Have you been on X (still better known as Twitter) since Sunday? I wouldn’t. It’s where reason and hope have gone to die.

Here’s a brief taste of the conspiracy theories saturating the site following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. “This was a DEEP STATE BLACK OP!”

And: “Dems and Deep State are real threat to democracy. Just ask JFK!!!”

Or how about this: “If you look real closely, Trump has a KFC ketchup package in his right hand when he brings it up to his ear. But when he brings it down it’s gone!”

Or this: “This country was founded by political violence. The left has declared a civil war and we will answer the call.”

A dangerous moment indeed.

The most predictable rumour is the baseless idea that the US government allowed or sponsored the assassination attempt in a bid to eliminate Trump. A Republican senator was quick groundlessly to claim “Joe Biden sent the orders”.

But the hashtag #StagedAssassinationAttempt has also been trending. This has been called an example of BlueAnon (a Democrat – blue – echo of the hard right QAnon conspiracy theory). It speaks to people’s understandable incredulity that the shooting could have happened. Again it concludes that it was deliberate, again it lacks a shred of evidence, but this time the assertion is that the shooting was staged to boost Trump.

A man holds a Q-Anon sign at a Trump rally in 2018 (Image: Rick Loomis)

The hard right has long been associated with this sort of crankery; indeed, the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election – completely discredited by multiple investigations – is still........

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