A pro-Trump wellness influencer and a suburban Democrat share a conspiracy theory - how did it spread so far?

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.

🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/

  • Carrolade@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    While yes, it is theoretically possible some blood pack was the culprit, I’d think that’d have shown up in some photos by now. He was surrounded by people recording him after all.

    I also don’t find the security hole to be very suspicious. I think overall people give the Secret Service far more credit than they deserve. It’s not some foolproof organization with unlimited resources and no history of big fuckups. It’s a moderately staffed organization with a whole bunch of different duties that stretch their resources, and that is prone to occasional failures and people not taking the job sufficiently seriously. I recall a bunch of them getting drunk and hiring prostitutes while overseas a number of years ago?

    Really I don’t find it that weird at all, the simplest explanation seems to fit all the evidence perfectly well. People just don’t like boring answers when there are exciting alternatives.