via ZeroHedge

At the height of the “QAnon” fervor in 2021 – roughly 23% of Republicans said they believed the theory that Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of satanic, sex-trafficking pedophiles.

As the Free Beacon reports, the conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire:

Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed “connecting some weird dots” surrounding the shooting.
“Did the extreme right want this to happen?” Tiedrich wrote, speculating the shooting could have been connected to a plot to replace Trump atop the GOP ticket with former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Tiedrich, who did not return a request for comment, on Thursday mocked the Washington Post for describing the shooting as “Trump’s near-death experience” and said there was no hard evidence that a bullet grazed the former president’s ear.
“What the fuck is going on under that bandage?” Tiedrich asked. “And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?”
Liberal MSNBC commentators have adopted a subtler approach to fanning the conspiratorial flames, suggesting in recent days that Trump could not have been shot in the ear by a high-caliber rifle bullet and that the former president is hiding something by not releasing detailed medical records about his wound.
“If he was shot by a high-caliber bullet, there should probably be very little ear there,” MSNBC host Michael Steele told viewers on Tuesday.
Steele’s fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Wednesday joined him in asking questions about Trump’s injuries.
“I have many questions!” Reid wrote on Threads. “Like where are the medical reports? What caused Trump’s injury and what was the injury? Sheapnel? [sic] Glass? A bullet?”
Reid doubled down on her baseless conjecture Thursday morning, posting a video to TikTok in which she said that “we still don’t know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet,” glass fragments, or something else. She then suggested something nefarious was behind the Secret Service’s having “allowed” Trump to pump his fist as agents led him off the rally stage.

Meanwhile, former CNN reporter John Harwood, who admitted he’s “not familiar with ballistics at all,” suggested that Trump’s ear shouldn’t exist if an AR-15 bullet grazed it.