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We were putting up decorations when my friend got the emergency alert. It was my roommate’s birthday, and we had just returned from shopping for drinks and party snacks. My friend works in a physics lab at Brown University, in the building where the shots had been reported. His coworkers were sheltering in their office. He listened to the police scanner with his headphones because we didn’t want to hear it, and we combed social media for reports from accounts that didn’t know much more than we did. The winter’s first snow began to fall as police helicopters churned overhead.

By the end of the night, only a few things were clear: Two students were dead, eight in critical condition; no suspect had been detained. By morning, the police had taken someone in. His name leaked in the afternoon, and the internet dissected his online footprint. But that night he was released, presumably cleared. No new suspect was named.

As the hours passed, the lack of information grew more glaring. In a press conference, Brown President Christina Paxson was caught off guard by a reporter indignant that she still didn’t know what students were doing in the classroom where the shooting happened. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley told the public they could go about their business, continue their holiday shopping, that they had no reason to fear another attack. Still, with minimal knowledge of what had transpired and no idea about the shooter’s motivations, most of the city stayed shut in at home.

Meanwhile, the internet churned to make meaning in the gap where the shooter’s name should be. Absent an official explanation, the loudest voices soon coalesced to reinterpret the shooting through an invented narrative that cast blame elsewhere — not on a society that celebrates violence and arms its disgruntled members with the means to carry it out at random, but on a community particularly likely to be made victims of its genocidal inclinations.

One of the victims, 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook, was the vice president of the Brown College Republicans. Right-wing commentators quickly speculated that she had been targeted for her political beliefs — another Charlie Kirk. The fact that the shooter had targeted a voluntary study session, one in which there was no way to know who was in attendance, or that he reportedly sprayed bullets at random into the class, or that the other student killed was 18-year-old freshman and Muslim Uzbek immigrant Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, did little to slow the inexorable momentum of the conspiracy.

Hours after the shooting at Brown, two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hannukah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach. Almost immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s recent decision to recognize Palestinian statehood, quoting an August letter in which he said he told Albanese the recognition “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” As if with one voice, members of the right-wing Zionist commentariat declared that, in Bret Stephens’s words, the shooting was “what ‘Globalize the Intifada’ looks like.” In the wake of the shooting, Jillian Segal, Australia’s special envoy to combat antisemitism,

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