A near-majority of Americans now believe in conspiracy theories. How did we get here?
A recent NewsGuard/YouGov poll dropped a statistic that completely blew my mind: 42% of Democrats believe the Butler, PA assassination attempt on Donald Trump was staged. Let that sink in.
I discovered this when hundreds of comments on my recent post on Trump’s assassination attempts claimed they were all fake. I hadn’t heard that much before and thought it was all AI comments.
Despite a mountain of live footage, hundreds of eyewitnesses, and tragic casualties, nearly half of a major political demographic believes it was faked. To me, that theory seems impossible given the sheer logistics—but it points to a massive, fascinating shift in our culture.
Conspiracy theories have officially gone from a fringe subculture to a mainstream reality.
Sovereign citizens, George Soros, vaccines are toxic, aliens are here, the earth is flat, moon landings fake, climate change is fake, stolen elections, the Great Reset, the deep state, Qanon, HAARP, digital ID, celebrity clones, Illuminati, Bill Gates, 5G, Jeffrey Epstein, masks, JFK assassinated by the CIA, 9/11 inside job, plandemic, contrails, the Trump assassination attempts, Barack Obama’s birth certificate….
Which conspiracies do you personally believe are true? Why? How did conspiracy theories become so widely believed? I personally have been sucked in by some myself. I’ll share those in the first comment along with research links for those interested.
But it raises a crucial question about the human psyche: Why are we looking for hidden plots everywhere?
THEORIES:
Trust loss: A total collapse of trust in our legacy institutions?
Phones: The isolation and digital echo chambers engineered by our phone addictions?
Hollywood: Hollywood conditioning? Have decades of movies with bizarre, secret plot twists trained our brains to look for the movie script version of real life?
Human nature? Have we always been uniquely vulnerable to this (like cults and ancient myths and religions), and we are only just noticing it now because of the internet?
Which of these conspiracies do you personally believe have a shred of truth to them? Why? Drop your thoughts below.