The Great Fireworks Conspiracy

[writerkit]

So according to the internet, the reason for the fireworks being such a thing is because the police are distributing fireworks to people in order to make lot of noise so we won't notice when they start their armed assault on... the protestors? I think? It's vague on that point. We will by that point be so used to the pounding of fireworks that we won't hear and therefore won't notice guns mowing down the protestors by the hundreds.

Also saw one with "If we know and believe the feds and narcs distribute firearms and drugs in the hood, is it really such a leap to fireworks?" Which I suppose it might not be if one believed they were in fact *distributing* either firearms or drugs. (Planting them on people, sure, but they're not running around *distributing* such things. What would be the point? If you want to arrest someone for drugs and you have some drugs you can come up with a pretext to search their car and "find" the drugs, and this is much less risky for you than just... distributing them.)

Now, several news organizations have looked into this and found that there are lots of people buying and reselling on Instagram in the fireworks stores and even gone out and talked to some of the illegal fireworks dealers selling stuff out of the backs of their cars. Gothamist had a story about the ridiculous amount of fireworks before George Floyd was killed and the protests were even started.

(Also, "calling 311 sends you to 911 and 911 sends you to 311" is... the sort of thing that would be REALLY REALLY NOTICEABLE if it were actually happening and definitely marks the person saying it as consciously spreading lies rather than being a paranoid dupe.)

But even without the news organizations debunking this, it's ridiculous. Because the majority of people don't actually react to noises that sound like an aerial assault in the moment; they wait and see what the news told them it was anyway. And the news is all out at the protests, so they would notice and report it if the police started just opening fire.

I didn't actually get into any arguments with anyone about this one; I'm just sort of staring at it like "Y'all do realize this is the sort of thing that leads to no one believing you when the government actually *does* do something that sounds like a conspiracy theory, right?"

(Also, in a bit of hilarity, while looking up news articles about this I came across an online fireworks store that's selling a "conspiracy pack" full of their most elaborate bangs and booms.)

Comments

[siderea]

Planting them on people, sure, but they're not running around *distributing* such things. What would be the point? If you want to arrest someone for drugs and you have some drugs you can come up with a pretext to search their car and "find" the drugs, and this is much less risky for you than just... distributing them.

No, actually distributing them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking :

From August 18–20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[10][11] which claimed:

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [This drug ring] opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles [and, as a result,] the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America.[12]

To support these claims, the series focused on three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandón, and Norwin Meneses. According to the series, Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles, and Blandón and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. The series alleged that the three had relationships with the Contras and the CIA, and that law enforcement agencies failed to successfully prosecute them largely due to their Contra and CIA connections.

There's more; this is controversial. But plenty of people take it as fact that the CIA peddled drugs in black communities to turn a quick buck to fund things it didn't want Congress to know it was up to, and to undermine the social stability of those communities.

[siderea]

Also, the theory I heard wasn't quite as machiavellian as that, nothing about habituating anybody to anything. It was simple revenge, to disrupt sleep of people in neighborhoods the cops thought too liberal, or simply to rattle the populace to remind them of whom they rely on to protect them when something goes bang in the night.

The revenge thing may also seem out there, but there was this, so.