The Boy Who Cried "False Flag"

Conspiracies are fun, aren't they? Sure, you could just repeat the official line--"Muslim extremists carried out a terror attack"-- but that's BORING. It's far more exciting to imagine we're all living in some Die Hard-Mission Impossible-Manchurian Candidate mash-up, and the true culprits aren't the guys with mountains of evidence against them, but instead, covert shadow government agents seeking to turn America into a police state in the most complicated, meticulously planned, secret operation in history.

What movie keeps you on the edge of your seat--the one where it's clear who the bad guy is.... or the one with the unpredictable plot twists? THE KILLER WAS PRETENDING TO BE THE DEAD GUY ON THE FLOOR THE WHOLE TIME!!! OMG!!!

Of course, there are people who actually take these conspiracy theories seriously. In New Hampshire, they call these people "state lawmakers", the rest of us call them idiots. But I suspect that the majority of those espousing these conspiracy theories aren't true believers. Indeed, follow someone's conspiracy story long enough, and you'll hear them contradict themselves. People who are making it up as they go along suffer this problem.

I think they do it because the world is a sometimes scary, sometimes dull place. And conspiracies give us that jolt to the heart... that idea that we're in a battle against foes only the sharpest of us have the eyes to see.

Which is fine and all... except that there actually have been "false flag" operations in the past, sometimes to devastating effect. Our whole current kerfuffle with Iran has its basis in Operation Ajax, a joint British-American plot to overthrow Iran's democratically elected leader and replace him with a dictator more friendly to Western policies. Calling every single event from the past decade into question--as sites like InfoWars have--is like the being the boy who cried wolf. When "false flag," becomes associated with the crazies and the idiots, it makes it that much easier for an actual false flag operation to succeed. Anyone who raises a stink about something will be lumped in with the nutjobs.

Maybe InfoWars is the conspiracy--to make us believe any "false flag" is just a figment of some crackpot's imagination.