Just one day after the shooting at the Los Angeles International airport, right-wing pro-gun activists are already calling the shooting a “false flag.”
Among those disrespecting the victims are the usual suspects: Alex Jones and Before Its News both published articles claiming the shooting was staged. As usual, their “reasoning” is a hash of non-sequiturs and fabricated claims.
Kurt Nimmo, writing for Alex Jones’ Infowars, points out a few instances in which the media initially misreported facts about the incident. For example, there were initial reports that the suspect was a TSA agent. As we know now, the suspect in custody was not a TSA agent. Early reports are often wrong in a fast-breaking news story. During the Boston Bombing (also called a “false flag” by Alex Jones), initial reports of an arrest by CNN proved wrong, and the NY Post even put two completely innocent people on their front cover.
Ironically, the news media is a frequent target of Alex Jones’ for its supposed lack of accuracy. In one video, Jones said that the “Daily Lies by Govt. Controlled Media are getting ridiculous.” Yet, Jones seems to think it highly unlikely that the media would misreport a story. When confronted with an early news report that a TSA agent was involved, he immediately takes it as fact. Conspiracy theorists often cling onto one misreported fact and use it as gospel to try to discredit later reports through contradiction.
Paul Watson of Infowars wonders whether the “LAX Shooting [Will] Be Exploited to Arm TSA Agents?” Maybe that would be a good idea considering that airport security is being threatened by paranoid anti-government nuts? Alex Jones never wants to solve our nation’s problems.
Another one of his website’s articles mentions that the police were training for a security breach a whole 3 weeks ago. That article makes me feel safer. The police should be trained. If they aren’t trained, they might not be able to handle such attacks.
The worst argument from the false flag community is that the suspect’s name is Paul Ciancia. At first I thought, so what? His name could have been John Smith. What would that mean? It would just be a name. But then I read someone arguing that, because the CIA is an organization that carries out clandestine operations, and because the suspects name has the letters CIA in it, that proves the CIA was involved in creating a false flag attack.
But actually, someone’s last name has nothing to do with whether they work for the CIA or not. In fact, if the CIA did give all of their agents fake names that conveniently spelled out who they worked for, that would kind of blow their cover, wouldn’t it? What kind of a moron thinks that someone who wants to conduct a secret operation would intentionally tell everyone who they were? Why wasn’t the suspect named John Imaciaagent? Or Steve Falseflagtotakeawayyourguns?
It feels stupid to have to write the above paragraph, but I had to address that argument. Maybe Alex Jones will read this article and learn why he’s wrong.
At Before Its News, Johnny Cirucci, a Ron Paul and Ronald Reagan activist, raises many of the same arguments as Infowars, and he adds that he thinks the government is trying to blame a right-winger for the attack. (According to a note left by the suspect, the suspect was motivated by right-wing pro-gun anti-TSA conspiracy theories.)
Cirucci wrote, “As I chronicled for you in May after the Boston Bombing, the original intent was to blame a Red Neck Patriot but that fell through.” His article on the Boston Bombing stated,
Our own government may be killing American citizens for political gain.
Yet, who were the suspects of the Boston Bombing? Not white Christian right-wing conservatives but Muslim immigrants.
If the government staged a bombing in order to demonize conservatives, then why didn’t they recruit conservatives to conduct the bombing? Duh. (And also, why did actual people die? In the LAX conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorists reported that most of the victims were actually dummies, and indeed that the shooter wasn’t even a real person.)
Right-wing conspiracy theorists will have you think that our government is powerful enough to create a fake shooting rampage but not even powerful enough to overcome Ted Cruz and take our guns away unilaterally. Some will say, if only they could.
Edited by SS
