The Weirdest Stories are the Least Likely PSYOPs
While you're questioning everything, make sure you're questioning the right people
Here’s one of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard. It’s about a guy named Stephen.
Stephen was a relatively successful American in an era of prosperity well suited for an average white American boomer to become successful without too much work. He grew up in Tuscon the eldest of four boys to a single mother. Their father was in prison and Stephen never had much interaction with him.
He did decent grades in school—he was higher than average intelligence, but not a genius intellect—and graduated with a degree in business. He went from there to lead the whitest life that you could come up with: He worked as a postal worker, then an IRS agent, then an auditor, then went into real estate.
He was married twice, divorced twice, but under amicable circumstances and he remained on good terms with both women. No kids, he preferred the freedom. He liked to travel a fair bit and was an amateur pilot.
It was his real estate ventures that earned him the most success and by the early 2010s he was worth a couple of million dollars. Not enough to put him on the cover of Forbes but enough to live out his later years stress free.
Stephen liked to gamble. But that’s not to say that he had a gambling problem. He had enough money to be regarded a high roller, but his affinity for casinos never put him into debt. He may have had a drinking problem, but not enough that he wasn’t functional and whip smart. He was by most accounts pretty apolitical, an atheist, a decent guy, happy, neither unusually isolated nor outgoing. Very law abiding—in keeping with the cliché, the only thing he had on his record was literally a parking ticket.
On the first of October, 2017, Stephen Paddock checked into the Vegas hotel he was staying at, went up to his room on the 32nd floor, opened a window, and casually shot over four hundred people in a spray of bullets that became the worst mass shooting in American history. 60 of them died. When he became satisfied that he’d accomplished whatever the fuck he was trying to do, he put the last bullet in himself, instantly eliminating any chance that any of this might ever be understood.
That’s it, that’s the story.
See, there’s two versions of a crime this heinous—there’s the straight forward one where a dude becomes radicalized through religion or politics or both, gets pushed too far, and snaps. Then there’s the strange one. The one you can’t figure out. The one that doesn’t add up.
Make no mistake, neither version of this story is good enough for conspiracy theorists. The weird stories are too weird and the others are too perfect. Ask your average InfoWars fan and the only tragic crimes that ever occurred as stated in the official narrative are the ones where the official narrative exactly matches the narrative they want to push or believe.
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It’s the weird ones that stir the imagination of the average person, though. The Vegas massacre was notable for being so far out of left field, so bizarre in its total lack of even speculative motive, that even the less conspiratorially inclined had to be a little swayed by the notion that there’s something they’re lying about.
Either Paddock was a patsy, a politically inconvenient operative, or a complete fiction. In any case, it wasn’t some ordinary dude named Steve who decided halfway through his margarita to commit mass slaughter, because that doesn't make sense.
Here’s the problem with that line of reasoning: If you were one of the conspirators in charge of coming up with this kind of cover story—if you were an Illuminatus, or a Man in Black, or a reptile person or just your bog standard human CIA spook—which story would you come up with? The one that makes perfect sense and raises no questions or the one that doesn’t?
If you want, for example, to get rid of two inconvenient buildings and blame a foreign nation for it, then do you orchestrate something believable like a run of the mill bombing, or do you come up with something insane involving multiple plane crashes and try to convince a public that you know is prone to conspiracy theories that that’s what really happened? Why would you make your own job impossible on purpose?
If you’re a deep state agency with intimate personal access to the president, control over his security, and the inside of his house, is the easiest and best way to dispose of that president really to shoot him in public and blame it on a lucky shot from some guy in a building that you also have to assassinate later, also choosing to do so in public? And then you have to give that second assassin cancer somehow?
You probably figured out the point I’m getting to, which involves the recent Texas mall shooting that left 9 people dead, a shooting that conspiracy culture’s usual suspects and key figures on the right including Elon Musk and his toady advisors are steadfastly insisting was not carried out, as the official narrative states, by a neo-Nazi.
Why? Well, it’s one of those weird stories, one of the ones that doesn’t seem to make sense. Primarily, the fact that the shooter was Hispanic.
This is the key detail that has people, sometimes relatively otherwise well-hinged people, utterly rejecting this story. Freelance journalist Michael Tracey, a graduate of the well worn Young Turks to Weird Reactionary Contrarian Pipeline, went on a several day meltdown about it.
Impossible. A non-white Nazi. This is, as Musk has repeated ad nauseum, an obvious PSYOP (psychological operation, if you don’t speak crazy).
And the plan, ludicrously, is to… invent a narrative of Nazis as a violent threat.
But think about it—what does an obvious PSYOP really look like? A PSYOP being a made up story, a fiction, that is designed for people to unquestioningly believe. You want to cover something up in a way that people won’t think to question the fiction. If you’re covering up a crime, for example, what lie do you reach for?
Something easy to believe, or something difficult to believe? Given you have the option to choose either.
See, what the conspiracy theorists want you to believe here is that the people who designed this PSYOP wanted to fabricate a villain to construct a narrative that white supremacists are a domestic threat in America, but they messed up because they accidentally named their fictional villain Mauricio Garcia instead of Johnny Jay Jason Smith Crumpetfuck.
They invented a Hispanic guy, put out fake photos of him covered in swastika tattoos, and didn’t think anyone would say “Hey, that’s weird.” This just didn’t occur to them. It didn’t occur to the CIA.
Thing is, there is no such thing as an obvious PSYOP. A PSYOP, the way we’re supposed to think of them, is indistinguishable from truth. There’s such thing as an obvious lie, of course, but the people designing psyops aren’t stupid enough not to know the difference.
Neither are Elon Musk or any of his weird alt-right friends.
See, there’s a real PSYOP here, but it’s not the one they’re saying. As usual, it’s the conspiracist idols and culture architects like Alex Jones, the pundits like Tucker Carlson, the ideologues like Elon Musk and the politicians with an agenda to push who are the ones engineering the narrative here.
And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think the intended narrative is that Nazis are good and unfairly besmirched people. I think the intended narrative is that they don’t exist.
It doesn’t come as any surprise to me, for example, that there’s absolutely zero conspiratorial ideation around the fact that the second most recent mass shooting in America was committed by a transgender person. They’re a very highly acceptable villain right now for a particular brand of narrative spinner. As are Hispanic people ordinarily. As were Islamists in the decade and a half after 9/11. When an ISIS operative did a massacre, there was never any question that’s who they were.
You’re not supposed to be getting distracted by Nazis when they’re not the villain of the hour. White identitarian motives are inconvenient right now. You’re supposed to focus on the Hispanic part of Garcia, not his SS tattoos.
And if you’re the target of this malicious politicking, if you’re on the fence and one to be swayed by this business of the Improbable Hispanic Nazi, I’d like to remind you of this:'
That photo was taken a couple of months ago. It’s a black man, a gay Jewish Greek, and, yes, a literal Hispanic neo-Nazi named Nick Fuentes all on their way to say heil Hitler live on the Alex Jones show. Nobody questions that it happened.
I wonder why?
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Must be great to be a conspiracy theorist and see all of life as one big jigsaw puzzle. It's actually reassuring to think that there are no accidents and everything is part of a big scheme.
I didn’t have time to do more than skim this, but it looks like a pretty perceptive look at how conspiracy thinking about notorious public violence tends to use unrealistic scenarios to reinforce the scenarist’s unhealthy psychological myopia.