Tragedy and false equivalence
The press is already “both-sidesing” the response to the attempted assassination on Saturday evening. The New Satesman announces “The alarming rise of BlueAnon,” a left-wing counterpart to the QAnon movement. Liberals flooded the web with conspiracy theories about the shooting within minutes, announces the Washington Post, with speculation that the act was staged. (Yep, that occurred to me upon hearing the news too, but I wouldn’t blast the web with it.)
Suddenly, there’s BlueAnon? Among “major” leftist influencers? That’s news to me (Washington Post):
The shooting threw into overdrive a phenomenon dubbed “BlueAnon” — a play on the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon — that refers to liberal conspiracy theories online. As more Americans lose trust in mainstream institutions and turn to partisan commentators and influencers for information, experts say they are seeing a big uptick in the manufacture and spread of BlueAnon conspiracy theories, a sign that the communal warping of reality is spreading well beyond the right.
“The good-versus-evil paradigm of QAnon has really taken hold of the anti-Trump movement and you’re seeing two sides that feel like they are fighting a battle between good and evil,” said Mike Rothschild, author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.” “It’s coming from major leftist and liberal ‘resistance’ influencers who believe that Trump is so devious that he’d fake his own assassination attempt in order to help his campaign.”
NBC News also highlighted the phenomenon but with more emphasis on the fringe right response. Alex Jones blamed “the deep state.” Posts on X blaming a “prominent Antifa activist” spread with the help of “Russian propaganda accounts, MAGA and Proud Boy channels on Telegram.”
Let me add that I don’t know anyone associated with Antifa and I’m still waiting for my fat checks the fringe right insists people like me receive from George Soros.
Yes, this sort of thing always pops up, even on the left. To my recollection, however, no one on the left has carried an AR-15 into a pizza parlor to rescue innocents from a Satanic, child sex ring run by prominent politicians in a nonexistent basement. It’s primarily a right-wing phenomenon.
Conservatives are quick to decry the politicization of shootings while doing just that. But the press in this case has seized an opportunity to double down on both-sidesing to demonstrate its “balance.” Oh, Left is Left, and Right is Right, and never the twain shall meet. Until tragedy provides an opening for promoting false equivalence.
One of the great unintended consequences of the internet age is how it’s accelerated the spread of misinformation, disinformation and flat-out propaganda by both friends and enemies of western democracies. Those who wish to see democratic freedoms under the feet of authoritarians welcome and feed the spread of thinking that dissolves external reality. We are all infected. But it’s nothing new.
Early on September 11, 2001, a colleague’s wife called him at our construction trailer in northern New Hampshire and said a jet had crashed into one of the twin towers in New York. My first thought was it was an internet rumor. Not exactly.
Hoaxes and rumors had already impacted our culture and sold books and movies even before the internet acted like an accelerant for spreading them.
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