There is something “more sinister” happening underneath the surface of the recent shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, according to one analyst.
Alleged shooter Cole Allen fired multiple rounds inside the Washington Hilton, where the event was taking place. He struck a Secret Service agent in the agent’s bulletproof vest, and the agent survived. No one was killed during the event, and the shooter was arrested by authorities on the scene. President Donald Trump and cabinet officials in attendance were swiftly escorted out of the building.
Molly Olmstead, a staff writer at Slate, argued in a new article that the rush by certain people on both the political left and right to decry the shooting as “staged” shows how deeply embedded conspiracy theories have become in modern politics.
That’s despite the overwhelming evidence that the attack was politically motivated, Olmstead argued. For instance, she pointed to Allen’s previous donations to Kamala Harris’2024 presidential campaign and the manifesto Allen left behind.
“Those signposts seemingly paint a straightforward picture of this attack as a politically motivated assassination attempt against the president and members of his administration,” Olmstead wrote. “But if you ask observers—and particularly observers on the left—there’s something even more sinister going on here.”
Olmstead argued that the trend suggests political movement could begin to coalesce around what conspiracies certain groups are willing to buy into.
“We have reached a point at which conspiratorial thinking in itself is its own kind of political movement—one that often exists outside traditional partisan lines,” she wrote. “There are typical MAGA conspiracy theorists and BlueAnon accounts, decrying fantastical sinister plots from the Democrats and Republicans. But there are also those who are poisoned enough by the “question-everything” side of the internet so as to betray their own former allies.”
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