The Message

Why the talking-points media are sending mixed messages

September 22, 2024

The talking-points media (TPM)¹ are tongue-tied on what to make of two attempts to murder President Trump, and the recent laser-focused near-blindings of his supporters in Tucson Arizona. They convey the latest regime word on what attitude to adopt regarding anything that might support or threaten the current regime. But they haven’t gotten the memo with their approved talking-points because nobody in authority knows what to say.

Yet the message of the attempted assassinations of President Trump and attacks on his constituents is clear: ‘We can do this to you too’. The message of the laser-focused ultraviolet-beam weapon² in Tucson is particularly clear: ‘We can do this to you too without anyone knowing’. Ultraviolet light is invisible to humans (though visible to insects), and its harmful effects are only felt 30 to 60 minutes after impact. UV is the part of the solar spectrum that causes sunburn. Highly focused into an intense beam by a laser, concentrated UV damages eyes and skin far more than the diffuse UV of sunlight. The most damaging UV is in the range of 200 to 300 nanometers. Devices emitting such low-frequency UV are readily available for legitimate purposes such as food purification. At least 20 Hispanic community leaders who helped organize Trump’s Tucson rally sought and received emergency treatment for UV-burned corneas and skin. Community leaders sitting near the stage where President Trump addressed the crowd appear to have been targeted. Many were blinded for several days and suffered excruciating pain around their eyes and faces. Long-term effects could include cataracts and associated hardening of the lenses of their eyes.

Investigators, official and independent, who are diligently pursuing leads should think carefully about who might have a motive to attack leading members of Latinos for Trump. Consider the narrative of his opponents — that Trump is a racist, that he harbors some animus against racial and ethnic minorities. Yet when thousands of these same allegedly Trump-despised people rally around him, that narrative obviously falls on its face. So, what to do? Frighten them into not organizing or attending his rallies. Memo to investigators: Look for those who are most threatened by the prospect of another Trump Presidency — officials and others whose jobs, careers, and power are most at risk. This is a politically astute group that knows what is at stake, has a strategy for subverting, with violence and rhetoric, those who threaten their supremacy, and can deploy and use sophisticated weapons to protect their positions.

But the message of the perpetrators, whoever they are, is not yet clear to the general public. So the TPM are full of stories about ‘lone gunmen’ and ‘security lapses’ in the two assassination attempts, in Pennsylvania and Florida. Once Secret Service Director and DEI hire Kimberley Cheatle resigned in disgrace over such elementary failings as leaving a shooting-gallery-style line of sight open to the free access of a known well-armed shooter in the first attempt, that ‘security lapse’ story lost all media traction and disappeared. Problem solved. But as Melania Trump said, ‘there is more to the story, and we need to uncover the truth.’ As Congressman Clay Higgins and others have noted, many questions remain unanswered. Higgins, a former policeman, followed the advice he was given as a young cop:

My initial investigative intent was to carefully observe and listen to document and consider the ‘totality of circumstance’ surrounding the attempted assassination ofPresident Trump. ‘Be calm, move slowly to the center, and just let the crime scene talk to you...’ This was advice to me, as a young patrol cop, from a renowned investigator many years ago. That was my purpose, as I traveled to Butler, to let the crime scene talk to me. In many ways, this preliminary report is essentially what the crime scene told me when I listened.

He found the FBI had quickly destroyed crime-scene evidence on the rooftop from which the shooter fired, and gathered up all the bullet-shell casings, precluding further investigation. Higgins also found that the Secret Service had never before deployed a counter-sniper team to a former President’s event.³ That, plus the studied inattention of Secret Service agents to the many rally-goers’ sightings of the rooftop shooter, look very much like an official invitation to murder President Trump. Although the attempt failed, the very suspicious circumstances surrounding the attempt clearly communicate a continuing threat to President Trump and his constituents, one of whom, Corey Competatore, was actually murdered at the Butler Pennsylvania rally on July 13.

Yet the TPM are loath to state this message directly. It would detract from their narrative that official agencies are doing their job, protecting a former President rather than arranging to eliminate him. If they failed, it must have been due to unintentional ‘lapses’, and the new people in charge are fixing the problem. But somehow the Secret Service failed again to secure the perimeter around another attempted assassination site, a golf course in Florida, allowing another would-be shooter to hide in the shrubbery for 12 hours until Trump came within range. It looks like the SS was issuing another open invitation to, as Joe Biden put it, ‘put Trump in a bull’s-eye’. So the TPM are sending a mixed message: On the one hand, the law enforcement and Presidential protective agencies are doing their job, and on the other hand, President Trump and his constituents had better curtail their activities if they know what’s good for them.

Where all this will go is not hard to predict. The would-be shooter in Florida, a professional mercenary, understood very well the tactical implications of incompetent or intentionally negligent senior Secret Service officials; he positioned himself exactly where the line of sight would be clearest, while affording concealment. It was only when an alert SS agent happened to see a rifle barrel poking through a chain-link fence, and shot at it, that the would-be shooter fled. And an alert citizen taking a photo of his car and license plate enabled local police to capture the suspect. Even if the general public cannot yet read the message of ‘security lapses’ as an official invitation to commit mayhem, to other attackers that message will come in loud and clear. Similarly to local officials pushing ‘de-fund the police’ in 2020, those who are itching to commit violence prove perfectly capable of reading a message saying ‘you will not be held accountable’ for what turned out, in that instance, to be deadly riots and arson in 40 cities throughout America. The TPM clearly conveyed this message to rioters by repeatedly characterizing scenes of flaming buildings and chaos as ‘peaceful’. If the current threat message of two assassination attempts and one laser-UV attack is not sufficiently clear, then there will be more.

Despite many unanswered questions about who engineered these attacks, it is possible to make well-informed guesses, for prognostic purposes, about their identities. They are officials and tributaries who have the most to lose, in power or money, from another Trump Presidency. His pledge to end the U.S./EU/NATO war on Russia in Ukraine with a negotiated settlement could plug a heretofore unlimited flow of taxpayer financing to weapons suppliers. Having failed to end the reign of spies, diplomats, and other officials who subverted his first term of office, Trump will probably not repeat that mistake if granted another term of office. Whether he will be similarly disposed toward the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex is less certain, given his capitulation to National Institutes of Health experts in 2020, but with Robert F Kennedy Jr’s participation there is a greater chance of reining in that abusive public/private colossus as well. Their seemingly endless pipeline of liability-free taxpayer-financed purchases of fatally flawed injectable drugs could (perhaps) likewise be plugged. These trillion-dollar-plus bonanzas are so enormous that their beneficiaries will try to keep them at all cost.

Those in Government who partner with these pharma, weapons, and Big Tech oligarchs are very much at risk not only of removal from office, but in some cases, of prosecution for abuse of authority, larceny, bribery, knowingly illegal and unconstitutional behavior, and other derelictions of duty. They have so much at stake that they really have no option but to prevent another Trump Presidency in any way they can, including by violence. They are acting under structural constraints⁴ that compel them to secure their own positions and agency independence no matter what. Thus structural constraints in the current Federal environment promote rather than limit arbitrary Government power, as the Supreme Court recognized.

This bureaucratic imperative is stronger than any patriotic duty that bureaucrats may feel toward their fellow-citizens. They see democracy and patriotism solely in terms of the welfare of their agencies. The fact that tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of Americans don’t see it that way — having the old-fashioned view that civil servants must serve the people, subject to free, honest elections — doesn’t sway them at all. They regard these masses as hopelessly uninformed, deficient in the expertise they exclusively possess, by virtue of their education and official position. The unentitled masses are ‘deplorables’, as one losing candidate famously put it — an assessment that did not endear her to heartland residents. So the owners of the Governmental apparatus, as they have come to see themselves, must defend it against the very people for whom they are supposedly working. Mass surveillance, censorship, forced vaccination, exposure to criminal mobs, revocation of professional licenses — these are among the powers that ‘civil servants’ have granted themselves in the past decade or so, with precedents going back many years before. They are, in other words, engaged in warfare against the American people.

Structural constraints will inevitably push toward self-protection and agency protection, requiring progressively higher levels of coercion against the populace. Censorship morphs into job denials, de-banking, and perhaps other controls redolent of Communist China’s social-credit scheme. Inflamed rhetoric about individuals or groups being a ‘threat to democracy’ morphs into kinetic attacks on them. But in so doing, the holders of the official apparatus of coercion expose their real intentions, which are hostile to the vast majority. This may explain why the TPM are sending mixed signals. They want to scare into submission anyone who might doubt the regime’s legitimacy, while also triggering the mass insanity that turns violent thoughts into action. News editors have their work cut out for them to achieve this delicate journalistic balance.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as has often been observed. As this dynamic takes on more coherent form, more people will see it for what it is, and act accordingly. They may have to remove their consent, for a time, to regain a system with ‘the consent of the governed’.

1. TPM is what others call legacy, corporate, or mainstream media. Talking-points media is a more accurate term, I think, because they subsist entirely on what they are told to write or broadcast.

2. Emergency room staff thought the symptoms resembled injuries inflicted by a chemical spray, but it would be impossible to focus an aerosol so precisely as was done at the Tucson rally.

3. Subject to further verification, Higgins wrote in his report.

4. One of the Twelve Modes of Prediction in Daniel Bell’s 1964 essay derives future prospects from economic, legal, or stylistic (what is called ‘organizational DNA’ today) limits on the scope of organizational action. In a totally Government-dominated environment, however, economic limits are superseded by money-printing, and legal constraints have been routinely violated. (Though the Supreme Court recently limited judicial deference to Federal prerogatives in overruling the Chevron decision.)