Promoting False Flag Conspiracy Theories Helps Fascists

Please don’t do this.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, CC

cThis weekend, in a very much at this point precedented sequence of events, someone attempted to assassinate the president. They failed, and then a thousand conspiracy theories

Political scientist Seth Masket drily explains why these theories are all bosh. He makes what I think are three key points:

1. If Trump had plotted a secret false flag assassination, he would brag about it, the same way he bragged about Russian election interference. “My false flag was the best false flag! People are saying this is the greatest assassination plot of all time.”

2. People buy guns in the US and commit acts of political violence absolutely all the fucking time.

3. There’s zero evidence that past assassination attempts on Trump or his allies have benefited him electorally in any way.

In short, Trump has no motive to do this, no capacity to do it, and there is an obvious and convincing alternate explanation in a country awash in guns and political violence.

So, yes, the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was what it looked like— misguided guy with weapons tried to assault the president and did not manage to get even close to doing that.

But! Lots of people (rightfully) hate Trump, and when you hate someone, you are often unwilling to believe that anything bad happened to them, because who wants to sympathize with that guy? In addition, Trump, of course, lies all the time.

So many people who don’t believe Trump and hate him are unwilling to credit the assassination attempt. And insofar as disbelieving Trump and hating him is good, why bother arguing with them? The lie, in this case, damages Trump’s political standing. Damaging Trump’s political standing benefits the country and democracy. Where’s the problem?

Let me point out a few ways in which crediting and disseminating false flag conspiracy theories is harmful.

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False flag theories are a major weapon of the right

The first problem with false flag theories is that they are a major tool of the right. Fascists target people for horrific violence on the grounds that those people “deserve” it. False flag theories—which argue that the targets of violence caused the violence against them—are a powerful tool to justify withdrawing sympathy from those who have been targeted. More, they’re a powerful tool for justifying further harassment.

Alex Jones’ use of false flag theories against the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is one particularly egregious example. Jones, as a violent far right ghoul, is rabidly pro firearms, and his audience disliked the way that school shootings made a powerful case for gun control. Jones, therefore, spent years insisting that the shooting was faked, going so far as to claim that no one died, and that the victims were “child actors.”

Jones’ horrific claims led to horrific harassment. The parents of Daniel Barden, a 7-year-old killed in the shooting, said they received one letter from a false-flag true believers who claimed to have urinated on Daniel’s grave; another threatened to dig up the grave to prove it contained no body. Another Sandy Hook mother who’s child died in the shooting said that the lies about Sandy Hook were so extensive that she was told she was a liar by another woman attending a support group for grieving parents.

Jones’ lies were so egregious that he was ordered to pay $1 billion to the families he defamed. His network, Infowars, will hopefully be controlled shortly by the satirical website The Onion, with proceeds going to the Sandy Hook families.

But Jones is hardly along in his use of false flag theories to discredit the enemies of the right. False flag theories regularly circulate about other shootings such as the 2022 school attack in Uvalde, TX or the 2019 attacks in El Paso and Dayton. Right-wing commenters claimed that the MAGA attacker who beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in 2022 was not a Trump supporter; they insisted (falsely) that his blog posts were faked.

You might say, well, if they do it to us, we should do it to them. The problem is that a lot of people are not hard-core partisans; they do not follow politics closely, and are often feel vaguely (or not so vaguely) alienated from political institutions.

The audience for a lot of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking, therefore, is not really on one side or another. It’s floating around somewhere in the disconnected middle. And when you validate conspiratorial thinking—when you tell people that false flags conspiracies are common and that victims are typically secret perpetrators of fraud—you aren’t just validating it for conspiracies that (supposedly) work to your advantage. You’re validating it in general and for everybody. Which helps fascists, since they are the ones who most often deploy conspiratorial thinking and most often blame victims.

False flag theories empower and enrich bad actors

Conspiracy theories empower fascists by legitimizing and cosigning their worldview. But they also empower fascists in more direct ways—by funneling them money.

Alex Jones embraced false-flag conspiracy theories because he likes guns and wants to delegitimize gun control. But he also (and even primarily) pushed these theories because disseminating scandalous lies while positioning yourself as the sole truth teller on earth can be extremely lucrative. Once you are the one trusted voice, you can ask you followers for money, or sell them garbage supplements, or monetize your cult-like following in a whole range of ways.

Jones, and people like him, attack the mainstream media specifically to delegitimize it and encourage people to listen to them and only them. That keeps the dollars flowing, and it also allows you to cultivate an audience that will listen to and do whatever you tell them—which has a lot of obvious advantages for unethical people.

The right has used this playbook most, and it has empowered a range of extremely bad actors who love sadism and power for its own sake. But the dynamics exist on the (fuzzily-defined) left to some degree too, not least among people like Jimmy Dore and Chapo Trap House that more or less deliberately cultivate audiences that cross over with the right.

Anti-establishment figures in those spaces too can use conspiratorial thinking to funnel legitimacy and cash to themselves while responsible journalists and academics (like, say, Seth Masket) are hobbled by their quaint commitment to truth and evidence. That undermines trust in people who care for truth, and that in turn destroys the basis for good policy making. It also makes it hard to realistically assess fascism—and you need to realistically assess fascism to defeat it.

False flag theories fundamentally misinterpret Trump

False flag theories make it hard to understand Trump because they attribute to him great cunning and intelligence when in fact he is a barely sentient toad. If the White House Correspondent’s Dinner plot was “fake,” then you have to assume that Trump not only arranged for dozens of people to stage the shooting; you have to also assume that he and his minions have amazing message discipline and the ability to hatch their schemes across weeks with no failure and little room for slip ups (we’re talking about live ammunition being fired in or around an event with much of the White House leadership in attendance.)

There is nothing that Trump has ever done that indicates that he or those around him have the capacity to do any of that. Trump literally just lost a war with Iran; there are currently reports that the Navy has fucked up logistics so badly that it can’t even feed US troops. Trump’s White House leaks like a sieve because everyone involves is incompetent and hates each other. Remember when Trump’s national security team accidentally invited a journalist to their super secret Signal group chat? Does that strike you as the work of brilliant conspirators who could successfully do…much of anything?

Trump is still dangerous even though he’s incompetent. In fact, he’s often more dangerous because he’s incompetent. He blunders ahead into coups that won’t work and into wars he’s going to lose, tearing up the Constitution and murdering people along the way.

But if you want to defeat Trump, it’s important to understand who he is and what you’re trying to defeat. The key to fighting Trump is not to out-think him and expose his plots; we’re not in some sort of high-stakes chess match where you need to think twelve moves in advance. What you need to do in general is to recognize he does not know what he’s doing, does not have a back-up plan, and just actually oppose him.

The clever fallacy with regards to Trump is dangerous because it leads people to think that the fight is intellectual rather than moral. Trump is a fool; when you try to defeat him in a game of wits, you just turn yourself into a fool too.

Telling ourselves that Trump’s constantly scheming and hiding his true motives is just an exercise in self-deception. Trump lies about everything, but in very straightforward ways. He wants to destroy the Constitution and steal all the money. You don’t defeat him by attributing to him massive powers of deviousness. You defeat him by telling the truth and standing up to him. False flag conspiracy theories have no part in that.