War of the Worlds, 2025

Trump's alien invasion

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles produced a radio program based on H.G. Wells’ novel “War of the Worlds.” The broadcast had no initial disclaimers, and 40 minutes passed before it was made clear that it was a work of fiction. It was so convincing that it created mass hysteria, with maybe a million or more people thinking that the alien invasion was real. It’s possible that some of the hysteria was exaggerated by newspapers that wanted to discredit radio as a source of the news (which might seem familiar to anyone following along with Musk’s anti-media narrative), but there’s no doubt that many people believed that false reality.

Today, we’re living in the same kind of false reality, one that Donald Trump spent months creating during his campaign. Probably, it goes back much further, but I had just started digging into him after a bit of a philosophical hiatus. I watched it unfold in real time as perhaps one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in American history. It is, essentially, Trump’s own alien invasion fiction, only the alien invaders are brown and black illegal immigrants from places like Mexico, Haiti, and Venezuela — instead of Mars.

Consider this quote from one of his rallies. Unfortunately, I forgot to write down which rally (I watched so many of them that they started to run together), but this is a literal translation. (As an aside, I use the excellent tool Limitless.ai to create transcripts. It’s meant for recording videoconferences, but it also transcribes whatever video you happen to play, and it does a great job. It’s free to download and use.).

Here’s the quote:

Under Kamala Harris, our country is under a thing called invasion. Did you ever hear the word 'invasion'? Just like a military... it's like a military invasion. We're being conquered and we're being occupied by a foreign element. And you know, if you think about it, China has a 5 million man army, mostly man, in that case, I can tell you. But they have a 5 million person army. And we have 21 million people coming in this year, this, this, period of time. 21 million people over the period of the last few years. Think of it, they have a 5 mill... that's a big army. And we have 21 million people here, so cut out half. That means you have 10 million people, and they have guns, you see that if you look at Colorado. Take a look at Aurora. They have guns that are the most sophisticated guns anywhere in the world. High-powered stuff. And you say to yourself, you know, if you cut the number in half, 10 million people, and cut that number in half, 5 million, that's the size of China. And what they have is an army. It's pretty dangerous stuff. We gotta get them the hell out of here.

I chose that one because it’s the most explicit. He talked relentlessly about this “invasion” in every rally, but this is the one time I can remember him defining it so precisely. I’m sure there are others that I didn’t catch. And as I’ve followed and interacted with many MAGA accounts on X, I’ve discovered that this is quite literally what they believe.

Just like those frightened people listening to “War of the Worlds,” many people today — maybe millions of people — perceive a literal invasion where thousands or millions of heavily-armed migrant criminals are ripping through American cities taking over entire communities. It’s never in their immediate vicinity where they can verify it for themselves, never with real evidence but always mere allegations whispered by someone they can never identify, always just out of sight. Then, give them a case or two, like Laken Riley, to whip them up into an emotional frenzy -- but never acknowledge that, in fact, those cases are aberrations that prove the case against them.

Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Advisor, amplified that false narrative in a recent post on X:

Do I really need to point out that none of this any more true than our world being invaded by Martians on October 30, 1938? Because if it was true, then we should be overwhelmed with evidence in our modern world of mass media, TikTok, X and Instagram. And, of course, we’re not.

Trump has leveraged that false reality by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which is a wartime law meant to give a President broad powers to repel a literal invasion or expel enemy agents. That’s the law Trump improperly has used to send hundreds of people to the 8th Amendment-violating hell-hole CECOT prison in El Salvador, without due process (and due process wouldn’t have justified violating the 8th Amendment, regardless) and admittedly including people who weren’t guilty of the crimes of which the Trump administration accused them, without evidence.

In other words, Trump created the false reality and is using it to demolish the Constitution. And people are supporting him because, after all, who would be against repelling an invasion? And even as federal judges stand in opposition, Trump’s MAGA minions accuse them of deliberately protecting violent immigrant gang members. And who would be in support of that?

Eventually, people realized that “War of the Worlds” was just fiction and the hysteria subsided. So far, Trump’s false reality is holding.