This week:
- Surveying the George Floyd hoaxes.
- The Secret Service grapples with QAnon.
- How to convince anti-mask Trump supporters to buy $20 masks.
George Floyd Hoaxes
As the protests over George Floyd’s death increase, so too has the amount of internet nonsense on the right about Floyd’s death. Below are some of the biggest conspiracy theories that are attracting some of the most craven conspiracy-mongers.
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The Drug Deal Gone Sour
Floyd worked security at Minneapolis’ El Nuevo Rodeo nightclub. So did Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed him. That coincidence has been seized on by right-wing conspiracy theorists claiming that Chauvin killed Floyd over some illegal business related to the nightclub.
Infowars’ Alex Jones was an early adopter of this narrative, pushing the idea that Chauvin and Floyd were somehow involved in drug-dealing together at the club. The excellent Infowars-tracking podcast Knowledge Fight has done a good job debunking Jones’ claims about Floyd, which rely on just implying that sometimes drug-dealing takes place at nightclubs, generally. Jones doesn’t really seem all that committed to the possibility. He relies on his viewers to fill in the gaps from there, with the implication that Chauvin killed Floyd as some sort of payback.
But that’s just about par for the course for Jones, who has seen his prominence wane lately. Disturbingly, though, this theory has also made its debut on the right’s biggest stage: Fox News. On Wednesday, Fox News host Jesse Watters picked up Jones’ baton.
“They worked at the same club together, a nightclub which had a lot of suspicious activity,” Watters said. “People should be looking into the nightclub. Was it a front for something?”
Watters went on to suggest Floyd was killed in a deliberate hit.
“This was some sort of criminal thing that went haywire, and this was a hit that was executed extremely poorly,” he said.
The appeal of this narrative, of course, is that it tars Floyd, suggests that Chauvin is a “crooked” cop whose actions can’t be held against other police officers, and gets away from the question of structural racism in policing. But it’s not without its holes and drawbacks. Not only is there no proof that Chauvin was motivated by anything related to the nightclub, but it would also mean that the Minneapolis police felt emboldened enough to carry out an execution in broad daylight, while being videoed.
It’s Fake / The “Cash Cab” Guy Did It
Naturally, in the post-Sandy Hook truther world, there’s also a false-flag narrative claiming variously that Floyd’s death was staged, set up, or conducted entirely by “crisis actors” paid to play roles in the Floyd video.
It’s hard to get a handle on this theory, because it relies more on knee-jerk skepticism than on any hard bits of proof. But it’s popular enough that a Republican county chairwoman in Texas speculated that Chauvin was brainwashed by a CIA mind-control experiment.
Alternatively, a handful of QAnon conspiracy theorists have just assumed that Cash Cab host Ben Bailey dressed up as Chauvin and carried out the murder. The only proof for this claim is that they’re both bald.
Fake Protester Stories
Amid some genuine violence and vandalism during the protests, false stories have proliferated on the right attributing exaggerated violence to the protesters—often in order to justify police action against protesters who otherwise seem peaceful.
Fox Nation host Lara Logan and others have promoted a years-old document supposedly laying out elaborate antifa plans for violence.
The document, which comes for unclear origins and has circulated for years, claims to organize left-wing antifascist demonstrators, but is almost certainly a hoax that’s been repurposed yet again for the Floyd protests. Logan claimed the bogus document was proof that activists had infiltrated police departments.
An “antifa” tweet promising to terrorize “white hoods” gained traction, until it turned out to be the creation of white nationalist group Identity Europa. And after an Egyptology professor tweeted about how to pull down obelisks, with the implication that the information could be used to pull down a Confederate monument in Alabama, right-wing personalities claimed instead that she was providing info on how to use ropes to pull down the Washington Monument—a project that would require tens of thousands of people.
But maybe the strangest claim about the protesters came on Tuesday, when Pizzagate promoter and perennial Right Richter character Jack Posobiec claimed that “crates” of pipe bombs had been discovered at the Korean War Memorial. Posobiec’s allegation exploded on the right, prompting blog posts from the likes of The Gateway Pundit and even a real-life Park Police search of the monument. But as it turned out, the pipe bombs never existed, according to the Park Police. Posobiec’s claim was completely made up.
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Secret Service Fields Calls About QAnon Kooks
I recently got some Secret Service documents I’d requested that mention “QAnon,” the conspiracy theory that now has its own Senate candidate.
While I had been looking for proof that the Secret Service banned QAnon clothes from Trump rallies—something they’ve denied, in the face of plenty of evidence—I learned something else instead. Specifically, the Secret Service has had several strange encounters with QAnon believers.
In 2018, for example, a QAnon believer tried to get into the White House, convinced that “Q”—the mystery person behind the conspiracy theory—worked there and wanting to meet with her. She told Secret Service agents that Q had sent her a message to come to the White House and that she’d learned who was going to be arrested in the “40,000 sealed indictments,” a fictitious set of indictments that have a talismanic role in QAnon culture.
“I’m where Q told me to go,” she said, according to the Secret Service report.
Eventually, the woman went away, but not before being baffled that she couldn’t meet with Q.
“When [agents] told [redacted] she was at the White House and ‘Q’ did not work at this location, she became very confused,” the report reads.
In another case, a QAnon believer visited a district office of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to explain that she had a plan to prove that QAnon is real. While Gaetz is one of Trump’s most ardent congressional defenders, Gaetz’s staff were freaked out enough by her visit to contact the Secret Service.
“The meeting was rather uncomfortable even for me,” one Gaetz staffer wrote to the Secret Service.
The woman, who claimed to be a former professional nanny for “VIPs,” had a plan. Like many other QAnon believers, she was desperate for a White House reporter to ask Trump whether QAnon is real. In QAnon lore, this would somehow be the big moment QAnon is proven accurate. They’re so convinced that they’ve relentlessly hounded prominent White House reporters to bully them into asking the question. So far, they’ve found no takers.
Frustrated, this QAnon believer thought she could use the security clearance she allegedly obtained while nannying to pose as a reporter and ask “the question” herself, presumably with help from Gaetz’s staff.
“She even volunteered herself to act as a fake reporter and blend in with the press pool,” the report reads.
Obviously, the Secret Service wasn’t thrilled to hear about someone who planned to assume a false identity to sneak into the White House. The documents don’t make clear how the case was resolved.
The records request also revealed some sad news for QAnon believers convinced that I’m about to be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, a popular fate QAnon fans imagine for their critics.
According to the FOIA response, the Secret Service has been internally using one of my articles, along with other stories on the conspiracy theory, to explain to one another what QAnon is when the Secret Service encounters QAnon believers. Another day, another military tribunal avoided!
Masks Off
Like other entrepreneurially minded people during the coronavirus pandemic, pro-Trump personality Brandon Straka has decided to sell his own masks. But unlike a lot of other mask-mongers, Straka faces a unique problem: Many of his fans are convinced the masks are a symbol of submission to Democratic control.
Straka, a former hairdresser, has been a conservative figure of some renown since 2018, when he launched the “#Walkaway” movement, which urges minority groups to “walk away” from the Democratic Party. While it’s not clear that Straka has actually won many votes, it has given him a platform of nearly 250,000 Facebook fans. Some of them, Straka hoped, would want to buy masks.
But announcing his plans to sell Walkaway masks for a whopping $20 per mask, Straka found himself deluged with angry comments accusing him of being a tool of social control.
“A lot of people think that to wear a mask is a very liberal, Democrat thing to do,” Straka told me.
Straka rushed to Facebook to assure his fans that he didn’t support wearing masks. He just wanted to sell them to people for $20!
“I (Brandon Straka here writing this) do not personally support wearing the masks because of my beliefs regarding social compliance,” Straka wrote on Facebook, adding that he was “staunchly against being forced into a social dogma which doesn’t seem well studied in the first place.”
Yet Straka is still selling the masks. He says he doesn’t blame Walkaway fans who don’t want to buy them, though. In his telling, many of them think wearing a mask is a sign you’ve been fooled by the Fake News.
“They don’t want to physically demonstrate to the rest of the world that they trust the liberal media,” Straka said.
