two points of interest she dug up for this article:

Conspiracy theories like “false flags” appeal to people along the political spectrum. According to a survey conducted in 2014 and reported by the Washington Post, Republicans and Democrats responded equally when asked if they agreed with four statements like, “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places.”

And in the current political environment, it seems that conspiracy theories are going mainstream. Ideas that used to remain confined to pamphlets or small networks leap from the dark corners of the internet into lines in speeches and tweets from the president himself, who has long trumpeted conspiracy theories.

and

Traditionally, a false flag would be staged by the government, but to Jones, an avid Trump supporter, the pool of suspects who have faked attacks has widened. A “false flag” can mean simply “someone staged this incident to make someone else look bad” — and that’s the very argument some on the far right are making about the mail bombing attempts this week.

“The language has shifted, like how ‘fake news’ has lost its meaning,” said Charlie Warzel, a senior technology writer for BuzzFeed News who has written extensively about conspiracy theories on the internet. “It used to mean misinformation and an organized group of people putting something forward — now, it just means something you don’t agree with.”

A similar thing has happened to “false flag,” he said: “‘False flag’ has lost the ‘government’ meaning, and now it just means ‘you’re being duped.’ It’s a stand-in for ‘something smells fishy.’”

The New York Times has published a piece going over some of the same ground, but also forensically delving into how this particular meme spread so fast:

‘False Flag’ Theory on Pipe Bombs Zooms From Right-Wing Fringe to Mainstream

By Kevin Roos, Oct. 25

[....] As prominent conservatives tiptoed around the conspiracy theory swamps, the right-wing internet dove in headfirst. Users on a pro-Trump Reddit forum called r/the_donald frantically assembled evidence to buttress the unfounded theory that the bombs were a left-wing setup. Conservatives on Facebook and Twitter distilled the theory into memes and talking points that were shared thousands of times. Groups originally formed to promote QAnon, a sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory, latched on and turned up the volume even higher [....]

One thing that comes to mind: top down talking points memo writers are being put out of their jobs by those more savvy about the viral highways (and lowways) of social media?

Steve Schmidt & Paul Krugman on Rush Limbaugh:

looks like someone is trying a new tack, a version of "me too", both sides of the nuts do it:

Nothing wrong with reminding us of these scare letters we have forgotten about. Bu the timing of this story is too suspect for my taste.