What To Know
- The hosts of Fox & Friends blasted conspiracy theories suggesting the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting was staged.
- After the incident, social media was flooded with posts speculating the event was a “false flag” to distract from President Trump controversies.
- MS NOW reporters also took issue with the conspiracies.
The hosts of Fox & Friends ripped into conspiracy theorists who believe that the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting was staged in an attempt to boost President Donald Trump‘s approval ratings.
On Monday’s (April 27) edition of the Fox News morning show, co-host Brian Kilmeade said he’s glad that Trump has “started giving the facts out,” though “It doesn’t stop the conspiracy theories, but hopefully it squelches them.”
“All of a sudden I’m hearing, ‘Well, the whole thing is… Was it staged? Was it staged so the president’s approval ratings can go up?’”
Co-host Lawrence Jones added, “It’s unbelievable.”
“It’s insane!” Kilmeade continued. “Nothing could possibly have been staged.”
On Saturday (April 25), agunman stormedan upper level of the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., the site of the WHCD. The suspect, later identified as 31-year-old Cole Allen, was quickly apprehended and taken into custody.
Following the incident, theories quickly spread across social media that the whole thing was “staged” as a way to distract from Trump’s war with Iran, the Epstein files, and the president’s falling approval ratings. According to the New York Times, the word “staged” was a trending topic on social media, with “more than 300,000 posts on X by midday Sunday.”
It wasn’t just Fox News that took issue with these theories. On Sunday’s (April 26) episode of MS NOW’s The Weekend, host Eugene Daniels, who was at the WHCD, said he was “disturbed” by the claims “that this was a false flag, that we are basically all in cahoots…”
He continued, per Fox News Digital, “I think as someone who, for all of us who was in the room, who had to jump on the ground, who had to text our family and friends and tell them that we were okay, calling our moms like so many people in this country have done for decades, to see people say those kinds of things, it is frustrating, and it’s disturbing, and it shows that the issues that we have to try and fix in this country.”
Fellow MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart noted how “false flag” claims often come from the “MAGA world,” but now he was seeing conspiracies from left-wing social media accounts.
“I’m hearing that from my social media pages, from people on the left, also thinking that this was staged, that this was a false flag, that this was something being done on purpose,” he said. “And hearing you speak, Eugene, if it’s coming from the right and it’s coming from the left, these conspiracy theories, it says to me that there feels to be a lack of trust in this country.”
