While Sunday’s protest rally against the closure of Washington, D.C.’s WWII memorial was seen as a stirring victory to those on the right, most other observers were instead struck by the unhinged vitriol directed at President Obama and, most of all, the unfurling by one protestor of a Confederate flag.

The response among right-wing tweeters was outrage, too — but not at the flag or the man who brought it with him. Rather, right-wing animus settled on the supposedly liberal media, conspiring to make the protestors look bad. Indeed, in the right’s telling, the conspiracy went deeper than just media bias: the flag-bearer, who has now been identified as Michael Ashmore of Texas, was likely a secret liberal, trying to make conservatives look bad.