“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.)
==
None of these were ‘wild’ or ‘barely believable’.
I think before he died, Scott Adams offered that about 25% of the respondents to any poll will offer a crazy answer.
Some of the 9-11 conspiracy guys refuse to understand that steel looses strength long before it melts into a liquid. There has been at least one metal bridge collapse since 9-11 I remember reading about when a large fuel source caught on fire on the road above it.
Remember the old John Wayne/William Holden movie, The Horse Soldiers? Remember the scene where the Union Soldiers were heating the RR rails and bending them around a post? Did that to make the rails unusable, not because of the bending but because it caused the rails to lose it’s tensile strength.
There was a conspiracy around Butler– a conspiracy to assassinate the former President. When you look at the series of events, you’re struck the actual number of coincidences/incompetence defies belief.
Add that to the conspiracies floating around.
Is there a number where coincidences no longer are a coincidence?
The creator eric kripke has moved on to the boyz (amoral psychotic superheroes which ended in a wretched mess
Brian E:
No, there isn’t such a number. Most crashes or disasters like the Titanic sinking or the Challenger explosion are the result of a host of causes, many of them involving negligence and poor decisions and some involving chance, all coincidentally coming together to cause the problem. But that doesn’t make them conspiracies.
Peter Drucker, in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity, discusses the increasing role of knowledge in modern societies and suggests:
“As a result, it is quite possible that the great new ‘isms’ of tomorrow will be ideologies about knowledge. In tomorrow’s intellectual and political philosophies knowledge may well take the central place that property, i.e. things, occupied in capitalism and Marxism.”
This must have seemed like a rather strange idea to most readers in 1969…the great new ‘isms’, and therefore the great political and cultural fault-lines, were going to be about knowledge? Surely, debate about the nature of knowledge must have seemed like something more appropriate for a university philosophy course in epistemology than a likely major subject for the political and media stage.
But, isn’t this precisely what we are seeing now, with all of the assertions and arguments about ‘disinformation’, the assertions about ‘science says’ and resultant reactions and critiques, the revelations about social media bias, and the concerns about potential artificial-intelligence bias? These are all arguments about what constitutes a valid, useful, and true source of information.
Some thoughts here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69021.html
Brian E (5:54 pm) said: “When you look at the series of events, you’re struck the actual number of coincidences/incompetence defies belief.”
It certainly does. It was a (true) conspiracy of malign neglect. “They” (heaven knows who was in on it) arranged circumstances so that any ordinary Joe or Jane could take a shot at Trump with effectively no interference from those, part of whose jobs were to protect the candidate. “They” didn’t fire shots, but were “they” hoping someone would? — if “they” weren’t hoping someone would, “they” sure as h#ll acted like “they” were.
He is wracked with tds and eds elon derangement syndrome
If there had been more comprehensive revelations as in the 28 pages there be less od a market for this madness
As to butler its not even arguable it was at least a concordance of events to allow it to happen
With the secret service director being right in the middle of it (and her conflicts of interest) the lack od scrutiny by the possums in the Senate and House the repeated failures of the protective detail as recently as a month ago
As Brandon and his friends said:
“Would you let me take this shot from 2 feet away?”
https://youtu.be/FsvJzfXZI18?si=VupZDfkh-QLLDxqM
Too many people believe crazy things because they’ve literally not gone outside and actually done many things.
Just today I ran (online) across someone who said that October 7 was a Mossad false flag operation. This was on a private email list. Fortunately, by the end of the day several people of known reputation flamed him.
Well he departed Supernatural in S5. Then went on to the series “Revolution” (which got canceled) before going to the Boys.
Unfortunately it seems like the popularity got his head and he’s gone off the rails.
Neo, somebody needs to come up with one. “It can’t be a conspiracy because there were only 25 coincidences all happening one after the other!”