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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I’m so fucking tired
It must be true. IHateYouAll said so.
A trans woman? No Sam is obviously a man. Trans are people who actually transition not just dress up. No he’s not a trans woman. But a cross dressing man.
I’m tied of watching children die and people with the ability to enact change, throw their hands in the air and say “what’re you gonna do?” while shoveling NRA money into their bank accounts
I’m tired of the brain rotted conservative base glomming onto every single conspiracy theory that confirms their own bigotry and allows them to just shrug and ignore the problem.
I’m tired of the governmental response to families having to bury their small children be thoughts and prayers
Fuck your thoughts and your prayers and fuck you too
I know 100% that a lot of these people know that they’re spreading lies. Time spent fighting the misinformation is time that can’t be used to discuss relevant subjects.
Dumb question: if all the victims and their families are really just actors hired to pretend to be killed / mourning, then where do these conspiracy theorists think those actors come from? Like, can they produce the ad(s) for whatever casting call is used to get these actors? Can they point to the agency that represents said actors to make sure they’re paid? And what kind of money do they think these actors are getting paid to play this one role for the cameras then ‘disappear’ for the rest of their lives?
Have they ever explain this anyplace?
@ redsilkphoenix
Part of the ‘crisis actors’ narrative is that Alex Jones types find images of people who superficially resemble some of the victims and claim that they are the same person.
This is so lazy as well as wrong. Like claiming the murderer was from El Salvador…because his first name was Salvador, I guess?
The point of fascist lies is not to be plausible. They are asserting power over the truth.
@Eric
It costs $0.00 to just not.
@ Eric
Congrats on getting so much wrong in one short statement.
First, the shooter’s name is Salvador. Not Sam. And not even Sal, which you were probably trying for. Proofreading is your friend.
Second, there is no evidence that Salvador Ramos was either a transgender individual (as David’s post clearly states) or a cross-dressing individual.
Third, when it comes to identifying who is a transgender person and who is a cross-dressing person, you, Eric, don’t get to decide. It’s the person himself or herself who makes that call.
Once again, Eric — or is it Rric? or possibly Wric? — congrats on a short, stunning performance of deliberate ignorance, trolling, misspelling, and disrespect toward others. But I’m sure you’ve heard this all before.
@Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile):
“Sam” is the trans woman in Georgia whose picture is being spread around as the image of the shooter, due to her superficial resemblance to Salvador Ramos, the actual shooter in Texas. It’s likely he did mean “Sam”, not that it’s any better if he did.
Thanks, Snowberry. I read the post yesterday and completely forgot Sam’s name.
@Redsilkphoenix:
You are absolutely correct, of course, that these conspiracy theories fall apart the moment one tries to follow how it would work logistically. Not to mention the incontrovertible truth that some of them need miraculous levels of organization and secrecy, neither of which is characteristic of government (or of large groups of people in general). The problem is that those invested in conspiracy theories are not interested in taking the theories apart, so they never question the explanations.
I’m so sad about more dead in a mass shooting, and especially more grieving families of small children. I have a dear friend with a little boy who lives in Texas (though not in this part of Texas) and it makes this especially resonate.
I’m angry and disgusted that such a tragedy is being co-opted to spread vicious false information that is being weaponized to hurt more vulnerable people (transwomen, immigrants, POC).
@Eric
Trans people don’t owe you anything, asshole. They don’t need to fulfill whatever nonsense criteria you came up with for what “actually transitioning” means. They aren’t obligated to pass in your eyes before they can be considered as being genuine in their identity.
If Sam says that she’s a woman, then she’s a woman. And you can fuck right off.
Which is just so ridiculous. Anyone who has struggled to tell Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard apart knows that every person on the planet has doppelgangers. I’ve had complete strangers start conversations with me because they thought I was an acquaintance of theirs. If you’re just going by vague resemblance, that widens the pool exponentially. Putting a random, non-celebrity person into Google image search is going to pull up a bunch of other people, which is probably exactly how Alex Jones types are doing their ‘research’. I suppose you add the word ‘trans’ to the search and that’s how 4chan found Sam.
Just… sitting here thinking about this and Orwell’s concept of doublethink, and how some of these bigots seem to believe that a) the shooting was fake and the kids and teachers were crisis actors, and b) the shooting was real and the kids were murdered by an undocumented trans woman, both at the same time. Not just abandoning consensus reality in favor of fantasy, but throwing out the notion of “reality” entirely, in favor of whichever fantasy at the moment suits their genocidal goals.
Totalitarian movements are horrifying.
Any explanation yet for why the law enforcement “response” to this active shooter made the one on January 6 look positively caffeinated by comparison?
It wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the fact that the victims all had surnames like “Gutierrez”, “Ramirez”, and the like rather than “Smith”, “Telford”, and the like, by any chance, would it?
Also, wtf at @Eric who doesn’t seem able to grasp that you don’t just decide that your trans and then walk into a doc-in-a-box for same-day gender-affirming surgery
What gets me is this argument that we need to turn schools into maximum security prisons. I guess we need to drive home at a young age what freedom truly means in the USA.
Conservatives keep holding up the idea of the society from Equilibrium as an evil bogeyman, but are nevertheless determined to bring such a thing about.
I wonder how many of these people who want schools to be turned into prisons also are the kind of people who believe they are superior because they survived a typical low-supervision 70s type childhood. Schools should have armed guards and metal detectors but wasn’t it great when Mom kicked us out after breakfast and wouldn’t let us in until supper time?
Paul Gosar needs to be impeached and sued for slander. This was definitely reckless disregard of the truth.
@45:
They evidently looked at the whole Number Of The Beast scenario in Christian apocalyptic literature and decided that that would be awesome—as long as they were the ones in charge.
Conservatives keep holding up the idea of the society from Equilibrium as an evil bogeyman, but are nevertheless determined to bring such a thing about.
That whole film struck me as one big first-person shooter precariously propped up by a rickety Idiot Plot (let me get this straight: the elite holy knights are supposed to be above passions and attachments—and they get to marry and have children? Also, why does the Stash Of Forbidden Media in totalitarian dystopias somehow never include porn?) My main reason for watching it was that the magnificent absurdity of a hand-to-hand gunfight was something I had to see.
@Dave:
But with some people, if they couldn’t speak with reckless disregard for the truth, they wouldn’t say much of anything at all!
… Not that I’m seeing a downside to that.
Also, it seems incredible that Candace Owens started off officially trying to be anti-cyberbullying… then flipped her lid when she was told her method wouldn’t work (in part because it would be immediately co-opted by the bullies as another attack vector); fell in with GamerGate after getting told in detail why her system was worse than nothing, and GamerGate did a 180 reversal and accepted her the moment she started feuding with some of their preferred targets; and has since become one of the major black stars of the pro-Trump alt-right. If people are ever confused on how a black woman could be pro-Trump, she’s a perfect example, and it seems to be pretty much entirely ‘liberals hurt my feelings by telling me I was wrong, and conservatives butter me up and tell me I’m right about them’.
@Bakunin
Same.