When MAGA Invents Its Own Enemies

Summary

Bulwark Takes: "When MAGA Invents Its Own Enemies"

Date: October 24, 2025
Host: Sam Stein
Guest: Will Sommer (author of False Flag)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into several recent cases where MAGA-aligned media and influencers have amplified or manufactured stories of left-wing violence—stories which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be distortions, misunderstandings, or outright fabrications involving fellow conservatives or troubled individuals. Sam Stein and Will Sommer break down these incidents, exploring the dynamics behind the right's search for enemies, the swift social media amplification, and the reluctance to correct misinformation once it spreads. They also discuss the real-world impact of these viral narratives, from political pressure on officials to government action.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Search for Left-Wing Violence After the Charlie Kirk Assassination

• The MAGA media is on heightened alert for leftist violence, seeking out proof to bolster a narrative of constant threat after high-profile incidents like the Charlie Kirk assassination.
• However, in their zeal, there are frequent “false positives”—cases where supposed leftist attacks actually originate within the right-wing community.

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2. Case Study #1: The Arlington GOP Debate Watch Party

[00:58–05:14]

• Incident Recap: Viral video shows two “hecklers” ejected from a Virginia Republican debate watch party at Mr. Days bar, passed around MAGA social media as an example of leftists targeting conservatives.
• Notable Quote:
  • Will Sommer: "And then this video emerges...this is, you know, these are leftists. Will these leftists never stop?" [01:20]
• Prominent right-wing figures—including radio host Larry O’Connor—blame Democrats and allege unpunished leftist aggression.
• The Twist:
  • Actually, the disruptors were Republicans themselves—Miles Morrell and Alicia—who had organized a previous Trump event in Arlington that turned out to be a flop ("MAGA Fyre Festival").
  • The Arlington GOP denounced them; their confrontation was an internal grudge, not a leftist protest.
  • Most right-wing influencers deleted their accusatory posts without issuing corrections.
• Memorable Moment:
  • Sam Stein: "What tickles me is that most of the people...just erased their tweets...they didn't even like, issue corrections being like, ah, I got that one wrong." [03:37]

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3. Case Study #2: The Missing 17-Year-Old in Florida

[05:14–08:51]

• Incident Recap:
  • Caden Spate, 17, from Marion County, FL, goes missing after texting his mother that "four Mexican men in a white van" are hunting him and have shot at him.
  • MAGA circles quickly seize on story, speculating on cartel or illegal immigrant involvement—fueling social media panic.
• Police soon release evidence:
  • He was last seen at a Walmart buying items to run away with.
  • He staged his own disappearance and shot himself in the leg as cover, later spinning elaborate tales (e.g., being forced into fights).
  • Right-wing influencers, having loudly promoted the story, quietly delete their commentary once the truth emerges.
• Relevant Historical Parallel:
  • Sam Stein references a 2008 incident where a woman falsely claimed political assault, paralleling the current appetite for stories fitting a preferred narrative.
  • "She had a bee carved in her face and quickly fell apart because the bee was carved backwards." [08:19]
• Analysis:
  • Will Sommer: "All of these right wing characters who were baying for blood...they suddenly deleted their tweets and moved on quietly." [07:57]
• Sam Stein: "It's pretty lame to delete your tweets and move on. He should probably issue Correction..." [08:08]

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4. Media Incentives and Misinformation Loops

[08:51–11:42]

• There is a considerable appetite within MAGA media and certain right-wing circles for content depicting liberals and progressives as uniquely violent or criminal.
• This leads to heightened scrutiny and amplification—even of non-events or mistaken stories—while corrections are rare and often quietly deleted.
• Example: The "no Kings" protest was painted as dangerous by the Trump administration, but actual incidents were minor.
• Press conferences can feature fringe or outlandish questions meant to further stoke outrage, regardless of their real importance.
• Notable Quote:
  • Sam Stein: "It feels like there is kind of this...effort to make these things into bigger storylines than they probably need to be." [10:27]

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5. Right-Wing Influencers and Real-World Impact

[11:42–13:50]

• MAGA-aligned influencers increasingly prompt government action through viral outrage—sometimes over long-standing, benign urban conditions.
• Case Example:
  • Canal Street in NYC: Influencer Savannah Hernandez posts about immigrant street vendors; within a day, authorities crack down, sweeping the vendors out.
  • The hosts express concern: external "influencer rage" increasingly provokes disproportionate state action.
  • Will Sommer: "We have obviously all these examples...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." [13:08]
• Example parallels drawn with James O’Keefe's contract videos and provocations in protest cities like Portland.
• The general impact: a fast-moving ecosystem where narrative, accusation, and enforcement blur—the loudest voices can prompt real consequences.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Miles Morrell...was very upset that in the False Flag newsletter, the head of the Arlington GOP had called him a goober." — Will Sommer [04:39]
• "This whole sort of effort to just paint one side as uniquely problematic and the other side as completely green is just not reality." — Sam Stein [11:24]
• "These influencers, if they get a target and they tee it up for the right people, 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..." — Sam Stein [12:17]
• "People have to understand it's just not normal. Right. Like usually there's more of a structure and coherence to this..." — Sam Stein [13:32]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:58–05:14 – Arlington GOP “leftist” incident and the “MAGA Fyre Festival” comparison
• 05:14–08:51 – Florida teen kidnapping hoax goes viral, is debunked
• 08:51–11:42 – The right-wing media's appetite for leftist villain narratives; historical parallels
• 11:42–13:50 – Influencers prompt authorities’ action (Canal Street crackdown), concerns about influence and accountability

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Conclusion

This episode exposes the cycle by which right-wing media and influencers create, amplify, and then quietly retreat from stories of leftist violence—even when those stories fall apart or boomerang. The hosts emphasize that, while political violence does exist on the left and right, the current atmosphere incentivizes exaggerated, misleading, or wholly fabricated narratives, which MAGA-aligned actors rarely walk back publicly. The tangible influence of this outrage engine, from local police action to federal intervention, points to a fragmenting media and political environment where perception—and virality—often drives reality.

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Recommendation:
Subscribe to Will Sommer's False Flag newsletter for ongoing in-depth coverage of misinformation and MAGA media trends.

Transcript

[A]

Hey everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the book and I'm on with my man Will Sommer, 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, 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 but or just framing it as left wing violence and turns out to not be all there. Let's start with the first episode which had video and involved a debate watch party for the Arlington gop. Set the stage for us so we can understand what actually happened here.

[B]

Sure. So this is at a bar called Mr. Days in Arlington. You know, this is very much GOP consultant class and they're, they're having the debate watch for the Attorney General debate in, in Arlington.

[A]

The Virginia Attorney General debate.

[B]

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, the person who posted the video who was at the party says, you know, this is, you know, these are leftists. Will these leftists never stop?

[A]

And it, what happens in the video, it's like two people showing up, heckling them and shit like that.

[B]

And yeah, it's 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 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 D.C. area, he said, you know, Abigail Spanberger, you know, basically inspired this violence. Someone else said, you know, these, these leftists, they get away with this stuff because they know they'll never be prosecuted.

[A]

But it turns out it wasn't leftists. That plot twist, what a twist.

[B]

In fact, it was other Republicans. The Arlington GOP put out a statement saying sort of to address this, we actually know who these people are. They are not leftists. They are, in fact, Republicans. In fact, it was a duo we talked about here before. It was Miles Morrell and a woman named Alicia. Who are the organizers? Were the organizers of this, what was supposed to be a celebration of Trump's first hundred days in office. It was very much an unofficial celebr. And basically a lot of people who went, came away feeling they had been to the MAGA version of Fyre 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.

[A]

I think the reference to Fyre Festival might have. 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 up.

[B]

Ja Rule was involved.

[A]

Ja Rule was involved. If you haven't seen, I think there's two documentaries around it, but if you haven't seen either of them, you should. It's incredible. It was a 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 was, you know, drew parallels to that. I guess what, what tickles me is that most of the people who were highlighting this instance as an example of liberals trying to disrupt or, you know, 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, ah, I got that one wrong. I mean, they're just like, I'm gonna remove this. This tweet. And then the guy who posted the video removed his entire Twitter account.

[B]

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.

[A]

Don't give yourself that much. Come on.

[B]

Said not. Not Will Somer at the bull work.

[A]

Will, you know, not the false flag newsletter. Delete.

[B]

Delete.

[A]

No. Come on. But they did. Most of them just deleted it.

[B]

So. So basically what happened here is that the Arlington GOP had been very critical of the organizers of Maga Fire 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. And there was this sort of exchange before that video was filmed where one of them, Miles Morrell, 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, into much bigger, you know, just proof that Antifa is out of control.

[A]

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 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?

[B]

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, 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 hunted by four Mexican men in a white van. This is a, 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. 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, 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 immigrants, someone is, 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 gonna be, I mean, this is less than three weeks after Charlie Kirk's assassination.

[A]

It would have been, it would have been massive.

[B]

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 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 stories started to unravel.

[A]

Well, how so?

[B]

Well, the police said, you know, they had 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 buy if you were looking to run away from home and to go on the run. And so they, they found the truck and it was, there was some blood in it, there was a gunshot. And so they said, 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, 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, these Mexican men. But then they released me. He, he claimed, I, I will say one thing I didn't include in the newsletter. He claimed they were making him fight other people. Kind of a very bizarre story, but obviously it, it quickly part and as with the Arlington case, all of these right wing characters who were baying for blood, who are, who are ready to, you know, oh, all these, you know, these, these liberals, these sickos, they suddenly deleted their tweets and moved on quietly.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, look, I would, 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, whatever. And she had a bee carved in her face and quickly fell apart because the bee was carved backwards. She had, she 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, 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.

[B]

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 gonna be out of control. It's gonna be the hardest of the hardcore.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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've.

[A]

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, and it was 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, at the no Kings 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 secretary, like some random person in the crowd, like, don't. Why would you waste your time asking that specific question to the White House press secretary? But of course, Carolyn Levitt 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.

[B]

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. You know, some people were saying really were hurt. But there were at one point Nick Sortor, who's kind of the, the ring leader of this crew, he said, you know, I stole a, a flag an antifa 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.

[A]

Yeah. No, it's, 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, should. Does 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. 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 as uniquely problematic and the other side is completely Korean, just not reality. Any other thoughts before we close shop here, buddy?

[B]

Yeah. Do you want to talk about this? The, the Canal street thing?

[A]

Yeah, Well, I Guess it's part of a, the, 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 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, 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.

[B]

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 Infowars 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.

[A]

Of this 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, they got on it.

[B]

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, 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.

[A]

Now it's wild. It's. People have to understand it's just not normal. Right. Like usually there's more of a structure and coherence to this rather than, oh, look at the next like mall. 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.

[B]

Yeah. Wants to keep track of everyone's deleting.

[A]

Their Twitter accounts when they know False Flag is calling. All right, everyone. Subscribe to Will Summers newsletter, False Flag. 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.