New polling data reveals that a surprisingly large portion of Democrats either believe the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump were staged or aren’t sure they were real. It’s a hard thing for many of us to wrap our heads around, and I think it’s worth asking why so many refuse to acknowledge those assassination attempts for what they were.
Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents in a Newsguard survey said they believed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting “event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans.”
So, a third of Democrats are entertaining what amounts to a wildly implausible conspiracy theory. The numbers skew even higher among younger respondents: Americans between 18 and 29 were more likely than older people to believe the incidents were fabricated.
Joe Rogan offered his theory about the findings on a Wednesday episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
He blames TikTok.
“This is TikTok. It’s f—ing ruined,” Rogan said while reacting to the numbers. He went further, arguing that social media is “rotting their f—ing brains out from inside their heads.” It’s a harsh verdict, but hard to argue with when 1 in 3 Democrats can’t accept a documented, photographed, and lethally confirmed attack on a sitting president.
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Rogan made the comparison that makes the TikTok argument particularly devastating. “You go on Chinese TikTok,” he said, “it’s all like traditional dance and martial arts, science projects” — and in China, the app shuts down for kids after 10 p.m. Think about that for a second. The Chinese government curates a wholesome, educational experience for its own children while exporting a brain-melting conspiracy machine to ours. And it’s working.
As for the Butler, Pa., shooting specifically, Rogan was withering. “The people that thought that the Butler, Pennsylvania one was staged don’t know anything about guns,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who knows anything about guns that thinks that the president would let some guy nick his ear with a bullet.” He pointed to the death of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed at the rally while there with his family. “That guy got shot by a bullet that was intended for Trump,” Rogan said, noting there is also “a photo of a bullet whizzing by Trump’s face.” His conclusion: “Anybody that thinks that that staged is out of their f—ing mind.”
I think Rogan is right that platforms like TikTok create an environment ripe for conspiracy theories to thrive. But I think that’s only part of the story.
PJ Media readers know that leftists have spent years insisting that political violence is a uniquely right-wing pathology. Joe Biden pushed that narrative excessively. The problem is that all the left-wing violence, including the assassination attempts against Trump, blows that narrative apart completely. Rather than grapple with the uncomfortable reality that their side produces the most political violence, including would-be presidential assassins, a significant chunk of the left chose the easier path: just pretend it was staged. Suddenly, the whole thing becomes a referendum on Trump rather than on them.
Democrats have been projecting the “right-wing violence” narrative for so long that when reality delivered a direct contradiction, they simply rejected reality. And to Rogan’s point, social media gave that rejection a platform and an audience.
