The MAGA 'conspiracy machine' is blatantly distorting this week's tragedies: analysis

The weekend of December 13-14 will be remembered for its horrific violence, from mass shootings at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island to the killings of iconic actor/director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle Reiner in Los Angeles.

Police are still investigating the Brown University attack for possible motivations, while Australian officials are describing the massacre at Bondi Beach — a popular attraction about four miles from the Sydney Central Business District — as an antisemitic terrorist attack. At least 15 people were killed at Bondi Beach, but the attack could have been even deadlier were it not for Ahmed Al Ahmed — a Syrian immigrant and Muslim who fearlessly tackled and disarmed the shooter and is now recovering in a Sydney hospital.

The fact that el Ahmed is a Muslim hasn't received a lot of attention from right-wing media outlets. In an article published on December 16, The New Republic's Aaron Regunberg cites the Bondi Beach shooting as an example of the "MAGA conspiracy machine" distorting major news stories.

"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," Regunberg laments. "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."

Although the Brown University shooting is still being investigated, Regunberg observes, right-wing media outlets are quickly jumping to conclusions.

"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," Regunberg explains. "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.'"

Regunberg adds, "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."

The New Republic journalist laments that MAGA distortions are easy to spread because there are so many right-wing media outlets online.

"The right now controls most of the traditional media institutions, the social media platforms, and the algorithms that shape our attentional ecosystem," Regunberg laments. "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?"