Monday on CNN, senior media correspondent Brian Stelter used the story of North Carolina man who was arrested Sunday for firing an assault rifle in a Washington DC pizza restaurant that inaccurate stories labeled the center of a Democrat-led child sex trafficking ring to say President-elect Donald Trump is a “conspiracy theorist.”
Stelter said, “President-elect Trump is many things. To his voters he’s beloved figure. One of the things he is a conspiracy theorist. During the election he latched onto a number of theories, for example, citing thousands of Muslims were clearing on 9/11. No evidence of that. He also tweeted out links to clearly fake news stories. That hasn’t happened in recent days. I would say it’s been about a week since he tweeted something that was clearly false. He said there were millions of illegal votes. That didn’t happen.”
“To see in this case Michael Flynn’s son tweeting about pizza-gate in a very serious way, it goes to show the people in Trump’s orbit or in his aides’ orbit do sometimes latch onto these outlandish theories,” he continued. “And what this is pizza-gate is an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory that’s taken on a life of its own online. Even today you have people saying this incident yesterday must have been fake, a setup, this man that showed up with the weapon must have been an actor. You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory. But I think it’s up to the rest of us, most people, most Americans who know this stuff is nonsense, to say so and to refuse to be confused by it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN