11.03.2021

Every Politically Inconvenient Event Was Merely a False Flag Attack

Off With Their Heads Stop The Steal (50813677883)
Tyler Merbler from USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A large public event takes place. Although you are not personally in attendance at this event, several thousand people are, meaning that there are many witnesses. There are also many photos and video footage of the event. Because the mainstream news media considered this event to be newsworthy, reporters were present with their cameras too. Thus, there is ample video and audio footage documenting most of what happened during this event from both trained journalists and private citizens. Print reporters were present too and took contemporaneous notes for the many stories they would quickly write about the event. The event is thoroughly documented and widely reported, so much so that most people will later recall reading about it, hearing about it, and seeing images from the event on multiple media platforms.

Within a year of the event, a group of people emerges making the bizarre claim that the event never happened. Would we listen to them? That is a difficult question, and I think "it depends" is about as close as we will come to an answer. Do they share our religious and/or political views? Is the nature of their claim such that we would really like it to be true? If so, then I think we probably would listen to them. What's worse, I think we could probably be convinced that what we all know happened didn't really happen.

One of the most popular terms one can expect to hear from the political right in the U.S. is "false flag." It has emerged as an incredibly effective way to convince their voters that historical events never occurred and that what we think we saw was merely staged for nefarious purposes. As absurd as these claims are, it is hard to deny their efficacy. They accomplish what they are designed to accomplish, often to disastrous effect for those of us who still believe that there is an external reality. Thanks to efforts like this, millions of Americans believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election and that the January 6 insurrection never happened.

It gets even worse. Countless school shootings are "false flag" incidents staged by Obama as a pretext to take their guns. Climate change is a Chinese hoax intended to weaken the U.S. Separation of church and state is a lie that the founders never intended; they sought a Christian theocracy. Poorly educated parents across the country should dictate what public school teachers can and cannot teach their children because they obviously know better and those damn liberal teachers cannot be trusted not to indoctrinate their children.

It is tempting to point and laugh. Do these conservatives really think anyone on the left is capable enough to pull of so many elaborate "false flag" campaigns? This is the same hapless left that has shown a knack for little more than the sort of destructive infighting that keeps them weaker than any political party has a right to be. We are supposed to believe that they are masterminding world-class counterintelligence efforts? They can't even reliably win governors' races in blue states!

The problem, of course, isn't that any of these wild claims are true. The problem is that it no longer matters what is true. All that matters is whether these claims work, and it should now be painfully clear that they do. They work toward the end of our collective destruction, but they do work. The right is not going to abandon methods this effective, and that leaves the hapless left with the challenge of coming up with a viable way to counter them. I have not seen much evidence that they have figured out how to do this, and I get the feeling that we may not have an unlimited amount of time remaining for them to do so.