Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!

Somewhere around the two-hour mark in JD Vance’s nearly three-hour podcast interview last week with Joe Rogan, the pair got into a serious conversation about supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena. By serious, I mean it in the sense that Rogan seemed to take the subject seriously while Vance cynically, or cretinously, or cravenly, or credulously or conspiratorially — or perhaps it’s all of the above — played along with him.

It contained the following insights from the vice president of the United States:

“If we’re talking about an extraterrestrial being that is humanlike, but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want, but I think there’s a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”

And:

“If you’re looking for me to concede the point that there is something different or could be something different between an angel, a demon, a space alien, a supernatural but non-any-of-those-other-things beings, yes, I concede that.”

And:

“I got two-and-a-half more years as V.P., and I swear to you, if there are little green men, like body remains, I’m not going to text you. I’m going to try to smuggle a camera in and get a photo of these things.”

Call the veep, Agent Mulder!

By this point, the two men had already propounded one conspiracy theory — that the Los Angeles mayoral election had been rigged (a claim previously debunked by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor); followed by Vance’s accusation that Joe Biden’s staff got him to eat ice cream “in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable” (a remarkable way of turning naked mendacity into adolescent prurience into another conspiracy theory); followed by an exchange about eating corn dogs in public (because, you know); followed by an argument about whether the Ten Commandments should be mandated in Texas public schools, in which neither man appeared to be aware that the commandments are not originally Christian.

Read the rest here.

A Deep Dive into the Death of Jeffrey Epstein

Late in the afternoon of July 6, 2019, about a dozen F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officers gathered at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, waiting out of view of the tarmac so as not to spook their quarry. The day before, they received an email informing them that a private jet would be arriving at 5:20 p.m. Attached to the email was an arrest warrant for its lone passenger, Jeffrey Epstein.

Returning from Paris, Epstein was making plans on his phone: a trip to his private island in the Caribbean, a documentary interview with Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser. When the plane touched down, customs agents boarded to check the passports of Epstein and the plane’s two pilots. Then they escorted Epstein into the terminal, where an F.B.I. agent and a detective told him he was under arrest.

Epstein appeared shocked. He managed to send one last message to Bannon: “All canceled.”

Bannon wrote back immediately. “you r not coming in?” There was no reply.

As the F.B.I. agents drove Epstein to Manhattan, he asked two questions. “Is this sex trafficking?” “Is this about underage?” It was.

The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors had quietly opened a new investigation eight months earlier into Epstein’s activities in New York, focusing on victims who had not been interviewed in his decade-old sex-crimes case in Florida. While Epstein was abroad, he was indicted under seal on charges of trafficking minors for sex. If found guilty, he faced up to 45 years in prison — a sentence far worse than the 13 months he had served in Palm Beach after a plea deal in 2008.

“Oh, this is bad,” he said aloud as he was booked into federal custody. “This is really bad.”

An F.B.I. agent and a detective took Epstein to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Lower Manhattan, shortly after 9 that night. The newly arrived inmate caught the eye of a jail employee named Elba Torres as she passed his cell. Epstein appeared “distraught, sad and a little confused,” Torres reported in an email to the jail staff. When she asked him if he was OK, he replied that he was. “But I am not convinced because he seems dazed and withdrawn,” she wrote. “So just to be on the safe side and prevent any suicidal thoughts can someone from Psychology come and talk with him.”

Neither Torres nor anyone else on the jail staff seemed to have yet identified Epstein as a figure of note. But her memo, written in the early moments of his incarceration, documented an extraordinary reversal of fortune. Hours before, Epstein had been cocooned within a personal empire of luxury and influence that had for years seemed to operate effectively beyond the reach of the law. Now he was in an overcrowded federal jail in an inmate’s uniform, reduced to a Bureau of Prisons number: 76318-054. It was the beginning of a journey into darkness that would end 35 days later, in the early hours of Aug. 10, 2019, when a guard found him unresponsive in his cell, hanging from a noose made from orange jail fabric.

The New York City medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide. But seven years later, the theory that Epstein didn’t kill himself, that he was murdered by someone with an interest in keeping him quiet, is held by many people who agree about little else. A broader discontent and suspicion around the handling of his death helped prompt the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress with bipartisan support in November, which has since resulted in the disclosure of more than three million pages of Epstein-related documents, photos and videos.

These include tens of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of video gathered in the official investigations into Epstein’s death: an initial inquiry by Justice Department prosecutors with F.B.I. agents and New York City detectives and a yearslong investigation by the Justice Department inspector general, both of which concluded that Epstein died by suicide.

The newly released records have raised more questions about his death — but they have also offered the clearest opportunity yet to answer them. Over the years, The New York Times and other news outlets sued for records from these investigations, but even those hard-won documents were dwarfed by the volume of what was now public. Congressional action had made possible the fullest examination yet of Epstein’s death, and we set out to do it.

Read the rest here.

Trump has lost control of the conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories have been central to Donald Trump’s political rise. He was a leading promoter of the “birther” conspiracy theory targeting then-President Barack Obama, embraced outlandish theories about a “deep state” in the government and still pushes false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

But conspiracy theories, and the people who support them, are unpredictable and hard to control. Now, Trump is increasingly the subject of conspiracy theories on both the left and the right, with many of his onetime supporters viewing him with growing skepticism.

This new dynamic played out immediately after Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner with conspiracy theories and false claims flooding social media, questioning whether the assassination attempt was “staged” for Trump’s benefit. There is no evidence suggesting that is the case.

Some of those who circulated that idea were once among Trump’s most vocal backers.

“Was The Trump Whitehouse Corespondents Dinner Shooting Staged??” posted the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, who has recently broken with Trump over the war with Iran. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who similarly broke with Trump over Iran and his handling of the release of information about the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, questioned why the suspect’s writing was released “almost immediately.” On the left, prominent progressive podcasters Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan released an episode on Monday headlined: “Major False Flags Revealed In Trump Shooting Aftermath, He’s Hiding From the Public?”

Read the rest here. 

Draw the Line Now Against a Trump Election Takeover

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting,” reports the Washington Post. The executive order would decree various changes to election law that Trump has been conspicuously unable to convince Congress to enact. These could include a ban on no-excuse mail voting, “requiring voters to register anew for the 2026 midterms with proof of citizenship,” and giving various federal agencies answerable to the president “a role in identifying ineligible voters.”

It won’t work. Measures of this sort, assuming there is no other problem with them, have to be enacted by Congress using its Article I, Section 4, powers. Under our constitutional order, changes to election law cannot be imposed on states by executive whim, whether or not some supposed national-security rationale is proffered. 

Per the Post’s reporting, the draft executive order is being pushed by some eccentric characters who have previously promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that have been uniformly rejected by courts and disproved by impartial investigation. In most administrations, such conspiracry theories wouldn’t get an audience at all; however, Trump is an obvious exception, as one of the nation’s leading promoters of election falsehoods and as one who has hired bitter-end “Stop the Steal” officials to fill key jobs relating to election policy. He has also repeatedly floated the idea of attempting at least a partial election takeover without going through Congress. 

To paraphrase a high official of this administration: We can do this the easy way or the hard way. 

Read the rest here.

62 Years Later: Oswald did it.

The MAGA Civil War Over a Conspiracy Theory

Last week President Trump’s Department of Justice delivered a blow to one of the foundational beliefs of the MAGA movement, one that helped carry him back to the White House.

In an unsigned memorandum, the department declared that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced deceased convicted sexual predator, maintained a client list or that he blackmailed prominent individuals for various misdeeds. The memorandum also declared that Epstein committed suicide.

Most Americans saw this news (if they saw it at all) and barely raised an eyebrow. The Epstein story was part of the past; he died in 2019. But it detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe. Pro-Trump influencers with vast audiences couldn’t believe what they were reading.

After all, they’d been told for years that there was an Epstein client list. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, told Fox News in February that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” (She later claimed that she was referring to the Epstein case file, not a specific client list.)

In October 2024, JD Vance, then a candidate for vice president, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”

Before he was Trump’s director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel told Glenn Beck, a right-wing radio host, that the F.B.I. had Epstein’s “black book” and that it was “under direct control of the director of the F.B.I.” In 2023, Patel told Benny Johnson, a MAGA podcaster, that members of Congress should “put on your big-boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

In September 2024, Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the F.B.I., told his listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal” that would “rock the Democrat Party.”

Read the rest here.

When you spend years building a cult like mass movement based on fringe conspiracy theories and outright lies, eventually it's going to become difficult to hold it all together. That said, I think predictions of the collapse of the movement are highly premature. One of the traits of cult movements is that the true believers tend to reach a point where they become impervious to facts and reason, dismissing any claims that do not align with their beliefs as false. They typically live within an ideological exclusion zone that rejects and dismisses sources of information that do not reinforce their belief system. In this case many of the faithful would give far more credibility to Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones than the New York Times or CNN. Even in the face of glaring inconsistencies or revelations that cannot be simply ignored, members will go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize or explain away those facts and contradictions which do manage to penetrate their information bubble.

See also QAnon. 

Making Kookery Great Again

People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.

A prominent far-right activist who has said, despite years of research and intelligence establishing otherwise, that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job by the U.S. government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year alongside President Trump.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged the agency’s support last month for a fight involving so-called chemtrails, a debunked theory that the white condensation lines streaming behind airplanes are toxic, or could even be used for nefarious purposes.

Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and often anonymous online forums are now being championed or publicly debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in particular has embraced, elevated and even appointed to his cabinet people promoting these theories — giving the ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to policy.

“The real problem with the ideas and the communication of conspiracy theories is when they get evinced by people with the power to act on them,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a professor at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “If some guy, somewhere, thinks the Earth is flat, the answer is ‘So what?’ But when people in power have those beliefs, it becomes a serious issue.”

He added: “You can wind up harming many, many people over a fantasy.”

Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, said in a statement that the mainstream media “has tried and failed to paint President Trump as extreme for his entire political career” and that his agenda was “common sense.”

Read the rest here. 

Hello Utah...

"This is RFK Jr, the Secretary of Health calling. I wanted to talk to you about something important..."

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

This is probably the best analysis of one of the most controversial events in American History that I have come across.

Gasoline on a fire

FEMA employee removed from role after telling relief team to skip houses with Trump signs after Florida hurricane

The number of conspiracy theories emanating from the usual sources on the far right in recent years has been off the hook. Most are too silly for serious discussion and some are just bat-fecal matter-crazy. Unfortunately this nuttery has taken a firm hold in Trump world. So when you get the odd incident like the above, that actually is true, it just reinforces the belief in all the others. There is a veritable cottage industry out there made of kooks, cranks and conmen who are making a comfortable living off the credulous that regard people like Alex Jones as a more reliable source than the New York Times. 

Colorado Election Denier Sentenced to 9 Years

A judge excoriated a Colorado county clerk for her crimes and lies before sentencing her Thursday to nine years behind bars for a data-breach scheme spawned from the rampant false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race.

District Judge Matthew Barrett told former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters — after earlier sparring with her for continuing to press discredited claims about rigged voting machines — that she never took her job seriously.

“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” Barrett told her in handing down the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”

Jurors found Peters guilty in August for allowing a man to misuse a security card to access to the Mesa County election system and for being deceptive about that person’s identity.

The man was affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from former President Donald Trump.

Read the rest here.

Election Lies: Trump is preparing to deny another loss

Former President Donald Trump has escalated his long-running assault on the integrity of US elections as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, using a new series of lies about ballots, vote-counting and the election process to lay the groundwork to challenge a potential defeat in November.

Nonpartisan democracy experts say they’re seeing many of the same warning signs that were blinking red before Election Day four years ago, when Trump flooded the zone with election lies and conspiracy theories that he amplified after losing to Joe Biden. His campaign of deception culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“The threats have not abated; they have only increased,” said Lindsay Daniels, a senior director at the nonpartisan Democracy Fund, which works to strengthen US democracy. “We saw a lot of activity in 2020 around peddling false claims and frivolous lawsuits. We are already seeing signs now, stage-setting, that these things may be attempted again.”

Trump has made at least 12 distinct false claims over the last two months that raise baseless doubts about the validity of a potential victory by Vice President Kamala Harris. (Recent polls suggest the race is very close, and Trump could certainly still win.)

Trump, who wrongly insists the 2020 election was marred by massive fraud, said at a debate in June that he will accept the 2024 results regardless of who wins “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.” A majority of Trump supporters in battleground states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania now say they’re “not at all confident” or only “just a little” confident the results will be accurately tallied, according to recent CNN polling.

Trump has lied about the legitimacy of the vote counts in key states, the reliability of mail-in and overseas ballots, the size of Harris’ crowds at rallies, and more. Here’s a fact check of these and other claims.

Read the rest here.

Tucker Carlson

I used to like watching him back in the days when he was a relatively sane conservative sparring on CNN and elsewhere. Now he seems to have gone off to whatever plain of reality is home to QAnon, MAGA, and outright Nazi apologists. All in all, rather depressing.

Political News

•  Some polls: Quinnipiac, AP-NORC
• Michigan is going to be a tough sell for Biden
• Trump and Biden campaign finances
• Kari Lake is getting cash from QAnon supporters (cf:QAnon)
• The California Senate Race (California is effectively a one-party state so the only question is which Democrat is going to win.)

Oswald did it, and he did it alone.

This video presents a good summary of the facts (as opposed to conjecture and mythology) surrounding one of the most tragic events in American history. Polls continue to show that most people believe there was some kind of elaborate conspiracy at the heart of Kennedy's murder. The only problem is that there is not a shred of credible evidence that supports that. Belief in a conspiracy can only be sustained by ignoring the mountains of actual hard evidence, all of which points to Oswald.

Two books do an excellent job debunking the myths, misinformation, and outright lies that are pervasive among conspiracy theorists. There are others, but IMO these are the best.

Case Closed by Gerald Posner

Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi (This book is massive and took me more than six months to read. It is available in almost any well stocked public library.)

‘Tons of Crazy’: The Inside Story of How Fox Fell for the ‘Big Lie’

Less than an hour after Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News projected that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, Murdoch decided to send Trump a message: You lost, get over it.

“Should we say something Donald might see?” the mogul wrote to Col Allan, his friend and handpicked editor of the New York Post, midday on Nov. 7.

The resulting editorial was titled “President Trump, your legacy is secure — stop the ‘stolen election’ rhetoric.” Murdoch and his son Lachlan reviewed the draft in advance. Lachlan said it looked great. Murdoch agreed but, ever the newspaperman, he flagged a few typos before it went to press.

The editorial gave Trump point-by-point directions on handling his loss with decency, starting with advice about his personal attorney: “Get Rudy Giuliani off TV. Ask for the recounts you are entitled to, wish Biden well, and look to the future.” As soon as it was posted online, Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott told Lachlan she would circulate it inside Fox, and then she wrote to PR chief Irena Briganti, “I’m sending this around to our staff.”

The Post editorial eliminated any doubt about the POV of Fox’s patriarch. Behave with “dignity,” the editorial said. Stop with the “baseless conspiracies.” Start planning for the transition.

The next day, Sunday, Nov. 8, the hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend were told to stay away from election fraud claims. But the show that followed, Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures, defied the guidance. Bartiromo, all gassed up on rage and righteousness, heaped shame onto the network and spurred a $787.5 million settlement payment. That’s because Bartiromo became the first Fox host to utter the name “Dominion.”

Bartiromo did it intentionally and repeatedly in front of millions of viewers. She mainstreamed a conspiracy theory which, by the end of the week, was being repeated in all caps by the president.

This episode — drawn from court records, television transcripts and interviews with people involved — is worth analyzing in detail because Bartiromo’s source was so unhinged; because the segment foreshadowed months of smears; and because it provided a predicate for the “Big Lie” that Trump continues to promote to this day. Six in 10 Republican voters say they believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. But “stolen” how? One day after Biden became president-elect, Bartiromo used her Fox megaphone to tell a story that Trump and the heartbroken MAGA base embraced, to the detriment of Trump’s party and the country writ large.

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch let it happen. If father and son have regrets, they have not expressed any publicly. Rupert is slated to step aside at his media companies, News Corp and Fox Corp, later this week, taking the title of chairman emeritus while Lachlan fully inherits control of the companies. While the transition is supposed to be a forward-looking celebration, Fox is still tied into knots by Trump — who now calls himself a “proud election denier” — and the falsehoods that Fox beamed into homes all across the country.

Read the rest here.

The strange story and rumors surrounding St. Feodor Kuzmich

I have been intrigued for years by the rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding this famous Russian saint. Was he really Czar Aleksandr I? The idea that a Russian czar might have faked his own death to live his life as a quasi-hermit makes for a very pious (and entertaining) story. But as with most conspiracy theories, I am at least slightly skeptical. The first question I ask whenever a conspiracy theory comes my way is, how many people would have had to been in on the plot, and then kept their mouths shut for the rest of their lives? Ben Franklin once famously observed that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. 

In this case, the number would have had to have been pretty high. And while a lot of rumors did start to crop up, most did not do so until quite a while after the czar's death. To the best of my knowledge none of those who attended the czar in his final days, or his funeral arrangements, ever made any statement that might have implied that things were not as they had been made to appear. I have also been on the lookout for years for a reliable source confirming the story about the Communists opening his grave, only to find it empty. Empty is also a good word for the results of that search thus far. If anyone has a reliable source for that story, please share it in the comments.

None of this is to say that I firmly disbelieve the stories. Only that hard evidence is extremely lacking and that commonsense inclines me towards a certain degree of skepticism. Unlike with some other popular conspiracy theories, such as the Kennedy assassination, or the alleged faking of the moonshot, both of which don't pass the laugh test when you consider the mountains of confirmed evidence; here there is no hard evidence on either side of the debate. And yes, there is some interesting, mostly circumstantial evidence that lends itself to the rumors. As such, while I remain skeptical, I am also keeping an open mind pending a DNA test or some other really hard proof one way or the other.

The Republican Party

Everything you need to know about the current state of the GOP in one number.

Arizona

The State Where the GOP Would Rather Lose Than Change

If I were a conspiracy theorist; I'd say that a few years ago in the middle of the night, the Democrats secretly freed every inmate in Arizona's mental asylums on the condition that they all registered as Republicans on their way out the door. 

Alex Jones Held Liable for Defamation

Probably the best news I've read in weeks. Alex Jones, the serial liar who falsely claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and who when challenged by the understandably distraught relatives of victims, sicced his lunatic followers on them even to the point of death threats, has been found guilty by default for defamation and the intentional infliction of emotional distress. Jones and his legal team have been repeatedly sanctioned for their "vexatious and generally bad faith response" to court orders and routine procedures related to legal discovery. On at least one previous occasion he was held in contempt of court. Jones will now face a jury trial to determine what damages are owed. FWIW I am not a fan of our hyper-litigious society, but there are times when recourse to the courts is justified. And this is one of them. Jones is a thoroughly despicable individual who inhabits the fringes \where extremist politics and conspiracy theories intersect with a long history of spreading the most outrageous lies. And when called out, his customary defense is claiming that he is just an entertainer. I sincerely hope that when the jury hands down its damages that Alex Jones is left walking out of that courthouse in his boxer shorts.