Madness: Claims the shooting was staged expose a conspiracy theory crisis

Most people would not turn to the classics in the wake of Saturday’s shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner. But the Greek tragedy “The Bacchae” offers plenty of lessons about the plunge into conspiracy theories that followed a California teacher’s foiled attack.

Euripides’s final play tells the story of the Theban King Pentheus, who is gradually driven mad by the god Dionysus. In time, Pentheus’s growing unreality infects the whole of Theban society, to the point that his own loyalists no longer recognize their king. Believing him to be a mountain lion, the women of Thebes kill and behead Pentheus, only realizing the barbarity of their crime after the collective madness has lifted.

“The Bacchae” isn’t just a warning about the madness of kings; it is a cautionary tale about what happens to a culture that chases delusional thinking down the rabbit hole, leading to violence and societal fracture. Can an America consumed by conspiracy theories and paranoid unreality even tell what is true anymore?

President Trump and his cynical allies certainly did the truth no favors by immediately turning the attack at the Washington Hilton into an opportunity to market the president’s proposed White House ballroom. The coordinated messaging campaign, rolled out on social media within minutes of the shooting, fed into speculation that Trump had faked the Hilton shooting in order to bolster his absurd claim that his ballroom is necessary for national security purposes.

The conspiracy theory cycle moves fast. Within an hour of the shooting, “staged” was the top-trending topic on Twitter. It remained at or near the top of the........

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