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Two weeks ago, when a radicalized schoolteacher rushed through the vestibule of the Washington Hilton and was swiftly neutralized by Secret Service agents, my thoughts quickly turned to the Bulwark’s Will Sommer, one of America’s foremost disinformation reporters, who surely had a busy weekend ahead of him. Sommer has been covering the grotesqueries of outré right-wing conspiracy culture for nearly a decade now. He has memorized the biographies of charlatans like Jacob Wohl, Gavin McInnes, and Steven Crowder, to say nothing of the empire of content published by Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. But more than that, Sommer possesses a special fluency with the illusory reality being signal-boosted by a seemingly infinite number of outlying MAGA partisans who have permanently altered our institutional sense of consensus. All of this research produced Sommer’s book, Trust The Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Reshaped The World, which charted the information crisis that birthed Jan. 6. Somehow, American politics has only grown stranger since then. For Sommer, that means one of the most recent editions of his newsletter, False Flag, focused on the worryingly large number of Republicans who believe this latest assassination attempt was staged.
