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“STAGED”: Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere!

We can’t imagine why…

By Kevin Barrett | May 3, 2026

On April 23, the 410th death anniversary of William “All the World’s a Stage” Shakespeare (and his trusty Hispanic sidekick Cervantes) CNN published a thought piece entitled “How Would an Assassination Attempt Be Staged?” Two days later, on April 25, somebody staged yet another Trump assassination attempt, this time at the White House Correspondents Dinner at the Washington, DC Hilton.

According to the official narrative, the Hilton shooting was staged by a lone producer, director, casting director, lead actor, and stuntman (it was a dangerous scene) named Cole Tomas Allen. We are told, and video seems to confirm, that Allen descended a back stairway from his hotel room, sprinted past a security checkpoint, fired a shot which struck a Secret Service officer’s bulletproof vest, evaded return fire, tripped on a magnetometer box and fell to the ground, and was jumped on by cops, never having gained access to the actual ballroom where the event was taking place. Allen left a brief manifesto calling himself a “friendly federal assassin” who was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Surrounding the event were some odd coincidences. As I wrote the morning after the shooting:

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline “Machine Gun Lips” Leavitt, predicted last night’s shooting two hours before it happened: “There will be some shots fired tonight!”… Fox News reporter Aishah Hasine was in the midst of describing Leavitt’s husband Nicholas Riccio half-bragging half-warning her of what was about to go down, when suddenly and for no apparent reason (beyond the obvious one) Fox cut off the feed…

Weird Israeli connections also surfaced, as is par for the course with these kinds of events, including:

The patsy’s social media profile featuring a picture of him wearing an IDF sweatshirt; the patsy’s name being allegedly researched in Israel less than 24 hours before the attack; and the shooting erupting at the exact moment that an Israeli magician was terrifying Melania by exposing private information she had thought was secret.

If powerful insiders staged the event, perhaps using Allen as a mind-controlled patsy, what might have been their motive or motives? Social media users argued that the shooting greased the skids for Trump’s secure White House ballroom, which had been facing legal and political challenges. The Guardian noted: “Trump’s quick pivot to claiming that the shooting incident confirms the need for a more secure ballroom at the White House, and rightwing pundits’ near-uniformity in messaging along the same lines in the immediate response, heightened the conspiracy framing.”

The Israeli connections suggested another possible motive: reminding Trump just who were the “magicians” who could stage assassination events, and who held terrifying secrets that could ruin his and Melania’s lives. The Guardian reported what many believe: “Israel is blackmailing him for untold reasons, perhaps related to the Jeffrey Epstein files, and dragging the US into war in Iran.”

The Guardian’s phrasing subtly injects confusion where none is necessary. Blackmailing Trump for untold reasons? Back when it was Russia being accused of blackmailing and controlling Trump, everyone knew the reasons why a foreign state would want to blackmail and control a US president. Is the Guardian pretending that it can’t even imagine why Israel would want to blackmail Trump? Unless, of course, they were using untold in the sense of “a quantity so huge that it cannot be measured, counted, or fully described.” Could the author, Rachel Leingang, be hinting at the obvious fact that Israel would have countless reasons to want to control the US president? Did she sneak that one past her editors?

Perhaps those “untold’ reasons, Leingang tells us, might be “related to the Jeffrey Epstein files, and dragging the US into war in Iran.” Is Leingang pretending to be too stupid to understand what she is saying, in a clumsy effort to avoid responsibility for unambiguously and explicitly conveying what everyone knows or strongly suspects to be true? The moral: If you write for mainstream media, never offer a clear, straightforward summary of what “conspiracy theorists” believe, because it might sound reasonable and convincing. Instead, muck it up a bit, add some confusion, and give the reader the impression that it’s the “conspiracy theorists” who are confused.

CNN’s “How Would an Assassination Attempt Be Staged?”, published 48 hours before the latest shooting, exhibits a similar technique of seemingly deliberate obfuscation. Noting that the hashtag #staged has been picking up momentum, reflecting ever-growing skepticism about the July 13, 2024 “Trump shooting” in Butler, Pennsylvania, the author, Harmeet Kaur, offers an overly complicated mishmash of reasons why staging a political PR event would be…overly complicated. And that, of course, is why nobody would ever do such a thing.

Kaur begins by pretending that she doesn’t understand what the term staged could possibly mean in the context of a political PR stunt. After a detour through the etymology and philology of the term staged (“from the Old French ‘estage,’ meaning ‘dwelling,’ and its verb form ‘estager,’ meaning ‘to stay somewhere.’ ‘Estage’ is also related to the Latin ‘stagium’”) Kaur notes that by the 1930s staged was being used to describe faked crime scenes. Such doings, she suggests, are rare and exotic. The plain, obvious fact that almost any serious crime, committed by criminals with above-room-temperature IQs, will involve “staged” presentations of evidence and/or the lack thereof, including such simple “staging” as wiping away fingerprints or wearing ski masks, apparently doesn’t register with her.

Nor does Kaur note that a certain ethnoreligious group, whose genocidal crime headquarters, I mean “state,” is the number one suspect in the Butler and Charlie Kirk shootings as well as countless other state crimes against democracy, has a well-documented history of staging crimes for political gain. As you watch the following half-hour video compilation of mainstream media reports of Jews hoaxing “antisemitic” attacks on themselves, keep two things in mind: 1) This is just the tip of an enormous iceberg; and 2) That iceberg of thousands of similar cases represents just the dumb and/or unlucky ones who got caught.

Rumble link

The US clearance rate for ordinary crimes, mostly committed by impulsive, none-too-bright criminals, is less than 45% for violent crimes and less than 15% for property crimes. Miscreants who plot their crimes carefully—as high-level political criminals do—are obviously going to get away with the vast majority of their misdeeds, even before we factor in the likelihood that they have corrupted law enforcement and the media. What is surprising about the Butler, Pennsylvania “Trump shooting” is not that they managed to pull off such a complex and difficult operation, but that they did it so casually and clumsily, not even bothering to create even the slightest wound on Trump’s ear.

Roughly two and a half hours after he was taken off the rally stage, Trump says in a Truth Social statement, “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin. Much bleeding took place…” Yet not one shred of convincing evidence, not least of all the extensive medical evidence that would exist had Trump actually taken a bullet to the ear, supports the claim that Trump’s ear was wounded in any way. Nor does he appear to have suffered the hearing damage that might have been expected.

Whoever was in charge of the Secret Service detail must have known that Trump was in no danger. Less than a minute after the volley of shots, Trump was allowed to stand up and shake his fist in front of the flag in an obviously pre-planned photo op. Apologists for the Secret Service conspirators claim that the determination “shooter is down” reassured them that it was perfectly okay to allow Trump to stand up and expose himself to more potential bullets. But had the event been authentic, how could they have possibly known that there was only one shooter?

Kaur’s CNN article avoids even entertaining such questions. Like Leingang’s Guardian article on the Hilton shooting, it offers an ad hominem argument against the “conspiracy theorist” by representing him as a deliberately discombobulated straw man, whose supposed incoherent, confusing arguments are actually CNN’s own deliberately distorted rendering.

Kaur hauls out Spencer Parsons, “an associate professor of media production at Northwestern University and an independent filmmaker who has staged shooting scenes,” to claim that staging the Butler “Trump shooting” scene would be so difficult as to be essentially impossible. Parsons claims that a “staged shooting scene” requires vast numbers of people: “the director, camera operators, camera technicians, lighting technicians, sound engineers, special effects coordinators, safety coordinators and so on.”

Talk about misdirection! Why would ANY such people be necessary for a high-level criminal operation involving a deceptive shooting?! Were camera, lighting, sound, special effects, and safety technicians necessary when hypnotized patsy Sirhan Sirhan fired a volley of random shots, distracting onlookers while the professional killer pressed a revolver to the back of Robert F. Kennedy’s head and pulled the trigger, leaving powder burns on his skull?

Kaur tells us that setting up a patsy to take the blame for a shooting is impossibly complicated:

Then there’s the issue of the fake assassin himself. The task would require an extraordinarily skilled marksman, someone who could aim close enough to the candidate’s head to make it look like he’d intended to hit him without actually hitting him. (Acquaintances of the gunman who tried to shoot Trump told reporters that he was rejected from his high school’s rifle club because he was such a bad shot.)

And to make the situation seem believable, the Secret Service would have to kill the designated shooter after he opened fire, an outcome the person in the gun-wielding role either wouldn’t anticipate or would have to be willing to accept.

Kaur again sets up a preposterous straw man: A conspiracy theorist stupid enough to think Thomas Crooks fired shots that came anywhere near Trump’s head, and that Crooks was a conscious, witting, fully-informed participant. But nobody thinks that! What skeptics actually think is that Crooks, like most other patsies going back to Sirhan, was probably mind-controlled. (For an introductory discussion including a demonstration of MK-Ultra style hypnotic mind-control, check out Jesse Ventura’s “Mind-Controlled Assassins and Programmed Killers.”) Crooks, like Oswald, was “just a patsy” who didn’t shoot anyone. The actual shooting, which did not and could not have caused a bullet to come anywhere near Trump’s head, but which likely did strike three onlookers, killing one of them, was fired from the building behind and to the left of the one that hypnotized patsy Crooks had climbed onto. For details, check out my interview with filmmaker John Hankey, and watch his film below.

Kaur then implies that it would have been too difficult or impossible for Trump to use a squib to create the fake blood he smeared on his face like warpaint for the photo op:

The blood would be another consideration, Parsons says. Film crews simulate gunshot wounds via squibs, small explosive devices that spout fake blood when detonated — some conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s assassination attempt claimed that he used a squib because the blood on his face was supposedly only seen after he raised his hand to his cheek, though researcher Katherine FitzGerald noted at the time that the first appearance of blood was not clear from the videos.

Another technique for staging bloodshed might involve the candidate superficially wounding himself with a small razor blade, like professional wrestlers do, but that also presents challenges…

Wait a minute! What does Kaur mean, also presents challenges?! The first paragraph quoted above fails to present the slightest argument or evidence that Trump or a Secret Service confederate would have faced the slightest “challenge” in using a squib to produce the fake blood. The word also is a lie. Kaur hopes the careless reader will gloss over it.

Having refuted nothing while flailing about with straw men, Kaur concludes:

Given all of this, Parsons finds the idea that an assassination attempt of this scale could be “staged” to be “tremendously unlikely.” “This is just astronomically difficult to stage,” he adds. “The whole thing, from a filmmaking perspective, seems to be just immensely, immensely difficult and really based on a lot of chance.”

What would be so hard about putting an MK-Ultraed patsy on a rooftop, a professional sniper in a difficult-to-spot location where he could shoot a couple of bystanders, and giving Trump a blood squib after rehearsing “hit the deck, smear the blood, count to fifty, get up, shake your fist in front of the flag”? Sure, you and I couldn’t do it, but we don’t control the top of the federal command chain.

Setting up that scenario wouldn’t require precisely the same skill set that Parsons, the film-and-TV guy, enjoys. But if you think that people with “deceptive shooting” skill sets don’t exist, you must not know much about special forces, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and the rather large area where they overlap. That’s why someone like Joe Kent, the former Counterrorism chief who knows people with such skill sets, can easily see that incidents like the Butler and Charlie Kirk shootings are extremely suspicious, and point directly at the overlapping territory inhabited by Israel, Israeli-linked organized crime, and their assets in US military, intelligence, and police agencies… and, perhaps most importantly, the mainstream media that insists on obfuscating such matters.

May 3, 2026 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video, Wars for Israel | Israel, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on “STAGED”: Conspiracy Theories Are Everywhere!