The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.
I find the rise of BlueMAGA very disturbing, and I’m surprised more people don’t. Or perhaps I’m not surprised; within progressive circles there can be a strong social prohibition against speaking frankly about this tendency, for fear of giving support to the enemy. Just mentioning this cadre of deranged obsessives, who frequently express violent sentiment toward Donald Trump, his family and Republicans in general, reliably gets me shouts of “FALSE EQUIVALENCE! BOTH SIDES-ISM!” and similar. I suspect that this mostly stems from progressives deliberately looking away from the pro-Dem online cesspool that has developed in the past decade, or barring that, from thinking that Team Blue needs an abusive and psychotic online cult of its own. One way or another, they’re out there, in great numbers, and they exhibit all of the ugly elements of online extremism that we’ve grown accustomed to. Yes, yes, I’m sure regular MAGA is worse. That doesn’t erase the problem, and you should want better than that.
I am particularly concerned with how ubiquitous conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump have become.
A core reason conspiracy theories don’t make sense is that the complexity and risk inherent to alleged schemes often badly exceed the potential reward.
I’m someone with a generally open mind for (what are often referred to as) conspiracy theories, given that the term is so often used to enforce consensus around official narratives. People believe in conspiracy theories for many reasons, but a core one is that human beings love to conspire. But obviously, any given theory has to make sense. And a core reason conspiracy theories don’t make sense is that the complexity and risk inherent to alleged schemes often badly exceed the potential reward. This calculus only gets more stark when you start to involve more and more people in the conspiracy. This, for example, is why “Bush did 9/11” is so absurd. The idea is that George W. Bush’s government orchestrated a large and complex terrorist attack on American soil in order to benefit from the post-attack panic and grab power. This would require finding 19 Muslim men who were not only willing to participate in such an attack, but to die for it, and for those hijackers to carry out not one or two or three but four hijackings, each immensely complex and risky individually. To ensure this outcome, for example by facilitating the immigration of the hijackers, hundreds of people would have to have been involved. If even a small number of them chose to blow the whistle, the consequences would not only entail the total political destruction of the Bush administration but possibly the death penalty for Bush and his inner circle. All for political benefits that proved considerable, but had sufficiently petered out by the 2006 midterms five years later that left Bush’s party politically humiliated.
And so too with this now-inescapable notion that Trump’s assassination scare was staged. Please, think.
- At the time of the assassination attempt, Trump had a comfortable lead over Joe Biden, whose campaign appeared to be collapsing. You’re going to throw an enormously risky Hail Mary like this when every national and swing state poll shows that you’re in a commanding position in the race? Why?
- The complexity of pulling off such a thing in front of a crowd of thousands, all of them armed with cameras capable of taking stills and video, would be enormous. You’re going to need a) a shooter with a long gun that is, at least, set up to produce realistic gunshot noises and which has the recoil you would expect; b) some sort of mechanism for shooting a nonlethal projectile close to or hitting Trump, similar to the one clearly visible in multiple videos of the incident; c) a squib or blood pack of some sort that is discreet and realistic enough to appear genuine to any of those in the large crowd and survive close and skeptical examination by the public and press. Or you’re planning to shoot an active round that passes inches from the head of your leader in a chaotic open space, all as part of a plan designed to help him electorally.
- The FBI and Secret Service have both confirmed the conventional narrative of events. The FBI and Secret Service are two organizations that I trust a little less than I do the Weekly World News, but why would they participate in a brazen and illegal Trump campaign operation? While the Democrats control the executive branch? For what purpose? Why would the Secret Service consent to take part in an operation that made them look so remarkably incompetent? How would the Secret Service control the actions of the local police? Were the local police in on it, too?
- This event produced two bodies; both of those killed were, incontrovertibly, real people who had real verified lives that are easily confirmed by the documentary record, by their online presence and by the testimonials of those who knew them. There is video of both, alive, at the event. So these actual living people became ex-people during the event. Were they in on it? If so, that means they signed up for a literal suicide mission. Why? Why would Corey Comperatore, an all around mundane person who worked at a plastics company and served as a volunteer firefighter, sacrifice his life in that way? Or perhaps he was just collateral damage — they needed to fire into the crowd to make the fake attack credible. Again, firing a live round past the very politician you’re trying to support seems like a bad idea. Beyond that, you would have to have at least several dozen people involved in this conspiracy willing to say, “Yeah, I’m on board with being an accessory to murder of one of our candidate’s supporters if and when we hit one after firing an assault rifle into a crowd of people.”
- To reiterate, the shooter is a real person, and we know that from documentary evidence, from testimonials by people who knew him, from video evidence and from his online presence. We know where he went to school and when. He’s not some “Manchurian Candidate”-style automaton or a secret CIA asset or whatever. So … what’s the deal? We have a very young young man, two years past his high school graduation, with no military or espionage experience and (evidently) very limited ability to use his rifle. Why was he chosen for this job? Why would he agree to take part in a suicide mission? Was he really so fanatically loyal to the Trump reelection effort that he would sacrifice his life at 20? Or perhaps you think he’s a patsy, that he didn’t really understand what he was getting himself into. How big of an idiot was he, then? He’s lying on a roof, exposed to fire, surrounded by armed law enforcement agents and thousands of witnesses. He can’t have been so stupid as to think he was leaving there alive. So, like … how did all of this work? Did they contact some school shooter outreach program and find a willing participant?
None of it makes any sense, at all. It’s a classic case of a conspiracy theory that combines a) vague motives and questionable gain; b) the conspirators taking on huge risks for that questionable gain; c) a requirement of absolute loyalty and total silence from a large mass of people and d) an absurd level of faith that the con would survive an immense amount of scrutiny with a huge amount of documentary evidence, in an era when everyone walks around with a high-quality photo and video camera in their pocket.
This is the kind of thing that I write that reliably results in a bunch of readers groaning and saying, “Yes, of course you’re right, but why do we have to talk about this? This doesn’t matter.” But I simply don’t agree. I find this kind of rabid Democrat tribalism to be increasingly hard to avoid, and it exhibits all of the ugly elements of binary thinking, vicious rejection of dissent, willingness to traffic in conspiracy theory and loose grasp on the truth that many people have rightfully fretted over when it comes from the conservative side.
If you’re the party that’s opposed to tribalism and misinformation and conspiracy theory, maybe do a little policing of your own coalition in that regard?
Here’s a post by Ron Filipkowski, one of many BlueMAGA celebrities who has ridden anti-Trump lunacy and absolutely relentless tweeting to Twitter celebrity status. You can see here the softer version of this particular conspiracy theory, the “just asking questions” kind. But his skepticism has been constant, and clicking through will show you that his many followers are happy to do the dirty work for him. And I do mean many. He has almost a million followers on that network. There are dozens of other anti-Trump celebrities like him and thousands upon thousands of their followers. Another big account is “Mueller She Wrote,” an account of some 750,000 followers named in the apparent belief that the Mueller report was going to end the Trump presidency. (Which, lol.) She too has engaged in “just asking questions” speculation about the Trump shooting, and her followers too understood the assignment and immediately engaged in unapologetic conspiracy theorizing. Mostly, though, she’s a “Russia did it” fanatic, one of many who are completely incapable of imagining the Democrats legitimately losing an election. Those two are among the more upstanding members of BlueMAGA, which is really saying something; for a more typical account, you might consider “Thelma Johnson,” a fake, Trump-hating grandma figure that the account holder barely attempts to keep in character. “She” openly states that there was no assassination attempt, believes the entire MAGA movement is a Russian psyop, and also apparently is under the impression that the Soviet Union still exists and that Vladimir Putin is a communist.
Blue MAGA Falls into Line
The most widespread BlueMAGA behavior, currently, is an absolutely rabid dedication to the idea that any polling that does not show a decisive lead for Kamala Harris is the product of Russian disinformation or the evil of Nate Silver or the machinations of the New York Times, which is alleged to be a dedicated anti-Kamala publication despite publishing five pieces a day with headlines like “How a Kamala Harris Victory Could Create a Time Loop That Would Prevent the Assassination of Medgar Evers.” There are so many people right now who dismiss any poll that doesn’t show Harris’ dominance, it’s remarkable — especially because Democrats have spent several election cycles mocking Republicans for their belief in “skewed polls”! It seems like the desire for Harris to win is so enormous that people just can’t allow themselves to admit that this election is currently a total tossup. New York magazine can’t stop running essays about how Harris is guaranteed to win because of THE POWER OF LOVE or whatever. But winning requires thinking, thinking clearly.
This whole thing creeps me out. If you’re the party that’s opposed to tribalism and misinformation and conspiracy theory, maybe do a little policing of your own coalition in that regard? Yes, Trump is worse. But so what?
The post About That Trump Assassination Conspiracy Theory appeared first on Truthdig.
