The False Flag Problem

If everything is a criminal conspiracy, then nothing is

It was 2018 when the problem first became clear to me.

We were in California on the edges of the Camp Fire, better known as the deadliest wildfire in the history of the state, manning a brushfire engine and working our way through threatened neighborhoods evaluating and prepping houses for the insurance companies we were contracted to. It was a weird experience, having a relatively chill daily routine that was around 50% lawn work to reduce fuel around a house and 65% or so paperwork, but with an apocalypse happening just out of frame and constantly looming over our shoulders as we planned our routes to balance efficiency with availability of Starbucks.

Yes, I was one of those private firefighters for a stint; doubled up on the filthy private sector by not even being hired out to the government. I figure that I put in enough unpaid traffic control on freezing nighttime highways in the same time period to balance the karma out.

We rolled into our work days in a historic disaster zone with sandwiches from a Safeway deli in hand and passed burned cars in ditches taped off by fire investigators on our commute, which could only mean that they had been found with bodies inside. I was lucky enough that my engine was not one that went into the ruin of Paradise city itself as the incident wound down, coworkers who’d worked in medical fields before could pick out the smell of burned human flesh from certain houses, but even disregarding the fatal car chase that ended within a mile of our engine, working every day a short drive away from one of the worst tragedies in recent American history left a weird feeling that lingered for a long time.

It could be that any brush with loss of life and the destruction of an entire town is troubling by nature, but it could also be that people kept trying to talk to me about how the fire was really started with lasers.

This is a narrative that everyone has been exposed to by a Facebook uncle at this point, so I won’t dedicate too much page space to my amateur retelling of its origins and spread. I will, however, let loose for a minute on why it has never made me any less mad than the first time I heard it: The conspiracy only sounds plausible if you never ask a firefighter a single question in the course of doing your own research.

Two houses are next to each other in a suburb: One has a good clear space of flat land devoid of major fuel around it, all the polyurethane porch furniture stowed away, air and dryer vents closed off or taped over, windows shut, and any other fuel like wood piles or bushes cleared away from the walls; The other is a hoarder house with attic windows propped permanently open and every square inch of property jammed with traps for hot embers from leaf-clogged gutters to stacks of scavenged furniture and forever ‘project’ vehicles.

These two houses, in the professional opinion of TikTok conspiracy theorists, have exactly the same chance of burning. Any difference really comes down to which looks more offensive from above to the little Jewish man who drew the short straw and got shut inside the weapon satellite, like a sacrificial Russian space dog.

Nevermind, of course, the one fact that kind of kneecaps the entire story of the space laser: Even if you are starting a major wildfire with directed energy weapons, once it gets going it’s going to behave like a regular fire because it is one. Further orbital strikes would be unnecessary, leaving no telltale inconsistencies or risk of accidentally starving your first inferno by starting a backfire in its path. If there were any space scorching from Star Wars program leftovers, it would be in the undeveloped land around Paradise City where the fire started, with absolutely no need to keep painting targets with particle beams or pulsed plasma along the advancing fire front.

So why do fire be the way that is, if not for Hebrew SciFi Assault? It is not, in fact, unusual that a house made of particle board and stuffed with synthetic materials that burn at better than 1000 degrees F will turn into a pile of char on cracked concrete, while a healthy green tree surrounded by short green grass or bare dirt will survive. It is, in fact, completely normal for a forest fire to leave islands of unburned trees and scrub in the midst of burned-over black due to variables in weather and terrain driving fire behavior. None of these require the concentrated power of the sun directed at an unfortunate target

Thus all evidence for space lasers turns to smoke and blows away on scrutiny, unless you want to argue that wildfires cannot spread on their own at all. This would allege that every wildfire in the history of the service has been us serving as the butt of a grand joke by the Space Jews, while we confuse correlation and causation. It’s less plausible (One wonders how they got up there as early as 1910), but it is at least consistent. This kind of thing is generally why I find it easier to respect the people who insist that the entire moon is fake and all of astronomy is a hoax than those who are 95% living in my reality and find some usually political reason to be contrarian anyway.

It’s the people in the latter group that I was having problems with, since I seemed to be surrounded by more and more of them all the time. It had been happening since the beginning of the fire season, when too many of my colleagues seemed convinced that the historically awful fire season was the work of Antifa arsonists operating nationwide to burn America down. I kept having the same conversation again and again, asking them where they heard that or pointing out the myriad ways that it made no sense, only for the conversation to turn tense and awkward when neither of us could find the news articles about arrests or videos of masked antifascists claiming credit they claimed they’d seen earlier that day. It became more and more clear that behind every ‘trust me bro, I saw the headline’ was an unsourced Facebook meme that they’d taken as fact without any double checking.

I would like to think that I would have seen all the problems with the narrative on my own, regardless of my own personal politics, but by this point I was already feeling the dissonance when someone would spout off about BLM being a domestic terrorist organization and I would grit my teeth and keep quiet for the sake of not having an argument that would last for the entire 2 week work assignment.

Many people were too knowledgeable to believe in laser fires, but could accept arson because it reinforced something they already wanted to believe about a political enemy. It didn’t matter whether it was true, the point was the feeling of validation, and you can’t argue rationally against an emotional state.

By the time it turned out that the lethal Camp fire had been unleashed by a Rothschild family special attack, I was absolutely out of patience. Not just because it was stupid and frankly disrespectful of my entire profession, but because it took heat off of real criminals.

Paradise city was a death trap from the day it was built, growing worse over time as developers lobbied the state legislature to keep adding suburbs with a single inadequate escape route while power monopoly PG&E kept passing on strongly worded letters to replace equipment in their vital infrastructure that dated to 1910. There was a conspiracy behind the Camp Fire, a conspiracy of short-sighted greed that indicts all of corporate America.

It’s harder to rally popular demand for consequences, and I do mean real consequences on the order of charges for criminal negligence or Manslaughter, if a third of the country can be convinced that the real cause is a secret cabal of vampires commanding a private space force.

While I was still on the Camp Fire, I knew that no one would ever see a day in prison for their part in the death and destruction, and I knew that when the same sins invoked the same consequences somewhere else we would have learned nothing.

I had no idea that so many national problems would get the space laser treatment.

It became the norm for wildfires of course, with perennial jackass Alex Jones adding it to his evergreen stock of narrative cue-cards as recently as the Maui fires, but the outward spread began to touch every case of corporate negligence or outright random chance in the country. First it was the food plant fires, wrapped up by my small town Facebook associates into a larger conspiracy narrative of planned NWO attacks on the supply chain and food processing facilities to tip the US towards chaos. Perhaps an over centralized supply chain stressed by the pandemic and short-sighted focus on quarterly profits over capacity and safety could be blamed instead, especially considering the history of lethal factory fires sparked by greed in the United States, but blaming Antifa wraps the problem nicely into a grand narrative of good vs. evil that promises the triumph of the Holy if you just wait it out. Absent Q’s Oncoming Storm, the responsibility for standing up to corporate malpractice for the sake of imperiled workers and the national food supply would fall to us ordinary people, not a Christlike super-savior scheduled to appear in two more weeks.

The next iteration of the pattern to really crowd out my social media was the East Palestine (Ohio) train derailment. What should have been a watershed moment in our popular culture, turning every hand against corporate greed, instead became a roiling mess of conservative pundits jumping into Partisan framing with both feet and yet more conspiracy theory. Instead of indicting the short-sighted regulatory slashing of the Trump administration before an audience of rural blue-collar American voters most likely to be harmed by it, a mass disinformation campaign spreading like a bloodstream infection through small-town Facebook groups and survivalist forums placed the blame on the next most logical culprit: Russian special ops, provoked by Biden’s warmongering into retaliation for the destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline. After all, the placement of the train derailment would seem to have been chosen to maximize contamination of vital waterways, if you’re not prepared to believe that these crashes are happening regularly and buried in the headlines when they’re not disastrous enough.

Wherever that didn’t take hold, a general vicious Sectarianism obscured the real tragedy and complicity of the government behind an argument over whether Trump or Biden really cared more about the people of Ease Palestine. By laying out cover stories designed to inflame arguments in the comments section debating basic reality, the frame was successfully shifted away from railroad executives and a state government who could have found themselves in some very hot water.

So it goes. Opportunistic special interests have rolled the successful conspiracy narratives into ongoing disinformation campaigns, to protect car-centric city planning and fossil fuel profits from the ravages of Marxist 15-minute cities, to protect small towns from the lethal high-frequency vibrations of windmills and the hunger of solar panels that suck all the sunlight from the air around them to deprive neighboring farms, and further have spun even undeniable changes to the seasons and unstable weather into rumors of HAARP weather control experiments by shadowy military organizations.

The result: Atomization, dissolution, apathy, the disintegration of people needed for a mass movement to right these wrongs into prepper pockets who feed the consumerist machine by anxiety-stocking basements with water filter subscriptions and Black Friday deals on Black Rifle accessories. To feed the narrative that every train derailment brought on by cursory inspections, overburdened tracks, overworked crews, and slashed cargo safety regulations is instead the work of foreign saboteurs is not only to sap the strength of opposition, but make them into customers. If every food plant fire is arson by Communist insurgent cells, every deadly wildfire a weapons test or a slash-and-burn operation to clear land for a corporate enclave, and every pandemic a hoax or bioweapon attack aimed at eroding civil liberties, then the people placing the blame on Shareholder Capitalism and corrupt politicians seem childishly naive. No solidarity with people who swallow the bluepilled lamestream news.

For their part, those who have accepted man-made global warming are almost as susceptible to apathy through simple despair, the Doomer Cult as much an obstacle to real change as diverted energy taken up by Doomsday Prepping. In the overlap between is where hardcore nationalists and racists recruit, preaching tribalism as the only path to survival when the climate disaster shatters the frail social contract.

Obviously neither of these are good paths, so what remains? First, we have to look inward and seize the natural impulse to push back completely against idiot conspiracy narratives so that we can strangle it. That kind of reflexive jump to the opposite opinion leads to articles by the NFPA, an institution I personally trust wholeheartedly, putting out blog posts on the food processing fires entitled "Nothing to see here," possibly the worst phrasing imaginable for swaying conspiracy theorists. This is the natural flaw in the way that Liberalism pushes back against right-wing conspiracy theory, being inherently an ideology in defense of the status quo: Taking the exact opposite position to every conspiracy means rejecting even the parts rooted in truth, giving the person speaking out against it the role of unthinkingly defending the system despite all evidence. In a way, they are.

This is one reason why, despite being counterintuitive if you’re looking at politics as a spectrum, farther left-wing content and personalities like the socialist “Breadtube” video essayist ecosystem are often a lot more appealing to the conspiracy-minded than centrism or old-guard moderation. As Libertarians are sometimes just Republicans in the process of discovering that Republicans are bullshit, a conspiracy theorist is sometimes a budding anti-authortarian with the potential to realize that the New World Order was right-wing and viciously capitalist all along.

Second, speaking out against these narratives is not necessarily effective if you bludgeon the right-wing and the propagandized over the head while shouting “No, it is YOU who are being duped!” Think back to every time someone on the other side of the spectrum has done that to you, and reflect on how likely it was to change your mind. Mocking an idiot or an idiotic view has its uses, packaged as an entertaining way to educate readers or to undermine a small demagogue in front of a neutral or persuadable audience it can be very useful (debate bros, for all their faults, are sometimes surprisingly effective at this), but it’s an awful persuasion tactic.

In general, a polite but firm “I disagree, and this is why” is much more effective than an aggressive stance that could make the person you’re trying to persuade feel attacked and entrench in their views even harder. Finding a common belief, especially one that goes against the Neoliberal mainstream, is often an excellent wedge in a defensive barrier. Showing that you have a viewpoint that they also believe to be obvious or evidence-based, but unpopular, helps establish a little anchor point of shared reality to build on, and demonstrates that you’re not necessarily just believing what you’re told by pop culture.

Of course, sometimes you cannot humor a belief. There is no honest way to respond to, “Well, the next thing the Gay Rights people are going to do is try to legalize pedophilia” except by dropping your mild tone and declaring that that’s a malicious goddamn lie. It’s up to you to determine where your line is, but being reasonable is not always the right response.

Third, the long and slow-burning persuasion campaign that comes from having honest conversations with the conspiracy people in your life over time, leveraging personal relationships and their knowledge of you as an individual to make the case for sincerity. If your conspiracy friend knows you double-check news articles and see through some of the same bullshit that they do, they are more likely over a long span of time to give you more benefit of the doubt than they would to a stranger. The upshot of this is that it requires you to maintain personal relationships with people who listen to Alex Jones in some capacity, which is natural for me as someone who lives in a very gun-toting conservative town and has a social circle consisting mostly of militia-sympathetic Trump voters in my three-dimensional real life. This may be a tall order for some people, but it can be as simple as striking up conversations with your neighbors who are normally siloed away from you in a separate parallel America.

I may sound a little too hopeful, but I have some reason: In the too-long stretch of time since I started working on this piece, I had my first experience of a believer in laser satellites really listening to my somewhat-expert opinion on what car and forest fires look like and taking it to heart. He may still be out there following Telegram channels that post about BalenciaGate and stray dangerously close to Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but he does know that Maui was not painted with a space gun.

Even counting small victories, having too much hope is far more productive than having none.