Tag: politics

Conspiracy Contradiction

Mike Rothschild

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

It was easy to miss in the normal chaos of weeks under the Trump Administration, and the particularly newsworthy death of Pope Francis, but last week, the White House entirely changed the contents of its COVID response page to a massive conspiracy theory touting the “lab leak” hypothesis as the origin of the pandemic.

The evidence touted by the White House is basically that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Hunan Seafood Market are seven miles apart, along with a bunch of statements backed up with phrases like “most likely” and “nearly all measures of science.” The only real evidence provided is a link to a House Select Committee report, made up of Republicans who are totally under the thumb of Trump.

The “lab leak” scenario has always seemed woefully under-evidenced and based on wishful thinking, so I’m not going to debate it here. But I thought it was worth sharing that the official stance of the US government appears to now be that COVID was a genetically engineered bioweapon that escape from a lab in China only to infect and kill millions – and we’re not doing anything to punish China for its depravity.

Of course, that seems at odds with the other mainstream conservative stance, which is that COVID, while bad, is basically just a cold that can be warded off with vitamins and ivermectin. As such, the massive number of deaths during the pandemic was hugely over-reported to include deaths “with” COVID rather than deaths “from” COVID, based on the deep state wanting to make the pandemic seem worse than it actually was so they could take our freedom away (note that substantial evidence shows COVID deaths were actually undercounted, particularly during the worst of the pandemic).

And both of those things seem at odds with the OTHER mainstream conservative stance, which is that COVID was a planned bioweapon attack on the west, which the deep state conditioned us for and practiced using tests like the 2020 Rockefeller document and the mysterious 2019 drill “Event 201.” In this scenario, the COVID release was planned to cull the population and put the rest of us on permanent lockdown, stealing our freedom and our money to keep us as slaves. And it only didn’t work because…

Sorry, I got a bit lost in my scenarios. How could COVID be planned AND a leak? How could it be just a cold AND a population culling bioweapon? How could the COVID lockdown be a tool of the cabal when it was launched during the administration of the president who dedicated his life to taking down the cabal?

Welcome to the world of conspiracism, where nothing makes sense because nothing has to make sense.

All of these things should, in theory, contradict each other. But somehow, in the conspiratorial mind, they all fit together on a timeline that gets more convoluted and absurd the more you try to make it all work. It doesn’t have to work. It just has to give the appearance of being complicated and long-planned by the most evil people in the world, but also easily discoverable by amateur sleuths doing internet research.

Every major conspiracy theory is riddled with these types of contradictions that are blindly accepted and worked into an incomprehensible world view that actually explains everything if you just don’t think about it at all.

Trump’s assassination attempt? Planned by the deep state to kill Trump, using literally the most incompetent assassin they could find, who utterly failed at his job.

Mass shootings? False flags perpetrated by gun-grabbing presidents in order to take away our firearms, even though they never do it, and numerous mass shootings took place under Trump’s first administration which were actually real mass shootings caused by SSRI’s and carried out by antifa.

Barack Obama? He was incompetent and an idiot, but also all-powerful and pure calculation – while also being both a communist and a Muslim, while secretly gay and married to a man pretending to be a woman whose children just appeared out of nowhere.

9/11? A controlled demolition planned in meticulous detail as a way to take away our freedom, while also being figured out that same day by multiple major figures in the conspiracy world.

The JFK assassination? Oswald was a patsy who never fired a shot, despite the rifle he was known to have owned being found at the exact spot where Oswald worked, and a Dallas police officer also being definitely shot and killed by Oswald, who just happened to kill a cop for no particular reason.

Some conspiracy theories rely on things that might not be contradictions if you use enough wishful thinking and sculpting of the facts to make them fit what you believe – COVID could have leaked from a lab and be planned if you assume that the leak was accidental, AND the deep state was making plans for a fake pandemic that would be activated when a REAL pandemic started. If you squint enough, it makes sense – even if the amount of squinting you’d need would make your face implode.

But some conspiracy theories rely on believing two things that literally can’t be true at the same time. Princess Diana was murdered by British intelligence AND she faked her death to escape public scrutiny. Osama bin Laden was already dead by the time of the US Special Forces raid on his compound AND he’s still alive and in hiding. How is that possible?? It doesn’t matter, don’t ask.

Such cognitive dissonance, the discomfort felt by holding two contradictory positions at the same time, has long been a recognized part of the phenomenon of conspiracism. But this kind of mental plate spinning was always the domain of cranks and fringe authors, not the White House. Of course, that was the before time. Now the President puts out a conspiracy theory that literally depends on contradicting things he’s already said and done, and millions of people simply put all those things together in a way that fits – even if it definitely doesn’t fit and stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Most people struggle to understand conspiratorial beliefs because ultimately, most of us want to have belief systems that make sense. We disregard the things that don’t fit the evidence, and act on the things that do. A controlled demolition on 9/11 or mass shootings being cooked up by powerful forces don’t fit the evidence, only belief systems that want them to be true. But when things they WANT to be true run into things that ARE true, and only one can be the real thing, then reality warps and we’re faced with confronting our own false beliefs.

That’s a line many conspiracy believers won’t cross. So the rest of us scramble to find ways to understand and react to the things that our conspiratorial friends and family believe, when really, the things they believe can’t be understood. The details of the conspiracy theory don’t matter and are entirely malleable depending on the circumstance. COVID is real and fake, it’s harmless and genocidal – whatever you need in the moment.

If the details of the conspiracy theory don’t matter, why bother debunking it?

For one, many people will come to the conspiracy theory as outsiders, not believers. And it’s important that the first time someone encounters a theory, they should also be given the information required to know it’s false. But more than that, conspiracy belief stems from a real psychological need to make sense out of things that don’t make sense, to find answers to questions that don’t seem to have answers, and to find order in chaos.

We ALL have those needs. We all need reasons why things happened, who did them to us, and what we can do to push back. That’s why we’re all vulnerable to conspiracy theories if they hit us in the right way at the right time. Maybe it’s not COVID or 9/11 or false flags – maybe it’s why did my house burn down, or why did I get hit with this medical bill, or why are things so hard and shitty?

That’s not political or historical, that’s human. So understanding the contradictions of conspiracism helps us understand the appeal of conspiracism. It doesn’t need to make logical sense. It just needs to FEEL like it makes sense. If it’s not THE truth, at least it can be MY truth.

Even if it’s not true.

January 6th and the Rewriting of Memory

Mike Rothschild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never happened.

Except, of course, it did happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rothschild Central Banks – Syria’s Version

Mike Rothschild

Extraordinary events are almost always catalysts for conspiracy theories – often providing more “acceptable” explanations for something that wasn’t “supposed to happen.”

And what could be more unexpected than the sudden and stunning collapse of the Assad regime in Syria? Rebel forces undid well over 40 years of rule in an offensive that took less than two weeks, and saw the Syrian armed forces collapse and even change sides. Watching it happen live was almost unbelievable, and many people indeed did not believe it. Or at least, they believed a different version of it. And of the many “more acceptable” explanations for what was going on in Syria, a familiar one that took hold early was that Syria was one of the only countries on earth without a “Rothschild Central Bank,” and the cabal finally took action to correct this half-a-century long oversight.

I’ve written extensively about the “Rothschild Central Bank” conspiracy theory, and why it’s incorrect on multiple levels. I spend a great deal of time on it in my book on the Rothschild banking family myth, Jewish Space Lasers.

But the situation in Syria is extraordinarily precarious and complicated. Even with Assad deposed, there’s no guarantee that the country will be able to develop a functional democracy, correct the previous regime’s human rights abuses, or not become a battleground for proxy groups and terrorist spillover.

With so many moving parts, it’s easy to imagine alternative stories emerging about how the Assad collapse was a Jewish plot, perpetrated by Israel and funded by the depravity of the Rothschilds, all to get their claws into yet another nation’s banking system. So with that in mind, here’s why the “Rothschild Central Bank” theory, and in particular its relation to Syria, is false and should be completely ignored.

There are no “Rothschild central banks”

A central bank is, by its very definition, a governmental entity. Central banks control money supply, print money, set interest rates, and manage the financial policy of a nation. And every country has one, other than a few tiny microstates that use the money of larger countries. In the US, we have the Federal Reserve, while the UK has the Bank of England, and so on. The nations of the European Union have individual central banks that are all members of the European Central Bank. Even North Korea has a central bank.

None of these central banks are owned by private investors, and certainly none of them are owned by the Rothschild banking family. Before the era of nationalized central banking, many wealthy banking dynasties owned shares of stock in national banks, including the Bank of England. But that era ended long ago, and for the Rothschilds, it saw a general decline in their wealth and power. Central banks are now owned and operated by their parent governments, not by decrepit tycoons in castles.

Why the Rothschilds in particular are linked to large scale ownership of central banks has a lot to do with their longevity and history. The family once did have business holdings all over the world, and had the ear of royalty and prime ministers. And the myth that Nathan Rothschild made so much money off the Battle of Waterloo that it allowed him to take control of the British money supply started in 1846 and has proven durable enough to fire conspiracism in everyone from French antisemites of the 1890s to Nazi propagandists of the 1940s to Alex Jones today.

But it’s not true, and never has been true. As I write about in Jewish Space Lasers, the myth of the Rothschilds and Waterloo spread decades after the battle, and we know for a fact that the family made little off the outcome of the battle itself – though they did make much of their fortune off loans and gold sales during the Napoleonic Wars.

The list of “Rothschild Central Banks” dates back to a 2012 blog post, and has been repurposed by countless bad actors and cranks, including finding a prominent place in the QAnon conspiracy theory, where it’s eagerly passed around by “truth seekers” who don’t understand how banks work. But why is Syria lumped into this nonsense? Haven’t its people suffered enough?

The Central Bank of Syria began operating in 1956, succeeding the previous French-run central bank that had administered the country since 1919. It didn’t retain its independence by keeping the Rothschilds out, it did because it was run by a brutal dictatorial family. And even its status as “non-Rothschild” varies depending on which internet meme you get your information from. Some cranks claim there are only three independent central banks in the world, others claim five, others claim nine. Sometimes Syria is on those lists, sometimes it’s not. Other lists have North Korea, Iran, Russia, or even Iceland as not being controlled by the Rothschilds – when in most cases, they’re controlled by repressive regimes. Or in some cases, like Iceland, they were nationalized due to financial crises.

All of this is lazy and nonsensical antisemitism. Blaming the Rothschilds for things going wrong in a country you support is the bedrock of anti-Jewish sentiment. Tyrants, cranks, crackpots, and conspiracy grifters have been doing it has been for millennia. If you’ve been a die-hard Assad supporter and you’re watching his regime collapse, it’s easy to point to Jewish power and control as the cause.

None of this means you’re a truth seeker or alternative journalist. It makes you a crank and an antisemite. The Rothschilds have no central banks, aren’t installing one in Syria, and have nothing to do with the bravery and tenacity of the Syrian opposition. They’re the real story, not the phone string pullers of meme-making nightmares.

To support my work on conspiracy theories, disinformation, and the people who spread them, check out my Patreon page, or my profiles on Bluesky and the website formerly known as Twitter. Thank you!

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.