"Staged Shooting" Conspiracy Coming from Foreign Accounts, WaPo Reports Shooting as "Popping Noises," Secret Service Knew the Rooftop Was a Threat Ahead of Time (The Five for 07/15/24)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
At first, I wasn’t going to write about the events of this weekend until tomorrow, the normal publication date.
But there’s enough covered here that’s not in mainstream press outlets that I decided to put this issue out today.
Let’s dive in to a very sober, serious issue of this publication.
[the disinformation]
A former military intelligence operative has done an excellent job of tracking the conspiracy theories around the attempted assassination, including foreign operatives spreading lies.
From Ryan McBeth’s Substack:
Karamo Brown, who's an activist and television host famous for the Netflix TV show Queer Eye, posted, How did none of the people behind him get injured with all those shots? Now, I took a look at Karamo Brown's background, and uh, Karamo is not a firearms expert, but when you have 2. 6 million followers, it would behoove you to be accurate.
I think this one kind of started the ball rolling. Pretty soon, hashtags like fake assassination and staged shooting started to appear. And it had some items like this from authentic accounts. Note that this strategy of using a foreign language character as a substitution for an English letter, in some words, is typically done by disinformation accounts to bypass dirty word filters.
Most people, they don't know what gunshots sound like or they're suffering from what you might call normalcy bias. I once had a friend of mine. Uh, his wife came home and went into their garage and noticed that the sledgehammer that they kept in the garage was on the floor. First of all, the garage door was open.
They go, oh, he left the garage door open. And then, oh, he left a sledgehammer on the floor. And then the door leading to the kitchen from the garage was open. Probably busted open by the sledgehammer. And they went, oh, he left the door open too. And then the guy's wife walks inside the kitchen and is smacked by a dude who is robbing them running out of the house, right?
So, you don't tend to come home with the idea that you're being robbed, and so you have this inherent normalcy bias going in. And so, people are watching President Trump and they go, oh, those must be firecrackers. Because the normalcy bias is kind of leading them down towards the thing that is not a threat.
Here’s an example of the foreign characters in text that McBeth references as evidence something is coming from a foreign operative or bot.
But, 99% of social media users won’t notice that. At this point, hundreds of millions of people have seen social media posts claiming the entire event was faked, like this tweet with 8.5 million views.
The new phenomenon of people who don’t believe Trump was actually shot are being dubbed “Blue Anon.”
From The New Statesman:
Behold the rise of “BlueAnon” – the Democratic, upscale equivalent of the right’s QAnon conspiracy theories, according to which an elite cabal of child-molesting Satanists has manifested in the Democratic Party and is out to “steal” elections while destroying the “Make America great again” movement. Now, it seems, it is the left who see covert plots everywhere.
In an email to left-of-centre journalists on Saturday night, Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder and Democratic mega-donor, suggested that it was possible that “this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas.”
Mehlhorn’s crankery isn’t an isolated case. “I’m sorry to be this guy right now and I await more details,” the left-leaning rock star Jess Margera wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “But this seems really convenient to happen right now after the world just woke up to project 2025” – a reference to a proposal by the think tank Heritage Foundation, a proposal disavowed by Trump himself, to push the next GOP administration in the direction long preferred by pro-business and hawkish donors and ideologues.
Shadi Bartsch, a renowned Latinist and Virgil translator at the University of Chicago, posted: “I am now a conspiracy theorist, I guess. The sight of Trump’s bloodless hand after grabbing his ‘shot’ ear has convinced me. Plus, there’s no ear part missing. I don’t know what happened, but I no longer believe the main narrative.”
One reason for the unhinged takes…is that many of the people making them are members of institutions and industries where there is no penalty whatsoever for going too far to the political left.
This is the University of Chicago prof…
…who doubled down on her views, claiming the victims in the crowd may have been shot by the Secret Service. (See original Tweet here).
I’d like to know more about the innocent casualty at the Trump rally and the two wounded. Were they victims of the shooter, or of the protective service shots?
I can’t believe this needs to be said, but bullets are not laser-guided missiles. They can’t change course mid-flight.
[the corporate press]
Less than 24 hours after the attempted shooting, opinion writer David Frum came staight off the top rope, pushing the view that hey, maybe DJT had it coming.
It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
Know what else is a secular religion? East Coast, hubristic modernism/humanism that devalues human life enough to shrug and say “well, dude probably deserved to get shot.”
Elsewhere, CNN and the Washington Post ran headlines and lower thirds that certainly damaged their credibility, to say the least.
If you want to increase the sympathy vote for Trump in November…that’s a good way to do it.
[the secret service]
The Secret Service is getting a lot of heat for this incident…in part, because the Secret Service allegedly knew the rooftop could be a threat…and didn’t secure it ahead of time.
NBC News reports:
The rooftop where a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally was identified by the Secret Service as a potential vulnerability in the days before the event, two sources familiar with the agency’s operations told NBC News.
The building, owned by a glass research company, is adjacent to the Butler Farm Show, an outdoor venue in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service was aware of the risks associated with it, the sources said.
“Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,” said one of the sources, a former senior Secret Service agent who was familiar with the planning.
Understanding how the gunman got onto the roof — despite those concerns — is a central question for investigators scrutinizing how a lone attacker managed to shoot at Trump during Saturday’s campaign event.
The Secret Service worked with local law enforcement to maintain event security, including sniper teams poised on rooftops to identify and eliminate threats, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. But no officers were posted on the building used by the would-be assassin, outside the event’s security perimeter but only about 148 yards from the stage — within range of a semiautomatic rifle like the one the gunman was carrying.
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy (who is somewhat apolitical, and definitely not a Trump fan), brought attention to the fact that one Secret Service agent was unable to re-holster her weapon….which calls into question how, exactly, such an inept group of bumbling idiots was put on security detail for a former POTUS.
As a person who has taken many new shooters to the range I would say…if you can’t re-holster a gun, please do not carry one as a civilian. For a government agency operator to not have this skill is inexcusable.
This will be a big story going forward, as a gaggle of politicians and talking heads are demanding an investigation into the failure.
[the political re-arrangement]
It’s easy to view this weekend’s assassination attempt as a merely domestic issue, but as Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihans points out…it’s a part of a larger pattern, where the global systems built after WWI and WWII are breaking down:
American parties tend to be fairly weak and so they tend to be coalitions of coalitions. So you get multiple political factions that bandy together around a single tent in order to get one more vote than whoever comes in second. So today, for example, the Republican party.
Has traditionally been made out of people who are concerned with budget deficit, people who are concerned with national security, uh, people who are concerned about business regulation, you get social conservatives, uh, that sort of thing. Uh, well, as technology and demographics and economic patterns evolve, the factions make less sense.
And so the factions rise and fall within the coalitions, and if things get stressed enough, Uh, they end up falling out of the coalition altogether, maybe becoming swing voters, maybe going to the other side. What we're seeing right now is that in spades for the Republican coalition. Uh, the business community and the national security community and the fiscal community have all been basically ejected from the party.
Uh, but Donald Trump has been successful in drawing other groups away from the Democratic coalition. So, for example, union voters are no longer, uh, Considered Democrats by their voting patterns, and Hispanics have shifted quite a bit. Uh, this is still very much a work in progress, and Donald Trump is benefiting from this as much as he is losing from this.
But, if you think about what's happened in the last 30 40 years, we've had the rise of hyper globalization, and now it's fall. We've had the height of the baby boomers in the workforce, and now the retirement. Not exactly a shock to think that we are going to manage our political system differently. So that's the first big piece.
America, politically, is in movement. Second, the world, economically, is in movement. The whole point of the post World War II global consensus was that the Americans will take care of the guns and keep everyone safe, the Americans will open the market and make the global seas safe for everyone's commerce, if, in exchange, you side with the Americans in the Cold War.
And that provided the basis for everything from the alliance with Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to NATO. And that's created the world that we know. It's also created the economic backdrop and the security backdrop that made the rise of China possible because during the Cold War, late Cold War, China was one of those allies.
Well, that whole system is breaking down. Two reasons. Number one, the Americans can't pay for it anymore and don't want to. The Americans refashioned their navy so instead of hundreds of ships that can patrol the oceans, they have a few clusters of ships that are really good for fighting wars. So the ability of having that global coverage isn't there, and Americans politically, uh, are tired of paying the economic price of keeping the world open for everyone because it's put everybody else at an advantage versus American workers.