July 20, 2024 • 14 mins
"...we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof."—Kimberly Cheatle Once again out of the blue—or out of the red, white and blue (sorry, I couldn't resist)—I'm putting out another short podcast, this time in response to the events of last Saturday in Pennsylvania, in which Donald Trump, as we all know, was very nearly assassinated by an allegedly "lone gunman" in front of the watching world. It's amazing how the "news cycle" speeds along though, isn't it? Already it's getting harder to find mention of it in "mainstream" news outlets. But this was a momentous event—and one that, as nearly everyone is saying, may well propel Trump into the White House for a second term (assuming another assassination attempt isn't successful). Anyway, essentially what I'm doing here is to "riff" in audio form on some notes that I've been making at TMR over the last several days. It's not a deep analysis; I'm not claiming that I've got everything right, and I'm certainly open to changing my mind on any of it as I'm exposed to new information. So, please take it for what it is: thoughts, musings, trying to make sense of what happened... and basically being someone, who, like you, has the audacity (nay, effrontery) to think about matters that one is told one should leave entirely to unimpeachable organs of the state (like the FBI). [For show notes please visit https://themindrenewed.com]
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:19):
Hello everybody. Julian Charles here ofthemindrneud dot com. Coming to you as
usual from the depths of the Lancashirecountryside here in the UK, and welcome
to TMR number three hundred and thirteen, which I am calling Trump a stochastic
terror event question mark. Before Iget going, I shall tell you straight
away that I am on one ofmy walks. You can probably hear me
trudging, you can probably hear atractor reversing, some seagulls, etc.
(00:43):
There's quite a lot of noise aroundhere for the depths of the Lankashire country
side, but I shall do mybest. I'm on one of my walks.
So essentially what I'm wanting to dotoday is to share with you some
notes to riff essentially on some notesthat I've been writing at the website over
the last several days. And sincemost people catch TMR material in audio form,
I thought that I would do this. I would present this in audio
(01:07):
form, so as I say,it's just a riffing really on some notes,
it's not a deep analysis. Sohere we go. One of the
benefits of living in the UK isthat I'm not living in the US.
All right, I'll just say I'mbeing funny there. I'm sure there are
many reasons why it would be betterto live in the US than the UK.
Just a bit of style there,okay. One of the benefits of
living in the UK is that I'mnot living in the US, and therefore
(01:30):
I feel less under pressure than manyto respond to things that happen there.
But this, I think is anexception. The events of Saturday last Saturday
evening in Butler, Pennsylvania are beingvigorously discussed around the globe, and everyone,
including everyone's dog and cat and goldfishand stick insects collection, has an
(01:51):
opinion on what happened. So Ithought that I should reveal at least some
of what's in my mind on thematter. What I am not about to
do, as I've just said,is to offer a deep analysis. I
don't have time for that at themoment, and there are plenty of people
already doing that anyway, so I'llgratefully leave that to them and benefit from
their wisdom in the days and weeksto come. Instead, I simply want
(02:14):
to indicate how I'm thinking at themoment, and I am open to argument
and evidence that might change my mind, But the way I currently interpret what
happened goes something like this. Numberone, the Trump assassination attempt I am
currently inclined to believe was a deepstate operation to kill Donald Trump in order
(02:35):
to prevent him from becoming US presidentfor a second time. And I shall
go on to explain why I'm thinkingalong those lines. In just the moment,
I just want to make two comments. One about the term deep state.
What do I mean by that?And it has various definitions. I
mean something like military industrial intelligence complex, which leads me to the second point,
which is, well, why wouldyou want to get why would they
(02:58):
want to get rid of Donald Trump? Well, because I think he's essentially
a political wildcard. I think he'sgot a mind of his own. I
don't agree with everything he does,but he's not a particularly compliant individual,
and they would much rather have somebodywho would just follow orders, and he's
not that kind of guy. Sothat makes sense to me. So the
following reasons Number two, assassination seemsto be the logical conclusion, after all
(03:22):
the other attempts to bring him downseem to have failed, and of course
many have been predicting an assassination attemptfor quite some time, And indeed it
gives me a slightly strange feeling,because I and my friends at a stand
in the park were actually discussing thelikelihood of a Trump assassination just six days
before it happened, and we wereeven talking about the possibility of it being
(03:45):
done by a supposed Republican, whichis interesting, just gives me a strange
feeling there. But number three,by all accounts, the US Secret Service
was unusually and inexplicably lacks that day. Not only did their marksmen fail in
inverted commas to neutralize a threat thatwould or should have been clearly in their
(04:05):
sights, but they failed again ininverted commas to secure the area in such
a way as to prevent the allegedshooter from accessing an obvious advantage point.
And they seem to have ignored crucialwarnings from members of the public. And
I note that agency failures again ininverted commas are hallmarks of events such as
(04:26):
the JFK assassination nine to eleven andother such events. Now, I note
that over the days there have beenvarious excuses forthcoming, such as and here
we have a tractor coming. No, no, we don't such as,
oh, well you know this roofwasn't within the inner perimeter, and well,
my question would be, well whynot. It's the obvious thing to
(04:48):
include that in the inner perimeter.It's so close, it's dangerously close.
That's what you would expect all that, Well, resources were directed elsewhere,
so we were under resourced. Wellthat's suspicious in itself. And given the
resources that you had, surely youwould still be able to put somebody on
(05:09):
that roof because it's so close.And the most ridiculous one, I think
extremely famous is the comment by KimberlyCheetle, who of course is the head
of the Secret Service, in anABC News interview where she responds to questions
about this quote. That building inparticular had a slope to roof at its
highest point, and so you knowthere's a safety factor that would be considered
(05:31):
there that we wouldn't want to putsomebody up on a slope to roof,
and so you know, the decisionwas made to secure the building from inside
end quote right, even though therewere individuals stationed on other roofs that had
steeper elevations. Incredibly lame excuse.So, yeah, I'm left thinking that
(05:53):
none of us has been explained away. All this sounds rather desperate to explain
something which seems like, well,it seems like failures in inverted commas.
I have to say that's all theonly way I can put it. Number
four, we were very quickly toldby outlets establishment outlets like the BBC of
course here, that we shouldn't speculateor entertain conspiracy theories because that sort of
(06:18):
thing would only serve to politicize matters, as if a clearly politically motivated event
shouldn't be thought about in political terms, but rather that we should leave it
to the FBI to carry out itsobviously impartial investigations and reveal the truth to
us in due course. In otherwords, shut up, stop thinking,
(06:43):
and accept that this was lone nutplus security failures from which lessons must be
learned, and that's that similar story. Shut up, don't think. Number
five. Now, I am awarethat there is a hoax view or hoax
views, but I'm not person wadedby them. I appreciate that Trump has
clearly benefited from this hugely in politicalterms, but I don't think that is
(07:08):
suspicious enough to warrant the view thatthis was a pro Trump false flag.
And let's make a note here aboutthat famous photograph. It's certainly a very
impressive piece of visual propaganda, andthat clearly is what it is. With
its American flag, red blood,white shirts, blue jackets, blue sky,
Trump's fist in the air, plushis defiant look, and all shot
(07:30):
in monumental style from below, it'sclearly propaganda. But I do think this
is propaganda by selection, not byconstruction. There are many images available of
the immediate aftermath. No doubt theseare burst mode exposures from which news outlets
were able to choose and to whichimage editors could apply appropriate framing and subtle
filters. Okay, that's all Iwanted to say about that. I think
(07:51):
too much has been made of that. I'm just going to wait for this
track to go by, so continuingmore importantly, I think it's highly unlikely
that a hypothesized pro Trump gunman allegedgunman would have shot so near to Trump's
(08:11):
head, or if he didn't shootnear to Trump's head and Trump used let's
say fake blood for that ear,that the alleged gunman would have continued to
shoot so as to murder a fellowTrump supporter in the crowd and seriously injure
to others, or if the gunmanwas anti Trump but being handled by pro
(08:33):
Trump operatives, that that alleged gunmanwould have been trusted to miss Trump at
such a dangerously close range. Furtheron the idea that this was a pro
Trump hoax, it does strike meas highly implausible that Trump would resort to
this kind of thing. I mean, he is a front runner for the
US presidential election, so why riskeverything by agreeing to something like this.
(08:58):
If it were to go seriously wrong, it would completely blow him out of
the water. He'd be out ofthe race for sure. I know that
there is this whole white hat theory, and I know this because I do
talk about this with people at thepark, in which pretty much everything is
being controlled by deep state white hatswho are orchestrating everything to go on looking
(09:20):
bad so as to wake everybody upto how evil things are before there is
some kind of white hat takeover thatwill put the good guys in charge permanently.
But I can't buy into any ofthat. Whenever I talk to people
who are into that way of thinking, I find myself arguing against a wall
of unfalsifiability, where everything fits thetheory fits the theory one way or another,
(09:43):
and in which ad hoc explanations arebrought into the discussion to neutralize any
analytical points I care to make.Okay, it could be true in a
sort of broadly logical sense, butfrankly, I've got no reason to believe
that it is true. So Ishall stick to the data at hand such
as I find it. I shalluse Ockham's raiser likely, and I shall
(10:05):
prefer simpler explanations over fantastical explanations.That is just me, Okay, And
of that aside, number six Ido find interesting the concept of a stochastic
terror event. Now, the ratheruntrustworthy but sometimes useful Wikipedia gives a definition
(10:26):
of this so Starcastic terrorism is targetedpolitical violence that has been instigated by hostile
public rhetoric directed at a group orindividual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this
is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator
(10:48):
to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resultingviolence. Okay, So essentially, if
you direct nasty speech at somebody fora long period of time, you're going
to make it more likely that thatperson is going to be the target of
real physical violence. Okay, itmakes sense. Okay, So along these
lines, the Trump assassination attempt couldbe understood. Perhaps there's a combination of
(11:16):
deliberate security failure in Berticomma's plus stochasticterrorism, in which months, maybe years
of encouraging people to accuse Trump ofbeing a threat to do democracy, a
threat to the republic, and nameslike pro putin traitor, Hitler Mussolini might
have been in part designed to encourageunbalanced individuals to take democracy into their own
(11:41):
hands and remove the Donald threat fromthe face of the earth for good,
while the ultimate instigators of both thefailures and the stochastic terror would remain hidden
from view. Okay, but numberseven I backtrack from that a little.
The more I think about stacaste terror, the less impressed I am by the
(12:01):
concept, and the less relevant Ithink it is. I think its main
weakness is that it does encourage theidea that overheated political rhetoric is a type
of violence, which of course isbad news from a freedom of speech perspective.
But I think its main strength isthat it does name an obvious truth,
as I said before that to fostera culture of nasty political speech aimed
(12:24):
at X is likely to increase theprobability that physical violence might be aimed at
X. Okay, and it's onlythat really that interests me. But I'm
not sure it has much explanatory powerhere, because it does really leave unexplained
why the security services their failures justhappen to coincide with the appearance of this
(12:46):
particular alleged shooter. I'm getting theI'm getting the impression that this individual was
kind of expected, but we shallsee, so a little reluctantly, I
am still tending towards the thought thatthe alleged shooter was handed in some way.
Okay, again, this is justhow I'm thinking at the moment.
It is still early days, andI am, as I've said before,
(13:07):
I'm open to changing my mind onany of this, So please do feel
free to agree, disagree, andsend me an email just to discuss.
And I add here smile, don'tget cross. We'll probably never know for
sure what happened anyway, so that'sessentially it. I'm probably going to correct
things, change, my viewers,things go on, but that's essentially it.
So thanks very much for listening.You have been listening to me,
(13:28):
Julian Charles orthmindneed dot Com, andI very much look forward to speaking to
you again in the near future.And just to complicate matters, I will
note that the excellent Chris Martinsen,in a report which I will link to
in the show notes, suggests thatthere is evidence of a second shooter.
(13:48):
So as I say, that notewill be in this show notes, which
is a report that I encountered duringthe week, so please do check that
out. It's very interesting. No, I don't want you know what you
doing. I want you know what. No, I don't want you know
(14:09):
what. No. No, no,
Hello everybody. Julian Charles here ofthemindrneud dot com. Coming to you as
usual from the depths of the Lancashirecountryside here in the UK, and welcome
to TMR number three hundred and thirteen, which I am calling Trump a stochastic
terror event question mark. Before Iget going, I shall tell you straight
away that I am on one ofmy walks. You can probably hear me
trudging, you can probably hear atractor reversing, some seagulls, etc.
(00:43):
There's quite a lot of noise aroundhere for the depths of the Lankashire country
side, but I shall do mybest. I'm on one of my walks.
So essentially what I'm wanting to dotoday is to share with you some
notes to riff essentially on some notesthat I've been writing at the website over
the last several days. And sincemost people catch TMR material in audio form,
I thought that I would do this. I would present this in audio
(01:07):
form, so as I say,it's just a riffing really on some notes,
it's not a deep analysis. Sohere we go. One of the
benefits of living in the UK isthat I'm not living in the US.
All right, I'll just say I'mbeing funny there. I'm sure there are
many reasons why it would be betterto live in the US than the UK.
Just a bit of style there,okay. One of the benefits of
living in the UK is that I'mnot living in the US, and therefore
(01:30):
I feel less under pressure than manyto respond to things that happen there.
But this, I think is anexception. The events of Saturday last Saturday
evening in Butler, Pennsylvania are beingvigorously discussed around the globe, and everyone,
including everyone's dog and cat and goldfishand stick insects collection, has an
(01:51):
opinion on what happened. So Ithought that I should reveal at least some
of what's in my mind on thematter. What I am not about to
do, as I've just said,is to offer a deep analysis. I
don't have time for that at themoment, and there are plenty of people
already doing that anyway, so I'llgratefully leave that to them and benefit from
their wisdom in the days and weeksto come. Instead, I simply want
(02:14):
to indicate how I'm thinking at themoment, and I am open to argument
and evidence that might change my mind, But the way I currently interpret what
happened goes something like this. Numberone, the Trump assassination attempt I am
currently inclined to believe was a deepstate operation to kill Donald Trump in order
(02:35):
to prevent him from becoming US presidentfor a second time. And I shall
go on to explain why I'm thinkingalong those lines. In just the moment,
I just want to make two comments. One about the term deep state.
What do I mean by that?And it has various definitions. I
mean something like military industrial intelligence complex, which leads me to the second point,
which is, well, why wouldyou want to get why would they
(02:58):
want to get rid of Donald Trump? Well, because I think he's essentially
a political wildcard. I think he'sgot a mind of his own. I
don't agree with everything he does,but he's not a particularly compliant individual,
and they would much rather have somebodywho would just follow orders, and he's
not that kind of guy. Sothat makes sense to me. So the
following reasons Number two, assassination seemsto be the logical conclusion, after all
(03:22):
the other attempts to bring him downseem to have failed, and of course
many have been predicting an assassination attemptfor quite some time, And indeed it
gives me a slightly strange feeling,because I and my friends at a stand
in the park were actually discussing thelikelihood of a Trump assassination just six days
before it happened, and we wereeven talking about the possibility of it being
(03:45):
done by a supposed Republican, whichis interesting, just gives me a strange
feeling there. But number three,by all accounts, the US Secret Service
was unusually and inexplicably lacks that day. Not only did their marksmen fail in
inverted commas to neutralize a threat thatwould or should have been clearly in their
(04:05):
sights, but they failed again ininverted commas to secure the area in such
a way as to prevent the allegedshooter from accessing an obvious advantage point.
And they seem to have ignored crucialwarnings from members of the public. And
I note that agency failures again ininverted commas are hallmarks of events such as
(04:26):
the JFK assassination nine to eleven andother such events. Now, I note
that over the days there have beenvarious excuses forthcoming, such as and here
we have a tractor coming. No, no, we don't such as,
oh, well you know this roofwasn't within the inner perimeter, and well,
my question would be, well whynot. It's the obvious thing to
(04:48):
include that in the inner perimeter.It's so close, it's dangerously close.
That's what you would expect all that, Well, resources were directed elsewhere,
so we were under resourced. Wellthat's suspicious in itself. And given the
resources that you had, surely youwould still be able to put somebody on
(05:09):
that roof because it's so close.And the most ridiculous one, I think
extremely famous is the comment by KimberlyCheetle, who of course is the head
of the Secret Service, in anABC News interview where she responds to questions
about this quote. That building inparticular had a slope to roof at its
highest point, and so you knowthere's a safety factor that would be considered
(05:31):
there that we wouldn't want to putsomebody up on a slope to roof,
and so you know, the decisionwas made to secure the building from inside
end quote right, even though therewere individuals stationed on other roofs that had
steeper elevations. Incredibly lame excuse.So, yeah, I'm left thinking that
(05:53):
none of us has been explained away. All this sounds rather desperate to explain
something which seems like, well,it seems like failures in inverted commas.
I have to say that's all theonly way I can put it. Number
four, we were very quickly toldby outlets establishment outlets like the BBC of
course here, that we shouldn't speculateor entertain conspiracy theories because that sort of
(06:18):
thing would only serve to politicize matters, as if a clearly politically motivated event
shouldn't be thought about in political terms, but rather that we should leave it
to the FBI to carry out itsobviously impartial investigations and reveal the truth to
us in due course. In otherwords, shut up, stop thinking,
(06:43):
and accept that this was lone nutplus security failures from which lessons must be
learned, and that's that similar story. Shut up, don't think. Number
five. Now, I am awarethat there is a hoax view or hoax
views, but I'm not person wadedby them. I appreciate that Trump has
clearly benefited from this hugely in politicalterms, but I don't think that is
(07:08):
suspicious enough to warrant the view thatthis was a pro Trump false flag.
And let's make a note here aboutthat famous photograph. It's certainly a very
impressive piece of visual propaganda, andthat clearly is what it is. With
its American flag, red blood,white shirts, blue jackets, blue sky,
Trump's fist in the air, plushis defiant look, and all shot
(07:30):
in monumental style from below, it'sclearly propaganda. But I do think this
is propaganda by selection, not byconstruction. There are many images available of
the immediate aftermath. No doubt theseare burst mode exposures from which news outlets
were able to choose and to whichimage editors could apply appropriate framing and subtle
filters. Okay, that's all Iwanted to say about that. I think
(07:51):
too much has been made of that. I'm just going to wait for this
track to go by, so continuingmore importantly, I think it's highly unlikely
that a hypothesized pro Trump gunman allegedgunman would have shot so near to Trump's
(08:11):
head, or if he didn't shootnear to Trump's head and Trump used let's
say fake blood for that ear,that the alleged gunman would have continued to
shoot so as to murder a fellowTrump supporter in the crowd and seriously injure
to others, or if the gunmanwas anti Trump but being handled by pro
(08:33):
Trump operatives, that that alleged gunmanwould have been trusted to miss Trump at
such a dangerously close range. Furtheron the idea that this was a pro
Trump hoax, it does strike meas highly implausible that Trump would resort to
this kind of thing. I mean, he is a front runner for the
US presidential election, so why riskeverything by agreeing to something like this.
(08:58):
If it were to go seriously wrong, it would completely blow him out of
the water. He'd be out ofthe race for sure. I know that
there is this whole white hat theory, and I know this because I do
talk about this with people at thepark, in which pretty much everything is
being controlled by deep state white hatswho are orchestrating everything to go on looking
(09:20):
bad so as to wake everybody upto how evil things are before there is
some kind of white hat takeover thatwill put the good guys in charge permanently.
But I can't buy into any ofthat. Whenever I talk to people
who are into that way of thinking, I find myself arguing against a wall
of unfalsifiability, where everything fits thetheory fits the theory one way or another,
(09:43):
and in which ad hoc explanations arebrought into the discussion to neutralize any
analytical points I care to make.Okay, it could be true in a
sort of broadly logical sense, butfrankly, I've got no reason to believe
that it is true. So Ishall stick to the data at hand such
as I find it. I shalluse Ockham's raiser likely, and I shall
(10:05):
prefer simpler explanations over fantastical explanations.That is just me, Okay, And
of that aside, number six Ido find interesting the concept of a stochastic
terror event. Now, the ratheruntrustworthy but sometimes useful Wikipedia gives a definition
(10:26):
of this so Starcastic terrorism is targetedpolitical violence that has been instigated by hostile
public rhetoric directed at a group orindividual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this
is accomplished by using indirect, vague, or coded language that allows the instigator
(10:48):
to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resultingviolence. Okay, So essentially, if
you direct nasty speech at somebody fora long period of time, you're going
to make it more likely that thatperson is going to be the target of
real physical violence. Okay, itmakes sense. Okay, So along these
lines, the Trump assassination attempt couldbe understood. Perhaps there's a combination of
(11:16):
deliberate security failure in Berticomma's plus stochasticterrorism, in which months, maybe years
of encouraging people to accuse Trump ofbeing a threat to do democracy, a
threat to the republic, and nameslike pro putin traitor, Hitler Mussolini might
have been in part designed to encourageunbalanced individuals to take democracy into their own
(11:41):
hands and remove the Donald threat fromthe face of the earth for good,
while the ultimate instigators of both thefailures and the stochastic terror would remain hidden
from view. Okay, but numberseven I backtrack from that a little.
The more I think about stacaste terror, the less impressed I am by the
(12:01):
concept, and the less relevant Ithink it is. I think its main
weakness is that it does encourage theidea that overheated political rhetoric is a type
of violence, which of course isbad news from a freedom of speech perspective.
But I think its main strength isthat it does name an obvious truth,
as I said before that to fostera culture of nasty political speech aimed
(12:24):
at X is likely to increase theprobability that physical violence might be aimed at
X. Okay, and it's onlythat really that interests me. But I'm
not sure it has much explanatory powerhere, because it does really leave unexplained
why the security services their failures justhappen to coincide with the appearance of this
(12:46):
particular alleged shooter. I'm getting theI'm getting the impression that this individual was
kind of expected, but we shallsee, so a little reluctantly, I
am still tending towards the thought thatthe alleged shooter was handed in some way.
Okay, again, this is justhow I'm thinking at the moment.
It is still early days, andI am, as I've said before,
(13:07):
I'm open to changing my mind onany of this, So please do feel
free to agree, disagree, andsend me an email just to discuss.
And I add here smile, don'tget cross. We'll probably never know for
sure what happened anyway, so that'sessentially it. I'm probably going to correct
things, change, my viewers,things go on, but that's essentially it.
So thanks very much for listening.You have been listening to me,
(13:28):
Julian Charles orthmindneed dot Com, andI very much look forward to speaking to
you again in the near future.And just to complicate matters, I will
note that the excellent Chris Martinsen,in a report which I will link to
in the show notes, suggests thatthere is evidence of a second shooter.
(13:48):
So as I say, that notewill be in this show notes, which
is a report that I encountered duringthe week, so please do check that
out. It's very interesting. No, I don't want you know what you
doing. I want you know what. No, I don't want you know
(14:09):
what. No. No, no,
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