By now you’ve no doubt read or heard about the unprecedented offensive Hamas launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel at approximately 6:30 a.m. local time on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. 

Cotopaxi is a blink-and-you-miss-it stop on US Route 50 in Fremont county, Colorado. It’s an unincorporated, tiny little burg that was once home to a small community of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled there in 1882. 

Mike Rothschild is a journalist and an author whose book The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is the most in-depth exploration of the QAnon movement and its utter insanity. In his next book, Jewish Space Lasers due out in September, he tackles the far-ranging historic antisemitic conspiracies that centered around the Rothschild family (no relation) from the middle of the 18th century and persist through today (to the point that sitting Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene would even accuse the family of funding secret space lasers that were used to start the California wildfires in 2018). I called Mike and we chatted for an hour about the conspiracy plague infesting the United States and how completely enmeshed it is with antisemitism. Mike has written extensively on the topic of conspiracies in the United States for myriad publications, and has even testified before Congress on the matter.