Oh what a tangled web Spring weaves

The weird shooting of Donald Trump

Last night I watched the footy at my Mum’s. Thoroughly deflated by England’s 2-1 defeat to Spain and irritated by BBC “pundits,” I then had the misfortune to watch the BBC evening news’ alleged analysis of the Trump shooting.

It seemed to me that the BBC were asking us all to believe that there are questions to be asked about what happened. Certainly, the story we have been offered to accept is pretty astounding.

Kit Knightly, writing for the OffGuardian, recently raised the spectre of the FALSE False flag. A Few days later, Trump was reportedly shot in a shooting that can only be described as bizarre. It is worth noting the point that Knightly made:

[. . .] observation would suggest a deliberate agenda of undermining the very idea of objective reality. A move by our controllers to insert themselves as a filter between every person on the planet and the world they experience. The final aim being that everything – everything – the entire fabric of our shared reality – is made up.

Cards on the table, I have done absolutely no research in to this shooting and probably won’t because, frankly, I’m not that interested. What I am interested in is BBC propaganda and psychological manipulation. No one embodies the state propagandist more completely than Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first social media and disinformation correspondent.

The BBC told me and my Mum that, while speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump—a nailed on certainty for the Republican presidential candidate nomination—was shot by a gunman who was positioned 130 metres away on the roof of a building adjacent to the stage. With a clear line of sight to Trump, at 18:11 (EDT) the gunman fired three shots. One of the shots grazed Trump’s right ear—because he was looking towards the gunman at the time—but, more importantly, a member of the crowd, Corey Comperatore, was shot and died.

The BBC reported eyewitness accounts from people who said they saw the gunman both moving into position, with rifle in hand, and taking aim—which at least one person captured on camera. One witness said he told the police about the gunman but that they did nothing. The BBC showed a still image of police looking toward the gunman before the shooting.

The BBC showed Mum and I a photograph of the bullet, in flight, as it flew past Trump’s injured ear. A Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, no less, called Doug Mills just happened to click his shutter at that moment. If you can believe that.

The BBC provided a report by BBC Verify—the BBC’s very own factcheckers—who confirmed everything I’ve just relayed to you and then told us what questions we should ask:

How did the US Secret Service fail to stop this. [. . .] The investigation will want to find out why the Secret Service didn’t do more to prevent it.

That is certainly one question but, given the completely implausible story—something that seems more like the plot of a comic than a “news” report—others definitely spring to mind—pardon the the pun.

We are supposed to believe the gunman, instead of shooting Trump in the temple, waited until Trump was looking directly toward him before firing his shots. Thus explaining the grazed ear that Trump apparently sustained from a bullet fired from a rifle 130 metres away from him. Certainly, Trump clutched his ear and was then seen to be visibly wounded.

A bullet grazed ear from a pistol fired a few feet away from the target is plausible, I guess. A one centimetre variance in the firing position could account for the near miss. From a rifle fired 130 metres away from the target that “variance” would be measured in nanometres.

The chance of the rifle-firing gunman hitting the target but only striking a relatively inconsequential part of the head he was aiming at, over such a distance, is incredibly, almost unbelievably remote. What we can say is that it was extremely fortunate that Trump was facing the right way at the right time, even more fortunate that the gunman chose that moment to fire and that Trump was very, very lucky.

The gunman was said to have been shot and killed by US police snipers and was later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. So, we are also given to believe that snipers were overlooking Crooks’ firing position. If, as we were told by the BBC, people in the crowd could “see” and film the gunman and they “told” the police about the gunman on a roof, the fact that he wasn’t shot by the snipers—who subsequently killed him—“before” he fired the fatal shots is, well, very, very surprising.

So, given all the evidently inexplicable anomalies in the story we have been given about the shooting it is perfectly natural that people would speculate. Sure, “mistakes” may account for the otherwise ludicrous narrative we’ve been told to swallow, but why rule out any other explanation?

What evidence is there to discount the possibility of a wider plot or fabrication? Frankly, there isn’t any. The official account reported by the BBC is patently absurd in many respects. Of course, it could be true, but it is perfectly reasonable for rational people to doubt it. And what’s wrong with suspecting something else other than “mistakes”?

Enter Marianna Spring.

The BBC rounded of their so-called analysis of the Trump shooting with a concluding segment delivered by Spring. She told the UK public that conspiracy theories and “hate” had dominated social media feeds as a result of Trump’s extraordinary near miss.

According to Spring, this alleged “hate” primarily consisted of people suspecting the whole thing was “staged.” This notion of a “staged” event, Spring claimed, is “evidence free.”

While, at this stage, such contentions are largely “evidence free,” so is the BBC’s assertion that “mistakes” are to blame. The BBC has no more “evidence” than anyone else. Or it certainly hasn’t reported any.

The point is not that one theory is more plausible than another. As I said, I have no idea what explains the outlandish tale of the farfetched assassination attempt. “Mistakes” may well turn out to be the most rational explanation but, in the absence of anything remotely believable, the only way any of us can find out is by examining the evidence.

But that is not what the BBC and Marianna Spring want us to do. They claim that only they, and other approved members of the epistemic authorities, have the wherewithal to undertake the task of investigating and thinking about the evidence. We should “trust” them to tell us the truth. Spring and the BBC will define reality for us, however “fake” it might appear.

In the accompanying BBC article, Spring wrote to expand on her ideas. Marianna explained why the “staged” hypothesis was so hateful:

It's a word [“staged”] that has become synonymous with conspiracy theories on the fringes of social media, often to cast doubts on an attack or shooting. But in the last 24 hours it has flooded into mainstream online conversation, and posts filled with evidence-free speculation, hate and abuse have racked up millions of views on X. [. . .] As ever, the conspiracy theories sometimes started with legitimate questions and confusion. They centred on alleged security failings, with lots of users understandably asking how this could happen.

The only people “centred on alleged security failings” are the BBC, other legacy media outlet, and state propagandists like Spring. The rest of us don’t have a clue, all we have is a narrative that makes no sense at all.

There is no evidence to suggest “mistakes” are even worth centering our focus of attention on at this stage. We are simply “told” that is the most plausible explanation by Spring and others like her.

Marianna Spring continues:

What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.

The “conspiracy theory playbook” is a made up, meaningless term Spring peddles without reason and contrary to all evidence. As I have explored at some length in my latest book—yes, I’m plugging it—The Manchester Attack: An Independent Investigation, there is no identifiable “conspiracy movement;” “radicalisation by algorithm” is baseless nonsense; there are no conspiracy “playbooks,” no “textbook radicalisation” and no evidence of anything that can be called the “conspiracy theorist’s mindset.” These are empty, accusatory labels stuck on people who dare to question power by Marianna Spring and propagandists like her.

With regard to the Trump shooting, there is no “reality” for anyone to deny, precisely because the fairy tale we have in hand is nonsensical drivel. We don’t know what the “reality” is, that’s the point. But Spring and the BBC claim they do.

Spring has no evidence—nothing, nada, zilch—to substantiate what she has already determined to be “reality.” We’ve all seen the same footage, the same photographs and read the same reports and absolutely none of it is conclusive proof of anything other than the fact that a shooting occurred during which an innocent man sadly lost his life.

We do, however, get to the crux of Spring’s propaganda:

Incorrect attempts to identify the shooter fed into the various evidence-free narratives. [. . .] On X, political activists and supporters quickly hunkered down in their own echo chambers, reading posts that were recommended by the site’s algorithm and confirmed what they already thought. The rest of us scrambled to avoid this deep pit of conspiracy and speculation. This was a test for Elon Musk’s new Twitter - and it’s hard to say the site passed with flying colours. The other social media sites haven’t been inundated in the same way, perhaps because of their target audience and X’s reputation as a home of political discourse.

Springs certainty about what happened is a clear example of an “evidence-free narrative.” There are some obvious observations we can make.

“Political activists” have just as much of a right to express an opinion as the BBC and Marianna Spring. The BBC and Spring have not avoided the “deep pit of conspiracy and speculation.” They have waded neck deep into speculation and have labelled everyone who thinks their speculation might be wrong as “conspiracy theorists.”

‘X’ failed Spring’s “test” because, apparently, it did not censor enough people for her liking. Most of whom were not “political activists,” just ordinary folk equally speculating about an unfathomable and extremely weird event.

This is not the social media environment Spring wants. Marianna Spring is among the legacy media propagandists who have been dispatched to promote state legislation—such as the UK Online Harms Act—designed to censor everything we say online and, ultimately, everything we think.

The idea that Elon Musk is providing some sort of safe-online-haven for political discourse is just as silly as everything else Spring asserts without reason. The only part of her waffle that is vaguely germane is her identification of “echo chambers.” Musk’s X is an online information silo. The shadow banning is rampant.

This so-called failure in the alleged home of “political discourse” is the real target of Spring’s propaganda. In addition to “trusting” whatever bilge she and the BBC offer, we must not raise questions that lie outside the Overton window of our officially approved “political discourse.” If we do, we should be silenced for our “hate.”

If we do, we fail Spring’s test.

So say Marianna Spring and the BBC.