David Gilbert, writing for Wired:

Conspiracists and far–right extremists are blaming just about everything and everyone for the Baltimore bridge collapse on Tuesday morning.

A non-exhaustive list of things that are getting blamed for the bridge collapse on Telegram and X include: President Joe Biden, Hamas, ISIS, P Diddy, Nickelodeon, India, former President Barack Obama, Islam, aliens, Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Wokeness, Ukraine, foreign aid, the CIA, Jewish people, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, Covid vaccines, DEI, immigrants, Black people and lockdowns.

The Francis Scott Key truss bridge actually collapsed when the MV Dali cargo ship collided with one of the bridge supports. Six construction workers, who were filling potholes on the bridge at the time, are presumed dead. The ship is owned by Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd, and the 22-person crew were all Indian. The ship was on route to Colombo, Sri Lanka at the time of the accident.

X, the social media website owned by no one else other than Elon Musk, the billionaire who has made an effort to push the dangerous great replacement conspiracy theory on his website, has been inundated with nonsense comments from blue-check-bearing accounts with prioritized replies. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, had her account reinstated however many months ago on X after the previous Twitter ownership permanently suspended it over her barbaric coronavirus conspiracy theories — now, she insinuated the collapse of the bridge could be due to a terrorist attack. (It was not a terrorist attack.)

Leftist, progressive users have blamed the attack on U.S. support of the wars in Israel and Ukraine while also complaining about how overfunded the Defense Department is. The bridge collapsed due to a Singaporean cargo ship colliding into a pillar of the bridge — how that is the Defense Department’s fault is beyond me. Meanwhile, right-wing nuts continued to blame the president and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for spreading non-existent “misinformation.” Very few of these posts — exclusively on X and former President Donald Trump’s social media website, Truth Social — had Community Notes pinned to them, presumably because most intelligent users authorized to write notes have better things to do than debunk bizarre antisemitic conspiracies on a dying social media platform.

However, less-intelligent conspiracy theorists continue to brainwash teenagers, the elderly, and anyone who gets their news exclusively on X — all to push their political propaganda. The owner of the website, Musk, embraces it in the name of “free speech” and the “First Amendment” without actually having the intellectual capacity to understand that the Constitution only applies to the government, not private platforms. Of course, none of Musk’s sycophantic followers will understand this quirk of the legal system, though, so we’re instead stuck with the most popular real-time news website peddling racist conspiracies until enough people move to Threads, Meta’s clone of X.

If this is how it is when a bridge collapses and kills six people, imagine how it’s going to be on Election Day when half the population’s preferred candidate loses — whomever that may be.