Bulwark Takes - When MAGA Invents Its Own Enemies

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Sommer break down how MAGA media keeps inventing stories of supposed “left-wing violence.” From a GOP event crash that turned out to be Republicans fighting other Republicans to a teenager’s fake kidnapping blamed on “Mexican cartel hitmen,” the right’s obsession with finding liberal villains keeps blowing up in their faces. The two also discuss how online outrage from right-wing influencers can now trigger real government responses, like ICE raids inspired by a single viral video. Go read the False Flag article here: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-media-keeps-thirsting-for-left-wing-violence

Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bork and I'm on with a man, Will Summer, author of False Flag. Will, you have another doozy. Everyone's a doozy, I suppose. This one is about MAGA Media, which seems to be on the hunt for instances of left-wing violence, which has become a priority to find in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. There's certainly honest cases of it, but in your newsletter, you note that, their efforts to find instances of this have led to what I would guess are called false positives. I don't know how you would determine this, but occasional cases where it's in fact conservatives who are committing acts of vandalism or disruption against themselves, or just framing it as left-wing violence, and it turns out to not be all there. Let's start with the first episode, which had video, and involved the debate watch party for the Arlington GOP, set the stage for us so we can understand what actually

happened here. Sure. So this is at a bar called Mr. Days in Arlington. You know, this is very much GOP consultant class. And they're having the debate watch for the Attorney General debate in Arlington. The Virginia Attorney General debate. Yeah, well, I guess I should describe the video. Yeah. So yeah, so this is the setting stage. This is the Virginia Attorney General debate. A lot of kind of Republicans around town are there. Exactly. And then this video emerges and the person who posted the video who's at the party says, you know, this is, you know, these are, you know, these are leftists will these leftists never stop and it's what happens in the video it's like two people showing up heckling them and shit like that and yeah it basically two people a man and a woman who

are trying to kind of enter the party and they're getting ejected and they sort of get frog marched out and there's some words are exchanged and then the staff has to kind of close hold the door closed and say you know you stay out and so this was this video rockets around right wing social media and it's captioned again as like leftists trying to crash our republican debate party people like larry o'connor who's a big talk radio host in the dc area he said you know abigail spanberger you know it basically inspired this violence uh someone else said uh you know these these leftists they get away with this stuff because they know they'll never be prosecuted but it turns out it wasn't leftists that's plot twist what a twist in fact it was other republicans

the arlington gop put out a statement saying um sort of to address this uh we actually know who these are they are not leftists. They are, in fact, Republicans. In fact, it was a duo we talked about here before. It was Miles Morel and a woman named Alicia, who are the organizers or are the organizers of this, what was supposed to be a celebration of Trump's first 100 days in office. It was very much an unofficial celebration. And basically, a lot of people who went came away feeling they had been to the MAGA version of fire festival, that they had been sort of duped. into paying a lot of money for what was supposed to be a very glitzy event and was in fact very downscale. I think the reference to Fire Festival might be too dated at this point, but for those who don't know, it was the bogus concert that was supposed to be on this island where all these models were going to be and everyone was going to just party it up and then people. Ja Rule was involved. If you haven't seen, I think there's two documentaries around it, but if you haven't seen either

them, you should. It's incredible. It was an incredibly dumb criminal hoax, basically, in which people showed up, were stranded and had no food and were like, what the fuck is going on? So this was the party that drew parallels to that. I guess what tickles me is that most of the people who were highlighting this instance as an example of liberals trying to disrupt or engage in violence. against Republicans. They just erased their tweets. They just didn't even like, they didn't even like issue corrections being like, I got that one wrong. I mean, they're just like, I'm going to remove this, this tweet. And then the guy who posted the video removed his entire Twitter account.

Yeah, once he heard, I think he heard I was writing about it because it was up for a few days. And then within hours, don't give yourself that much credit. Come on. He said not, not Will summer at the bowlwork. Not will. Not the false flag newsletter. Delete. No, come on. But they did. Most of them just deleted it. So basically what happened here is that the Arlington GOP had been very critical of the organizers of Magafire Festival because it was in Arlington. And I will say the chairman, this guy named Matthew Hurt, is sort of unusually anti-Grifter for a Republican and very outspoken about it. So these people had shown up and basically to confront him and kind of try to embarrass him in some way. And there was this sort of exchange before that video was filmed where one of them, Miles Morel, according to Matthew Hurt, was very upset that in the false flag newsletter, the head of the Arlington GOP had called him a Goober.

And so, you know, these are classic kind of Beltway Stafford dramas that are then blown up into much bigger, you know, just proof that Antifa is out of control. It's too funny, the Goober. But there's an, so that was one instance. The other one was like legitimately sad. and also I think maybe a little bit more, well, illustrated a little bit more of the issue that we're dealing with. Can you talk about this 17-year-old kid who posted that he was being hunted by Mexicans? Yeah, so this is a, this was a case in late September, that's only sort of, we're finding out more details about now. But this was September 25th, this 17-year-old named Caden Spate in, in Marion County, Florida. He goes missing on his way, I believe, back from agriculture class at a local community college.

And he texts his mom, essentially, that he's being. hunted by four Mexican men in a white van. This is a white kid. And he says, these Mexican men are after me and they've already shot at me. And his mom, obviously, alarmed, alerts the police. He disappears. The police start looking for him. And then, you know, within by the next morning, this is becoming a major MAGA media story.

There was, I think, an erroneous report that he was wearing a MAGA hat when he was grabbed. And there sort of becomes this idea that, you know, maybe a cartel, maybe, you know, illegal immigrant, someone is after him as sort of revenge against the Trump administration. And I will say, like, I was kind of following this in real time. And I was like, you know, oh my God, you know, if something like this did happen, anything, anything approaching this narrative, there's going to be, I mean, this was less than three weeks after Charlie Kirk's assassination. It would have been, it would have been massive. Unbelievable. And you saw people like Benny Johnson, a lot of these kind of big right wing Twitter characters were, you know, really breathlessly covering this story, this idea that this young

man had been kidnapped. But, you know, pretty soon within a few hours, I mean, his name was trending on Twitter, but within a few hours, the story started to unravel. Well, how so? Well, the police said, you know, they put out this Amber Alert on him and everyone be on the lookout. The federal authorities were involved. And then they said, well, you know, here's a video of him at a Walmart shortly before texting his mom about the Mexicans after him. Buying a tent, buying a bike, sort of things you might by if you were looking to run away from home and to go on the run. And so they found the truck

and it was there was some blood in it. There was a gunshot. And so there's I don't know. But then eventually they found him a day after he went missing. He seems to have, you know, according to the arrest affidavit later, basically he staged his running away and that he

shot himself in the leg in an attempt to be like, well, I really was kidnapped by these Mexican men, but then they released me. He claimed, I will say one thing I didn't including the newsletter. He claimed they were making him fight other people. Kind of a very bizarre story. But obviously, it quickly fell apart. And as with the Arlington case, all of these right-wing characters who were baying for blood and who were ready to, you know, oh, all these, you know, these liberals, these sickos, they suddenly deleted their tweets and moved on quietly.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's pretty lame to delete your tweets and move on. He should probably issue correction. On the 17-year-old kid, he's troubled, right? And I hope he gets help, obviously. There's some actual weird history here. You might not remember this. But right before the 2008 presidential election, a woman showed up claiming she had been attacked by, I guess, ostensibly Obama supporters. Maybe it was the new Black Panther Party or whatever. And she had a B carved in her face. And it quickly fell apart because the B was carved backwards. She had carved it in her own face in the mirror and hadn't realized that it was going to be

backwards. But like, you know, this happens. And it's really unfortunate. I guess the difference here is that it's the behavior of some of these right-wing media outlets, which are very much invested in surfacing instances of liberal. violence because it is part of a emerging narrative that all political violence comes from progressives and liberals, right? That's right. I mean, I think there's this huge appetite for this content. I mean, certainly we saw in the lead up to the No Kings protests. We saw the

Trump administration saying, you know, these are going to be out of control. It's going to be the hardest of the hardcore. Right. And then they ended up doing, you know, oh, this guy, this Trump supporter was tripped by a teenager. Someone stole his glasses. So these are, these are not really these sort of crazed violent stories, you know, we've been expecting. I mean, we talked about. But it's all over the place, too, because I was watching the White House press briefing today. This is Thursday when we're recording this. It was a fairly mundane press briefing, honestly, and they're going over some of the

ballroom stuff and some other stuff. And then some random reporter, and I don't know what outlet it is, because who knows anymore what these outlets are, was like, did you see the sign at the No King's protest about someone saying, like, Stephen Miller should get shot or something, something? and they're like, do you believe that person should get arrested? It's like, what a weird question to ask the press secretary, like some random person in the crowd? Like, why would you waste your time asking that specific question to the White House press secretary? But of course, Carolyn Levin was like, yeah, absolutely, we want any legal activity to, you know, be prosecuted.

So it feels like there is kind of this, I don't know, effort to make these things into bigger storylines than they probably need to be. well i mean you think about the antifa roundtable a few weeks ago where you know people came oh yeah antifa was rude to me um you know some people really were hurt but that there were at one point nick sortor who's kind of the ringleader of this crew uh he said you know i stole a uh a flag and an tifa guy was about to burn and then trump's you know there was some kind of like well what do you think trump should the doj pursue that guy who was going to burn the flag oh yeah absolutely yeah no It's like, you stole the flag, man. You committed the act that's not actually legally allowed.

You stole someone's property. But they do want to, they do want to tee it up for the DOJ. It's like a weird thing where they always like to tee up these situations, be like, hey, Pam Bond, are you going to prosecute this? Or, hey, does the president believe you should prosecute this? So it does seem a little bit like theater to a degree, which is not to say there's not instances of this shit. Like, there clearly is instances of left wing violence as there is instances of right-wing

violence. It's just, you know, this whole sort of. effort to just paint one side is uniquely problematic and the other side is completely Korean and it's just not reality. Any other thoughts before we close shop here, buddy? Yeah, do you want to talk about the Canal Street thing? Yeah, well, I guess it's part of a, it goes with that, which is, so the other day, and I'm not really sure how it happened.

Maybe you know the origins of this, but it very quickly became a thing where it's like, oh my God, Canal Street's filled with these immigrants, hawking goods, and it's crap. crowded and the sidewalks are kind of dirty and grimy and I can't push my stroller and all that stuff. And then like the next day, the immigration authorities come and clean out the street. And I don't know, to me that was kind of crazy in the sense that it's like these influencers, if they get a target and they tee it up for the right people, you know, I don't think Pam Bondi is going to go arrest everybody, but it is not beyond the realm of reason that the federal government will respond to these right-wing influencers.

I mean, look, this is a theme we've always been returning to. The power these right-wing influencers have over our government. In this case, this was Savannah Hernandez, who's independent, you know, quasi-reporter personality, who's very close with Info Wars. And she had this video, oh, my gosh, I can't believe there are these immigrants selling these handbags in Canal Street. And then, as you said, it gets swept up. You know, I mean, there's a lot of this kind of- Completely swept up.

These people have been there for, like, years and years. And it's just like, oh, someone from not in New York City came, didn't like what she saw. and was just like, hey, can we get the, you know, Customs and Border Patrol on this? And, yeah, they got on it. Yeah, I mean, we have obviously all these examples. You know, James O'Keefe just put out a video about contracting and suddenly the government is pulling these contracts. We have, obviously, the situations in cities like Portland where these right-wing influencers sort of really often, not always, but often sort of put themselves in positions that are very aggressive and provocative. And then, you know, if one of them gets shoved or something like that, then suddenly it's more of an excuse to send in ice to send in

the troops. No, it's wild. People have to understand it. It's just not normal, right? Like, usually there's more of a structure and coherence to this rather than, oh, look, the next, like, mole I need to whack that a right-wing influencer pointed out. So just the world we live in. Fun times.

Luckily, we have Will to cover it all. So thank you for that, buddy. Yeah, wants to keep track off. Everyone's deleting their Twitter accounts when they know false lag is calling. All right. Everyone, subscribe to Will Summers Newsletter, False Lag. It's so good. It's just so fucking.

Good. It's delicious. And subscribe to this YouTube feed where you get this stuff too. Talk to you soon. Take care. Bye.