Ben Shapiro

Again, a majority of Americans say it was staged or they were unsure.

And this does break down by party.

So by party idea, again, people tend to believe the things that they find it emotionally resonant to believe.

So again, not a shock.

It turns out the Democrats

and independents, people who don't love Trump, are significantly more likely to believe that particular events were staged.

34% of Americans who are Democrats believe that the White House Correspondents Dinner assassination attempt was staged.

42%, four in 10 Democrats believe that the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt was staged.

That compares to 13% of Republicans on the White House Correspondents Dinner and just 7% on the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting.

Independents are somewhere in between.

Again, the question is why this conspiracism has cropped up.

The answer is, of course, our mainstream legacy institutions have failed us.

I spoke about this at University of Austin a couple of weeks ago.

When people don't believe places that were supposed to tell them the truth, they start believing everything and anything.

And typically they resonate to things that are one, popular, and two, filter with their priors.

And so what you end up with is a wide variety of Americans who side with America's enemies.

Because they don't like Trump, so they side with America's enemies.

Or they don't like what's going on in their life, so they buy the lie that there's some conspiratorial elite who is making bad things happen in their life.

Our enemies know this.

Alexander Dugan's been writing about this for 30 years.