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Right-wing conspiracy theorists are riding the GOP train crash to crazytown

Alex Jones, for one, declared the crash was a “kamikaze” attack on the GOP lawmakers aboard.

It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to start spinning after a train carrying Republican lawmakers to a retreat crashed into a truck Wednesday morning in Virginia.

What we know is that the chartered Amtrak train collided with a garbage truck at a road crossing over the tracks near Charlottesville, killing one of the truck’s passengers but leaving the dozens of GOP lawmakers and their staffs unharmed. NTSB officials are investigating on the presumption it was an accident.

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But InfoWars’ Alex Jones, who’s says President Trump calls him sometimes, and his friends are convinced there’s something sinister at work.

As federal investigators headed to the scene, Jones declared on his show that the crash was a “kamikaze” attack on the GOP lawmakers aboard the train, which included senior figures like House Speaker Paul Ryan.

“So this country is in a civil war,” Jones said. “You can believe this was on purpose. I mean, I’d say 98 percent chance. This is unbelievable.”

On purpose by whom? Well, Jones suggested, it might be antifa, or the CIA.

Others, like the head of InfoWars’ D.C. News Bureau, suggested the attack was part of a deep state conspiracy to prevent the #ReleaseTheMemo memo from discrediting the Russia investigation.

On various internet forums, plenty of commenters had their own ideas about a plot to assassinate our political leaders. One user on Reddit’s /r/ The_Donald, a fav hangout for the alt-right, suggested it could be that antifa protesters thought they were going to stop the train in protest, only to be set up by their mysterious handlers.

“If the truck was there as a plant, the only sense I can make of it is that the occupants were patsies, i.e., they were told they were only going to force the train to stop, on the idea of an antifa protest,” said user OperSoars this morning.

Comments like these quickly inundated Facebook’s “People Are Saying” feature, a sort of personal comments section that accompanies news stories, prompting the social network to promise to work toward stopping the problem.

“We built this as a way for you to easily see what others are saying around a topic,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Daily Beast yesterday. “The type of stuff we’re seeing today is a bad experience and we’re going to work to fix the product.”

Meanwhile, federal authorities could take more than a year to finish investigating the cause of the crash, but NTSB’s Earl Weener said Wednesday they wouldn’t speculate on a cause and presumed the event was an accident, UPI reports.

"The NTSB does safety investigation,” he said, “so the fact that we're here is a presumption that it was an accident."