This is an On the Media podcast Extra. I'm Bob Garfield. For much of the past month, a new edition has joined the audio scape of cities across the country.

Fireworks, loud ones, keeping you up all night ones.

And during those sleepless hours in the dark of night, the brain can do some remarkable dot connecting.

One Twitter thread went viral reading,

My neighbors and I believe this is part of a coordinated attack on black and brown communities by government forces.

It's meant to sound like a war zone because a war zone is what it's about to become.

The fireworks were being supplied by the NYPD to cause chaos and provide a pretext for a violent police crackdown?

It sounds unlikely to say the least, and people reporting out the story have found little evidence to back it up,

finding instead that vendors in neighboring states were selling the fireworks in bulk at a discount

likely to young people looking to blow off steam. But those drawing connections

between fireworks and law enforcement should maybe be given a pass, because if you were a person

of color in this country, the most outlandish conspiracies too often turn out to be real. And as journalist Anna Merlin, author of Republic

of Lies, explained to me in a conversation last year, conjuring them up is a pastime as old as history.

One of the earliest examples of that that we see and the one that you'll read about over and over

is this suspicion among ordinary Romans that Emperor N see and the one that you'll read about over and over, is this suspicion among

ordinary Romans that Emperor Nero set the fires that burned much of Rome on purpose, that he set

those fires to rebuild the city to his liking and to pin the blame for the fires on his political

enemies, in this case, the early Christians. And so the phrase Nero fiddling as

Rome burns comes from that. There was this urban legend that spread that Nero, while the fires

were raging through the city, was at his vacation home, plucking a liar or fiddling, placidly watching

the city burn. Hmm. The proto-fals flag operation.

Yes, the proto-fals flag.

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