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As the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack approached, a national Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found a disheartening number of Americans embracing bizarre conspiracy theories about the assault on the Capitol.
The survey found that 30% of independents, 34% of Republicans, and 39% of those who say Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI “organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 attack.” Among self-identified Trump voters, the total was 44%.
As for why in the world so many Americans would buy into such a nonsensical idea, the Post also reported on Donald Trump’s rhetoric the day before the Jan. 6 anniversary.
In that speech, Trump also repeated baseless conspiracy theories blaming the violence on outside agitators or undercover agents rather than his own supporters. ... “There was antifa and there was FBI,” Trump said in Sioux Center. “There were a lot of other people there, too, leading the charge.”
Whether the former president realizes this or not, there is literally no evidence pointing to FBI officials and/or antifa activists “leading the charge” in the pro-Trump assault on the Capitol.
But that didn’t stand in the way of the likely GOP nominee touting this nonsense anyway, helping shed light on why so much of the electorate believes it.
At face value, there might appear to be a degree of logic to all of this. A group of Trump supporters, fueled by Trump’s lies, attacked their own country’s Capitol in the hopes of handing power to a losing candidate. It’s not too surprising that the man responsible for helping instigate the violence would prefer to shift blame to anti-fascist activists and FBI officials.
But just below the surface, there’s a related problem the former president and his allies prefer to ignore: Their conspiracy theory keeps following a meandering path.
In the immediate aftermath of the riot, several Republicans scrambled to try to shift blame to far-left troublemakers who, the theory went, wanted to make the right look bad. When such talk proved unsustainably ridiculous, Trump and his allies decided that the Jan. 6 rioters weren’t radical liberals, but rather, heroic conservative patriots who deserved to be celebrated.
Indeed, the likely GOP nominee also said in Sioux Center over the weekend — in the same aforementioned speech — that convicted Jan. 6 criminals are “hostages,” adding, “[N]obody has been treated ever in history so badly as those people.”
So to recap, we're supposed to believe the Jan. 6 attack was bad, except for the good parts, and the rioters were heroes, except for the secret anti-fascist activists and FBI officials, who definitely exist, despite the total absence of evidence.
Baseless conspiracy theories are a scourge. Baseless conspiracy theories that evolve in incoherent ways are worse.