IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE!

The kerfuffle over widespread drone sightings in the Northeast is creating a prime opportunity for conspiracy theories. Can the normie media still cut through the noise and sort out fact from hysteria?

• WTF is in the air over New Jersey? Reported drone sightings are leaving locals “stressed and upset.” And what began in Jersey last month has spread to a half-dozen states around the Northeast, with thousands of reported sightings in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and Massachusetts. Perhaps — and I say this on behalf of all Northeasterners, myself included — we all need to take a deep breath here.

• The Biden administration has been trying to calm people down. Many of the sightings have actually been airplanes, commercial drones, hobbyist drones, law enforcement drones, helicopters, and even stars, White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters today. Out of 5,000 recent tip line calls, fewer than 100 were considered even worth investigating by the FBI. Some are indeed drones — which shouldn’t be surprising in a country with almost a million registered drones, the FBI pointed out. And yet the lack of clear detail has only fueled speculation, frustration — and rampant conspiracy theories.

• President-elect Donald Trump got in on the action today, baselessly accusing the Biden administration of a cover-up. “The government knows what is happening,” Trump said. “Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it’s a garage. They can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don’t want to comment.” Trump even claimed he’ll avoid his own residence in Bedminster, New Jersey for now. “They’re very close to Bedminster,” Trump said. “I think maybe I won’t spend the weekend in Bedminster. I decided to cancel my trip.” (Just a couple days ago, Trump was urging people to “shoot them down!!!,” which experts say you should definitely not do.)

• Wherever Trump leads, his party follows. Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) claimed he saw “large drones” in the sky… which, hilariously, turned out to actually be stars in the constellation Orion. Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) went on Fox News to claim the drones were coming from an Iranian “mothership” hovering off the eastern seaboard — before the Pentagon dismissed his idea as nonsense . Crackpot Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said the drones are some kind of secret government plot. State Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-NJ) claimed told NewsNation: “It must be something going on that they can’t tell us because they are so fearful of what the public’s gonna do when they hear what the drones are doing.” Kirby denied that there’s any cover-up.

• Then there’s the truly out there stuff — like the random account on X with an AI-generated video of UFOs and an all-caps warning: “THE ALIENS ARE NOW INVADING MARYLAND !!!” That kind of thing seems laughable — until you bring in someone like Trump-fan Roseanne Barr, whose tweet promoting the “Project Blue Beam” conspiracy theory has racked up over 2 million views. That would be the baseless idea that global elites are plotting to use a faked alien invasion (among other events) to impose a new world order.

The mass hysteria shows how hard it’ll be to sort fact from fiction when literally anyone can blast out unfounded theories on social media, and the legacy media continues receding under budget cuts, layoffs and partisan distrust.

• After driving around with local police, Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) said the government needs to be more transparent about what’s going on, but he concluded that the sightings “were almost certainly planes.” Like a responsible person, Kim spoke with aviation experts and used a flight tracker to make an informed opinion.

• On the other hand, the Maryland governor personified the dangers of DIY journalism when he looked into the sky and mistook one of the most popular constellations for a UFO — then blasting fake news out to his 250,000 followers on X. That social media platform is where many of these conspiracies boomed, hardly surprising considering centibillionaire Elon Musk’s call for users to “be a citizen journalist!”

Listen, reporters aren’t perfect all the time. But at least we make a few calls before concluding that aliens are about to take over the world.

COLLEGE DAZE

Donald Trump’s election doesn’t have many silver linings for Democrats, but Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) sees one: An opportunity for a more serious conversation about abolishing the electoral college.

Actually getting rid of the institution would be a heavy lift requiring a constitutional amendment. But Schatz has proposed a bill that would start the process, and thinks it’s a goal worth the fight.

“I still think the electoral college is a stupid idea,” Schatz told What A Day.

Most Americans (63 percent) agree. The trick is convincing Republicans, who in recent years have benefited from the electoral college, since two of their candidates used it to take the White House despite losing the popular vote (both Trump and former President George W. Bush in 2000).

The fact that Trump actually won the popular vote this time may help “depolarize and defang” the idea of abolishing the archaic institution, Schatz said.

“We don’t have to invent something complicated,” he said. “All we have to do is conduct this national election like every other goddamn election is conducted, which is the person who gets the most votes is the person in the office.”

NEWS NEWS NEWS

A teenaged student shot and killed at least two people at a Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin today. At least six other people were injured. The suspect was found dead inside the school.

An Israeli airstrike killed an Al Jazeera journalist and five others in Gaza on Sunday. He was the third journalist killed by Israel just over the weekend, according to the outlet.

Germany’s government collapsed today after a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a shocking development that makes me feel only a little bit better about our democracy. But really not much. And we still feel bad about it.

A crowdfunded defense fund for Luigi Mangione, the suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter, reached over $100,000 on Sunday. Meanwhile, surveys show that health insurance companies deny tens of millions of people medical coverage, and the rate of denials appears to be rising, the Washington Post reports.

Donald Trump said he has a “warm spot” for social media platform TikTok, which is set to be banned in the U.S. in a few weeks, because it helped him win the election: “I won youth by 34 points, and there are those that say TikTok had something to do with that,” he told reporters. TikTok asked the Supreme Court today to block the law that would ban it.

Trump’s transition team is expected to roll back the Biden administration’s efforts to boost electric vehicles sales and fuel economy standards, according to a document seen by Reuters.

Certified weirdo Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC) logged into a virtual meeting with the username “minisoldr,” the same one he denied using to post on a porn messaging board and say some truly crazy shit, to the point of filing a lawsuit against CNN. But this one might be hard to explain away…

Masayoshi Son, a Japanese tech billionaire, announced a $100 billion investment in the United States over the next four years. “My confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory,” Son said, ignoring the 82 Nobel Prize winners who warned Trump will endanger Americans’ “standards of living.”

On that note, centibillionaire conspiracist Elon Musk poured $277 million into Trump’s campaign — and has become $200 billion richer this year, most of which came after the election. Economic populism at its finest! Let us know when we can re-up that “Overturn Citizens United” conversation!

Top executives at Amazon rejected internal recommendations to lower production quotas, which could’ve lowered high injury rates, because they were worried about it negatively affecting the company’s performance (aka enormous profit margins), a Senate investigation found.

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