Conspiratorial Acrobatics
By now you've probably heard the claim that actually it was Antifa behind the events of January 6th as a false flag attack to make Trump supporters look bad. Maybe the highest profile booster of this claim was Representative Matt Gaetz who said this on the floor of the House the same day this happened.
It brings to mind a This American Life episode from 2015 about the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist. The right-wing community of Israel appeared to have been very embarrassed that "one of their own" committed an assassination, so what has settled in the aftermath were various theories alleging that Yigal Amir, the assassin, was a patsy who was framed and that Rabin faked his death for political purposes.
The part about the TAL episode that seriously haunted me was when they were interviewing Yigal's brother, Hagai, who was an accomplice to the plot, around the 55min mark. Hagai was interviewed while living with his parents after being released from prison. He described exactly how they had concealed a pistol while riding a bus to the assassination attempt. Hagai's mother chimes in during the interview and excoriates him to "tell the truth", and she does this by Just Asking Questions about whether it was possible that a highly-trained Mossad pickpocket took the loaded pistol from Yigal and replaced every bullet with blanks. In her mind, it apparently makes sense for her son to acquire and take a loaded pistol with the full intent of assassinating the prime minister of his country, but she still is trying to interject this superseding event implicating a vast and intricate web of subterfuge, all apparently with the same goal of snuffing Rabin? It reminds me of course of the claim that the Twin Towers were not brought down by the effortlessly and crudely effective method of just throwing an airplane full of jet fuel at a building, but instead it was thousands of pounds of demolition charges snuck into the building covertly over the course of several weeks.
I have a hard time understand how this mindset is supposed to work. In each instance, a deeply uncomfortable truth is countered by utterly implausible alternative which necessarily requires increasingly elaborate theories to plug the plot holes. The best that I can come up with is that this is what the brain is capable of when someone is faced with overwhelming evidence which shakes someone's foundational convictions to the core. It can't be Trump supporters who defiled America's symbolic seat of government resulting in 5 people dead, it has to be Antifa behind this. And I won't hide my opinion on a similar dynamic: "It can't be that Trump lost an election, it has to be a child-raping cabal conducting widespread election fraud with the help of Hugo Chavez and China."
There is also a parallel dynamic at play which is muddying the waters, and one which takes into account how fluid societal affiliations can be. The person behind the best situated footage of Ashli Babbitt's killing was someone named "Jayden X". His Twitter account was curiously only created last month. It's difficult to parse fact from fiction within this area, but journalist Radley Balko has concluded that Jayden X is actually John Sullivan aka "Activist John" (Jayden X has "activist john" in his Twitter bio but I can't tell if he's being sarcastic or actually confirming it) who has been present at many BLM protests. John Sullivan has been previously called out by leftist activists back in late November as a "likely infiltrator/agent provocateur" and a warning bulletin was issued for him. This, in turn, is heralded as prime evidence that BLM and Antifa were behind the events of January 6th.
And of course, relevant 4chan screenshot:
