Claim: The Midtown Manhattan shooter shouted “Free Palestine” while shooting people
Verdict: False
On July 28th, 2025 a man named Shane Devon Tamura opened fire in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, killing four people and then himself. In the aftermath, his motivation became fairly clear: a former high school football player, he left a note attacking the NFL, whose offices are in the skyscraper he attacked; it appears he started his attack in the lobby, and then took the wrong elevator and missed their offices.
But Laura Loomer has other ideas.
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Attached is a short (37 second) clip of a woman claiming to be a witness saying that the shooter was shouting “Free Palestine”
To be clear, there is no evidence of this. The killer was not wearing anything on his head, and he was not Middle Eastern. And his motivations are clear: he had two notes on him explaining them.
But that leaves the mystery of what this photo, constantly attached to the case, represents:
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Initially claimed to be the shooter, and then claimed to be an accomplice, every citation of this story comes from the New York Post, who claim that two protestors were arrested when they wandered into the active shooting situation and started saying “Free Palestine! I’m not the shooter!” The Murdoch-owned Post is obviously not a reliable source, but they’re not the source of this image. But screencaps of the original story let us find it:
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The story has now changed completely, and no longer has the photo, and the original does not appear to be in the Wayback Machine, though we can recognize it’s the same as the url still has the original headline, to reflect new information. It also has an editor’s note attached:
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It appears that two people, a woman and the man pictured, were taken into custody by police, possibly for entering an active crime scene. One of them may have yelled something during this time. Neither were tied in any way to the shooting, whose motive is very easily established as rage against the NFL. AMNY retracted this story and the photo, but it had spread onto the New York Post, and to X/Twitter, where it was combined with the false witness testimony video shared by Laura Loomer to form a narrative
Claim: Did Mahmoud Khalil hire an “American-looking” woman to pose as his wife?
Veridct: False conspiracy theory bullshit. Obviously.
Weird racists, of both the Netanyahu & Trump supporter variety, are trying to discredit the outrage around Khalil by claiming that he hired a “fake wife” who looked “more American” to appear at a press conference.
Obviously, this isn’t true. Notably, every post about this uses exclusively images - even though the original tweet is a video. And if we watch the video…
…it’s his lawyer. Of course it is. The entire framing is nonsense that only works if you’re also a weird racist creep, bc what does “Western-looking” even mean?
Now, whoever first shared this knew that - they had to, in order to get the right screencap to lie about its contents. They seized on an admittedly poorly written tweet that included a quote from his wife over a video of his lawyer without making it clear it was the lawyer saying it, making it easy for them to spin a story to gullible conspiracy types about how it’s a different woman (I looked up the original post’s author, and he is a crypto & Epstein list guy, since that is the only type of guy left on Twitter no matter what else they support). His tweet was copied by “Open Source Intelligence” accounts (if you’re only familiar with OSINT from outlets like Bellingcat, it’s been a trend that social media platforms, from Twitter to Bluesky, are being flooded by “OSINT” accounts that…just share news videos they see) and spread further, and now it’s the crux of the argument of some weird crisis actor conspiracy theory
But it takes about thirty seconds to look up this video & see the immediate caption explaining that she’s a lawyer…you know, if you want to do anything but believe it unthinkingly, and hold up that it’s Very Suspicious when multiple women stand adjacent to a man at different times, or when women refer to him in a press conference
A growing number of people believe that the war in Ukraine isn’t real. Not the usual conspiracy theorist belief that takes Putin’s motives at face value, but that it’s entirely being staged by Ukraine. This is being advanced by noted right-wing internet figure Catturd and going off retweets, at least 18,000 people believe this, bc we live in a hellworld
As always their reasoning is absolutely convincing to anyone inside their media bubble and absolute lunacy to anyone outside of it
The claim isn’t that some footage of Ukraine is doctored. It’s that there isn’t any footage. At all.
Which sounds like total bullshit to anyone not within the cult. No footage? It’s just about the most documented war of modern times. There are entire subreddits and Twitter accounts devoted to posting dozens of new videos from the war daily. It’s a war between two European countries in a era where everyone has smartphones and cameras are regularly mounted on military equipment, of course there’s an abundance of footage
To paraphrase Dan Olson’s video about flat Earth/QAnon, it’s the type of thing that drives anyone curious about the world and understanding it insane.
“No graphs explaining how the war is going” There are multiple websites doing daily maps of the war. Wikipedia has one on every page of anything associated with Ukraine.
“Zelenskyy jet setting around the world” Well, yeah, what do you expect him to do? Lead troops into battle personally like a medieval lord? Zelenskyy is President of Ukraine, and the President handles international relations while the Prime Minister is the head of government (tbf, I think a lot of Americans don’t realize the President of Ukraine isn’t like the President of the US but is like…well, most European countries with Presidents [except for France, where the President is the most powerful government figure]). This is his job.
The Catturds of the world know that. They’re banking on the idea that their followers don’t, that they absorb information about the world entirely through their prism. They aren’t shown war footage, they’re shown the staged celebrity photo-ops and told that’s all there is, that everything else doesn’t exist or is fake.
Which is good for keeping the converted converted, but may be too out there for your garden variety reflexive contrarian; on the other hand, it’s good for converting the remaining true believers into the type of overtly antisemitic fascist that understands what MAGA types really mean when they rant about “evil globalist worms”.
Claim: Michael Jackson’s music video for “Black or White”provoked outrage for scenes where the musician destroys racist graffiti.
Notes on Tumblr: ~900
Verdict: False
Buried in a post rightfully attacking the casting of a white actor as Michael Jackson and people using the lyrics to his song “Black or White” in a misguided attempt to defend it is this claim about the ending sequence to the song’s music video. Unfortunately, while the overall point is correct, this claim is not true.
The post contains a link to the rare full version of the video, which it is dubbed “Black or White: The Complete Version”. We’ll see why this is the case later. It indeed does contain scenes of Michael Jackson destroying racist graffiti. But these scenes were not the same when the video debuted on November 21st, 1991 on FOX, MTV, and BET, when this post claims people were outraged by the scene because of its anti-white supremecy statement.
That brings us to the Complete Version. Far from being the object of outrage, the racist graffiti was added digitally to this later release of the video to quell outrage by making the destruction more understandable:
As the full video is infrequently shown (even the official upload on Youtube is a short version) and the edited version of the long video has long supplanted the controversial original when shown on TV or released in compilations, it’s easy to assume that the more popular form of the video is the original. However, this is not the case.
Did the video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” inspire anger among white viewers for its statement against racism when it aired on the FOX network in 1991? Not quite.
Claim: In the final Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin sees Hobbes as just a toy after he’s put on unspecified pills and works on assignments.
Verdict: HOAX
This faked Calvin and Hobbes strip, which has made the rounds on Tumblr and other sites many times, is easily identified as fake. The real final strip, published December 31st 1995, is readily available online.
That real final strip doesn’t on a last twist where Calvin grows up, but instead on a fanciful note, with Calvin and Hobbes going sledding - much more in keeping with the strip’s style.
Claim: The French offered the United States a statue paying homage to slaves; the American government refused it and made their own statue with a white woman.
The statue on the left was sculpted in 2007 and is of no relation to the Statue of Liberty. None of the models for the Statue of Liberty were black; information can be found on Snopes.com.
Claim: A Fargo man cleared out snow with a flamethrower.
Verdict: Satire
This story originates from the FM Observer; that site’s Twitter feed describes it as “The Fargo-Moorhead area’s only satire news and entertainment website.”
Claim: This photo shows the Sphinx covered in snow after a unexpected snowfall.
Verdict: FALSE
On December 13th 2013 Egypt was hit by a extremely rare snow storm.
However, the widely-circulated photo above shows not the recent snow fall but a replica of the Sphinx in a Japanese theme park. Keen eyes may spot what appears to be the tip of the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Those interested in real photos of this snow storm can find them on social media; some examples can be found in this Huffington Post article.
Claim: While a college student, David Cameron was a member of a group that made Hang Mandela posters.
Verdict: FALSE
While the Hang Mandela posters were produced by the Federation of Conservative Students, Cameron had just started college and was never active in politics during his time as a student.
Claim: David Cameron went on a fact-finding mission in South Africa on behalf of an anti-sactions group.
Verdict: TRUE
This trip is documented and Cameron has commented on it, saying his party was wrong to oppose sanctions.
Source: Buzzfeed, which in turn cites Cameron’s biographers and the Telegraph.