Stephen Bannon’s Tuesday appearance on Alex Jones' show provided a perfect window into the state of the MAGA movement: It’s an unhinged echo chamber running on deranged conspiracy theories and wildly overheated rhetoric, aimed at fomenting grievance and seeking retribution, and it’s unwilling or unable to self-correct in the face of contrary facts.

Bannon, a key Trump ally, told Jones that the FBI’s August 2022 court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and resort had been a planned “assassination attempt,” promoting a conspiracy theory that the agents’ standard use-of-force orders revealed the search was part of a scheme by President Joe Biden to kill his predecessor. 

 “Let me be blunt: This was not a standard operating procedure. Alex Jones, you know that better than anybody,” Bannon told Jones, a notorious false-flag enthusiast. 

The host replied that “they were hoping for a confrontation” in which the “Secret Service would think it was an attack.”

Bannon went on to claim that the FBI “had use of lethal force approved” and “wanted someone to bleed out. This entire thing was thought through in a high level of detail, and they weren’t absolutely sure Trump wasn’t going to be there.” He added, “They were looking to have a confrontation that would be an armed confrontation.”

Jones agreed, adding that the agents’ plainclothes attire, instead of uniforms, showed they were “looking for somebody to think it’s a burglary” and “make a mistake.”

In reality, the FBI reportedly picked a date when Trump would not be present for the search, contacted the Secret Service in advance of their arrival, and wore white polo shirts and khakis rather than their usual FBI jackets to avoid attracting attention from guests at Trump’s club.

Bannon subsequently claimed this assassination plot was part of a “vast conspiracy” that requires congressional investigations to “adjudicate” alongside the 2020 “stolen election” and the January 6 “Fed-surrection.” He concluded that when Trump is elected in November, “we’re going to take apart the administrative state brick by brick, and we’re gonna purge the deep state.”

The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search triggered an immediate MAGA firestorm in August 2022, with Trump’s media supporters comparing the bureau to the East German Stasi and Nazi Gestapo. They have not been deterred by revelations that the search uncovered a trove of highly classified documents Trump had refused to return, by special counsel Jack Smith charging Trump with 40 federal criminal counts, or by an armed and enraged Trump supporter’s attack on an FBI field office.

In their latest salvo, MAGA commentators used last week’s unsealing of filings in that case to argue that the FBI search had been part of a Biden plot to assassinate Trump. Their theory was facially absurd, and the evidence they cited — an unsealed court filing in the classified documents case which stated that the FBI agents conducting the search had been advised that they “may use deadly force when necessary” — was swiftly debunked. Reporters, legal experts, and the FBI itself pointed out that this “generic” language is part of “every FBI operations order” as part of the bureau’s “standard policy” — and had been similarly provided for document searches conducted at Biden’s own home. 

After Trump responded to the MAGA frenzy by claiming that the FBI order showed Biden “was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” special counsel Smith noted that the former president’s statements “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to the law enforcement agents.” But neither the debunking of the assassination claim nor the potential danger to FBI agents is slowing down the likes of Bannon and Jones. 

And they aren’t alone — Julie Kelly, the self-proclaimed “J6 conspiracy theorist” who launched the story in the first place, is still at it.

This is how quickly these frauds go from “lethal force is SOP” to “yea it’s ok agents arrived in street clothes with credentials hidden and oh yea Trump wasn’t there anyway so no big deal.” https://t.co/bwgh1Qrfky

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 28, 2024

This is sadly typical. The MAGA right is a constant font of zombie conspiracy theories which are spun up and maintained indefinitely, unaffected by the emergence of contrary facts.

The fervor ignited by their unhinged claims can have serious consequences, as Smith noted — consequences measured in massacres and an insurrection, a shot-up pizza parlor and gym bomb threats, threatened legislators and an assault on an FBI office. And at the end of that yearslong drumbeat, a Trumpist plot to overturn the 2024 election results if Trump loses is looming.