“Butler was staged”
Why do so many people believe the Butler assassination attempt was staged? Or that all the assassination attempts on Trump were staged?
About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged according to a new survey.
Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans. …
Perhaps the most striking finding was that 42% of Democrats said they believed the Butler shooting was staged.
Among independents, that figure fell to 21%, while just 7% of Republicans said the same.
My explanation? If you believe that there is no objective truth, you are free to choose your truth – and the internet will assist you in doing so. There are also many people for whom most of life is lived online, watching a screen and coming to think of people as actors on that screen. The idea that these attempts were fake is one that’s spread online, and for people who believe the worst of Trump it’s a “truth” they can get behind. The fact that other people were wounded and one person killed at Butler? Fake. The photos of the assassin on the roof? Fake.
As just one example of the folks spreading this particular set of ideas, I bring you the odd couple, Candace Owens and Hunter Biden. Yes, you heard that right (the clip is less than a minute long):
Or a conspiracy. The JFK conspiracy theories have spawned countless others. But to the best of my knowledge, it never became a widespread idea that he hadn’t died and that the killing was fake; he was obviously dead in a way that would have been difficult for even the most devoted conspiracy theorist to deny. As far as I know, though, the other attempted presidential assassinations between then and now – for example, the shooting of Reagan, or the attempt on Ford’s life – never engendered any sort of widespread notion that they weren’t real.
Perhaps that sort of idea began with 9/11 Truthers. There was a not insignificant number of people who believed the WTC and Pentagon attacks were, if not exactly fake, then a performative plot by the US government:
The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements from inside the U.S. government, or that hijacked planes were remotely controlled …
Extraordinary. And there are also the people who think the moon landings were faked.
The other day I heard two jokes about conspiracy theorists and the tenacious quality of their beliefs. Here’s the first:
“Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.”
And the second:
“A JFK assassination conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God welcomes him and says, ‘To reward your lifelong search for the truth, I will answer one question for you.’
“The man doesn’t hesitate. ‘Who really killed John F. Kennedy?’ he asks.
“God smiles and says, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone shooting from the Texas School Book Depository with a Manlicher-Carcano rifle. There was no second shooter and no conspiracy.’
“The man mutters, ‘Shit. This goes much higher up than I thought.'”
Nice post. I definitely laughed at the 2nd joke. A friend & I just finished watching all 15 seasons of Supernatural, which has very creative & blasphemous potrayals of religious fictions. That joke would fit right in with the devious God they portray.
I agree with all the post’s commentary, though the World Trade Center #7 building is an interesting case. A friend got caught up in the conspiracy theories because of that building’s collapse.
It is very strange because apparently the design of the building was quite flawed. The failure of a single structural beam can and probably did cause the entire structure to collapse.
I was fairly recently unfortunate enough to be in a conversation with someone who believed that the Butler assassination incident was staged, that whatever (if there even was anything) that flew by candidate Trump’s ear was not a real bullet.
I asked whether that father of two daughters (all seated together in the rally audience) that was killed by a fast-moving projectile, whether that was a fake bullet, too; whether the man’s death was staged.
Crickets (predictably).
I’d say about 90% of the leftists i follow believe all the attempts were staged. Why? Because Trump is evil and will do anything to promote himself. It’s TDS in its terminal stages.
Yeah, probably. And that father was killed by splashes of apple cider vinegar [snicker].
Most people lack access to the direct evidence necessary to prove common facts. Almost everyone relies on someone else’s say-so, whether that’s an expert, a journalist, a bureaucrat, or the like.
The institutions that people can normally rely on to vouch for truths that they can’t directly prove have become unreliable, often because of wild and barely-believable scandals/conspiracies that turned out to be true. (Trump/Russia, COVID lab leak, Hunter laptop, CIA failures in Iraq, etc.)
When people can no longer trust the institutions that rely on those institutions, the result is a free-for-all.
There is also the Flat Earther conspiracy guys. Every ocean going ship captain and airline pilot would have to be in on the conspiracy since that flat plate Earth Model they use would only correspond at one place East – West distance wise with the spherical Earth.
(Trump/Russia, COVID lab leak, Hunter laptop, CIA failures in Iraq, etc.)
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None of these were ‘wild’ or ‘barely believable’.