May 13, 2026 - Chinese Leaving Nothing to Chance

I cannot believe yesterday’s poll result. A near even divide on the question of whether any of the three attempted assassinations of President Trump was staged. I was a hard “no” vote. At least there was less conspiratorial thinking in my result than a recent national survey.

It took 60 years and more than 500 books to build the case that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. Serious researchers collected evidence, named suspects, and filled hundreds of pages constructing arguments - however flawed. That was the old conspiracism. It required effort.

Compare that to the stolen 2020 election. That conspiracy - rejected by courts, auditors, and Trump's own attorney general - never spawned more than a handful of serious books. It didn't need to. "Rigged!" fit in a tweet.

Dartmouth political theorist Russell Muirhead saw this coming. He was my radio guest yesterday and you can watch the discussion on YouTube.

In a 2019 book he co-authored with Nancy Rosenblum called “A Lot of People Are Saying”, he identified what he called "conspiracy without the theory" - a new kind of conspiracism that dispenses with evidence entirely. No dots to connect. No shadowy plotters to unmask. Just repetition and bare assertion. The old conspiracy theorist said “here's what really happened”. The new ones just say “a lot of people are saying”.

Now consider a NewsGuard/YouGov poll released this week. It found that 30% of Americans believe at least one of the three assassination attempts against Donald Trump was staged - including a stunning 42% of Democrats who think the Butler shooting was a hoax.

This despite one suspect dead at the scene, one convicted and sentenced to life, and another who faces charges.

Nobody wrote a 300-page book making an argument about there being more to any of these cases. Nobody had to. Social media did the work in minutes - the same way it did after Butler in 2024, when claims of a "blood pill" spread before Trump had left the stage.

That's not skepticism. That's surrender to the algorithm.

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