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Welcome back to False Flag! Next week, the emotional former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino will finally be in a position to make real change in this country: as a podcaster!
Despite working for less than a year at the FBI, Bongino made a lot of enemies in right-wing media, both by not arresting high-profile Democrats and for insisting that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Having had to restrain himself as a government employee working out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, he now appears ready to take on his detractors from behind a mic. For example, after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos called Bongino a “pedophile’s pit bull” on Tuesday, Bongino dredged up Yiannopoulos’s own remarks downplaying pedophilia.
What grievances will Bongino settle? Will his fans hold the whole Epstein files coverup against him? These are important questions, not just for a sicko like me.
That’s because Bongino returns to a right-wing media industry that is less tethered to reality than ever. His reception will say a lot about the state of the movement. As does the hot topic of today’s newsletter, which is on right-wing media’s insistence that Rep. Ilhan Omar staged an attack on herself on Tuesday just to come off as cool. It’s conspiratorial, a bit depraved, and totally devoid of humanity. Just my cup of tea. Admit it, you love it too. Subscribe to The Bulwark, fellow sicko.
–Will
Did Ilhan Omar Stage Her Attack? Of Course Not. But Trump Thinks So.
A real false flag story for your favorite False Flag newsletter.
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Ilhan Omar Nuttiness
AT A TOWN HALL GATHERING in Minneapolis on Tuesday night, a troubled man sprayed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) with a mysterious substance from a syringe. It was a scary moment, one that underscored how widespread political threats and acts of violence have become. But on right-wing media, it quickly became something else: a false-flag assault designed to let Omar aura farm.
MAGA media figures spent much of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning insisting that Omar had somehow made the suspect, Anthony James Kazmierczak, spray her with the mysterious substance, which they concluded was likely apple cider vinegar. Much of the suspicion focused on the fact that Omar appeared ready to fight her assailant, before her security guard pulled the man away.
Popular MAGA X user “Zeek Arkham” (484,000 followers) wryly declared the incident “totally, totally wasn’t staged.”
Breaking down the incident as if it were the Zapruder film, Arkham wrote: “She then bravely runs towards him, without reflexive safety reaction as most people would do, to tune him up as her security gets there, without concern for her own safety. Then, instead of taking her to a hospital to get checked out regarding this unknown liquid, she continues her speech as if nothing happened.”
Lest you think this is just the musings of a hyper-online rando, the president of the United States—himself hyper-online but hardly a rando—picked it up too.
“She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” Donald Trump told ABC News.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) had the same thought, declaring the attack “staged” in an appearance on Benny Johnson’s show.
In a world where the January 6th riot happened—and elected officials are regularly the targets of violence—the idea that a kook would attack Omar doesn’t seem far-fetched. That’s especially true considering how much Trump and fellow conservatives have verbally attacked the congresswoman in recent weeks, accusing her of corruption and criticizing her home city of Minneapolis.
But to acknowledge that Omar was, indeed, threatened would require the right to grapple with the possibility that Trump’s rhetoric may have inspired the threat. And so, they’ve chosen to reflexively argue that Omar concocted the entire thing.
Conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler claimed Omar made some kind of “head nod” toward the suspect before the incident, even demanding an investigation of the congresswoman. Many others, perhaps revealing more than they’d like about their own fortitude, questioned Omar’s decision to charge at the man even after he sprayed her (the congresswoman told MSNow on Wednesday that she thought he had spit on her and that she “instinctively tried to, like, punch him.”) Some online accounts noted that the alleged assailant appears to have goth kids—a non sequitur to people outside of the right-wing media bubble but taken as proof within it that Kazmierczak must be a member of Antifa.
Hyperpartisans on both sides of the aisle are prone to act in ways that are defensively conspiratorial in these types of moments. In the immediate aftermath of the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt on Trump, there was a flood of social media posts claiming that it was fake.
But the new Omar conspiracy theory is being pushed by the actual president and a sitting U.S. senator. And that’s not the only reason it stands out. It also reflects, like so many other things in the Trump era, the right’s refusal to grapple honestly with news events whose implications they don’t like. School shootings are false-flag attacks meant to promote gun control. Wildfires have to be started by lasers fired fro