On Monday, there were news reports from Austin, Texas, about several deadly package bombs that killed and injured four people—black and Latino. While police have said they believe all the bombs are linked, it will take some time before a full picture of this tragedy is painted.
While both local and federal investigators seek the truth, the people on the far-right are scrambling to push out harmful conspiracy theories that sustain their racist agenda. This is something we’ve seen before in the aftermath of other public tragedies—most recently in Parkland—and it looks like their response to the Austin bombing attacks will be more of the same: using lies and misinformation to undermine the truth.
Alex Jones took to Infowars to spin a web of lies to blame Antifa—aka anti-fascist activists—for the bombings. It’s important to note that in the early hours after the Parkland shooting, the far-right jumped to blaming Antifa as well.
Jones’s lies are being spread with the help of Google’s YouTube algorithms; his show on the bombings is the #1 result on the platform, a BuzzFeed reporter pointed out on Twitter.
It’s not just Jones pushing theories; people on far-right message boards are trying to say that it’s a “false flag”—and maybe Mexicans or Jewish people are to blame. They say that there’s no way a racist white person could have done it, despite it being the likely outcome.