The Post-Truth Era Is Upon Us. The Correspondents’ Dinner Attack Is the Latest Example. |
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Here’s what we know about the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night: A man carrying two firearms tried to charge the event. He failed to kill anyone. Federal authorities are charging Cole Allen, a 31-year-old man from California, with firearm and assault charges, and they may add more as the investigation continues.
We do not yet fully understand the suspect’s motivations, but we have strong indications. He had donated to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, he had attended an anti-Donald Trump protest, and he had sent messages to family members before the attack denouncing the Trump administration. Investigators have said they believe he was attempting to shoot members of the Trump administration. Before the attack, Allen wrote an apology letter to his friends, colleagues, and family. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he wrote, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets report.
Those signposts seemingly paint a straightforward picture of this attack as a politically motivated assassination attempt against the president and members of his administration. But if you ask observers—and particularly observers on the left—there’s something even more sinister going on here.
In the hours after the incident, social media users began speculating that things weren’t as they appeared, and that the shooting, some argued, had clearly been staged.
This was a popular enough idea that “staged” trended on social media Saturday night. Some of the posts on X that spelled out the conspiracy theory got several million views. One popular resistance lib account polled his followers, and more than 80 percent who responded said they believed the attack had been staged. And on X, Bluesky, TikTok and elsewhere, the comment sections are awash in accounts proclaiming the shooting a fake.
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