Tag: trump

When the President Lies About You

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was nine months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

A lot has happened since we lost our home – to us, to our community, to our country. Rebuilding is a full time job, one that pays in exhaustion and crushing lows. And it doesn’t help anyone when the President of the United States lies to the entire country about what happened to you, and how he could have stopped it if only someone had let him.

Even with the relentless lying inherent to Donald Trump’s political rise, it’s still somewhat disconcerting to have the most powerful man in the world specifically making up an entire fiction about what happened to you and your community. And it’s even stranger that he does it in the service of making himself the real victim of the disaster, as opposed to the people whose lives were devastated and remain in perpetual limbo.

Over and over, in dozens of press conferences and public remarks, Trump has created a fantastical and fake version of the LA fires.

In this bizarre fantasy, the fires started because of Governor Gavin Newsom refused to allow water into California from Oregon in order to protect an endangered fish. They destroyed far more homes than they actually destroyed, and were only contained because Trump (who was not president) “broke into” the water supply of various Pacific Northwest states and funneled it through a “giant faucet” to put out the fires.

If you go by statements like these, he’s a hero, and also the real victim:

March 13: “A place called Los Angeles almost burned to the ground.  By the way, I broke into Los Angeles.  Can you believe it?  I had to break in. […] And we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down.  They have so much water, they don’t know what to do.  They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons.  Okay?  Can you believe it?  And in the meantime, they lost 25,000 houses.  They lost — and nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

May 6: “I always liked Gavin. I have a good relationship with him. I just got him a lot of water. I sent in people to open up that water. We just got him a lot of water. If they would’ve had that water and done what I said to do, they wouldn’t have had the fires in Los Angeles.”

June 10: “Look at the fires he had. He had fires where half the city it seemed burned down. What was it? 25,000 houses, all because he wouldn’t take water. I released the water from the Pacific Northwest and it came down, millions of gallons a day. And it’s right there, right now. They’d like to send it back.”

August 25: “They did lose 25,000 houses to a fire that should have never occurred. Because they didn’t let the water come down from the Pacific Northwest, which you guys don’t want to write about. I had to break into the water supply to let the water down. And even now we want more. We can have much more. Less than half of what should be coming in.”

September 3: “Newsom didn’t allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. I demanded that to be open. If that were open. You wouldn’t have had the fire because all the sprinklers would’ve worked in the houses.”

September 12: “They lost 25,000 houses to fires because they didn’t have the water come down from the Pacific Northwest. They have a lot of water but they send it out into Pacific to protect a little tiny fish which did very badly when it didn’t have any water, by the way.”

October 14: “They already lost 25,000 houses to fire because they wouldn’t let the water come in from the Pacific Northwest. They didn’t do it and we had 25,000 homes where they had no water in the sprinklers, they had no water in the fire hydrants. We broke in and had the water come down.”

If someone you loved were rambling this kind of relentless nonsense, touting himself as the victim of a disaster that only he could have stopped, you’d start looking at websites for memory care wards. But since it’s Trump, he has a cult of personality that holds up his every word as gospel, and a press that either just goes along to get along, or amplifies his lies. So he gets away with telling the same lie over and over again – he stopped the fire he didn’t stop, and could have stopped it sooner had Newsom, who did not start the fire, not stopped him from stopping it.

Obviously, this is very stupid. But it’s also incredibly dispiriting and depressing. It does nothing to help survivors, and instead kicks them while they’re down.

I lived through what he’s talking about, as did the tens of thousands of people in West Altadena who have been displaced by the fires. Naturally, he does not care. He hasn’t visited Altadena, he hasn’t mentioned it as far as I can tell, and has actively hindered our recovery process. In his first days in office, he repeatedly claimed that the fires happened because of an endangered smelt, and ordered the state to reroute water from the north to Southern California. There was no way to do this quickly or cheaply, and it wasn’t needed, because the fires had been almost entirely contained by the time he was inaugurated.

Since then, his administration has gutted the federal workforce, including the Forest Service and federal wildland firefighters. He has turned US relief agencies into shells of themselves, while threatening to all but close FEMA. And he has, again and again, threatened to withhold federal aid from the state if the government doesn’t meet a set of ridiculous conditions. We haven’t received billions in promised assistance for reasons Trump and his minions in the GOP won’t articulate.

Fire survivors in LA expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting of rebuilding without help from a Trump administration that has always spoken of Southern California as some kind of Satanic dumping ground. But the lying has become so pathological that one begins to wonder if he actually thinks it’s real – that he really believes he saved Los Angeles weeks before he became president, and we should thank him for it by arresting immigrants and giving him money.

He did not “break into” anything to release any water, nor did he have any ability to do anything of the sort before he was inaugurated again. A week after taking office, Trump ordered the opening of two dams in Central California, flooding unneeded and destructive water into Central Valley farmland owned by the farmers who have supported him election after election. It did nothing to help anyone, and was nowhere near LA. He called it a victory, when it was literally nothing but a cheap stunt and a knife in the back for his loyal farmer voters.

There is no “giant faucet” and Trump’s understanding of water on the west coast appears to be cribbed out of things he heard from donors and mixed with things he made up. It is an infantile flight of fancy to believe that a huge pipe can just be opened up to allow limitless “water from the Pacific Northwest,” because it doesn’t flow to LA, and the infrastructure to make that happen would be ludicrously expensive and inefficient. Nothing he’s talking about would have stopped the fires, and his relentless destruction of the federal government is all but ensuring that future fires will be worse, and that survivors will have fewer resources at their disposal to recover.

Trump is even lying about the number of homes lost in the fires, exaggerating it by almost half. About 13,000 homes were lost – a far cry from the 25,000 he keeps repeating.

Everything he has said about the fires is a lie, and it’s a lie that continues to turn the loss and devastation of thousands of families – people who live in the country that he is president of – into a cheap punchline. He doesn’t care about us, I get that. But he doesn’t even care to know what happened to us. He doesn’t care that he’s wrong. He doesn’t care that the fiction he’s created doesn’t help anyone and mocks our pain.

If you want to know what happened in Altadena and Palisades, ask someone who survived it. Talk to us, get our stories from the people who lived them. Trump’s ridiculous fiction is just that, a story he tells himself and his fans to make himself part of a story he wasn’t part of, and absolve him of giving a damn about the survivors. Because he doesn’t have to care.

We don’t have that option.

This is How Stupid They Think You Are

Mike Rothschild

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Donald Trump began his rise to political prominence with his enthusiastic embrace of a conspiracy everyone could see was absurd and fake. So it’s fitting that exactly ten years after the 2016 Republican primary field began to disintegrate around Trump, we’re doing it again. Only this time it’s so much dumber.

Before he was the Daddy God King of the Republican Party, Trump was a blustery TV businessman who was Just Asking Questions about where Barack Obama was actually born. Trump took birtherism, which had mostly been the domain of desiccated far right fossils or crank perennial candidates and made it mainstream and hip. In doing so, he normalized the conspiracism that the “square” conservative movement had mostly attempted to push away, starting us all down a deep dark hole of lunacy and contrarianism that would lead to Pizzagate, QAnon, COVID denialism, January 6th, and Trump winning two presidential elections.

Birtherism depended on a vast conspiracy to fake Obama’s citizenship, train him in the ways of Marxist Muslim terrorism, install him in government, and pull all of the strings and levers exactly how they needed to be pulled in order to elevate him to the presidency. It would have required hundreds or even thousands of people to be in on the plot, none of them to reveal any of it and all of them to execute it perfectly, and forged documents done so perfectly that nobody could ever determine if they were real or fake – except for a few truth-seekers who immediately determined they were fake, and nobody cared.

Also, it would have required time travel. Birth announcements in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, both based on information provided by the Hawaii Department of Public Health, proclaimed the arrival of a son to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama on August 4, 1961. Various conspiracy theories would try to work around this by claiming that the elder Barack Obama was not the president’s father, and that he had changed his name from “Barry Soetoro” or some such. But the announcements themselves were impossible to fake. They were found in decades-old archives. Unless someone had the forethought to plant them in local papers as part of a half-century conspiracy to elevate a non-citizen usurper to the presidency, that should have been the end of the matter.

And yet, it wasn’t. And logic never dictates how conspiracy theories end, only their usurpation by other conspiracy theories.

A decade later, Trump is now asking America to believe that the crude cartoon and bizarre poem he wrote for sex trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s 50 year birthday book is just as fake and planted as Obama’s birth certificate. Trump and his mouthpieces want us to think the drawing wasn’t his and that he’s never drawn a cartoon, despite his long and well-documented history of drawing cartoons. He wants us to think the signature on the cartoon isn’t his, despite looking exactly like his signature looked from 20 years ago, and matching up perfectly to other verified signatures from the time. And he wants us to think that despite being handed over to Congress by Epstein’s estate, and despite being in a disgusting book full of obnoxious praise and sexual innuendo written by people who have confirmed they contributed to it, that he had nothing to do with it and it’s not from him.

Essentially, just like the Obama birth announcements of 1961, Trump wants us to believe that someone planted that cartoon and signature 22 years ago just so it could be unearthed by Democrats and the media to smear him. It’s all a conspiracy – hopelessly convoluted, entirely pointless, and defying all available facts and logic. It requires nothing other than belief, and will be believed only by those who wish it to be true.

This is how stupid Trump and his minions in the White House, GOP, and right wing media arm all think you are. They need you to believe that the thing for which overwhelming evidence exists and which has no conceivable way to fake does not exist and is fake. Trump’s denial does nothing but bring up more questions, none of which have good answers. If Trump didn’t do it, who did? Was it faked two decades ago or now? Why would Epstein’s estate hang on to a fake? Or conversely, why would someone put a fake into a birthday book which was exceedingly and disgustingly real?

There will never be any answers to these questions because they aren’t real questions that anyone would ask. The only evidence the card is fake is that Donald Trump keeps saying it’s fake. For most, that will never be enough. For a few, it will be the only thing that matters. So you keep saying it’s fake, keep changing the subject to literally anything else, and repeat it often enough to ride out the controversy.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is whether conspiracy gurus actually believe the things they say, or whether it’s all part of their grift. It’s always hard to answer, and I usually say that conspiratorial beliefs are often an extension of things the person already believes, just taken to irrational extremes. Those extremes are often driven by commerce, since conspiracism is a lucrative industry. But sometimes they’re driven by self-preservation.

Trump, presumably, knows that he drew and signed that card for Jeffrey Epstein. And while the people around him are dimwitted, incurious, sycophantic, and fairly evil; they’re not complete idiots. They almost certainly know that the simplest explanation for the cartoon isn’t a decades-long conspiracy, but that Trump drew a doodle of a naked young woman with no arms and wrote a poem about the “wonderful secret” he and Jeffrey Epstein share.

And that’s why they’re saying it’s fake. Because if they admitted it’s real for any reason then they have to answer the next logical questions. Even Trump’s usual pivot of “yeah I did it, so what” can do nothing other than harm him and the GOP, and open up glaring weak spots to be pounced on.

What is the “wonderful secret” Trump and Epstein shared? What were the “things they have in common?” What does “enigmas never age” mean? What happened “the last time” Trump saw Epstein?

Those are questions Trump and his bunker-mates would rather eat glass than face up to. Their answers might reveal truly horrifying things about the relationship the two men had, what they did together, and what they knew about each other. They might cast the President of the United States in such a foul and sick light that it might not be recoverable for the GOP.

Sure, Trump has survived everything anyone has ever thrown at him, but the rest of the Republican Party don’t have that invisible shield. What Republican member of Congress wants to face their constituents and have to answer questions about potential horrible acts their leader did to children alongside a billionaire pedophile two decades ago?

There is nothing to be gained for anyone around Trump in telling the truth about Epstein.

So they just lie. Over and over and over. And they think you’re dumb enough to either believe it, or be so frustrated with their lies that you drop the matter and move on.

Conspiracist belief flourishes when the lie becomes more palatable than the truth. And there is no truth less palatable to Donald Trump and his acolytes than Trump being close friends and sharing “wonderful secrets” with Jeffrey Epstein. And so the lie will flourish. Because the truth can never be acknowledged by the people who need to hold Trump up as a paragon of virtue and success. They need the lie.

Even if we all know it’s true.

When You Don’t Care About Being Wrong

Mike Rothschild

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

As part of my post-fire mental health, I’ve been trying to stay off social media on the weekends. I’m also trying to avoid getting too wrapped up in debunking instant conspiracy theories about tragic events, preferring to wait a day or two before really diving into what fringe communities are claiming. The positive side of this is that I’m generally less frantic and glued to my phone. The vulnerability is that if a bunch of things happen over the weekend, or a major event spawns a deluge of disinformation, by the time I jump back into the fray, I’m already behind.

So after the horrifying shootings of multiple Minnesota lawmakers on Saturday spawned countless conspiracy theories minutes later, I was way behind.

By the time I had popped onto social media Saturday afternoon, the worst people on the internet had long ago flooded their readers with conspiracy theories and false claims that the alleged killer was a radical leftist Marxist, that the shootings had been revenge by the state’s Democratic party for the two lawmakers voting against a bill to fund healthcare for undocumented immigrants, that the shooter was friends with MN governor Tim Walz, and that he’d been planning to attend the No Kings protests scheduled for that day.

All of these theories either lacked evidence or took real things out of context. They weren’t true, and when they were first posted, nobody could have actually known if they were true, because for at least the few hours immediately after the shooting, the suspect hadn’t been publicly named and little was known about him. How could anyone know that the shooter was a “radical Marxist” or “friends with the governor” if we didn’t actually know who he was?

None of this kept these theories from immediately going viral, driving traffic and merchandise sales to their creators, and confusing the issue for people who are not dialed into internet culture. Of course, you didn’t need to be an expert on conspiracy theories to know this would happen, because it’s happened already – countless times.

The facts and details about the MN shooting didn’t matter, because the people who create these theories have developed a template for every single mass shooter, would-be assassin, tragic accident, mass casualty event, or any other unexpected and traumatic event. The perpetrator is always a far-left deep state assassin with links to antifa, Black Lives Matter, George Soros, liberal political figures, or transgender activism. The details and nouns vary a bit, but the gist is the same – a deranged hyper-liberal who acted out their violent ideation on innocent people, either because pig pharma made them insane, or because they’re working for the deep state.

The early “reporting” on these incidents is always the same, following the same outline and making the same accusations. And it’s always wrong. Trump’s would-be assassin in July? He was a “deep state hitman” and dedicated Democrat – until it turned out he had no known motive and had debated shooting at both Trump and Joe Biden. The horrifying mass shooting in Uvalde, TX in 2023? The shooter was immediately “identified” as both transgender and an illegal immigrant – except he was neither. The 2022 Highland Park, IL shooter? The far right media immediately claimed he was linked to antifa and transgender. He was neither. The 2017 Las Vegas massacre? Alex Jones immediately ran with conspiracy theories that the shooter was both a member of antifa, and linked to ISIS – except he had nothing to do with either, and local police and federal officials disclaimed both accusations. I could find dozens more examples.

Claims about mass shooters “actually” being transgender and part of an “epidemic” of trans massacres are so common that Jones, in a Twitter post after the 2024 Madison shooting, claimed “there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.” In reality, the number of mass shootings carried out by trans individuals is 0.11% – or about one out of a thousand.

Even disasters beyond shootings are fodder for the “deranged leftist” template. Recent helicopter crashes, train derailments, and even the fires in Los Angeles that burned down my home and thousands of others have all been blamed on some form of mutated leftism, usually DEI hiring practices. And it’s entirely without evidence, and done only to inflame people who are already inflamed about DEI hiring practices. The facts don’t matter, and they’ll never be applied.

As it turned out, the MN shooter was a hardcore Trumper, a right-wing evangelical, and a domestic terrorist with a list of dozens of Democratic lawmakers he wanted to murder. The “No Kings” fliers in his car were likely there because he was going to attempt to murder people at one of the events in Minnesota. But even now, the influencers cling to the idea that he was actually a radical leftist with close ties to Tim Walz – despite no evidence that they’d ever met, and their only link being that the shooter had served on a non-partisan business commission rubber-stamped by the governor.

But conspiracy theory gurus dropped him into their template of radical left-wing transgender antifa abortionist the moment the news of the MN shootings broke. They seeded the ground first, and the narrative was set. And it’s not a narrative that started with Alex Jones or Trump’s election – merely one that’s changed shape to comport with the times.

In the Before Trump days, mass shootings and violent incidents were blamed on the looming specter of gun confiscation and mass arrests of patriots. In the wake of Sandy Hook and other massacres, the far right media immediately saw whatever was going on as some form of a staged false flag or targeted hit, always carried out by either multiple shooters or a drugged-up government patsy, with the purpose being an excuse for harsh gun control measures, the taking away of 2nd Amendment rights, and the incarceration – or elimination – of those who resisted.

Ultimately, the far right media machine switched out the “staged false flag” template for the “deranged antifa trans” template for a couple of reasons. One was that after Sandy Hook came and went without the dreaded Great Gun Grab, it became clear that if the massacre of 20 6-year-olds didn’t motivate Congress to do anything about gun control, nothing ever would. The second was that Trump was elected, and the conspiracy theories about tyrannical government overreach suddenly became wishful thinking. Conspiracy influencers who turned their paranoia about the federal government into full time jobs suddenly became Trump’s biggest fans and apologists. No government he controlled would ever carry out staged false flags to take away our gun rights, because Trump was only going to use the hammer of government to get rid of bad people, not patriots.

And yet mass shootings kept happening. So rather than engage in any kind of introspection about why mass shootings keep happening and what can be done to curtail them, they just switched out the conspiracy theory. False flags were out, deranged leftists were in. It didn’t make anymore sense in its new form than its old form – and even Jones continued making contradictory claims that the shooter was both anti-Trump and a hired stooge of the government. But overall, it became a way to excuse why the thing Trump should have stopped – the federal government killing people in preparation for martial law – kept happening.

The sad truth is that none of the influencers making these theories up care about whether they’re true or not. The only thing that matters to them is building out and monetizing their endless narrative that “the left” – whoever that is – wants to kill them, take their freedom, and transgender them. Create the fear, spread it without consideration, sell them the cure. Do it again, and again, and again. And when you’re proven wrong, the only thing you do is push the lie harder. As it became clear that the MN shooter wasn’t any of the things that early conspiracy theorists claimed he was, they just kept saying he was those things.

When you don’t care about being wrong, you don’t care about continuing to be wrong. Being right takes time, and these people don’t have it. Not when there are ad buys and clicks and podcast subscriptions at stake.

There will be more violent incidents in America, not just because of Trump and the general ratcheting up of tension between Americans, but because America is a violent country where guns are easy to access and mental health is always the first thing to run out of funding. The people who rely on making money off disinformation about these incidents will stick to their pre-written narratives until the time comes for them to swap the template out again, once Trump is out of office and presumably the “deep state” takes the White House again. Then we’ll likely be back to false flag gun grabs, rather than transgender Marxists.

It won’t matter. When you don’t care about being right, it never does.

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.