So. Sorry if this is a little late.
But I wanted to wait a few days and let information properly come to light before attempting a deeper dive into what happened in the US at the weekend.
A few days on now from the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, it still isn’t entirely clear what really happened.
And there are so many questions. Was there a second shooter? Does the narrative around young man Thomas Crooks hold up? And why did Trump say, one hour before the rally, that ‘all hell was about to break loose’?
And aside from looking at the anomalies and strangeness concerning what happened on Saturday itself and whether this was ‘staged’, ‘real’ or some mixture of both, we also can look at some of the prevailing ‘theories’ and accusations and see if they hold water.
Inevitably, the partisan information/propaganda war – as usual, completely counter-productive to any search for objective truth – erupted almost immediately, with biased and questionable observers of all persuasions throwing up their theories or accusations into their respective echo chambers.
Lots of information (and, one assumes, misinformation too) was circulating in no time, leaving any neutral observers with whiplash.
We’ve got psy-ops within psy-ops these days, and so many layers of fakery that the truth of any given situation is pretty much impossible to identify with any confidence anymore.
All of that being said, let’s at least give this a go, shall we?
I’ll state outright that much of what’s written here consists of questions rather than confident answers: which some of you might find annoying.
But I prefer not to forward ‘definitive’ answers unless I’m fairly sure of them.
And it’s just as valuable to debunk or scrutinize misinformation and bad-faith theories/accusations, as opposed to just offering speculative ‘answers’.
Let’s start with the obvious.
What is fairly clear is that the Secret Service and other security agencies were highly – and suspiciously – negligent on Saturday.
Eyewitness accounts barely an hour after the shooting – which I highlighted here on the night – were already explaining that they’d watched the shooter go on to that rooftop and take up position with a weapon, and had tried to inform security or police personnel about it minutes prior to the shots being fired.
Subsequent footage has emerged of onlookers filming the alleged shooter on the roof and, again, trying to draw attention to him.
So how it is that the Secret Service and other involved parties didn’t notice the shooter – or at least were slow to react to his overtly suspicious behaviour – is baffling.
It’s even more baffling that the shooter got to that vantage point in the first place. According to the reports, he was only some 150 yards away from the stage.
It is incongruous to entertain the idea that the Secret Service doesn’t have it in its operational practices to thoroughly secure the areas adjacent to the rally and to make sure no such vantage points were accessible. All in all, the entire area should’ve been locked down for a mile or more.
How does a supposed twenty-year old waltz into the area, climb up to a sniper position that close to where a former president is speaking, set up his weapon… and have up to three minutes (according to some accounts) uninterrupted before he starts firing?
Once he’d fired a few shots of course the SS managed to blow the kid’s brains out – from one of their own rooftop vantage points.
There can’t be anyone on the planet who thinks this sequence of events holds up well. And even the mainstream media has been acknowledging this.
Clearly, standard security procedures wouldn’t have allowed for something like this to happen.
And this, remember, concerns a person who has already had previous ‘security incidents’ at public events, as I highlighted in a video a few hours after the news of this incident broke.
Those previous incidents were almost certainly faked/staged to create a certain image or impression of a ‘heroic’ Trump facing danger for the sake of the MAGA cause. And we’ll come back to that precedent later: especially as it relates to something that occurred in Brazil’s elections in 2017 and may be a model for what just went down in Pennsylvania.
So much of the whole MAGA saga for several years now has been manufactured theater and measured manipulation.
This event in Pennsylvania, however, was in a different league.
It gets worse though. Let’s talk about the alleged shooter.
The alleged shooter, named as Thomas Matthew Crooks, was reportedly identified via a DNA test from his blood after he was shot dead.
Information about him has been sketchy and ambiguous.
What was conspicuous was that the media quickly ran with the tried-and-tested narrative of this kid being a loner, with no friends, and who was bullied at school.
Articles appeared supposedly quoting people who went to school with him, saying all of these predictably copy-and-paste things about him to establish the classic image of the troubled ‘lone wolf’.
I don’t think there’s any real evidence that any of those people or quotes were real.
And, strangely, the FBI stated that Crooks had no known mental health issues: which is the opposite of what you’d expect them to say.
It’s also been noted that it’s strange for someone of his age to have no online footprint. Though he has been spotted in an old ad for BlackRock – which some online theorists are making a lot out of.
Then word circulated about his political leanings. Pro Trump right-wingers claimed he was a Democrat, as he’d been reported to have donated to a Democrat cause called VoteBlue.
Anti Trump people argued he was a Republican and a Trump supporter.
The problem is that both were reported in different media coverage: therefore adding to the confusion and giving both sides the ammunition to make accusations against the other and keep all the psy-opera going.
In fact, the claim that he donated to VoteBlue appears to have been a mistake: Pittsburgh Channel 11 ascertained through an FOI request that a 69 year old man with the same first and last name (but a different middle name) had apparently made that donation and someone got their wires crossed.
Continual claims that Crooks was a Democrat donor are therefore seemingly false.
Subsequent local media reporting has apparently stated that Crooks’ family house had Trump and Republican paraphernalia displayed on their lawn.
More importantly, it was uncovered that the family/household was on a Trump campaign database of Republican-voting gun owners and enthusiasts.
And the 20 year-old was also wearing a t-shirt of a right-wing gun fetishist You Tube channel called Demolition Ranch.
But if he was a Republican (or at least from a Republican family) or a Trump supporter, why the hell would he want to shoot at the man?
Not that these motives have to always make sense – especially if dealing with someone with mental health issues.
Mark Chapman was apparently a massive John Lennon fan – and shot him dead.
Then again, Mark Chapman was almost certainly a Manchurian Candidate. Given countless past cases, it’s reasonable to wonder if this kid might not also have been manipulated.
We know that the FBI and other agencies have a record of grooming and manipulating either mentally ill people or otherwise isolated ‘loners’ into acts of terrorism or acts of violence.
If that was the case here, then the apparent motives – or lack thereof – wouldn’t need to make sense: as the shooter wouldn’t be acting out of any logical agenda necessarily.
But even that’s assuming that this young Thomas Crooks was *actually* the shooter.
Claims surfaced quickly that the named shooter had been misidentified: an individual named Max Yearick was the actual shooter, it was claimed. A known anti Trump activist with some apparent history of agitation or disturbances at some past public events.
I’ll admit that, visually, the ill-fated figure shown in the rooftop footage could be either of them: but it probably resembles the likeness of Crooks more.
But if it was this Max Yearick who was shot in the head by the Secret Service, then who the hell is Thomas Crooks?
And where is Thomas Crooks?
And if it was vice-versa, then the same question applies – where is Max Yearick?
If both of these people are real, then only one of them could’ve been killed on that rooftop. So where is the other?
Ordinarily, we might entirely dismiss this claim about an alternative shooter identity. But what’s curious about the Max Yearick claim is its initial source: which appears to have been the moronic real-life Bond villain Roger Stone, who tweeted it on ‘X’ – only to later delete the tweet after Thomas Crooks was officially announced as the shooter.
Why did Trump ally Stone think this other guy was the shooter?
It’s almost as if he wanted to make sure the shooter was identified as a known leftist or anti-Trumpist – so that there could be a clear-cut propaganda narrative: and not the problematic, ambiguous narrative that comes with Thomas Crooks, a supposed Trump supporter and gun enthusiast.
This claim about Yearick being the dead shooter naturally went viral among right-wing social media users. I don’t think I’m convinced.
Either way, Roger Stone is a vile, evil creature in general: so his motives should always be considered suspect.
And this isn’t new: this confusion of alternative culprits being identified and then those claims being retracted after official suspect identification has been made. For example, it happened with the Westminster false-flag terror incident in 2017, where Channel 4 announced a completely different perpetrator to the one that was subsequently identified.
But Roger Stone seemed too eager to say what he said: almost as if there was a pre-planned narrative and it went wrong.
As an aside, Stone has already unveiled his master plan for Trump to refute the election outcome in November if he loses: the vote is months away, but the idea of undermining the democratic process is already predictably in play.
And then there’s the alleged bomb materials that were discovered, supposedly belonging to the dead shooter. These were apparently discovered in both his car and his home.
What was the plan then?
To assassinate Trump and then be able to walk away unimpeded by anyone and go set off a bomb somewhere?
And what was the bomb target?
Why would anyone not know that once they’d shot at the former president they would be confronted by security and law enforcement – making the bomb pointless?
Or was there someone else supposed to be setting the bomb off somewhere?
Was there supposed to be a two-pronged attack of some kind? Is this reminiscent of the Orlando nightclub massacre, where a second individual was mysteriously arrested but then never spoken of again, indicating a possible broader attack that never materialised?
Whoever the shooter was on the roof, he must’ve known that, once he’d taken shots at the rally, he would have no opportunity to proceed with any bomb plot.
There are far more questions than there are answers.
And most of these questions aren’t going to be answered. Because they know we have short attention spans and the news cycle/agenda will accelerate onto other events at a fast pace, with the trail of unanswered questions gradually disappearing over the horizon.
Was this a lone wolf?
Or was it a manipulated patsy? If so, who were the controllers?
Were authorities in on it? Which ones?
Or did they allow the perpetrator to simply have a go at it, hoping he might succeed?
Was this a full on assassination plot organised from elements of the Deep State, as people like psy-op merchant Alex Jones and other right wing commentators say?
Or was it staged theater, organised by pro Trump elements to massively influence the course of the election?
If it was an assassination plot involving Deep State elements, why do it out in the open, with multiple witnesses and TV cameras? And why fail?
Such assassination plots don’t tend to fail. JFK didn’t get grazed on the ear. Neither did RFK, MLK or Malcolm X.
People might point out the attempt on Ronald Reagan‘s life – but Reagan’s would-be assassin arguably did fit the profile of lone nut job and not a deeper plot.
There are other, less conspicuous ways to assassinate someone like Trump if you’re either the Deep State or one of the powerful agencies. Food poisoning, for example.
Find a way to infect him with an illness and make it look like natural causes?
A car accident. A plane crash? Choking on a pretzel?
But not shooting at him in front of hundreds of witnesses and lots of live TV crews and cameras – and missing. And making the Secret Service look suspiciously inept in the process.
You can’t help but logically deduce that if the ‘Deep State’ or the FBI wanted Trump dead, he’d be dead already.
And accusations against the Secret Service meet with the same flaw: the Secret Service has plenty of opportunity to assassinate Trump in private – and make it look like the cause of death was whatever they wanted it to be.
They’ve had years to do that, with private access to him.
What they wouldn’t do, I assume, is make a botched attempt at it in front of a massive crowd, all with cellphone cameras, and a bunch of live broadcasting TV crews.
And make themselves look terrible in the meantime.
See, for every possible theory or angle, there’s a counter argument.
This event doesn’t really make sense: unless it really was a lone actor, maybe trying to trigger a civil war, along the lines of Manson and ‘Helter Skelter’ and all that.
The only beneficiary here is Trump himself and the Republican Party’s chances of winning the election.
The Democrats don’t benefit from this. And even if the shooter had succeeded in killing Trump, the Dems still wouldn’t have benefited, as everyone would point the finger at them.
Was the alleged shooter even *meant* to kill Trump?
Or was he just meant to create the impression of an assassination attempt?
Given that Trump was apparently bleeding from the ear and that that particular shot must’ve been extremely close to being a kill-shot, we have to assume he was legitimately trying to kill the former president.
It’s still bizarre though that the Secret Service let him get so close. It’s just as odd that he came so close to a fatal shot and yet didn’t succeed – yet was able to fire reportedly five or six shots.
It’s also odd that Trump was so focused on the photo opp of raising his fist to the air for the cameras that he wasn’t worried about additional bullets flying about – or that there could’ve been multiple shooters.
How did he or the Secret Service know there wasn’t any further threat at that point?
Is it because they knew there was only one shooter at one vantage point? If they knew that already, then how did any of this happen in the first place?
Given how many armed personnel, including military, are on the scene in the immediate aftermath, there’s really no way a disturbed kid with a rifle could’ve gotten to that vantage point barely a few hundred metres away and fired off those shots without being detected or monitored.
Which lends itself to the notion that maybe this shooter – whoever he was – was meant to be on that roof or was allowed to make the attempt.
But, again, in that scenario, was he supposed to succeed – or just to create an impression?
I mean, if he literally grazed the former president’s ear with one shot, then that’s not someone trying to miss – that’s just too close for that.
Unless… unless that wasn’t real: and fake blood was applied to Trump’s ear when the protection officers huddled around him and got him to the ground.
Which is actually what some people are arguing, pointing out that the blood only appears after the former president is brought back up.
But no, I guess I don’t think that. At least I don’t think I think that.
But frankly, I wouldn’t put anything passed these people when it comes to deception and manufactured events.
But let’s keep going.
What about the idea that there was a second shooter?
This claim actually comes from an audio analysis carried out by the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado. This argued there were three shooters – one being the guy on the rooftop, one being the Secret Service sniper that took him out, and the other being from an unknown source.
Also, why were some people at that rally acting so calm and unruffled after the shooting?
I focused on this in the video a few days ago, but some of the audience reaction seemed very relaxed about the whole thing.
Some of them even looked like they were having a good time still – even after an injured Trump had been taken away and a person in the crowd had apparently been killed.
There are some ladies, for example, who – moments after Trump has been shot at – are just casually perusing their phones.
Some others, when the shots start firing, start enthusiastically filming with their phone cameras – instead of ducking for cover or showing any fear for their lives.
I highlighted some of this in the video a few days ago.
It’s weird, right? The madness of crowds, maybe?
And what *did* Trump mean when he emailed supporters one hour before the rally and said ‘All hell breaks loose in one hour’…?
He’s been saying this for a while, actually. Or some variation of the same phrase – at least six or seven times. Here, for example, he’s saying back in June ‘“1 MONTH UNTIL ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE!…’
It’s like he was doing a countdown well in advance, preparing people for a specific event: right down to announcing it again with an hour to go.
It seems a little bit like foreshadowing, doesn’t it?
In fairness, he is partial to colourful language and repetition. And I’ve seen some Republicans wave this away, saying he was referring to his imminent announcement of his pick for Vice Presidential candidate.
But really, announcing your VP pick does not equate to ‘all hell’s about to break loose’.
Besides, he’s been saying that same line for months – and he only announced his VP pick yesterday.
And why say it specifically again one hour before the Pennsylvania rally – that specifically ‘all hell’ was going to break loose at that specific rally in an hour’s time?
What specifically was he envisioning happening that afternoon?
Some interviewer needs to ask him about that. But they probably won’t.
But it’s easy to see why some people think the whole thing was staged by pro Trump actors.
You’ve got Trump himself making an ominous announcement that something’s about to go down that afternoon; a kid apparently from a pro Republican household being allowed to set himself up adjacent to the stage and take the shots; an almost movie-quality visual of a defiant Trump in the perfect image; and almost everyone saying Trump now wins the election.
Look, I’m not saying for sure that I think this was entirely staged: but even *I* think things like this ‘one in a million’ photo of the bullet or vapor trail in mid-air are just too ridiculously perfect to be true.
And that already lionised photo of a defiant Trump with raised fist seems like the most manufactured photo opp ever.
Look, I’m sure it was just a case of very savvy opportunism on Trump’s part: and a very good photographer who knows how to capture a moment.
It’s still weird though.
And there’s an interesting, recent parallel that’s worth keeping in mind. In 2017, in Brazil, Trump clone Jair Bolsonaro also survived an apparent assassination attempt when he was stabbed during a rally.
That incident was regarded as the turning point in that election – the point after which Bolosonaro’s support spiralled and a perceived martyr image and sympathy vote won him the election. Prior to that incident, he had been performing poorly and was barely receiving news coverage.
It has since been more or less accepted that the whole thing was staged. He was never really stabbed.
To avoid detouring here into a more detailed account of those events, I recommend reading this article from BrasilWire.
But aside from that event being a staged/fake assassination incident that is perceived to have determined an election outcome, it’s also interesting in our current context for this reason: Bolsonaro’s campaign strategy was being advised by Steve Bannon – Trump’s 2016 election strategist.
It’s a small world, isn’t it?
So, what is our conclusion?
I don’t know. One inch to the left and presumably Trump would’ve been dead. What would’ve happened then, I don’t know.
And, as it stands, the only beneficiary of this event is Trump himself – and, by extension, the Republican Party: who are now clear frontrunners to win this election.
Hey, maybe the insane evangelicals are right: and God is protecting the MAGA Messiah.
At this point a supernatural presence might account for the man’s survival better than anything else does.
That’s what Trump himself is saying, obviously. And all the MAGA followers think this, of course. But, if he did genuinely survive a genuine assassination attempt, then who can blame him for thinking this anymore?
Nothing seems to be able to stop the man: not impeachments, not election results, not court cases, not even bullets. At this point, even I’m more or less convinced it’s destiny.
But do you ever get the impression there are agents of chaos out there, running around and creating havoc and mischief for the sheer hell of it?
‘Order out of Chaos’, perhaps?
Again, I think we’re seeing psy-ops within psy-ops.
And I also still think we’re looking at rival factions and sub-factions even within various agencies and various levels of the state – as befitting the ‘Civil War’ footing that’s been in play ever since Trump won the 2016 election.
This was what those wacky Qanon cultists was largely talking about, wasn’t it – a shadow war going on between ‘white hats’ and ‘dark hats’ within the Deep State?
I thought that dynamic had reached its zenith in the events of January 6th 2021 (as I went into in-depth here at the time): but I think it’s still very much in play.
And this would actually account for all the confusion, conflicting narratives and obscured agendas – because there is a dangerous divide right through all of America’s agencies and institutions.
There are conflicting loyalties.
I believe it could be comparable to the situation in Turkey, where you had the Erdogan loyalists and the rival Gulenists – both of which were embedded across the Turkish Deep State.
This seemed to culminate in the bizarre failed coup attempt in 2016 – which even now isn’t fully understood, as some claim Erdogan staged the whole thing to implicate the rival faction while others think the Gulenists were trying to take over.
Centering on Donald Trump himself, America has gotten itself into an extremely dangerous situation of divided or unclear loyalties and institutions.
The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Actually, the right hand might be trying to destroy the left hand, and the left hand might be one step ahead of the right hand, and so on.
It has become actual insanity.
I keep having to come back to the same phrase I used in this article right before the Pennsylvania assassination drama unfolded. That this is the continuing American Nightmare.
US media initially reported the shooter as being ~130ft away from Trump.
But other media like Al Jazeera or german truther TrauKeinemPromi give the distance as ~130 meters.
From the drone footage shown by the media it definitely looks like the distance was more than 50m (~150ft) and Wikipedia agrees:
> from the roof of a building 400 feet (120 meters) to 450 feet (140 meters) from the stage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_assassination_attempt?&useskin=vector
tl;dr: the alleged shooter was farther away than we initially thought
Interesting. Judging by what MSM news showed, he seemed very close. But I don’t know.
There’s one more thing to consider which I noticed when listening to Derrick Broze and which he also pointed out later in his article:
https://theconsciousresistance.com/will-you/
According to the official story
– A local cop eventually climbed up to look over the edge of the roof where everyone and their mother said they saw this guy with a gun.
– The alleged shooter then pointed his rifle at the cop and the cop let go of the ledge and injured himself from falling.
– Immediately afterwards Crooks shot at Trump.
So if Crooks hadn’t been startled by the cop he might have taken the time to aim properly and could have succeeded.
Maybe he wasn’t as bad at aiming as we might think.
(And maybe Trump wasn’t saved by God or whatever but random chance after people kept pestering police to do something about the rooftop assassin.)
But I didn’t see a video of any cop climbing up there and the witnesses all said they were ignored by all the officials, so meh :-/
And apparently he wasn’t startled by the snipers who were aiming at him for some time (half a minute? several minutes?).
Thanks for that.
I can’t imagine what that kid was thinking in general. I can’t think he was expecting to be shot dead: that doesn’t fit with his behavior.
That’s a great overview. Thanks for putting so many of the pieces together. The part about Bolsanaro is especially interesting. My own thoughts immediately skipped to the film Bob Roberts, which I have since rewatched out of curiosity. Then I checked the wikipedia entry on Bob Roberts and discovered that director Tim Robbins had already made the same connection. Here’s the relevant extract:
“In 2018, Robbins said: “Bob Roberts came true”, referring to President Donald Trump. In July 2024, following an attempted assassination of Trump, a conspiracy theory emerged that it was staged akin to what happens in Bob Roberts. Robbins condemned the theory, writing on X, “Those that are denying the assassination attempt was real are truly in a deranged mindset.”
Funny how he sent out that tweet the day after the shooting. As someone who evidently has “a deranged mindset” I am impressed that he beat me to the punch!
Thanks James. I’ve never heard of that film, I’ll have to find it. It’s funny that everyone in Hollywood is scared to say a word about this one incident.
This incident also benefits Trump for another reason:
Many republicans are mad at him for making bump stocks illegal after whatever happened at Las Vegas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_stock?&useskin=vector#United_States
Now he can argue that a lot of people might have died at his rally if he hadn’t signed that executive order.
Asking “Cui Bono?” leaves me with those options:
–> the event was staged by Trump or Republicans
–> the deep state consists of a bunch of inbred morons on drugs who thought that sending in this kid would be a brilliant idea
–> (((someone))) is trying to start a civil war (but why? maybe Masons are mad for losing power to Silicon Valley?)
–> we are in a simulation and the NPCs start glitching (that would explain A LOT, especially since 2020)
PS: Is it true that CNN and other mainstream media never livestreamed a trump rally before?
Thanks dude. I hadn’t thought about your first point: good observation.
With your Cui Bono options; I think 1 and 3 combined or even 2 and 3 combined might be a decent bet. But 4 is my favorite! Hey, maybe we’re in a simulation and Trump is the main character, like the Truman Show.
And yes, I’ve heard that Trump rallies were never livestreamed before this: but I’m not sure if that’s true. I feel like they *must’ve* livestreamed one of the 2016 rallies, surely.