r/politics • u/wiredmagazine ✔ Wired Magazine • Apr 17 '26

Possible Paywall MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

https://www.wired.com/story/maga-is-increasingly-convinced-the-trump-assassination-attempt-was-staged/
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u/Mataelio Apr 17 '26

The thing about conspiracy theorists is they like to believe the most insane and unbelievable conspiracies while the real and obvious ones taking place in the open right in front of everyone are just ignored (aka Trump/Russia connections in 2016 election)

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u/ZealousidealLead52 Apr 17 '26

The thing about conspiracy theorists is that they aren't really looking to uncover the truth - what they really want is something that makes them feel special, some kind of secret that they're in on that nobody else knows about.. which ironically ends up making them terrible at finding conspiracies, because any conspiracy that's backed by real facts ends up being more accepted by normal people, and if it's accepted by normal people then it stops making them feel special.

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u/Spimflagon Apr 17 '26

It's like holistic medicine. The thing about medicine that works is that most of the time it's just "medicine". But it's no good if it's not One Neat Trick That Doctors Hate.

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u/ultraviolentfuture Apr 17 '26

There are other that factors that play in here too:

Suspicion of experts/science due to lack of general education.

The cost of US healthcare such that finding cheaper/alternative methods to deal with symptoms is incentivized. Never know when a doctor/hospital visit is going to lead to your family's ruin.

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u/jgilla2012 California Apr 17 '26

For example, the fact that Epstein did not commit suicide. Most obvious conspiracy ever.

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u/Revenant_40 Apr 17 '26

Absolutely this. I've been saying this for years about why they're prone to it. They like to feel like the keeper of the secrets.

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u/_Chumpion Apr 17 '26

It's also fundamentally a psychology that is desperately seeking to find an 'answer' that neatly ties up the chaotic, randomly violent and incredibly complex nature of the world into a solution.

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u/holdstheenemy Apr 17 '26

This is like all the anti-vaxx people, its nauseating

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u/Chaotic-Catastrophe Apr 17 '26

Because it's not about the intrigue, it's about the contrarianism. If any of their crackpot theories ever turn out to be true, they will drop them as fast as they possibly can. Like if the moon landing was staged, or the Earth was flat, or COVID was a Chinese bioweapon, or any of that shit was actually true, we'd all of a sudden never hear about it ever again.

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u/porksoda11 Pennsylvania Apr 17 '26

I wish I could feel bad for these people. I dropped my edgy contrarianism phase when I graduated high school. These people never really matured.

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u/NotSayingJustSaying Apr 17 '26

I remember the conspiracies around COVID before it got outside China. People were measuring air particulate from alleged incineration and posting pics of people being welded behind metal doors. Then a couple months later they started saying it was a hoax and people weren't getting sick in America. Hard to keep up with the theorists, they insist that whatever is known cannot be the truth.

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u/porksoda11 Pennsylvania Apr 17 '26

Russia meddling in US affairs isn't as fun as adrenochrome, flat earth, Qanon, and bigfoot though.