In looking for the whole "After Truth" on Netflix I was shown other movies that were "related," one of which was "A Gray State," a 2017 documentary about a very strange murder-suicide in 2014 in Minneapolis.
David Crowley was an Iraq war vet who served his tour, came home, got married, and got his wife pregnant. Then the army initiated a "stop loss," refusing to let vets return to civilian life. They redeployed him back to Iraq against his will. During his second forced tour of duty he went through some stuff he never talked about, but it's clear PTSD was involved (his wife was Muslim).
When he came home, he wanted to make a movie, to be called "Gray State," about how the government is allied against its citizens and will start murdering them in cold blood. He got very apocalyptic. He got close to Alex Jones and his nutjob army. He dressed up in army fatigues and did a lot of military role-playing, shooting guns in the woods. He traumatized his wife and daughter by obsessing over visions of militarized combat between armed patriots like himself and FEMA(!?!?)
Crowley got as far as making a YouTube trailer and getting some Hollywood money interested. But things got weird, he friends & family got worried about him, and one day, near Christmas in 2014, he apparently killed his wife & 4-year old daughter, smeared "Allah Akbar" on the wall in their blood, then killed himself.
Maybe.
Nobody's quite sure why he did it. There were no warning signs, no suicide notes, no threats against his wife. He had appointments and plans well into 2015, and his project was making progress. Even though it was a dystopian right-wing snuff movie.
So of course the QAnon right winger blogosphere is convinced Crowley got too close to the truth and the government had him murdered, then tried to make it LOOK like a murder-suicide. Which is maybe(?) exactly what he wanted ("Helter Skelter"), who knows.
The whole story is very weird with a beard.
Like most conspiracy theories there's a nugget of truth in the core: today, six years later, Bill Barr's unmarked secret army is snatching peaceful protesters off the streets and fomenting riots.
It's a funhouse mirror. The conspiracy theorists are worried about armed troops attacking American citizens, when actually it's the "bubbas with AK47s" who are attacking peaceful protestors, setting fire to buildings, and clashing with police -- all supported by Trump & Barr, because it feeds their narrative that chaos is erupting in the streets and a military dictator response is required to "keep the peace." By participating they're actually bringing about the very conspiracy they're afraid of.
But how do you explain this to a mouth-breather who barely understands gun safety?
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