Parallel Coups 1 of 2: The Blood of the King

The Failed Attempt on Trump

I timed my vacation into the far north for what was looking like it’d be the lull in the American Election/Cold Civil War/Collapse cycle.

Unlike 2020 where the regime was hyper focused on creating enough chaos to drive Trump from office, whether that be the extreme totalitarian and deranged response to Covid or fake Gretchen Witmer kidnapping (a plot which may have had more feds and informants than actual target “extremists"), or actively burning the country to the ground in the state backed riots and violent pogroms against white, asian, and black small business owners throughout American cities. This time, so I thought, the regime was committed to the illusion of “Normalcy” and the Bidenist talking point that all the madness of 2020 was a result of Trump and Trump alone, with the promise/threat that so long as Biden retained the whitehouse Americans would be permitted to pretend it was still the 1990s or early 2000s and that the economy is doing well (Of course it’s not once you adjust for how understated official inflation is compared to actual cost of living, Americans have effectively been in an economic depression for years now, it is just instead of losing 20+% of jobs, they’ve lost 20+% of what their wage buys, net real worker income is still down 20%).

They were incentivized to keep the news as boring as possible and the Quiet a little too quiet, or so I thought.

Then Biden’s campaign imploded at the debate, and it became damned clear that the default would be a second Trump Administration without drastic measures…As to whether those measures included a Letter-Agency backed assassination attempt on Trump…???

The Attempted Assassination of Trump

All the people I usually respect as voices of reason and restrained respectable professional opinions, people who either could, or could certainly suggest qualified people to, staff an administration or state government… people like Tho Bishop and Ryan McMaken of Radio-Rothbard or Judge Andrew Napolitano, who was a respected Fox commentator, libertarian legal thinker, and was floated very seriously as a potential Trump SCOTUS pick, and Whose "Judging Freedom” is maybe the best and most intensive geopolitics podcast currently covering Ukraine and the war in Gaza (the things I’d never have known if not for that show)… They’re all treating a Letter-Agency enabled attempt on Trump’s life as not only a plausible explanation, but the MOST LIKELY explanation.

Indeed I’ve not heard a single serious right wing commentator treat it as anything less than a serious possibility (20-30%), and many serious people are treating it as the extreme likelihood (80%+).

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As I’ve stated previously: when I heard the news about Trump being shot, I was completely without wifi on my travels and was reduced, like some nursing home denizen, to watching CNN. My friends and I, of course, immediately started speculating from the brief clips of the shooting as CNN tried to deflect from any relevant information (opting instead to get the “feelings” of the worst looking aged Trump supporters they could find).

My friends and I immediately developed two theories from the video and awful audio: either the shooter had managed to conceal a small handgun and was firing from extremely close to Trump (something we ruled out very quickly, neighboring members of the crowd would have dived on him in the length of time he was firing)… or he must have had a large caliber semi-automatic rifle like an AR10, M14, Dragunov, or HK41 that could be setup with a scope, bipod, and other accessories for precision shooting from 400-800 meters… that he’d be able to use a rifle at any closer range seemed so preposterous to us.

It was obvious something like a Ar-15 used from a mere 130 meters could never happen, so we thought… There were crack Secret Service counter snipers assessing the sightlines to the president trying to rule out or keep eyes on firing positions potentially even as far as a mile, 1600 meters, or further (currently the record for longest sniper shot in history ranges between 2800 and 3800 meters (just under or just over 2 miles)…

This could be ruled out from the video: To the best of my knowledge shots of that extreme length can only be made with Extremely high calibre bolt action rifles (.338 Lapua, 50 BMG, or other obnoxiously large rounds)… but the secret service has to be prepared for that!

A president or presidential contestant is the most valuable assassination target in the world. State level actors might dedicate their best intelligence and special forces team to such a mission if their regime is desperate enough (as indeed some have speculated already happened to a previous president), If a special forces sniper could conceivably make the shot at 2 miles with a bolt action or special made weapon, then the Secret Service we’d expect to be preparing to counter that or prevent those sightlines from presenting themselves.

So the idea that a relatively amatuer shooter would get a rifle… Not 2 miles (3200 meters), not 1 mile (1600 meters), not even 1300 meters (a very tricky but achievable shot for a committed and disciplined marksman)… But 130 meters!? 10x less!?

Even with my estimate of 400-800 meters, merely getting the rifle that close would take a coup of planning and subterfuge.

There are only so many uncontrolled sightlines to a stage outside of the actual controlled audience and security screened area, most potential views are blocked off by crowds, bleachers, banners, displays, ect.

At 400-800 meters (5-9 football fields) it’d take a great coup of planning, stealth and tactical espionage action to get in a hidden position with such a sightline without being spotted or having that spot eliminated or closely watched by the counter sniper team, and that’s about the farthest away you can get if you want to be able to hit the target in one shot from the limitation of most semi-automatic rifles, and make a follow on shot if you miss (the advantage of semi-automatic rifles).

At 130 meters it’d be nearly impossible to do even against moderately aware rent-a-cops.

Indeed the choice of an AR-15 rifle and a red-dot scope reads like crappy fanfiction by some gun controller looking for a propaganda win over gun-owners.

That simply isn’t the rifle setup you’d use to assassinate a president if you had any wherewithal whatsoever and expected the Secret Service to actually try to stop you.

If you wanted to shoot a president with a rifle you’d use something like this:

Ruger Precision Rifle, available in 243 Winchester.308 Win; 5.56/.223 Rem; 6mm Creedmoor; 6.5mm Creedmoor.338 Lapua Magnum.300 Win Mag.300 PRC. Effective up to 1600 yards depending on round.

You’d use a bolt-action precision rifle with a high magnification scope, a bipod or tripod (both are pictured) and a host of other quality of life mods and precision investments to make your one shot (it’s a bolt action) more precise.

Put otherwise you’d use an extremely effective/expensive hunting rifle.

You’d do this because every single meter you get closer to the target (A US PRESIDENT!) radically increases the chance that someone will spot you and report you to the police, or the counter-sniper team will take you out. Then you’d probably have to wait hours or days hoping the venue doesn’t reorganize, the sightlines don’t change you don’t get unlucky and a secret service agent just decides to check your precise grid coordinates and notice that: Hey wait a minute, that box isn’t supposed to be there, that mount of earth isn’t natural, that tree stump is made of plastic and has a viewport in it, that’s mound of leaves is actually camo netting with a dirtbike hidden underneath… And then you’re either dead or in prison for life, without ever getting to see a glow of orange through your sights.

This would be the most nerve-wrackingly dangerous sneaking and stealth operation if you were special forces making the shot from 1000 meters.

the idea that you’d PLAN on making the shot UNMAGNIFIED from 130 meters, getting into position ON THE DAY OF, not a pre-hidden position but when all the secret service and police are going to be present... That you’d plan on being able to single handedly get a RIFLE into position 130 meters from the president to make such a shot…

You be planning to fail. It’d be a suicide mission with no no chance of getting away, and basically no chance that you’d ever even get a shot off.

NBCNews Graphic.

Seriously! Look at the actual distance between Trump and the Shooter, and then look at all the space within a 1 kilometer range of Trump’s position.

My edit of bing maps. Trump is the Orange stat, the shooter the red, and the Red circle is everything within 1000 meters of Trump… A difficult shot requiring a precision rifle, but one you could train up and equip yourself for with about 6 months and 20-30k dollars (shockingly cheap for a shot (pardon the pun) to change human history).

Admittedly most of the eastern half of this circle is ruled out by the 3 barns immediately behind Trump. but look at the wide open space in front of him.

The fairgrounds of the Butler farm show (blue circle) is a massive complex of horse racing tracks, presentation spaces, livestock buildings, lots of stuff at the 200-400 meter range that is unoccupied during non-event days and lend themselves to preparing keyholed hidden positions that would be invisible to a counter-sniper team trying to return fire (the stage itself has to be prepared in advance allowing a shooter to reliably know where Trump will stand); The mazda dealership, tractor dealership, and barbeque restaurant form a series of elevated positions (purple circle) at the 400-500 meter range with a clear shot down the flat fields directly in front of where Trump is set to speak; and probably the best positions (if you want to survive the day and manage to flee the scene) there is a leafy row of houses, a church and a monument store (gravestones), which all form a dense nest of terrain (red circle) in the 500-700 meter range, from which countless hidden keyholed firing positions would be available without obstruction across the open field.

This is an antitank Keyhole position but same principle, the arc of fire through which the shooter (with less firepower) is going to fire is made purposefully narrow so that only a part of the enemy element, or only the target themselves has a sightline to the shooter. In the Troubles, IRA snipers would make a habit of hitting the last man on a patrol as he crossed an intersection perpendicularly, so that the rest of the patrol could not see down the street the shot had come from.

I cannot emphasize enough this is mostly the basics that any war-gamer, infantryman, or reader of Fry The Brain: The Art of Urban Guerilla Sniping from my banned book list could tell you.

And in spite of the vastly more complex and skilled threat that the Secret Service must necessarily be preparing for, skilled shooters with large caliber precision rifles in .308 winchester, 6.5 Creedmore, .338 Lapua Magnum, and .50 BMG effective from 300 to 1300 meters (and these are just normal rifles and skills for Americans to have… Heaven help them if someone decides to go after a president with a Mortar attack)… In spite of the vastly more complex threat they have to be prepared for, Thomas Mathew Crooke was able to get within 130 meters, with an AR-15, and No Scope (or atleast no magnification) an aimed shot at an American President.

I’ve seen commentators try to attribute some skill to the shooter… That given the limited time he had between confronting a member of local law enforcement (who retreated in the face of the gun) and firing the first shot that this actually represented considerable skill and discipline in acquiring a target and squeezing off a shot, especially on a hot roof… that he might have only had a few seconds. with many speculating about witting or unwitting assistance from a firearms instructor to help him zero the rifle and develop his shot…

And i don’t really buy it.

Was it a Skilled shot?

I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve shot vastly worse on the first shot of the day on a cold range morning, I’ve gone to shoot only to flinch the first shot, or realize the Zero had migrated by inches, if not feet, on a crappy optic while in storage.

But i was testing my rifles on a snowy morning while drinking my first coffee, not trying to change world history in a split moment.

The factory variance on even a bad rifle at 100 meters is about 1-3 inches (1-3 minutes of angle (MOA)) a really crappy soviet production might be as far out as 5, and all of that magnifies the further out you get. A 1 MOA rifle is 1 inch off at 100 meters, 4 inches off at 400, etc. This is with hypothetical perfect shooting.

Combine this with shaky hands, no bipod, wind you don’t have time to adjust for, a merely imperfect zero, and at 130 meters the variance of a grouping can be 5-10 inches, about the width of a head in and of itself.

Of course, skilled shooters with a bit of time and a good setup can get much closer to ideal than that, but as soon as you’re aiming for the head you’re aiming for a moving target. Just look in the mirror and start gesticulating as if giving a speech or merely having a conversation. your head will bounce back and forward several times the width of your head itself.

People made a big deal over the fact that if Trump hadn’t moved his head to look at a display his brain would have been right in the path of the bullet… but this is true of every shot that hits or misses the head of a target, natural human head motion in conversation or while walking, or just doing anything is extreme enough the target is ALWAYS a split second between being lined up and completely out of the crosshairs.

This is why every single military rifleman, from basic training on to advanced sniper courses is told again and again and again “Aim for the Center of Mass”.

This is the thing with that first shot… assuming the rifle was zeroed properly and he was actually aiming for Trump’s head (and it didn’t fly wildly high)… That would have been a fatal shot if he had merely been aiming WHERE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AIMING and not where hollywood shlock has trained him to think assassins aim.

Assuming he was genuinely only off by a few inches he would have 100% killed Trump if he had merely aimed for the chest like combat shooters are supposed to.

Contrary to people who watch too many schlock thrillers, politicians don’t wear body-armor capable of stopping rifle rounds

This is what a level IV plate carrier able to stop .556 looks like. And even this isn’t able to stop a large calibre round like .338 Lapua or .50 BMG. .308 Winchester would be right on the edge, maybe a good plate might stop it, maybe not.

There is not a level IV plate carrier under that shirt.

Trump is wearing nothing of the sort, no politicians do. Kanye was the only one to try it for a while.

“Oh but I’ve seen the kevlar weaves. Suits and shirts can be bulletproof now like in John Wick”

Ya, a really expensive and uncomfortable “bullet-proof” suit can stop a 9mm handgun round travelling at 1200 fps. A .556 rifle round travelling at 2700-3100 fps will shred right through that.

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And remember this isn’t like the movies, where any bullet wound to the chest is merely a suggestion that a character might die, but the writer can save them, or have them give a long speech, or whatever because they weren’t shot in the head… so the bullet is just an excuse for dialogue.

Rifle rounds hurt.

Only 1 out of 6 handgun wounds to the chest is fatal (thus how 50-Cent has been shot nine times but is still around to speak at Trump rallies), whereas 5 out of 6 rifle wounds to the chest is fatal. The increased velocity creates a temporary cavity that shreds organs, ruptures blood vessels, and leaves a massive exit wound.

Notice how the full cavitation happens between 15 and 25 centimeters into the body? about the distance between the front and the back of a human chest? Ya, that temporary cavity just becomes the size of the exit wound. A 10-15 centimeter (4-6 inch) hole in the back of your chest.

A 78 year old man, with the biggest most easily hit torso of any president in my lifetime, would simply not survive this happening to his chest.

And yet! This most basic bit of advice, that every single Marine, Soldier, Police Officer, and self defense instructor has heard and repeated hundreds of times: “Aim for the center of mass”, Crooke simply didn’t follow. And that saved Trump’s life. His outrageous orange face was simply too tempting a target.

The Limits of Conspiracy

This, I think, puts an extreme upper limit on how much coordination he could have, if any, with some mysterious deep state agent or faction of the federal government. Any actually trained shooter would have told him this vital piece of advice if they were knowingly training him to assassinate Trump. Maybe a local shooting instructor helped him zero his rifle and tighten his grouping, as shooting instructors do for any paying customer… but it seems insane to me that a committed trained federal killer could have been coaching him through the biggest assassination of the century, without giving him this advice or the money for a 2x magnifier on his red-dot

As countless people have pointed out, the CIA and other Letter agencies have never balked at assassinating FOREIGN politicians and heads of state who threaten their interests, and the FBI practically collects mentally deranged loners they can entrap or manufacture fake terror attacks around to justify their budget and control the political discourse.

2020 saw the FBI manufacture a kidnapping plot against Michigan governor Gretchen Witmer in an attempt to control the electoral cycle and crush budding opposition to lockdown, with what is now looking like a MAJORITY of those involved in the plot being federal assets or informants of one stripe or another.

The possibility that feds might bring a tactic used against foreign governments home to use on the American people, and combine them with the tactics they already use on the American body-politic is not only plausible, it should be the default assumption.

Indeed Murray Rothbard was recognizing patterns to “lone nut” killings back in 1972.

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Yet profound incompetence, either in protecting Trump, or indeed in conspiring to kill Trump is the major phenomenon of the entire sequence.

Trump was not even tackled to the ground by Secret Service, but rather the 78 year old lion of a man was left to dodge his own bullets… Then having survived, the girl boss diversity hires could not even drag him away before he had the opportunity to fistbump and shout “Fight, fight, fight”.

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If indeed every failure to secure the site was deliberate, and a sequence of purposeful negligences and orders to stand-down or ignore reported threats were orchestrated, complete with a Jill Biden visit to Pittsburgh to draw secret service agents away from Trump… then it is all the more telling that they could arrange all of that, only to not have a competent shooter.

I’ve seen speculation that the lack of security was the plot… that they might have been tipped off then merely allowed security to collapse in the slim hope the Crooke would succeed on his own given the opportunity… but this is insanely weak. Trump has had maybe a dozen assassination attempts on him so far… most pathetically impotent. There’s even a BBC/Netflix Documentary on one of the previous would be assassins. To suspect that the FBI or CIA or other letter agencies might make moves to enable a lone wolf to fire on Trump, but exert no effort to ensure he was likely to succeed betrays a lack of knowledge of just how many of these attempts and plots there are and how rarely they manage to get anywhere.

It would betray profound lack of even machiavellian judgement or malicious competence if this was a deepstate plot.

And of course all “Second Shooter” conspiracies are poisoned by the fact Trump was able to Fistpump and shout “fight” 3 times after finally getting back up. You’re telling me a Deep State sniper is willing to risk EVERYTHING to stop orange Hitler, willing to risk his life and liberty to save the Republic from the greatest threat to “Our Democracy” in 100 years. Like all deep state apparatchiks, this hypothetical second sniper is even more indoctrinated and deranged than the Crazed teenage shooter himself. (remember the first people the regime propagandizes is themselves).

but now that Trump’s survived and is nearly guaranteed to have a second term, this secret soldier of Democracy won’t take a second shot to save America? If your model of the Deep State is they’re simultaneously so incompetent that out of 5-8 shots, plus a mysterious second shooter bullet, they can’t get one to land… And yet they are so simultaneously disciplined that even in the heat of the moment as Trump fist pumps and mocks them with his electoral victory now practically locked in, they wouldn’t take the shot they would have 100% had as he stood in the same spot.

Ya you have a weird model of the deep state.

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Whereas if indeed it was mere incompetence and once again dedicated spergy autists prove more effective than entire government bureaucracies… (something we’ve seen many times before, not least in Trump’s election) then that also speaks to the profound incompetence of our institutions and elite.

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Indeed the way the police and secret service are behaving to cover their asses cannot even be distinguished between the one and the other.

As we’ve seen from Uvalde, the Mandalay Bay shooting, and countless other farces… The “Thin Blue Line” protects incompetent managers first and foremost, if they were ordered to stand-down and ignore threats in a malicious manner that is obvious after the fact, you can bet that no Agent or cop would speak up or blow the whistle, just as none would do so if it was mere rank incompetence.

American police have been systematically selected for people who will remain silent and pass any fault and tolerate any corruption in the full knowledge that the ONLY thing their union will not back them up on, the only thing that could actually cost them their pensions, is not any abuse of the public or failure of duty, but speaking out against their superiors own moral failure.

Indeed this “Thin Blue Line” will allow police officers to lie even against their own comrades and “brothers” who’ve done exactly as they would do such as in the trial of Derek Chauvin when countless officers and officials remained completely silent as he was railroaded for executing a hold exactly as the Minneapolis Police Department had trained him to.

If they won’t speak out or break rank for one of their own, you can bet the American police class won’t risk their pensions even if it there were plainly malicious orders.

Then of course there is the admitted cowardice, that Crooke did encounter police officers, but scared them away… the admitted fact that the roof was considered as a police sniper point, but ruled out due the slant of the roof posing a “safety threat”…

None of which would be acceptable in any guard unit of the 19th century, regiments have been stripped of their standards for less.

But this is the state of American institutions.

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The institutions that we suspect would like to kill Trump so lack the competence, skill, and daring to do it themselves, that they must either enable or merely insinuate and pray that some lone white male teenager will do the job for them… or these state security forces are so incompetent at securing what we’d suspect to be one of the most protected men in world history, that teenage hobbyists can get 8 shots off and draw the blood of the once and (likely) future king of the world, without even having to figure out how a magnifier on a red-dot works.

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I genuinely wonder at competent men out there… How can people see rank fools and incompetents repeatedly come so close or indeed succeed in making history and yet not being tempted to step on the stage themselves?

When you look at the stupidity and incompetence that assassins, drug lords, smugglers, major crime/political families, military leaders, and world historic personages regularly display… how can intelligent men of competence continue to resist the black flag?

So far only Trump seems daring enough to throw the gauntlet on the stage of history… maybe because for every step of greatness he takes he finds a way to take another as a greater fool?

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Anyway this was the more respectable farce whilst I was away… Crazy teens and darring old men staring each-other down and risking death for the fate of America.

Next time, we’ll look at the successful coup against Biden… And the layers and layers of Farce and decay this entire sequence has betrayed.

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