Tag: politics

When You Don’t Care About Being Wrong

Mike Rothschild

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

As part of my post-fire mental health, I’ve been trying to stay off social media on the weekends. I’m also trying to avoid getting too wrapped up in debunking instant conspiracy theories about tragic events, preferring to wait a day or two before really diving into what fringe communities are claiming. The positive side of this is that I’m generally less frantic and glued to my phone. The vulnerability is that if a bunch of things happen over the weekend, or a major event spawns a deluge of disinformation, by the time I jump back into the fray, I’m already behind.

So after the horrifying shootings of multiple Minnesota lawmakers on Saturday spawned countless conspiracy theories minutes later, I was way behind.

By the time I had popped onto social media Saturday afternoon, the worst people on the internet had long ago flooded their readers with conspiracy theories and false claims that the alleged killer was a radical leftist Marxist, that the shootings had been revenge by the state’s Democratic party for the two lawmakers voting against a bill to fund healthcare for undocumented immigrants, that the shooter was friends with MN governor Tim Walz, and that he’d been planning to attend the No Kings protests scheduled for that day.

All of these theories either lacked evidence or took real things out of context. They weren’t true, and when they were first posted, nobody could have actually known if they were true, because for at least the few hours immediately after the shooting, the suspect hadn’t been publicly named and little was known about him. How could anyone know that the shooter was a “radical Marxist” or “friends with the governor” if we didn’t actually know who he was?

None of this kept these theories from immediately going viral, driving traffic and merchandise sales to their creators, and confusing the issue for people who are not dialed into internet culture. Of course, you didn’t need to be an expert on conspiracy theories to know this would happen, because it’s happened already – countless times.

The facts and details about the MN shooting didn’t matter, because the people who create these theories have developed a template for every single mass shooter, would-be assassin, tragic accident, mass casualty event, or any other unexpected and traumatic event. The perpetrator is always a far-left deep state assassin with links to antifa, Black Lives Matter, George Soros, liberal political figures, or transgender activism. The details and nouns vary a bit, but the gist is the same – a deranged hyper-liberal who acted out their violent ideation on innocent people, either because pig pharma made them insane, or because they’re working for the deep state.

The early “reporting” on these incidents is always the same, following the same outline and making the same accusations. And it’s always wrong. Trump’s would-be assassin in July? He was a “deep state hitman” and dedicated Democrat – until it turned out he had no known motive and had debated shooting at both Trump and Joe Biden. The horrifying mass shooting in Uvalde, TX in 2023? The shooter was immediately “identified” as both transgender and an illegal immigrant – except he was neither. The 2022 Highland Park, IL shooter? The far right media immediately claimed he was linked to antifa and transgender. He was neither. The 2017 Las Vegas massacre? Alex Jones immediately ran with conspiracy theories that the shooter was both a member of antifa, and linked to ISIS – except he had nothing to do with either, and local police and federal officials disclaimed both accusations. I could find dozens more examples.

Claims about mass shooters “actually” being transgender and part of an “epidemic” of trans massacres are so common that Jones, in a Twitter post after the 2024 Madison shooting, claimed “there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.” In reality, the number of mass shootings carried out by trans individuals is 0.11% – or about one out of a thousand.

Even disasters beyond shootings are fodder for the “deranged leftist” template. Recent helicopter crashes, train derailments, and even the fires in Los Angeles that burned down my home and thousands of others have all been blamed on some form of mutated leftism, usually DEI hiring practices. And it’s entirely without evidence, and done only to inflame people who are already inflamed about DEI hiring practices. The facts don’t matter, and they’ll never be applied.

As it turned out, the MN shooter was a hardcore Trumper, a right-wing evangelical, and a domestic terrorist with a list of dozens of Democratic lawmakers he wanted to murder. The “No Kings” fliers in his car were likely there because he was going to attempt to murder people at one of the events in Minnesota. But even now, the influencers cling to the idea that he was actually a radical leftist with close ties to Tim Walz – despite no evidence that they’d ever met, and their only link being that the shooter had served on a non-partisan business commission rubber-stamped by the governor.

But conspiracy theory gurus dropped him into their template of radical left-wing transgender antifa abortionist the moment the news of the MN shootings broke. They seeded the ground first, and the narrative was set. And it’s not a narrative that started with Alex Jones or Trump’s election – merely one that’s changed shape to comport with the times.

In the Before Trump days, mass shootings and violent incidents were blamed on the looming specter of gun confiscation and mass arrests of patriots. In the wake of Sandy Hook and other massacres, the far right media immediately saw whatever was going on as some form of a staged false flag or targeted hit, always carried out by either multiple shooters or a drugged-up government patsy, with the purpose being an excuse for harsh gun control measures, the taking away of 2nd Amendment rights, and the incarceration – or elimination – of those who resisted.

Ultimately, the far right media machine switched out the “staged false flag” template for the “deranged antifa trans” template for a couple of reasons. One was that after Sandy Hook came and went without the dreaded Great Gun Grab, it became clear that if the massacre of 20 6-year-olds didn’t motivate Congress to do anything about gun control, nothing ever would. The second was that Trump was elected, and the conspiracy theories about tyrannical government overreach suddenly became wishful thinking. Conspiracy influencers who turned their paranoia about the federal government into full time jobs suddenly became Trump’s biggest fans and apologists. No government he controlled would ever carry out staged false flags to take away our gun rights, because Trump was only going to use the hammer of government to get rid of bad people, not patriots.

And yet mass shootings kept happening. So rather than engage in any kind of introspection about why mass shootings keep happening and what can be done to curtail them, they just switched out the conspiracy theory. False flags were out, deranged leftists were in. It didn’t make anymore sense in its new form than its old form – and even Jones continued making contradictory claims that the shooter was both anti-Trump and a hired stooge of the government. But overall, it became a way to excuse why the thing Trump should have stopped – the federal government killing people in preparation for martial law – kept happening.

The sad truth is that none of the influencers making these theories up care about whether they’re true or not. The only thing that matters to them is building out and monetizing their endless narrative that “the left” – whoever that is – wants to kill them, take their freedom, and transgender them. Create the fear, spread it without consideration, sell them the cure. Do it again, and again, and again. And when you’re proven wrong, the only thing you do is push the lie harder. As it became clear that the MN shooter wasn’t any of the things that early conspiracy theorists claimed he was, they just kept saying he was those things.

When you don’t care about being wrong, you don’t care about continuing to be wrong. Being right takes time, and these people don’t have it. Not when there are ad buys and clicks and podcast subscriptions at stake.

There will be more violent incidents in America, not just because of Trump and the general ratcheting up of tension between Americans, but because America is a violent country where guns are easy to access and mental health is always the first thing to run out of funding. The people who rely on making money off disinformation about these incidents will stick to their pre-written narratives until the time comes for them to swap the template out again, once Trump is out of office and presumably the “deep state” takes the White House again. Then we’ll likely be back to false flag gun grabs, rather than transgender Marxists.

It won’t matter. When you don’t care about being right, it never does.

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.

A Few Lines About “Cocaine-Gate”

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 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.

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.