I’m really worried about my adoptive homeland, the United States. It isn’t just that a would-be assassin targeted Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday 13 July. Horrifying as the public attempt on the life of one of the two major-party presidential nominees was, it was far from unprecedented in an extraordinarily violent, heavily armed country with a veritable tradition of murdered political leaders. Equally alarming was the speed with which the event became the subject of feverish conspiracy theorising, particularly among liberals who normally mock Trump supporters for doing the same thing.
Behold the rise of “BlueAnon” – the Democratic, upscale equivalent of the right’s QAnon conspiracy theories, according to which an elite cabal of child-molesting Satanists has manifested in the Democratic Party and is out to “steal” elections while destroying the “Make America great again” movement. Now, it seems, it is the left who see covert plots everywhere.
In an email to left-of-centre journalists on Saturday night, Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder and Democratic mega-donor, suggested that it was possible that “this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. 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. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas.”
Mehlhorn’s crankery isn’t an isolated case. “I’m sorry to be this guy right now and I await more details,” the left-leaning rock star Jess Margera wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “But this seems really convenient to happen right now after the world just woke up to project 2025” – a reference to a proposal by the think tank Heritage Foundation, a proposal disavowed by Trump himself, to push the next GOP administration in the direction long preferred by pro-business and hawkish donors and ideologues.
Shadi Bartsch, a renowned Latinist and Virgil translator at the University of Chicago, posted: “I am now a conspiracy theorist, I guess. The sight of Trump’s bloodless hand after grabbing his ‘shot’ ear has convinced me. Plus, there’s no ear part missing. I don’t know what happened, but I no longer believe the main narrative.”
Some 52,000 X users “liked” a post that claimed that the instantly iconic photo of the event – depicting a bloodied Trump raising his fist under the Stars and Stripes – was staged: “Great camera angle; great quality; no Secret Service agent in front of his head covering the wound; conveniently placed US flag.”
A post urging users to “raise your hand and repost if you think this was staged!” garnered some 48,000 likes and was viewed 1.2 million times. A post with 6 million views and 7,000 likes asked: “Why would you open yourself up to more potential harm after thinking you were almost assassinated and yelling, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’”
Think through what is being claimed here: that Donald Trump, presumably with an assist from the US secret service and security apparatus, staged a shooting that resulted in the death of at least two people, including the attempted assassin, and that almost lodged a bullet in his own temple – all in order to get a polling boost in an election he was widely predicted to win before the events of 13 July. Such claims are no less absurd than those that say Hillary Clinton runs a paedophile ring.
The BlueAnon phenomenon predates the assassination attempt on Trump. I first encountered it in the wake of President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June. Chris Strider, an Emmy-nominated former senior video producer for Biden responded to the president’s consistently incoherent answers by musing that “something about all this feels very Russian-disinformation-y. Can’t prove a thing, just a gut feeling.” Numerous other accounts suggested that CNN had deliberately used side-angle cameras to make the incumbent look bad or that Biden’s mic levels had been tweaked to enfeeble the sound of his voice.
The purveyors of these left-coded conspiracy theories laugh at their right-wing counterparts, depicting them as delusional and malignant. And that’s the most depressing dimension of all this. Though one side still claims to be above such behaviour, Americans have reached a point in our national life in which those both sides of the partisan divide immediately resort to spinning conspiracy theories over any historical event.
Who or what is to blame for this? A social failure on this scale probably has many fathers. Part of it no doubt has to do with the turbulence of recent history and the instantaneity with which social media saturates us with images of these dramas. Sharp political polarisation hasn’t helped. But most of the blame has to lie with the mainstream media, which time and again in recent decades has gotten important stories horribly wrong.
From Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction to the Russiagate hoax, from Hunter Biden’s laptop to the overstated efficacy of masking and severe lockdowns in the pandemic — the so-called responsible media have too often acted irresponsibly. Drawing too close to power, rather than taking the naturally sceptical positions that journalists should, they have discredited their own authority to dispel myths and establish the public truth.
Repairing the broken, conspiratorial brains that are now working to craft the narrative of our politics – on the right and on the left – won’t be an easy task. God help us.
[See also: Back to the American future]
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