Staged examines the July 13, 2024, Butler, PA, shooting where Matthew Crooks’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear amid chaos—killing Corey Comperator and wounding two others. Early misinformation (teleprompter glass shards) fueled "#staged" claims, despite forensic evidence and Secret Service snipers’ missed shots due to a tree or training gaps. Trump’s WWE history debunks fake-blood theories, yet his post-rally bandage at the RNC failed to sway moderates. Critics like Derek the Jedi (40K+ followers) and Morgan J. Freeman spread unfounded skepticism, ignoring forensic realities and the shooter’s ties to no conspiracy. False narratives risk radicalizing groups, turning misinformation into a dangerous frontline war where truth becomes optional. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is 100% powered by coffee.
Oh, sure.
That's what you want us to believe.
Yeah, well, there's no other way for anyone to know, David, that anyone here is drinking coffee.
Except for this.
I have something in a mug.
It is hot.
It is brown.
There's no way for anyone else to know what it is.
But it is not coffee.
So it's only 50% powered by coffee.
So you would have us believe.
Yes.
We would have to trust you in order to know that that's true.
Yes.
So as you can tell, the other voice on this podcast is David Bloomberg.
And we are going to go through some intricate details, detailing some evidence that other people have to provide and whether we trust that.
And how we know that anything is true is really the question of our times.
But mostly today, we had an event a little over a month ago on July 13th.
Someone climbed up on a roof and took some shots at Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
And when that happened, we saw live in front of us the birth of a new conspiracy belief about a new event.
And it was old in that it looked a lot like previous conspiracy beliefs we had seen.
But it was new in that we saw a lot of people that we hadn't previously seen engage in any conspiracism, actively engaging in it and saying things like it's staged, which by the way, just this morning I saw that hashtag staged was trending, apparently in relation to exactly this.
So that's fun, but we're going to do our best to push back against that idea today.
So we're going to step through all of the the entire story of how it happened.
And as we do, as we do that, we're going to go through how it is that people get this wrong, come to the wrong conclusions about this.
And while I do that, I just want to be clear when I do this, because I'm not always, but it is a thing I've mentioned several times before, that getting the right answer or the wrong answer is very rarely related to your IQ.
It doesn't correlate strongly with IQ.
A lot of people make a lot of jokes about, you know, you're on the opposite side, so you're stupid or you got this wrong.
So you're, it's all the low IQ people who think that these things are true, but that's, that's not really the case.
So as people listen to this, and I hope, I hope that it does reach people that are confused about this event.
As you're listening to it, know that I'm not telling you you're stupid when I point out things that you might have gotten wrong.
We're going to go through and point out, I hope, things that you may have been thinking poorly about.
But having a higher IQ doesn't give you a access to good reasoning.
In fact, also having lower IQ doesn't usually deny you access to good reasoning.
There are steps and we go through those steps and that's how we do it.
It's kind of boring when you put it that way, but it's a process.
Yeah, there was a guy at work.
He bragged about his membership in Mensa, you know, and everything else.
And he was also a huge alien UFO believer, which he also bragged about at work.
So yeah, one does not necessarily correlate with the other.
It would take a whole other episode to say the rest of what I'm thinking.
So we won't, we won't go into that because this is plenty long.
I have a feeling, but I do want to go back to something you just said for a moment.
Because you said that many of these people who started spreading this conspiracy had previously not engaged in this type of behavior.
Now, I haven't done a study or anything like that.
It would be a good topic for study, actually.
But I feel like people don't generally just jump headfirst into a huge conspiracy belief like this.
So I bet if we search through their Twitter histories, for example, we would find belief in other conspiracies.
I don't think for many of these people, I don't think it's their first dipping their toe in the water.
That might come up later.
Yeah, okay.
Well, much like the left had their own anti-Bush conspiracies when 9-11 happened.
Right.
You know, and many have forgotten about that or they've kind of looped that current view of right.
But I suspect, again, I wish I could have done a deep dive, but I don't even know.
We're already reading.
We're diving into the business.
I mean, a deep dive into these individual Twitter accounts that are still spreading this.
What's probably true, and I don't mean to cut you off or anything, but what's probably true is that everyone has the mechanics for coming to unreal beliefs just always there.
It's like soil.
Well, everyone has them.
It takes actual work to stay on the sort of real side of like absolutely everything, right?
It's sort of like bacterial stuff.
You clean your kitchen, but you're not actually getting rid of 100% of everything bacterial in there.
You're just getting rid of enough that you can eat safely and do everything you do.
But if you don't keep at it, if you don't keep at cleaning your kitchen, that bacteria will still grow and will come back.
So like I say, it's a thing that takes work, constant work effort to do.
And there is the right conditions inside every human brain to find these poor notions.
Yes.
Yeah.
So it's also possible that you wouldn't scour their Twitter content and you wouldn't find any, but it's also possible it was still there, just not evident from their Twitter content, right?
So if I were a betting man, which I sometimes am, then I would I would bet that at least the main ones that I have seen, I, you know, you know, someone who scoured it could find stuff.
Poker at your level is barely about gambling, David.
Don't fool me.
Okay.
So we're getting into this.
The event.
So how we're going to do this, just so I try to, in advance, not confuse people.
We are going to weave back and forth between describing the event and the sequence of things that led to everything happening, interspersed with the ways in which we saw people coming to poor conclusions, the actual mechanisms that we feel were happening that led people to come to poor conclusions about this event.
So you'll hear me relatively often say, back to the event, because we're switching from describing how people were thinking and going back to describing the event, the sequence of actual things that really happened.
So we're starting with the event right here.
Donald Trump scheduled a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania for July 13th.
So the date and venue were announced 10 days before on July 3rd.
20-year-old Matthew Thomas Crooks took note and apparently sometime around then, he began planning.
Every conspiracy belief thrives in an environment that lacks information.
The fact that we still don't have any real idea why Crooks did this will likely fuel some level of conspiracism for a long time to come.
Yeah, can I throw out my idea here of why he did it?
It is a completely a complete guess.
Yeah.
But as soon as it happened, and well, not as soon, as we got more information of them looking into it and finding nothing, it really sounds like a situation similar to the one described in a Peter Gabriel song.
Okay.
And in this song, he talks about, it's basically the song is a would-be assassin waiting for a president to come into range so he can take a shot at him.
And then you find out at the end of the song, it's actually a kid who has just been dreaming or fantasizing about it.
But in the lyrics of the song, it's talking about, you know, you wanted to be famous.
I want that too.
So it's nothing against you.
I just want to be as famous as you are.
Right.
And given what we found out, you know, that he also did some searching of Biden stuff and he, you know, wasn't anti-Trump per se, as far as we know.
I just wonder how much that played into it.
Yeah.
You know, it does appear that he wasn't looking for one specific person as a target.
It looks more like he was looking for a big event and a famous person as a target.
And anyone sufficiently famous seems to have been maybe possibly someone who would do.
Personally, I think, sadly, it's more related to a level of depression.
This is more like his way of committing suicide.
I think he knew that he wasn't getting out of this alive.
He doesn't appear to have made any future plans past this moment.
And he must have known that he was, you know, very unlikely to, you know, he didn't try to do this in a way that would let him get out of it.
He just seems to have done it in a way that let him do it.
I mean, it could be both.
It could be a combination of both.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
That's right.
Yeah.
And by the way, the Peter Gabriel song is Family Snapshot, if anyone wants to look it up.
All right.
I'll provide a link to a version of that in the notes.
So first note of things that I think are happening to influence people away from reality here.
Changing details.
So influencers and grifters who engage with and promote conspiracy beliefs tend to be the most active in the earliest hours of an event like this.
If conspiracy beliefs thrive on a lack of details, then the time when there is the most lack of details is immediately after an event takes place.
Inevitably, some of those details are going to be inaccurate.
And as those details are corrected, conspiracists will often claim that they're being corrected to confuse you from quote unquote the truth to quote unquote the narrative.
This can push people away from viable and real facts and toward fictional ideas that continue the conspiracy story for as long as possible.
Yeah.
And, you know, we've seen this in so many conspiracies.
I mean, as soon as news started coming out, I know I posted this and a lot of other people did too, which was don't repost misinformation.
Don't expect to get all the facts right away, et cetera.
Just kind of a warning to people.
Like, calm down, people.
Let's find out what happened before jumping to any conclusions.
But yeah, when news happens, especially in the social media age, wrong information just gets out.
And it doesn't have to be the social media age.
I mean, the same thing happened with what was it, Area 51 or New Mexico.
Sorry, the New Mexico flying saucer crash, where some dummy in the PR department of whatever armed forces bureau it was, you know, said something.
You know, he was trying to cover up the reality of the situation and stupidly said something that was worse by saying, oh, it was a crashed flying saucer.
And then like his bosses were like, what are you doing, you dummy?
And no, it was a weather balloon.
No, it wasn't a weather balloon.
It was a spy balloon, basically.
You know, it will get fewer eyeballs on the situation.
Tell them it's a UFO.
Yeah, exactly.
What?
Yeah.
You know, but of course, that has lived on infamy now that, oh, it's a perfect example of what you said.
You know, the truth was it was a flying saucer, but the narrative is that it wasn't.
No, it never was.
But anyway, especially in the social media information age or misinformation age, someone will interview a person who appears to have details, but it turns out they got it wrong.
Or they thought it was right, but it's, you know, then corrected.
In this case, right away, I saw tweets from solid news organizations quoting what seemed to be solid Secret Service sources saying it wasn't a bullet that nicked Trump, but glass shards from a teleprompter.
And so I was like, oh, okay, they're quoting someone.
This looks, you know, like it's good information.
And, but then a little later, we were told, no, it was a bullet.
And you could see the pictures that the teleprompters were intact.
Yeah.
And then we got the high-speed photos of the bullet taken by a photographer who was standing right there covering the speech.
He just happened to have the shutter going and you could see the bullet like whiz by Trump.
But even after all that, there were still some people claiming it was glass.
There are still today some people claiming it was glass.
Oh, they heard that right away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They heard it right away.
They ignored the correction or like you said, they believed the correction was, oh, that's just the Secret Service trying to protect part of the cover-up somehow.
Yes.
Doesn't make any sense.
And I even saw a doctor say, there's no way a bullet could have hit him and caused so little damage.
Yeah.
Which apparently they're unaware that there's such a thing as a graze.
You know, physics, every solid object has an edge.
And being grazed by the edge doesn't mean you get the full force.
So this idea that if it touched him, it had to blow a hole in him is idiotic.
And yet, like I said, here's this doctor putting it out there.
And what you say about what we did, you and I and several others did right away about trying to discourage people from taking the first little bits of news and spreading them all around just in a wild frenzy.
That's directly contrasted with what actual people who push conspiracy notions did, which was tell their followers to pay close attention to all the things happening right now because all these things are going to change once the fix comes in or whatever they think is going to happen.
And so, yeah, the sober view of this is to take your time to come to conclusions.
This is not the sort of thing like there might come one day come a time when we have to make decisions much more quickly about this stuff.
But there's only sort of a in the air in the world, there's just sort of this sense of urgency towards almost everything right now, especially if you're on social media a lot.
You'll have this general sense of urgency to a lot of stuff and you'll feel like you're in a hurry to make decisions about this stuff, but you're really not.
That's just sort of a like an illusion in front of you.
And really, we have to take time to assess as many things as possible before we come to conclusions, especially when things are important, like you're going to use any of the info to choose something about a presidential candidate.
That would be really useful to make sure that you do.
And then by your, maybe by your example, someone else does.
I mean, everyone influences the people around them.
Everyone does to some extent or other.
It might be that they don't, not the sole influence, but we all do in little ways.
So try to be a better information citizen.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah.
And that was something that we discussed with Daniel Loxton, you know, in talking about skepticism and that, yeah, you don't need to rush to a conclusion.
Some things take time to figure out.
Yeah.
And, you know, you, you may not like it.
You want, you want it right away.
Everybody wants it right away.
But it doesn't always happen right away.
You need time to gather factual information.
Yeah.
So back to the event.
As we know now, the Secret Service were working with local police to protect candidate Trump and the people in the crowd.
As part of this cooperation, the police were in charge of some buildings surrounding the crowd and the Secret Service in charge of other areas.
It's possible and maybe even likely that there wasn't perfect communication between the two teams and that this was a factor in how this was allowed to occur.
Crooks was initially spotted using a rangefinder in the hours leading up to the event and was noted by the local police as a person of interest at that time.
A police officer was dispatched to follow him, but Crooks was lost in the crowd.
Later on, Crooks managed to climb onto a roof that had a direct view of Trump, aim an AR-15 assault rifle and begin shooting.
The building which Crooks climbed was adjacent to a building in which the local police had placed their own snipers and command center.
At one point, just moments before the shooting, I've seen roughly 40 seconds before, but the entire sequence would have taken about 10 to 15 seconds to complete.
A member of this local police department climbed up to the edge of this roof, boosted by another officer, to check it out.
He spotted a man who later turned out to be Crooks, was subsequently spotted by Crooks, was shown the business end of an AR-15 rifle by Crooks, then subsequently dropped down below the edge of that same roof to protect his own life.
Incidentally, he fell eight feet and badly injured his ankle.
It's possible that knowing he was spotted may have caused Crooks to act earlier than he had originally planned, but obviously we'll never know.
One other thing to note is that there were two Secret Service sniper teams on roofs behind Trump.
Each was assigned to focus their attention in separate directions.
The team that was meant to focus their direction toward where Crooks was positioned on the rooftop had their vision obscured by a tree.
We don't know why the Secret Service sniper team was okay with this, but they may have been relying on the local police to monitor that building as it was directly next to the building where the police were located.
Yeah, it may be a situation.
I mean, I haven't studied this or anything.
It may be a situation where, okay, that tree is there, but it's still the best overall position.
Right.
And the other thing to note is if you're looking down the scope of a rifle, of a sniper rifle, you don't have a very wide field of view.
No.
So, you know, a lot of people were like, why didn't they see him?
Yeah.
Because your field of view is small.
And, you know, they were focused on certain areas.
Right.
So we're going to move right into from the event to another, the second of our trips that trip people up.
And this one's one I call assumptions of competence.
We often see people who engage in conspiracy beliefs greatly elevate the competence of participants in order to either make their conspiracy story make sense or to justify a disbelief in the details provided.
Many people in the days after July 13th questioned how a person could be using a rangefinder and subsequently be noted a person of interest, but then be lost in the crowd.
People also question how a person could make it to a rooftop that was next to a building that had police snipers in it, and how a policeman could have climbed up to spot Crooks on that roof, but not immediately alert the Secret Service about this to protect Trump and the crowd.
Questions also came up about how there were two teams of Secret Service snipers, but neither of them spotted Crooks on a rooftop aiming a rifle toward Trump.
Yeah, I guess I jumped the gun on.
Oh, bad pun.
Sorry, that was totally unintentional.
I guess I jumped ahead on that one there.
But yeah, see, I deal with this issue by never assuming that people are competent.
Just, you know.
And so you'd like to think so.
Right.
But I mean, all you have to do is look at things that happen in local police forces all the time.
And I'm not saying every police officer is incompetent.
I'm not even seeing saying most are.
But there are enough of them that things happen and, you know, they either don't know how to deal with it properly or they think they know how to deal with it properly.
And yeah.
Yeah.
Incompetence and competence are not binary positions.
There's a great grand scale of competency and training is strongly involved in creating any competency.
Right.
So yeah, it's not that we're saying that the police were incompetent.
They were likely shouldn't have been used for this, really.
But all the questions about this fall under the assumption of competence.
We often imagine ourselves doing a different thing than what was done by people on a particular day.
We also have the benefit of hindsight.
The local police likely didn't have the kind of training it took to spot and follow a person in a crowd.
It's also likely that the Secret Service suffered from this same assumption of competence when assessing the value of the local police to the effort to protect Trump and the crowd.
It isn't exactly new for law enforcement officers, law enforcement officers, if I could do that without slurring, to have imperfect communication.
And this is also likely was a factor in the events leading up to the shooting.
Yeah, I also think one thing we have to consider is the last time someone actually tried to assassinate a president or candidate for president or former president was a long time ago.
And so you have these situations set up where a lot of people go through a lot of work for something I'm sure they all believe isn't going to happen.
It's difficult to train for a thing you think will never happen.
Right.
And so, you know, the Secret Service, obviously, that's kind of in their job description.
Yeah.
But even they, I'm sure, don't expect to have to throw themselves over the president to protect him.
I mean, they're trained for it, but they don't expect to.
The snipers did not expect to actually have to shoot someone.
The local police, even less so.
You know, like, really?
Someone's going to take a shot here in Pennsylvania.
Yeah.
We have this big open field.
We can see people coming from miles away.
Yeah.
So I think that that probably, you know, plays into it.
I remember one of the things that I absolutely hated when I was first working for my boss was she would have, she would, you know, make me stay late and work with her on memos in case a topic came up.
Like, well, if we are questioned on this, we will have this at the ready.
Literally, it never happened.
So I spent many late nights writing these pointless memos.
Now, there's a big difference between writing a pointless memo and, you know, shooting someone or protecting someone's life, but it gets to you after a while.
Yeah.
Thinking no one's ever going to read this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I spent, you know, I was there till 10 at night when I should have gone home at five because I had to do all this research on something that no one ever asked about.
Because heaven forbid, someone who asked would have to wait a little while once they asked.
And, you know, so like I said, I'm sure even on a grander scale, even on a much more important scale, that can get to you and make you think, why, you know, okay, whatever.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm sure that guy climbed.
No one's ever going to try this.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
There was someone climbing a roof.
Okay.
He was probably just trying to get a better view.
I'm not that worried about him, you know.
And I know I'm jumping ahead in the series of events, but I think another area in the assumption of competence is that after the shooter was taken out, the Secret Service let Trump stand up and then ushered him to his car.
And I right away saw people saying standard practice for the Secret Service would be to assume that there could be another shooter.
So there's no way they would let him up.
Right.
And, well, this presumes two areas of competence.
One, that the people saying this are competent in knowing this is what the Secret Service would do.
Right.
And two, that the Secret Service would rather keep him on the ground covered rather than getting him out of harm's way if there was a second shooter.
Yeah.
I think also another factor might need to be entered into the thought process there, which is that, you know, you and I don't support Trump in any way, but I think we are dishonest if we don't acknowledge that he has some charismatic effect on the people who are around him to some degree at least.
And I think the secret service around him are not immune to that, unlikely to be immune to that.
such that if he's going to, for example, insist on being treated in a, in a, in a more certain manner, that maybe they're a little more likely to let some of the rules slip in order to allow that to occur.
And I think that that may have been part of this is that is that he, you know, in his, the way that he socially affects people, he demanded to have his shoes brought to him before he left and he wanted to be not hustled off like that.
And then in that moment, he picks a moment and he looks at the crowd and he raises his fist and he mouths the words fight.
Yeah.
He didn't say them into a microphone.
He wasn't close to a microphone.
He just had that moment and he picked his opportunity.
And we're going to link to a couple of videos in the show notes for this episode.
And a couple of them are really good.
They're a guy, they're by a guy named Jeff Ostroff, who himself, I mean, not all the videos that he puts in his videos are ones that he put together and found, but he gives credit to all those people.
I'm not going to list them because I'm just going to list him.
If you watch his video, you'll get all those.
But you can see that it includes the video that shows this moment where you're at the front facing Trump and he is stood up and he's asking about his shoes and all these things are happening.
And then you can see him and you can see him look outward.
And when you kind of know what's going to happen, you can see the thought forming in his head.
And then he raises his fist and does a thing.
And it's the idea that they did this choreographed just to give him this moment sort of is punctured at least by watching it happen because it doesn't feel like a thing that's choreographed.
It's just a thing where he's there and he gets stood up and he feels like he's in some kind of control again.
And then he says, I want this for something.
And you can, once you're used to seeing Trump in that moment, you can tell he's got the grit in his teeth and he just wants he wants to make hay out of this moment.
And that's what he did.
He reached out with his fist and mouthed the word fight to raise the raise the crowd up in his favor.
And that's what he's been doing pretty much constantly for eight years.
So it doesn't seem like a stretch to see him do that opportunistically in that moment.
Yeah, I mean, you say you can see it and it, you know, you, you can tell it's not a pre-planned moment.
But there are other people who see it and they say, oh, well, this obviously was a pre-planned moment.
There's no way he could possibly have done that.
It's a perfect shot.
They also, you know, the photographer must have been in on it too.
And because it's too perfect a shot, ignoring the fact that there's a million photos of that, you know, and you can go through them all.
You know, was the iconic moment of Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson, another Michael Jordan dunking the ball with his tongue hanging out and his legs split apart, you know, was that too perfect?
Was that planned?
No, it was something he did in the game and a photographer caught it.
Yeah.
And I may have mentioned that Michael Jordan, also an opportunistic showboater who wanted to make these flashy moves, not just for the camera, but to intimidate the opposing team.
You can't stop me from doing this kind of thing.
It is very similar in a lot of respects.
And they're acting like there's no way someone could have thought to do this in a moment of crisis.
But then what about the shoes?
Like, really?
Was the shoes part of it too?
No, that was the first thing he thought of.
Got my shoes.
You know, that wasn't part of a big pre-planned moment because if he had known this was coming, he wouldn't have been worried about his shoes.
Yeah.
And it speaks more to the fact that Trump is and always has been a showman.
Some might say a con man.
And once he knew he was safe, like you said, his brain kicked into that mode.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's just something that he did.
And people have taken it to say, well, there's no possible way that that could have been natural.
And but to circle back to something you said earlier about how him wanting things a certain way could have been, you know, kind of that the Secret Service might have led up a little bit.
Yeah.
Now, first of all, let me just say the assumption of competence, you know, we were talking about that.
There was clearly some incompetence here.
Yeah.
The head of the Secret Service already resigned.
There should probably be other resignations or firings.
People screwed up.
But Trump was also holding these outdoor events in these areas in part because of himself.
Like he still owes money to venues that he never paid four years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so now a lot of venues.
The event indoors in those indoor venues.
Right.
Yeah.
And a lot of venues are like, no, you're going to pay up front because we don't want to get stiffed.
And some of those venues are affiliated with other ones in regions.
So you stiff one.
There's a whole region where they won't let you in.
Yeah.
And so it's, I recently, just before we're recording, I saw a Twitter thread about this talking about how, and I think it was actually from the New York Times pitch bot.
He actually sometimes goes out of character instead of pitching pretend New York Times stories.
He goes out of character.
And this was one of those situations where he talked about, you know, Trump is a narcissist and being around a narcissist changes the way things happened.
And that included this attack because he never would have been in this situation if he hadn't done all the things leading up to that point.
And if, like you said, he probably convinced some of the Secret Service to allow certain things that maybe weren't quite standard because it wasn't the best location.
Yeah, maybe.
Another example of the way I've seen people employ the assumption of competence is in relation to Trump.
So, like I say, we haven't gotten to describing this part of the event yet, but we'll describe it here because it's part of the assumption of competence.
Is that, I mean, we could see from the whatever you want to call the picture of him getting stood up that he had blood on the side of his cheek.
He had came from the tip of his right ear.
And some people are trying to say that this was fake, this was a blood capsule, or he nicked, you know, the way wrestlers do.
They'll have a little razor and they'll nick their ear or something just to make it more dramatic.
It's a very safe spot to nick yourself.
There is blood there that can come out, but it's not like you're going to lose so much.
You're going to endanger your life or have too much a problem with healing it.
So it is a trick that wrestlers have done before and that people put this together that Trump was involved with the WWE.
Okay.
However, most of Trump's involvement with the WWE was in promotion.
He had a casino in Atlantic City where he hosted wrestling events.
And he had an agreement with them to host events there.
And he liked the spotlight.
So he got involved with some of the events.
He inserted himself into the storyline a couple of times.
And on one, I looked into it, one lone occasion, he himself did one lone wrestling move on one person.
So I have the YouTube video.
He did this move on Vince McMahon on the side of the stage.
And it was most of the skill involved in these sort of wrestling maneuvers is on the side that's defending, the side that's sort of mock being attacked, right?
One person jumps on another and it's up to the other one mostly to have the skill to not get hurt by what's happening.
And this is what happened.
Donald Trump jumped onto Vince McMahon's back.
Vince McMahon fell to the ground and was, you know, mock pinned.
And then this little moment was over and it was the crowd goes wild because they didn't expect that.
And it's all about surprise.
And, you know, it's all a show.
And of course, as everyone should know, wrestling is not real.
It's scripted.
There are some people who've done some things that weren't part of the script, but that's not the same thing as saying it's like a real sports event.
And this one move, this one maneuver, the one time is not enough to pretend that Donald Trump accumulated over years of practice the kind of expertise it would take to, in front of a live audience that has many, many, many cameras focused on him from many, many angles, the wherewithal to hold this thing in his ear,
put it up and nick his ear like this to draw the blood at just the right moment and have no one else notice.
It would be a stretch even to say that someone who has the years of experience that say Hulk Hogan did, that Hulk Hogan could have pulled this off in this way, having cameras behind him and in front of him and from all sides.
But Hulk Hogan did what he did for decades, like practicing, practicing, and then doing it for real and working his way up and eventually becoming a champion and being a champion for a very, very long time and did that as his job for decades.
And it would still be like, well, maybe he could have, maybe he couldn't have.
But Donald Trump doesn't have those decades of experience.
He just does not.
And if you want to believe that maybe he had decades of experience practicing with the WWE and then somehow only used it to do one maneuver one time, well, I need to put you in a box somewhere because Donald Trump was also doing many other things.
His whereabouts were well known for a lot of that time.
Like he wasn't practicing with wrestlers to learn all this stuff so that one day in the future he could pretend to be assassinated.
Like that's a fantasy world.
And I need to say that out loud.
Yeah.
And beyond that, he has to do it at exactly the right timing.
Yeah.
As the gunshots go off and as the bullet goes by his head, yeah.
Because again, we have the photographs, we have photographs showing him reaching up and here I am, yeah, you know, miming it as if we're doing a video podcast.
Moving your hand, right?
Yeah, um, you know, his hand going up, and then you see the bullet, yeah, going right by his head.
This level of hand is reaching up, and then we can also watch the video of him reaching up in that moment toward his ear.
Like, right, the idea that this could be created in a Hollywood studio, yeah, you could, but in front of a live studio audience with no, with just one take and no one is going to notice if you have to do it again a second time because it didn't quite work right or something, that really strains credulity.
Yeah.
And you're assuming that he has a huge amount of skill that he just doesn't have the history of having accumulated because he's been a public figure most of his life.
He hasn't been a secret wrestler or magician.
I mean, any of this.
Or a magician.
Oh, yeah.
He also hasn't been a magician.
He also hasn't have a history of doing card tricks at parties or anything.
Like people would know this.
And he's almost a razor blade and cutting himself at exactly the right moment.
And the other thing is, I don't know.
I was going to save this for the end, but maybe we should just get this out of the way.
Because you and I have both said this multiple times.
There is no way someone like Trump, a pure narcissist who cares only about himself, would put his own life in the hands of anyone to shoot at him.
Not even that Secret Service sniper that he would trust to save him.
He would never be in the line of fire of those bullets, not voluntarily.
Right.
Not the best marksman in the world with a scope and all, you know, stabilizing and everything else, let alone some kid who learned to shoot a rifle, which is, it is, it is not a the same type of rifle that the snipers use.
No.
You know, it's meant to shoot a lot of bullets in a short amount of time.
That's what the R-15 is meant for.
Yeah, he learned to shoot in high school.
Yeah.
This is even if he were going to do it, this is not the person you would trust to do it.
Yeah.
Unless, of course, you're going so far into conspiracy world that you're going to claim it wasn't actually him.
That there was some mysterious.
And I haven't seen this.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm sure it's out there.
People saying there was a second shooter.
He's actually the one who fired the bullet because that would explain everything.
Because that's what conspiracies do is anytime they can't explain something, they make it more, you know, a deeper level conspiracy.
So maybe there was another shooter who is an expert marksman and who did fire that bullet when he saw that Crooks was firing and Crooks was taken out, but that other person got away because, of course, he was on the, you know, he was never meant to be the one who they get rid of.
But, you know, again, you're, you're going to these extremes to explain and everything.
In the video that will be linked to this podcast, the two videos, really, because Jeff Ostroff did one and then he did one three days later that corrected some of the things and provided more details.
He provides very thorough, detailed, forensic reasons why this could not have been a person shooting from another position that did what happened that day.
The man who died on the scene, Corey Comperator, he was in the line of fire and was shot.
And then the two people who were injured were behind Trump.
And they were in the line of fire.
And then there was another object that was struck by a bullet.
It was, there was some kind of a hydraulic machine that I think was holding something up.
And it had like an extended reach.
And one of its hydraulic hoses was hit by a bullet.
And he shows where you can see the hydraulic fluid gushing out of the hose in the moments after when the shooting took place.
You can see it lowering and you can see on the ground where the hydraulic fluid hit.
And Corey Comperator, who was in front, Donald Trump, the two people who were injured, and then that object were all in one straight line that lines up perfectly with where Matthew Crooks was on the rooftop.
It's incredibly clear.
To imagine that another person was shooting is then to imagine that that person additionally shot in four locations to line this up so that there were four shots hit that, you know, and he would have to move his gun to do that because he's not in the same position as Crooks was.
This, again, raises the level of difficulty for such a thing to be fake.
And it makes it, you know, you get to a point where it's likely more likely that it was just Crooks that fired these shots in one line and did all this damage from one position because that's what fits all the forensic evidence.
Right.
Yeah.
So we should move on to the event and move on to our other points because so back to the event.
Crooks began shooting at Trump roughly six minutes after Trump began speaking.
Crooks fired three shots, then paused, then fired five shots, then was subsequently shot by a member of the Secret Service sniper team.
Notably, there were two Secret Service sniper teams, a North team and a South team.
The North team was designated to watch for trouble in the direction that Crooks was shooting from, but had their vision of Crooks obscured by a tree, as we mentioned earlier.
It was the South team that swiveled their sightfinders around toward the North to spot Crooks on the rooftop and then fired the shot that stopped Crooks from being a further danger that day.
Or any day.
Well, any future day.
So this brings us to point number three about these events.
Simple versus complex.
Conspiracy beliefs often lean toward a supposedly simple explanation ahead of a complex truth.
This process is myopic.
It zooms in on a select few events in order to justify a simplistic explanation, but often these simple explanations are contradicted by the wider context of events.
I sometimes call this hijacking Occam's razor.
They're attempting to present a limited number of facts as the relevant part of the story and sometimes even mention Occam's razor as a way of pushing their interpretation of events as the true interpretation.
But Occam's Razor doesn't only say we should go with the simplest answer.
It says we should go with the simpler answer if both answers explain the same number of observable phenomenon.
Reducing the number of observations gives a false simplicity that needs to be called out more often.
So, as we were just mentioning about a second shooter, maybe being the one who did this instead of a relatively low-skilled 20-year-old, they would have to have been not only much better, but much, better.
And it sort of breaks the idea that these were fake bullets when you had one person shot dead on the scene, two more badly injured, then also a bullet that was affecting a hydraulic hose on a machine behind it.
And I don't believe even the people who think this was fake believe that Trump would voluntarily put himself in the line of fire.
And to say that he wasn't knowledgeable about the fact that he was in the line of fire sort of puts paid to the notion that he then had the wherewithal to hide a razor in the palm of his hand in preparation for shots that he that weren't going to occur and then nicked his own ear for this.
Already you're getting too many holes in this and things just aren't lining up.
And the more details we learn, actual real details, the harder and harder it is to construct a coherent narrative around this.
And you have to leave a lot of things out in order to continue to believe that this was a staged event.
Yeah.
And you know what?
It just occurred to me.
The people who I've seen spreading the idea that this is a conspiracy lately, and I'll name some names later.
I don't follow them.
So I only see them retweeted into my timeline.
The tweets I've seen have not been making any specific claims.
No.
They're just raising questions and saying questions.
Yes.
Suggesting, oh, well, this isn't real.
It wasn't real.
There are too many questions.
It was a conspiracy.
It's an easy out if you don't actually have to answer the questions.
Like, okay, why are you saying it's a conspiracy?
What do you think happened?
I mean, I suspect if you ask any of these people, they wouldn't answer because they all have big enough followings that they'll ignore you just like they ignore me when I tell them to shut up.
But it is interesting that, you know, at least when, you know, Alex Jones and his crowd come up with conspiracies, they have details.
They're ridiculous, idiotic details, but they have details.
These folks, I don't even see details from them.
They're just, oh, there are too many questions.
We know it wasn't real.
Then what was it?
Right.
And many of those questions are answerable by people who have, and in this case, I'll mention his name again because I think his work is really tremendous, what he did with his YouTube videos.
Jennifer Ostroff has gone through.
He's tried to pick up as much of the video footage and pictures as he possibly could from as many of the people who have put them online as possible, including things off to the side where some people noticed things about crooks that day and thought things were weird, but they didn't put it together that this was going to be leading to what it did, because why would they?
They only had this little bit of information.
Yeah.
And he tries to put it all together.
And so far, with everything he has, nothing that he's found contradicts what is looking like the what really happened.
So a lot of people have a lot of questions, and I think we're still going to get to answering them.
So let's get into back to the event.
So the shooting occurred while several networks were broadcasting Trump's speech live in that moment.
Also, there were a lot of people who took camera footage of events on that day from many angles.
Most of the footage was available within a day or two of the event, and as such, had very little time for any kind of quote-unquote doctoring of the footage.
None of the bits of footage directly contradicts events portrayed in any other bit of any other footage.
I may need to be more precise here.
The footage at slightly different times or at different angles has shown some parts of this that were not available at first, but none of it shows anything other than what is sort of derisively called the official story by conspiracists.
None of it says anything and says that this directly contradicts and makes it not possible that this could possibly happen.
The footage shows Trump reaching for his ear just after those first three shots went past him.
It shows the Secret Service rushing the stage immediately after those first shots.
They arrived and had Trump on the ground as the second set of five shots was being fired.
Based on the best available information, Trump was grazed by a bullet on the upper part of his right ear.
As the Secret Service got up and got Trump standing and ready to move, Trump found a moment to raise his fist in the air and mouth the word fight at the crowd.
He had blood from his ear smeared across his right cheek, and one of the photographers took a picture from below the podium upward of Trump, raising his fist to do this.
So this is where we come to note number four.
I call it the good fortune fallacy.
So this is the image most shared about the incident and also the part of this event that most caused people to disbelieve that this could have occurred just as happenstance.
There's a conspiracy trope that often trips people up when discussing events like this.
The idea is put forward, either subtly or overtly, that when a person benefits from a thing, then perhaps they caused that thing to occur.
This effect is especially sharp when you oppose that person and don't want to see them get any benefit from anything.
This appears to be happening here with this apparent attempt at shooting Donald Trump.
Many of the people who support the idea that this event is fake also oppose Donald Trump.
So your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, I would say pretty much all of the people.
I mean, okay, when you say all, there's probably one or two who don't.
But yeah, it immediately came out of, I mean, out of the people we've talked about, the liberals, the left side of the political equation, and, you know, people who on other topics I had seen retweeted before and I agreed with and I still agree with a lot of the things they say, but they've become conspiracy nuts in this area.
Yeah.
And they won't listen.
And it got to the point, and I think I mentioned this on one of our earlier podcasts right after it happened, one of our politics updates, our election updates.
Yeah.
It literally got to the point where I was seeing these retweeted so much that I had to tweet out a threat and say, I'm done with this.
If I see any more of these in my timeline, I am going to start unfollowing and blocking people.
And suddenly it stopped because the two or three people who I follow who were retweeting it saw that, presumably, and stopped retweeting stuff.
But at least one of them has picked up again with these more, I'll call it milder versions.
And by milder, I mean things like, for example, there was a tweet, and I'll mention the names later, but Kevin Sorbo, washed up actor Kevin Sorbo, who is extremely right-wing.
Yes.
He had posted about a week before, maybe a little bit more before we're recording this.
He had said, Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith had more media coverage than the assassination attempt on Trump.
Not sure that's true.
Well, true or not.
And then one of the people, I'll name the name now, Derek the Jedi, is what he goes by.
Yeah.
He has a following of over 40,000.
And he quote tweeted it and said, because the slap was real.
So now, has he come out and said it's a big conspiracy?
No, not in that particular post.
But he was clearly saying that the assassination attempt was not real.
Yeah.
And, you know, I responded and I said, stop it.
You sound like Alex Jones.
No, he's not going to listen to me.
He had a lot of responses on that particular tweet, I'm sure.
I was hoping that the person who retweeted it into my timeline would listen, you know, but clearly these people are still having some influence because again, it's being retweeted into my timeline.
So someone is acting like they agree with it.
Yeah.
And, you know, again, they're not as clear as some of the conspiracies we're used to dealing with.
Someone else, I don't know that I can pronounce his name.
He's an investigator of conspiracies, an exposer, a fact-checker.
You mean Cheyenne Soterizadeh?
Yes.
Yes.
Good.
I'm glad you did that instead of.
You can't pronounce his name, David.
I can pronounce Cheyenne.
And he was talking about how, yeah, these are still going on.
And he quoted one person who said, you know, the American people have a right to hear the role the Republican presidential candidate may have played in the quote assassination attempt.
We demand daily updates about Trump's murderous plot until election day.
Right.
I mean, again, they're not even saying we know what happened and it was this.
They're saying we demand, we know there was a conspiracy and we demand you tell us what that conspiracy was.
Yeah.
Hold that thought.
That's coming up.
Okay.
I promise.
But this good fortune fallacy, this is a flavor of motivated reasoning, right?
It's telling that everyone who invokes it opposes the person that they are invoking it about.
This good fortune fallacy falls very often.
I mean, anti-vaxxers use it to inspire and throw questions about vaccines and Pfizer.
Also about Anytime that Bill Gates invests in anything and that thing does well, they look at that and go, oh, you know, I mean, he knew that it would go up or he knew that this would happen or he, you know, he invested in this and then, you know, he manipulated events to make this occur.
Bill Gates has an advantage in this life.
You know what I mean?
He's got several billion dollars at his disposal.
You know, he has investment advisors doing all kinds of things for him.
You know, if you had that advantage, you could be in that spot too.
It's not.
But people look at this and go, you know, who profited?
Who benefited from it?
And that was a major factor in driving a lot of 9-11 conspiracies was people looked at the fact that George W. Bush got to do his invasion of Iraq that everyone knew he wanted to do.
And they said, you know, well, he did that.
Well, a couple of things.
There was a couple years gap between when 9-11 happened and the invasion of Iraq.
So that's already a little bit disconnected.
And it's also nothing about this directly connects it.
He's, you know, George W. Bush.
He's a politician.
Politicians are notably opportunistic, especially when they get inside an office with other politicians and there's just 100 of them and they're all scheming and plotting different ways to take advantage of opportunities.
I watched the West Wing.
I think it's one of the best shows ever.
But it did show that even when you might agree with some of the things they're trying to get done, they are very opportunistic.
And I think it was very well written.
Maybe a little bit too kind, that show was, but still seemingly fairly realistic for how they were planning to get a lot of things done.
And yeah, there are opportunistic people who take advantage of misfortunes to get done what they want to get done.
But that doesn't mean they planned for those things to occur.
Those two things don't always line up, don't even necessarily line up.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's something you see a lot in a number of different conspiracies when, you know, some conspiracist or a supporter, you know, will die somehow or another.
Yeah.
And well, it must have been they killed him.
You know, because there's no possible way that person could have just died.
Yeah, they were aware of something.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They would have been on the inside of a circle or something.
Seth Rice would have known a thing if it was there.
And therefore, his death shows that they were trying to get rid of him.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, you had a whole, there was a whole conspiracy, the Clinton murders, you know, that these people tied to Clinton.
And I mean, they were, some of them were very loosely tied.
And yeah.
Or I think it was recently, I can't remember who it was.
I feel like it was like the Obama's chef or something like that went swimming and drowned.
Yes, he did.
He drowned, sadly.
So clearly, no one ever goes swimming and drowns.
So he must have known something being the Obama's chef and they got rid of him.
Right.
And so you might call that, you know, the inverse, the bad fortune.
I guess it's good fortune for the people who would have been subject to whistleblowing if he came forward.
Right.
And oftentimes the claim is made, they were just about to make a phone call and tell someone the important details or something.
And there's no evidence of that.
That's almost always just made up parts of the story.
Right.
And so, you know, it's just something we see all the time with these conspiracies.
Someone dies and oh, that was part that proves it.
You know, they were about to, like you said, they were about to come forward.
Yeah, right.
So we're working up toward our finale here.
Back to the event.
So at this point, the event itself was over.
But for the world, the post-event mania is where this actually occurred in our minds.
As we learned of the event and eventually the details coming out in dribs and drabs, this fractured view of highly detailed events is ripe for opportunity for conspiracy grifters to farm engagement from speculations.
In fact, in an uncharacteristically honest moment, one of Alex Jones' flunkies on InfoWars on July 14th, the day after the event, said, speculation is the seed of prophecy.
These words were spoken by people whose job it is to spin the unknown parts of catastrophes into rage farming for engagement.
People usually struggle with creating a full and accurate picture in their minds of tragic events, which is why investigators and journalists are a very necessary part of our ability to process these sorts of events.
As we learned more about the details, we learned about how Crooks bought a ladder on the day he shot a Trump.
But it took us several more days to discover that he didn't use that ladder and it remained in his trunk.
We learned that Crooks not only used a rangefinder, becoming a person of interest, but also used the drone to scout the buildings around the grounds.
Although law enforcement didn't know in the hours before the event that the man using the drone was the same man who was using the rangefinder.
We learned that the communication between the local police and the Secret Service was almost non-existent on July 13th, and that had they spoken, this whole shooting may have been avoided.
So on to our last point of how people get this sort of thing worked around and confused in their minds.
The assessment of evidence and independent events.
People engaging in conspiracy beliefs often cobble together a large number of seemingly unrelated events that are usually stripped of context.
They attempt to speak them as close together as possible in, for example, a list to give the illusion that they're all related, all relevant, and that the large number of them collectively gives weight to the supposed conspiracy.
In addition to this, there's a mathematical failing that occurs related to dependent and independent events.
Conspiracists often attempt to look at the large number of individual things that had to occur to make an event happen exactly as it did, and then put forward the idea that the odds against that exact sequence of events happening randomly are incredibly high, and therefore the events must be staged.
Individual events can be categorized statistically as being independent or dependent.
That is, if one event affects the outcome of the other event, then they are related, and the odds of one happening affect the odds of the other happening in the way conspiracists describe.
This is related to what people may have heard of before, something called the gambler's problem, where if you look at, say, a coin that's flipped heads five times in a row, and then you think to yourself, what's the odds of it happening next time it flips?
You might think that the odds are really, really low because it just flipped five times in a row to heads, but the odds are still just 50% because each flip is independent of all the flips that came before it.
Yeah.
And casinos make use of that.
Like if you go by a roulette table, it will show you a lot of them have displays, like electronic displays, either showing you what the last numbers were or showing you what the most frequent numbers were.
Make you think you have an edge in what the next number will be.
Right, exactly.
The problem here is that the only thing that would make all of the individual events related to an event like the July 13th shooting dependent and connected is the presence of a conspiracy.
But they're using the incredibly high odds to prove the existence of a conspiracy, which means that mathematically, they would have to assume the existence of a conspiracy in order to, in turn, connect all the events to show the very high odds to, in turn, again, show the presence of a conspiracy.
Assuming the presence of a conspiracy in order to prove the existence of that same conspiracy is circular logic.
But the loop is difficult to see on your own.
Yeah.
I mean, are there a number of unlikely events occurring here?
Yes.
A 20-year-old evading the Secret Service and the police.
Okay.
But he didn't evade the Secret Service.
He only evaded the police.
Right.
I'm saying in the minds of the people.
He used the drone and a range finder to assist in measurements to make that happen, to see the exact route he would take.
And that helped him greatly in being opportunistic about finding the right way to get up to the roof.
He didn't have to, you know, happen across it.
It was, it was not really luck.
He planned it and he had a route with which he could scout the Aryan planet.
So it looks like he got really lucky, but he got less lucky than it looks.
Right.
Other luck.
Trump turned his head at the exact moment that he needed to.
Right.
And you can see that in the video.
And Jeff Ostroff goes through that.
He actually has a part of a video that's like a three-dimensional replay of how Trump turned his head and then the path of the bullet.
And it is true that that bullet would have gone right through the back of Donald Trump's head if he hadn't turned it at just that exact moment.
It was only a fraction of a second.
It's, you know, it is lucky, except that turning his head is something Donald Trump regularly does.
It's not unusual for him to do that.
Right.
It's only that he would, you'd have to imagine him as part of the conspiracy in order to imagine that him turning his head like that at that exact moment was part of this whole thing working out the way it did.
Right.
Which takes us back to really, he's going to put himself into the line of fire.
Yeah.
When, and, you know, because some people immediately were like, oh, he turned his head at exactly the right moment.
Well, yeah, he did because he was looking at a chart or something like that.
Yeah.
There was a chart on a screen he had to look at.
Yeah.
I mean, the timing involved, there was not time, for example, for someone.
Let's just, let's take the conspiracy route for a second.
Someone would have had to signal him.
Yeah.
Or he would have had to have some synchronized timing device on him that vibrated or something at the moment the trigger was pulled, but it also sent an electronic signal to vibrate his hand.
But even then, it would have to be half a second before because he couldn't react in that time.
Literally faster than a speeding bullet, you know?
Yeah, it would have to be a quarter second before.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just not even remotely reasonable to think that this, you know, that he was going to put himself within a fraction of a second of getting the back of his head blown off.
And again, you have to assume the presence of a conspiracy before you could then prove the conspiracy exists.
And that's that circular logic needs to be pointed out more often when I see it.
And I'm going to do it a lot more often.
I might do an individual episode that just has that so I can drop it right in place when I see it.
Oh, you're using this problem thing here.
Yeah.
And yes, conspiracies do, you know, use themselves to or use evidence to prove themselves.
You know, they will use anything.
A good conspiracy can include any piece of evidence because it's either a piece of evidence for the conspiracy or if it's evidence against the conspiracy, then they'll say, well, that's, that's clearly because that's what they want you to do.
Yeah, that was left there purposely to mislead you.
That's a red herring.
Right.
Yeah, right.
And so, but the other part in reality is infinite.
Why do we bother to fight it, David?
Right.
The other part is, like you mentioned, he shot three bullets.
One of them nicked Trump, not the other two.
No.
And so that's, again, now you're tripling the odds of it coming close to him.
Yeah.
You know, if he only fired one bullet and that one bullet had to nick Trump's ear, well, you know, but he fired multiple bullets.
And then after he saw he saw the first three didn't do what he wanted, he just started firing four or more bullets.
The thing is, unlikely things happen every day.
Yeah.
They just do.
There was, as we're recording this, and this will time stamp it a little bit.
There was a super yacht that was sunk by a water spout.
I believe it was off the coast of Italy.
And the number of like billionaires went down with it.
And they said that, you know, the officials said, this is not something we see happen very often, you know, that a yes, water spouts do occur, but it's not something you'd ever know to be on the watch for.
And it just came up, it hit this yacht and sank it in a matter of seconds to minutes.
Now, are we going to say someone used a weather device to create this, you know, this water spout tornado to get rid of the, you know, this tech billionaire and this head of an investment company and whoever else was on the super yacht?
Yeah, it's, it's strains credulity, right?
So let's wrap this up.
The finale of this event, the July 13th shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania caused the death of a firefighter and serious injuries to two other people in the crowd.
It also breathed life into a large number of false ideas.
Those false ideas have the ability to cause further harm if they inspire people to take more desperate actions.
This radicalization of large groups of people doesn't actually happen in a moment, like with a shooting.
It happens over many moments.
And it's greatly insisted by people not voicing appropriately skeptical questions.
Yeah.
So that's my round.
And I've said it before.
I am still seeing far too many tweets from too many different fairly popular liberal accounts who are spreading the BS conspiracy idea.
I mentioned Derek the Jedi.
There's Morgan J. Freeman, Marlene Robertson, and more.
And all of these have at least 40,000 followers.
Some have hundreds of thousands of followers.
And they're putting it out there and people are listening.
And as conspiracy expert Mike Rothschild said on Twitter, this is now just QAnon for liberals.
I do want to make something clear.
Do I think that Trump and his sons and his staff and others exaggerated the extent of his ear injury?
Yes, absolutely.
They made as much money that as they possibly could.
Yeah, one of them talked about the bullet ripped through his ear.
Trump at one point described himself as looking down at his hand and seeing a pool of blood pooling in his hand after the moment, which was compared by some people to photographs of him in those moments where his hand has almost no blood on it at all, and saying that this is somehow proof that it was fake.
But you're right that it's proof that the two descriptions were different, but it just means that Trump is lying about the pool of blood in his hand.
That's what it means.
I would even give him, and people are going to be shocked, the benefit of the doubt on that one, because you have been in a traumatic situation.
We know he wiped his hand over it and then, you know, looked down and saw the blood.
And so from a pure memory standpoint, anyone who's ever been in a car accident or any other traumatic.
It always seems different than it really is.
Right.
Right.
But his son later saying it ripped through his ear.
Yeah.
No, that's simply not true.
Not true.
So do I think he was trying to get some sort of sympathy by wearing the giant ear bandage during the RNC?
Absolutely.
Do I think they would absolutely use it to his advantage if they could?
Yes.
And that's why some of them, like the one I was complaining about, or the one I mentioned, who was complaining, oh, there's he, you know, it's not being mentioned anymore.
They're upset that this didn't give him a bump in the polls.
But all of those are after-the-fact scenarios.
Yeah.
And so, yes, I do think they were trying to make the best use of it, but it fell apart because there just wasn't that much there there.
And I hate to say an attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential candidate isn't much there there, but he got a Gregies.
It was terrible.
Someone else died and others were injured, like you said.
But the thing is, it's not like he's beloved by most of the population.
Even many of those who will vote for him aren't madly in love with him.
Yes, some are.
Obviously, he has a cult-like situation.
But yeah, he just couldn't use it.
You know, this happening is not going to suddenly win over moderates.
And the other thing is, you know, about the conspiracy.
And I'm sure conspiracists have answers to all of this.
But if it was a conspiracy, if this was all organized, this was all planned out so that the bullet, you know, would come so close they could be photographed.
Why didn't they plant evidence that Crooks was a died in the wool Democrat?
Why didn't someone go into his computer ahead of time and go and do his search history to make it look like he'd been specifically planning this for Democrat reasons?
Why didn't they have a note or social media ransomware?
The manifesto, which is the thing of our time.
Yeah, wanting Democrats to win and hating Trump.
Now, you found out, like we said earlier, he was a 20-year-old kid.
He may have been a Republican.
He may not have been.
He may have wanted fame.
He may have just wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
There's a lot of mayhaves.
If this were conspiracy to the extent that people are acting like it is, how do you forget to put motive into play?
You have all these pieces and you forget about motive.
The one thing that would have convinced people, look at these evil Democrats.
They're trying to kill Trump.
Yeah.
And you forget about that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like a pretty important step if you're going to take all these other steps, assemble the crowd, some of whom must have been in on it, fake a death.
He must have, you know, like it, the idea that someone died, that must be not a real person, right?
If you're going to go down that route, you know, and then you, you somehow can't manufacture anything that's even like a word document that anyone could have typed, not even needing to be signed that just says that he's, you know, going to do this for his Lord and Savior, Democrat politician X.
Then, yeah, that doesn't make sense.
That's not coherent.
Right.
Yeah.
So why are we, why do people push this?
Why do, why are we here?
These ideas can lend strength to other ideas, other future moments where people will need to be, again, skeptical and keep their heads on straight.
The thought that this one isn't totally up and up is going to lend strength to the idea that future ones are not 100% transparent.
And so, yeah, we have to stomp on this one and all the other ones as well and all the previous ones.
I think I almost wonder if at some point I might go through and do some actual real debunking work of some previous events that people have said.
I don't know.
It's something I haven't focused on and I wasn't really crazy to do it because there'd been so many people who had already worked in that, but I don't know.
We'll see.
Maybe it just needs more voices debunking.
I don't know.
Yeah, but the thing is, like I said, what is their debunk?
They're not even making claims.
They're just suggesting it wasn't real.
What is your claim?
What is not real?
Well, we don't know.
It's all being hidden from us.
We're going to need someone whose voice is noticeable enough to just ask them.
Make this a coherent story.
Tell me what you think happened based on the things you know.
Yeah.
And make it, make a coherent story out of it.
Just type it out.
Make a thread out of it.
And enough of these little veiled sniping accusations.
Anyway, we're going to wrap up here.
Where can people find your work, David?
So people can find me on Linktree at linktree slash David Bloomberg.
And there's a dot before the EE and Linktree in the URL there.
That'll connect you to all my different accounts.
I have, you know, more directly, I'm on Twitter and Blue Sky as at David Bloomberg on Threads as at David Bloomberg TV.
On all of those, mostly Twitter.
I discuss a wide variety of things, though.
You know, let's be honest here, most of it's reality TV.
And believe me, there are lots of conspiracies in reality TV too, just not to this extent.
I tried debunking them there too.
And also, I can be found on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok as at David Bloomberg TV.
Again, all reality TV in that case.
So the best bet, you want to see me talk about politics or you want to interact on politics, conspiracies, skepticism, critical thinking?
Twitter is still the best place for that, like it or not.
Yeah, same here.
Most of my online time is spent on Twitter because, as I've said before, it's the front line.
And that's what I am.
I'm a guy in a trench in the misinformation war.
So someday we'll find the cave where the bug hive mind is, a la starship troopers, and we'll go in and we'll kill it.
But until then, we're just troops.
People can find me at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
And if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about this podcast, this episode, any other episode, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.