Stelter says Trump is a 'conspiracy theorist'

America is swearing in a conspiracy theorist as president next month, according to Brian Stelter.

“Yeah, President-elect Trump is many things,” the CNN media reporter and “Reliable Sources” host said in a segment Monday. “To his voters, he’s a beloved figure. But one of the things he is, is a conspiracy theorist.”


Stelter said Trump “latched on to a number of [conspiracy] theories” during the campaign, including an unsubstantiated claim that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11.

“And he’s also in a few different cases tweeted out links to clearly fake news stories,” Stelter continued. “Now, 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 have been millions of illegal votes. That didn’t happen.”

Stelter’s criticism of the president-elect’s propensity to propagate conspiracy theories came during a CNN segment on fake news. And it’s not just Trump who has an affection for fake news, Stelter said, noting that the son of one of Trump’s top appointees shared his interest in bogus news.

Stelter highlighted Michael Flynn Jr.’s tweet embracing the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy as “a very strange path to go down” that’s so farfetched that it would be funny, if not for the incident that occurred Sunday.

Washington, D.C., police arrested an armed North Carolina man Sunday in front of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria that has been the target of fake news stories. Police said the man, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, said he came to the pizza joint to “self-investigate” the online conspiracy theory.

Authorities said at least one shot was fired Sunday and three weapons were seized, though no one was injured.

“Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story,” Flynn tweeted Sunday, also drawing condemnation from CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many ‘coincidences’ tied to it.”

Stelter suggested Flynn’s logic is, “If I can’t guarantee that every light in the sky is not a UFO, then all of the lights must be UFOs.”

He explained the conspiracy as an anti-Clinton hoax that involves the notion that secret tunnels exist under the pizza establishment that are home to an alleged child sex predator ring. Even in the aftermath of what occurred Sunday, he continued, people are suggesting it was fake or staged.

“You know, this man in North Carolina apparently felt compelled to drive up to Washington with the guns in his car in order to investigate this idea for himself,” he said. “Again, it just sounds funny. It sounds ludicrous until you realize someone actually bought into this enough to show up with weapons yesterday.”

Stelter said Flynn was tweeting “in a very serious way,” which shows that people in Trump’s world “latch on to these outlandish theories.”

“You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory,” he said in closing. “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, not just to ignore it.”