Mike Rothschild

NEWS: My next book, ZERO CONTAINMENT, will be out in Fall 2027! It's a detective story about how everything went so wrong before, during, and after the Eaton Fire; and how we recover and rebuild in its wake. I have lived this nightmare for over a year, and now I get to share what I've learned.

Don't be surprised if whoever killed Charlie Kirk has no coherent political ideology, didn't do it for any particular reason, and doesn’t fall anywhere neat on the left/right paradigm.

There's no reason to take any reporting about Tyler Robinson at face value right now. Countless officials, law enforcement agencies, politicians, influencers, and reporters have been wrong, hoaxed, or caught making things up. Social media is making us all crazy and stupid.

"During the exam, I'll hide under some coats, and hope that somehow everything will work out..."

This is some Robespierre shit. "Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue."

Even with Musk shoving the scale down, the "Talarico nut house" hoax failed to break containment from X, and already seems to have fizzled out in a haze of retractions. It was simultaneously low effort (they couldn't even get the days right) and maximum effort (it was pushed WAY too hard too fast.)

No new Patreon piece this week due to various deadlines. I hope you'll consider subscribing anyway. As we approach the midterms, I'm trying to cover disinformation in a positive way, providing context and explanation rather than nihilism. And this is my main income. www.patreon.com/c/MikeRothsc...

People have talked themselves into believing Donald Trump is a wizard who can do anything he wants with no pushback. And it's an exhausting type of nihilism. "He's just going to steal the election and declare martial law, who's going to stop him" is code for "there's no point in voting."

When he ran, Trump had already spent years claiming Obama wasn't born in the US, that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's memoir, that Obama wore "an Arabic ring" and was secretly Muslim, was actually named "Barry Soetoro," and had a Hawaiian health department official killed to protect his fraud.

Even my Quora recommendations are dooming.

The really scary thing about the Eaton Fire was that it didn't start in a vast forest. It broke out in a natural area right in the middle of a densely populated city. And our house was 5+ miles form the ignition point, in an area not deemed High Risk by CalFire. We're all in danger.

The completely coordinated and manufactured "James Talarico in rehab" fake story is proof that the far right knows he's a real threat to win in Texas. There's no reason to run such a massive smear campaign against a guy with no shot. He's a threat, and they're scared as hell.

Most Americans don't want civil war or martial law. Not for Trump or any other politician. We want to raise our families and live our lives and watch football and be left alone. This isn't Paris in 1789. We want suburban boredom, not to storm barricades. People are tired of this and want it to stop.