The whole Charlottesville protest was a purposeful provocation by the liberal left to hurt President Trump.
That’s the view of several Trump supporters CNN’s Alisyn Camerota sat down with to gauge their views of current events and how President Donald Trump is handling them. One segment of that conversation – focused on racially charged violence in Charlottesville – aired this morning.
“I think a great portion of it is a conspiracy,” said L.A. Key. “I think it was a setup.” Asked by Camerota who organized this conspiracy, Key responded: “I think people who want to derail our President.”
Later, Key added that protesters were “coming off the same bus with some wearing Black Lives Matter and some wearing the KKK shirts. They were brought in to cause a controversy. Right?”
Added Robert McCarthy, another Trump supporter: “The protesters, the antifa people had an ad on Craigslist recruiting people for $25 an hour to show up for the protest in Charlottesville. It’s all over the place.”
(CNN’s Leigh Munsil did some searching to find these alleged videos. The closest she could find was this video – in which a man in a car recounts these “stories” about people in KKK shirts and BLM shirts getting on buses next to one another. The narrator of this video appears to be citing something he was told by someone else.
And the $25-an-hour rate showed up in posts like this one, which showed a screenshot of an unverified Craigslist ad for actors wanted in *Charlotte, North Carolina* – but with the headline: “Did Crowds on Demand bus rioters into Charlottesville, Virginia?”)
Asked what he meant by having seen the information “all over the place,” McCarthy said he had see “a lot of it on Facebook” – a source he said he trusts far more than the mainstream media, despite the fact that he couldn’t necessarily trace the origins or source of the videos he was watching or information he was reading.
At another point in the conversation with Camerota, another female Trump supporter said that she saw videos on Facebook which prove that Trump was right when he said not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist. Pressed by Camerota on whether the videos could be fake, the woman responds “could be.”
So, here we are.
It’s important to note that roughly 63 million people voted for Donald Trump. The six people Camerota interviewed represent .000009% of those Trump voters. So, to say “everyone” who supports Trump thinks exactly like this is a vast over-simplification and flat-out wrong.
Still, the Camerota interview sheds light on a few common elements among those who still remain totally committed to Trump:
- Massive distrust of the media
- Dependence on a group of like-minded Facebook friends to curate the news for them
- A deep-seated belief that “both sides do it” – regardless of what “it” is – but the media only covers conservatives doing it
- Willingness to engage with conspiracy theories that affirm points 1-3
The idea that a man sitting in a car recounting something someone told him about Charlottesville is cited as real evidence of a false flag operation speaks to how people are forever in search of things that affirm their points of view – and a search on Facebook appears all-too-willing to accommodate.
That’s a scary place to be – no matter where you fall on the political spectrum.