BlueAnon Rising: One Third of All Democrats Believe That The Trump Assassination Attempt was "Staged"

I'm sure the "Disinformation Experts" that routinely attempt to deplatform people for "dangerous misinformation" will get right on this.

Unless their real goal has nothing to do with "protecting the public from dangerous misinformation," and is simply a fig-leaf for their true intention of simply censoring and deplatforming speech that conflicts with their political cult.

A conspiracy theory has run unabated in Democratic circles following the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump on Saturday. It posits that Trump staged the shooting for a photo op, that the wound on his ear was caused by something other than an assassin's bullet, and that he was never in mortal danger.

It's a baseless conspiracy theory disproven by reams of documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts. And it's a belief held by one-third of the Democratic electorate.

One in three registered Democrats believe it is "credible" that the shooting Saturday in Butler, Pa., was staged and not intended to kill Trump, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. The findings show that large swaths of the Democratic base have fallen prey to the phenomenon known as "BlueAnon," a play on the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that once gripped portions of the Republican base and served as an obsession of the mainstream media throughout the first Trump administration.

But the Morning Consult poll shows that BlueAnon adherents among the Democratic base far outnumber their QAnon counterparts on the right. The poll showed that 34 percent of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday's shooting, with less than half--45 percent--saying the conspiracy theory is not credible. By comparison, a widely cited 2021 poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans were QAnon believers.

The rise of BlueAnon can be attributed to prominent Democratic activists and liberal media commentators egging on the notion that Trump staged Saturday's shooting.

Democratic powerbroker Dmitri Mehlhorn, an ally of President Joe Biden who has made at least 10 visits to his White House, wasted no time fanning the flames of conspiracy in the immediate aftermath of Saturday's assassination attempt. Mehlhorn on Saturday evening sent a memo to reporters imploring them to portray the shooting as a false-flag operation straight from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump a good photo opportunity.

"This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power," Mehlhorn wrote.

Mehlhorn did not address the numerous photos that captured bullets whizzing just inches away from Trump's face and blood running from the clearly visible bullet wound across his right ear as Secret Service agents escorted the former president off the stage. Nor did he mention the death of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was shot while shielding his family from the assassin's bullets.

Mehlhorn is hardly the only liberal activist pushing the conspiracy to liberal voters. Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed "connecting some weird dots" surrounding the shooting.

"Did the extreme right want this to happen?" Tiedrich wrote, speculating the shooting could have been connected to a plot to replace Trump atop the GOP ticket with former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Tiedrich, who did not return a request for comment, on Thursday mocked the Washington Post for describing the shooting as "Trump's near-death experience" and said there was no hard evidence that a bullet grazed the former president's ear.

"What the fuck is going on under that bandage?" Tiedrich asked. "And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?"

Liberal MSNBC commentators have adopted a subtler approach to fanning the conspiratorial flames, suggesting in recent days that Trump could not have been shot in the ear by a high-caliber rifle bullet and that the former president is hiding something by not releasing detailed medical records about his wound.

"If he was shot by a high-caliber bullet, there should probably be very little ear there," MSNBC host Michael Steele told viewers on Tuesday.

Steele's fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Wednesday joined him in asking questions about Trump's injuries.

"I have many questions!" Reid wrote on Threads. "Like where are the medical reports? What caused Trump's injury and what was the injury? Sheapnel? [sic] Glass? A bullet?"

...

MSNBC did not return a request for comment.

David Harsanyi has an upcoming book about The Rise of BlueAnon.

Democrats Have Become A Party Of Paranoia And Conspiracy Theories

I know, I know: "Become"? Democrats have always been the party of conspiracy theories. The party's foundational myths are all political conspiracy theories.

Black poverty and failure is due to White Supremacists scheming about how to keep blacks down.

Women not being picked for high-status jobs is all due to The Patriarchy trying to keep women down.

Inflation only strikes free-spending Democrat administrations not because spending profligately reduces the value of the dollar, but because of "corporate greed" and "corporate fat-cats" raising prices just to make more profit. (They never explain why "corporate greed" takes a break during Republican presidencies, when you'd think the "corporate fat-cats" would feel the most empowered to raise prices.)

Socialism only fails because "wreckers" and "hoarders" sabotage the perfection of socialist economies.

But let's move on:

The morning after Donald Trump was nearly murdered by an assassin's bullet in Pennsylvania, the top political adviser to Democratic Party mega-donor Reid Hoffman -- who had himself recently joked about Trump becoming a "martyr" -- sent an email to journalists wondering why, "NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR OPINION LEADER IN AMERICA IS WILLING TO OPENLY CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY THAT TRUMP AND PUTIN STAGED THIS ON PURPOSE."

Dmitri Mehlhorn implored reporters to consider the "possibility -- which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally -- ... that this 'shooting' was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash."

Indeed, it was horrific to see social media explode with claims that the assassination attempt was "staged" and "false flag." These theories garnered millions of likes, retweets, and views. And plenty of people who should know better, academics and activists, participated.

Indeed, Mehlhorn's boss, the founder of LinkedIn, isn't some unhinged commenter on Reddit; he is worth $2.5 billion. He pledged $100 million to fund efforts to oppose President Trump in 2020 and was on the same path in 2024.

...

The Russian collusion conspiracy theory -- hatched by Democrats -- is the most successful and consequential in American history, conceived by a major political party and spread by establishment media. Earlier this year Nancy Pelosi was still on MSNBC claiming that Putin probably "had" something "financial" on Trump.

...

One regular guest, erstwhile historian Michael Beschloss -- a trustee of the White House Historical Association and the National Archives Foundation -- warned that if Democrats lost the midterm 2022 election it would be the difference between "whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed." Beschloss is hardly alone. There are scores and scores of similar examples.

Though we don't know much about the assassin yet, nearly the entire message of Democratic Party since Biden's "Red Wedding" speech has been to accuse the opposition of violence and fascistic intentions. 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. There have been so many ginned-up moral panics over the past few years that it's difficult to keep track of them all. 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.

More:

A UVA professor -- charged with education young, stupid minds -- declared immediately that the assassination attempt that killed a hero fire-fighter was "staged."

A University of Virginia professor denied the legitimacy of the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, posting to X that the Saturday shooting was "staged theatrics" performed by Secret Service to garner "idiots' vote".

In a quote-tweet by University of Virginia Assistant Professor Sethunya Mokoko, he said that Trump's secret service purposefully "ignored" eyewitnesses who allegedly informed police of an armed man on a roof before the shooting took place.

"ignored him because trump & secrete service staged theatrics to win idiots' vote," Mokoko wrote.

Another DEI woke incompetent and luantic, hired only for his skin color and wacky woke politics.

BlueAnon's Newsletter, the New York Times: Trump's belief that he is somehow being targeted by the Regime is a conspiracy theory.

Now The New York Times has an added twist to the spin: Trump is playing the victim, and this is now just another arrow in his quiver. He will use the fact that he was NEARLY KILLED to falsely portray that he is somehow the victim of a multi-year attempt to smear him, bankrupt him, put him in jail, and label him an existential threat to America.

As we know, nothing could be further from the truth. It is Trump who is entirely at fault, not the people like the Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, who called for putting a "bullet" in Donald Trump--on national TV.

Nineteen minutes into Trump's presidency--Trump had just begun his inaugural address and had literally done nothing yet as president besides be sworn in, the Washington Post printed this headline:

Next thing and you'll be telling me that the leftwing media suppresses some news -- and some photos -- in order to help the Democrat Party!

What was it he knows about reporters that made him think they'd be game to push such obvious disinformation?

A "former Democratic candidate for Senate" says that "2 people died" -- he includes the killer in the counting of the dead -- and thinks it's very "odd" that no one sent him an invitation to the funerals.

I guess the body that was seen being dragged from the bleachers on video was just a stuffed dummy.

Rick Taylor @OhRick4

The shooting happened 5 days ago

2 people died

Any mentions of funerals, memorials, etc ?

ANOTHER THING that seems odd

Remember during the 2004 presidential debates, the biggest BlueAnon outlet of all, The New York Times, ran a story about "the Mystery of the Bulge" in George Bush's jacket, claiming it might be a radio by which he was getting answers from his staff?

Meanwhile, Biden walks around with a "hearing aid" visible in his ear and they have no questions.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:30 PM

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