Is Trump going to false-flag the left?
If the administration can't find a pretext to crack down on us, they may invent one.
I have always been extremely suspicious of claims that a false-flag operation is afoot, especially when a simpler explanation will do. In both of the most recent international conflicts — Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza — the aggressor has repeatedly defended itself by alleging that its own attacks were false flags, and in both cases these were demonstrable lies. As a rule, anyone making false flag claims needs to establish two crucial points:
That the simple explanation is not in fact way more likely
That there are specific reasons to suspect a false-flag other than convenience
Consider Gaza. If you wanted to argue that Hamas had attacked Palestinian hospitals, you first needed to establish that Israel attacking them was not way more likely. This was impossible to do because in war the overwhelming majority of casualties are inflicted by the aggressor; false flags are in fact exceedingly rare. On top of that, you also needed to give specific evidence that a false flag was at hand. Zionists pleaded that it would be convenient for Hamas to stage one, but that is just true by definition; false flags are always convenient if they work, but that doesn’t mean that one is likely to have happened.
The recent round of “political violence”1 in the United States presents a very different situation.
First, because contrary to what the right would have you believe, the American left is not particularly prone to political violence. This is not a situation where some belligerent at open war with some opponent is asking everyone to believe that this attack wasn’t theirs; this is a situation where the American left is asking people to take seriously the fact that the overwhelming majority of political violence in the US comes from the right.
And second, because the case that Trump is likely to false flag the left is not just based on speculation about what would be political convenient for him. It is based on specific precedent: namely, the administration’s rush to announce that the bullet shell casings found at the crime scene of Charlie Kirk’s killing had “pro-trans ideology” engraved on them. This was eventually found not just to be false but wildly false: they had the letters TRN on them, standing for the Turkish bullet manufacturer Turan. It is also based on the fact that administration officials continue to characterize Kirk’s killing as an attack by the left even though subsequence evidence has made it clear that the killer was a fairly apolitical gamer.
There is also, of course, a long history of authorities and the right framing the radical left for crimes. As far back as 1898, August Bebel paraphrased the attitude that German authorities had adopted towards left-wing assassination plots: “If other people don’t commit assassinations, then, we ourselves must help the thing along.” And as recently as 2020, a white supremacist was caught inciting riots at a Black Lives Matter protest.
Today, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that bullets with the slogan “anti-ICE” had been found at the scene of another shooting. And it is indeed entirely possible that this will turn out to be the work of some left-leaning vigilante. But it’s also possible that this was a right-wing vigilante who is trying to frame the left; and it’s even possible that this was planted by someone associated with the government. Despite what the Trump administration would have America believe, leftists still deserve a presumption of innocence. Left activists and journalists should bear this in mind moving forward.
Is there any kind of violence that isn’t political?