Tag: false flag

When You Don’t Care About Being Wrong

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work telling the story of the Eaton Fire and its aftermath, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

As part of my post-fire mental health, I’ve been trying to stay off social media on the weekends. I’m also trying to avoid getting too wrapped up in debunking instant conspiracy theories about tragic events, preferring to wait a day or two before really diving into what fringe communities are claiming. The positive side of this is that I’m generally less frantic and glued to my phone. The vulnerability is that if a bunch of things happen over the weekend, or a major event spawns a deluge of disinformation, by the time I jump back into the fray, I’m already behind.

So after the horrifying shootings of multiple Minnesota lawmakers on Saturday spawned countless conspiracy theories minutes later, I was way behind.

By the time I had popped onto social media Saturday afternoon, the worst people on the internet had long ago flooded their readers with conspiracy theories and false claims that the alleged killer was a radical leftist Marxist, that the shootings had been revenge by the state’s Democratic party for the two lawmakers voting against a bill to fund healthcare for undocumented immigrants, that the shooter was friends with MN governor Tim Walz, and that he’d been planning to attend the No Kings protests scheduled for that day.

All of these theories either lacked evidence or took real things out of context. They weren’t true, and when they were first posted, nobody could have actually known if they were true, because for at least the few hours immediately after the shooting, the suspect hadn’t been publicly named and little was known about him. How could anyone know that the shooter was a “radical Marxist” or “friends with the governor” if we didn’t actually know who he was?

None of this kept these theories from immediately going viral, driving traffic and merchandise sales to their creators, and confusing the issue for people who are not dialed into internet culture. Of course, you didn’t need to be an expert on conspiracy theories to know this would happen, because it’s happened already – countless times.

The facts and details about the MN shooting didn’t matter, because the people who create these theories have developed a template for every single mass shooter, would-be assassin, tragic accident, mass casualty event, or any other unexpected and traumatic event. The perpetrator is always a far-left deep state assassin with links to antifa, Black Lives Matter, George Soros, liberal political figures, or transgender activism. The details and nouns vary a bit, but the gist is the same – a deranged hyper-liberal who acted out their violent ideation on innocent people, either because pig pharma made them insane, or because they’re working for the deep state.

The early “reporting” on these incidents is always the same, following the same outline and making the same accusations. And it’s always wrong. Trump’s would-be assassin in July? He was a “deep state hitman” and dedicated Democrat – until it turned out he had no known motive and had debated shooting at both Trump and Joe Biden. The horrifying mass shooting in Uvalde, TX in 2023? The shooter was immediately “identified” as both transgender and an illegal immigrant – except he was neither. The 2022 Highland Park, IL shooter? The far right media immediately claimed he was linked to antifa and transgender. He was neither. The 2017 Las Vegas massacre? Alex Jones immediately ran with conspiracy theories that the shooter was both a member of antifa, and linked to ISIS – except he had nothing to do with either, and local police and federal officials disclaimed both accusations. I could find dozens more examples.

Claims about mass shooters “actually” being transgender and part of an “epidemic” of trans massacres are so common that Jones, in a Twitter post after the 2024 Madison shooting, claimed “there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.” In reality, the number of mass shootings carried out by trans individuals is 0.11% – or about one out of a thousand.

Even disasters beyond shootings are fodder for the “deranged leftist” template. Recent helicopter crashes, train derailments, and even the fires in Los Angeles that burned down my home and thousands of others have all been blamed on some form of mutated leftism, usually DEI hiring practices. And it’s entirely without evidence, and done only to inflame people who are already inflamed about DEI hiring practices. The facts don’t matter, and they’ll never be applied.

As it turned out, the MN shooter was a hardcore Trumper, a right-wing evangelical, and a domestic terrorist with a list of dozens of Democratic lawmakers he wanted to murder. The “No Kings” fliers in his car were likely there because he was going to attempt to murder people at one of the events in Minnesota. But even now, the influencers cling to the idea that he was actually a radical leftist with close ties to Tim Walz – despite no evidence that they’d ever met, and their only link being that the shooter had served on a non-partisan business commission rubber-stamped by the governor.

But conspiracy theory gurus dropped him into their template of radical left-wing transgender antifa abortionist the moment the news of the MN shootings broke. They seeded the ground first, and the narrative was set. And it’s not a narrative that started with Alex Jones or Trump’s election – merely one that’s changed shape to comport with the times.

In the Before Trump days, mass shootings and violent incidents were blamed on the looming specter of gun confiscation and mass arrests of patriots. In the wake of Sandy Hook and other massacres, the far right media immediately saw whatever was going on as some form of a staged false flag or targeted hit, always carried out by either multiple shooters or a drugged-up government patsy, with the purpose being an excuse for harsh gun control measures, the taking away of 2nd Amendment rights, and the incarceration – or elimination – of those who resisted.

Ultimately, the far right media machine switched out the “staged false flag” template for the “deranged antifa trans” template for a couple of reasons. One was that after Sandy Hook came and went without the dreaded Great Gun Grab, it became clear that if the massacre of 20 6-year-olds didn’t motivate Congress to do anything about gun control, nothing ever would. The second was that Trump was elected, and the conspiracy theories about tyrannical government overreach suddenly became wishful thinking. Conspiracy influencers who turned their paranoia about the federal government into full time jobs suddenly became Trump’s biggest fans and apologists. No government he controlled would ever carry out staged false flags to take away our gun rights, because Trump was only going to use the hammer of government to get rid of bad people, not patriots.

And yet mass shootings kept happening. So rather than engage in any kind of introspection about why mass shootings keep happening and what can be done to curtail them, they just switched out the conspiracy theory. False flags were out, deranged leftists were in. It didn’t make anymore sense in its new form than its old form – and even Jones continued making contradictory claims that the shooter was both anti-Trump and a hired stooge of the government. But overall, it became a way to excuse why the thing Trump should have stopped – the federal government killing people in preparation for martial law – kept happening.

The sad truth is that none of the influencers making these theories up care about whether they’re true or not. The only thing that matters to them is building out and monetizing their endless narrative that “the left” – whoever that is – wants to kill them, take their freedom, and transgender them. Create the fear, spread it without consideration, sell them the cure. Do it again, and again, and again. And when you’re proven wrong, the only thing you do is push the lie harder. As it became clear that the MN shooter wasn’t any of the things that early conspiracy theorists claimed he was, they just kept saying he was those things.

When you don’t care about being wrong, you don’t care about continuing to be wrong. Being right takes time, and these people don’t have it. Not when there are ad buys and clicks and podcast subscriptions at stake.

There will be more violent incidents in America, not just because of Trump and the general ratcheting up of tension between Americans, but because America is a violent country where guns are easy to access and mental health is always the first thing to run out of funding. The people who rely on making money off disinformation about these incidents will stick to their pre-written narratives until the time comes for them to swap the template out again, once Trump is out of office and presumably the “deep state” takes the White House again. Then we’ll likely be back to false flag gun grabs, rather than transgender Marxists.

It won’t matter. When you don’t care about being right, it never does.

January 6th and the Rewriting of Memory

Mike Rothschild

Upon his soldiers discovering the first Nazi concentration camps in western Europe, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower personally toured the sites of the Final Solution. Writing in his memoirs after the war, Eisenhower said he “visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’” He would also ask members of the press and Congress to walk the grounds and see what he and his men had seen, so they could show it to the public “in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”

As many journalists and observers will write about, today marks four years since the assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election – or die trying. And while Eisenhower insisted the camps be documented so that nobody could deny their existence with any credibility, cynical doubt and propaganda are now the currency of the west.

With a few exceptions, Holocaust denial never flourished beyond the fringes of neo-Nazi dead-enders and Hitler worshippers selling pamphlets to each other. But January 6th denial and the rewriting of current events, has shown enormous staying power and mainstream appeal, to the point of being one of the biggest factor’s in Donald Trump’s improbably comeback. The thing that looked to have doomed his political career is now its engine.

The rewriting of history around January 6th has become an industry that denial of the camps could never have become. If you deny that millions of Jews and other “undesirables” were murdered by a methodical Nazi machine, you’re probably not going far in mainstream public life. But if you deny that January 6th was an organized attempt to violently seize total power and nullify an election, you’re probably going to be a superstar in the GOP. You might even get your own podcast.

The American press covered January 6th, its planning, its minute-by-minute execution, and its prolonged aftermath with as much vigor and enthusiasm as maybe any subject since 9/11. But for a certain segment of the population, all of it was a lie. To Trump, his inner circle of acolytes, and his vast (and growing) base, January 6th wasn’t an insurrection, it was a “day of love” meant to show support for the rightful winner of the election. The angry, violent, armed, unhinged mob that breached the Capitol was actually a “sightseeing tour.” The instigators of the insurrection weren’t a loose alliance of racists and anti-government extremists, but actually federal agents directing these peaceful tourists who were just there to express legitimate political differences and their sincere belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

On and on the false history goes, rewritten on the fly by cynical grifters and political hacks. The Capitol Police were the unhinged ones who viciously attacked the meek and humble Trump supporters, while the peaceful patriots caught up in the dragnet are hostages and political prisoners. Nobody was there to hurt anyone except the fed plants and undercover antifa soldiers who turned the day dark. There were no Republican criminals that day, the real criminals are the Soros-funded Trump-hating members of Congress investigating the “attack” to influence the 2024 election. Democrats in Congress weren’t under siege that day, they planned the attack or, at the very least, allowed it to happen. And Donald Trump never told anyone to do anything wrong, and did nothing wrong himself. He even told the “mob” to go home peacefully and that he loved them. Because it was a day of love.

Falsifying history gets easier as events recede and witnesses die off. But falsifying current events takes willpower, commitment, and a vast and relentless drive to tell yourself that the things you saw happen didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean you’re being lied to, like a conspiracy theory requires. It means you’re lying to yourself. Over and over and over. And if we know one thing about devotion to Donald Trump, it’s that self-delusion is a requirement.

Reeling from his loss and his party turning against him in the days after January 6th, Donald Trump decided that the only way to recover from the event was to created an alternative history of it and act as if it were the real one. At first, he was in exile, rambling to a seemingly shrinking audience that he’d won the election, that January 6th was a setup, and that the people who rioted and killed for him were heroes.

The falsified history was that not only did Trump do nothing wrong, but nobody did anything wrong except the Democrats and law enforcement. And he just kept at it, relentlessly, and with no oxygen given to any other narrative.

Of course, it worked. It started working on the same day as the attack, with hundreds of thousands of tweets immediately calling the riot fake, a false flag, and a fed hit job – all based on Trump’s own casting of blame elsewhere. In the months after the insurrection, when ardent Trump acolytes in Congress began shifting blame to mythical FBI plants and antifa infiltrators, it was in full swing.

The Republican history of January 6th, the one clung to by the party that will soon control every branch of the federal government, is that it was a peaceful protest ruined by federal jackboots and outside agitators. And it’s a protest that the American people, much more concerned about the price of eggs and the possibility of being raped by Haitian migrants, don’t care about anymore. Soon it will be swept out of the history books entirely, with Trump pardoning all the “hostages” and going after the investigators who tried to hold him to account

It never happened.

Except, of course, it did happen.

Relatively few people saw the immediate aftermath of the Nazi camps, and virtually none are still with us. Most of us only know of the Nazi horror through the footage taken in the aftermath, the testimony of those who survived, and the blubbering fake repentance of those who did the deeds. But millions of Americans were watching the news and seeing in real time how the American electoral system teetered on the edge.

We all saw it together. Our hearts raced and our jaws dropped and we all asked ourselves and each other “can this really be happening?” Because it was happening. We heard the screams of the Capitol Police officers being torn apart. We saw the blood on the floors and the shit on the office walls. We know it wasn’t a peaceful love fest, but a sacking that would make a Visigoth proud. We know what January 6th was – not a “day of love”, but an organized and well-planned attempt to prevent a presidential election loser from transferring power to a presidential election winner. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters knew what it was. Until they decided otherwise and began lying to themselves.

The more an event is documented, the more effort needs to be put into making us question our memories of the event. And that’s ultimately what J6 denial is about – not even so much rewriting history, but rewriting our memories. Trying to convince us that what we saw wasn’t what we saw, what we experienced wasn’t what we experienced, and our feelings – our horror – weren’t real.

Don’t let Trump and his acolytes rewrite your memories of that awful day. Take them with you, speak of them often, tell those too young or disengaged to have been watching what you saw. Don’t allow them to cynically deny what they did, and never question the depravity and deeply unpatriotic derangement of those who did it.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will pardon those responsible for January 6th. But no matter what their legal outcomes are, we can hold them to account with our memories and witnessing. We must all be the documentarians of the horror of January 6th, and we can never allow ourselves to be convinced that it was anything else than what we saw.

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All the World’s a Staged False Flag

Mike Rothschild5 Comments

In the seconds and minutes after a traumatic event, all we know is what we already knew before the event. As information starts to come in – what exactly happened, how it happened, who did it – that starts to change. Questions get answered, new questions arise, an overall narrative starts to emerge. But the moment we learn of something truly enormous and unexpected, such as an airliner flying into the World Trade Center or a mass shooting at a school, we don’t know anything other than the fact that something happened. And we want to know more.

Our minds demand more information, more details, more facts. We need to know what’s going on, even if nobody even knows what’s going on. And we want to talk about it, even if we don’t know what we’re even talking about yet. Social media and the speed that information travels now have exacerbated this need to concoct a story when one isn’t available, but it’s always been part of us.

With all this in mind, nobody should be surprised that the seconds and minutes after a 20-year-old loser with a rifle tried to assassinate Donald Trump, conspiracy theories exploded on social media. It was inevitable, given the intensity of the situation, the infrequent nature of such assassination attempts, and of course, the fact that involved Donald Trump.

Each block of conspiracy theories fell neatly down partisan lines.

Pro-Trump influencers have spent months obsessing over the “deep state” trying to assassinate Trump because he’s going to beat Joe Biden (again!) and they only way they can stop this is by taking Trump off the board. And anti-Trump influencers believe that Trump is so craven that he’d stage his own assassination attempt, complete with a pre-made photo-op, to change the conversation from Biden’s refusal to step aside.

The information you allow yourself to take in depends entirely on the information you’ve already taken in.

None of this should be surprising if one has followed Western politics and media for the last few decades. Within hours of the World Trade Center collapsing, major conspiracy figures like Alex Jones and Bill Cooper claimed the hijackings were staged as an excuse to detonate charges on the main girders of the buildings and bring them down in order to take control of the American people. It now takes minutes for “citizen journalists” to declare that “something is wrong” with the story when news breaks of a school shooting. Most of these conspiracy theories are repackaged versions of ones that have come before, and quickly fade out.

What’s new with the Trump shooting is that the volume of right wing conspiracy theories is being overwhelmed by the volume of conspiracy theories from the left. While many Republicans have fallen back on the usual narrative of a surprisingly incompetent deep state hit job, many Democrats have embraced the false and deranged notion that Trump staged his own attempted murder, based on “proof” that doesn’t stand up to logic or scrutiny, and sticking to the idea even once it became clear that multiple people, including the shooter, were killed in those furious few seconds.

“What, you think Trump wouldn’t do it? You think he cares about anyone but himself dying?” is that believers will ask, though these are rhetorical questions designed to reinforce belief. “Why would you put anything past him?”

Left wing conspiracy theories aren’t new, of course. But they’ve never quite caught on the way right-wing myths and disinformation have. They aren’t as compelling, they aren’t as profitable, they don’t offer the same heady stakes and cartoonish villains. And they aren’t equivalent. Left-leaning nonsense doesn’t have the same rotten core of antisemitism and racism and hate and fear. It wasn’t left-wing conspiracy theories that fueled January 6th or Charlottesville. Even health freedom and antivax conspiracy theories, once more the domain of progressives, have been usurped by the far right – Steve Bannon is just as likely to shill for “vaccine detox” as he is for “white genocide” these days.

But that’s changed as Donald Trump’s grip on American politics and discourse has tightened. Trump is an accelerant for left wing conspiracism in the same way Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were for the right. They are all-powerful, pure evil, devious and cunning in ways that defy description, and yet never quite pulls off their dark plans for world domination and mass slavery. They kill anyone they want, but manage to get caught on the internet. They create vast networks of underground bases and camps and terror cells that, for some reason, mostly remain dormant. And when they do activate – a mass shooter “brainwashed by MKUltra” or something like that – the internet figures it out easily.

These are cartoon villains. They’re Cobra Commander in the 80’s GI Joe Cartoon, building a vast army of soldiers and tanks and lasers, hatching plan after plan, and never winning. And like all “world domination” theories, they give a free pass to the real villains. They absolve the food conglomerates, the mass polluters, the actual dictators, the holders of medical debt and the inventors of “lunch debt.” These people get off – while the phony Saturday morning TV villains of the “deep state” keep pumping out their ham-fisted plots in public.

The idea that Trump staged his own assassination, built around one lousy marksman shooting him just close enough to his head to get a once-in-a-century photo, then having that marksman killed, is just as goofy and unserious a plan as much of the far right’s supposed chicanery. Sure, it’s fun to tweet about your belief that WWE-trained showman Trump could duck down just long enough to smear blood on his ear and pop up for a first pump, but once you find out people are dead, that’s not going to stick as a story.

Once you find out the shooting was real, it can’t be staged anymore, right? The problem with conspiracy theories is that they don’t function in the realm of logic. It can be real AND staged. Why not? The details don’t matter and are entirely fungible. You claim no kids died at Sandy Hook, then when overwhelming evidence emerges that they definitely did, you just claim they died but not the way THEY are telling us. The theory changes, but it doesn’t really change.

Likewise, Trump’s “shooting” clearly was real, but it can also be fake. Arguing over the details is pointless, because they’re meaningless. The idea that anyone would let some clown with no training shoot at their head on the off chance that they’d hit their ear is comical – but Trump is evil and Project 2025 will turn us all into breeding slaves in a Christofacist hellscape, so can we really say he wouldn’t do it?

I caught twelve kinds of hell from liberal influencers when I pushed back at the conspiracy theory that Trump had his ex-wife Ivana murdered by throwing her down the stairs, then used her fake burial to hide classified documents in her empty casket. I didn’t push back at it because I love Trump – far from it. I pushed back because it was insane and totally devoid of evidence, while sidestepping actual evidence, like Ivana being in so much pain from degenerating hips that she could barely walk. But people who have turned Trump in dime store villain capable of doing anything to anyone didn’t want to hear it.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories how they transform their believers into conspiratorial people. They invert trust and faith. They wrap certainty in a blanket of nonsense. And they make people paranoid and joyless, distrustful and cynical. They show us a real and traumatic event and make it cartoonish and bizarre in ways that don’t actually help us process and react to them.

Political assassinations are pretty common in the US. Four presidents have been shot dead, many others have had guns pulled on them or shots fired at them while in office or around then. Gerald Ford had guns pulled on him twice in three weeks. Reagan was nearly killed by a shooter, while Harry Truman survived an assassination attempt as VP. Likewise, the atmosphere at Trump events and around Trump in general is one of chaos and violence and a sickening kind of “anything can happen” energy. It’s not surprising that this happened, it’s more surprising that it took this long.

So the attempt to kill Donald Trump doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. Like so many other hinge points in history, it just requires a dope with a gun who maybe shifts the tides of a generation depending on if they can hit a target or not.

But we process information through conspiracy theories. We fill gaps in our understanding with garbage rather than simply sit in that lack of understanding. We make up better stories than the ones the officials give us because we like stories. And we cast our villains as being so evil they must be stopped while also being so incompetent that they never quite start.

We know who and what Donald Trump is. We don’t need conspiracy theories to make him worse or more devious. We only need look at his history and his plans for the future. It’s all there and obvious. Him “smearing blood on his ear” or conspiring with the Secret Service to be photographed on his good side only obscures his danger in a haze of nonsense.

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The Only Mass Shooting Conspiracy Theory Primer You’ll Ever Need

Mike Rothschild2 Comments

Over a span of less than 24 hours, America endured two more mass shootings, both carried out by young white men armed with assault rifles, and fed by internet-driven hate. The motivations of El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius and Dayton shooter Connor Betts appear to have been different, with Betts in particular seeming to be driven more by personal animosity and hatred of women than any political cause.

The causes of the two shootings might diverge, but one thing that doesn’t is the conspiracy theories that started up in their wake. The discourse about the El Paso shooting was flooded almost from the first moment with fake news, memes, errors in early reporting, nebulous conspiracy theories, and outright lies.

The Dayton shooting didn’t generate much in the way of conspiracies, but that’s only due to it taking place late on a Saturday night. By then, it was easy enough to lump the two shootings together as part of some kind of vast plot, carried out in two different places by the same shadowy group.

Longtime watchers of the early discourse around mass shootings will recognize everything that was written and said about El Paso, because it’s the same stuff that’s written and said about every mass shooting. They all have the same conspiracy theories, the same fake allegations, the same mistaken eyewitness reports, and the same attempts to flood the news cycle with fakes in order to create chaos.

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Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting Conspiracy Theories

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Late afternoon on Sunday, news broke that America did that thing America does so well: walked into a peaceful crowd of celebrating people and started shooting them.

From the details we have, about 16+ hours after the shooting, 19-year-old Santino William Legan decided he wanted to be a martyr for a cause existing entirely in his head, and cut the fence of the Gilroy Garlic Festival carrying a semi-automatic rifle. He opened fire, shooting approximately 12 people, killing three – including a six-year-old boy. Legan was then shot and killed by Gilroy police, ending the rampage.

As used to these horrible shootings as we’ve become, so too have we become used to the fusillade of conspiracy theories that follows each one. The one you’ll hear the most is the one you always hear the most, and the one that pisses you off to the greatest degree: that it was a “false flag” staged by (INSERT PRESIDENT HERE) to serve as a distraction from (INSERT NEGATIVE NEWS STORY HERE).

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