Tag: news

Droning On and On

Mike Rothschild

In 2016, Americans suddenly and somewhat hilariously became terrified of killer clowns. The creepy mirthmakers were spotted in South Carolina luring children into the dark woods, in Green Bay handing out black balloons, skulking around cemeteries in Chicago, randomly knocking on doors, intimidating residents, and approaching young girls in the open. The creepy clowns made their way to the UK, where they intimidated and pulled pranks on people in car parks and streets. One even ran for president.

Four years later, with the world on lockdown, boredom and fear walked hand in hand. That summer, full of tension and dread, people started to notice that every night in big cities, huge numbers of fireworks were going off in the middle of the night. Nerves were rattled and people were frustrated – and scared. Immediately, panic set in that this was a military exercise designed to rob us of our sleep, police activity designed to spur arrests, or even a Trump-ordered test to immunize the population into becoming accustomed to the sound of explosions and artillery.

Cut to 2024, another presidential election year involving Donald Trump. And sure enough, there’s another panic spreading through the plugged-in population over social media: drones. Thousands of drones, all the size of large cars, flying in straight lines and coming out every night (and only at night), hovering over population centers and military bases, and scaring the crap out of us. Is it a false flag to prepare us for alien invasion? A military exercise that Trump will use an excuse for martial law? An attack on American from Iran or China? Proof that nuclear weapons are being trafficked by nefarious forces and the government is desperate to find them? It’s now the Drone Panic of 2024, and it’s spread from news of drones over New Jersey to drones over everywhere.

Taken together, it seems like these three panics prove one of two things: either every presidential election now comes with a deep state engineered panic meant to distract and exhaust us in the face of the oncoming horror, or that Americans are nuts.

Of course, neither of these are the sole explanation. Societal panics are nothing new, and take place all the time fueled by new technology and collective unease. And many Americans, like people of every nationality, are conspiratorial and fueled by fear of what they don’t understand.

In the face of calls for the government to “do something” or “be more transparent” or “shoot them down,” it’s important to realize that what people are pointing out as drones are not actually drones.

They’re airplanes coming in for a landing, stars, planets, satellites, helicopters, optical illusions, deepfakes, hoaxes, and maybe a few commercial drones. They’re the same specks of light that have been in our sky for generations. There might be more of them now, thanks to outfits like Starlink and the revitalizing of commercial aviation post-lockdown. But at any time since the advent of the passenger jet, if you look up at night, you’re going to see something bright and flickering moving across the sky, or maybe appearing to hover, or maybe not moving at all. Isn’t it strange how the “drones” never seem to appear during the day? Or how countless SUV-sized craft are flying around and none have crashed, hit each other, or just stopped working over a busy city? Don’t expect answers from those panicking.

So why did the Great Drone Panic of 2024 happen, and what can we learn from it?

Panics rarely start over things that never happened, they start over isolated incidents that are blown massively out of proportion

In the case of recent past panics, they started with something real that spread over social media because it was equal parts absurd and terrifying. Clowns occasionally go about town in their clown getup, and scare the hell out of people in the process. (Incidentally, if I get a few new Patreon subscribers, I’ll post my own story about being at an event in Los Angeles with a clown that was very much not an event for clowns. It’s wild.) The fireworks panic was the same thing, at first – the nightly fireworks bombardments were real, but there was never any evidence that “the government” or “the cops” were behind them, other than unverifyable social media posts. It turned out that fireworks companies were desperate to unload excess product that wasn’t going to be used for 4th of July shows because of lockdown. No conspiracy required, just one made up to fit the facts.

Drones have become omnipresent, especially in war, but few people know what they really look like

Even just the term “drone” has scary connotations, especially for anyone who watched the Great War on Terror unfold live on cable news every night. It conjures up sinister forces using cryptic orders to fire missiles at weddings, killing you before you even know you’re a target. But drones can be anything – from hobbyist quadcopters to commercial drones delivering packages to lights flying in formation to create a nightly show to military grade missile carriers. Some drones are tiny. Others, like the Shahed 136 drones hammering Ukraine on a nightly basis, are 11 feet long, nearly the length of a compact car. There are over a million of them registered with the FAA, and there’s no doubt that at least a few of the “drones” are actually drones. Because there are so many different types of drones, it’s easy to look at something in the sky and tell ourselves it must be a drone. We don’t have to know what type of drone, or who launched it. It’s a drone. And drones can kill us.

Panic spreads because when we go looking for things, we find them

If you go outside on a cold night with the intention of seeing a drone, you’re probably going to see a drone. Why? Because why would someone go outside to see something and not see it? We like to find the things we’re looking for, and to not be disappointed. We want to be able to tell our friends and social media followers that we saw a drone, not that we saw a plane or a star. Ultimately, “I saw something” is a more compelling – and potentially viral – story than “I didn’t see anything.” That’s boring.

It’s a weird time where not much is happening

Americans have been on a relentless run of breaking news for years, and maybe no year more than 2024. We had stretches where absolutely insane and game-changing things were happening every day, and with Trump’s election, that seems to have calmed down. Yes, his cabinet nominations and goofy lawsuits are news, but they don’t the heady high-wire thrill of assassination attempts or last minute candidate changes. People are a little bit bored at the moment, and when people get bored, conspiracy panics start. When we lack danger and thrill in our lives, we find ways to make them up.

A lack of basic understanding about physics makes us turn the ordinary into the extraordinary

If you’ve ever driven across Los Angeles at night going north from LAX, you’ve seen a line of what look like floating blobs of light just hanging in the air. And because you’re at one of the busiest airports on the planet, you know they’re planes coming in to land, and not UFOs or drones or whatever. But if you’ve never lived near a major airport or flown into a big city at night, you might not be familiar with why descending airplanes look like they’re floating. So when you see it for the first time, your mind assigns meaning and danger to it. For the record, there’s a name for why descending airplanes appear to be floating. It’s an optical illusion called the parallax effect, It’s a difference in how the brain perceives rates of motion when moving, which is why closeup objects look to be moving quickly, while faraway ones look to be moving slowly or stuck. Parallax is a critical depth perception tool, not a deep state conspiracy. It’s basic physics – but a lot less entertaining and alluring than the unevidenced alternatives.

The “I know what I saw” fallacy

So many of the claims of drone sightings ultimately fall into some version of “I saw three lights in the sky forming a triangle. Triangles in the sky are UFOs. Therefore, I saw a UFO. And I know what I saw.” We aren’t interested in other explanations, such as the three lights being the lights on the wings and nose of a plane. We know what we saw. Except most of the time we don’t know what we saw, only that we saw something, and decided we knew what it was. Our brains have a remarkable ability to create stories out of things that didn’t happen, or that we only saw a glimpse of and filled in the rest. Maybe the best example of this is the numerous witnesses to TWA Flight 800 exploding who claimed they saw and then immediately heard a missile hit the plane, despite the laws of physics making this impossible. The people who told the FBI this weren’t lying, they were just convinced they saw something that they could not have experienced. And the more you tell them they’re wrong, the more they believe they’re being called a liar.

We’re just really into conspiracy theories right now

This might be the simplest explanation of them all for why drone panic hit so hard and so fast. Americans, just like all humans, are innately prone to pattern-seeking and making meaning out of randomness. But 2024 has seen the continuation of conspiracism and paranoia creeping into our everyday lives in a way that was never even possible just a few decades ago. Our political leaders and cultural titans spread disinformation the way a knife spreads butter. Even Donald Trump has stoked the drone panic, claiming without any evidence that the government “knows what they are” and telling his followers to shoot them down. Other influencers have claimed, also without evidence, that the drones are part of a desperate attempt to find a nuclear warhead, or a Russian disinfo op, or a secret coup plot. This used to be the stuff of rambling drunks at bars and your weird uncle at Thanksgiving. But it’s everyone now, and it’s everywhere we look. And that now includes the sky at night, once a place of awe and wonder, but now cluttered up with planes and satellites and ever-present low light blotting out the glory of the stars.

So what can we do to abate drone panic? Like all pushback against conspiracy theories, think micro and not macro. Stop sharing random videos that “saw a drone” flying somewhere, because absent other evidence, it’s not a drone. If you go looking for drones, expect not to find them. If you see a blob of light floating in the air, think about airports near you, not motherships and aliens. Get familiar with the stars and planets at night in your area, so you know what they are and are not. They’re pretty cool to look at.

And disabuse yourself of the notion that you are a player in a secret nighttime war between good and evil, being played out through drone swarms and viral panic. Take the opportunity to become acquainted with something bigger than your own life – in this case, the very cosmos that made us. It’s a hell of a lot more breathtaking than panicking over nothing.

The Humiliation Ritual Strikes Again

Mike Rothschild

To be in Donald Trump’s inner circle requires a few traits that most people don’t have, some people have one or two of, and only a few people have all of. You have to be able to do something for him, of course. You have to be unstintingly loyal, willing to do anything and everything to advance his aims or simply amuse him. You have to look good on TV. And more than anything, you have to take your dignity and sense of shame, ball them up into the tiniest fraction of their normal size, and hide them away deep in a part of your soul that you will forget exists.

Trump rules the GOP the way autocrats rule nations. He shapes them into his image, and never lets the people forget that they serve him, not the other way around. No matter what baubles and titles Trump deigns to hand out to his bootlickers, they will always be just that. But even a dictator needs acolytes, and if you degrade yourself enough, you can be one too. Nobody should feel sorry for anyone who chooses degradation over dignity, and for the participants in Trump’s ritualized shaming, what they get out of it is far more important than what Trump puts them through.

As much as any other right wing troll, Trump loves to humiliate his enemies. That’s to be expected from someone who has built a brand around being America’s ultimate winner – everyone else is a loser and should be treated as such. But for as much time as Trump spends rubbing it in the faces of defeated electoral opponents, he is more devoted to publicly shaming and degrading those who support him. And the more you support him, the more he will shame and degrade you.

The worst of the humiliation is reserved for those who once opposed him, but then bent the knee to him for various political and financial reasons. The past few years have seen a flood of public embarrassment and shaming so pronounced that it even has earned a nickname – the humiliation ritual.

Ironically, the term “humiliation ritual” has a slightly different context in conspiracy theorist circles, that of an Illuminati rite designed to break down the dignity of celebrities who wish to join the inner ranks of the puppet masters, or who have run afoul of them. This version often involves cross-dressing, men publicly appearing naked, or celebrities suffering a public and embarrassing loss because they dared speak out. The Trump humiliation ritual is different – it’s not about literal embarrassment, but about a spiritual kind of shame. It’s about Trump breaking the GOP to his will, humiliating those who dared to question him, and letting them know that no matter what, he owns them and they are beholden to him. If Trump tells them to jump, their only acceptable response is “off what?”

There was a devil’s bargain that the more moderate, once firmly anti-Trump right made with Trump after he won the nomination in 2016. Yes they complained about him, insulted him, and scored him. But once he’d won the primary no matter how coarse or crude or embarrassing Trump was, he was the only one who could beat Hillary Clinton. And nothing no Access Hollywood tape or bizarre outburst would be more humiliating than allowing that woman to become the president. Then he won the election, and to stay in his good graces, it made more sense to heap praise upon him than to criticize him and face his wrath. Opponents who had once vocally opposed him, including former 2016 primary rivals Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham, all became some of his most vocal bootlickers, bending over backwards to defend him, praise him, and extol his qualities – often at their own expense. Other detractors, like Mitt Romney, were simply humiliated, forced to sit through dinners and slap shit-eating grins on their face to match Trump’s perpetual expression. Such is the price of Trump taking control of the GOP.

Of course, the humiliation of Trump’s early years in office pales in comparison to what we’re likely to get in a second term. Just like 2016, the 2024 election saw Trump save his deepest and starkest humiliations for those who once opposed him, like Nikki Haley, who sat through countless insults from Trump about her heritage and husband, and yet immediately supported Trump once her primary challenge fizzled out; and Tim Scott, a Republican senator who utterly debased himself at Trump rallies, smiling through endless Trump insults to the point where some commentators thought it smacked of self-hatred.

When Trump posted a picture from this weekend of him, his son, Elon Musk, and HHS nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. all eating McDonalds on Trump’s plane back from watching a UFC fight in New York, it wasn’t just a way to engage with fans. It was a direct form of revenge against Kennedy for a comment he’d made about Trump earlier in the week, that flying with Trump meant eating the “poison” that he eats on the road – almost all of which was fast food. That wasn’t very obedient. So Trump broke him, and broke him publicly. It was his way of telling both Kennedy and the world at large that if you want a seat at the table of power, he had to eat what the powerful people were eating – which apparently was the same fast food you can get in every major city in the world. Naturally, Kennedy wants power more than he craves dignity, so he ate the poison with a smile that looked something like the face you make when you’re passing a kidney stone. Kennedy even followed up his shame with a pathetic tweet about how he “couldn’t wait to eat McDonalds again!”

At this point, it’s a fair question to ask whether these people allow Trump to debase them for reasons other than craven lust for power. Does he have financial or sexual blackmail on them? With Lindsey Graham in particular, there’s been a tendency on the left to ascribe the sheer volume of obnoxious praise and bootlicking to “kompromat” – the Stalinist slang term for “compromising material,” and a constant feature of the coverage of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. Could Trump have such material on his former foes? Is that why they’ve all bowed so deeply and so completely perverted their own values in his service?

It’s certainly possible, though not at all necessary. Trump doesn’t need lurid photos or “pee tapes” of his rivals, because he has the thing they all want and need to stay close to: power. Trump runs the GOP, has broken and rebuilt it in his image, and seeks to do the same to the country. While some Trump opponents have stayed on his bad side, many others have accepted that if they want any kind of role in the new administration or the GOP as it currently stands, they have to eat the poison. After all, it’s a two-way street. Like any abuser, Trump might hit you, but he only does it because he loves you.

So the humiliation rituals go on, because those who endure them have decided that the loss of dignity is worth the gaining of clout. RFK Jr. might have to cram some dreaded seed oils down his gullet, but he’s in line to have one of the most powerful cabinet positions with a vast swath of the American health system under his thumb. Once derided by Trump as “liddle Marco,” Rubio is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State – a level of power that he never could have achieved in any other administration. Tim Scott might have soft-shoed his way through some humiliation, but was picked to lead the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz get to be on TV all the time, because they spend their appearances praising Trump and extoling his leadership. Even Nikki Haley, who has been totally iced out of the incoming administration, gets to pretend that she’s a kingmaker, whose supporters flocked to Trump and put him over the top, rather than staying on the anti-Trump side and voting Democratic.

And no politician more exemplifies the flip side of the humiliation ritual than vice president-elect JD Vance. The Ohio senator had once been a vocal Trump hater, to the point where after Vance asked Trump to campaign for him in 2022, Trump vociferously insulted him from the stage in his home state. But two years later, Vance is the closest one can get to Trump and the presumptive nominee for the 2028 Republican primary. It’s a mighty reward for a little bit of embarrassment.

There’s no reason to feel the slightest sympathy or cringe for Republicans who have embraced Trump’s humiliation ritual. They’ve chosen to lick the boot. Nobody forced any of these people to line up for embarrassment, they did it because power is more valuable than dignity. As America slides into autocracy, kissing the leader’s ass is just the cost of doing business.

In Trump’s America, the business of bootlicking is good.

We’re Drowning in a Deluge of Nonsense, So Let’s Buy a Rope

Mike Rothschild

Hurricane Milton has died off after heading out into the Atlantic Ocean and dissipating. The damage appears to be bad, but not quite as bad as a category 5 hurricane might have inflicted, because people had time to prepare. Those in the path of the monster had time to flee, while those outside it had time to stock up on the supplies they’d need to ride it out.

The damage in North Carolina and Georgia from Hurricane Helene is far worse than Milton, at least so far, due to the storm maintaining it power while moving inland after striking Florida. But at least some people there had some time to do what they could to evacuate or get ready.

In the midst of these two awful storms there was another deluge. Not one that destroyed property or flooded homes, but one that imperiled people and hampered the response and recovery nonetheless. It imbued many survivors with a sense of hopelessness, and inflamed their paranoia and suspicion. And despite the certainty that it would take shape in at least some form, virtually nobody was ready for it.

We weren’t ready for the storm conspiracy theories, outright lying, grift, emotional manipulation through AI, antisemitic bullshit, and misleading viral nonsense that followed just behind the two hurricanes. We weren’t ready for people invent new realities out of thin air, realities where FEMA was blockading aid and confiscating property, where terrified little girls were left adrift with their puppies, where government weather machines were steering the storm into its most destructive path, and where the executive branch was too busy vacationing and appearing on sex advice podcasts to do anything to help the desperate Americans screaming for a lifeline.

That’s the reality that hit America and the world like a ton of storm-tossed bricks over the last few weeks. Never mind that none of this happened, and all of it was inflammatory bullshit spread by right wing politicians and social media influencers to help get Donald Trump over the finish line. For so many desperate Americans it felt true. It was true to them. So it was true.

After spending a decade writing about conspiracy theories at a time when conspiracism has become a primary driver of politics and commerce, it wasn’t surprising to me why this happened.

Some of it is definitely because of the election, given that Helene hit two swing states that Trump desperately needs to win. So if it takes exploiting the damage done by a storm to make Kamala Harris look out of touch and unsympathetic, then that’s what it takes, casualties be damned. It’s also about climate change denial, something that the far right has practiced for decades and that’s increasingly hard to maintain as the climate quickly and drastically revolts against us.

But more than that, I wasn’t surprised it happened because it happens every time. And it happens for the same reasons that drive conspiracy theories about everything else: from mass shootings and disasters to COVID and 9/11, all the way back to the Great Fire of Rome. Something outsized and destructive happens, and we grope in the darkness for information. Rapidly moving events defy easy explanation, and we’re desperate to know why it’s happening, what’s really going on, and who did it to us. Social media and the internet didn’t create any of this, it only sped it up and lowered the cost of entry. So the new problem is the same problem as the old problem, just faster and dumber.

That said, if the new problem is the old problem, why was nobody ready for the old problem? We know it’s going to happen because it always happens. So why were we unprepared for it happening? Why were the government agencies, news outlets, social media giants, state and local officials, and weather experts all so completely blindsided?

FEMA wasn’t ready to counter the fake our out of context AI slop images and stories showing it not only wasn’t doing its job, but actively making recovery worse.. Politicians at every level weren’t ready to counter the claims that they were heartless and cruel in leaving victims to die. Social media wasn’t ready to counter the insanity coming from its owners and and most prolific users. Media outlets weren’t ready to talk clearly and accurately about the deluge of conspiracy theories and the danger they presented. First responders, being a little busy doing their jobs, understandably weren’t ready or able to deal with the onslaught of nonsense about what they were or weren’t doing.

Obviously, you can’t prepare for what you don’t know is coming, or what you can’t conceptualize. But by now, can’t we see this coming? Why can’t we look at a looming event and ask ourselves “how can this be misinterpreted and weaponized against us?” It happens over and over, with every disaster and mass shooting, every “once in a century” event and election.

So why aren’t we ready?

For one, disinformation will always travel faster than information. It takes no time to make something up and share it, but it takes time to prove that the made up thing is made up. And at that point, it’s already out there. Beyond that, some people and industries still exist in a world where things on the internet aren’t part of the real world and don’t matter, and if you ignore them and don’t give them oxygen, they’ll die off. We know by now that this isn’t true, and that conspiracy theories allowed to fester with nobody paying attention will just grow in darkness. But this is a big shift for many longstanding industries, particularly government, to make. And some people may not want to seem overly approving of what looks like censorship. Government can’t even begin to play a part in solving the problem until it’s done in a way that doesn’t seem like an Orwellian disinformation ministry that wants to control your thoughts. Somehow, we’ve managed to regulate TV and radio, but the internet continues to be the Deadwood of media – no law at all.

Obviously, we’re weeks away from an election that has already seen a frenzy of lies unlike any other election in world history. And it’s only going to get more insane, an opera of countless voices all screaming lies at the top of their lungs into giant microphones that drown everything else out. We have no idea what exactly is going to drive the bullshit purveyors and their legions of believers, because it hasn’t happened yet. But it will happen – and it will be outrageously bad.

What can we do to prepare? And what can we do to prepare for what happens after that, for what can’t be known or even reliably imagined?

The first thing is that we, as people, can take ourselves off the chessboard. Don’t share bullshit. Don’t share it even to call it bullshit. If you have to, at least take a screenshot and mark clearly that it’s bullshit. Nobody’s perfect, but we can all do more of this. Call out your friends and loved ones sharing bullshit, quietly and in a way that’s firm but not insulting. Be the firebreak.

But this is a much bigger problem, one that has infected every industry and profession. So a big problem takes a big solution. And big solutions cost big money.

Every industry should know that disinformation and lies are a threat to their existence, and open their wallets to fight back against it.

Government agencies should have people on staff who understand how this stuff works, how to push back against it in a way that doesn’t infringe of free speech, and why it’s so bad for public health. Law firms and courts should hire journalists or experts (many of whom are out of work due to the proliferation of AI slop stories) to point out instances of defamation and harassment in the aftermath of epochal events, and be prepared to move against them quickly. Every news outlet everywhere of any size should have someone whose job it is to immediately point out when something viral is false and what’s true instead, and spend the money to get it out there fast.

And private citizens should have the resources and education to understand how conspiracy theories function, why they are effective, and what to look for when someone is attempting to manipulate them with bullshit. Yes people want the truth, but they don’t want to be lied to or made to feel stupid. And nobody wants to feel like they’re a potential victim of going down a rabbit hole and never coming out – which virtually everyone, regardless of party affiliation, is.

All of this is time-consuming. It’s not all going to work, and some conspiracy theories will always get through. And of course, all of it costs a lot of money to do it well and professionally. The far right is excellent at spending money on and making money off disinformation – and we have to get as good at doing it for the truth. If we want to be prepared for the next storm of bullshit, we have to spend some money on supplies. We have to be ready for what’s going to happen, even if we don’t know exactly what form it will take or where it will come from. When a hurricane hits, do you buy bottled water or do you put out a bucket and hope for the best?

You buy bottled water. You make the investment. We are drowning in a deluge of conspiracism, paranoia, and absolutely untethered realities. Let’s buy some rope and pull ourselves out.

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Does Donald Trump Actually Think Hannibal Lecter is Real?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

One of Donald Trump’s signature bits of weirdness in 2024 has been repeated references to the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter and comparing him to the plight of undocumented migrants crossing the US/Mexico border.

In speeches going back at least to January, Trump has referred to the liver-eating menace – who is fictional – as “legendary,” “the late, great,” “a wonderful man,”

So why is the former (and maybe future?!?) President of the United States talking about a fictional character as if he were real, and about a truly monstrous character being a “wonderful” and “great” guy?

Psychoanalyzing Trump is like trying to get squirrels to sing an aria – impossible and not worth the time. But there are questions here that can be answered through research, and maybe by answering them, we can get at least closer to an answer to the question that can’t actually be answered – what the hell is going with this?

Does Donald Trump think Hannibal Lecter is real?

It’s fairly clear from the context of Trump’s most reported-on reference to the cannibalistic murderer that the former president knows Hannibal Lecter is a character in a movie. During a lengthy ramble at a campaign event in New Jersey in May, Trump went on extended riff about Lecter specifically being a character from The Silence of the Lambs.

“Silence of the Lambs. Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me. I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” as this poor doctor walked by. “I’m about to have a friend for dinner.” But Hannibal Lecter. Congrats. The late, great Hannibal Lecter…”

Despite being unfollowable and bizarre, this makes it pretty clear that Trump knows Lecter was a character in a movie, and Trump is known for making copious references to movies and music in his speeches – though his pop culture knowledge pretty much has a hard out in the early 90s. He even references Lecter’s final line in the movie, though it should be noted that Lecter is not actually dead at the end of the movie. Hardly the worst of Trump’s factual abuses.

What does Hannibal Lecter have to do with undocumented immigrants at all?

Nothing really, which is why the reference is so baffling. At first, it seemed like the reference stemmed from Trump confusing asylum seekers – ie, people crossing the border because they are fleeing violence and persecution, and are hoping to be allowed into the country for their safety – with asylums for the insane. This is likely a reference to FBI agent Clarice Starling visiting Hannibal Lecter at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and engineering his release. But none of these things or places are real. And insane asylums in general no longer exist in the United States, nor in much of the rest of the world – though Trump has long called for reopening asylums and institutionalizing more people.

Later, Trump would clarify this bizarre story with his remarks at the Republican National Convention, claiming,

“They’re coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. You know the press is always on me cause I say this. Has anyone seen ‘Silence of the Lambs’?” 

Trump is essentially creating a narrative that other countries are dumping their mentally incapacitated felons on us, which is essentially the same rap that Trump used all the way back in 2015 by kicking off his campaign with the false claim that Mexico was sending rapists and killers in the US. Trump has been making the specific insane asylum claim since at least 2023, and nobody has ever found any evidence this is true. Trump has claimed these are “real stories” but never offers proof to support them, because of course he doesn’t.

Is this the first fictional person Donald Trump has talked about as if they were real?

Not at all! Trump constantly talks about people who may or may not exist with the absolute certainty that they do exist, even if nobody can find them. Trump tells so many stories about burly, tough, great men that probably aren’t real coming up to him with tears in their eyes exclaiming “sir!” and regaling him with how great he is that they even have a name – “sir stories.”

Trump has even told stories about specific people who likely don’t exist. One actually has a name – Jim, a “very, very substantial guy” who used to “go to Paris every year with his wife” but no longer goes to Paris because “Paris is no longer Paris.” When Trump started talking about “Jim who no longer goes to Paris” in 2017, multiple journalists went on a fairly substantial hunt for who he was talking about, but nobody could figure it out. Later that year, Trump claimed he was no longer listening to Jim’s badmouthing of Paris, though, again, it’s not clear who exactly Jim was or whether Jim was real.

This type of easy conflation of real and fake doesn’t stop at people. Trump’s New Jersey golf course has a monument to a horrifying Civil War battle called the “River of Blood” that supposedly took place there, though no historical record or expert can confirm that such a battle ever took place. And Trump consistently brags of his winning the state of Michigan’s “Man of the Year” award some time before 2016, though, again, this award does not exist.

Why is he doing this?

We can’t really know why Trump has picked out Hannibal Lecter specifically, but we have established that Trump doesn’t actually think Lecter is real, that he’s linked Lecter to undocumented immigration through an “asylum” connection that’s not real, and that he’s done this kind of conflation before.

But none of those are reasons why he does it. The real reason might be that Trump doesn’t know what the word “asylum” means, and that would make sense.

But there’s another reason why, and it actually lies in Trump’s comments about his comments on Lecter: that the media “goes crazy” when he does it. A former president and current nominee talking about a fictional serial killer as if he were a real and great guy is newsworthy, and Trump knows it. He knows that it will be written about and get the “lying fake news media” all lathered up. And it’s not as if his supporters care, they love this kind of attention for Trump as much as Trump loves it.

So whether Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is real, wonderful, and deserving of the Michigan Man of the Year award isn’t the point. We can’t really know if he thinks this is all real or not. The bigger point is that this is just another bizarre and awful and racist thing that Trump talks about, and that Trump knows the media will talk about him talking about. Like so much of Trumpworld, the details don’t matter – only the coverage.

Jim who doesn’t go to Paris anymore would agree. If he existed.

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We’re Talking About Joe Biden Completely Wrong

Mike Rothschild

One of the hardest things about being of a certain age is that the people you once depended on start to depend more and more on you. They need more from you – more time, more energy, more help doing things they used to do without help, sometimes even more money.

Sometimes, having an elderly person who depends on you means making decisions. It means painful conversations and losses of things that they never thought they’d lose. Have you ever needed to take driving privileges away from an older person? Have you ever told them they have to move into assisted living, or it’s impossible for them to live independently without help?

Was it easy? Did they just hand over the car keys? Did they just shrug and say “I’ll start packing?”

They probably didn’t. They probably fought you, told you you were wrong, you were crazy, that they’re fine, that maybe they’ve slowed down a little and have a little trouble doing things, but that’s just part of getting old. They’re fine. And they don’t want to hear it again.

But you have to bring it up again, because they’re not fine. And before they drive into a tree or burn the house down or hurt someone, you’re going to have to resolve this. And on and on it goes, you push them to give up something, they push back that they don’t need to, and you argue and put your head in your hands and want to give up. You want to say “fine, let them drive off a cliff.” I tried. I give up.

But you don’t give up, because if you love someone and you see something about themselves that they don’t, you have a duty to keep telling them it’s there until they believe you.

Now take all of that stubbornness and denial and refusal to accept what the people around you have long ago accepted – and make it about the most important job in the world, a job that a lot of other people think only you can do, and that you believe if you don’t do it, we descend into a fascist hellscape.

That’s the problem with Joe Biden running for president again. It’s not that we’re asking him to give up the car keys or the house he lived in for fifty years. We’re asking him to give up being the most powerful human on the planet. And he doesn’t want to.

We’re talking about Joe Biden the wrong way. We’re talking about him like a political candidate, and not like a person. A person who is aging in a very public and ugly way. He is 81 years old, and will be 86 at the end of a second term. And nobody knows what that means for him, for his presidency, and for the country. But it’s hard to see it as anything positive or comforting. Not anymore.

Aging isn’t linear. It’s a slow decline in your faculties and abilities and memory and judgement and temperament. For a while, Biden could walk that line. It appears now that, at a minimum, he’s having trouble walking it. And his halting, quiet, feeble, mush-mouthed, incoherent, extremely painful performance in the June presidential debate against Donald Trump (who, it should be noted, is also mush-mouthed and incoherent, just much louder) proved it.

Biden’s defenders believe that him stepping aside and handing the nomination over to someone else, be it Vice President Harris or another Democrat, will be a disaster. They might be right, of course. They might also not be. They believe that Biden just had a bad night, that he was jet-lagged and feeling sick, that he was over-prepared and restricted by said preparation and let lag and sickness from “letting it rip.”

And again, they might be right.

But if you’ve watched someone you love age, you know that the Biden we saw during the debate is probably closer to the real Biden than anyone wants to believe. Yes, older people can have better days than their worse days. But Biden is only going to get older. Whatever is going on with him might ebb and flow, but it won’t get better. Aging doesn’t go in reverse.

It might happen again. Maybe even worse. And it might happen again when it’s too late to make a change without it seeming like chaos and a total lack of planning.

The conversation about Joe Biden stepping aside is one we should have had years ago. It’s one that should have been had based on reality, on the cruelty of aging, on the idea that one man does not define a political party, and on the knowledge that once you reach a certain age, things start to go wrong in ways that can’t be fixed and so maybe we should act before those things go wrong. It’s not ableist or ageist to see an extremely old man who is clearly breaking down in the way that almost all extremely old people do and point it out. To take the car keys away before he hits someone.

We are being told by Biden loyalists, social media influencers, and die-hards that all of this is just bedwetting and a waste of resources and does nothing but help Trump by ignoring his many flaws and horrors in favor of a media frenzy being goosed by the right wing oligarchs and rat-fuckers that run everything. That Biden is fine, he had a bad night, his appearances since then have gone better, and that we need to suit up, shut up, and get in line.

I reject all of this.

I reject the idea that the movement to push Biden to step aside is just more of the “but her emails” nonsense that sunk the Clinton campaign in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s emails were a minor story that was relentlessly exploited by the right wind media machine who had spent decades trying to destroy her. And the idea that the far right was actually concerned about information security is laughable given their unblinking acceptance of Trump keeping untold classified documents in the bathroom of his golf resort.

I reject the idea that criticism of the Democratic Party and of Joe Biden’s stubbornness is tacit support for Trump. It’s the exact opposite, it’s wanting the Democrats to put forth the candidate who has the best chance to win, and being extremely concerned that this might not be Biden, and even if it is, we should probably talk about it while we can.

I reject that anyone who is having serious doubts about Biden’s ability to win again, his age, and his state of mind are “bedwetters” who are panicking over nothing. The debate we’re having now is the debate that should have been had last year. It’s the sign of a healthy party that puts the good of the country over the ego of one man. We have one party like that already – the Republicans. Just because they will support their man no matter what he does, says, or inflicts on anyone else doesn’t mean we should do the same.

I reject the idea that Democrats wouldn’t support another candidate if Biden were to step aside. Sure, there would be crabbing and bellyaching over Biden leaving the field, but it’s ludicrous to believe that Biden diehards would stay home rather than support another candidate who was already lock-step in beliefs with Biden. Democrats did support a potential Biden replacement already: Kamala Harris, who 81 million people voted to step in for Biden should something happen. Well, something happened.

And I reject the ludicrous conspiracy theories that Biden was sabotaged by a rogue soundman at CNN, the excuses that he was in Italy 12 days before and was too tired to debate, and the self-serving demands to “unite or die.” If Biden thinks that the scrutiny he’s getting from his own party is bad, wait until Trump – who has been uncharacteristically silent the last two weeks – starts on him.

At the moment, the far right has been content to let the two Biden factions battle each other. But that won’t last much longer, and Biden is going to have to defend not only his record and presidency from the right, but his sanity and health and basic ability to make decisions. And it won’t be for the good of the country, it will be for the good of Trump – a man who puts nothing above himself.

Joe Biden is not like that. He is a man who puts country over self. Not many people are like that. But everyone gets older. Everyone loses the ability to do things they used to be able to do.

And everyone has loved ones that at some point will have to step in and make the decisions they might not be able to make anymore.

Because Joe Biden the person has reached the point where while it might not get worse for a while, it won’t get better. It never does.

This is the first post in what will be a relaunched TheMikeRothschild.com. For quite a while I’ve put it to the side while I work on bigger projects, but I’m missing the immediacy of regular writing. I hope to post twice a week, with one post more expressly political and/or fringe, and one a little more of a mix of things I care about and want to share. I hope you’ll share, subscribe, and do all the other things we ask readers to do these days. One post will be Monday or Tuesday, the other Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll develop more of a regular schedule as I go.

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Thanks for reading this far, and for everything!

(photo credit: Elizabeth Frantz/REUTERS)