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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.

On Monday, a Morning Consult poll found that 34% of Democrats think Trump faked his own assassination attempt last Saturday. Such left-wing conspiracy theorists have been referred to as "BlueAnon," and as the Washington Free Beacon reports, this particular notion – that Trump faked the assassination attempt – originated with Democratic powerbroker Dmitri Mehlhorn, who has made at least 10 visits to the Biden White House.

Hours after the shooting on Saturday, Mehlhorn – and adviser to LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (who joked about assassinating Trump the week before the attempt) – sent a memo to reports suggesting they portray the shooting as a false-flag operation directly from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump an iconic photo-op.

"This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power," wrote Melhorn, who failed to address numerous photos – such as the one showing a bullet whizzing past Trump's head, the obvious bullet wound across Trump's right ear, or the death of a rally attendee – Corey Comperatore, who was shot while shielding his family from bullets.

Oh?

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

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.

So… those spreading conspiracy theories should be deplatformed and debanked, correct? What playbook are we on.