Antifa Strikes Again
The conspiracy nutters are nuttering overtime.
My only appropriate response to the attempted assassination of adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump, whom the Republicans are unable to replace with a credible candidate for president, was Secret Service Failure. My hot take would have been just as irrelevant as all the rest were within hours of the event, but Carol Leonig’s book on the rise and fall of the Secret Service is required reading for those seeking a deeper understanding.
I ignored the news, spent some time on Neo4j’s GraphAcademy, cleaned my hut, and took my typical biphasic sleep schedule nap. Now that the initial wave of useless hot takes has crested and the conspiracy theorists are theorizing in earnest, it’s a good time for me to provide some additional material for y’all to review.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Strip down to your undies, grab your favorite pair of crazypants, and get in - we’re going conspiratard hunting. If you aren’t involved in incident response where conspiracists are active, this might sound like a foreign language …
This was drafted a few hours after the assassination attempt, then scheduled for Monday morning, hence the slightly off base time references in it. I’m just going to let it go as is, there’s no material difference if I update it. I’m including this notice so nobody thinks Substack is holding stuff up for a day and a half.
Deep History:
When conspiracy nutters involve me in their conspiracy theories, that’s a license for me to treat them like lab rats in an approach avoidance test. My mode of operation has changed, and Confessions Of A Conspiracy Broker is a review of some historic fun back in the day. The important bit from that article is this:
The Conspiracy Brokers are a Subgenius culture jamming effort against weaponized conspiracy theorists, which seeks to create a therapeutic double bind, playing on their mental quirks, as inventoried in the Recursive Fury paper. They experience a feeling of empowerment when they find “dots” and “connect” them. If they so much as entertain the existence of this group, by implication they are NOT empowered, they’re “sheeple”. The broker they are in conflict with is always going to best them, being an agent of whatever shadowy, nefarious “they” the conspiracist fears the most.
The person that features most heavily in the extant material on the Conspiracy Broker blog is a psychiatrically challenged former journalist named Ron Brynaert, whom I profiled in Scientology’s Dullest Tool. His Twitter account, @ronbryn, proudly announces he was once the executive editor at Raw Story. He neglects to mention he lost that job fourteen years ago, he got on my nerves thirteen years ago, and I finally socially engineered him into some behavior that cost him his sealed settlement with the company twelve years ago. I don’t hate the dude, he’s a victim of various bad actors, I’m just way past weary of being made to participate in his mental illness.
If you could see what’s been shifted to private there are other characters that got the business end of my displeasure - a psychiatrically challenged attorney in Virginia, a corpulent conspiratard detective in Texas and his drunken, drugged attorney sidekick, a defective detective true crime obsessive in the DFW area, and some reality TV vermin, first among them being James “Pissboy” McGibney.
So those are my bona fides, I’ve been dealing with stuff like this since 2010 and I set the occasional Psychic Snare when some particularly bothersome nutter wont’t take a hint.
Recursive Fury:
I tried to get back into the @RecursiveFury Twitter account a couple weeks ago. But I’ve misplaced the login information and in any event the platform is an absolute cesspool, there’s little point in my contributing further fuckery at this point. But there is great value in your poking around in the Hacker Cultural Attache Training folder and reading the actual Recursive Fury paper. You’ll find there are half a dozen mental twists that make up the conspiracist mindset.
Nefarious Intent - surprise birthday parties are conspiracies, too, but in the conspiracy nut world they are always malign.
Persecution-Victimization - the conspiracist and their fellow travelers are the intended victims of the nefarious intent.
Nihilistic Skepticism - facts that do not fit their conspiracist worldview are easily discarded.
No Accidents - there’s an almost animist world view, everything that happens is being directed by some powerful, shadowy foe.
Must Be Wrong - even when absolutely cornered with superior evidence, the official explanation is never to be trusted.
Self-Sealing - when presented with superior evidence debunking a conspiracy theory, the theorist will simply expand the theory to include that source’s involvement in the coverup.
While conspiratorial thinking isn’t in the DSM V, as it’s not a problem with brain chemistry, brain structure, or character, this cluster of attributes may one day qualify as a faulty character type. Not explicitly laid out in Recursive Fury is the fact that conspiracists typically have trouble assessing competence in others. This is how you get 9,000+ scientific papers on anthropogenic climate change, but you see a pack of nutters cling to that lone state climatologist who fuels their nuttery. A single person with some sort of credentials, even if they’re not closely related to the issue at hand, will often get lionized by the conspiratard masses, if they provide some sort of intellectual sounding backing to their theories.
Violent Antifa:
There has been an ongoing effort to demonize “violent Antifa” since the George Floyd protests began. This ignores the fact that there are precisely two deaths attributed to Antifa over the last thirty one years - a neo-Nazi named Eric Banks was shot in 1993, and a Patriot Prayer member named Aaron Danielson in 2021. Both instances involve violent individuals intruding into communities where they did not live and they both appear to have been self defense.
This is one of my favorite images of first generation violent Antifa, posing with a stolen banner.
Today, before the echoes of the shots faded away, the usual suspects were busy on Twitter, sniveling about the Antifa assassin that almost got Cheetolini. Fast forward a couple hours and the deceased twenty year old U.S. Army cook who fired the AR-15 is found to be a registered Republican. There will be a furious hunt for something … anything … that can be used to make it look like it was a leftist plot, then they will reach for the boilerplate language in warrant for the FBI Mar A Lago raid as proof that President Biden is somehow involved.
The same thing happened with the January 6th Capitol Siege. Random people in black were determined to be Antifa provocateurs. Despite three and a half years of intense attention on the crowd, there has been precisely ONE nominal Antifa member identified - John Sullivan, the guy who made the Ashli Babbitt shooting video.
So this guy, who was kicked out of every protest group he ever joined in the Pacific Northwest, and whose brother James is a member of the Proud Boys, is the lone antifascist, who must be responsible for the entire January 6th attack. Clearly, he was using those demonic crazy eyes to hypnotize innocent conservatives who’d wandered under the chemtrails on the way into D.C. …
I know, I know, it’s PAINFULLY stupid, you actually lost brain cells parsing that.
But this is it, this is the United States, four months before November’s Civil War Referendum, and some twenty year old Republican with an assault rifle has just given his all in an effort to set the blood flowing.
Conclusion:
I can usually make out the possible paths conspiracy nuts will take given the “dots” that are available for them to “connect”, but this is an international scope problem, not the tempest in a teacup sized things I personally faced. The Catholic Integralist/Prosperity Gospel heretics/Qanon fault lines in the religious right are nightmare fuel, the same sort of conditions that gave Europe the Thirty Years’ War. I cheer … and cringe … at every new article I see on Leonard Leo’s corruption of the Supreme Court. Something MUST be done, but disputing matters of divine right always ends with a river of blood. This is why, after two years of study at the turn of the century, I selected a new direction that had nothing to do with any of the Abrahamic religions.
Last night I was doing some background reading on Germany’s Kulturkampf, which might be a better model in some ways for what is happening than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Better in terms of prediction, but not at all in terms of the future we all face. The cold civil war that began on January 6th three years ago is starting to wind up, and we’ve got a long, hot summer ahead of us.