I was pushing my 4-year-old on the swing at our neighborhood playground in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday, less than a mile from my alma mater, Brown University, when my wife texted me about a mass shooting. I would eventually learn that two people had been killed and many were injured. Three days later, we still don’t know the shooter’s identity, and thus don’t know anything about his motives—but that has not stopped influential right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, from amplifying disinformation that portrays the shooting as a political attack on Republicans. Meanwhile, voices of reason in the center and on the left have appeared helpless to counter this dangerous false narrative, which is further evidence of how badly we are losing the information war.
What we know is that a man dressed in black walked into a classroom in Brown’s Barus & Holley building, just as a study session for Brown’s introductory economics course—the most widely taken course at the university—was wrapping up. The gunman shouted something (students who were present have reported that they don’t know what he said), and then fired more than 40 rounds at the assembled group, injuring nine students and killing two people: Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan who grew up in Virginia, and Ella Cook, a 19-year-old Alabaman who was vice president of the Brown College Republicans. This is more or less all we know.
Right-wingers have filled this void with a baseless narrative that Cook was, as the chairman of the College Republicans put it in a post on X with nearly two million views, “targeted for her conservative beliefs, hunted, and killed in cold blood.” To be clear, there is zero evidence, as of this writing, that Cook was targeted for her conservative beliefs. It’s not impossible, but it’s just as likely—or significantly more likely, considering that most extremist-related murders are committed by white supremacists—that the shooter targeted Umurzokov for being an immigrant. By far the most logical possibility, given that the shooter fired 40 rounds into a crowded classroom and hit 11 students in total, is that this shooting was not targeted at any one individual—that he wanted to kill as many people as possible at Brown, regardless of what they believed.
And yet, the right’s declarations of victimization, honed after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, have been immediate and relentless. One right-wing influencer wrote, “The left is going to target and kill every effective Republican they can find.” A fellow at the Heritage Foundation with almost a million followers on X wrote, “If you don’t absolutely destroy left wing extremists, they WILL be emboldened.” Republican elected officials joined in, with New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino writing that the attack “was perpetrated by the leftist activist and targeted Republicans.” Another post read, “This happened because Antifa (and all the like groups) wasn’t liquidated after Charlie Kirk was assassinated.… The time to respond harshly was months ago, but now is better than never.” Musk shared that last post, which has more than 30 million views.
At one point, my timeline on X was full—literally full—of nothing but these false claims, all from accounts I have never followed. Others have reported similar experiences. It’s hard to imagine such informational dominance not being the result, among other dynamics, of a clear algorithmic push (Musk runs X, after all). And the goal is to exploit this tragedy toward political ends, namely the repression of MAGA’s political opponents. This repression is the explicit aim of President Donald Trump’s NSPM-7 directive and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent memo ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” which is targeted toward those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity,” as well as “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”
Of course, this isn’t an isolated example of the MAGA conspiracy machine whirring into action. Increasingly, it seems like every high-profile event with potential political ramifications—certainly shootings but also climate disasters, elections, and more—gets poisoned by the right’s toxically mendacious content amplification system. This week it’s been occurring on multiple fronts simultaneously, with Grok spreading the lie that the hero in the antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach was Christian, despite media confirmation that the man, Ahmed Al Ahmed, was a Muslim immigrant originally from Syria.
American politics today are defined by a profound informational asymmetry. The right now controls most of the traditional media institutions, the social media platforms, and the algorithms that shape our attentional ecosystem. They have also built up a far larger network of creators than anything the left has at its disposal. How do you beat opponents who have the informational and attentional firepower to impose deceptive conspiracies on the public and, in many cases, make their lies an accepted common truth? How can we win back the narrative on climate change when they can ascribe every climate-induced hurricane or wildfire to DEI initiatives or weather control technology? How can we address far-right political violence when they can turn an evangelical Trump supporter’s assassination of a Democratic lawmaker into a plot by radical Marxists? How can we protect free and fair elections when they can just deny the results?
I don’t have the solutions to these problems. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few days—watching the buzz saw of MAGA disinformation tear through the factual reality of this mass shooting not far from my home—it’s that we need to figure them out, and quickly. It’s not about finding that oft-discussed “liberal Joe Rogan.” What’s required is the buildout of a media ecosystem that can challenge the right’s extensive informational infrastructure with the full panoply of content creators, revenue structures, cross-platform coordination, amplification systems, and attention-getting strategies necessary to win this narrative war.
Our reality is just what we see in front of us. It can be defined by truth or by lies, by information or disinformation. Ensuring that people start receiving more of the former, and less of the latter, is an incredibly difficult and expensive challenge. But there may not be a way around it. And we’ve got to start building fast, before MAGA’s attentional stranglehold becomes our permanent reality.
