Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - False Flags

Episode Date: December 30, 2017

Underneath a giant American Flag in a Midwest Airport Your host takes a knee in order to tie his shoe. Trouble. Big Trouble. Plus False Flag meets Dictionary.com  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. I'm at the airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My left shoelace has come undone, and so I set my bag down on the carpet, take a knee, and retie it. Hey! Hey! A man is yelling. Dude! Dude! A very angry man is yelling. Hey, Hey! Dude! Dude! Hey, dude!

And just as this impassioned gentleman discovers that he can string two guttural utterances together, I make the connection that their intended target is me. I look up. Standing a few meters away from me is a man vibrating with rage. It seems as if he wants to hurl more words in my direction, but he can't. His jaw just shakes and twitches. This man is very obese. And his sweatshirt, which is like a size double obese, hangs off of him like a rumpled bed sheet.

So I can't make out the words that are printed on the front. It looks like they say, make America MAGA, but that makes absolutely no sense. But then he raises his meaty fist up in the air and shakes it at me, and I see that his sweatshirt actually does say, make America MAGA. I'm totally dumbfounded, and my face displays as much. This seems to jolt him out of his stupor, and he manages to add two new words to his repertoire.

Hey, fuck you, dude! And then he turns and shuffles off. Tourettes. It's gotta be Tourettes, I think, as I stand up. But then, I notice, hanging from the ceiling above me, a giant American flag. General Mitchell International is one of the only airports I know of with a used bookstore. An actual used and rare bookstore in its main terminal.

Renaissance Books. I walk inside and try to forget about what just happened. I pick up a book of old New Yorker cartoons. But every caption is the same. Make America MAGA. I go to the art section, and I pick up an illustrated history of battles between the U.S. Army and Native Americans. There's a picture of General Custer's last stand. Only in this image, Custer isn't standing. He's on his knees, awaiting death like everyone else. Now, this incident that I'm telling

you about went down in September, before President Trump declared war on the NFL, before Papa John's decided to pin the blame for its failing profit margins on black athletes, before this whole kneeling thing turned into a debate on patriotism rather than a response to police brutality and the disproportionate abuse and violence police inflict on black males, which is what kicked the whole thing off in the first place. Perhaps this is why a book in the history section catches my attention. Our Enemies in Blue, Police and Power in America, revised updated edition by Christian Williams.

But how or where I get the idea that I should purchase this book and then go find Mr. Make America MAGA in the airport and present it to him, I truly do not know. In 2017, the lexographers at Dictionary.com added a number of new words and phrases to the big book. A few of them, like alt-right and fake news, seem to have emerged whole cloth from recent events here in America. But some of them, like false flag, have much deeper histories. The new official dictionary definition for a false flag is an attack or other hostile action that obscures the identity of the participants carrying out the action while implicating another group or nation as the perpetrator. The flag itself, that fabric waving dishonestly in the wind,

we can trace it back all the way to the age of piracy. It was a diversionary tactic. Pirates would approach another ship or the shore flying a flag of an ally or friend. But once they had gained the element of surprise, they would lower their false flag and raise their true colors, the skull and bones, and attack. Pirates aren't the reason Merriam-Webster added false flag to the dictionary, though. It was American conspiracy theorists. They've been using the term for decades.

But their definition is a lot shorter. For example, when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars says 9-11 was a false flag, he simply means the government did it. According to Alex Jones, the Bush administration took down the World Trade Towers so that it could build up support for war and deprive Americans of their civil liberties.

Jones moved on from 9-11 once Obama became president. He devoted himself to warning Americans about an impending false flag. Alex Jones was convinced that Obama was going to stage a mass shooting so that he could sweep in and pass draconian gun legislation. And then, on December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza attacked an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and 8 adults. It was such a horrific event that for a brief moment, some form of gun reform in America actually seemed possible. For Alex Jones, this was of course proof that he was right all along.

And he started pushing a story that Sandy Hook was a fabricated false flag. In other words, the government had made the whole thing up, complete with fake blood and child crisis actors. Members of Jones' audience started phoning and emailing grieving Sandy Hook parents, demanding to know why and where they were hiding their children. Alex Jones suffered no consequences for these lies. In fact, his audience and power grew. In 2016, during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump called into his show, gushing with admiration. The love fest was mutual. Alex Jones is definitely a Trump guy. And thus, after the election, I was curious as to what he was going to do.

Now that his pal was president, would he go on accusing the government of planning and executing false flag operations? This is when Alex Jones started talking about the deep state. The government, Jones says, now has split into two factions. There are the good guys, the Trump people who are devoted to making America great again, and the bad guys, the deep state, government civil servants, Obama holdovers, who are all still hell-bent on using false flags to take away our liberties, our freedoms, and our guns. The Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, a deep state false flag. According to Alex Jones, George Soros and other deep state operatives bust in a few fake neo-Nazis who mixed it up with the good patriotic monument-defending Americans and caused the whole thing to blow up.

According to Jones, even James Alex Field Jr., the white supremacist who drove his car into the crowd killing Heather Heyer, was part of the operation. The deep state, Alex Jones says, will stop at nothing to hurt or embarrass President Trump. Here's another one. A few weeks ago in Washington state, a speeding Amtrak engineer drove a new train off the tracks,

killing three people and causing extensive infrastructure damage. Within hours, Alex Jones' InfoWars was abuzz with talk that the whole thing was a false flag. According to InfoWars, Antifa activists had possibly poured concrete onto the tracks. But what kind of false flag is this? A reverse false flag? A cleanup false flag? I've actually spent weeks trying to come up with proper terminology. And let me tell you something, that new dictionary definition is no help whatsoever. But here's the thing.

Even if you can make sense of all this, even if you can clear a path through this maze of false flags, well, you're still going to have to figure out what you're going to do about it. This is what a young philosophy student named Hannah Arendt realized in the days after the Reichstag fire, one of history's most infamous false flags. On the evening of February 27th, 1933, the building where the German legislature met went up in flames. Hitler rushed to the scene and claimed the fire was proof of an impending communist coup. The communists were then rounded up by the Nazis and the police

and routed by the voters at the ballot box the following week. At the time of the fire, Hannah Arendt was working on her dissertation on Augustine's concept of love. But the fire changed everything. It was an immediate shock, she told an interviewer later in life. It was no longer possible for me to simply be a bystander. Hannah Arendt wrote some of the most important political philosophy books of the 20th century, including the Origins of Totalitarianism. There's a line in that book. I imagine it's rooted in her experience of those days after the Reichstag fire. It goes like this. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction Now this is what they should have added to the dictionary in 2017. A few shops away from the Renaissance used bookstore,

in the main terminal of General Mitchell Airport, there's a brew house, the Miller Brew House. And this is where I find Mr. Make America MAGA. He's sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and watching television. He no longer looks angry. Unlike me, he's moved on. Gaffaws and snorts of laughter ripple across his bulky frame. But as I watch him watch TV, I realize my plan to present him

with this book, Our Enemies in Blue, Police and Power in America, revised updated edition by Christian Williams, is a total shit plan. You see, in 2017, one in four Americans read zero books. Zero, dear listener. And as much as I don't want to be one of those people who assume things about others, I'm putting Mr. Make America MAGA in the zero category. Because a man outraged by someone tying their shoe in the airport underneath an American flag doesn't live in the world of books. This is the real American divide.

People who live in the world of books and people who live in the world of outrage. Left? Right? Those words don't mean anything anymore. In the world of books, police brutality begins with slave patrols, bands of white men tasked with catching, humiliating, beating, and oftentimes lynching black slaves.

This is in fact how Christian Williams begins his narrative of police and power in America. But in the world of outrage, none of this is relevant. In the world of outrage, history, context, narrative, they've all been rendered irrelevant and impotent. This is how, in the world of outrage, a protest against police brutality can be transformed into outrage over police officers being hounded by regulations and traitorous athletes and politicians. But in the world of books, slogans like Blue Lives Matter and I Can Breathe aren't outrageous.

They're false. They have no truth. And they have no power. But you know what has no power in the world of outrage? Books. Like I said, one in four Americans read zero books in 2017. But you know what, dear listener? I'm not ready to give up.

I'm not ready to concede without a fight. And so I march towards Mr. Make America MAGA, brandishing my hardback copy of Our Enemies in Blue, Police and Power in America, revised, updated edition by Christian Williams, as if I'm holding out a gift. And as he turns to face me, I say, Hey, dude. He's confused.

My ruse is working. I have the Theory of Everything. This installment is called False Flags. This episode was written and produced by myself, Benjamin Walker. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia.

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