TRUMP’S EAR, MAGIC TRICKS AND THE MYTH OF INFALLIBILITY

All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Such was the case with some American presidents: the Kennedys were murdered because they still had a political dimension. The others, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, only had the right to phantom attempts, to simulated murders. But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they were no longer anything but the mannequins of power.’ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Enjoy the show — that’s what the man said, right?

For some reason there was a lot of anticipation about the event. CNN had never covered a Trump rally on live television, but its cameras were there. The BBC was there, also for the first time at a Trump event, to interview a planted witness. Doug Mills of AP and the NYT — one of the most famous photographers in the world — was there to capture the iconic shot, just as he was on the morning of 9/11, as Bush was given the message that “America is under attack.”

So apparently there was foreknowledge that something was going to happen. They were all there to capture… well, what? A final desperate attempt to stop him? Or a deliberately botched job to enthrone him: a staged event with blank rounds and a blood capsule. It’s very much a sign of the times that the question immediately arose whether what we saw was real. That’s what interested me — the perfection of that iconic photograph is extraordinary, a propaganda triumph ensuring Trump’s accession to the political dimension of a Kennedy. Yes, it looks staged, with the flag above him and the diminutive female agent seeming to fold into his protection rather than the other way round. It’s too perfect, and immediately there were those saying that everything had turned out exactly as planned, that it was all a show, a psychological operation from start to finish, and not just young woke hysterics on Instagram, either, but middle-of-the-road Dems in the suburbs, and commentators on the libertarian right as well. Tim Truth (cool name, bro!), the Dollar Vigilante and the Google Whistleblower all chimed in: not enough blood, they said. Ears bleed copiously, and blood doesn’t clot that fast. The SS unit behaved more like crisis actors — real security professionals would never have allowed the candidate to expose himself to further danger like that before leaving the stage. And Trump’s good luck was inconceivable. An inch to the right, and the candidate is dead. An inch to the left, and that blood-smeared image of defiance, of courage under fire, is never captured by the cameras. So, it can only be that the script was written, and the denouement played out exactly as scripted; that the outcome of the event was as intended; that everything on the day went as planned, to showcase a display of defiance and frame that rebel yell in a stunning coup de théâtre.

Marshal McLuhan tagged it years ago:

“The satellite medium encloses the Earth in a man-made environment, which […] turns the globe into a repertory theatre to be programmed.” (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970)

What else could this be? Life doesn’t work out like that: only theatre, simulation, and programming.

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Zach Vorhies is a sophisticated researcher and precise communicator for whom I have a lot of respect. He is the ‘Google whistleblower’, who ditched his career at the tech giant when he discovered that Google’s euphemistically named ‘Machine Learning Fairness’ algorithm was designed to filter objective fact as ‘unfair’, and that if this were to be unleashed without public knowledge, it would be the end of democracy. As if to confirm everything he says, Google immediately adjusted its autofill algorithm so that “attempted assassination of” would bring up anyone but Donald Trump. Even Justin Trudeau wanted to get in on the act, now that nearly being assassinated was cool. Of those I have heard propagating the global theatre/psychological operation narrative, Vorhies has the most credibility, and his interview with Dr Drew is worth listening to for his reflections on AI, energy and China. He makes the case that the establishment has abandoned the Democrats and swung behind Trump; from this he infers that the Deep State arranged the whole charade for Trump, to energise his base, ensure the unification of the Republican party behind his candidacy, and give his campaign unstoppable impetus. Asked how the mock-attack could have been carried off, he replies: “I don’t pretend to know exactly what happened; what I’m putting out is that this is a magic trick.” In Baudrillardian terms, then, a simulation of the order of sorcery. When he is reminded that three audience members were hit by bullets, one of them fatally, he says, “I mean, look, they have to make it look convincing,” eliciting guffaws of “Oh, come on!”

I’m just as cynical as Vorhies, and didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. We can find examples where real slaughter is added to the mix to make a simulation convincing — Manhattan in 2001, for example, or Paris in 2015. Political movements need martyrs, and Trump, let’s face it, is an enigma, and it’s not wise to take anything for granted. Full disclosure: in 2016 I succumbed to the hopium for a while, but it didn’t last. I don’t like his extreme Zionism, was disgusted by his betrayal of Julian Assange, and Operation Warp Speed cast him as an asset of the New World Order, either the ultimate dupe or a treacherous Pied Piper for the technocracy. The MAGA movement is real, but Trump? He is, as many have pointed out, an actor of sorts; the unanswerable question was always whether he was always playing a role as a political outsider, while underneath the hostility he was an instrument of the agenda: controlled opposition. Watching the J13 videos, however, I found Trump’s reactions perfectly authentic. When they let him up, he looked pretty shaken to me. If he was deliberately provided with an inexperienced security team, the move backfired, since they didn’t possess the authority to make him follow the protocol when he demanded his shoes and when he ordered them to wait so that he could show the crowd that raised fist and the mouthed exhortation to fight, fight, fight! And so we came to that triumphant conclusion, that photograph for all the ages. But yes, there was something uncanny about the whole affair.

The problem with pulling off such a deception — a ‘phantom attempt’ in which the target is in no physical danger but simulates an injury — is that there were cameras everywhere, hundreds of them focused on the action, and with every camera, crucially, a microphone. It’s much harder, probably impossible, to pull off such a simulation without total imagery-control of the theatre of operations. In Boston on April 15 2013, it took a mere 24 hours to crowd-source thousands of photographs, showing the same events from multiple angles, impossible to fake, then or now, that proved conclusively that this was a drill presented as a real event, using crisis actors, prosthetics and blood bags. At Butler Park, however, audio analysis of crowd-sourced videos immediately revealed that it was indeed live ammunition flying around, not blanks. With real ammunition it’s not just the gun that makes a noise; the bullet does, too, a supersonic ‘snap’ as it passes a microphone. The bullet arrives before the report, creating the characteristic ‘crack-thump’ signature, which then allows analysis of distance. With the assassination of John F Kennedy, it took decades for public scrutiny to expose the administrative coup it represented. With Trump, crowd-sourced citizen investigations swung immediately into action, and in a matter of weeks I believe an accurate and detailed picture of what happened on July 13th is already emerging.

The best of these in my opinion is the highly professional investigation being conducted by John Cullen in collaboration with Jason Goodman. Cullen has track record with his analysis of the Las Vegas mass shooting, and this is undoubtedly the account to visit to catch up with jaw-dropping developments in the case. Cullen and his collaborators have built a three-dimensional digital model of the site, which allows detailed reconstruction of sight-lines and trajectories, and I highly recommend watching this two-hour livestream which goes over all the discoveries made thus far.

First, Cullen slowed the videos down to one tenth speed and detected the presence of suppressed subsonic gunfire while Trump is still speaking. The use of a silencer or suppressor dulls the report of the gun, but the bullet still makes the supersonic ‘crack’ in the air — unless, that is, subsonic ammunition is used, travelling just under the speed of sound, at less than a thousand feet per second. The sound-signature then is an almost imperceptible tsss! as the bullet fizzes through the air — but enough to register on the audio if you know what you’re looking for. Ten or twelve subsonic rounds are fired before any audible shots are heard — and they are directed not at the man on the podium but at the counter-snipers situated on the rooves behind Trump, and possibly in the empty grandstands further off to Trump’s left-hand side as well, where it looks like a third, secret team was situated.

You see, there was another first at this event. As well as the unprecedented live coverage by CNN and others, and the highly unusual presence of the BBC and the celebrated photographer Doug Mills, there was something else that had never happened before: the assignment of sharp-shooter teams to a Trump event. Yes, it’s almost incredible that Trump’s rallies and other public appearances had never before been protected by sniper rifles. But on July 13th, it seems there were three two-man teams. And unlike the makeshift, somewhat incompetent unit of bodyguards, these were highly effective professionals who did their job magnificently on the day.

The implications are fascinating. Did foreknowledge of the attempt reach the ears of principled elements within the security apparatus, who stepped up to protect the candidate? The assassination team of at least three shooters, one on the water-tower, one or more in the trees and one in the window of the AGR building directly below the patsy on the roof, may or may not have known that they would face opposition from counter-snipers. Either way, they had to try to take them out before their decoy could show himself over the roof-peak on the AGR building. So they engaged the Hercules teams with suppressed, subsonic rounds from their .300 Blackout weapons. And they missed, and missed, though one of the rounds ricocheted off the rifle of the sniper stage-right behind Trump. The counter-snipers became aware that they were taking fire, and, according to eye-witnesses, killed the shooter on the water-tower and possibly another assailant among the trees.

Meanwhile, ‘Thomas Crooks’, the young patsy on the roof, who would have been told to keep his head down until the sniper-teams had been neutralized, couldn’t restrain himself any longer and stuck his head up to see what was going on. Video taken by James Copenhaver, who was severely injured by a bullet seconds later, shows him in the background, scurrying along the roof-line to get to his position — and, though only Cullen noticed it, apparently getting taken out with a head-shot there and then, while Trump was still speaking and before we knew that anything was happening.

It appears that the principle assassin was stationed in the window directly below Crooks, so that the trajectories would be similar. With the patsy down, and the sniper teams intact and engaged, the assassin decided to go ahead and fire on the target.

Injuries in the crowd line up perfectly with shots taken from that window, and there is absolutely no question that Trump was in the crosshairs and the line of fire. So far from being a psychological operation to launch Trump to new heights, this was a deadly serious attempt to blow his brains out on live TV, using the same modus operandi as the J F Kennedy assassination: a lone crazed gunman whose death would close the case, and a team of shooters triangulating the target.

So why did it fail?

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It’s not the attempt but the failure Vorhies finds inconceivable, since “the Military Industrial Complex doesn’t mess around. When they want you dead, you’re dead.” And if you don’t die, then it must be some kind of a magic trick.

Or a miracle — divine providence?

Three hours before Trump started speaking, a strong gust of wind twisted the flag above the stage into this angelic shape. The cranes had to be lowered so that it could be straightened out. And whether or not there were supernatural influences at play, the wind was a big factor in what happened — or didn’t happen.

In view of the flag stretching out horizontally in some photographs, Cullen and Martin settle on a windspeed estimate around 10mph, blowing at right angles to the bullet trajectories from the AGR building. This is enough to require a scope-adjustment of one or two clicks at that range, according to Martin. We know the wind was gusting, and it would also be ‘ripply’ according to Cullen, with all those sloping rooves. The slower, larger subsonic rounds are more easily deflected by air movement. One way or another, the assailants kept getting it wrong, except for one single shot; and then the sheerest chance of a perfectly timed turn and tilt of the head saved the target’s life. It’s no wonder that many of Trump’s Christian supporters see his impossibly narrow, skin-of-the-teeth survival as an act of God. There’s been a lot of talk of spiritual warfare since 2020, Year Zero of the Great Reset. For myself, I don’t dismiss what I cannot know to be false, and always remember what a special forces soldier turned jungle-psychonaut told me in 2017 — I remember it word for word — “War is everywhere,” he said, “and all the time, on every level, even in the cells of your body.” (How prophetic that last phrase turned out to be.)

But when Vorhies argues the infallibility of the Deep State, he is making an error. Things go wrong sometimes. Incredible escapes happen. The wind blows. Something, you don’t know what, makes you go off-script. Something makes you turn your head. In any case, it is a mistake to deify the powers of the enemy like that. They are human too. If you don’t like the divine providence inference, then let’s leave magical thinking out of this altogether. If not by angels or by wind — and this is where a sign of hope lies, if you’re looking for one — Trump’s life was saved by whoever assigned those sniper teams to the protect him on this of all days, and by the way they carried out their work. One very salient fact to emerge from the 3D modelling is that the shooter on the water tower, although he had no sight-line to Trump because of the screen, had a clear line of fire to the backstage area, and would have had an opportunity to finish the job as Trump was brought round to the car, if he hadn’t already been taken out by, Cullen thinks, the secret sniper team in the empty grandstand half a kilometre away.

It’s an important point. The “Deep State” is a very general concept, and in reality it is not a single entity, but riven by factions and internecine conflicts like anything else, the military, the intelligence agencies, the mafia, the church… I think what we saw on July 13th was spectacular evidence of that, as a gun battle raged above the heads of the oblivious public, with victory in the end going decisively to the counter-assassination faction.

So rather than some phantom attempt or JFK-tribute to disguise the reality of his being a “mere mannequin of power”, this was the Deep State going full-Dealey Plaza on Donald Trump, and by Baudrillard’s heuristic that means he must indeed have a political dimension — in other words, a genuinely disruptive potential in terms of the globalist agenda. There can be no doubt, now, that his enemies are very afraid of him. To be clear, I do not believe he can or will save us from the technocratic miasma that is bubbling up all around us; his record on the vaccines and his approach to Bitcoin and CBDCs tells us not to hope for that. His rebellion, I believe, is against the geopolitical reset — specifically the subservient and impoverished place assigned to America in a new world order dominated by China. Of course this phase of history is marked by all kinds of jockeying and competition between the superpowers as to who will control the emerging one-world system. China would love nothing more than to see Russia and the United States destroy each other, and that is what their collaborators in the West have been working towards for years. Trump, and Putin, I believe, understand that perfectly well. So you don’t have to be on the Trump train to have reasons to be grateful to the bumpy wind and the excellence of those counter-snipers.

As for the man himself, the mystery of Trump’s ear (now almost as famous as Van Gogh’s) ensures that even in his moment of triumph there’s an element of farce. The FBI director said it may have been a bullet or a splinter of flying glass from the autocue, and maybe the latter is more likely in retrospect. What is certain is that he came under deadly fire and survived — and I don’t think that anyone who has never experienced that should detract from the self-possession he showed and the presence of mind with which he rose to the occasion. In more honorable times, even his enemies would recognise that. But there’s no doubt that many among the public have been impressed by the leadership qualities he showed, and the courage and defiance of that parting gesture.

Everything can be faked, but not everything is fake. In the tide of artificiality that is overwhelming human culture, some things are still real. Scraps and shreds of the territory still cling, here and there, to the map. Let’s hold onto that — on the Google Earth, in this post-truth world, where algorithms filter out fact as ‘unfair’, let’s cling to objectivity as if our lives — more than our lives — depended on it, and fight on against the death of the real. What else can we do?