Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.
The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.
Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.
I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.
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Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
Bingo! That’s all my squares filled for Wackadoodle Bingo
- Influencer
- Holistic Wellness
- free space
- Disseminating personal info of offspring
- Donald sycophant
A hippie name would be Moon or Dweezil. Desirée is a pretty normal name for folks in the boonies.
Already sceptical that something did not add up, Camille turned to X for more answers.
sigh
I have the same quote in my clipboard. Anyone turning to Twitter for answers deserves the answers they find.
Ok, but we’re trapped on the boat with them. What have we done to deserve them?
We’ve failed to beat the stupid out of them. That’s what we get for being a nominally civilized society.
“Hey, let’s talk to two people whose only qualifications are a shameless willingness to post whatever crazy shit enters their skulls about their conspiracy theories.”
“Should we also talk to ballistics experts and mental health professionals to get a sense of how reasonable it is to think that these plans were staged?”
“Too expensive, I’m already flying first class and staying in five star accommodations in Denver.”
The article isn’t focused on questioning the expertise of ballistic experts or debating whether events were staged. Instead, it assumes that any reasonable reader isn’t a conspiracy theorist. Surely you know that?
The real focus is on the spread and impact of conspiracy theories. The headline highlights a specific example where individuals from two different political backgrounds and towns arrived at the same conspiratorial conclusion, despite receiving information from entirely different sources and completely different justifications.
If your aim is to understand how conspiracy theorists—an increasingly widespread group—come to adopt and believe these theories through their media consumption, then these individuals are entirely appropriate subjects for interviews.
I honestly wouldn’t put it past him to fake an assassination attempt to get attention.
I wouldn’t either. What I would find doubtful is him trusting in the marksmanship of that rando kid that tried at his outdoor rally, to miss instead of accidentally tagging him.
The second guy just generally reeks of crazy dude.
The part that gets me is how utterly unbelievable it is that the Secret Service did not secure a nearby roof with a clear line of site to where Trump would be speaking and then allowed a kid with a rifle to climb up there during the speech and they didn’t notice? Cops noticed. Audience members noticed. But the Secret Service didn’t? They just didn’t notice a huge gaping hole in their defenses while guarding a former president and current candidate? I know the saying is that you shouldn’t ascribe to malevolence what can be adequately explained by incompetence, but come on. Incompetence just cannot do this kind of heave lifting.
They frankly don’t have the manpower to secure every rooftop, that’s not a reasonable expectation. He was spotted earlier on the roof supposedly, but they can’t simply start shooting at every guy on a roof. A guy on a roof at a public gathering is not a confirmed threat.
Now if they saw his rifle because he had lifted it, instead of keeping it laid down, that would look suspicious to me.
He could have told someone to do it, and then completely forgot about the entire thing. He doesn’t need to be told the details.
But I think only him getting shot it the ear was fake. That’s a perfect spur of the moment thing to act like a victim.
A really minor grazing could draw blood as seemed to happen at the first attempt, but heal within several days, which explains all the evidence I’ve seen.
Dramatically exaggerating a minor wound to maximize the benefit to him seems exactly what Trump would do in that situation.
That’s operating under the assumption that Trump was actually shot and it wasn’t just a blood pack. His ear looked perfectly normal a few days later.
Plus there’s the fact that he was spotted by security with his rifle like 20 minutes before he started shooting.
Spotted earlier with a rangefinder, not a rifle. You also wouldn’t need a big chunk of your ear missing or something to make a little bit of blood splatter. A graze could do it, and could easily be covered up a day later by some makeup or his usual orange bodypaint.
The evidence just isn’t very convincing.
I don’t think Trump and his team are competent enough to do that in an untraceable way, without getting caught. That would require reaching out to a bunch of folks anonymously, KGB-style, and bringing them all along until one or two decide to just do the thing already.
I wonder who could pull that off?
/conspiracy-hat
Putin is getting the mentally unstable to commit fake assisnation attempts on Trump.
/rational-hat
Trump has just made people that are prone to poor rational thinking and emotional outbursts ravenous for some sort of internal war to begin. His continued rileing of his base and supporters on fictional doomsdays approaching has finally gotten people that are on edge to finally toppled off that edge and commit their crimes.
He’s the type, but I also think of the reichstag fire. Fascists don’t need to fake attacks against them, they need to call the shot then continue escalating at a reasonable pace. Either they get attacked and can clamp down or they just walk their way into what they wanted.
Not even trump is dumb enough to order his ear to be shot with öive rounds.
What kind of a bizzaro story is that. Two nutjob online influencers have an opinion.
