David Pakman (4:18)
All right, you get it? Trump goes, this is why we need the ballroom. That I want to do. Now, let's talk about a few different things. First of all, how tight was security? Well, I was in that building just a couple of hours before the shooting. Now, it is true that there was the veneer of security. I'll give you some examples. The entire block on which the Washington Hilton sits was blocked off. When I got picked up in an Uber, I had to walk several blocks away because the Uber couldn't get close. There were dogs, beautiful dogs, sniffing around, presumably bomb and explosive sniffing dogs. You had Secret Service as well as Capitol Police. And then there's this other. Like, they have the white cars, and it says protective services. There were three, four. You had National Guard stalking around the area. So there was indeed the veneer of security, but at the same time, anybody could just walk into the lobby or other areas once the event started, to get into the ballroom, which was on a different floor. And yes, security was very tight, but that's not where the shooter got. The shooter, in fact, ended up discharging the gun in the. In the lobby area. So, yes, security was sort of tight, but it also wasn't really that tight where the shooting took place. And remember that this was not in the room where the event was taking place. So that's number one. Number two, there were conflicting reports about whether the shooter was killed, which are fomenting the belief in some that this was staged. Oh, the shooter was killed. Oh, no, they got the shooter. So. But this stuff is always incomplete and messy. At the beginning, the lack of clear, widely shared footage at one point was fueling conspiracy theories. Everybody expected everything to be captured super, super cleanly on video. But we have surveillance footage of the shooter running by. And so since there wasn't, I guess the extensive footage that some expected that is fueling conspiracy theories. There were claims about the suspect, that the suspect was clearly a plant fake in some way. But the truth is that we have a wide, pretty extensive social media history for the suspect and it does seem to have been an anti Trump person on the left. I mean, that's just what it seems to have been. And so a lot of this is getting filtered through the false flag frameworks where people already are predisposed to believe events like this are staged and they immediately interpret the events in that way. Social media amplifies it. There's a general distrust of government, a general distrust of media. And so some people start saying it must have been staged. Now I'm going to give you my view on this and I know because I'm on social media, there are fellow leftists who, who are saying they believe that this was staged. I don't believe that it was staged. If the claim. There's a. We'll go through some of the claims. Trump did this because his approval rating is in the toilet and he believed this would help his approval rating. Trump's polling moved half a point after the Butler assassination attempt in which the belief is Trump's ear was grazed by a bullet and he actually bled and someone died who was standing behind Trump. After all of that, Trump's polling budged half a point. So even the idea that this would help Trump's approval seems shaky at best to me. Number two, the ballroom. This was staged so that Trump could immediately say this is why we need the ballroom. And Trump did say this is why we need the ballroom. And all sorts of MAGA social media accounts immediately started posting this is why we need the ballroom. Well, on the latter, we know that there is a coordination of MAGA influencers. They clearly got the message, start saying this is why we need the ballroom. That's not proof that it was actually staged. And importantly, I don't believe that, that this shooting will help get the ballroom built even a single day more quickly. It just doesn't make sense. There's no evidence that that's going to happen next. Why leave a Comilla supporting left wing shooter alive if it was staged and a plant and he's a patsy when you could have easily had him killed and it would have been considered justified as a killing by the standards that are applied in this country. Why allow him to live? And now he is a liability who could potentially spill the beans. Doesn't make any sense. Now, when you tell the people who say it was staged what I just said, they will often come back and go, no, no, no, no. Even the guy, the guy wasn't in on it. They used psychological tools and techniques to make him decide. The guy believes he did it on his own. He did. Now we're going two layers deep into conspiracy. So, case in point, I don't think that this was staged. The superficial incentives that are being presented as the evidence that it was likely staged don't hold up. It runs counter to the incentives of many of the people that are involved. And quite frankly, I still don't think that this administration is capable enough to actually pull it off. So absent actual evidence that this was staged or a plant, I don't believe it was. And this opens up a broader conversation about conspiracy theories that goes back to Butler, which I now want to talk about. The story about the first assassination attempt of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania is now seeing even MAGA people suggesting that it was staged and fake. It's a strange turn in a way. It's not coming from the left, it's coming from some of the people in Trump's base and, and formerly in his base. Increasingly, we are seeing supporters of Donald Trump's saying the whole thing was staged and the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania during the 2024 presidential campaign wasn't real. Now let's rewind for a second. This was the 2024 rally where Donald Trump's ear was reportedly grazed by a bullet and a supporter of Trump's in the crowd was killed. Now, at the time, the reaction from MAGA world was immediate. It was predictable. This is proof that leftists are violent. This is proof that Trump was chosen by God and protected by God and divinely spared, even though for some reason God directed the bullet to kill a completely innocent guy standing behind Donald Trump. We, we of course, ultimately learned that the shooter was a Republican. Republicans didn't really care about that. But now we are seeing cracks in the movement and we're seeing something different happen, which is that there are even MAGA people suggesting there are questions here. Tucker Carlson is raising questions about that shooting, not in a responsible, evidence based way, but in a something feels kind of off way. You've got former supporters, influencers, conspiracy figures openly suggesting the entire thing was staged or covered up or manipulated behind the scenes. You've got Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeting. She doesn't come out and say straight up it was a hoax, but she says, quote, I'm not calling the Butler assassination a hoax. But there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers. I'm asking, why won't Trump release the information about Matthew Crooks? Did he actually act alone? If not, who's behind him and who helped him? Why the COVID up? Now, I want to connect this to something else. When I talked last week or the week before about the fact that this was a growing sentiment on the right, I got a lot of messages from people in my own audience also expressing skepticism about the Butler assassination attempt. And some pointed to how quickly Trump's ear appeared to heal. Others said there didn't seem to be the amount of blood that we would expect. Some mentioned, you know, photographers seem to already be in position and they were escorted to get the dramatic images of Trump. And Trump didn't appear particularly shaken up afterwards. And really, he never appeared particularly shaken up. I want to be really clear. None of that is proof of anything. They are observations. There are understandable questions, but they aren't evidence that this was staged or faked. Now, conspiracy theorists will sometimes then go back to a position that I've talked about before, which is that the lack of evidence is proof that it was staged and vague because they've covered up the evidence. I am very hesitant to jump in on that sort of belief. And what you're watching right now is a movement that is, in a way, turning on itself, using the same conspiracy logic that it used to defend Trump, it is now being used against Trump. It's like the boomerang effect of conspiracy, conspiratorial thinking. And as far as the MAGA movement is concerned, when you build a political movement on distrust of institutions, and we distrust the media, we distrust that we are even being told what facts are, that distrust will spread. And at first it's the FBI is lying, then it's the election was rigged, then it's maybe even the assassination attempt wasn't real. And once you open that door, I don't think there's a mechanism to close it. Because when you think throw standards of evidence out the window or flush them, everything is suspicion. What does it feel like? What do I trust in the moment and not what can actually be proven? Now, there is one other thing that is happening that I think is worth mentioning, which is that some of the people that are now talking about the Butler assassination in these terms are trying to tie this into broader Narratives of shadowy control, foreign influence. Sometimes it's anti Semitic tropes. It's all the stuff that always happens with conspiracy theorists. That's how these ecosystems evolve. They escalate to try to keep attention. They got to keep people engaged, keep the outrage machine going. And it creates a situation where even something as serious as an assassination attempt becomes another thing to reinterpret for clicks and loyalty tests. Now what this has always been about is narrative control, not what facts do we have and how can we connect facts. It's when Trump looked strong, he survived because he's the chosen one. Now he's facing criticism and the story shifts to maybe it was fake. Same event, okay, different interpretation depending on what serves the moment. And eventually it just consumes everything. We're seeing this with the White House correspondents dinner shooting. We're still seeing it now with the Butler shooting. And what has been blown wide open at a political level is the instability of the MAGA movement which doesn't know what to believe anymore. It trained itself don't believe anything consistently. Every belief is subject to throwing the evidence out and coming up with a brand new interpretation absent any evidence. And it is destroying them from the inside. We have a piece we're putting up on my substack about how the conspiratorial thinking festers, generates and then consumes everything. It's a really good piece about how all of this works and why it happens. You can find it on My substack David pakman.com/substack I'm excited to tell you about the world's number one expanding garden hose and their brand new product, the pocket hose ballistic. I used to go through cheap hoses all the time because of the kinks and the leaks and the tangles. This is on another level. The pocket hose ballistic is tough, reinforced with a liquid crystal polymer used in bulletproof version vests so it'll handle wear and tear. It's also really lightweight. It's easy to carry, easy to store because it expands with water pressure and shrinks right back down when you turn the water off. 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