Bill Ackman speaking in June.Jared Tarin/Patrick McMullan/Getty

Something unusual This happened the other week, when podcast megastar Joe Rogan spoke with Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In the midst of a conversation about abortion, Vance claimed that liberal women were publicly celebrating the termination of their pregnancies with elaborate social media displays: “They’re baking birthday cakes and posting about it “, he said.

Unusually, Rogan actually pushed back. “I think there are very few people who party,” he replied.

This basic fact-checking – a brief display of a bare minimum of common sense – was not only rare for Rogan, but it was rare in an election season where some of the richest and most powerful men in the country have relentlessly encouraged hoaxes, politically charged lies and more or less absurd conspiracy theories.

This confusing trend was on full display at other points in Vance’s interview with Rogan, with both agreeing that teenagers change their gender or become non-binary to get into Harvard or Yale and “reject (their ) white privilege.” (Vance also pushed himself into anti-vaccine territory, saying he went “red from the whole vaccine thing” after two days of illness following a shot.)

If there’s one salient feature of the 2024 election cycle, it’s that rich people — rich men in particular, and especially those who support Donald Trump’s re-election campaign — have gotten caught at a pace previously unimaginable. Beyond simply supporting Trump or advancing right-wing arguments, they have promoted ideas and stories that almost no reasonable person could believe: cartoonish lies, absurd leaps of logic, and clearly false documents.

Take the example of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who spent days this fall promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory that an “ABC News whistleblower” had appeared to prove that the network’s presidential debate was rigged for Kamala Harris. The hoax was spread by a Twitter user calling themselves Black Insurrectionist, who pushed a typo-filled “affidavit” from the “whistleblower” that he appeared to have written himself. Later, the poster attempted to promote even more sinister and clearly false sexual assault allegations against Tim Walz. before apparently completely deleting his account. When the Associated Press tracked down the person behind “Black Insurrectionist,” it turned out to be a white serial fraudster in upstate New York.

Ackman has not commented publicly on Palmer’s unmasking and did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He did so, weeks after promoting the ABC whistleblower story, and finally admitted it was a “fairly clear” that this had turned out to be false. But he immediately joined Trump and others in accusing CBS News of misleadingly editing a Kamala Harris interview, calling for an FCC complaint. filed against the network by an “irrefutable” right-wing law firm.

Ackman, of course, was not alone in promoting such false or flimsy ideas. Like the Atlantic noted, other Trump-loving venture capitalists spend an unimaginable time on Twitter – if there’s a contagious disease at work here, they caught it on the site – triggering an endless supply of suspicions and unsourced assertions. For example, Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital publicly supported Donald Trump this spring, he then went all-in on allegations of voter fraud, reposting texts that a “general contractor friend” sent him, claiming that “hundreds of ballots” had been mailed to a vacant house he worked on in 2020. Maguire speculated that the ballots were mailed. been sent there so that the “antifa” could commit electoral fraud. Earlier this year, after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July, he speculated that the shooter “will almost certainly be discovered be a member” of antifa. (The shooter turned out to be a 20-year-old registered Republican.)

And of course, there was the richest of the rich men, and the one most willing to repeat lies of all kinds: Elon Musk turned himself into a one-man treadmill for misrepresentations, especially electoral disinformation and endless false claims about illegal immigration and undocumented voting. (He also has reposted Maguire’s voting message, adding: “Anyone else see this kind of thing? “)

In his own conversation with Joe Rogan on Monday, Musk made one final preemptive claim of Democratic voter fraud and signaled an atmosphere of permanent, perpetual suspicion going forward, should Harris win.

“Everything they accuse Trump of, they are guilty of,” he said. “If Trump doesn’t win, this will be the last real election in America. And…if big government, Kamala’s puppet machine, wins, they will legalize illegal immigrants in swing states. There will be no swing states. Every upcoming election will be a guaranteed victory for Democrats.”

“This,” he promised solemnly, a few moments later, “is the last chance.”

With all these very rich men, of course, there is a fundamental unanswered question: How much they actually believe in these ideas, and how much they repeat them simply because they think it will help Donald Trump, or at least obscure a potential victory for Harris. .

In the end, it doesn’t really matter: they threw the unimaginable weight of their money, power and influence behind these lies. Their impulse to suspicion and paranoia – and their willingness to make extreme allegations of fraud – will not disappear after Election Day. And no one can guess the next target.