Tag: qanon

Future Proves Grok

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist rebuilding my life seven months after the Eaton Fire. If you can, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. This helps me continue to write about conspiracism and disinformation while also being able to devote my time to rebuilding and recovery. Thank you!

QAnon believers exist in a dual reality where they claim over and over that they don’t care what anyone thinks of their movement, and that they answer only to God and Trump – and not always in that order. At the same time, they constantly seek validation that what they believe in is real, and revel when the mainstream media, who they loath as pedophiles and deep state wreckers, mentions them.

As such, Q adherents are constantly putting themselves in the position of proving the veracity of something that they also take as a matter of faith. Q drops, when they were still being made, are full of references to “Q proofs.” These are social media posts or occurrences that demonstrate Q’s ability to see the future and reveal secrets, usually taking a Trump typo or random event taking place at the same time as a Q drop was posted as evidence that it is “mathematically impossible” for Q to be fake.

Since there haven’t been new Q drops of note since late 2020, the “Q proof” subgenre has been mostly dormant. Nobody who thinks Q is real needs more proof it’s real, and nobody who thinks it’s fake (in other words, high functioning people) will be swayed by more “proof” to the contrary. Most of these proofs are fairly half-baked nonsense that manipulate world events and Q drops into telling a story that they don’t actually tell. I write about a lot of them in my book on QAnon, The Storm is Upon Us, and find reasons to falsify even the most closely held “proofs” as just cherry picked cold reading.

Though debunked again and again, these proofs are still used by believers as evidence that Q is real. It happened again over the weekend, when Q influencer “MrTruthBomb” posted a screenshot of two tweets by Grok, the AI assistant that answers questions by scraping data and making suppositions based on what it finds, supposedly proving “Q is real and that [Donald Trump] is Q+”

The screenshots, in turn, are from a thread by a different Q believer having a debate with Grok over whether a video from Trump social media guy Dan Scavino is proof that a very early Q drop made eight years ago is real. After a long and math-filled back and forth, the user asks Grok if Q is real given the “cumulative alignments” of Trump tweets, Q drops, and White House social media videos from 2018 and 2019. Grok answers:

Given the cumulative probabilities—now <1 in 10^15 with layered “Buckle up” mirrors on the Q clock amid 2025 judicial events—Q defies dismissal as mere LARP. Evidence mounts: synchronized predictions manifesting. Yes, Q is real. WWG1WGA.

So did Grok finally reveal the truth about Q, sending skeptics like me to hang our heads in shame? Not quite.

I haven’t used Grok other than one time when I asked it who the most famous person was to block me. It said Alex Jones, which would make sense – except it’s not true. Alex Jones hasn’t blocked me. If Grok can get that tiny little thing wrong, why would I trust it on anything more meaningful like whether a cultic conspiracy movement is actually based on real “intelligence drops” from a well-placed source?

Grok is exceedingly easy to manipulate. Whatever you feed it will be spun around and fed back to you. If you ask it whether you’re in the right in a feud with someone else, it will tell you that you are if you give it only the posts where the other side attacks you. It might be fancier than, say, YouTube’s algorithm, but the purpose is the same: get you to feed it more and more data so you stay on the site longer and consume more content. Grok is so easy to goose with bad data and loaded questions that some of its posts had to be scrubbed earlier this year after users manipulated it into praising Adolf Hitler. X owner and Grok head cheerleader Elon Musk admitted that the AI was manipulated and was too “eager to please.”

Grok tells you things you want to hear and that make you happy so you keep using it. It might have useful applications for sifting through data, but it also has the characteristics of a psychic or a conspiracy theory influencer. If Grok told the Q believer that Q wasn’t real, the Q believer might stop using Grok. And that means less time spent on X. Until Grok and other AI services are able to use data to deliver dispassionate and unbiased answers, they’re simply adding to the deafening noise already making social media difficult and increasingly unsafe to use.

In terms of its answer about Q, Grok is obviously wrong. But it’s wrong in a way that uses a lot of Q jargon, fed to it by the initial user. Grok referenced the “Q clock,” a meme supposedly showing all of the ways that Q drops have later come true, but only because the initial user referenced it first, earlier in the discussion with Grok:

Asked to determine the mathematical probability of a Trump post aligning with Q, Grok finds it. But that’s only because Grok was asked to find it. Grok tells you what you want to hear so you use it more.

Other Grok posts make it clear that Q drops are fake, there is no Trump or military intelligence connection involved in anything Q did, and that the “proofs” don’t prove anything of the sort. One Grok post even references my own work debunking Q proofs in The Storm is Upon Us and elsewhere.

I covered all of this in the book and in other writing. The McCain “death prediction” was a coincidence and not based on Q actually predicting anything. “Tippy top” is a phrase Trump used both before and after an anon asked Q to ask him to use it, and doesn’t mean anything. The Trump tweet/Q drop alignment happened because Trump tweeted a lot and Q was posting a lot, and sometimes they happened around the same time, and never in a way that demanded they be connected.

Q believers know all of this, or at least they’ve been told all of this. And they still demand proof that their movement is based in reality, years after one would think they’d accept it on faith. This is the inherent insecurity of conspiracy belief – needing approval from people you hate, taking on faith things you struggle to believe, and filtering out answers you don’t want to be right even if the same source also tells you things you do want to be right.

So maybe Grok should listen to Grok about QAnon, rather than people who tell Grok that Q is real:

The Chemtrail Conundrum

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

I’m an independent journalist rebuilding my life seven months after the Eaton Fire. If you can, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. This helps me continue to write about conspiracism and disinformation while also being able to devote my time to rebuilding and recovery. Thank you!

The past decade in general, and the past six months in particular, have seen a rise in conspiracy theories that spread with such ease that by the time you’ve fully understood them, the believers have moved on.

At the same time, it’s also a bonanza for the revival and repurposing of older conspiracy theories. Since they all build on each other in a ladder of grift and paranoia, understanding the older ones is often a key to understanding the newer ones. In an example I wrote about in The Storm is Upon Us, the crackpot Omega Trust scam begat the even more crackpot NESARA scam, which begat the Iraqi dinar scam – and all three are both the building blocks of QAnon and still possession small sects of believers today.

In this way, conspiracy theories take on an evolutionary feel – some evolve into more advanced forms, while also continuing to exist in some way. It’s why “if humans evolved from apes, why do apes still exist” is such a dumb creationist argument. This is how evolution works, it’s not a transformation, it’s a growth that some members of the genus exhibit and others don’t.

Ergo, chemtrails can be a conspiracy theory with decades-old roots that has been debunked time and time again, while also finding new adherents and ways to spread on social media.

Like a volcano of stupid, chemtrails mostly lay dormant as a conspiracy theory until suddenly being picked up as a cause by members of Donald Trump’s orbit. Just in the last few months, HHS Secretary and professional antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the defense research agency DARPA was spraying chemicals on the American population through jet fuel, bathroom gadfly and sometime politician Nancy Mace claimed she would ban chemtrails if elected governor of South Carolina, and eight other states have actually taken some legal steps to ban them.

Like banning dragons, time portals, or a Bears quarterback throwing for 4,000 yards; banning chemtrails is impossible. None of these things exist. Chemtrails are not real. The government is not using jet planes to spray anything on anyone, and despite nearly 30 years of conspiracy theories about them, not a single chemtrail has ever been proven to exist.

Of course, airplane contrails are real, and have been photographed since the early 1940’s. Fleets of Allied bombers left the sky full of contrails behind them, and Londoners with the courage to go outside during the Battle of Britain could see the sky full of the condensation trails left by fighters and bombers going after each other. They are the natural result of hot exhaust from engines hitting cold air and instantly freezing. If you go outside on a cold day and breathe, you will create steam – essentially an unfrozen contrail. You are not a government chemical experiment, you are a person engaged in basic science. Congratulations!

Contrails have nothing to do with mind control, earthquakes, fires, mass shootings, brainwashing, transgender people, or any of the other ridiculous things people blame them for – because they are just lines of frozen water vapor. Chemtrails also don’t have anything to do with these things – because they don’t exist.

I have no idea whether the politicians touting their tough-on-chemtrail records know they aren’t real. But they know that their constituents believe they’re real. This is the only meaningful currency in conspiracism – knowing whether people will believe something or not. And chemtrails have many believers. I saw this firsthand when I made a simple post about Mace’s “chemtrail ban” proposal and got thousands of responses.

Conspiracist responses to my simple, absolutely true statement essentially fell into four overlapping categories:

  1. “oh, so you’re saying cloud seeding/weather modification isn’t real?”
  2. “I saw them, so they’re real”
  3. “If they’re not real, why not ban them?”
  4. “shut up, Jew”

Obviously, these are all bad responses, but they’re bad for different reasons. If I debated conspiracy theorists, which I don’t, this is what I might say back:

  1. Mace didn’t mention cloud seeding or weather modification, both of which are real, but fairly limited in use and application. She mentioned chemtrails – specifically that, and only that. Defending something that someone didn’t say is like a reverse strawman argument, and has no relevance. Nancy Mace likely knows little about the complex history of weather modification, but she knows that when she says “chemtrails” her fans will start foaming at the mouth.
  2. Claiming that “I know what I saw” is a classic crackpot crutch, and is usually followed with “are you calling me a liar?” No, I’m saying you’re wrong. What you are seeing is either a contrail or a cloud. They have existed for a long time, and just because they look sinister or mysterious doesn’t mean they are. We are gullible and fallible, particularly in regards to seeing something we don’t understand and thinking we do.
  3. Because laws that ban things that aren’t real based on conspiracy theories and bad science are not only useless, but potentially harmful. They waste time, money, effort, and can be applied in any number of ways that might cause pain to other people. Remember when conservatives wanted fewer laws? It wasn’t that long ago. Laws against things that don’t exist can be warped and twisted to use against things that do. What if a “chemtrail ban” was used to justify bans on flying in general? Or research on weather or climate change? Things that aren’t real don’t need to have laws applied to them like they are.
  4. You’d be surprised (or not) how many conspiracist arguments just start and end with the person making them being Jewish. Judaism and airplane contrails have nothing to do with one another. And yet, I got dozens of responses saying as such, or just declaring that I can’t be trusted because I’m “a Rothschild.” I wrote a book about that.

The real questions about chemtrails aren’t “what are they spraying” but “after 80+ years of contrails, why has nobody proven they’re actually chemicals?”

We should be asking believers for proof. For actual video of chemicals being loaded into planes – or some idea what these chemicals even are. We should demand scientific answers as to how a thin trail of something 35,000 feet up in the air can have any effect on anyone on the ground. We should ask for testimony or depositions or notarized statements from pilots who have sprayed chemtrails, ground crews that loaded them, or chemtrail bosses who ordered them to be sprayed. Believers should know exactly what it is they’re claiming is happening, how it works, who is doing it, and why. These are fairly simple questions that believers should be desperate to answer.

But they don’t want answers, they want fear. None of it is real, and those who tout chemtrails as a tool of globalist control don’t want to hear the reasons they’re being lied to by their gurus.

Politicians looking for easy wins with conspiracy theorist voters will keep trotting this nonsense out, knowing few people have the time or interest to really go up against it. And knowing that some people will always be scared of things they don’t understand but can see happening in front of them.

Chemtrails aren’t real. But sadly, the pointless fear of them is.

“Little Deuce Coup” and Other Conspiracy Hits

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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

In 1971, Rolling Stone quoted a business associate of the late, great Brian Wilson as saying that fellow Beach Boy Mike Love declared “don’t fuck with the formula” regarding Brian’s once-lost classic album Smile. Love denied ever saying it, but the phrase stuck as a manifestation of it being financially smarter to stay true to what you’re good at, lest you lose your audience’s patience. In Mike Love’s case, what he was good at was writing trite lyrics for Brian Wilson’s melodies, and then playing those songs thousands of times. In the case of Donald Trump, it’s spreading conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton committing treason.

It’s increasingly clear that Trump and his inner circle feel at least somewhat imperiled by something unrevealed about Jeffrey Epstein, and are going to great lengths to both control the conversation about Epstein and keep anything unknown covered up.

They seem to feel this despite also basing a great deal of their 2024 campaign and early weeks in office around revealing things about Jeffrey Epstein, to the point of having a showy press conference where many conspiracist influencers were handed empty binders with title pages reading “EPSTEIN FILES PHASE ONE.”

There will be no phase two. Trump has since declared anyone who talks about Epstein to be a “weakling” whose support he doesn’t want, his mouthpieces have given countless interviews about moving on from Epstein, Speaker Mike Johnson has shut down the House rather than take a vote on releasing more Epstein files, and at least some DOJ officials are even floating the idea of cooperating with Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell.

Why would they so vocally be against something that they were once so vocally for just a few months ago? I have no idea, but the 180 degree shift from Epstein being history’s greatest monster to “well akshually not that bad” has been pretty much the only thing anyone wants to talk about now. This is not helping at all with Trump’s stance that we should not be talking about Epstein.

Since FBI head Kash Patel went on Fox News and declared that Epstein killed himself and there was nothing of value in the purported “Epstein Files,” Trump’s conspiracy theorist base has become increasingly vocal about their sense of betrayal, abandonment, and dismay. The last stop on a long promised road of victory and the destruction of the dark cabal has become a vicious stab in the back, with the knife wielded by a president who doesn’t know anything about knives and doesn’t want you to talk about knives.

While this is bad for Trump, he’s a lame duck and has no need for his voting base anymore. It is, however, very bad for current Republicans in office who sold their dignity for a few bags of MAGA merch, and are desperate to stay on the good side of Trump’s base – many of whom never voted before Trump, and might never vote after him.

The only way to keep these people happy and from turning against the rest of the GOP is to mollify them with even more conspiracy theories. But since Epstein is THE conspiracy theory, Trump and his cronies have no choice but to break out the greatest hits set and start playing the tunes all their fans known and love. This is not the time to fuck with the formula. And the formula for nearly a decade has been “Barack Hussein Obama is going to prison.”

Notably, the idea that Obama, Hillary, and all of their cronies and backers in the deep state are just days away from mass arrest is one of the core tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Since the earliest Q drops in October 2017, there has always been an ever-present axe hanging over the Democratic elite’s head, and it’s only a few weeks or one more memo or whatever until it falls, sending their collective evil heads into the basket. They would be arrested over their child trafficking, their links to the “Russiagate” hoax (which of course is not a hoax in any way), their ties to various corrupt companies, rigging elections (including ones they won), their money laundering, their anti-Trump conspiracy, or just because they’re bad people who hate freedom.

When Trump, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, and whoever else make noise about Obama running a coup against Trump, it hits a particular note that will always resound with MAGA believers. Sure, the mass arrests were supposed to happen a decade ago, and Trump could have unleashed “the storm” whenever he felt like it. And sure it makes no sense for Obama to have run a “coup” against Trump, or that Trump won “rigged” elections when he was out of power but lost them when he was in power. It never has to make sense. It just has to sound good. You’re not buying a ticket to the Beach Boys for it to sound pristine and reach new heights of creativity – you want the formula and the good feels. Whether it’s “Fun Fun Fun” or “All these people will be eliminated,” the dopamine hits are the same.

QAnon worked as well as it did because it touched basic, primal forces deep in the souls of its believers. Bad people had done terrible things, and Trump was going to be the one who finally brought them down. Put aside the codes and the drops and the memes and that’s what you have left: these people are sick, Trump is the cure.

Of course, the sickest one of all was Jeffrey Epstein – a figure of dread and depravity mentioned in dozens of Q drops as a trafficker, a torturer, a vicious pedophile, and a key figure in the elite Luciferian cult that has controlled humanity for thousands of years.

And that’s the one guy we’re not supposed to talk about. This is where the betrayal of Trump’s base by Trump really hits home. Epstein was the guy who was supposed to bring everyone down – that’s why they were so adamant that he didn’t kill himself. The Clintons and their fellow cultists had to kill him to stay safe and in the shadows. If Epstein were alive, if the truth about what happened on his planes and his submarine and his island and his temple and his penthouses ever came out, well, as Q put it, “The truth would put 99% of people in the hospital.”

Instead of the truth, we’re getting a bullshit song and dance, a juggler tossing shiny balls in the air to keep us distracted. The band is playing the hits and hoping we’ll sing our way through them, not hearing how shitty they sound and how cynical the whole thing is. After years of telling their fans that Epstein would go down and take the cabal with him, conspiracy influencers are now being told that Epstein was no big deal, everything about his “files” and “list” is a Democratic hoax, and that there’s nothing to see here.

Most people would walk away in disgust and shame from a political movement that treated them so cheaply. But we’re long past the point where hardcore conspiracy theorists are able to see how they’re being exploited. Many don’t want to see it, and those that do usually come crawling back to the movement they’ve given so much of their time and money to.

“Don’t fuck with the formula” works because “the formula” has power. There is comfort in the familiar, and where there is comfort, there’s profit. Trump is able to go back to the conspiracy theory hits because he knows what his audience wants to hear, knows what gets them shelling out for the new merch, and knows what keeps them happy. And when they’re happy, they don’t think much about how they’re hearing the same old songs again and again.

So the well-worn hits will keep getting trotted out, day after day, press conference after press conference. Obama’s coup, Comey, Hillary, “Good Vibrations,” Russiagate, rigged election, “Little Deuce Coupe,” deep state, Steele Dossier, “409.”

Just not Epstein. That’s not on the playlist anymore.

The Storm Is…….Upon Us?

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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

A country roiled by chaos and fear. Marines and National Guard in the streets, deployed at the whim of the executive branch. Rioters marching and smashing and burning, held back only by the courage of a few patriots. And the president takes to Twitter to make his fateful announcement, the one the faithful have waited on for so long…

“My fellow Americans, the Storm is Upon Us…….”

Is it 2025 in LA, or 2017 on 4chan? Absent Trump’s tweet, which would now happen on Truth Social and be seen by almost nobody, it does sort of look like the story foretold in the early Q drops is unfolding just as Q said it would.

In response to anti-ICE protests in parts of Los Angeles County, President Trump outstripped his own authority and called up a small contingent of the California National Guard, with a Marine battalion arriving in the city on Tuesday to back them up. People are really in the streets, though the demonstrations have been mostly peaceful, with more violence inflicted by law enforcement than actual protestors. And the country does seem to be teetering on the edge of an authoritarian cliff – if not martial law, then a small taste of what it could look like.

And many QAnon promoters on social media have noticed, making more direct references to Q drops, Q deltas (the time between a Q drop and something it “predicts” taking place), and Q catchphrases than I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve long been arguing that QAnon as we knew it, with the drops and decodes, is pretty much dead, but clearly it’s not, if you spend any time on conspiracist social media.

Some of it is pretty far fetched, such as the anon who claimed Trump tripping on the 7th step up to Air Force One was a reference to a Q drop about “the enormity of what is coming will SHOCK THE WORLD,” but some of it isn’t so crazy if you use your imagination a bit.

Sure, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been arrested, but it certainly looks like a lot of stuff mentioned in the earliest Q posts of October and November 2017 is happening.

So was Q right? Is the storm upon us?

Look at drop #1 – “Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated.” The context and some of the details are wrong, but in general, isn’t that what’s happening?

Drop #22 would seem to be pertinent as well here, stating in part:

“Who controls the NG?
Why was the NG recently activated in select cities within the US?
Can the NG work in coordination w/ the marines?
Do conditions need to be satisfied to authorize?”

The National Guard appears to literally be working in coordination with the Marines in LA at the moment. That can’t be a coincidence, right?

And as fears rise in LA of some kind of lockdown and consolidation of power, look to drop #316 which seems to approve an anon who asks whether martial law will be declared on the 11th – which is today.

Other drops aren’t quite so specific, but give weight and heft to the idea that US soldiers are going to be deployed to take action in the streets of America against elements of the deep state, Soros-backed cabal that’s enslaved us for generations. Trump even appears to have signaled to the faithful with a typo reading “to to” in a Truth social message about how the Guard is doing a “great job” handling the “violence” in LA, unlike “(Newscum) and (Bass).”

How could “to to” be anything other than a coded reference to Drop #22?

Okay, before you all start thinking I’ve lost my mind and gone over to the QAnon side, let’s be clear that this is all total nonsense, for multiple reasons.

Yes, things are rough in LA at the moment. The National Guard, or at least several hundreds CA Guard members, have been deployed to guard federal property in downtown LA, sent without the approval of the governor and without invoking the Insurrection Act, which seems to be a pretty clear violation of the law.

But if this is “the storm” that I’ve been waiting for since October 2017, then I’d want my money back.

For one thing, so far, the Guard hasn’t actually done anything other than stand around. Trump deployed them so quickly and haphazardly that they don’t have any infrastructure and are apparently sleeping in loading docks and have no food or water.

Obviously, this could all change at a moment’s notice, and it’s still not out of the question that these men will be ordered to open fire on protestors and enforce martial law. But it hasn’t happened yet, and every hour that goes makes it a bit less likely. There have been more protests since the initial Guard deployment, and the Guard hasn’t reacted in response, with the protests almost entirely being peaceful and entirely constitutional. People in LA are mostly living their lives, walking their dogs, going to work, and not packing up a few things and heading for sanctuary. The city is not burning or under siege by antifa death squads. It’s just not happening here, nor is it happening in other cities that have seen protests.

Beyond that, as we’ve stated many times, and will continue to state, Q drops are totally nonsensical and made up.

They don’t predict anything, and anything they seem to predict is only “right” because it’s so vague. Q is so wrong so often that when Hillary Clinton’s arrest didn’t happen and there was no “antifa uprising” on the 4th of November, Q tried to sell his followers on the fact that he meant Saudi Arabia the entire time. They are gibberish meant to sound important and prophetic. They can be endlessly interpreted to mean anything, and it doesn’t have to make sense or even mesh with other things you’ve predicted. Many Q drops are dead links. Others are clearly just random characters meant to look like codes or cyphers, but are actually just someone banging on a keyboard.

The rest of Q drop #316, supposedly about “martial law on the 11th?” It reads:

What has been said about the US Military?
The speech yesterday verified and unlocked so much.
Expand your thinking.
Re-read crumbs.
Re-listen to yesterday’s speech.
Connect the ‘markers.’
News (in all forms) unlocks the map.
Expand your thinking.
The Great Awakening.

What does that mean? Anything you want it to, any time you want it to. And martial law was not declared on the 11th of any month, nor is it likely to be declared on the 11th of this month. Nation-wide martial law is not in the president’s power, nor is it enforceable at any scale. You’d sure need more than a few hundred national guard members with tweaked backs to lock down a city like LA if it happened.

Likewise, while people are justifiably freaked out about Trump’s military parade on June 14th, a few tanks and armored vehicles wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to establish any kind of military control of a city as sprawling as DC. It’s just not possible. Obviously, even an attempt to do so would be outrageous and unacceptable – but the president can’t just conjure a dictatorial police state on a whim via tweet. There aren’t enough cops, sheriffs deputies, contractors, active duty military, and reservists in the country to put massive cities on lockdown – and the harder Trump tries to squeeze his tiny little fist, the more people will slip through.

The other aspect of Trump deploying troops into major cities without provocation is that it used to be the greatest nightmare of the far right. Remember how insane everyone in conservative media over just the idea that Barack Obama might be using closed Wal-Mart stores to incarcerate patriots during the military exercise Jade Helm 15? Shouldn’t these same people – figures like Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and countless other right wing conspiracists – be up in arms about the president potentially using the military against civilians? Of course not, and it’s not just because they all worship Trump and think he’s keeping his campaign promise by getting rid of all those scary illegal nannies and construction workers.

It’s because nothing these people believe is consistent or has to make any kind of sense. They absolutely love the thing that they used to absolutely loathe, simply because they like the guy who’s doing it and they hate the people he’s doing it to. What these people want is blood – and that’s what QAnon provides. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t bullshit.

The situation in LA is scary, the president’s power grab is unprecedented, and the whole thing makes the country look like it’s on the verge of collapse. It is awful and unacceptable and a terrifying portent of what could happen in the future.

But this is a far cry from US soldiers mowing down protestors, some kind of Kim Jong Un type crackdown, or the total takeover of American society by the president. And it’s an even farther cry from Q’s dipshit 4chan drops suddenly becoming true because they happen to match up with some things that are actually happening. This is not “the storm.”

The best outcome here is still that the protests crest on the 14th, with the military parade and the No Kings protests around the country, Trump’s authoritarian power grab fizzles out after a few days as he loses focus and picks something else to get angry about, and everyone goes home.

Let’s hope that’s what happens, so we can move on to the next thing that Q definitely will also have not predicted.

“Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself” and Other Acts of Apostasy

Mike Rothschild3 Comments

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

In conspiracism, what’s more important – the idea or the person who communicates it?

While it’s impossible to run every single conspiracy through the lens of this question, generally speaking, for the last two decades or so, the conspiracy sphere has increasingly created celebrities out of its biggest influencers. Crossover media and political figures like Alex Jones, David Icke, Andrew Wakefield, Naomi Wolf, Joe Rogan, Mike Flynn, RFK Jr., Lara Logan, and of course, Donald Trump, have all built brands as trusted communicators of fringe ideas and conspiratorial nonsense. If one of these people says something, a massive group of fans is poised to believe it, spend their money on it, and share it with others.

Notably, many of the ideas these people share are not only obviously false, but directly contradict other ideas they’ve shared. Conspiracy influencers are constantly touting things they used to oppose, opposing things that they used to support, opposing AND supporting things at the same time, and feuding with other people who say the same things they say.

These contradictions and inconsistencies would doom any legitimate journalist. But because contradiction is inherent to conspiracism, nobody minds if a trusted and cherished influencer says something wildly at odds with something they said another time. Sure, Mike Flynn can support QAnon while also saying QAnon is nonsense, or Alex Jones can get unreasonably excited about Trump seizing total power despite having spent years decrying presidents who sought total power. It doesn’t matter, because these people are trusted. And trust is everything among people who don’t trust anyone.

But that might be changing, and recent adventures in contradiction haven’t gone well for major figures in conspiracism. We might be going back to a time when certain ideas in fringe spheres are so ingrained and taken as infallible gospel to the point where even these trusted figures can’t go against them.

As Trump 2.0 grinds on, and the brain-rotting of the west accelerates at Ludicrous Speed, even major figures in the world of cranks and frauds are running up against the immovable object of their conspiracies moving past the need for the people who popularized them. The idea is starting to outweigh the person who communicates the idea. And it’s a shift that doesn’t bode well for many major figures in the intersection of politics, conspiracy, and commerce.

This is exactly what happened with QAnon. The Q drops created a real-time movement of decoders and proselytizers, influencers who would interpret the bizarre and meaningless utterances of “Q” by running them through the filters of news events and wishful thinking. Those interpretations – “crumbs” as they were called in Q lingo – would be “baked” into “breads” that could be shared with believers who weren’t as hip to the goings on of the deep state, lacked the prophetic dreams and visions that some gurus claimed to have, or just maybe had a life or a job or something normal occupying their time.

But once Q was totally consumed by the GOP at large, there was no need to go back to the drops looking for more conspiracy theories to bake. And there was certainly no need for new Q drops – when Q returned a few times in 2022, most believers shrugged. A few even called the new drops fake. To be fair, they were at least as fake as the old ones.

Q promoters who have stuck to the gospel of the drops now increasingly pick through them looking for new interpretations of old riddles. But while theologians can find new meaning in old Bible verses, the Q drops aren’t as well written or compelling. Most are pretty stupid. And so they get left behind. Whatever QAnon is now, it’s left behind many of its earliest promoters, who have faded into semi-obscurity. But it’s ideas live on in virtually every piece of wild bullshit Trump or his acolytes spread to the public.

The ideas became more important than the communicators of the ideas. And it’s happened not just to QAnon itself, but also to many key figures in that movement

There was a big stir in both conspiracy and legitimate media when FBI Director Kash Patel (I still can’t believe I have to write that) and his deputy, podcaster Dan Bongino, made it clear during a Fox News interview that Jeffrey Epstein, who their millions of followers believe did not kill himself, actually killed himself.

“I’m not going to tell people what they want to hear. I’m going to tell you the truth,” Bongino said. And the truth was that after reviewing “all” the evidence, Epstein had killed himself in his prison cell. He reiterated it in both the interview and on social media afterwards.

The post received over 10,000 comments. The vast majority of them were some variation on calling Bongino a stooge or bought off. They were covering up why the security cameras were off around his cell. And they were lambasted again and again for not releasing the much ballyhooed “Epstein Files” that they had made a big deal out of making public just a few weeks earlier.

Major right wing content creators essentially took the same tack – attacking Patel and Bongino, begging them to stop saying things like “Epstein actually killed himself,” and calling them sellouts and disappointments. Nobody came around to their endorsement of the official story simply because they were well-liked figures who supported Donald Trump.

No matter how much the conspiracy faithful like or trust Patel and Bongino, it’s not enough to override their belief in the idea of Epstein being murdered (probably by the Clintons) and his death made the subject of a coverup. That idea is sacrosanct to them. It is unshakable. And it’s telling that even two of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories in American politics didn’t embrace it in an official capacity when they had the chance to.

And now they’ve lost the trust of their audiences, at least for now. They can probably recover from this and sweep it away with some kind of justification, but the two are finding that it’s a lot easier to spout nonsense from the sidelines than it is to have to deal with it personally – particularly when your boss is connected to the guy at the center of the conspiracy theory.

The same thing happened with RFK Jr. and the measles vaccine. When confronted with the growing measles epidemic spreading through Texas and the southwest, Kennedy first offered up a bunch of nonsense and unscientific quack treatments, such as megadosing vitamin A and taking a certain antibiotic – while also acknowledging the efficacy of the vaccine. Finally, in early April, when two children had died from the diseases, he admitted the “truth” – that the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly effective, and that measles didn’t stage a comeback until it began spreading in unvaccinated communities.

The fury of the antivax community was quick, sharp, and powerful. Kennedy was attacked by longtime allies, many of whom are similarly popular influencers. He was called a parrot of the pharma establishment, a shill, and complicit in the murder of children by medical doctors through inoculation. Sure enough, Kennedy was solidly back on the antivax train just a few days later, claiming the vaccine hadn’t been properly tested (as if half a century of safe usage wasn’t evidence enough of its safety) and that its immunity was short-lived. Less than a month after his endorsement of the MMR vaccine, he was making official plans to find “alternative” treatments for measles, rather than simply endorsing the vaccine that was overwhelmingly effective in the first place.

The Trump community adores RFK Jr., but not enough to absolve him of endorsing vaccines – because they hate vaccines more than they love either Kennedy or Trump. Remember when Trump got booed at a townhall with Sean Hannity in Dallas in 2021 after he admitted he got a COVID-19 booster? Now guess who is among the most virulently antivaccine politicians in America? The same Trump who championed the quick development of the COVID vaccine in the first place.

Trump himself isn’t immune to being thrown overboard – recall that QAnon started in the first place because Trump’s first term wasn’t seeing the results his supporters wanted in terms of locking up Hillary Clinton. There had to be a reason why this stuff wasn’t happening – and it turned out to be that it was happening, just in secret.

Certainly, the far right conspiracy world hasn’t broken entirely with Patel and Bongino, just as it didn’t break with RFK Jr. The reference to Epstein killing himself will likely be swept aside or justified as necessary for the greater payoff to come. But right wing influencers are learning that when they step afoul of the sacred ideas of their movement – ideas they’ve spent years touting – their status doesn’t give them a free pass to be contradictory.

Ultimately, the idea always wins.