Tag: politics

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.

Stop the “Stop the Steal”

Mike Rothschild

In the wake of the 2024 election going for Donald Trump, social media has become overrun with conspiracy theories about the results being rigged, stolen, and the product of a vast plot by Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions.

Obviously, this is a repeat of the 2020 election, except with the parties reversed – and at a much smaller scale. But while conspiracy theories about the rigged election aren’t coming from the top, and won’t end in a violent riot, they’re still a problem and not good for how people are processing the events of last week.

Election fraud conspiracy theories are negatively impacting how we think about the results, and how we’ll move forward as a country. They’re feeding paranoia and delusion on both the left and right – with one side claiming they prove 2024 was stolen, and the other claiming that they prove 2020 was stolen. Denial is not a good place to be, and conspiracy theories about a Democratic version of “stop the steal” are no more helpful or productive than the Republican one was last time. Many of these will burn out once Trump takes office, but for now, they’re driving much of the discourse about the aftermath of the election, and they deserve to be addressed.

Musk hacked the election with Starlink, then destroyed the satellites to cover his tracks!

In the earliest hours after the election, the biggest conspiracy theory going around was that there were tens of millions of “missing votes” between 2020 and 2024, and a full audit of every state would make them turn up.

This was easy to falsify, since California had only just begun to count its millions of votes, and the “missing votes” dwindled from 20 million to 15 million to 5 million. As the vote total ticked up toward 2020 levels, the big conspiracy theory changed – from votes being “eliminated” to votes being “hacked” or “changed,” with the most likely culprit being by Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system.

What else could explain the vast difference between what Trump got in 2020 and in 2024? Couldn’t Musk, who became Trump’s biggest funder and cheerleader, use his near-monopoly on private space travel and communication to harness Starlink to rig the election for Trump? Isn’t that the ultimate return on investment?

Proponents of the conspiracy theory tended to share the same few pieces of evidence: a thread on social media from a self-proclaimed election hacking expert, a snippet of video of an official in rural Tulare County, CA claiming election officials “used Starlink technology” to improve access to connectivity, and claims that Musk himself said Starlink could be hacked. There were even claims floating around that Musk bragged about using “an app” that gave him the final results four hours early.

Given the deluge of right wing conspiracy theories about voting machine technology in 2020, it’s not a surprise to see them from the left this time around. And just like those theories then, there’s no evidence Starlink was used to change anyone’s vote, or any real theory of how that would actually work. Satellites don’t count votes, can’t access voting machines, and can’t change votes. The vast majority of ballots are still filled out on paper or with a paper backup – it’s tabulator machines that count them and add up the numbers for each candidate.

Electronic voting machines themselves are never hooked up to the internet due to the potential for hacking, but vote tabulators can be in certain cases, usually in remote areas to directly transmit results once polls close. Final totals are mostly transmitted via secure transfers to election offices, and then are sent out to news outlets as they come in. Starlink can be used for this transmission, just as any other internet provided by Verizon or AT&T can, but the votes have already been counted and recorded. And since, again, the vast majority of ballots are filled out on paper, there’s no way for Starlink, or any other internet service provider, to change them. Any audit would immediately find massive discrepancies in vote totals that would immediately point back to Elon Musk. It takes specialized equipment to actually communicate with satellites beyond just using them for internet connectivity, and this is far beyond the scope of what county electoral offices can provide.

As for Musk “destroying evidence,” Starlink is a vast network of satellites, and they crash or burn up pretty regularly. SpaceX satellites “de-orbit” almost daily, and YouTube constantly lights up with videos of satellite burn ups or crashes. Sometimes they even crash in batches, to the point where space experts are concerned about the lasting impact of satellite debris on both the planet and its atmosphere. The idea that Musk “knew the results of the election four hours early” is a third-hand quote from Joe Rogan, who said on his show a few days after the election “I was texting people like Tulsi and JD Vance. And apparently, Elon created an app, and he knew who won four hours before the results were called.” Nobody knows what this app is, who Musk told that told Rogan, or if any of this is actually real. And Tulare County has reliably gone for Trump in three straight elections, meaning no cheating was required to keep it in the red column. But it makes sense that election officials would use Starlink in lieu of poor broadband quality to transmit the results – results that were counted and recorded elsewhere.

Ticket splitting proves the election was rigged – who would vote for Donald Trump AND Democrats?

The fact that Democrats retained Senate seats in four states (and maybe five, depending on the outcome in Pennsylvania) that Trump also won doesn’t prove fraud or cheating. It proves that voters aren’t monolithic, and that while social media makes it easy to think of every single Trump voter as a Nazi, plenty of people wanted Trump, and also either didn’t vote down ballot, or wanted more progressive candidates in other offices. Pro-choice ballot measures did well, there was no great red wave in state and local legislature races, and as of this moment, Republicans look to have expanded their control of the House by a grand total of one seat.

Split ticket voting ebbs and flows with various elections – look at 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon won 49 out of 50 states, while Democrats retained control of both the House and Senate. It’s rarer now to split voting between the parties, but clearly not unheard of. Democrats not getting clobbered down ballot, particularly in the House, isn’t a sign of cheating, it’s a sign of hope that people might want Trump, but they don’t want Republicans quite as much.

Ultimately, voters are people, and people sometimes do things that we personally don’t like or approve of. That includes voting for both Trump and Democrats – trying to understand why people did this is much more useful and impactful than pretending they only did it because of a conspiracy to steal the election.

Russian bomb threats swayed the election!

Obviously, no threat of violence against a polling place is acceptable. But there’s no evidence that the spate of bomb threats called into polling places in swing states, particularly Georgia and Arizona, had any influence on the final outcome. Seven states in total received bomb threats, with polling hours extended due to disruptions. Many other states Trump won received no threats at all. Small scale acts of electoral terrorism did not throw entire states to Trump, and to think they did is simply to live in willful denial. It’s not clear whether Russia was involved in these threats, of whether those who sent them in only used spoofed Russian email addresses. And hopefully, a Trump-staffed FBI will still take the threats seriously and investigate them.

Trump repeatedly told rally crowds “I don’t need your votes” which is proof he cheated!

I don’t know how many times we’ve heard Trump say something stupid that has no relation to reality, only for detractors to use it as proof of a vast plot to overthrow democracy and make himself president for life. Trump spent an endless campaign rambling about Hannibal Lector, windmills killing whales, immigrants eating dogs, and how Christians would “never need to vote again.” Obviously, some of this stuff is troubling and way outside the bounds of what any normal politician would ever say.

But Trump isn’t a normal politician! That’s what so many people gravitated toward about him! He promises things that he’ll never deliver, makes claims he never proves, and says things that make no sense and that are immediately forgotten. How many times has Trump promised to reveal a plan or a policy or evidence of something in two weeks, only for it never to materialize? Hell, the entire premise of QAnon began with Trump claiming a gathering of military officers “could be the calm before the storm,” with nobody knowing what he was talking about, and it never came up again. That’s not to say that his alarming statements shouldn’t be taken seriously, but random stuff Trump said during rallies is not evidence of a conspiracy.

Liberals are still shellshocked about Trump winning, and it’s not like anyone is planning to storm the Capitol. Let people vent and conspire, it’s a form of coping!

I actually agree with this. Conspiracy theories stem from unexpected events scrambling our sense of reality, and Trump winning another election after everything that’s happened is a massively unexpected event. It’s still shocking that the man who led an insurrection to retain power was handed power back four years later. People need time to process it, and to figure out how and why it happened. Conspiracy theories that it was all rigged are a form of bargaining, and an appropriate place in the stages of grief. Eventually, reality will set in, but for now, the mourning continues.

But conspiracy theories are not evidence. Feeling it’s “wrong” in your gut that Trump won is not evidence. Nor are viral threads about Starlink, memes about missing votes, or accusations by liberal influencers. Trump won the election, not because he seized power in a coup, but because the voters chose him. As stunning and strange as it is, that’s the system we live in. There’s a lot of blame to go around for Trump being allowed to run again and to win, but he did win.

We get to mourn now, but pretty soon, we have to take the black garb off and get back to work. A midterm election looms, and it presents a major opportunity to take control of Congress back. Or at the very least, to generate a new round of conspiracy theories about what “really” happened to the losing side.

The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Ooh baby, that’s hard to change
I can’t tell them how to feel
Some get stoned, some get strange
But sooner or later, it all gets real
Walk on, walk on – Neil Young, “Walk On” (1974)

We had a presidential election. Donald Trump won. Again. This time, by a lot.

I’m not an expert in political trends and forces, and I don’t have the training to dig through the data and explain why it happened or what Democrats could have done to stop it. The country has veered hard to the right for a lot of reasons, some economic, some based in fear, and some just because America veers to the right when things get tough. Books will be written about why Trump won and Harris lost, and I’m not the person to write them.

But I am something of an expert on disinformation and conspiracy theories. This was an election that was utterly infused with them, just as Trump’s entire political persona is based in them. I’ve written a lot, and will write more, about how we got here. But I want to take a little time while my mind is still a sleep-deprived jumble to write about what might happen in the conspiracist sphere during a second Trump term.

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

While Trump’s 2024 campaign was sloppy, undisciplined, and borderline incompetent at times; he had a message and he stuck to it. The message was that bad people are out to get you, things used to be better, and I will fix it. He appealed to the fear and nostalgia of his audience, and it worked. Migrants will rape you unless you vote for Trump. Want eggs to be cheap like they used to be? Vote for Trump. It’s simplistic, but it works. And it will always be more compelling than trying to explain that no, you won’t be raped by a migrant and eggs are more expensive for a variety of complex reasons. Fear and nostalgia are always going to be powerful weapons to use against people looking for answers and certainty. Which, to be fair, can be pretty much everyone.

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

I don’t know that conspiracy theories have ever not been part of our life, but the public’s acceptance of them and feeling of safety in spreading them is a Trump-era phenomenon. The few Republicans who openly embraced conspiracy theories usually lost badly in elections, and became figures of mockery. With Trump in office again, and taking a host of conspiracy theorists and disinformation peddlers with him, we will be inundated with lies, garbage, hoaxes, fakery, and conspiracy theories. It’s never going away, and it’s going to keep getting worse. We have to know how to spot it, how to push back, and understand why it’s so powerful for getting a message across.

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

Having said all that, I can see a falloff in content from some of the big names in the conspiracy world. The reason is that inherently, conspiracy theories come from people who don’t have power. Trump has power, and will likely be surrounded by toadies who will do whatever he wants. Not only that, but Trump is entering office a second time in a very different environment than 2016. That was an election he squeaked his way to winning, against an opponent who had a thirty year industry of bullshit working against her, and with a cloud of scandal due to Russian interference. This time, Trump is coming to office with something close to a mandate, including a likely win in the popular vote. There’s no “steal” to stop, no “Russiagate” to engineer disinformation about, and no need for something like QAnon to explain why Trump isn’t “locking her up.” The deep state, it would seem, has been broken. The urgency for creating conspiracy theories won’t be there – unless Trump’s agenda bogs down and he doesn’t do certain things his conspiracist followers expect. Then the conspiracy theories will flow.

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

One thing his flock absolutely expects are large scale pardons of those in prison or with felonies for their actions on January 6th, 2021. Obviously, Trump will make the federal charges against himself go away. And he’s said he was going to pardon the “political prisoners” of January 6th and do it on “day one.” But why bother pardoning people like Proud Boys head Enrique Tarrio or chief Oathkeeper Stewart Rhodes? He has no use for these people anymore, there’s nothing they can do for him, and he never lifted a finger to defend them or pay for their defense in the first place. All they can do is eventually turn on him or blab to the media, becoming one more nuisance to deal with. Ultimately, Trump doesn’t need the Oathkeepers or Proud Boys anymore. He has a mandate from the American people, so why bother cleaning up any loose ends from the past election? Don’t be surprised if Trump lets these people rot.

American will not be “made healthy again”

Trump has promised to allow unelected bureaucrat health czar Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to “go wild” on lunatic public health initiatives that come straight out of InfoWars: removing fluoride from tap water, “banning” vaccines, and presumably waging a holy war against seed oils. I don’t expect any of this to happen in a meaningful way. Kennedy himself has merely said he would “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” a recommendation that said water systems would likely be free to ignore. It’s also fairly ludicrous to imagine Trump “banning” vaccination, given that there are no federal vaccination mandates for school attendance. It’s entirely a state issue. The best Kennedy likely could do is try to countermand CDC recommendations on vaccination – which is certainly bad, but nothing that’s going to send parents over the Canadian border looking for bootleg polio shots. Of course, another global pandemic could hit, and Kennedy could be right there making sure to hamstring vaccination efforts for that, but he’s already been doing that for COVID.

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

It might be a long time before we know how important Elon Musk’s money and disinformation spreading were to getting Trump back in office. But while Trump has touted Musk as a czar of cutting the government’s budget to go along with RFK Jr. being the czar of making us healthy again, don’t be surprised if this strange alliance shatters fairly quickly. These are three men with huge egos who are used to getting what they want – and only one will be the president. Trump has feuded with both before, and if things go south with “banning vaccinations” or Musk’s “Department Of Government Efficiency,” the knives might come out. Like the J6ers rotting in prison, Trump finds people useful until they’re no longer useful. Or Musk might just get bored and wander off to go dig tunnels or play video games.

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

This is more of a personal grievance for me, but my sincere hope is that if there is a “resistance” to a second Trump term, it’s based on facts and organizing, and not unbridled hopium and grift. Any liberal content creator who spent the last eight years screaming about how “the walls are closing in” on “the former guy” who is “going to prison” because “Mueller’s got this” should be shamed and mocked to the point of digging a hole and crawling into it. Sure, I believed Harris would win and that Trump was running a tired and sloppy campaign. She didn’t win, and I can own it. We move forward in the world that exists. The idea that magical sealed indictments will finally send Trump to oblivion should be well-understood by now to be fiction. It always was.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be a dark and strange time for America. We have to stick together, stick to the facts, and try to stay as hopeful as we can. Every day he’s in office is one day closer to him no longer being in office.

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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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.