CONSPIRACY is as American as apple pie – at least, that’s what they want you to believe.

Just seconds after that bullet whistled through Donald Trump’s ear, the most insane theories began sprouting across the internet.

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‘STAGED!’ was the instant cry from left-wing Trump haters.

It was all a ‘false flag’ operation, you see, designed to elicit mass sympathy for the Donald.

Trump, it was claimed, had a gel pack in his hand. It contained artificial blood which he then smeared on his face as his Secret Service covered him up. 

A top Democratic adviser even suggested the incident could be a ‘classic Russian tactic’ to create a popular backlash against President Biden. 

Trump fans, meanwhile, had their own crazy ideas. Thomas Matthew Crook, the 20-year-old shooter identified by the FBI, was a patsy ‘antifa’ terrorist named ‘Mark Violets’.

This man in question was in fact an innocent Italian YouTuber called Marco Violi. He had to beg the online sleuths: ‘Leave me alone.’

The loons soon moved on to other fantasies. A woman behind the stage in a black cap behaving ‘very calmly’ was fingered as an accomplice.

The Secret Service’s (admittedly shocking) failure to secure the perimeter was widely seen as less cock up, more ‘deep state’ plot.

Why else did snipers wait until Trump’s would-be killer pulled the trigger before taking him out?

Today, with AI and online deepfakes, misinformation spreads faster than your 5G connection.

A doctored image of agents smiling as they bundled Trump off stage was widely shared — and manipulated videos also received millions of views. 

Even though he has just been shot, many pundits want to blame Trump for all the wild theorising.

It is Trump, they say, who has lead us into a ‘post-truth’ world where everybody believes anything.

Trump famously claimed that bleach cured Covid and that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

His lieutenant, Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, theorised that ‘Jewish space lasers’ were controlling the world.

Greene and other Trumpists have subscribed to the Q-anon movement, which holds that God is channelling Donald Trump in order to destroy a Satanic pedophile elite.

Qanoners believe that celebrities are harvesting a chemical called ‘adrenochrome’ from children so as to keep themselves looking young.

They also now claim that Robert F Kennedy Jnr, who is currently running as an independent candidate in the presidential election, died in a plane crash in 1999 – and a Trump supporter called Vince Fusca is now pretending to be him.

As it happens, Vince was also standing behind Donald Trump during the shooting last weekend.

‘The paranoid style’

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But conspiracy blather existed long before Trumpism.

In 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he called ‘the paranoid style’ in US politics.

In fact, since the advent of mass media, every major event in American history has been interpreted as a sinister cover-up. 

Whole libraries of books have been written about the assassination of John F Kennedy.

Some say a ‘magic bullet’ killed JFK. Others alleged that Jackie Kennedy had her husband slain.

Nixon’s Watergate scandal was linked to a plane crash and a kidnapping. The moon landings were, of course, a total fraud.

In the 21st century, the madness proliferated. The 9/11 terror attacks were an inside job!

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Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile network from a Washington pizza restaurant!

The Pentagon is reverse engineering alien spacecraft! Chemicals in the water supply are making frogs gay!

Money in the madness

There’s big money in being bonkers. The television host Alex Jones, for instance, has made a fortune through InfoWars, his conspiracy-obsessed media network – though last year a court ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. He’d claimed the atrocity had been carried out by actors.

Jones exploits the gullibility of others. But America is a very strange land – and the US government gives its citizens good reasons to be suspicious.

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Why is the Secret Service, whose main job is to be protect the president, quite so secretive? Why did the Pentagon for so long cover up evidence of UAP – unidentified aerial phenomena? Is the ‘Eye of Providence – a symbol associated with Freemasons and the illuminati – printed on every single US dollar bill?

It’s all just a bit odd. Just because you’re paranoid, the saying goes, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

Information overload

It’s not just America that’s gone bonkers. Thanks to the internet, conspiracy theories are growing in power across the world. The Covid pandemic didn’t help.

Locked in our homes with their devices for months on end, a surprising number of Brits convinced themselves that the virus was a hoax and that Covid vaccines was ploy by Bill Gates to insert chips into all our arms.

One theory is that it’s all information overload. People are desperate for stories that help them make sense of an increasingly confusing and inter-connected world.

We want to believe that somebody, somewhere knows what is going on because we don’t.

That’s what the experts say, anyway. But then they would say that…

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator and host of the Americano podcast