SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Within minutes of the news of a shooting at the White House correspondents' dinner last weekend, people claimed on social media the incident was staged. To be clear, these were conspiracy theories, not supported by what we know about the suspect. But the most common of these theories claim the shooting was orchestrated in an effort to somehow boost President Trump's plans for a new White House ballroom. It isn't surprising that rampant speculation would instantly surround an act of apparently politically motivated violence, but this incident suggests that voices on the left are increasingly engaged with conspiracy theories. Molly Olmstead is a staff writer with Slate and has been following this and joins us now. Welcome.
MOLLY OLMSTEAD: Thank you. So happy to be here.
DETROW: Let's just start with the last few days. Run us through some of the most popular conspiracy theories surrounding this latest shooting.
OLMSTEAD: Pretty much immediately when this shooting happened, the first way that people processed it was by expressing suspicion. Pretty quickly, there were some dominant narratives that happened on the left. One was just that this was sort of something that Trump arranged to boost his polling. People tried out talking about Israel's involvement and things like that, which is pretty typical for any time you have conspiracy theories. The reason that the ballroom narrative was the one that stuck so quickly was that the president himself did quickly talk about how this was a justification for his ballroom. So he handed his opponents sort of a theory, an argument that they could make.
DETROW: It's such an Occam's razor thing. Like, the straightforward thing is somebody who had a deep opposition to Trump or whoever the target is - who, in many cases, has serious mental health challenges - tries to act in a violent way. That's a straightforward thing that is often happening, and yet people drift to the most convoluted scenario they can think of. Like, why do you think that keeps happening?
OLMSTEAD: Yeah. I mean, I think the reason this has now become such a uniform reaction on the left is that social media has incentivized this in terms of this sort of attention economy that we're in. You also have a populace that is just really feeling powerless in a way that they didn't during the first Trump administration. And here I'm talking about sort of the liberal opposition. And people have just been worn down by the sort of relentless lying that does come out of the Trump administration, which is not to say that I think it is justified to have these conspiracy theories, but I do think that at this point, this is just how people process information.
DETROW: What's the best way to think about the way that this seems to have spread on the left just as much as the right in recent years?
OLMSTEAD: It is fair to say that until recently, it has been largely the purview of the right. And still, to be clear, I do think that the right and the left are different when it comes to conspiracy theories largely because the right has politicians who spread these conspiracy theories themselves. There are also a lot of really large social media influencers that really push these conspiracy theories. I don't think there's as much of an equivalent for the left. That being said, I think there has been sort of a journey to some of this - the way that a lot of these right-wing conspiracy theories have started to creep over to the left in terms of that shared paranoid thinking and because of Israel, Palestine, actually.
DETROW: Yeah.
OLMSTEAD: I think that there has been such an intense overlap over the conflict with Gaza that some of the same conspiracy theories that emerged originally from the right have taken root in the left, even if they don't know that these are conservative conspiracy theories to begin with. There's a basic distrust that guides the left's reaction to any sort of chaotic event involving Donald Trump.
DETROW: You wrote in your piece, quote, "conspiracy thinking is starting to overtake partisan thinking." Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that?
OLMSTEAD: Yeah. I think most remarkably, when we look at what's happening in modern American politics, you can look at what's happening within the rift in the MAGA movement, where you have a lot of people who are defecting largely because of these sort of more geopolitical issues. So Israel, Palestine is one of them. We also have people who are quite frustrated about the war. And so you get these people, such as Candace Owens, who command these huge followings, who are saying, you know, I think we can't even trust the Republican Party anymore to tell us the truth. So for them, it's conspiratorial thinking that is their guidepost instead of what Trump is telling them to think.
DETROW: My personal view, and I'm curious if you agree or if you have a different take, is that it just seems like the way that algorithms increasingly drive content that appears in front of us, the way that AI has gotten more and more realistic and the way that people are making money by being, you know, the most outrageous front-facing person that they can be - it just seems hard to see how any of this gets better in the near future.
OLMSTEAD: I'm going to be honest with you. I don't see any way for it to get better. It just seems that this is the America we live in now. This is the reality we live in now. It seems to me that for the foreseeable future, the different political factions are going to be operating not just on different views but entirely different realities.
DETROW: That was Molly Olmstead, staff writer at Slate. Thanks so much for talking to us.
OLMSTEAD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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