Tag: rfk jr.

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.

“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.

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.

The Conspiracy Theorists Won – For Now

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public acceptance of conspiracy theories is here to stay

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

Conspiracy content creators might struggle during Trump 2.0

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

Trump might not pardon the January 6th felons

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

American will not be “made healthy again”

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

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

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

The left wing grift machine will sputter out

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

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

Disunity Ticket

Mike Rothschild

If you believe a small, mostly-Trump worshipping part of social media, dead bear-planting antivaxxer and brain worm guardian Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump represents a massive blow to the Democrat [sic] Party establishment that will propel Trump to victory as part of a historical unity ticket when all of Kennedy’s voters embrace Trump and vote for him.

If you believe pretty much everyone else who knows anything about polling, elections, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump, or brain worms; then Kennedy dropping out will have almost no effect on the race. It might even hurt Trump in the long term by saddling him with Kennedy’s considerable baggage.

I’m certainly not an expert on presidential polling, but I am something of an expert on brain worms and antivaxxers. So I can safely say that the real effect of RFK Jr. dropping out is almost certainly going to be closer to zero than the 50 STATE LANDSLIDE being predicted on MAGA social media. Numerous polling firms have already given pretty good reasons why Kennedy’s departure won’t boost Trump much, if it all.

Trying to apply trends in niche social media groups to the population as a whole is always tricky. Most people, Democrats and Republicans alike, think Kennedy is an irrelevant weirdo, to the point where the Harris campaign wanted nothing to do with him. There might be some crossover between the two in the health freedom/Tucker Carlson community, full of people who think vaccines are poison, seed oils are worse than Hitler, an all meat diet will keep you alive forever, skin cancer isn’t real, and the medical establishment’s job is to keep you fat and sick. Some might even believe Trump is going to declassify all the files about the assassinations of both JFK and RFK – though, of course, Trump could have blown the doors off the “deep state” conspiracy any time while he was already president, and never did.

The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd is loud, but small – and while they might like both Trump and RFK, they were already overwhelmingly going for Trump. And again, most other people think these folks are creepy weirdos who are obsessed with meat, genitals, seed oils, and assassinations.

So I wanted to focus specifically on the conspiracist community’s reaction to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, and why a Trump/Kennedy marriage is much more likely to end in disaster than in triumph. Putting the two together might seem like a thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party establishment, but in reality, Trump and Kennedy are a poor fit, with fan bases that want different things and don’t especially like or trust each other. And Trump and Kennedy themselves were sniping at one another on social media as recently as a few weeks ago. So here’s why a Trump/Kennedy match is more likely to be a disunity ticket than a magical rocket ride for Team Humanity:

Kennedy’s campaign was already toast: Joe Biden dropping out and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris had already taken almost all the wind out of Kennedy’s sailboat, picking up scores of disaffected Democrats who mistakenly believed Robert F. Kennedy’s son was the next great Democratic standard bearer. Kennedy’s polling cratered, and Harris’s rose almost exactly as much. Beyond that, Kennedy’s campaign was broke, and had struggled to attract anything but negative attention for his bizarre antics. There’s just simply not many people in his camp to actually flip from him to Trump, and as we’re about to see, most aren’t going to do it anyway.

Most RFK Jr. voters supported him because he WASN’T Trump: the biggest reason so many people got behind Kennedy in the first place is that he was supposedly fighting back against the idea of the “uniparty” – a Democratic and Republican establishment that had total control over elections, politics, and governing. While he was nominally a Democrat and was trying to get into Democratic primaries, he was much more anti-establishment (or as least as anti-establishment as a Kennedy can be) in general, not conforming to the rigid doctrine of either party and making no secret of his displeasure with what used to be the part of his father and uncle.

And his supporters have acted accordingly – RFK Facebook groups and Reddit threads have been full of Kennedy voters declaring how they feel betrayed, lied to, used, and incredibly confused. Many are already saying they’ll still vote for him (which he had asked voters to do in states where the winner is all but assured), while others are declaring they’ll vote for other third-party candidates, or just not vote. And every single influencer who has proclaimed Trump/Kennedy to be a “unity ticket” was already a Trump supporter, and is basically wishcasting. A few are saying they’ll go over to Trump, but it’s hard to tell if they weren’t already going to vote for Trump anyway, they just liked what RFK had to say about vaccines. Speaking of which…

Operation Warp Speed should be a red line: This, at least to me as someone who follows the “health freedom” community, should be the ultimate deal breaker. Donald Trump has claimed he is the “father of the COVID vaccine,” and has taken credit for the speedy development and availability of COVID vaccines just a year into the pandemic. Truth be told, it’s the only thing he got right about COVID, and it’s probably just because it had a cool name.

Kennedy, on the other hand, has made a career out of selling false and dangerous claims about inoculations, and called the COVID shot “the deadliest vaccine ever created,” among other insane conspiracy theories about the virus being “engineered” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy-funded activist groups were taking vaccine challenges to the Supreme Court as recently as June. The vaccine was becoming a sticking point for Trump supporters who ALSO believe it’s a poison death shot, as evidenced by the many times people like Alex Jones twisted themselves into knots defending Trump while “being concerned” about the shot.

Kennedy is already touting Trump as the candidate who can “make America healthy again.” Given that Trump is one of the most physically unhealthy presidents in American history, that seems unlikely. But ultimately, this should strangle any sort of Trump/Kennedy union. If you back Operation Warp Speed, you can’t support Kennedy, and if you support Kennedy, you can’t back Operation Warp Speed. We all know conspiracy theorists excel at finding space in these sorts of logical nightmares, but if Trump is behind a genocide jab, and Kennedy endorses Trump, what does that say about Kennedy? Nothing good, I’d imagine.

Kennedy has nothing to offer Trump except baggage: given that Kennedy has no real base of supporters other than people who mostly already hate both parties and won’t vote, what value add does he represent? It gets him a little bit of media coverage, and maybe a fraction of his voters, but the cost is going to be high: Trump is now saddled with a ton of baggage he’s not going to want, related to Kennedy’s past drug use, erratic behavior, insane statement, and conspiracy theories. Any major right-wing influencer who had expressed support for Kennedy, most notably Joe Rogan, has already been batted down by angry MAGA believers and browbeaten into submission.

And Trump endorsing Kennedy on social media is raising some really uncomfortable questions about the Vice Presidential candidate he already picked, who has a massive train of weird baggage himself. There’s pretty much no chance Trump admits the Vance pick is a disaster and drops him, and Kennedy would be a massive drag as a VP for Trump anyway, putting an unstable weirdo front and center in a race where there already too many unstable weirdos. So what are we even doing here?

Ultimately, listen to what Kennedy supporters are telling us – they almost entirely hate both parties, hate Big Pharma, hate the vaccine, and hate how a few groups control the media and politics. There’s nothing antiestablishment about Trump at all, other than the fact that Trump supporters think everyone hates them. Maybe Kennedy brings a few people over with his new message of “Make America Healthy Again,” though even that’s as cynical and see-through as it gets. And any Kennedy supporter who believes that Trump would “pay back” Kennedy for his support with a cabinet post is kidding themselves.

So no, there won’t be a “unity ticket” running on making seed oils illegal and nut-sunning mandatory. Trump will trot Kennedy out as a prop a few times, then the uncomfortable questions will start coming, and Trump will pretend he’s never met Kennedy. And the final act of a long, strange, and increasingly tragic story will have been written.

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