Descartes' demon, the attempted assassination of Trump

So, as of 21 July, it seems that on July 13 2024, at a Butler, Pennsylvania Trump rally, a 20-year-old called Thomas Matthew Crooks got on a roof with his father’s AR-15 and took a shot at Trump, half-missed (clipped his ear), wounded two and killed one of the audience, and was then killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.

At present, the online Right is divided between those (like me) who more or less take it at face value, and those who think it’s all a psy-op, Deep Fake, crisis actor, holograms, Hollywood, staged, Trump wasn’t even there, there is no Trump, etc. I think it’s therefore useful to delineate what is supposedly known, and what we can reasonably conclude.

It seems that Crooks was reported to local police/Secret Service an hour earlier, as he was observed clambering around with a range finder and a rifle. Finally, a local cop climbed the ladder (conveniently placed by the roof) to see what was going on, Crooks pointed the rifle at him, the cop retreated, and then Crooks took his shot at Trump.

Although many have said Crooks was a bad shot, I think the first shot was as good as could be expected for a headshot. As far as I can tell, Crooks was firing with iron sights. He didn’t miss because he was a bad shot; he missed because Trump moved his head at just exactly the right moment, so the 5.56 round barely grazed his ear.

Crooks then laid down more semi-automatic fire, hitting three of the audience but missing Trump.

I suppose a professional would have either been able to swiftly adjust to a prone target, or maybe would have brought a bigger gun and gone for centre mass. Crooks presumably went for a headshot because Trump is known to wear body armour, (I suppose) proof against 5.56. But the head is a small, mobile, rounded target, and Trump moves a lot.

So much for Crooks. The Secret Service failure is another thing entirely. It’s clear, just from the video footage, that these were not Trump’s regular, steely-eyed team (as you see when, e.g. he visited East Palestine). For whatever reason the Secret Service were understaffed and Trump was left with some fat women and random burger-eaters. Just some of their errors:

1. Didn’t secure a roof 150 meters away.

2. Ignored multiple reports of a suspicious individual.

3. Didn’t react when they could clearly see Crooks on the roof, pointing a rifle at Trump.

4. Tried to steal Trump’s shoes, possibly to sell on Ebay, or for their own sinister sexual purposes.

At present, those who, like me, “have fallen for the psy-op” are in two camps: 1) the Secret Service are incompetent; and 2) the Secret Service wanted Trump to die — a good account of things here, by Millennial Woes.

Each of the Secret Service’s multiple points of failure could, I think, be ascribed to incompetence, just about; but as with statistical probability, the chances of several coin tosses coming up Whoops shrink and shrink — it’s still possible, just not very.

I initially thought that 8 years of Orange Man Bad hysteria from the mainstream media would inevitably produce several dozen Crookses, and this one just happened to strike when Trump had the shit-tier shoe-pervert security detail. Again, this is entirely possible, and I find it a good deal more likely than “Despite already being set for an easy November victory, Trump decided to stage an elaborate psy-op to get a few more points’ approval; it could easily have been uncovered, and he had to have one of his fans killed and two badly wounded to add verisimilitude but now he has slightly more political support”. However, some additional data points suggest the failure may have been more than happenstance:

1. CNN were livestreaming the rally, which apparently they never do. Were they expecting something memorable?

2. The bullet was caught on camera because Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Doug Mills was there with a highly expensive camera. shooting at 1/8000. Is it normal to take a $6000 camera to a routine rally, or did Mills expect something else, e.g. Trump’s head to explode?

3. Austin Private Wealth bought put options on 12 million DJT stocks the day before the shooting.

So, right now it looks like maybe some people knew there would be an attempt, may have prompted and assisted Crooks, and may have arranged for the Secret Service shoe perverts to take over for the fateful day. It would be interesting to sit down with CNN and Austin Private Wealth, and ask, Why exactly did you decide to act as you did?

I’m not a gun expert so my interest is mostly in the cultural reaction to all this. Morgoth wrote a very good piece, on the “it’s all a psy-op” crowd:

The initial default position is not one of skepticism but belief. The belief that superhuman elite world planners orchestrate everything that transpires with such consummate ease that it is utterly pointless to concern yourself with logistical questions. In this rather gnostic worldview, the people who investigated what temperature-burning jet engine fuel would need to melt steel would be considered normies because they have not immediately concluded that everything is planned. Likewise, whether or not JFK actually died slumped across Jackie’s perfectly fitted Chanel suit with his brains dripping out or went on to live in the Bahamas is moot because, again, the world planners achieved their ends anyway.

There is indeed something oddly gnostic to the conspiratorial worldview. For your modern gnostic, Descartes’ demon exists and everything is fake and gay, it’s all one giant psy-op, per the First Meditation:

I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as having falsely believed that I had all these things. I shall stubbornly persist in this train of thought; and even if I can’t learn any truth, I shall at least do what I can do, which is to be on my guard against accepting any falsehoods, so that the deceiver – however powerful and cunning he may be – will be unable to affect me in the slightest.

The Miles Mathis or James Delingpole worldview has its own internal logic, and it’s not as extreme as Descartes’ thought experiment: for them, literally everything you have not directly experienced is probably a psy-op. It offers clear psychological satisfaction: if you tried to “get” Shakespeare or Mozart or Wittgenstein and failed, well that’s not because you’re thick or have spots of spiritual deadness — no, it’s because it’s all a psy-op: they were all Cabal puppets, frauds, and anyone who claims to get anything out of Hamlet or Don Giovanni or the Tractatus has just fallen for the psy-op:

So, like J. K. Rowling, Shakespeare was just an Intelligence project. But to what end? Propaganda, of course. Disseminating information and forming opinion. You thought Edward Bernays started that? Nope. It has been around for a long time. Remember, prominent Jewish critic Harold Bloom has recently argued that the modern Western mind has been all but created by Shakespeare. Given what the modern Western mind has become, I don't see that as a great recommendation, but Bloom said it, not me.

Actually, I think Bloom is partially correct, but not in the way he is normally read. Bloom intends that the great mind of Shakespeare made possible the magnificent modern world, but we are seeing the opposite: the modern mind has been crushed by Intelligence and its puppetmasters, and Shakespeare was indeed one of their greatest and most promoted projects, over more than four centuries.

Just because this kind of thinking appeals to the monomaniacal and the midwit doesn’t mean it’s wrong; people can arrive at truth from any vector; but at some point, I decided to wash my one and a half hands of all the Delingpoles & Mathises.

The prevalent fakeness of our mass media, the degree to which much is indeed stage-managed & contrived, has driven this bizarre epistemic divide. Grug-brain thinking leads to monocausal explanation, whether it is the NPC who believes everything on the telly, the Jew-obsessed, or the Delingpole who assumes it’s all a psy-op. Each has its own internal logic; each explains the world — so it’s just a question of which rings true for you.

I’m something halfway between the normie and the Delingpole. After all, even in gnostic imaginings, e.g. The Matrix, there is something of Gödel’s incompleteness, of Bach’s well-tempered clavier, an inherent & necessary flaw in the system — a Neo, a Trinity. I don’t think our world is anywhere near as far gone as the ultimate gnostic prison; we rather live in “an old chaos of the sun” (Wallace Stevens, presumably another CIA agent), where good & evil messily compete. Much of the elite structure is aligned to evil; but even there I think mortal creatures can only bear so much evil — Tolkien was right (in the tradition of Plotinus): evil tends towards non-being, so more advanced evils will be only vestigially & thinly connected to ordinary physical existence. The middle management of evil must be a compound of the humanly good and this pure, inhuman evil; and thus their conspiracies will not run precisely to plan, there will be plenty of ordinary human motivation & weakness in the mix.

Fundamentally, I see the epistemic divide so: serious adults understand that absolute spiritual being is unlikely to irrupt & purely manifest into our reality; childish, weak-minded people see everything in cartoonish terms, however they define their moral axis.

The impatient, the naturally obsessive, and those in over their cognitive heads (as it were) are drawn to a low-res, blocky 80s Atari view of reality — no nuance, no gradation.

As I’ve been slowly writing this post, the initial 13 July narrative has been swiftly unraveling. There are now rumours (based on audio analysis) of a second shooter, presumably a professional, 200 feet behind Crooks; if so, I guess the pro took the first (perfect) shot, two more, and then the rest was Crooks. There are so many holes in the official narrative that the only thing I’m reasonably sure of is that someone shot at Trump and just barely grazed his ear. Watching the narrative falling apart in real time reminds me of one of my all-time favourite film scenes, Dave Ferrie’s interrogation in JFK:

Jim Garrison: Dave, may I ask you why the urge to go ice skating in Texas happened to strike you during one of the most violent thunder storms in recent memory?

David Ferrie: Uh, spur of the moment thing. The storm wasn't that bad.

Jim Garrison: I see. And where did you drive?

David Ferrie: Uh, we went to Houston, and Saturday night, we drove to Galveston, and stayed over there.

Jim Garrison: And then Sunday?

David Ferrie: In the morning, we went goose hunting.

Jim Garrison: You bag any geese on this trip?

David Ferrie: I believe the boys got a couple.

Jim Garrison: But the boys told us they didn't get any.

David Ferrie: Come to think of it, they're right. We got out there where the geese were, and there were thousands of them all over the place, but you couldn't approach them. Wise bunch of birds!

Jim Garrison: Your young friends also told us you had no weapons in the car, Dave. Isn't it a bit difficult to hunt for geese without a shotgun?

David Ferrie: Yes, I remember now. I'm sorry, Mr. Garrison. I got confused. We got out near the geese, and only then did we realized we had forgotten our shotguns! Stupid, right? Uh, so of course we didn't get any geese.

Jim Garrison: I see, Dave. Well, thank you for your time. I'm sorry that this has to end inconveniently for you, but I am going to have to detain you for further questioning by the FBI.

David Ferrie: Why, what's wrong?

Jim Garrison: David, I find your story simply not believable.

David Ferrie: Really? What part?

Right now, 13 July is like a big jumper full of holes, with many many stray threads sticking out, and those threads will be tugged and the holes will grow. My particular interest is: why did the Secret Service rip Trump’s shoes off? Per Trump himself: “The agents hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight.” I find this highly implausible. Shoes don’t just fall off, especially not if tightly-laced. For whatever reason, the Secret Service deliberately ripped Trump’s shoes off. My own theory is that they were told “let Trump die and you can masturbate into his shoes for eternity, in your private dungeon, in your unspeakable eldritch rituals to summon forth the Elder Ones, the madness behind the stars.”