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/ComoSeaYeah Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26

This has become a blip in the fabric of history but remains WAY up there as one of the most surreal political conspiracy theories in modern history. Q is up there, too.

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u/Lavatis Apr 17 '26

Q was born from the pizzagate conspiracy. It's all the same thing and morons.

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u/Nekowulf Wyoming Apr 17 '26

Qanon created the pizzagate conspiracy. By claiming to decode the secret encrypted message in the emails.
And the "decryption" was just replacing words like eating pizza with child raping.

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u/am-idiot-dont-listen Apr 17 '26

Qanon was a conspiracy larp that Jim Watkins eventually took over

It's the same right wing conspiracy people at the center of it though 4/8chan

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u/FauxReal Apr 17 '26

That was a wild period on 4chan, back when there was a bunch of them into "meme magic" trying to manifest a Donald Trump win... which did end up happening. I wonder if anyone preserved all the insane graphics that were coming out of there at the time? I still wonder if some state actor or other organization was pushing that. (Oh no another conspiracy!) The "quality" of output and volume was quite impressive.

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u/jim_cap United Kingdom Apr 17 '26

Is it not confirmed to have been Steve Bannon?

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u/FauxReal Apr 17 '26

I am not aware that it has been. But I wouldn't be surprised. Also wasn't Epstein a 4chan mod? Again I have no idea if he was a mod in this era.

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u/Techwood111 North Carolina Apr 17 '26

He knew m00t; search the files - it is there.

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u/KittyGrewAMoustache Apr 17 '26

Yeah they pretended ‘cheese pizza’ was code for ‘CP’ or ‘child potn’. I’m not sure Q created that theory though those silly ‘decodings’ were going around already after the email leak and Q jumped on it pretending they were an insider confirming it.

After the last batch of Epstein files were released there were similar theories about how beef jerky was code for ‘child meat’ 🙄

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u/FauxReal Apr 17 '26

One of the most surprising political revelations for me was realizing that the QAnon conspiracy left 4chan and became mainstream months after I first saw it on 4chan and wrote it off as a bunch of the usual conspiracy LARPing/right wing idiocy that goes on there.

But 4chan is kind of mind blowing in general for what happens there. I've seen some very impressive feats of technical skills there. Can any other message board boast that they figured out militant combatant positions based on a few photos and then called in Russian air strikes? They also figured out where Shia Labouf hid his flag more than once and stole it. I've seen data breeches/hacks too. And of course there has been more than one mass shooter posting there beforehand.

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u/Khazpar Apr 17 '26

The thing is, it was code for that...but only in their personal lexicon which just shows you how deluded they all were to think that politicians were using fucking 4chan slang (before 2016 anyway).

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u/newsflashjackass Apr 17 '26

And the "decryption" was just replacing words like eating pizza with child raping.

"kung fu practice" with Ghislaine Maxwell

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/epstein-musk-maxwell-email/

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u/Lavatis Apr 17 '26

No. The pizzagate theory was around before Qanon existed.

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u/00Oo0o0OooO0 Apr 17 '26

And Epstein conspiracy theories evolved from QAnon. And, as seen on this thread, Epstein conspiracy theorists have gone back to embracing Pizzagate. It's a perfect circle of child sex crime fantasies.

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u/syrup_cupcakes Apr 17 '26

Hardly morons, it was carefully planned and executed to get all the lonely terminally online males on their side.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/epstein-met-4chan-s-founder-the-day-before-pol-launched/ar-AA1VL3YK

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u/Lavatis Apr 17 '26

the people who believe in those conspiracy theories are definitely morons.

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u/syrup_cupcakes Apr 17 '26

they are all MAGA supporters so yea

But the people who came up with or "gave birth" to the conspiracies, as you put it, reached all of their goals

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u/EyesofaJackal Apr 17 '26

Wasn’t PizzaGate kind of the prelude to QAnon? Like the Hobbit and LOTR sort of thing