Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional, and a recent convert to anti-absurdism.
“There is no indication of alien or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”—White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
“I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”—General Glen VanHerck, commander of NORAD
Oooh, this one’s too good. The Republicans just can’t let this one get away.
The Goofball Old Party, which brought us such believe-it-or-nuts such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, just has to get going with the latest Clinton/Obama/Biden/ conspiracy theory.
Are you ready for UFOgate?
The premise is sure to arise, from the nether reaches of wherever the party gets its cornucopia of comicality, that the liberals—who are already stealing America away from white Christians, and grooming your children to give up the gender that Jesus gave them—have concealed the presence of aliens in our midst, or at least, our skies.
Because after all, if a spokeswoman for Joe Biden says there’s no indication of extraterrestrial activity, you can be sure she’s lying, because that’s what Biden does, like when he said he won the 2020 election.
Probably, we won’t see this spring from the depths of Tucker Carlson’s twisted yet fertile imagination . . . right away. The outlandish conspiracy theories he winds up gleefully distributing, like the way America Online once handed out free CDs, start in the out-there world.
Perhaps it will start to roll downhill as the “birther” movement began, with someone like Andy Martin. In 2008, this nebbishy, perennially no-shot candidate sued the state of Hawaii, alleging that the man who was about to be elected president of the United States was not a natural-born citizen. Donald Trump gleefully picked up that loose ball, like the Kansas City Chiefs’ Nick Bolton did in Super Bowl LVII, and rode it with his base into the White House.
But, surely, you don’t think the Republicans, who promise to invite international chaos by refusing to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, would really glom on to this idiocy? Sorry, but if you think they are incapable of launching such a Galaxy Quest remake, you’ve evidently forgotten how 9/11 was an inside job, and how Bill Gates placed tracking chips in doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
Besides, isn’t it a logical step from claiming Jewish-owned space lasers caused western wildfires to asserting that those same “international banking families” control the UFOs the military is shooting down?
“Oh but UFO’s! What is going on?” Taylor Greene, America’s monarch of moronness, tweeted last week.
Please note that “UFO” isn’t even officially used anymore in government circles; the preferred term is “unidentified aerial phenomena.” But the military still logs them: 366 sightings reported in 2022, according to a January report released by the Office of the DIrector of National Intelligence. Of those, 171 remain “unexplained.”
Ooo-wooo-oo.
Frankly, if I were consulting for the Repulsive Party, I’d recommend that they run with this game plan, forthwith. It’s the perfect conspiracy theory because there’s no way to disprove it. Obama a natural-born American? Just produce his certified birth certificate. But accuse the administration of hiding details about alien invasions? How are they gonna answer that one?
If they say there’s no proof of aliens, the same 40 percent of Americans who believe Trump really was elected president won’t abide by it, simply because the Biden White House said it. If the Republicans push hard enough, the administration will be forced to appoint a special counsel to investigate itself, as they did with the classified documents fiasco.
And if the White House really is covering up proof that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials, well, the Democrats simply ought to dig a deep, deep hole and bury their party in it for all time.
OK, this is all ludicrous, right? Because these things in the air, whatever their origins, are as unlikely to be from outer space as for George Santos to aver that the sun rises in the east. But it doesn’t matter whether the Air Force is shooting down stuff made in China or a constellation. In our take-leave-of-common-sense society, where reality is what Twitter says it is and AI can conjure up a work of Shakespeare out of ones and zeros, the truth is so far out there that we need the Webb Telescope to spot it.
So, buckle up in your gravity chairs, people of Earth, and batten down your space helmets. Because we are about to embark on the ultimate question of human existence: No, not whether we are alone in the cosmos. But whether intelligent life exists at all.
Top illustration of landscape with cows and a UFO by andrey_l, available via Shutterstock.