Over the weekend, local media in Louisville reported that “up to 2,000 people” were involved in a riot at a shopping mall, causing the mall to shut for the night. Once the dust settled, it became clear that the people involved were fighting teenagers and that there were likely far fewer than 2,000 of them. But no journalistic scruples, of course, stopped Fox News commentator and serial misinformer Todd Starnes from spreading the alarm, writing in a column yesterday that “mobs of unsupervised teenagers” were terrorizing shoppers “across the fruited plain” and complaining that the “little thugs and thugettes” involved were not arrested.

In an interview with a St. Louis radio station this morning, Starnes took his alarm even further, wondering if the teens fighting in Louisville were part of a liberal plot stemming from the ideology of Saul Alinsky or George Soros.

“Is this being coordinated by someone?” Tim Jones, who was guest-hosting “Allman in the Morning,” asked Starnes. “Is this all just spontaneous? It seems hard to believe that this is all happening just by itself.”

“Doesn’t it?” Starnes replied. “It smells of something that Saul Alinksy or George Soros might concoct, but, again, we have no proof of that.”

The two also linked the fight in Louisville to peaceful Black Lives Matter protests at the Mall of America.