The Ray Epps conspiracy theory story is powerfully viral — so let's see how it's handled by The New York Times.

I saw this, linked at Instapundit, here. My instinct is to compare what the NYT says about it, and there's a substantial discussion in a piece published yesterday: "The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot/How revisionist histories of Jan. 6 picked up where the 'stop the steal' campaign left off, warping beliefs about what transpired at the Capitol." 

I'm reading this for the first time, so I'll excerpt and react as I go. There's a heading, "The Case of Ray Epps," but the first 2 paragraphs are general material about who is inclined to believe conspiracy theories about January 6th, so it's not as substantial as it looked at first glance. 

Next:

Adherents have built up characters to support their claims that antifa infiltrators or federal agents were the ones who whipped up the mob, in some instances doing so as events were unfolding in Washington. One is a man named Ray Epps, a Trump supporter who was captured on video the night of Jan. 5 urging his compatriots to “go into the Capitol” the next day.

Some in the crowd responded approvingly: “Let’s go!” rings out one reply.

“Peacefully,” Mr. Epps said, just before others began chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!” at the man, who at age 60 stood out in the far-younger crowd.

There's no link to the video, so readers can't see how much "urging" there was or why there was enough to provoke some people — "others" — to call him out as a federal agent and to do it by chanting — as opposed to confronting him and arguing with him. The only reason I'm not linking to the video myself is that I didn't easily find something that wasn't either cut down or edited into commentary.

Mr. Epps, who lives in Queen Creek, Ariz., where he owns Rocking R Farms and the Knotty Barn, a wedding and event venue, according to PolitiFact, appears in another video taken the next day. He is seen yelling to a crowd: “OK, folks, spread the word! As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol. The Capitol is this direction.”

No link for that video either.  

Both moments went largely unnoticed until June 17, when a poster on the online message board 4chan put up the video of Mr. Epps from Jan. 5, writing, “This Fed was caught on camera encouraging the crowd to raid the Capitol on the next day.”

Ah! Video this time. I watched the video (which I've seen before), and I get the sense that the man speaking, whoever he is, is insincere. By the way, the reaction of the people around him indicates that people did not come to the event with a plan to enter the Capitol. They seem as though they'd never even thought of the idea and consider it obviously stupid.

The anonymous poster added, “Who is this man?”

Another person then identified him as Mr. Epps. Soon after, the video and Mr. Epps’s name were posted in a Twitter thread, and a new conspiracy theory began its journey into the Republican mainstream.

The NYT has independently verified that the man is Ray Epps, right? I myself do not know.

Four months later, on Oct. 21, the video was being shown during a congressional hearing. There, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, used it to question Attorney General Merrick B. Garland about whether federal agents had acted as agitators on Jan. 6.

Within days, stories about Mr. Epps began appearing on websites like Revolver News... The Epps story gained further promotion on the far-right cable network One America News... and, far more widely, in [Tucker] Carlson’s “Patriot Purge.”

The NYT doesn't link to those places. I presume it has a policy about which sites get links and which don't. Readers can easily find those places if they want. Question whether it's good journalism to link to some but not others — to have, apparently, a black list (or a white list).

To date, no evidence has emerged linking Mr. Epps to the F.B.I. or any other government agency.

The absence of evidence is never going to convince people that there's no connection because one can easily make inferences from the lack of evidence. The connection, if any, would have been hidden. Perhaps it was hidden competently. Perhaps those who should have looked are in on the conspiracy.  

In fact, his known connections are decidedly anti-government: In 2011, Mr. Epps served as the president of the Arizona Oath Keepers, the largest chapter of the militia group whose members were among the mob that attacked the Capitol, though it is not clear if he remains a member of the group.

It's not clear? Find out! Let's hear more about that. How do we know he didn't infiltrate the group? The NYT set out to demonstrate that the Ray Epps story is a conspiracy theory, but it isn't doing what it needs to do to convince a close reader that there's nothing here. I realize it's hard to prove a negative, but if you want to squelch an actively spreading conspiracy theory you have to do much more than assure complacent readers that there's nothing to see here. You have to provide suspicious minds with reason to believe that you investigated to the point that if he were a government agent, you'd have figured it out.

Yet in the days leading up to Thursday’s anniversary, and on the anniversary itself, the speculation around Mr. Epps only seemed to snowball, amplified on countless social media posts, on Mr. Bannon’s podcast — part of a possibly “massive false flag operation,” as his website put it — and on Mr. Carlson’s prime-time show on Fox News on Wednesday and again on Thursday. “Is this guy going to be charged? Where is he?” Mr. Carlson asked. “It’s a legitimate question, why won’t they answer it?”

The section of the article on Ray Epps ends right there, with Carlson's questions, and no answer to them. I'd say at this point that I don't like referring to the story as a "conspiracy theory." I'm rewriting my post title. It's only a conspiracy theory if it's augmented with assertions of fact that are not backed up with evidence.