Someone might have tried to kill the president last night.
Last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, someone attempted to breach security with firearms and likely shot a police officer in the vest. Early this morning, news outlets named a 31-year-old suspect who is custody: Cole Tomas Allen. Cole is a Black teacher from California with a master’s degree in computer science.
I’m not here to tell you about him. I’m not an investigative reporter.
I woke up with morning to check Bluesky (there’s my first problem, I suppose) and see conspiracy post after conspiracy post. “Something doesn’t add up here,” they claim. “There’s no way security was that lax,” they claim.
Maybe you live in a different information ecosystem / echo chamber than I do, and if so, I’m a little bit envious. Because rushing towards the assumption of a conspiracy is embarrassing and those who do it publicly with large platforms should be embarrassed. It is far and away more likely that someone wanted to shoot people (or one man in particular) than that the whole thing was one of those dreaded and scare-quote worthy “false flag attacks.”
In the 1970s, the FBI waged a sort of war against Leftists in the United States. The name of their covert program was COINTELPRO, and we know about it because some activists associated with the Catholic anti-war movement (though themselves largely Jewish, I love a good multicultural resistance) broke into an FBI office and stole the evidence. (Yeah, I covered this on my show, part one and part two.)
COINTELPRO was a masterful work of movement disruption, and part of their playbook was infiltration. But explicitly part of the point of that infiltration was to stir up paranoia among the activists. Fear of infiltration was more effective at disrupting our movements than the infiltration itself. Fear got us to do their work for us: we sowed our own distrust, and we turned on one another.
So it goes with conspiracism. When every action is presumed to be a “false flag” (I’m not going to stop with the scare quotes, I’m sorry), then there’s no point in taking any action at all. Conspiracism teaches people that people don’t have agency, only the state has agency.
Are there real conspiracies? For sure. Most conspiracies come out eventually. Like the massive ring of pedophiles who rule much of the world.
Is it possible that this or that specific action was a conspiracy or a false flag? Absolutely. It’s happened before. It will happen again. It’s far and away the less likely thing in most situations, and we need to understand the impulse to rush towards assumptions of conspiracy.
I’ve written about some of this before, but most actions that are accused of being false flag attacks are not. The most famous “false flag attack” in history was the burning of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, in 1933. This action was used by the Nazis as their excuse to consolidate power, but it wasn’t planned or executed by them. A young Dutch council communist named Marinus van der Lubbe set that fire, hoping to spur the German workers to revolt against the fascists. (Podcast part one and part two)
He’s been done dirty by history, presented as anything from a patsy to a useful idiot instead of what he was: one of the only people in Germany taking the Nazi threat seriously. If there’d been another hundred thousand people like him in 1933, it might not have taken the 75 million or so allied soldiers ten years later.
Marinus has been done dirty by history, but the Nazis were going to consolidate power anyway. Everyone plays the hand they are dealt, so everyone tries to use attacks against them to their own advantage. The Nazis were looking for a justification to enact martial law and they took it. They were going to find some excuse or another.
We love to blame the people who take radical acts, because by condemning them we forgive ourselves for our comparative lack of action. Conspiracy thinking, in these cases, is a way of abdicating moral responsibility. Conspiracists are not just forgiving themselves for not taking action, they’re forgiving themselves for being too cowardly to say “who can blame the guy?” when someone tries for a wild hail mary of an arson (or assassination).
We need only to judge actions by two criteria: was it morally justifiable and was it strategic? If an action is morally justifiable, we ought not condemn it. If it was morally justifiable but not strategic, we ought to neither condemn it nor celebrate it. (And you can’t judge something’s strategic value based on whether or not it succeeded, but rather on whether or not it was the best chance available.)
But we can’t look to others (and you can’t look to me) to answer questions of morality or strategy for you.
There’s a fine line between fedposting (posting public praise for those who commit serious offenses in such a way that you draw unwanted attention from the government) and saying “well, what did you think would happen when the most powerful man in the world is revealed to be a pedophile who is in the process of destroying the world economy and no legal institutions are working effectively to stop him?” Personally, that’s how I see actions like this: consequence. Of course this was going to happen. It’s going to keep happening. “Good” or “bad” is somewhat besides the point.
It’s hard to know what to say in moments like these. It’s hard to know what’s safe to say, or how safe versus brave we should really try to be. Fear is an important emotion and we should take danger into consideration when we make our decisions. Fear can be our advisor, but it ought never be our ruler. Not personally, not politically. But I will say that the part of you that rushes towards conspiracism is the part of you that is a coward.
We ought to work to spread calm instead of fear. Conspiracies spread on social media because fear is contagious, and the algorithms reward contagious thoughts, so conspiracies get the clicks. The most useful and experienced activists in the crowd at a protest will yell “walk!” when people start running in panic.
Dethrone fear. Spread calm. Stop assuming everything is a conspiracy.
Sound comments and sound advice.
As always, a great article. The only thing I have a minor objection to is the question of fear and calm. I don't necessarily think that this is the right choice to be had here. Hamilton Nolan made a more convincing case the other day, I believe, when he made the distinction between a politics of fear and a politics of love.
There is too much calm in the form of complacency. I am very well aware that you don't mean that but I feel that the notion of calm lends itself all too readily to this misunderstanding. What we need to have instead is zones of security, shelter, love, call it what you will. I like to think of us as beleaguered for most intents and purposes. At the very least there is an imaginary out there that wants us to feel that way. What we can do about it is create zones of agency, action, solidarity and community. The state of occupation we are in is precisely the state that tells us that this is an impossibility.
I am in a constant mode of heightened action in the moment... one that I will not be able to sustain indefinitely. I don't think I have to. However, while it is necessary that we - as a movement - take care that no individuals burn out and get plenty of time for recovery, I also think there is a case to be made that we - again, as a movement - act in a way that is akin to having an engine be in the "red". It is not how it should be, it is a state that needs to be remedied soon, but given the alternatives it might just be necessary.
I think the case of love or safety over calm boils down to this: their entire apparatus is built in a way that is meant to convince us that action is impossible. Our entire apparatus has to be designed in a way to reassure us that we are capable and beautiful and worthy, at the risk of sounding cheesy, but I 100% mean it. Given the current parameters this will translate into action. Possibly even rather busy action. That it will all the same be calm and measured holds true - but it will be calm in the way in which a group of friends takes care of an urgent problem. And, by most metrics, that doesn't look that calm at all.
Anyway, I didn't want to be verbose and don't mean to be nitpicky - the calmness just rubbed me a little in the wrong way, especially given the allusion to the "keep calm and carry on", which was likely not the optimal advice in the historical moment.
Thank you most sincerely for the article.