Assassination Conspiracy Theories Take Hold on the Left
A third of Democrats think one or all of the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump were fake.
Some leftists think that political violence, in some cases, is perfectly justified. Some leftists are angry that all three would-be assassins of President Donald Trump missed or failed. And some leftists believe that one or all of the assassination attempts were staged. Certainly, there’s a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.
Leftists also claim to hate misinformation and hate itself. You know the type — the single cat lady next door who has that “Hate Has No Home Here” sign in her front lawn while she seethes with rage over everything conservatives believe. Or maybe the sign that says something about believing in science and other left-wing tropes.
The same people who don’t know what a woman is or that life begins at conception. The ones who think “white supremacists” are the biggest threat to America and hate Donald Trump with the heat of a thousand suns.
Yesterday, the information gatekeepers at NewsGuard — some of our least favorite people — published the results of a poll:
Nearly one third of Americans (30 percent) believe that at least one of the three attempts on President Donald Trump’s life over the last two years was staged, according to a new NewsGuard/YouGov poll. For each attempted assassination, a majority of Americans said either that it was staged or that they were not sure — averaging 54 percent across all three.
Only 38 percent of Americans believe that all three assassination attempts were authentic.
Predictably, the false belief that any of the attempts were staged is far more prevalent among Democrats — 42% of them believe the July 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt was staged. Cole Allen, the man charged with attempting to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, was one of them. He also falsely believed that Trump is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” — phony allegations CBS’s Norah O'Donnell was all too eager to repeat, in “the gunman’s words,” of course.
Leftists never did care much about stopping misinformation.
Naturally, after reading this poll, the first thought that comes to mind is that it’s unbelievably outrageous. We all saw Trump bleeding from the ear after literally being shot in Pennsylvania. Firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed by a real bullet that day while shielding his wife and daughter, and two other rally attendees were also shot. Then again, there are plenty of people who think we never landed on the moon, that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the earth is flat, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.
The second thought that came to mind was that this poll is an incredible indictment of the mainstream media, from which most Americans still get their news. The Leftmedia is infamous for peddling misinformation — from the Russia collusion hoax to COVID’s origins and mitigation plans to a thousand other political things. It’s why we’ve long borrowed the Russian term “dezinformatsiya” to describe Leftmedia reporting. Left-wing social media influencers are even more brazen in their hateful lies.
NewsGuard editor Sofia Rubinson framed it this way: “Increasingly, people on all sides of the political spectrum are distrustful of both this administration and also the media.” Right. Assassination is a “both sides” problem. Sure thing.
And that led to my third thought: NewsGuard stays in business by policing “misinformation.” Hmm.
In order to justify its own existence, NewsGuard needs people to think that other people are still succumbing to fake news. It’s sort of like the Southern Poverty Law Center funding the very hate it purports to fight.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not really engaging in my own conspiracy theory here about NewsGuard. The real problem there is that the leftists who run NewsGuard put a veneer of objectivity on their operation so they can more “legitimately” target conservative news outlets like The Patriot Post and serve as a Praetorian Guard for the mainstream media. They fancy themselves heroic defenders of impartiality, when their real agenda is suppressing the Right. In this case, they’re noting that misinformation is a widespread problem, so they can say, See, we police everyone.
Clearly, there are left-wingers who are so beset with Trump Derangement Syndrome that they think he staged the assassination attempts against himself to generate sympathy. We also live in the age of AI and social media fakery, so young people are particularly skeptical (in select cases, anyway).
Yet it’s a seemingly odd pairing that there have also been three assassination attempts by deranged leftists who are triggered by left-wing hate. And that’s not counting the numerous plots that were thwarted before becoming attempts.
Radical leftists are frequently haters and liars, and they have seduced more than a few Americans to their ideological darkness. That’s why the light of truth and Liberty is so critical.
