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Two weeks ago, when a radicalized schoolteacher rushed through the vestibule of the Washington Hilton and was swiftly neutralized by Secret Service agents, my thoughts quickly turned to the Bulwark’s Will Sommer, one of America’s foremost disinformation reporters, who surely had a busy weekend ahead of him. Sommer has been covering the grotesqueries of outré right-wing conspiracy culture for nearly a decade now. He has memorized the biographies of charlatans like Jacob Wohl, Gavin McInnes, and Steven Crowder, to say nothing of the empire of content published by Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. But more than that, Sommer possesses a special fluency with the illusory reality being signal-boosted by a seemingly infinite number of outlying MAGA partisans who have permanently altered our institutional sense of consensus. All of this research produced Sommer’s book, Trust The Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Reshaped The World, which charted the information crisis that birthed Jan. 6. Somehow, American politics has only grown stranger since then. For Sommer, that means one of the most recent editions of his newsletter, False Flag, focused on the worryingly large number of Republicans who believe this latest assassination attempt was staged.

I have been curious about how Sommer does his job for a long time. His encyclopedic knowledge of murky right-wing media networks requires a dedication to the canon that few are willing to muster. (The archetypical Sommer tweet features him effortlessly rattling off the perverse backstories of ancillary MAGA figures, with sourcing cultivated far outside the visibility of mainstream news consumers.) His insight has been crucial in a world that continues to spin off its axis, even if it takes a toll on the soul. I talked to Sommer about how he keeps tabs on an intractable conservative media ecosystem, the peculiar way MAGA activists regard his work, and what value he thinks disinformation reporting has in 2026, when the mess he is reporting on looks increasingly impossible to resolve. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Luke Winkie: So when the news comes across your timeline that someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump—which you know is going to kick up a firestorm in right-wing conspiracy circles—what is that day like for you?

Will Sommer: It’s kind of like pulling in the lobster traps. I have a finely tuned Twitter algorithm that surfaces any kind of drama on the right really quickly. So I see things that will just take over my feed, and then I’ll talk to my editors, who are very online themselves, and I’ll be like, “It’s probably not even worth writing about this because everyone knows about it.” And they’ll say, “What are you talking about?” I have a list of 40 conservative websites that I’ll go through a couple times a week, because what I’m looking for is typically an emerging trend, or something that’s out of the ordinary. A lot of those sites just focus on whatever the Trump line is, but other times you find yourself asking, “Why are they........

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