The major political director to Democratic Party mega-donor Reid Hoffman, who had just joked about Trump becoming a “martyr,” sent an email to journalists asking why,” NOT ONE News And OPINION LEADER IN AMERICA IS WILLING TO OPENLY CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY It TRUMP AND PUTIN STAGED THIS ON PURPOSE.
Dmitri Mehlhorn urged investigators to take into account the “possibility” that this” shooting” was promoted and possibly even staged but that Trump could get the pictures and take advantage of the backlash, which feels brutal, humanoid, and absurd in America, but is quite common worldwide.
However, it was horrifying to see says that the assassination attempt was” staged” and “false flag” faze spread across social media. These principles garnered millions of wants, likes, and views. And plenty of people who should know better, scientists and protesters, participated.
Indeed, Mehlhorn’s boss, the founder of Linked In, is n’t some unhinged commenter on Reddit, he is worth$ 2.5 billion. He set out on the same course in 2024 and pledged$ 100 million to support his 2020 opposition to President Trump.
Because they have been very receptive in the past, Mehlhorn might have felt comfortable asking conspiratorial questions to reporters. Mehlhorn, for instance, padded his appeal to journalists by referencing secretive stalwarts of the modern left, saying that the staging of the assassination was a” typical Russian tactic” and urging them to ponder “how frequently Putin and his allies run this play.”
Democrats ‘ hatched version of the Russian collaboration conspiracy theory, which was developed by a major political party and spread through the establishment press, is the most influential and powerful in American history. Earlier this year Nancy Pelosi was still on MSNBC claiming that Putin perhaps “had” things “financial” on Trump.
But the public’s crazed fear about Trump has been popular and adjusted. MSNBC did never heat” Morning Joe” this day in an implicit entrance of the culture the hyper-hyperbole had created, rather moving with breaking media coverage of the attempted assassination of the former president. According to CNN, professionals expressed concern about what would be said on the program.
They should be. Joe Scarborough, an alleged average who regularly raises the bar for the D.C. consensus, has claimed that Trump was using border agents as SS guards and that the former president may destroy reporters and “execute whoever he’s allowed to arrest, do, drive from the country” if he won the election.
Former historian Michael Beschloss, a trustee of the White House Historical Association and the National Archives Foundation, once warned that if Democrats lost the midterm 2022 election, it would mean the difference between “whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.” Beschloss is hardly alone. There are scores and scores of comparable examples.
Although we are yet to learn a lot about the assassin, nearly the Democratic Party’s message has been to accuse the opposition of violence and fascist intentions since Biden’s” Red Wedding” speech. For years now, Trump has been cast as Hitler, or worse — not by hyperbolic pundits but by mainstream Democrats.
Then again, for modern Democrats, every political loss, every inconvenient event, threatens democracy itself. It’s challenging to keep track of all the ginned-up moral panics that have occurred recently due to how many there have been. More than that, even the left’s policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems— are increasingly tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. Democrats no longer debate, they accuse you of sedition.
From Jim Crow 2.0 to the conspiracy to end the Confederacy to the Internet turning off and on and on, everything is connected. Even the violence that Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and pro-Hamas rioters reported frequently was the result of ginned-up paranoia promoted by the media about the prevalent evils of American society.
All of this is not to say that Republicans are immune to conspiratorial thinking. Hardly. But unlike right-wing conspiracies, there is no real countervailing force to stop it. How many people actually think that QAnon exists? The right’s ham-fisted theories are crude, screwy, and largely inconsequential to policy.
But the left’s conspiracies and hoaxes have been laundered through mass media, polished off with high production values, calibrated for maximum plausibility, and draped in a patina of legitimacy. How many Democrats still think the Russians threw the 2016 presidential election? How many believe that there are “book bans” in red states, or that one ca n’t” say gay” in Florida, or that the Supreme Court is secretly run by a cabal of oligarchs?
It’s paranoia all the way down.
In a few months, I’ll publish a book that goes over the history and mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, panic, and paranoia on the modern left, including the Trump-is-Hitler variety. It’s been decades in the making.
