Fireworks and psychological warfare

[TODO: insert update here when there is evidence that fireworks are, in fact, a psyop]

If you live in a major US city, you have probably heard (and possibly seen) way more fireworks this summer than you ever have before. If you spend a lot of time on twitter (which seems likely for my audience), you have probably encountered this thread:

Reporting from Brooklyn, there was yet another night of extremely loud fireworks starting at 8 pm. and ending at about 2 a.m. This is the second week straight of this; every night during the same time period, like clockwork.

— Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones, Jr.) (@SonofBaldwin) June 20, 2020

The tl;dr is that:

• the cops are responsible for the fireworks, both directly (setting them off themselves) or indirectly (distributing them to the community)
• the purpose of this is psychological warfare – the fireworks provoke anxiety, prevent people from sleeping, and will inure people to the sound of gunfire

Here are some alternate and additional theories for the fireworks:

• People are spending their evenings bored at home because of COVID and are shooting off fireworks to pass the the time
• The above, except that the fireworks are an act of protest
• Anarchists are shooting off fireworks to disrupt gunfire detection systems
• The above, except the purpose is to provoke police escalation, and the anarchists are funded by George Soros
• People are spending their COVID stimulus checks on fireworks
• There is an increased trade in illegal fireworks because underemployed rideshare drivers are “trafficking” in out-of-state fireworks to supplement their incomes
• Police are selling fireworks themselves (perhaps those seized from other fireworks “traffickers”) but purely for financial reasons
• Police are uninvolved in the distribution of fireworks, but are refusing to respond to noise complaints because they feel “under-appreciated”
• The above, except that they are not responding to noise complaints because they blew their overtime budgets on protests & curfew

The thing is – any or all of these could be true at the same time. All of them are attempts to explain the fireworks phenomenon through deductive reasoning, and none of them have any evidence beyond the fireworks themselves. And while I have no issue believing that law enforcement agencies would wage psychological war against the people they claim to serve, this seems like a lot of work for a relatively subtle effect.

I think it’s worth contrasting the fireworks conspiracy with some other terror campaigns involving the police. Of course there is a selection bias in play here, but there are plenty of examples with only the flimsiest cover-up, eg. the gruesome deaths of activists ruled as suicides. In these cases, the flimisness of the cover-up is part of the effect – the terror comes not just from the activist’s murder, it comes from the idea that the police have the power to deny objective reality. The absence of a cover-up, with zero consequences, is the expression of power and the act of psychological warfare.

And if there is, in fact, a police conspiracy to distribute fireworks for the purpose of psychological warfare, there is probably an abundance of evidence indicating this. The scale of the plan outlined in the thread linked above suggests that lots of people were offered free/cheap professional-grade fireworks; where are these people? Some of the people who were offered fireworks (especially if they were free) must have suspected a set-up and declined; where are they?