He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
This ain’t your grandaddy’s Democratic Party. Nor is it your daddy’s Democratic Party. Heck, it’s not even the Democratic Party of just a few years ago!
This is something very, very different.
Just a few years earlier, the Democrats snorted and sniggered at Republican conspiracy theories — like QAnon, pizzagate, stolen elections, or COVID escaping a Chinese biolab. Conservatives were derided for falling for dopey, Alex Jones-inspired fantasies about secret government cabals, gay frogs, and covert misinformation campaigns.
Explosive media exposés — like NPR’s 2022 classic, “How the Republican Party Came to Embrace Conspiracy Theories and Denialism” — were everywhere:
It's reckless rhetoric. It is turning people against the government, turning people against the FBI and the Justice Department. And it is only natural to expect that this is the kind of thing that will lead people to desperation and to take matters into their own hands.
[…]
At this point, the Republican Party and Fox News and the entire right… own the conspiracy theory space. It has become mainstream.
Isn’t that quaint? The Democrats warning us that “reckless rhetoric” might lead to political violence(!) — and their tsk-tsk condemnation of conservatives falling hook, line, and sinker for kooky conspiracy theories.
But that was then. Today:
🔥📊 Shocking New Survey from the Manhattan Institute
— BiffBifford™ 🇺🇸 (@TBifford) April 29, 2026
According to a March 2026 poll of Democratic and Harris voters:
47% believe the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was orchestrated by Trump’s own supporters to generate sympathy… pic.twitter.com/ccL58cvwKP
It gets worse when you read the Manhattan Institute’s breakdown:
Nearly two-thirds of today’s Democrats (64%) believe that Vladimir Putin holds compromising information on Donald Trump that the Russian leader uses to sway Trump’s policy positions, and a 47% plurality believe that the July 2024 assassination attempt on Trump was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.
When nearly half of all Democratic voters believe the current president staged his own assassination attempt, something is seriously wrong.
My theory: Social media sites, especially TikTok, Bluesky, and Reddit, are responsible for disseminating today’s left-wing conspiracy theories. They’ve become Ground Zero for left-wing insanity. And since these sites veer young, it’s created a generation of liberals who believe conspiracies are… everywhere.
Younger [Democratic] voters are consistently more open to conspiracy theories that older Democrats are vastly more skeptical of. Among those aged 18–29, 24% say that the Holocaust of Jews in Nazi Germany was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe (compared with 3% of those 65+), 28% believe that NASA faked the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing (compared with 3% of those 65+), 37% are 9/11 “truthers” (compared with 11% of those 65+), and 38% view October 7th as an inside job (compared with 11% of those 65+).
[…]
Younger members of the [Democratic] coalition express lower institutional trust and greater openness to revisionist interpretations of political events and historical narratives than older Democrats. Taken together, the findings point less to a unified conspiratorial worldview than to a widening generational gap in epistemic confidence and institutional credibility within the Democratic coalition.
In other words, younger Democrats are three- to nine-times more likely than older Democrats to accept conspiracy theories as the stone-cold truth.
The Manhattan Institute didn’t ask about the so-called “Epstein Conspiracy,” but a 2026 YouGov poll did: 91% of Democrats believe Trump attempted to cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes — and 86% believe he personally participated in them.
Like it or not, conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the Democratic Party: When roughly nine out of ten Democrats believe something, there’s nothing “fringe” about it!
Fun fact: Only 83% of Democrats are pro-choice — which means, believing wacky conspiracy theories about Trump and Epstein is now MORE mainstream in the Democratic Party than protecting abortion rights!
Some conspiracies are (mostly) benign. A few are fun: If you want to believe in, say, a UFO cover-up — or that Paul McCartney died in 1966 — go right ahead. (Hey, I kinda hope aliens are real, too. How cool would that be?)
But other conspiracies are a siren’s call for violence, death, and vengeance — which certainly seems to be a motivating factor in Cole Allen’s alleged attempt to murder Donald Trump and his cabinet officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
From CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski:
We went through 4700 of Cole Allen tweets/posts and one of the strangest things we found was he shared a lot of posts claiming the Butler assassination attempt was staged. He also repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler and urged people to buy firearms. pic.twitter.com/xWarTzHT5S
— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) April 28, 2026
Mr. Kaczynski explained his findings on CNN to Erin Burnett:
Our segment from last night pic.twitter.com/XS2cyzgkKF
— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) April 28, 2026
We reviewed 4,700 posts from two social media accounts that appear to belong to the suspect. They include comments that compare President Trump to Adolf Hitler… Early on, [Allen] was using his Twitter account mostly to post about the video game Super Smash Brothers. He was promoting his own content. But then, 2024, this changes and he’s sharing a lot of political content that’s very, very critical of Donald Trump. Now, Allen appears to have started posting on Bluesky in February 2025, just a few weeks into Trump’s second term. The account frequently criticized Trump, his administration policies, and lamented that more powerful figures weren’t taking action against the president. He wrote in one post, “Everyone [already] knows trump [sic] is a f***ing awful person in multiple dimensions and no one has done s***.” Some of the other posts and reposts advocated for gun possession and purchases. One post he said, “Best time to buy a gun was days ago…” in December 2025, and he added, “second best time is today.” Last month, he posted that Trump was a traitor. The posts also echoed the arguments that he made in the message he allegedly sent to family members before the attack that laid out a plan to target Trump administration officials and expressed anger at their actions.
The scariest thing about Cole Allen is his surface-level normalcy. As far as we know, this isn’t a kid who was in and out of mental hospitals. Nor does he have a track record of violence. By most accounts, he was your average, run-of-the-mill liberal.
Allen simply believed that Donald Trump is “literally Hitler” — and that the president conspired with Jeffrey Epstein to rape little children — and then staged his own assassination attempt(s) for political gain… which places him squarely within the Democratic Party mainstream.
Gone are the days when assassins hailed from extremist groups. That’s no longer necessary, because today, extremism is a mainstream Democratic belief.
Which means, the next would-be assassin could come from anywhere in today’s Democratic Party.
And that’s a very chilling omen for the rest of America.
Recommended: Kings, Kimmel, and Comey: Three Unforced Errors — One by the Dems, Two by the GOP
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First. It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battle lines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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