Whenever news breaks about a new school shooter, an unhealthy alliance of trolls and true believers takes to social media to flood the zone with bullshit.
It happened last week with the Buffalo shooter, when trolls tried to distract attention from the shooter’s far-right politics by claiming he was actually a deep state plant (or an antifa agent) carrying out a “false flag” operation.
In the wake of yesterday’s horrific elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which took the lives of 19 children and two adults, internet trolls and one elected official spread similarly fabricated stories about the now-dead shooter. Some cried “false flag,” others spread rumors that the shooter, a US citizen of Mexican descent, was an “illegal alien.”
And then there was the most insidious “theory” about the shooting: that the shooter was trans. This false claim was rooted in a 4chan hoax, and it was amplified not only by internet randos but also by public figures like GOP congressmen Paul Gosar and professional shit-stirrer Candace Owens from the Daily Wire — whose tweet on the subject was posted many hours after the claim had been authoritatively debunked.
Gosar even managed to get the first name wrong. He ultimately deleted the tweet.
Then Candace Owens came along with her own version of the claim; as of this writing the tweet is still up.
Even after seeing evidence proving the claim was a hoax she is not backing down.
(We’lll get to all those pictures in a minute.)
Owens is now using the false claim to buttress another false claim: that trans people are mentally ill, and thus very dangerous.
She seems to be inviting a Twitter ban that she could milk for publicity as an alleged victim of “cancel culture.”
Let’s look in a little more detail at all the claims still swirling around social media — and the complete lack of evidence behind them.
THE CLAIM: The massacre was a “false flag” by the “deep state” or possibly … Beto O’Rourke?
THE EVIDENCE: None.
The best the false flaggers can do is to point to odd details about the case — or try their hand at something more arcane.
THE CLAIM: Salvador Ramos was an “illegal alien.”
THE EVIDENCE: Right-wingers’ racist imaginations
According to government officials the shooter is a US citizen, born in North Dakota, not a murderer from El Salvador on the run.
You can choose to believe them, or go with the diligent reporting by *checks notes* ObamaSucksBalls.
THE CLAIM: Ramos was trans, possibly mentally ill and/or “groomed for a sex change” by his teachers.
There are literally hundreds of tweets like these.
THE EVIDENCE: Fabricated.
This story began as a 4chan hoax. Here’s a brief explanation from a Rolling Stone article on the hoax and its long legs.
The rumor about the shooter being trans surfaced early Tuesday evening from an anonymous poster on the “Politically Incorrect” channel on 4Chan. This person posted a link and the claim: “Here’s the shooter’s reddit” adding using a slur to insist the shooter was transgender. The post was accompanied by a picture of a trans woman in a miniskirt, with shoulder length brown hair, who bears an at-best-passing resemblance to social media profile pictures that have been attributed to Ramos. She is not the shooter.
We know that the woman in the pictures is not the shooter because the actual subject of the photos came forward on Reddit with new pictures proving she is who she says she is and that, unlike the real shooter, she is very much alive. Her name is Sam; she says she lives in Georgia, more than a thousand miles away from the crime scene in Uvalde.
In addition to the photos of Sam that were spread around the internet as photos of the shooter, there is another extremely blurry picture circulating of some unknown person in a dress; you can see it in Rules of Meme Believe’s tweet above. This is the photo that Owens claims is the smoking gun.
Some of those spreading these theories online are gullible true believers who are willing to accept any dubious conspiratorial theory that best fits their own ideology without taking even five minutes to check if it’s true. Others are more devious sorts, pushing what they know is fake news in an attempt to distract from the real issues — in this case, the easy availability of guns.
I’m not sure which of the tweeters above fall into which category. But they have achieved one thing together: by flooding social media with an assortment of false narratives they are making it not only more difficult not only to discuss the real issues of this case but also to trust any legitimate news sources at all. And that, quite frankly, is as dangerous for our fragile democracy as a teenager with an assault rifle and some unknown grudges.
UPDATE: Parker Molloy wrote an excellent piece on this mess and on an earlier episode in which Ted Cruz suggested in bad faith that an antiabortion terrorist was actually “a transgendered leftist activist.”
In case you’re wondering, Candace Owens is still at it. (Scroll down past her gardening tweets.)
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Never forget that what broke Candace Owens was a couple of GamerGate victims telling her a doxxing app wasn’t a good idea.