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.
Perhaps Mehlhorn felt comfortable posing conspiratorial questions to reporters because they have been quite receptive in the past. Mehlhorn, for example, padded his plea to journalists with conspiratorial mainstays of the contemporary left — theorizing that the assassination staging was a “classic Russian tactic” and urging them to consider “how often Putin and his allies run this play.”
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.
But the left’s unhinged paranoia about Trump has been widespread and normalized. In an implicit admission of the environment the hyper-hyperbole had created, MSNBC did not air “Morning Joe” this morning, instead going with breaking news coverage of the attempted assassination of the former president. CNN reports that executives were nervous about what would be said on the show.
They should be. Joe Scarborough — an alleged moderate who takes the temperature of the D.C. consensus each morning — has claimed that Trump was taking orders from Putin, that Trump deployed border agents as SS guards, and warned that the former president would kill reporters and “execute whoever he’s allowed to imprison, execute, drive from the country” if he won the election.
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.
From Jim Crow 2.0 to the plot to institute a Republic of Gilead to scheming to revive the Confederacy to the plot to turn off the Internet and on and on. Even the violence we saw from Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and pro-Hamas rioters was often based on ginned-up paranoia that was pushed by the media about the prevailing evils of American society.
None of this is to say Republicans are immune from conspiratorial thinking. Hardly. But unlike right-wing conspiracies, there is no real countervailing force to stop it. How many people really believe in QAnon? 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 believe that the Russians stole the 2016 presidential election? How many believe that there are “book bans” in red states, or that one can’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.
I have a book coming out in a few months detailing the history and mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, panic, and paranoia on the contemporary left — including the Trump-is-Hitler variety. It’s been decades in the making.
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