Assassinations Classified by Motive

August 2024

Press/Release, photogravure etching

Assassinations and their attempts can be classified according to motive:

Revenge — The JFK assassination, if done by either Fidel Castro or the Mafia, could easily be explained as an act of revenge. Castro had survived hundreds of assassination attempts, including some directed by Kennedy. The Mafia might have felt JFK was ungrateful after they delivered Illinois to him in 1960. JFK would have won without Illinois — by only three electoral votes — but nobody could have known the outcome. Having gained the Presidency with their help, directing RFK as Attorney General to prosecute the Mob might have been deemed bad form. But it's likely the CIA recruited Oswald for the hit; he missed, and an inexperienced Secret Service agent killed JFK, probably by accident. If the CIA organized this hit, even in its customary bungling way, it would be classified as an act of deterrence. JFK never had a chance to negotiate real peace with the Soviet Union, as he had intended to do in his second term. A chastened LBJ got the message and pursued a war policy until overwhelming unpopularity forced him from office.

The assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022 appeared to fit the classic revenge mold. The killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, enraged by his mother's bankrupting the family to donate to the Korea-based Unification Church, sought out Abe because Abe's grandfather had helped the cult get started in Japan. Stalking Abe for weeks with a home-made shotgun, he found a clear unguarded line-of-sight at a stump speech in Nara. But a widely-circulated post asserted 'Assassinated Japanese P.M. didn’t follow [World Economic Forum] orders. Didn’t mandate vaccines, sent 1.6 million doses back and gave citizens Ivermectin. Make sense now?' Actually, no. While it is true that the Japanese Government did not force covid-vaxing, and did return 1.6 million Moderna doses due to contamination, it did not promote Ivermectin either formally or, as far as is known, informally. Yamagami's trial has not occurred as of August 2024. So the motive for his assassination of Shinzo Abe may remain revenge unless reliable information of wider involvement is forthcoming.

History-changing — The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King removed a popular charismatic black leader strongly committed to nonviolent change. Having incurred the displeasure of FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, King was subjected to unremitting official harassment, wiretapping, and media leaks of his personal failings. The assassination deprived black and white people alike of any hope of peaceful race relations. It fomented racial violence, fueling George Wallace's racist campaign and later the Black Panthers and BLM. The King assassination and its legacy continue to dictate the terms of race relations in the United States to this day.

The conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar sought to restore the Roman Republic, to stop the drift into tyranny. Alarmed by the increasing sidelining of the Senate, which represented the Roman aristocracy, they witnessed the ruling Triumvirate descend into one-man rule by Caesar. Caesar diverted public funds into the famous 'bread and circuses' formula by which he bought public support, while pursuing foreign wars. Both of these brought the Roman treasury, and those who were taxed to finance it, into ruin. Finally Brutus, Cassius, and even Cicero realized they had no choice but to end Caesar's life. But they apparently assumed that the Roman Republic would automatically reconstitute itself immediately upon Caesar's death. Nothing of the sort happened. The conspirators hid themselves away, seemingly shocked by their own audacity, and took no active steps to reinforce the Senate. Into the power vacuum rushed Marc Antony, who soon enough established a personal dictatorship even more ruthless than Caesar's. So history was changed, but not for the better.

Strategic — The 1943 assassination of Admiral Yamamoto, who had organized the 1941 Japanese Navy's attack on Pearl Harbor, crippled Japan's naval warfare in the Pacific. A revered figure in Japan, and a brilliant naval tactician, he knew before launching the Pearl Harbor attack that Japan could only hope to delay inevitable loss. With Admiral Yamamoto's death, as U.S. military strategists expected, Japanese naval warfare efforts collapsed; leaving suicidal sorties of Zeroes crashing into ships as an unexpected but hopeless consequence.

Deterrence — The 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was the culmination of a series of attempts on Gandhi's life by Nathuram Godse, seeking to prevent the partition of India after Independence. Gandhi inspired a worldwide following with his nonviolent campaign to free India from the deadly grip of the British Empire. From the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny onward, the increasing tempo of violent uprisings left no doubt that the British were not wanted in India. The Amritsar massacre of unarmed civilians by General Dyer in 1919 shocked the consciences of many in Britain, but still Britain clung to this jewel in its imperial crown. Nazi Germany loomed as the only effective challenger to British rule. Gandhi appealed to Hitler in December 1940 to embrace nonviolent resistance against the British. The Fuhrer was unmoved. Finally it was Gandhi's half-century-long campaign of nonviolent resistance that gave India independence in 1947. While Nehru became Prime Minister of newly independent India, Gandhi's influence proved decisive. Having earlier opposed partition into Muslim and Hindu states, Gandhi reversed himself and agreed to it. Mass migrations, and killings of millions, followed as tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims moved across hastily drawn borders to where they thought they would be safe. The assassin Godse was evidently actuated by a desire to deter further progress of what had already occurred, and perhaps to discredit Gandhi's nonviolent tactics and spiritual influence.

Margaret Bourke-White, Partition of India series for Life Magazine

Jeffrey Epstein's life ended in a New York jail after he had assembled embarrassing and incriminating sex-videos on numerous world leaders, billionaires, and savants. With ties encompassing British royalty, Mossad, CIA, and MIT, he privatized and enhanced techniques of getting 'kompromat' that had previously been monopolized by government spies. We can discard the New York Medical Examiner's suicide ruling by the fact that rope marks were well below where they should have been if he had hanged himself. All the dozens of passengers recorded in flight logs as passengers on Epstein's 'Lolita Express' had reason to wish him dead, in order to prevent publication of his cinematic trove. So this assassination can reliably be classified as an act of deterrence.

Isolated insanity — John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in March 1981 was motivated by Hinckley's desire to impress actress Jodie Foster. In repeated viewings of the film 'Taxi Driver', he had watched her portray a child prostitute. Hinckley was also obsessed with the December 1980 assassination of John Lennon by Mark Chapman. Chapman was also obsessed with Jodie Foster. Both shooters also derived inspiration from J D Salinger's iconic novel of adolescent despair 'Catcher in the Rye'. These shootings may have revealed a hitherto unexpected mine of mass insanity in popular culture.

Where does the July 13 attempted assassination of President Trump fit into this catalogue of motives? At first it may seem that the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, belongs among the unaffiliated insane. Despite some initial confusion about his allegiances, the free-speech website Gab uncovered posts favoring Biden and lockdowns. Crooks had also appeared in a promotional video by ESG promoter Blackrock. Posts manifesting susceptibility to Trump Derangement Syndrome, or any particular animus toward Trump, have not appeared. His classmates and teachers depict him as a harmless loner. Other sources of information about what may have motivated Crooks, or why he was so interested in guns, have not yet (August 2024) been disclosed. There is nothing connecting him to Federal officials, and yet it is extremely unlikely that he would have been capable of bringing a scoped AR-15 past checkpoints, and up a ladder, to an unguarded rooftop with a clear line-of-sight onto the rally podium, and left untouched despite having been sighted by numerous people on the ground, without assistance. So while Crooks was perhaps not in full possession of his faculties, the lone-gunman story doesn't gel.

Depending on the motives of those who directed the hit, the July 13 assassination attempt falls either into the history-changing or deterrence category. Had it succeeded, it would have certainly changed American and world history by removing an extraordinarily popular and charismatic figure. The timing, days before the Republican Convention, suggests that one objective was to put the opposition party into disarray, with nobody to rally around who could attract such enthusiastic support. Failure to achieve this objective meant that the incumbent, Joe Biden, who was clearly unable to recite the talking points given him, would be forced to drop out of contention for another term. This timeline suggests that whoever was propping up Biden also directed the attempted removal of Trump. Donald Trump, having shown true courage in the line of fire, emerged from the ensuing chaos with more fervent support than ever.

The architects of Trump's assassination had tried since 2016 to portray him as a tool of Russia, someone who if elected President would take orders from Vladimir Putin, and who therefore had to be stopped by any means. Officials of the FBI, collaborators in other administrative agencies, in Congress, in the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and in the talking-points media (TPM), pursued this theme relentlessly throughout Trump's 2016 - 2020 term of office. Indeed they began soon after Trump was elected, with sanctions against Russia proclaimed by Obama at the end of 2016 obviously designed to entrap incoming transition officials into assuring the Russians that these sanctions would soon be lifted. As a warning of the reception Trump might expect in Washington DC, FBI Director James Comey informed Trump two weeks before Inauguration that scurrilous 'information' about Trump's behavior in Moscow could be circulated. Post-inauguration, the sanctions ruse enabled the TPM to howl for the removal of National Security Director Michael Flynn and the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, leaving the politically naive Trump defenseless against internal sabotage. Impeachment efforts and investigations began immediately and continued to occupy Trump's entire first term. Timely release of a bio-weapon by the Chinese Communist Party in early 2020, whether intentional or accidental, then caught President Trump off-guard. Desperate to save his Presidency, he ill-advisedly promoted a hastily proffered 'vaccine' that turned out to be another bio-weapon, throwing the 2020 election into a blizzard of more than 100 million mail-in ballots most of which were pre-marked for his opponent. Yet even this did not eliminate the threat to the positions of FBI and other officials whose illegal behavior had been exposed.

After Biden's disastrous June 27, 2024 debate performance, it became clear that only some kind of deterrence could prevent Donald Trump's re-election. Biden's backers assumed they could continue passing him off as a fully functioning intelligence, as they had done since his 2020 installation. After June 27, their confidence gave way to panic, as all the American people and the world saw a bumbling moron unable to complete a coherent sentence. Trump, himself not exactly a champion of logic, nevertheless continued to strike a responsive chord among not only his supporters but crucially among independents as well. To wealthy Democrat-inclined political donors, political analysts, TPM, and unelected officials, this spelled certain defeat. Unless...

Abandoning the Russia-collusion hoax that large majorities had found unpersuasive, they then portrayed Trump as a Nazi or fascist who would turn the United States into a personal dictatorship. This was a mirror-image of what the Biden regime was actually doing. In this campaign, however, they did not need majorities. They merely needed to concentrate the pervasive climate of fear, generated by multiple crises, onto a particular target. Everyone knew that had Hitler been assassinated, World War II could have been prevented. One left-leaning magazine duly adorned its cover with a photoshopped portrait of Trump made-over to resemble Hitler. Celebrities followed suit, and Biden after his poor debate pieced together not one, but two coherent sentences: 'We're done talking. It's time to put a bulls-eye on Trump.'

The July 13 setup was consequently as much a deterrence type of assassination as a history-changing one. The TPM role was neither to inform nor even to persuade — large majorities distrust it; instead the TPM's role was to mass-message the narrative of removing a threat to democracy and help recruit someone willing to 'go ballistic' in doing so. The open rooftop vantage-point, a clear line-of-sight to the target a mere 130 meters away, an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with both telescopic and iron sights easily passing through checkpoints, a conveniently placed ladder, rally attendees' sightings of a rooftop shooter ignored by police and Secret Service, and SS snipers giving the shooter plenty of time to fire fatal shots before killing him — all this sends a clear message.

What is the content of that message? Attributing these 'lapses' of security to mere incompetence is simply incredible. No, the message is 'We can do this to you too'. The message is directed to all of Trump's campaign staff, rally attendees, supporters, and anyone who might dare to vote for him. In the clearest possible terms of threat to life, it is intended to deter political acts and thoughts that threatens the tenure of incumbent officials. How this will play out is unclear. Threats work. Some will be deterred from expressing thoughts that might put their lives at risk. Thought-crimes such as 'mis-gendering', 'misinformation' concerning 2020 election fraud or vaccine harm, and other dissident views, are already punished by employers anticipating or subject to Government control. Livelihood and career threats can easily morph into physical threats. Much will depend on raw courage, and on the building of mutual support systems that can withstand official attack.