Vice President JD Vance told a podcaster he’ll “get to the bottom” of the government’s UFO files, adding that he’s “obsessed,” The Hill reports.
Said Vance: “Trust me, anybody who’s curious about this, I’m more curious than anybody, and I’ve got three years of the very tippy-top of the classification. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
“The release of an enormous cache of files about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein might have been expected to quell conspiracy theories about his crimes and the government’s knowledge of them. Instead, it is spawning a generation of new ones,” the New York Times reports.
“Conspiracy theorists, foreign influence operatives and trolls armed with artificial intelligence are seizing on the millions of haphazardly redacted materials, released last month, to cobble together new, speculative stories.”
NewsGuard: “Pizzagate, the baseless conspiracy that top Democrats ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizzeria, has resurged thanks to the Epstein files.”
New York Magazine: “QAnon is premised on the idea that a global cabal is engaged in the rampant sex-trafficking of minors, and one takeaway from the never-ending Epstein blowback is that we really are governed by an overclass of degenerate elites.”
“What’s more, the crude underlying logic of QAnon is being reinforced with every new screen-grab of a terse missive from jeevacation@gmail.com, making the universe of conspiracy thinking increasingly legible to the rest of us and creating a cycle of perpetual astonishment at the discovery of previously unsuspected webs of influence and intrigue.”
“In other words, the Epstein files are making us more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez: “In the days after American commandos raided Nicolás Maduro’s compound and whisked him out of Venezuela, Mike Lindell wasn’t ruminating about the dramatic military operation or oil prices—he was reviving a long-dead conspiracy theory.”
“Lindell, better known as the ‘MyPillow guy,’ was celebrating because, in his telling, a possible witness to the theory that Venezuela conspired with election-equipment companies to rig the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump was now in U.S. custody.”
Said Lindell: “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections.”
“If you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by the New York Times, in secret grand jury testimony on Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
New York Times: “The pardon proclamation saved them, opening prison doors and ending all of the criminal prosecutions related to the Capitol attack. Even more, it gave a presidential stamp of approval to their inverted vision of Jan. 6, 2021: that those who assaulted the police and vandalized the historic building that day were victims, and those who spent the next four years using the criminal justice system to hold them accountable were villains.”
“But nearly a year after Mr. Trump’s sweeping proclamation asserted that he had cleared the way for ‘a process of national reconciliation,’ many recipients of his clemency remain consumed by conspiracy theories, angry at the Trump administration for not validating their insistence that the Capitol attack was a deep-state setup and haunted by problems from both before and after the riot.”
President Trump shared various conspiracy theories about fraud in Minnesota — including a baseless one that Gov. Tim Walz orchestrated the assassination of state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) to cover up fraud, the Washington Post reports.
“The man charged with planting two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican party headquarters on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” NBC News reports.
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) said he worries his committee’s probe into the Jeffrey Epstein files could be drowned out by conspiracy theories, Politico reports.
Said Comer: “I fear the report will be like the Warren Report. Nobody will ever believe it.”
“Conspiracy theories never go away, and each revelation feeds that. That’s pretty much it.”
— A longtime Republican operative, quoted by the Washington Post, on the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein fallout.
“Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a ‘grand conspiracy’ against President Trump’s adversaries,” the New York Times reports.
“Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and ‘deep-state’ operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office.”
“But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation.”
“The Trump administration has ordered FBI employees to immediately search their workstations and digital media for any records pertaining to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa,” CNN reports.
“A Florida federal judge has empaneled a grand jury for January that a close Donald Trump ally recently suggested is related to a criminal investigation into allegations of a long-running Democratic conspiracy against the president,” Bloomberg reports.
“Mike Davis, who has advocated for a criminal investigation into Trump’s political opponents, made the comments in a video he posted on social media.”
“The QAnon shaman has sued Donald Trump for $40 trillion in a rambling lawsuit that targets Elon Musk, T-Mobile, and Warner Bros,” The Independent reports.
“Jacob Chansley, infamous for wearing a horned warrior outfit while storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, has claimed that he is the rightful commander-in-chief.”
“In his 26-page complaint, he has claimed that an elite group has launched a conspiracy to violate the Constitution. The entire complaint, which is more akin to a manifesto than a formal legal document, is presented in a single paragraph.”
President Trump posted a video purporting to be a segment on Fox News (it wasn’t) in which an A.I.-generated, deep-faked version of himself sat in the White House and promised that “every American will soon receive their own MedBed card” that will grant them access to new “MedBed hospitals,” Politico reports.
If you’re unfamiliar with the “MedBed” conspiracy theory, it’s a belief that there are certain hospital beds “loaded with futuristic technology” that can “reverse any disease, regenerate limbs, and de-age people.”
The video has since been deleted.
Will Sommer: “I wrote last week about the rise of the conspiracy theories surrounding Kirk’s death, which began to circulate within hours of his assassination. But I didn’t anticipate that the director of the FBI would decide to acknowledge—and thereby elevate—them.”
“But in this modern, Trumpified era of the Justice Department, that’s what happens when major right-wing figures, including Jones and Owens get involved. It doesn’t help matters that Patel (at least according to his critics) seems utterly consumed with his social media clout and how his reputation is faring on the online right.”
“From here, it seems likely that the skepticism about the official narrative of the Kirk assassination will only grow.”
Wall Street Journal: “On the eve of Kirk’s funeral, this official version of events—presented by Utah’s governor and county attorney and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—has been met with a tsunami of disbelief by swaths of the public.”
“Without any basis in fact, Kirk’s killing has variously been attributed to Israel, the MAGA movement—of which Kirk was a part—transgender militants or the far-right Groypers. Robinson either acted alone, as the government has so far asserted, or as part of an organized cell, as the unfounded theories go.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
