Drones Descend on New Jersey

We’re entering a new phase of cultural change: 2024 is almost gone, the Biden-Harris Administration is on its way out, and, as I argued last week, the BLM era is over.

This week, I’m speaking with Jonathan Keeperman, the writer and publisher who goes by the pen name Lomez. We discuss the mysterious drones over New Jersey, the controversy around Disney’s deleted trans storyline, and whether we’ve really entered the “post-woke” era.

All that and more on this week’s podcast.

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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

Drones over New Jersey

Christopher Rufo: We’re here today with a very special guest, Lomez, and we’re going to be talking about some of the things that are in the news. As we’ve been talking a little bit about what’s happening, I think the story that is most interesting to me is something that’s totally out of my normal range of conversation. It’s the story about the drones in New Jersey, which is amazing. We’re going to go straight for that because it’s the holiday. People want something light; we can’t talk all heavy politics. Let’s start with something light. Tell me about the drones. You have an interesting theory that I hadn’t thought about, as I’ve ignored this story. What do you make of it?

Lomez: I don’t know that my theory on this is all that novel. The thing with this story that’s compelling to me is that you have a bunch of people who are—and I see this generally online, people not just on the Right, but across the political spectrum are—the phrase I’ve used before is—reading messages in the clouds. There’s this psychic derangement in the air, and there’s this real sense of displacement from reality. People really are struggling to understand what is real and what is not real, and even beyond that what is significant and what is trivial and negligible. For whatever complicated reason, people’s attention can get focused on random events, and I would categorize the drones over New Jersey as a somewhat random event. We were speaking off camera previously that this is reminiscent of Don DeLillo’s mid-1980s novel “White Noise,” where there’s just something vague, this undefined presence in the air, and it’s potentially threatening. The reaction to this has been to assign to these lights some significance that is probably not warranted. And the question is why are people so hungry to ascribe, not just a story, a narrative to this event, but then also ascribe a threat. Why are these lights threatening to people? I don’t quite have an answer to this. I think it’s mostly harmless, but it is interesting that people are looking around for what amounts to the signs of the apocalypse, and I don’t quite know what to make of that.

Rufo: What’s so great about it is it’s not just the random people on social media spouting off. I think this all started because a congressman from that area had said, ‘No, an Iranian mothership has launched these drones over southern New Jersey, and they’re menacing the people there.’ The other theory that was again from a public official, maybe a state senator, said, ‘No, there’s loose nukes somewhere in New Jersey. There was some radioactive material that went missing from a train car, and it’s the government searching for it.’ And the third one that I heard from, again, from people that ostensibly have some hook into a position of authority, was, ‘No, it’s China. They sent their spy balloon and now they’re sending the drone swarm.’ Some state senators said we need to authorize the Americans to shoot them down, like with a shotgun or whatever. I think part of it is the tendency toward conspiracy theory obviously, but it’s also Cold War nostalgia in my view. This exurban, suburban area of New Jersey, it’s the MAGA central culture. It’s like guys that are 50 or 60 going out there, looking in the sky, seeing all these lights, and it’s this nostalgia. It’s like that—what is the movie where the Russians come in? Amanda Milius’ father directed.

Lomez: Red Dawn.

Rufo: It’s like Red Dawn slash Independence Day passed through postmodern media theory, which is now mediated by social media instead of these big Hollywood stories.

Lomez: I think that’s right. I think, like you said, we’re replaying the end of the Cold War. That’s exactly right. Trump is obviously this figure of tremendous nostalgia for this particular period in time. I remember when that Tyson-Paul fight happened, and I was thinking back to my own childhood of watching a Mike Tyson fight with my son; and then the first fight I ever saw was Mike Tyson around this late eighties, early nineties period with my dad. The consistent image is, on the one hand, Mike Tyson—although Mike Tyson is this degraded version of himself—and then Donald Trump. Donald Trump is really the guy that captures that vibe. So I think that’s definitely part of it.

I also think I want to be careful about assigning myself too much significance to the fact that people are assigning significance to these drones. Because, yes, it’s conspiratorial thinking but, something else—I taught when I was at Irvine classes on conspiracy theories—is that there’s this misunderstanding that when people espouse conspiratorial beliefs or partake, it’s participatory. It’s real-life fan fiction, that these are firmly held and committed beliefs. When someone says the moon landing was fake or the earth is flat, there are people who legitimately believe that one hundred percent and are committed to that belief. But a lot of people are just participating in these ideas because it’s fun. It’s just fun to construct crazy, wild theories about this and indulge, to some degree, what if it was true? What if these are? What if this is the Iranian mothership? This justifies going out to Costco and buying your bunker supplies. People actually like this. It’s a LARP, but it’s also fun and, frankly, fairly harmless. These are mostly what you’d call quasi-beliefs. They’re not real beliefs. On the one hand, I’d say, ‘Yeah, why are these people so deranged,’ but on the other hand who really cares? These are just people looking for something to stem the boredom of whatever period we’re in, where frankly our normal modes of media and entertainment are so lacking and so degraded, that the enjoyment that they would get out of that they can’t get anymore. So they have to basically construct their narratives out of whole cloth from whatever random snippets of media come across the transom when they’re scrolling on Twitter.