with all of this election stuff going on I was reminded of something which led me down a rabbit hole of political meme gaslighting and I wanted to know what you guys think.

I distinctly remember around 2015 watching a video of a donald trump interview from sometime in the 90s of Trump saying if he were to ever run for office he would run as a Republican because
"Conservatives are the dumbest group of voters out there"

Trying to find this video on google results in endless links to sites like snopes claiming that the image of trump with this same quote underneath it was verified fake BUT, None of these links that i've seen ever mention anything about a video of him saying this even exists.

At this point I was really confused and I kept looking and looking but to no avail, I could only find two actual videos and, while they are video clips OF The interview, They don't show the part of him saying that conservatives are the dumbest group of voters out there but oddly enough the titles of all instances of these videos are worded very similarly or contain something like "Trump Interview: What party he said he'd run as" and then the video is just him talking about something unrelated to what party he would affiliate with.

At this point I was pretty convinced that it was just some kind of weird glitch in the matrix or I just invented the memory after seeing this fake picture of trump with that quote, but I stumbled onto a reddit post and SEVERAL people in the comments Swear up and down 100% that they watched this video with their own two eyes and heard him say that "he would be republican because conservatives are the dumbest people" and none of these people can find a single instance of the video anywhere on the internet.

After thinking about it for a minute I think I have like a good idea of what went down (at least in my opinion)

So this video does in fact exist and surfaced like mid 2015 right as the election was starting to heat up and trump was about to hit the campaign trail, But, if that video were to catch on and eventually be able to be mass shown to his potential constituents (which would probably have to be on the news given they were generally older people who didn't watch viral videos" It would basically tank his entire campaign up until that point and I think he had just won the primaries or it was almost time to vote on the primaries
Knowing what we know now, that That entire campaign had their hands in everything from weird voting fraud stuff to Russian interests using Facebook and social media to spread fake sensationalist information and fake news about the competition and the obama admin at the time around to help him at the polls getting boomers riled up and stuff.
what they did was (keep in mind this video was mainly on facebook. if i remember correctly, videos on facebook arent queried on google so you wouldn't be able to google this vid and get a facebook link for it. Someone would have had to re upload it somewhere online) Firstly used whatever angle they had to work with the people using Facebook to spread misinformation to both try find and copyright strike every instance of the video they possibly could as quickly as possible and at the same time purposefully cause some sort of stir involving trump that wouldn't have been hurt him, just something that would be a big story for a few days and cause any googling about trump to show results for whatever happened ( I remember there were constantly new breaking headlines every week and I feel like in a situation like that they would be handy)
After basically clearing the internet of the video they either purchased a ton of domains and uploaded more or less the same snopes article that they also made up claiming that a still image meme with that quote on it was proven to be fake, In one of those articles it says the quote was supposedly from some magazine and in the magazine it doesn't have the quote anywhere. This, honestly, is really really fucking smart if thats what they did. Anyone looking for this video is going to encounter endless articles explaining that "This quote liberals and trumps opposers wont stop talking about" was faked, but all of the articles that I've seen don't even mention anything about there being a video.

This entire thing really threw me for a loop. If I hadn't ran across the reddit comments of a few other people who swear by having seen it I would've just told myself that I made it up and I would have been successfully gaslighted in what is probably the most successful anyone has ever been in completely wiping something off the internet and then letting it quietly die all the while having it set up so that people who remember the video and try find it will probably just convince themselves it wasn't real after not even being able to find a mention of it anywhere.

This is all super speculative, but if any of you guys happen to have this video or a link send it to me. also if you remember seeing this video leave a comment with your thoughts and try give finding the vid a stab too. If its out there its thoroughly buried under AI generated snopes articles denying the existence of the picture and Just endless random filler stuff that's seemingly there to keep anyone who remembers it and searches it from finding it even if they decide to try look for a minute.

submitted by /u/sobrietyishardfrick
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracytheories/comments/jogiy4/with_all_of_this_election_stuff_going_on_i_was/