“Butler was staged”
Why do so many people believe the Butler assassination attempt was staged? Or that all the assassination attempts on Trump were staged?
About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged according to a new survey.
Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans. …
Perhaps the most striking finding was that 42% of Democrats said they believed the Butler shooting was staged.
Among independents, that figure fell to 21%, while just 7% of Republicans said the same.
My explanation? If you believe that there is no objective truth, you are free to choose your truth – and the internet will assist you in doing so. There are also many people for whom most of life is lived online, watching a screen and coming to think of people as actors on that screen. The idea that these attempts were fake is one that’s spread online, and for people who believe the worst of Trump it’s a “truth” they can get behind. The fact that other people were wounded and one person killed at Butler? Fake. The photos of the assassin on the roof? Fake.
As just one example of the folks spreading this particular set of ideas, I bring you the odd couple, Candace Owens and Hunter Biden. Yes, you heard that right (the clip is less than a minute long):
Or a conspiracy. The JFK conspiracy theories have spawned countless others. But to the best of my knowledge, it never became a widespread idea that he hadn’t died and that the killing was fake; he was obviously dead in a way that would have been difficult for even the most devoted conspiracy theorist to deny. As far as I know, though, the other attempted presidential assassinations between then and now – for example, the shooting of Reagan, or the attempt on Ford’s life – never engendered any sort of widespread notion that they weren’t real.
Perhaps that sort of idea began with 9/11 Truthers. There was a not insignificant number of people who believed the WTC and Pentagon attacks were, if not exactly fake, then a performative plot by the US government:
The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements from inside the U.S. government, or that hijacked planes were remotely controlled …
Extraordinary. And there are also the people who think the moon landings were faked.
The other day I heard two jokes about conspiracy theorists and the tenacious quality of their beliefs. Here’s the first:
“Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.”
And the second:
“A JFK assassination conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God welcomes him and says, ‘To reward your lifelong search for the truth, I will answer one question for you.’
“The man doesn’t hesitate. ‘Who really killed John F. Kennedy?’ he asks.
“God smiles and says, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone shooting from the Texas School Book Depository with a Manlicher-Carcano rifle. There was no second shooter and no conspiracy.’
“The man mutters, ‘Shit. This goes much higher up than I thought.'”
Nice post. I definitely laughed at the 2nd joke. A friend & I just finished watching all 15 seasons of Supernatural, which has very creative & blasphemous potrayals of religious fictions. That joke would fit right in with the devious God they portray.
I agree with all the post’s commentary, though the World Trade Center #7 building is an interesting case. A friend got caught up in the conspiracy theories because of that building’s collapse.
It is very strange because apparently the design of the building was quite flawed. The failure of a single structural beam can and probably did cause the entire structure to collapse.
I was fairly recently unfortunate enough to be in a conversation with someone who believed that the Butler assassination incident was staged, that whatever (if there even was anything) that flew by candidate Trump’s ear was not a real bullet.
I asked whether that father of two daughters (all seated together in the rally audience) that was killed by a fast-moving projectile, whether that was a fake bullet, too; whether the man’s death was staged.
Crickets (predictably).
I’d say about 90% of the leftists i follow believe all the attempts were staged. Why? Because Trump is evil and will do anything to promote himself. It’s TDS in its terminal stages.
Yeah, probably. And that father was killed by splashes of apple cider vinegar [snicker].
Most people lack access to the direct evidence necessary to prove common facts. Almost everyone relies on someone else’s say-so, whether that’s an expert, a journalist, a bureaucrat, or the like.
The institutions that people can normally rely on to vouch for truths that they can’t directly prove have become unreliable, often because of wild and barely-believable scandals/conspiracies that turned out to be true. (Trump/Russia, COVID lab leak, Hunter laptop, CIA failures in Iraq, etc.)
When people can no longer trust the institutions that rely on those institutions, the result is a free-for-all.
There is also the Flat Earther conspiracy guys. Every ocean going ship captain and airline pilot would have to be in on the conspiracy since that flat plate Earth Model they use would only correspond at one place East – West distance wise with the spherical Earth.
(Trump/Russia, COVID lab leak, Hunter laptop, CIA failures in Iraq, etc.)
==
None of these were ‘wild’ or ‘barely believable’.
I think before he died, Scott Adams offered that about 25% of the respondents to any poll will offer a crazy answer.
Some of the 9-11 conspiracy guys refuse to understand that steel looses strength long before it melts into a liquid. There has been at least one metal bridge collapse since 9-11 I remember reading about when a large fuel source caught on fire on the road above it.
Remember the old John Wayne/William Holden movie, The Horse Soldiers? Remember the scene where the Union Soldiers were heating the RR rails and bending them around a post? Did that to make the rails unusable, not because of the bending but because it caused the rails to lose it’s tensile strength.
There was a conspiracy around Butler– a conspiracy to assassinate the former President. When you look at the series of events, you’re struck the actual number of coincidences/incompetence defies belief.
Add that to the conspiracies floating around.
Is there a number where coincidences no longer are a coincidence?
The creator eric kripke has moved on to the boyz (amoral psychotic superheroes which ended in a wretched mess
Brian E:
No, there isn’t such a number. Most crashes or disasters like the Titanic sinking or the Challenger explosion are the result of a host of causes, many of them involving negligence and poor decisions and some involving chance, all coincidentally coming together to cause the problem. But that doesn’t make them conspiracies.
Peter Drucker, in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity, discusses the increasing role of knowledge in modern societies and suggests:
“As a result, it is quite possible that the great new ‘isms’ of tomorrow will be ideologies about knowledge. In tomorrow’s intellectual and political philosophies knowledge may well take the central place that property, i.e. things, occupied in capitalism and Marxism.”
This must have seemed like a rather strange idea to most readers in 1969…the great new ‘isms’, and therefore the great political and cultural fault-lines, were going to be about knowledge? Surely, debate about the nature of knowledge must have seemed like something more appropriate for a university philosophy course in epistemology than a likely major subject for the political and media stage.
But, isn’t this precisely what we are seeing now, with all of the assertions and arguments about ‘disinformation’, the assertions about ‘science says’ and resultant reactions and critiques, the revelations about social media bias, and the concerns about potential artificial-intelligence bias? These are all arguments about what constitutes a valid, useful, and true source of information.
Some thoughts here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69021.html
Brian E (5:54 pm) said: “When you look at the series of events, you’re struck the actual number of coincidences/incompetence defies belief.”
It certainly does. It was a (true) conspiracy of malign neglect. “They” (heaven knows who was in on it) arranged circumstances so that any ordinary Joe or Jane could take a shot at Trump with effectively no interference from those, part of whose jobs were to protect the candidate. “They” didn’t fire shots, but were “they” hoping someone would? — if “they” weren’t hoping someone would, “they” sure as h#ll acted like “they” were.
He is wracked with tds and eds elon derangement syndrome
If there had been more comprehensive revelations as in the 28 pages there be less od a market for this madness
As to butler its not even arguable it was at least a concordance of events to allow it to happen
With the secret service director being right in the middle of it (and her conflicts of interest) the lack od scrutiny by the possums in the Senate and House the repeated failures of the protective detail as recently as a month ago
As Brandon and his friends said:
“Would you let me take this shot from 2 feet away?”
https://youtu.be/FsvJzfXZI18?si=VupZDfkh-QLLDxqM
Too many people believe crazy things because they’ve literally not gone outside and actually done many things.
Just today I ran (online) across someone who said that October 7 was a Mossad false flag operation. This was on a private email list. Fortunately, by the end of the day several people of known reputation flamed him.
Well he departed Supernatural in S5. Then went on to the series “Revolution” (which got canceled) before going to the Boys.
Unfortunately it seems like the popularity got his head and he’s gone off the rails.
Neo, somebody needs to come up with one. “It can’t be a conspiracy because there were only 25 coincidences all happening one after the other!”
People who believe Trump to be a blithering idiot ,also seem to believe that he was able to pull of amazing false flag attempts on his life.
On the Oct 7 attack , was anyone ever fired or demoted or received a letter in there jacket over the epic failure causing the death of innocents ?
Brian E:
Not sure what your point is. Coincidences are coincidences. Have you ever read that long long list of strange similarities between Lincoln and JFK? Uncanny, but meaningless because they are coincidences.
Keith:
Easy to ascertain. By January 2025, here are some Israelis who lost their positions. And this is from about a year later.
“My explanation? If you believe that there is no objective truth, you are free to choose your truth – and the internet will assist you in doing so.”
True enough. That said, those who believe that there is no objective truth, are those most desperate for a ‘truth’ they can believe in…
Miguel; M J R:
I think it is quite clear that security at Butler was abysmal. But that doesn’t mean the security people wanted Trump dead. And of course none of that implies anything was faked.
I think incompetence is usually far more rampant than conspiracy in these matters.
Neo, I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek when I said there should be a minimum number of coincidences before we call it a conspiracy.
As to the comparisons between JFK and Lincoln, it’s not the same, IMO, as between coincidences during a single event.
Brian E:
Ah! Got it
Neo, let me try this one on you. I often say, “my humor is so subtle, even I don’t know when I’m joking.”
The problem is several generations have been both educated and groomed to believe that truth is what you believe to be true. Until objective truth smacks them up side of the head I don’t know how to enlighten them.
“Until objective truth smacks them up side of the head I don’t know how to enlighten them.”
At my former place of employment, northeastern liberal arts college, I had a passionate English faculty lady explain to me that physics was a construct of white racists with no basis of truth. I offered to take her up to our observatory roof and have her jump off to see if Newton really was a white racist. She declined. They know it’s bullshit.
Brian E:
🙂
Brian E:
You write: “As to the comparisons between JFK and Lincoln, it’s not the same, IMO, as between coincidences during a single event”
No, not the same. But equally coincidental.
Brian E
Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”
It seems that many people have never heard of Murphy’s Law.
When a lapse of judgement, mistaken assumptions, and physics come together there is usually blood. No conspiracy necessary.
When unlikely events have to coincide with other unlikely events and the result coinciding with yet other unlikely events, and onward, it’s sort of like a series of exponents; X to the such and such a power, the result to another power of itself, and so forth. Like Heinlein’s discovery that the Number of The Beast, 666, should really be six to the sixth, the result to the sixth. Pretty big number.
When the unlikelhoods coincide with other unlikelihoods, and the result must coincide with yet other unlikelihoods, the likely “one chance in…..” what?
Everybody has his own number beyond which it’s not just chance.
The Butler case doesn’t need a lot of unlikelihoods. Couple of negligent or oversight issues and….. Sure, the rooftop must have been covered and….now the question is not whether it was staged by Trump, but to get Trump.
Why is nothing known about Crooks and his family?
I have no idea, no conclusion. But indications are that seeing a plot is not all that far out. But “staged” is pretty low on the likely chart.
What was disturbing is the number of no-answer answers the SS gave Congress in the hearings.
neo (6:45 pm) said: “I think incompetence is usually far more rampant than conspiracy in these matters.”
neo, in almost all such instances I agree with you. But in the Butler instance, there were so many examples of incompetence, that I end up asking Brian E’s (5:54 pm) question, “Is there a number where coincidences no longer are a coincidence?”
I’m fuzzy on the details now, due in large part to the fact that I have a life, but I definitely recall how the list of stringed-together incompetencies was *very* large: yuuuuge, as someone we all recognize might say.
That’s why I termed the situation as being one of malign neglect. Was it, as I (6:08 pm) wrote, “a (true) conspiracy of malign neglect”? I find it very hard to believe that the people involved *all* could have been *that* incompetent, particularly when (as I now imperfectly recall) had any one of that yuuuuge chain of incompetencies been a competency, that competency would very probably have frustrated the shooter’s plans.
Time to wrap up here. I need to amend my (6:08 pm) statement as follows:
By “(true),” I intended only that something really did happen — it was not staged or faked. Was it a “conspiracy”? Still, I find it very plausible that there was at least somebody involved, possibly somebodies, who were probably okay with candidate Trump being left insufficiently protected. Plus, there were underlings who were only following orders; therefore, not everyone was involved in the malign neglect.
But (again), it took only one or a couple of somebodies to screw up security, and I strongly suspect that that’s where the malign neglect enters. Does that qualify as a “conspiracy” (even a “conspiracy” of one)? Can’t say; but do consult Brian E [smile].
Richard Aubrey:
Well I don’t take that number to seriously, not since it was assigned to me on one of my state Geologist’s licenses.
11% of people believe that BIG Foot is real.
Om-
There is also Grey’s Law, “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice,” which is a variation of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
And then there’s om’s Law…
Barry,
There’s a lot of resistance to om’s Law. 🙂
Thumb up emoji here
There is something about the leftist outlook or personality that seems to make them incapable of dealing with inconvenient reality. JFK was killed by a committed communist, so that cannot have been real. Stalin and Mao killed millions of their own people, so that must not have really happened. Trump is evil, so the attempt must have been staged. It is easier to deny reality, than it is to face unpleasant facts.
Don’t fight the current, and let’s get the “h” out of here.
It was a dezinforma campaign as mitrokhin and pacepa have described it max holland went more into detail johnson didnt want to directly confront the Soviets on that score. Oswald had too many east bloc contacts in minsk in mexico city et al for comfort
With 9-11, the security services were unwilling to take the threat seriously on the homefront even with all the indications we were receiving from sister services
If cheney deemed Trump ‘was the most dangerous threat and cheatham was
handlpicked right before mara lago
what does that tell you
Susan crabtree suggests curran is more focused on rooting out her sources than actually reforming the protective detail
You say “resistance”, I say “persistence”,
Let’s blow the whole thing up…
The incuriosity from most of what passes for press is the bewildering bit
Its rather striking what they substitute for insight
Which is more like naval gazing
They don’t care!
Much of this falls under ‘wet streets cause rain’
The press probably but those who hang on every word
Piereson has a nice summary of the first part of the post
The notion of the maskirovna is as much involving pre soviet russian history that solzhenitsyn approsed us of in August 1916
— John
And they might be right. It’s not inconceivable. It’s much more plausible than the ‘Butler was fake’ idea.
The reason so many believe or claim to believe that Butler was fake was the ame reason so many claimed to believe that 911 was done by Bush, or that Israel is the problem in the Middle East.
They _need_ it to be true for their world view to make sense, for their emotional security. The implications of the alternative are more than they can deal with.
This is an old issue. A lot of the driving energy for the various JFK conspiracy theories is that him being murdered by a lunatic Communist sympathizer didn’t fit the worldview of the theorist, it didn’t _work_ . They needed JFK to have been killed by racist right-wingers, and some of them have never come to terms with reality.
Jon Baker:
Sorry to harp on this once again, but it’s loses strength, not “looses”. I continue to be puzzled as to why this error is so insanely common, even among intelligent people who spell everything else correctly.
Which is a very foolish notion but you know what orwell said
‘Some things are so ridiculous only an intellectual can believe it’
(1) The Nazis justified their attack on Poland with a false flag operation to take Poland.
(2) Trump is Hitler.
Therefore … the assassination attempt on Trump at Butler was a false flag operation to win the 2024 election.
It’s easy once you get the hang of it.
@ huxley > “Therefore … the assassination attempt on Trump at Butler was a false flag operation to win the 2024 election.”
I can almost follow the logic on that one (not the reasoning, because there is none), BUT – what about the rest of the attempts to kill him?
He can’t run for election again.
Just to drum up sympathy for his policies?
Channeling Brian E, who asked “Is there a number where coincidences no longer are a coincidence?”
Is there some number of “false flag” operations that indicates maybe they are REAL attacks?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
At least one.
In the film “Bob Roberts” (1992), directed by and starring Tim Robbins as a young conservative, Bob Roberts, who becomes a popular right-wing Bob Dylan-style folk singer. It’s a great premise.
Roberts parlays his singer-songwriter career into a run for the Senate. In the final days of the campaign, his team stages a fake assassination attempt which supposedly paralyzes Roberts from the waist down.
The menacing final scene shows Roberts performing one of his songs from a wheelchair. The camera zooms in on his left foot … tapping the time.
–“Bob Roberts: the end”
https://youtu.be/stIK_uPpVjY?t=174
For extra credit the film shows Gore Vidal as the principled Democrat running against Roberts on the issues. [Multiple eye rolls.]
Politics aside, it’s actually an interesting film. Tim Robbins feared that Roberts’ conservative songs could be gleefully taken up by conservatives, so he locked up the rights. He might have been correct.