightmare of the far right. Remember how insane everyone in conservative media over just the idea that Barack Obama might be using closed Wal-Mart stores to incarcerate patriots during the military exercise Jade Helm 15? Shouldn’t these same people – figures like Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and countless other right wing conspiracists – be up in arms about the president potentially using the military against civilians? Of course not, and it’s not just because they all worship Trump and think he’s keeping his campaign promise by getting rid of all those scary illegal nannies and construction workers.

It’s because nothing these people believe is consistent or has to make any kind of sense. They absolutely love the thing that they used to absolutely loathe, simply because they like the guy who’s doing it and they hate the people he’s doing it to. What these people want is blood – and that’s what QAnon provides. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t bullshit.

The situation in LA is scary, the president’s power grab is unprecedented, and the whole thing makes the country look like it’s on the verge of collapse. It is awful and unacceptable and a terrifying portent of what could happen in the future.

But this is a far cry from US soldiers mowing down protestors, some kind of Kim Jong Un type crackdown, or the total takeover of American society by the president. And it’s an even farther cry from Q’s dipshit 4chan drops suddenly becoming true because they happen to match up with some things that are actually happening. This is not “the storm.”

The best outcome here is still that the protests crest on the 14th, with the military parade and the No Kings protests around the country, Trump’s authoritarian power grab fizzles out after a few days as he loses focus and picks something else to get angry about, and everyone goes home.

Let’s hope that’s what happens, so we can move on to the next thing that Q definitely will also have not predicted.

“Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself” and Other Acts of Apostasy

Mike Rothschild3 Comments

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 conspiracism, what’s more important – the idea or the person who communicates it?

While it’s impossible to run every single conspiracy through the lens of this question, generally speaking, for the last two decades or so, the conspiracy sphere has increasingly created celebrities out of its biggest influencers. Crossover media and political figures like Alex Jones, David Icke, Andrew Wakefield, Naomi Wolf, Joe Rogan, Mike Flynn, RFK Jr., Lara Logan, and of course, Donald Trump, have all built brands as trusted communicators of fringe ideas and conspiratorial nonsense. If one of these people says something, a massive group of fans is poised to believe it, spend their money on it, and share it with others.

Notably, many of the ideas these people share are not only obviously false, but directly contradict other ideas they’ve shared. Conspiracy influencers are constantly touting things they used to oppose, opposing things that they used to support, opposing AND supporting things at the same time, and feuding with other people who say the same things they say.

These contradictions and inconsistencies would doom any legitimate journalist. But because contradiction is inherent to conspiracism, nobody minds if a trusted and cherished influencer says something wildly at odds with something they said another time. Sure, Mike Flynn can support QAnon while also saying QAnon is nonsense, or Alex Jones can get unreasonably excited about Trump seizing total power despite having spent years decrying presidents who sought total power. It doesn’t matter, because these people are trusted. And trust is everything among people who don’t trust anyone.

But that might be changing, and recent adventures in contradiction haven’t gone well for major figures in conspiracism. We might be going back to a time when certain ideas in fringe spheres are so ingrained and taken as infallible gospel to the point where even these trusted figures can’t go against them.

As Trump 2.0 grinds on, and the brain-rotting of the west accelerates at Ludicrous Speed, even major figures in the world of cranks and frauds are running up against the immovable object of their conspiracies moving past the need for the people who popularized them. The idea is starting to outweigh the person who communicates the idea. And it’s a shift that doesn’t bode well for many major figures in the intersection of politics, conspiracy, and commerce.

This is exactly what happened with QAnon. The Q drops created a real-time movement of decoders and proselytizers, influencers who would interpret the bizarre and meaningless utterances of “Q” by running them through the filters of news events and wishful thinking. Those interpretations – “crumbs” as they were called in Q lingo – would be “baked” into “breads” that could be shared with believers who weren’t as hip to the goings on of the deep state, lacked the prophetic dreams and visions that some gurus claimed to have, or just maybe had a life or a job or something normal occupying their time.

But once Q was totally consumed by the GOP at large, there was no need to go back to the drops looking for more conspiracy theories to bake. And there was certainly no need for new Q drops – when Q returned a few times in 2022, most believers shrugged. A few even called the new drops fake. To be fair, they were at least as fake as the old ones.

Q promoters who have stuck to the gospel of the drops now increasingly pick through them looking for new interpretations of old riddles. But while theologians can find new meaning in old Bible verses, the Q drops aren’t as well written or compelling. Most are pretty stupid. And so they get left behind. Whatever QAnon is now, it’s left behind many of its earliest promoters, who have faded into semi-obscurity. But it’s ideas live on in virtually every piece of wild bullshit Trump or his acolytes spread to the public.

The ideas became more important than the communicators of the ideas. And it’s happened not just to QAnon itself, but also to many key figures in that movement

There was a big stir in both conspiracy and legitimate media when FBI Director Kash Patel (I still can’t believe I have to write that) and his deputy, podcaster Dan Bongino, made it clear during a Fox News interview that Jeffrey Epstein, who their millions of followers believe did not kill himself, actually killed himself.

“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth,” Bongino said. And the truth was that after reviewing “all” the evidence, Epstein had killed himself in his prison cell. He reiterated it in both the interview and on social media afterwards.

The post received over 10,000 comments. The vast majority of them were some variation on calling Bongino a stooge or bought off. They were covering up why the security cameras were off around his cell. And they were lambasted again and again for not releasing the much ballyhooed “Epstein Files” that they had made a big deal out of making public just a few weeks earlier.

Major right wing content creators essentially took the same tack – attacking Patel and Bongino, begging them to stop saying things like “Epstein actually killed himself,” and calling them sellouts and disappointments. Nobody came around to their endorsement of the official story simply because they were well-liked figures who supported Donald Trump.

No matter how much the conspiracy faithful like or trust Patel and Bongino, it’s not enough to override their belief in the idea of Epstein being murdered (probably by the Clintons) and his death made the subject of a coverup. That idea is sacrosanct to them. It is unshakable. And it’s telling that even two of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories in American politics didn’t embrace it in an official capacity when they had the chance to.

And now they’ve lost the trust of their audiences, at least for now. They can probably recover from this and sweep it away with some kind of justification, but the two are finding that it’s a lot easier to spout nonsense from the sidelines than it is to have to deal with it personally – particularly when your boss is connected to the guy at the center of the conspiracy theory.

The same thing happened with RFK Jr. and the measles vaccine. When confronted with the growing measles epidemic spreading through Texas and the southwest, Kennedy first offered up a bunch of nonsense and unscientific quack treatments, such as megadosing vitamin A and taking a certain antibiotic – while also acknowledging the efficacy of the vaccine. Finally, in early April, when two children had died from the diseases, he admitted the “truth” – that the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly effective, and that measles didn’t stage a comeback until it began spreading in unvaccinated communities.

The fury of the antivax community was quick, sharp, and powerful. Kennedy was attacked by longtime allies, many of whom are similarly popular influencers. He was called a parrot of the pharma establishment, a shill, and complicit in the murder of children by medical doctors through inoculation. Sure enough, Kennedy was solidly back on the antivax train just a few days later, claiming the vaccine hadn’t been properly tested (as if half a century of safe usage wasn’t evidence enough of its safety) and that its immunity was short-lived. Less than a month after his endorsement of the MMR vaccine, he was making official plans to find “alternative” treatments for measles, rather than simply endorsing the vaccine that was overwhelmingly effective in the first place.

The Trump community adores RFK Jr., but not enough to absolve him of endorsing vaccines – because they hate vaccines more than they love either Kennedy or Trump. Remember when Trump got booed at a townhall with Sean Hannity in Dallas in 2021 after he admitted he got a COVID-19 booster? Now guess who is among the most virulently antivaccine politicians in America? The same Trump who championed the quick development of the COVID vaccine in the first place.

Trump himself isn’t immune to being thrown overboard – recall that QAnon started in the first place because Trump’s first term wasn’t seeing the results his supporters wanted in terms of locking up Hillary Clinton. There had to be a reason why this stuff wasn’t happening – and it turned out to be that it was happening, just in secret.

Certainly, the far right conspiracy world hasn’t broken entirely with Patel and Bongino, just as it didn’t break with RFK Jr. The reference to Epstein killing himself will likely be swept aside or justified as necessary for the greater payoff to come. But right wing influencers are learning that when they step afoul of the sacred ideas of their movement – ideas they’ve spent years touting – their status doesn’t give them a free pass to be contradictory.

Ultimately, the idea always wins.

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.

January 6th and the Rewriting of Memory

Mike Rothschild

Upon his soldiers discovering the first Nazi concentration camps in western Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower personally toured the sites of the Final Solution. Writing in his memoirs after the war, Eisenhower said he “visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’” He would also ask members of the press and Congress to walk the grounds and see what he and his men had seen, so they could show it to the public “in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”

As many journalists and observers will write about, today marks four years since the assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election – or die trying. And while Eisenhower insisted the camps be documented so that nobody could deny their existence with any credibility, cynical doubt and propaganda are now the currency of the west.

With a few exceptions, Holocaust denial never flourished beyond the fringes of neo-Nazi dead-enders and Hitler worshippers selling pamphlets to each other. But January 6th denial and the rewriting of current events, has shown enormous staying power and mainstream appeal, to the point of being one of the biggest factor’s in Donald Trump’s improbably comeback. The thing that looked to have doomed his political career is now its engine.

The rewriting of history around January 6th has become an industry that denial of the camps could never have become. If you deny that millions of Jews and other “undesirables” were murdered by a methodical Nazi machine, you’re probably not going far in mainstream public life. But if you deny that January 6th was an organized attempt to violently seize total power and nullify an election, you’re probably going to be a superstar in the GOP. You might even get your own podcast.

The American press covered January 6th, its planning, its minute-by-minute execution, and its prolonged aftermath with as much vigor and enthusiasm as maybe any subject since 9/11. But for a certain segment of the population, all of it was a lie. To Trump, his inner circle of acolytes, and his vast (and growing) base, January 6th wasn’t an insurrection, it was a “day of love” meant to show support for the rightful winner of the election. The angry, violent, armed, unhinged mob that breached the Capitol was actually a “sightseeing tour.” The instigators of the insurrection weren’t a loose alliance of racists and anti-government extremists, but actually federal agents directing these peaceful tourists who were just there to express legitimate political differences and their sincere belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

On and on the false history goes, rewritten on the fly by cynical grifters and political hacks. The Capitol Police were the unhinged ones who viciously attacked the meek and humble Trump supporters, while the peaceful patriots caught up in the dragnet are hostages and political prisoners. Nobody was there to hurt anyone except the fed plants and undercover antifa soldiers who turned the day dark. There were no Republican criminals that day, the real criminals are the Soros-funded Trump-hating members of Congress investigating the “attack” to influence the 2024 election. Democrats in Congress weren’t under siege that day, they planned the attack or, at the very least, allowed it to happen. And Donald Trump never told anyone to do anything wrong, and did nothing wrong himself. He even told the “mob” to go home peacefully and that he loved them. Because it was a day of love.

Falsifying history gets easier as events recede and witnesses die off. But falsifying current events takes willpower, commitment, and a vast and relentless drive to tell yourself that the things you saw happen didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean you’re being lied to, like a conspiracy theory requires. It means you’re lying to yourself. Over and over and over. And if we know one thing about devotion to Donald Trump, it’s that self-delusion is a requirement.

Reeling from his loss and his party turning against him in the days after January 6th, Donald Trump decided that the only way to recover from the event was to created an alternative history of it and act as if it were the real one. At first, he was in exile, rambling to a seemingly shrinking audience that he’d won the election, that January 6th was a setup, and that the people who rioted and killed for him were heroes.

The falsified history was that not only did Trump do nothing wrong, but nobody did anything wrong except the Democrats and law enforcement. And he just kept at it, relentlessly, and with no oxygen given to any other narrative.

Of course, it worked. It started working on the same day as the attack, with hundreds of thousands of tweets immediately calling the riot fake, a false flag, and a fed hit job – all based on Trump’s own casting of blame elsewhere. In the months after the insurrection, when ardent Trump acolytes in Congress began shifting blame to mythical FBI plants and antifa infiltrators, it was in full swing.

The Republican history of January 6th, the one clung to by the party that will soon control every branch of the federal government, is that it was a peaceful protest ruined by federal jackboots and outside agitators. And it’s a protest that the American people, much more concerned about the price of eggs and the possibility of being raped by Haitian migrants, don’t care about anymore. Soon it will be swept out of the history books entirely, with Trump pardoning all the “hostages” and going after the investigators who tried to hold him to account

It never happened.

Except, of course, it did happen.

Relatively few people saw the immediate aftermath of the Nazi camps, and virtually none are still with us. Most of us only know of the Nazi horror through the footage taken in the aftermath, the testimony of those who survived, and the blubbering fake repentance of those who did the deeds. But millions of Americans were watching the news and seeing in real time how the American electoral system teetered on the edge.

We all saw it together. Our hearts raced and our jaws dropped and we all asked ourselves and each other “can this really be happening?” Because it was happening. We heard the screams of the Capitol Police officers being torn apart. We saw the blood on the floors and the shit on the office walls. We know it wasn’t a peaceful love fest, but a sacking that would make a Visigoth proud. We know what January 6th was – not a “day of love”, but an organized and well-planned attempt to prevent a presidential election loser from transferring power to a presidential election winner. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters knew what it was. Until they decided otherwise and began lying to themselves.

The more an event is documented, the more effort needs to be put into making us question our memories of the event. And that’s ultimately what J6 denial is about – not even so much rewriting history, but rewriting our memories. Trying to convince us that what we saw wasn’t what we saw, what we experienced wasn’t what we experienced, and our feelings – our horror – weren’t real.

Don’t let Trump and his acolytes rewrite your memories of that awful day. Take them with you, speak of them often, tell those too young or disengaged to have been watching what you saw. Don’t allow them to cynically deny what they did, and never question the depravity and deeply unpatriotic derangement of those who did it.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will pardon those responsible for January 6th. But no matter what their legal outcomes are, we can hold them to account with our memories and witnessing. We must all be the documentarians of the horror of January 6th, and we can never allow ourselves to be convinced that it was anything else than what we saw.

To support my work, please visit my Patreon page. Thank you!