Every time some angry man with a brain poisoned by 4chan and/or Fox News guns down multiple innocent victims, the conspiracy trolls come out, spreading misinformation and disinformation about the shooter in an attempt to wash the blood off of their own hands by convincing others that the shooter was no right-winger but rather a government plant or an Antifa agent.
There is never any evidence to prove their case, but who wants to let facts stand in the way of their favorite conspiracy theory?
Let’s take a quick look at three forms of mis/disinformation now popping up on social media and in the ight-wing press.
ONE: The Buffalo shooter was a Fed agent; the murders in the supermarket were a “false flag” to make right-wingers look bad.
This brand of bullshit popped up fairly quickly on social media.
Well, that took a turn at the end there.
But it wasn’t just internet randos floating this theory; several prominent figures on the far-right also pushed the false-flag narrative. “Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen Wendy Rogers, an ally of white supremacists, declared on Telegram. Meanwhile Nick Fuentes — a far-right shit-stirrer with something of a cult following — jumped onto Telegram while the bodies were still warm to declare the shootings a false flag.
And then, of course, there is Alex Jones, telling his still-vast audience that it was
guaranteed [that] this guy had been reached out to by the system — he was schizo, he was told he was a secret soldier, probably managed by some ‘militia group’ that was really FBI-run just like the Whitmer kidnapping. …
That’s how they would do it. Got a crazy, wants to shoot up a school…let’s just wind him up like Theodore Kaczynski, the Uni bomber — on the record was CIA — they set him up.”
This is mind control 101, MK Ultra at large.
Perhaps worried about another lawsuit for spreading bullshit about a mass killing, Jones declared that this was all just “speculation” on his part.
TWO: The Buffalo shooter was actually a leftist.
To hear some on the right talk about it, this shooting was the work of a leftist Democrat communist antifa monster trying to bring about a race war.
To rebut these claims, all we have to do it read the shooter’s manifesto. Over the course of several pages he tried his best to explain his rather complicated and sometimes contradictory political ideals. He said it was fine for anyone to label him as “a bigot, racist, xenophobe, nazi, fascist” because, well, that’s what he is. He also declared himself at one point as “an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist.”
In a series of questions and answers, he explained his views further:
Are you a facsist?
Yes, fascism is one of the only political ideologies that will unite Whites against the replacers. Since that is what I seek, calling me a facsist [sic] would be accurate.
Are you a white supremacist>?
Yes, I would call myself a white supremacist, afterall, which race is responsible for the world we live in today? I believe the White race is superior in the brain to all other races.
Are you racist?
Yes I am racist because I believe in differences of capabilities between races.
Are you intolerant?
Sure. The last virtues of a dying nation are tolerance and apathy, and I want none of it.
Are you an anti-semite?
YES!! I wish all JEWS to HELL! Go back to hell where you came from DEMON!
But in reality, a Jew confined to Judea where he can’t spread his people or beliefs is of no concern to me. It’s important to note that with proper connection to the internet, that is impossible.
Are you a neo-nazi?
I support neo-nazism but I am not a member of any neo-nazi groups, you decide what that makes me.
Yeah, I’ve pretty much decided. This depraved racist killer wasn’t AntiFa. He’s just a plain old Fa.
But you don’t need all this to tell where his politics lie. He’s a white supremacist who murdered a group of mostly elder black shoppers because he wants to protest what the racist right-wing calls “the great replacement,” a sort of slow-motion “white genocide” intended to weaken and perhaps eradicate the white race. Doing this makes him a de facto rightist, even aside from anything he has said, or written, or plagiarized.
But some on the right have picket out a couple of phrases from the manifesto out of context that they think prove that this man, who calls himself a fascist, is really a leftist — or, more specifically. an “authoritarian leftist.”
Here’s where they’re getting this — a portion of the manifesto in which he talks about his political “journey” from left to right.
Did you always hold these views?
When I was 12 I was deep into communist ideology, talk to anyone from my old highschool and ask about me and you will hear that. From age 15 to 18 however, I consistently moved farther to the right. On the political compass I fall in the mild-moderate authoritarian left category, and I would prefer to be called a populist.
Well, you might prefer to be called the Easter Bunny; that doesn’t mean that’s who you are. A self described “bigot, racist, xenophobe, nazi, fascist” who guns down elderly black people because he’s worried about white people being ‘”replaceed” is nto not in any way “mild,” “moderate” or “left.”
THREE: Whatever the fuck this is.
I found the strangest response to the shooting on the conspiracy-obsessed Natural News website in a post provocatively titled “Decoding the cryptic “manifesto” of the alleged Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron, which also spells Pentagon Drony.”
The author began by noting that “something [doesn’t] look right in the “manifesto” message of the supposed Buffalo food store shooter.” After noting several slightly odd word choices on the part of the shooter, he gets to the real point of his analysis. Which is that “Payton Gendron … also spells Pentagon Drony.”
Oh dear.
In addition, the claimed name of the person is an anagram for “Pentagon Drony,” which seems to mean “Pentagon drone.” (i.e. Manchurian candidate, sheep-dipped control subject…)
Payton Gendron = Pentagon Drony
Because of these oddities, I decided to dig a little deeper into the text and look for elements of cryptography or hidden messages. Because the text seemed as if the surface meaning were merely a distraction. There seemed to be a far more important message encoded in the text, which is why such strange grammatical and word choices were likely made.
To begin, I converted the lines into text blocks, eliminating special characters, spaces, etc.
After a bit more word-wrangling he comes up with a new batch of anagrams, this time from the jumbled batches of letters that appeared when he began looking at the new “text blocks” vertically rather than horizontally. Here are a few he lists:
iiratereel stnlededry = Altered destiny, dead eternity, insider trade, deadly elite, red-letter day*
pitldiaidi aniyhnrnit = I didn’t plan it, a dirty hand
ygewiseaaottrhgubngo = … How to be a gangster, Enough to get away, Beast with a gun
ohnihniynk nietsygmoa = Nothing is okay, Hey I’m a ghost
Hey, I’m a ghost. Now everything is clear to me.
By the way, I took a whack at the old internet anagram server myself and discovered that Payton Gendron also anagrams itself into “Gonad Penny Rot,” “Danger Pony Not” and “Anger Pond Tony.”
Perhaps even more tellingly, NaturalNews.com can be turned into “Romance Walnuts,” “Caramel Nuns Two,” and “Tumor Canal News.”
So in conclusion never go to NaturalNews.com for your news. Unless what you are looking for is evidence that conspiracy theories rot the brain. But we already have a good deal of proof of that; if you need a reminder, glance back at the first two delusions I talk about above. If your first response to any tragedy is to make up stories that make your side look better, maybe reflect on this a little bit. Once you start going outside the realm of facts, it gets weird very quickly.
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As usual, most of these assholes just assert their claims without bothering to back them up. And when they do offer evidence, it’s bullshit.
@personalpest:
For a lot of people, just the fact that some random person (or, in the case of Alex Jones, less random but more ranting) on the internet says the Buffalo shooting was a false flag/government plot/leftist plot is more than enough to accept that as a fact.
Such are the times we live in. “Post-truth” indeed.
Isn’t that pretty much the exact same method used to “prove” that the Bible “foretold” 9/11, to much hullabaloo back in the early ’00s? Of course, given a big enough text (such as, say, the doorstop known as the Bible, any recent Stephen King work, or a giant-ass manifesto by a deranged killer) it is likely you can find anything by such a method, including “foretellings” of the outcomes of the War of the Ring and the Battle of Endor.
If so, I very much doubt they’re concerning themselves with a few random people in a poor neighborhood in one of Earth’s smaller cities. Much more likely they’re shaking whatever it is they have that are analogous to humans’ heads and muttering “we didn’t give them blockchain so they could make it into a form of bankless money, to pursue the childish dream of a rugged-individualist governmentless Galt’s Gulch paradise of never having to compromise with other people as members of a society ever again, and then even manage to fuck up the bankless part! These primates are hopeless. Let’s try over at Epsilon Eridani instead.”
If Reagan ‘s handlers hadnt shut down mental health facilities this guy could have gotten help. Or at least been put somewhere he couldn’t hurt people.
Well, that’s a perfect description of stochastic terrorism from one of its chief practitioners. I seem to recall Alex Jones got suspended from Twitter for inciting violence, by telling his followers to get their “battle rifles” ready in order to murder liberals.
Easy there, Dan Brown. You’re giving far too much credit to someone who copy/pasted large chunks of his manifesto.
Wow. That’s a lot of gymnastics to go through to dig out secret messages.
This guy is way past Kool-Aid. He’s drinking the Ovaltine.
@Buttercup
It’s right up there with the people who “decode” Shakespeare’s plays to “prove” that they were written by Bacon. Or the 17th Earl of Oxford. Except that’s just scholarly footling around (in the opinion of someone whose teachers and professors pointed out that Shakespeare was not always great, and his true genius lay in his mass appeal, rather like Stephen King). Last I heard, nobody ever got murdered at an MLA conference, though I’m sure there’s flyting going on.
If Shakespeare was around today he’d be writing EastEnders.
You people are weird. The buffalo shooter calls himself a communist.
You gals make up or pick an outlandish statement and “debunk” it while ignoring what most are saying.
Again, the shooter calls himself a communist and left leaning guy.
“Drony” sounds like a word for doctors who like My Little Pony.
I see that we have plenty of the classic “The Nazis called themselves National Socialists, therefore they were socialists, therefore the Nazis were leftists, liberals are leftists, thus liberals are Nazis. And all those Trump supporters waving Nazi flags were paid by Soros to make the right look bad.”
…As if it couldn’t get any stupider, “He can’t be a white supremacist because he’s a furry” is starting to make the rounds. With Stew Peters also calling for genocide against furries to keep them from “corrupting our youth”, apparently.
OT, but apparently Jordan Peterson left twitter after getting called out for bullying a Swimsuit model. Supposedly, people calling him on his shit was bullying.
@Battering Lamb
I saw some of that. I think my favorite reactions were from the men who complained that JP was disrespecting a body type that they themselves found sexy, like the guy who said his girlfriend was also plus size.
Kudos to Yumi Nu who has made it clear that her haters are her motivators, and that her boyfriend is ecstatic that his teenage dream of dating a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model has now come true.
@Alan Robertshaw:
I can see that. Part of why I think the anti-Stratfordians are full of it; Shakespeare so much stuff that was obviously there to keep the general public entertained that the rather blatantly class-snobbish idea that somebody better educated than him must have been the one really writing the plays just doesn’t really stick the landing.
@Snowberry:
…. WTF?
I mean, as Trae Dorn said a few years ago when discussing the fall of Rocky Mountain Fur Con back in 2017:
Included is a tweet where the person mentioned there was tweeting to Richard Spencer.
Anybody who thinks furries can’t be white supremacists obviously hasn’t been paying attention. I mean, heck, we’ve seen black white supremacists. Any group of a sufficient size is going to have some fraction of people holding bigoted ideas.
George, things might go better for you if you read the post first before commenting. Here is the relevant portion of his manifesto on the “communist” thing. — which I quoted in full above.
You realize that the word “was” is past tense?
Considering how dark some of his tales got (King Lear, anyone?) and that some of them (e.g. Macbeth) had actual witchcraft or other supernatural elements in them, it’s probably fair to say that Shakespeare was the Stephen King of his time.
Which leaves one wondering if schoolkids on the NCC-1701-D are made to study Stephen King in English class …
Hey George, when you come to this site and immediately say “you gals” in this way, you appear to be using this phrasing in order to be rude and to exhibit contempt for the commenters here. The ‘tedious troll identified’ bell gives a little ping sound. We hear it.
Usually the tedious troll then very quickly falls into general name calling and more specific nastiness. Then they experience the Ban Hammer!
Rudeness and contempt are not part of the sort of conversation and discussion that we have here, even when people disagree with each other.
You are welcome to come here and put forth your ideas, and see if they interest and engage other people. But the language you use matters, as it does everywhere else.
I’m vaguely amused when a troll wanders by and says things like, “The buffalo shooter calls himself a communist.” Because when we say “transwomen are women” and “transmen are men” and “nonbinary folk are nonbinary and we should respect their pronouns,” we get screeds on how biology is REAL and you can’t just CALL yourself a woman if you don’t have tits.
I’m not going to unpack all of the problems with that approach, but here’s part of what I’ve been thinking lately: When we see somebody apply a label to themselves, and we see how they behave in accordance with that label, we can draw our own conclusions. So for those who claim that Nazis are really socialist, no, they aren’t, and it’s not because I want “socialist” reserved for people who don’t commit crimes against humanity. It’s because the Nazi regime was working the propaganda from a very early stage. Similarly, we wouldn’t call the former East Germany a democratic country just because the German name translated to “German Democratic Republic.”
There are labels, and there are fig leafs.
@Victorious Parasol
Heh. Probably a bit more passive-aggressive than the Viking version, tho.
@Moon Custafer
Oh, probably!
I had a vague memory tickling at me, so I hit the google and sure enough! Somebody HAS written a murder mystery that took place at the MLA convention.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1649406
Was the killer a college student who got a bad grade for not formatting their bibliography exactly correct?
@Dave
I haven’t read it, but I’m currently favoring the idea that the murder arose from an argument as to whether “deconstructionism” or “post-modernism” should become the preferred term.
@Moon Custafer; @Victorious Parasol:
I had a vague memory tickling at me, so I hit the google and sure enough! Somebody HAS written a murder mystery that took place at the MLA convention.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1649406.
Rule 221B: Whatever exists, there is mystery fiction about it.
I so completely share that motivation! It’s not the most important motivator. That’s my orgasm. Then again having that be my main motivator gets me a lot of hate and I so enjoy seeing those male tears. Same thing with being a “hot” blonde cis woman who insists on kinky non-PIV sex with gorgeous tall men only. Haha assholes I hope that upsets you.
@ Stacey
Did you see the idea we had for you in the makeup thread?