In the aftermath of *any* sort of attack, whether a mass shooting or a bombing or a truck/van rampage, the very first thing that happens is people begin to speculate about the motive. The very next thing, usually virtually simultaneous to speculation, is people attributing motives to the attack with no evidence whatsoever.usually this comes in the form of political attacks, ethnic or racial bias. Attempts to claim that The Other Guy is responsible for the atrocity; get the news out there fast so that even f it turns out it *wasn’t* the other guy, a lot of people already believe that it was. And belief sticks even in the face of evidence to the contrary, sad to say.

(This is one of the reasons why I’m trying to avoid talking much about these things early on. I’ve been tricked before.)

So a few days ago there was the school shooting in Florida. There were immediate speculations that it was a Jihad attack, or an Antifa attack, or a white supremacist, or a you-name-it. But the one that actually seemed to stick was the story that the shooter was a member of a Floridian white supremacist/militia group. Lots of media outlets ran with that one. And it turns out that that belief is apparently not only false, but the result of a deliberate attempt to plant that story for political purposes. but the weird thing is… it wasn’t BLM or Antifa that planted that hoax… it was the white supremacists themselves. Gentlemen… behold:

How white nationalists fooled the media about Florida shooter

That right there is a head-scratcher. I *think* the idea was to plant the false story, then make sure that the falseness of the story comes out after the media ran with it, in order to make the media look bad. Not sure that devious scheme’s really going to work that well, though… it’s not like the media is going to apologize to white nationalists and start running positive stories about them.