Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.
The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.
Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.
I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.
🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/
I don’t think Trump and his team are competent enough to do that in an untraceable way, without getting caught. That would require reaching out to a bunch of folks anonymously, KGB-style, and bringing them all along until one or two decide to just do the thing already.
I wonder who could pull that off?
/conspiracy-hat
Putin is getting the mentally unstable to commit fake assisnation attempts on Trump.
/rational-hat
Trump has just made people that are prone to poor rational thinking and emotional outbursts ravenous for some sort of internal war to begin. His continued rileing of his base and supporters on fictional doomsdays approaching has finally gotten people that are on edge to finally toppled off that edge and commit their crimes.