DANIEL VAUGHAN: The Rise Of Liberal BlueAnon
For the entire time Donald Trump has been on the national political stage, liberals have attacked him and his followers as conspiracy-riddled people. They point to things like QAnon, birtherism, and more. Some critiques are fair, others are not. However, the overriding point is that Democrats believe they are different. They're not, and many of them buy into any BlueAnon conspiracies.
A Morning Consult poll run in the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt found that "One in three registered Democrats believe it is "credible" that the shooting Saturday in Butler, Pa., was staged and not intended to kill Trump."
The Washington Free Beacon, analyzing the results, found, "The poll showed that 34 percent of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday's shooting, with less than half—45 percent—saying the conspiracy theory is not credible. By comparison, a widely cited 2021 poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans were QAnon believers."
Right now, less than a week after the Trump assassination attempt, there are more BlueAnon conspiracy theorists in the Democratic Party than QAnon. If you're looking to Americans to hold sane views based on reality, you're dismayed by both results. But in the aftermath of a shooting, where we have hundreds of videos by journalists and ordinary Americans, we have a good idea of what happened.
The New York Times, no bastion of conservatism, had a photographer on the scene snapping pictures and caught the bullet in flight going past Trump's head. When asked about whether a bullet or glass hit Trump, the Secret Service told NBC News it was unquestionably a bullet.
That's not enough for BlueAnon, who continues to assert Trump was hit by the glass, the entire thing was fake, or some other nonsense. And when I'm describing the 34% of these Democrats, you can find them on television. Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC fame is "just asking questions" about Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt.
BlueAnon is transcending every part of the Democratic Party. The Trump assassination is just part of the latest round. You can go back and find all kinds of conspiracy-riddled beliefs around Trump and Russia or any of the Trump legal cases.
During the 2020 election, these same types of people began a rampant conspiracy theory that Donald Trump's pick to head up the Post Office was secretly rigging mailboxes in favor of Trump. They also believed that Donald Trump was removing mailboxes to prevent them from voting by mail during the pandemic.
There wasn't a lick of evidence to this, but they still believed every word. You could go on social media and watch them sharing videos of mailboxes getting removed from service and claiming it was Donald Trump's fault.
In college, I dealt with the BlueAnon-type people who believed "Bush did 9/11." They'd point to YouTube videos like "Loose Change" and more. I went to class several times where lefties would use sidewalk chalk to write up their 9/11 conspiracies everywhere, including the library, which they rarely entered.
More recently, during the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, BlueAnon conspiracies went wild that Biden lost because "Trump lied so much." It's supposedly a rhetorical trick Gish gallop that Trump employed to confuse Biden in the debate, which you can learn about from Heather Cox Richardson.
The more straightforward explanation is that Biden is aging at warp speed now and suffering from either age-related mental issues or a hidden medical issue like Parkinson's disease. This point gets handwaved away, even though NBC News had a Parkinson's expert on one of their shows who said he sees hundreds of Biden-like patients walk through his clinic all the time and could diagnose Biden from across a mall.
The straightforward explanations which provide truth are ignored for the grand conspiracies.
An irony in all of this is that these same people should be mad at Democrats for hiding Biden's condition for years. Ever since the debate concluded, the press has published an avalanche of stories describing Biden's feeble state around anyone and everyone.
There have even been think pieces in the press asking the question: Did the press have a role in hiding Biden's condition from the public? After watching Joe Biden's debate performance and the subsequent attempts to right the ship, the answer seems easy to figure out.
BlueAnon isn't going away any time soon. If Democrats travel down the road of chucking Biden off the ticket, BlueAnon will only grow. Democrats are playing a secretive game of how to handle Biden and get back on track in the race. That kind of behavior invites more conspiracy theories.
But even when we have evidence, like video and photos of an attempted assassination on Donald Trump's life, BlueAnon is rejecting that, too. If they're starting out rejecting the clear evidence of an assassination attempt on a former President and current Presidential candidate, what else will BlueAnon reject for conspiracies? Only time will tell.