The final week of an election is a stressful time. Some people deal with it by knocking on doors. Others decide that MAGA has formed a secret hit squad that strikes Democratic candidates with cars.
"Three Democratic female candidates for Congress have been hit by cars over the past few days," a social media user named James Tate announced on Monday. He listed them: "Peltola, a woman running for Congress in TN, and a woman running for Congress in OH."
SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah picked it up and ran. "So just days after Trump files suit claiming Alaska election is already filled with fraud someone hits her car," he posted. "MAGA terrorism?"
Another poster, John Rocha, said the Peltola crash "could just be an accident or something much more sinister."
That got the replies going.
"There are no coincidences," one user declared. "Looks like attempted murder," wrote another. One woman shared her first thought: "maybe her brakes mysteriously went out. That's where we are."
Her brakes weren't the problem. Peltola was rear-ended by another car.
So, what did this alleged MAGA death squad actually do?
On Friday, Heidi Kuhn, the Democrat running for Congress in Tennessee's 8th District, was in a three-car crash on Interstate 240 in Memphis. She broke her nose and upper jaw and suffered whiplash, and her husband was hurt too. Both are expected to be OK.
On Saturday evening, Mary Peltola, the Democrat running for Senate in Alaska, was stopped at a red light in Anchorage when a car hit hers from behind and pushed it into the car in front. Peltola and her family were taken to the hospital with injuries that weren't life-threatening. She postponed two days of campaign events.
And the woman in Ohio is Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who was hit by a driver who fled the scene in Toledo, on August 2.
That's nearly three months before the "past few days." A community note on Tate's post pointed out: "The accident did not occur in the 'past few days.'"
If this is a MAGA hit squad, it's a strange one. It apparently strikes during rush hour on a busy interstate. It ambushes its targets from behind at red lights. It also took a three-month break between Ohio and Tennessee, maybe to regroup.
Anchorage police were asked whether Peltola had been targeted. "There are no indications that this was a targeted attack," said Gina Romero of the department's community relations unit. Toledo police tracked Kaptur's crash to a driver who ran from the scene. Nobody has suggested Kuhn's interstate pileup was anything but a pileup.
Here's what the conspiracy theorists left out. Americans get into roughly 6 million police-reported car crashes a year, about 16,000 a day. More than 900 Democratic and Republican nominees are running for Congress this year, and in the final weeks of a campaign, most of them spend their days driving from one event to the next.
When that many people are on the road that much, a few of them are going to get rear-ended.
Kuhn posted a video Sunday saying she was still "shaken up." Peltola planned to get back on the campaign trail Tuesday with a stop in Homer. Kaptur has been back at work for months.
As of Monday, Anchorage police hadn't issued a single citation for the Peltola crash. Nobody was charged with terrorism, either.