On Tuesday, Newsweek reported that the QAnon movement is already spreading wild conspiracy theories that the mass shooting at King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado was a "false flag" operation.
"Rather than express empathy for the victims of the attack, supporters of QAnon ... instead declared that the media reports and statements from the police were all false and that there is no way yet another mass shooting could have occurred in the U.S.," reported Ewan Palmer. "'No question Boulder, Co incident today was a false flag. The only question is by which side?,' one QAnon profile, who has more than 260,000 subscribers on Telegram, wrote. 'False flag means it's fake. Nobody actually died. Was this false flag to try and take your guns or scare the s**t out of you?'"
"An account with more than 58,000 Telegram followers added: 'This Boulder situation reeks of false flag. Anons will pick this apart in a matter of hours if it is,'" continued the report. "Another Telegram user wrote: 'Nobody died. I was there for an actual shooting. This was 100% fake fake.'"
QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement that believes the United States is secretly run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping cannibal child traffickers, has largely been booted off most major social media platforms, but persists on direct encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.
Conspiracy theories that mass shootings are false flags for government social engineering are popular with the far right. Most famously, InfoWars webcaster Alex Jones repeatedly claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was staged with child actors — a claim for which he is subject to multiple defamation suits by the parents of the victims.
