The More Thorough the Debunking, the Deeper Conspiracists Dig In

The IG report on the FBI's activities on January 6 was immediately twisted by the MAGA Right.

Earlier this month I wrote about ongoing efforts to whitewash the events of January 6, 2021, almost four years removed from that fateful day. I described how much of the endeavor still relies on pushing false narratives and cartoonish conspiracy theories. One such angle, as I’m sure many of you have heard over the years from the MAGA-right, is that it was undercover FBI agents (not Donald Trump and his two months of “stolen election” lies) who instigated the violence.

Why did the FBI (notably under Trump at the time) order this false-flag operation, where bureau agents posing as Trump supporters incited the riot? According to the conspiracists, it was to entrap and jail Trump’s followers.

It was always a dopey claim, but that’s how shameless scapegoating typically looks. And last week the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz (who was hailed by Trump supporters five years ago for exposing FBI misconduct in the Russia investigation), put out a report that hammered a nail in the coffin of the “false flag” narrative.

The number of FBI agents among the January 6 rioters, the report states, was exactly zero.

But the MAGA conspiracy crowd wasn’t discouraged. Not by a long shot. They ignored the egg on their faces, and smugly claimed vindication!

Vice President-elect JD Vance scolded those who had appropriately labeled the bogus charge against the FBI “a dangerous conspiracy theory.”

“Legacy media lies,” declared Elon Musk, one of the richest and most consequential men in the world, reacting to the IG report that largely confirmed the legacy media’s reporting.

“If you uttered the facts in this IG report last year, you were labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist’…” tweeted Vivek Ramaswamy, though the conspiracy theorists were (and remain) on the opposite side of the facts in the IG report.

You can be forgiven for being confused, since it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I’ll try my best to explain it anyway…

You see, while there were no FBI agents among the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, there were 26 confidential FBI informants (also known as confidential human sources) among the thousands in attendance that day. Four of them entered the Capitol, and 13 entered a restricted area outside of the Capitol.

The “false flag” promoters and panderers decided, for rhetorical purposes, that agents and informants are a distinction without a difference… which would apparently mean that Team Conspiracy had it right all along.

Unfortunately for them, the facts don’t line up anywhere close to their feelings.

For starters, like a funny uncle who’s been known on occasion to wear a “Federal Boob Inspector” shirt, FBI informants are not FBI employees. They are compromised defendants (the type of low-lifes you’d expect to show up at an unruly, ultimately criminal event) who provide the bureau with information.

Of those 26 informants, as stated in the report, none “were authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”

Were any of the informants following a directive by the bureau that day? Yes, actually. Three were tasked with observing and reporting on suspects in unrelated domestic terrorism cases. The rest were there of their own accord.

In other words, what the IG report did was shred the “false flag” narrative, not bolster it.

People like Vance, Musk, and Ramaswamy are smart enough to understand this, but they have a political base that needs pandering to at times like these. So, they did what Steve Bannon likes to call, “flood the zone with shit.” The goal at such times is to disorient, not clarify. And judging by the masses on social-media currently gloating that their conspiratorial trash has been proven correct, it seems to have worked.

That’s the easy thing about being a modern conspiracy theorist. You never actually have to produce a promised apple to claim victory. You just have to point to an orange.

The “Stop the Steal” campaign after the 2020 election is another example. The charge from Trump and his supporters was that vote counts had been manipulated, whether by voting machines or election officials, giving Joe Biden an unjust and illegal win.

Since then, numerous recounts, audits, and fraud-investigations have only further confirmed Biden’s victory. Yet the same stop-the-stealers continue to cry foul. They just take a different tack when you pin them down for specifics. They gripe about mail ballots. They scoff at the notion that 81 million Americans would ever vote for Joe Biden. They evoke Mark Zuckerberg’s voter-outreach funding, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and a biased media. And up until recently, they’d tell you to watch the film “2,000 Mules,” which has been so thoroughly debunked that it was pulled from distribution, and apologized for by its disgraced director, Dinesh D’Souza.

For those keeping score (as JD Vance might say), none of that amounts, in any tangible way, to the actual manipulation of votes… which was the entire premise of the “Stop the Steal” claim. It’s just speculative grievance — succulent oranges in absence of a shiny apple.

Remember that story, also advanced by Vance, about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs? The claim famously made it all the way to a presidential debate earlier this year, where it was presented as fact by current president-elect, Donald Trump.

At the local level, the news-media, law-enforcement, and even Republican political leaders figured out pretty quickly that there was absolutely no truth to it (and they loudly stated so). But that didn’t matter because alternative “proof” had emerged. It came in the form of a wild (and already apologized for) suspicion by a cat-owner who couldn’t find her beloved “Miss Sassy” for a few days. It came in the form of an alleged “cat barbecue” by non-Haitians in Dayton a year earlier (where the videoed meat on a grill appeared to have talons). Oh yeah, there was also that photo of a random dude of color carrying a dead goose across a Columbus street.

Oranges, oranges, everywhere!

It was enough to keep the politically self-serving fear-strategy intact all the way up until election day, including on Trump campaign material. Heck, I drove past this very semi-trailer (and at least two more just like it) here in Northern Colorado numerous times. They were parked along Interstate-25 and major highways through November 5th.

The Right, of course, doesn’t have a monopoly on politically nurturing conspiracy theories and zone flooding. The months and months of aforementioned “Russian collusion” claims, for example, turned out to be an embarrassing flop for the Left. But these days, it’s a far more frequent and consequential practice on the Right — where even individuals (including some of the most powerful people in the world), who don’t explicitly push such obvious and dangerous hoaxes, still feel obligated to justify or rationalize them.

And sadly, since it keeps working on millions and millions of Americans (not just the fringe, like in the old days), I don’t expect the situation to change anytime soon. The public trust, our public safety, and important institutions will continue to suffer the consequences.