At a political rally held in Michigan on Saturday, supporters of Donald Trump – the event’s keynote speaker – dragged out both tried and trusted conspiracy theories as well as some brand new, and even more unverified and unsupported, claims ahead of the former president’s speech.
While the one-term president brought his own false claims to the stage later on Saturday, including one where he boasted of winning a non-existent ‘Man of the Year’ award, there were even more falsified fables being pushed outside the doors of the crowd at Michigan Stars Sports Center in Washington Township before Mr Trump even took the main stage.
One particular theory caught on camera, however, has caught the internet’s attention.
This theory, touted by a woman being interviewed by the conservative outlet Right Side Broadcasting Network ahead of the rally, alleges that Space Force, the US military branch set up by the Trump administration, is going to assist in returning the former president to power.
“Space Force has it all. Trump has all the information. It’s going to be overturned,” said the woman, who asked to only be identified as Julie.
When the reporter pressed the woman, draped in an American flag with a matching cap, to elaborate, she railed off into the difficult to connect dots of the new QAnon-adjacent theory.
“But we know that, Space Force has it all, Trump has all the information, it’s going to be overturned,” she began. “The night of the election they literally watched the election be stolen. They watermarked the ballots, they know exactly what happened with every ballot,” she continued to allege, before adding that she believes that the military branch knows “which countries were involved” and “every politician that’s been paid off”.
All of the claims pushed by the interviewee, which went unchallenged by the right-wing outlet’s reporter, are unproven and are part of an outlandish conspiracy theory that, in addition to the Space Force claim, also wove in familiar elements of core QAnon theories, such as the deep state.
“They’re going to be showing us taped tribunals, taped confessions, and the world is really going to be awakened to what’s really going on with the deep state,” the woman told the reporter, suggesting without providing evidence that these tribunals are likely going to include some of the “269,000 sealed indictments associated with stealing the election”.
This isn’t the first time that Space Force has become ensnared in a wider conspiracy pushed by QAnon followers and Trump loyalists alike.
Earlier in 2020, a popular post was circulated on a Telegram channel popular with QAnon conspiracy theorists, in which it pushed claims echoed in the Trump supporter’s viral rant from this past weekend.
“An Election Monitoring (Surveillance) System was installed by the US Cyber Command, Space Force, and the Shadow Warriors of the Cyber Brigade,” the post claimed, adding, “Soon we will see the real numbers”.
And then back in 2018, FactCheck.org, a project from The Annenberg Public Policy Center, debunked a claim being peddled online that Mr Trump’s then newly requested military branch was motivated from the former president’s belief that there was a feared “alien attack” in the works.
