No, MAGA friends, Antifa didn’t put algae in the Deflecting Pool (and that’s not a typo) | Opinion
I woke up this morning to otherwise intelligent friends of mine sharing the “news” on social media that two Antifa operatives have been arrested for dumping algae into the Reflecting Pool in Washington.
Of all the things that never happened, this might be the one that happened the least.
Antifa, they believe, is behind the algae bloom that has embarrassed President Trump’s efforts to “improve” the capital landmark by painting it blue, like the pool at his Mar-a-Lago funhouse.
Trump likes to rename stuff (a lot), and in this troubled summer, he ought to rename the pool between the Washington and Lincoln memorials.
Let’s call it the Deflecting Pool.
What’s it deflecting from? Could be any number of things.
The Epstein files are always a popular choice.
Or maybe it’s the agreement to pay the Islamic Republic of Iran more than $300 billion in war reparations, after we killed an 89-year-old guy (who probably wasn’t long for this world anyway) and blew up a bunch of stuff in their country, and they responded by trashing our Mideast military bases with the equivalent of bomb-strapped model airplanes.
Or maybe it’s the bozo who blurted “Michelle Obama is a man” on national TV to curry favor with his emperor after winning in Sunday’s gladiatorial combat on the White House lawn.
Could be any of the above; could be all of the above. Who knows?
What we do know is the water turned green after the president’s “great idea” to paint the pool blue to reflect the mood of the country as its 250th birthday approaches.
MAGA folks don’t do science, so they’re having a tough time grappling with the concept that algae blooms are perfectly normal for dark-bottomed pools of still water baking in the Washington summer sun.
So, enter Antifa, the nebulous all-purpose boogeyman Trump and MAGA blame for pretty much everything that goes wrong on the president’s watch.
The viral post “quotes” a U.S. Park Police Capt. Joseph Barron, who’s as real as Captain Crunch, saying that two Antifa operatives have been arrested for the Great Algae Bloom of 2026.
“Cameras caught a pickup truck entering the National Mall carrying the two men and about half a dozen buckets of what environmental experts are calling an extremely aggressive form of Georgia algae,” the bogus post says.
The post originates from a Facebook page called “America’s Last Line of Defense.” It specializes in making up nonsense to rage-bait gullible MAGA folks for fun and profit.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s how the page defines itself: “The flagship of the ALLOD network of certified AI-free trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real.”
Back in the day, when social media pretended to be responsible to anything but its investors’ bottom line, X and Facebook had “fact checkers” (I know how quaint that sounds today) to ferret out the fakest of fake news and delete it.
But then Trump ally Elon Musk bought Twitter (renaming it X), and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg bent the knee to Trump and paid a million dollars to stand with him on his inaugural stage. Since then, falsehoods are welcome as long as they support the regime. The bigger the lie, the bigger the payday.
Sensing opportunity, ALLOD followed its original post with one saying acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is charging the fictitious Antifa couple with a hate crime, including this made-up quote: “We have a truckload of evidence against them.”
That’s the falsest thing of all.
The original ALLOD post shows a blurry security camera photo of what appears to be a Dodge Ram pickup, ostensibly fleeing the scene of the crime that never happened.
If it had actually been Antifa, they’d have used a Prius.
