It begins. Immediately after Donald Trump vows that he watched "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey cheer the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11, fellow Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson says he too saw that thing that nobody else remembers happening or can find footage of.
Q: But did you see that happening though, on 9/11?
I saw the film of it, yes.
Q: In New Jersey.
Yes.
It seems Dr. Ben Carson has sensed a good xenophobic narrative in Trump's version of things and does not want to be left out. That, or we're getting our first real evidence that conservative television sets genuinely receive different signals from those delivered to you and I.
For the record, once again, this did not happen. There is no footage of this happening. There are no news reports of this happening. At best there are a few scattered and poorly documented assertions of a few people here and there allegedly "celebrating" 9/11, but "news footage" of "thousands" of New Jersey residents cheering 9/11 remains nonexistent. It's not even clear this qualified as a fringe conspiracy theory, right up until a few days ago when Trump asserted, seemingly out of the blue, that it happened.
The most rational explanation appears to be that Dr. Ben Carson, at least, is confused because he does not know the difference between New Jersey and the Middle East. There was news footage at the time of some Muslims in the Middle East celebrating the attacks—in, say, the occupied West Bank. If you assume the occupied West Bank includes Newark and Union City, that indeed would prove your point, but also raises some Very Serious foreign policy questions for Dr. Ben Carson that might be worth delving into in the next debate.
Trump, for his part, is already demanding apologizes from all the critics and fact checkers who have been pointing out he is Completely Making Shit Up on this one.
“I want an apology,” he tweeted. "Many people have tweeted that I am right.”
See there? That's how it goes. "Many people" have tweeted at Donald Trump that they believe this thing happened, despite there continuing to be absolutely no evidence in all of the thousands of hours of television and news reports and Our Own Damn Eyeballs in the aftermath of 9/11. That is more than sufficient for Donald Trump to assert that his version is true; now it is time for the purging of the unbelievers. Declaring that the Donald Trump and Ben Carson version of events is the version that happened and the news footage at the time was erased will become another new cornerstone of proper conservative thought. Those that do not believe it are merely part of the ongoing conspiracy.