Tag: History

A Few Lines About “Cocaine-Gate”

Mike Rothschild

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It often takes just one offhand remark, misinterpreted picture, or joke that doesn’t land to start a conspiracy theory that subsequently never goes away. We’ve seen it happen time after time – World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein’s comment that the firefighting team working to save WTC 7 should be “pulled” serving as “proof” that the building was a controlled demolition, John Kasich mistakenly saying John McCain was “put to death” rather than “laid to rest” being “proof” he was executed, a very stupid joke by Joan Rivers about Michelle Obama being transgender sparking over a decade of conspiracy theories that she’s actually a man, and so on.

Sometimes this happens organically, but many times it stems from a conspiracy influencer seeing or hearing something and deciding it’s something else – usually something they can use to drive traffic to their website or product.

So it went on Sunday May 11, when Alex Jones announced on Twitter that he had broken a “DEVELOPING SCANDAL,” which was a short snippet of a video that he claimed showed three world leaders getting blasted out of their minds on cocaine.

The text with the tweet, accompanied by a short video, reads:

DEVELOPING SCANDAL: Macron, Starmer, and Merz caught on video on their return from Kiev [sic]. A bag of white powder on the table. Macron quickly pockets it, Merz hides the spoon. No explanation given. Zelensky, known cocaine enthusiast, had just hosted them. All three of the “leaders” look completely cracked out.

Jones followed up his “scandal” with a video titled simply “BREAKING: It’s Coke” where the inexplicably slimmed down Jones rambled for over four minutes, followed by several minutes of ads, about how the leaders of France, Germany, and the UK were “lit up like Christmas trees” while reiterating that Infowars is one of the most accurate media sources in the world.

It’s not. The the three leaders on the train back from Kyiv were not feverishly trying to hide their Bolivian marching powder from the press, and a cursory analysis of the video showed that the “bag of coke” was a tissue that Emmanuel Macron hid because he probably didn’t want to look like one of those people who blows their nose and leaves the tissue out. And the “coke spoon” was obviously not that, likely either a stirring spoon or a Bamboo Knot cocktail pick. It doesn’t actually matter, because the “bag of coke” is so clearly not a bag a of cocaine and actually a crumpled tissue that it immediately renders the rest of Alex’s conspiracy moot.

But we all know that conspiracy theories like this aren’t designed to stand up to scrutiny. They’re designed to be shared in anger and disgust, which generates income for their originators. And this one was shared big time, getting over ten thousand retweets in its first day of existence.

Jones spent most of his Sunday show touting his “discovery” as proof that the European leaders trying to drum up support and sympathy were Ukraine were nothing but blasted out druggies. Still, the story started to draw pushback from skeptics who pointed out that Macron was clearly hiding a tissue, and even from other conservatives who claimed Jones was making them look like fools. For his Monday show, Jones mentioned “cocaine-gate” only once, but when other conspiracists starting turning against him, he went back on the offensive, structuring much of his Tuesday show about the non-scandal, and declaring “of course that’s cocaine on the table” and that they’re so drugged up that they’re going to start a nuclear war and we’re all going to die.

In the case of “cocaine-gate,” it’s too early to tell if this is a conspiracy theory that will stick. Given the trajectory of other instant-boil conspiracy theories of the past few years, it likely won’t. Stuff like “Michelle Obama is a man” sticks because it came from an earlier time when there weren’t as many theories like it popping up every day, nor were there as many vectors for these theories to find new audiences. It used to take time for a conspiracy theory to worm its way into our brains, but that timeline has now crunched years into days, and we are hit with so many of these things that many never get a chance to really take root before they’re replaced by something equally absurd.

But “will anyone remember this in a week” might not even be the right question to ask. The right question, like most other conspiracy theories, is why did people believe this in the first place? How stupid do they think the leaders of three of the most powerful countries in the world are to leave evidence of their drug usage out for the cameras of numerous news outlets to see? Surely, some people were sharing the video out of curiosity or disgust. But it’s clear that many people believed that the most powerful politician in France was hurriedly hiding a bag of blow that he’d accidentally left out – just one thread on r/conspiracy on Reddit has hundreds of affirmative comments agreeing with the hypothesis.

And yet…it’s clearly a tissue, and also very stupid. So what are we doing here?

The idea of the leaders of Europe being blasted on cocaine while making life-and-death decisions fits in with the general idea that Jones and other far-right propagandists have been pushing for years: these are elites who live and pleasure themselves in worlds of decadence that the rest of us will never set foot in. It’s a huge part of what made QAnon take off: it promised the downfall of the power brokers who waste our money on weird rituals and Satanic ceremonies and drug-fueled anti-family mayhem while the rest of us suffer and fight over scraps.

(Why did these same conspiracists fall in line behind Donald Trump, who has made a career out of professional displays of obnoxious opulence while philandering his way through three marriages and multiple sexual assault accusations? Don’t ask for it to make sense, it never will.)

This one “works” in particular because Jones and his ilk have spent years alleging that Vladimir Zelenskyy is some kind of drug addict who’s “obviously on methamphetamine and so many other drugs,” flying into Hitlerian meth-fueled rages where he orders more helpless Ukrainians to die in his Satanic war on the Christian bedrock of the west. It’s a huge part of the opposition to western funding of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and is all over the media output of conspiracy influencers. To these people and their fans, Putin is the bulwark against evil, and the decadent west is the evil – though it’s fascinating that all of the references to Zelensky being a drug addict come after Russia had invaded his country. It’s almost like they didn’t know anything about him, then all decided they knew everything about him.

So in the Alex Jones/right wing conspiracy universe of leaders who answer to Satan and get hammered all the time, the idea of three of Europe’s heads of state all doing coke while on a goodwill tour for a fellow cokehead makes perfect sense. Of course they all get together and do blow and shoot meth and hunt children while they conspire to push their transgender Magog nuclear war agenda. Why wouldn’t they all be on drugs?

And he’s instilled his value system into his fans, pumping out hours-per-day of paranoia and conspiracism, all meant to explain why the have nots have nothing and the haves have everything, how they’re trying to destroy the west and the family and freedom, and how you can stop it by sharing Alex’s videos and buying Alex’s products.

That is literally what a huge part of his show is about – buying supplements and shirts and survival equipment. Just the 2024 episode where he claims Zelensky is “obviously on methamphetamines” features Jones mentioning his “products” dozens of times, overprices wellness shit like “nano super blue toothpaste” and “Ultimate Turmeric Formula” and “Immune Gargle Mouthwash.”

So when people get agitated about the “drug use” of European leaders, they’re really just serving themselves up as marks for the long-running con game of the far right influencer sphere: come for the outrage, stay for the products. In that sense, it doesn’t matter at all what Starmer and his cohorts were doing or not doing. As long as you’re angry about the potential of them doing something, you’re in the right spot to mainline more Infowars and purchase more Infowars swag.

All that super immune gargle mouthwash isn’t going to buy itself, you know.

Soros Killed the Radio Star

Mike Rothschild

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Hungarian billionaire and philanthropist George Soros has been blamed by so many cranks for so many different supposed horrors that his name is on par with Kleenex, Xerox, and Band-Aid: a product that has become shorthand for every version of that product. It’s become so trivially easy to blame Soros for whatever is happening in the world – from student protestors buying coffee to the supposed links between the “Albanian narco-state” and Tim Walz – that it’s essentially lost all its meaning as a right wing canard.

But every so often, the far-right crankery machine can get behind a new Soros conspiracy theory, and it’s happening right now. In this case, it’s the slightly true but mostly false story that Soros is “buying 200 radio stations” in a “fast-tracked” process that “nobody has ever seen before” as a way to “take over the radio market.” And Congressional Republicans are desperate to stop before it swings the election to the Radical Marxist Comrade Kamala Harris. Despite the story having been around since April, it’s really taken off in the last few weeks due to the FCC allowing the purchase (which is real) to go ahead.

As with almost all conspiracy theories, there are kernels of truth wrapped inside layers of lying. And of course, since it’s Soros, those layers are also chock-full of antisemitic lunacy and grandiose accusations. Take a guess as to what the first reply to Elon Musk’s tweet about the FCC “breaking the law” for Soros is:

Without getting into a long digression about the FCC’s complex rules for foreign ownership of US radio stations, some of this is true.

Soros Fund Management, which controls the bulk of the investments made by Soros’ Open Society Foundations, is buying a majority share of the debt held by radio conglomerate Audacy. Despite having 240 stations in more than 40 markets in the US, Audacy couldn’t keep pace with the changes in radio and podcast consumption, and its stock tanked. It declared bankruptcy in January, and re-emerged recently as a private company, with its debt held by various buyers, and its radio licenses in the process of being transferred to the new company

With the FCC approving a deal that’s been in the works since February, Soros Fund Management now owns about 40% of that debt, making his Fund the company’s biggest shareholder, and nothing more than that. He doesn’t personally own the radio stations under the Audacy umbrella – Audacy does. And since he doesn’t personally own the company, Soros will have no say in what the stations owned by Audacy put on the air. Their stations are a mix of news, talk, sports, and music that likely won’t change under a privately-held ownership – even one headed by Geoege Soros.

It’s not even outlandish for Soros to be making investments in radio and podcasting, since he’s already done so, buying stakes or making investments in multiple other major podcasting companies.

Such bankruptcy restructuring deals are the bread and butter of American business – as Donald Trump, the “King of Debt“, could tell you. Moreover, these deals aren’t at all unusual in the bankruptcy-ravaged world of terrestrial radio. Audacy competitors IHeartMedia and Cumulus both went through the same license transfer process and foreign ownership review that Audacy just finished after their bankruptcies in 2019 and 2018, respectively. With their debts bought up, both companies have been restructuring to cut costs and improve efficiency.

(Full disclosure, I’ve appeared as a guest on radio shows or podcasts on all three networks.)

The FCC has insisted that all three radio restructuring processes were the same, that their approvals were routine, and that, contrary to reporting from conservative outlets like the New York Post, there was no “fast track” or “shortcut” with Audacy and Soros. In fact, the FCC review process took longer because of demands for additional oversight from Congressional Republicans who were concerned about George Soros taking over the radio and pumping vulnerable American ears full of leftist filth.

So why are we doing this? Because it’s Soros.

Or to put it another way, do any of the right wing cranks screaming about “George Soros buying 200 radio stations” know or care who bought the bulk of IHeartMedia’s debt? Were there demands for accountability from Congress and right wing influencers? No, because the main holders of IHeartMedia’s debt are the asset management firms PIMCO and Franklin Advisors, not Soros Fund Management. Do you know who they are? Does Glenn Beck do hour-long specials about how PIMCO is the puppet master behind all wars? No, because they aren’t GEORGE SOROS, the “Money-Changing Globalist.”

These are routine transactions in an industry struggling to stay relevant and profitable. Except nothing is routine when dealing with Soros, who is said to be “tightening his grip” on US radio by “controlling 200 stations” in a “scary” move that is nothing less than “an attack of free speech.”

It should also be noted that the bulk of the accusations about the FCC creating a “Soros Shortcut” come from the New York Post, which has consistently attacked Soros with rumors and conspiracy theories for decades, including earlier this year, when they created a fiction about Soros and the OSF funding the student protests against the war in Gaza by buying everyone tents. It’s all nonsense to sell papers and get clicks.

Ultimately, the “George Soros is buying the airwaves” conspiracy theory is the same as all of the other conspiracy theories about him. It uses ancient puppet master tropes to attack one leftist Jewish philanthropist while paying no attention to the inherently evil corporate practices that allow rampant bankruptcies, the easy buying and selling of massive amounts of debt, and the layoffs that come with such massive movement of money.

Criticizing those things would actually require courage and honesty from the far right, not unhinged conspiracism and tired allegations. So don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.