This recalls (to those who’ve paid attention), the tale of Edgar Maddison Welch, who reportedly fired a rifle shot into the ceiling of Comet Pizza, in hopes of rescuing the kids held captive there, the Pizzagate “conspiracy theory” having driving him around the bend. This story of the Belgian sniper also harks back to the propaganda shrieking of the clear and present danger posed by QAnon, and its imaginary links to several crimes that were probably fictitious, too.
Then there was that platoon of “far-right” types in Michigan who planned to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and that pack of “neo-Nazis” who tried to storm the Reichstag (!) just as RFK, Jr. was addressing that gigantic, wholly peaceful crowd of anti-lockdown protesters in Berlin.
I know all too many educated people who’ve believed those stories to be true, and fell especially hard for that preposterous charade in the Capitol on Jan. 6. What’s really putting all of us at risk is not such actors posing as far-right extremists, but the abject credulity of all those educated liberals who don’t know enough to see through all such tripe (which, skillfully aimed at them, is imperceptible to them as scare propaganda).