Screaming ‘false flag’ doesn’t make it so

Truthers are so predictable.

When news started to trickle in yesterday that Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, had died from her injuries following a brutal broad-daylight attack in Birstall, West Yorkshire, our first reaction was horror and sadness.

Such a terrible loss for those who loved her, for those who worked with her, for her family and friends.This murder left us all a bit diminished.

And yet these days, whenever some great public tragedy occurs, you can set your watch by the inevitable reaction: it wasn’t half an hour before the predictable howls of ‘false flag!’ began to emerge from the bowels of the conspiraloon brigade: It happened earlier this week, as well, in response to the mass shooting inside the Orlando nightclub, where 49 people were gunned down in the early hours of Sunday morning. The usual cabal of Hoaxtead pushers and other truthers just couldn’t wait to start cranking out the false flag bilge.

The hypocrisy is stunning: these people claim to be the moral guardians of the world, dedicated to saving children and babies from elaborate scenarios involving imaginary cults.Their hearts, they claim, overflow with compassion and the milk of human kindness. They are selfless crusaders, they’d have you believe.

But when real people are gunned down, whether on a street in West Yorkshire or a nightclub in Florida, all human feeling vanishes instantly. When terrible things happen, the false flaggers say, they must be some sort of elaborate ploy to trick us into thinking what the ‘powers that be’ want us to think.

Never mind that real people are grieving for their lost loved ones, for children, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers who will never come home again. Never mind that innocent lives have been cut brutally short. Forget about those who must somehow carry on, knowing that their loved ones died random, senseless deaths, terrorised and suffering.

None of that matters to the false flag/crisis actor crowd. To them, it’s all a game. It’s an opportunity to pretend superiority over those of us who are foolish enough to actually weep tears of sympathy for the fallen or those who remain behind.

The irony, of course, is that the false flag/crisis actor mob are the ones hiding their heads in the sand. Unable to cope with the reality of tragedy, they turn it all into a game, an opportunity to show off their cleverness as they point out tiny, inconsequential ‘clues’ which, they believe, will make the bad scary thing go away.

This is the reality: bad scary things happen. Pretending that they don’t won’t make them stop happening; it just cuts them off even further from their essential humanity, and makes the world a far uglier place.