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Welcome back to False Flag! I’ve long been interested in the Daily Wire, the conservative outlet helmed by Ben Shapiro, and its quixotic efforts to produce a lavish Game of Thrones–style show about King Arthur. So last week, I was thrilled to see that the show, awkwardly titled The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, finally has a trailer, which was released to coincide with the Daily Wire’s tenth anniversary.
The Pendragon Cycle production saga has played out amid the mysterious disappearance of braggadocious former Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing. A King Arthur superfan, Boreing was seen as a sort of Charles Foster Kane of the right-wing digital media age right up until he abruptly stepped down from the publication in March.
The Daily Wire had promised that Boreing would return one day to talk about Pendragon. And indeed, last week, he returned to the panel show he once helmed alongside Shapiro and other Daily Wire personalities to introduce the trailer—but only in a pre-recorded segment filmed apart from his onetime colleagues.
That’s the content biz! Unfortunately for the Daily Wire, the hottest conservative content right now isn’t medieval fantasy. It’s the right’s ongoing effort to find proof that left-wing violence is very real and very rampant. Almost every outlet seems to be offering its own take on this storyline. But as we’ll discover in this week’s newsletter, sometimes the incidents of crazed left-wing violence they claim to have discovered turn out to be totally fake.
You know what’s not fake? The gratitude I feel for Bulwark+ subscribers, without whom this newsletter and everything else we do at The Bulwark wouldn’t be possible. Won’t you join them?
–Will
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MAGA SOCIAL-MEDIA USERS WERE OUTRAGED over the weekend to find their feeds full of further proof of the left’s problem with political violence: Liberals had been caught on tape attacking Republicans. In a video posted last Thursday by conservative X user Kevin Tober, a former staffer at the conservative blog Newsbusters, a man and woman appear to disrupt a watch party for the Virginia attorney general debate, which was being hosted at a bar by the Arlington GOP.
In the video, customers and bar staffers are seen scuffling with the pair as they struggle to make their way into the party. Some people fall on the ground, and the duo are frog-marched out the front door.
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“Don’t fucking touch me!” the woman yells at one point.
As staffers hold the door closed, the ejected pair fume outside and shout at party attendees.
“This is the left in America today,” Tober tweeted, describing the interlopers as “violent leftists.”
The video went viral on the right, with many users claiming it as proof once again that it’s open season on conservatives in America.
“Violence against conservatives is legal and they know it,” moaned popular conservative X user “Political Math.”
Conservative talk radio host Larry O’Connor took to X to pin the blame on Democrat gubernatorial hopeful Abigail Spanberger, juxtaposing the video with a story she told at a June campaign event that included the line “Let your rage fuel you.”¹
But the man and woman who disrupted the watch party were not liberals at all. As the Arlington GOP made clear in its own statement, the duo were in fact former Daily Caller reporter Myles Morell and wannabe Republican operative Alysia McMillan. If those names sound a bit familiar, it might be because you’ve seen them printed in this very newsletter. The same pair was responsible for the abortive Trump “First 100 Days” party that turned into such a disaster some who were involved described it as MAGA’s own Fyre Festival.
As Arlington GOP chair Matthew Hurtt told me, Morell had shown up to the debate watch party precisely to confront Hurtt. Why? Because Hurtt had, among other things, called Morell an “archetypal goober” in an interview with False Flag about the calamitous “First 100 Days” party.
“Why don’t you call me a ‘goober’ in person?” Hurtt recalled Morell yelling at him at the bar Thursday.
McMillan didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Morell declined to speak with me. In a statement to the ARLnow blog, Arlington police said neither side has pressed charges. As I was in the process of reporting this piece, Tober deleted the tweet in which he initially published the video of the confrontation and made his X account private.
Interfaction battles and emotional meltdowns are fairly common in MAGA politi