Tag: politics

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.Β 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.

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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.

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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 β€œadvise 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.