Swimming in the Ocean of Lies

In the Age of Nothing is Real

Election day 2024, is day after tomorrow! Yay. One might wonder the purpose in publishing this article (which will largely address US politics) today, rather than wait until I can weigh in on the election results. This is a conscious decision on my part. In doing so, my message is to de-emphasize the importance of how the election shakes out. As of this moment, signs point to a Trump victory. If Harris pulls off a surprise win, scrutiny will turn toward the integrity of the vote-counting process (and if Trump wins, the other side will scrutinize the legitimacy of that too! Just like they did in 2016). I weighed in on the long history of compromised US general elections in my 2021 article Mass Media and the Taboo Power, and I for one, welcome election scrutiny. We need more of it if we’re ever going to get to a point of true election-integrity reforms.

Generally speaking, however, I urge us to look past the ups and downs of policy changes between Republican and Democratic administrations and observe the remarkable continuity of policy that persists regardless. In my view, the last exception to this phenomenon was the presidency of John Kennedy, and it should be no surprise that his presidency was ended by assassination. But more on that later. The best purpose I can currently imagine in US general election voting would be to aggressively vote for third parties and write-ins until the current Hegelian political duopoly apple cart is overturned.

The More Bizarre Things Get, the More Normal It All Seems

In my previous article, The Great Disillusionment, I remarked on Donald Trump’s remarkable aptitude in continually convincing a demoralized and disillusioned people that he, at least, is worth our significant care and attention—whether in fervent opposition or fervent support. Scant days after I published that article, Trump survived an assassination attempt.

The legitimacy of the attempt was immediately denied by a number of voices on the establishment Left. Initial news reports stated only that Trump had “fallen.” Soon, other voices began insisting that Trump had staged the whole thing. It was too perfect: a single bullet just grazing his ear out of eight shots fired—a monumental photo op after returning to his feet—with the Secret Service allowing him to pose for the cameras and chant for the crowd after the shots, rather than whisking him away immediately.

On the Right, it also seemed too perfect, but not as a setup arranged by Trump—it was evidence of Divine Intervention. The hand of God spared Trump’s life by guiding him to turn his head to the side at just the right moment. This theory was buttressed by circulation of a video recorded and posted by online personality Pastor Brandon Briggs in March of 2024 (almost four months prior to the shooting). In the video, Briggs describes receiving a prophetic vision of a bullet shooting right past Trump’s ear, bringing the former president to his knees. I’m not kidding, watch for yourself.

It’s so bizarre, it makes one believe the whole thing might have been staged after all, and that this Briggs fellow was let in on the script ahead of time—not for God’s grand theater, but for the grand theater staged by the ruling oligarchy to agitate and distract the masses. Multiple people have remarked to me in recent weeks that public events are unfolding like the script of a TV show—nothing feels real.

I began doubting things myself—surely the ear wound couldn’t have been staged, especially not with several bystanders getting shot, and one of them killed. Then again, sacrificing three or four crowd members in this way is almost nothing when compared to the tens of thousands of Gaza civilians willingly murdered in an ongoing state-sanctioned blood sacrifice, or the ongoing carnage in Ukraine. Or the ongoing carnage of the global imperial chess game, waged by the Great Powers for centuries. What’s a few more innocents sacrificed for the next act of the stage play?

These days, anything seems possible. The theories about Trump staging the incident speculated that when Trump dropped to the ground behind his podium, the Secret Service huddled on top of him and applied stage makeup to his ear with blood streaks on his face, then hoisted him to his feet in a predetermined spot for a strategically-positioned photographer to snap the viral “Trump Iwo Jima” image. Trump then delivered his scripted performance, pumping his fist, urging the crowd to chant “Fight!” after (bizarrely) telling the Secret Service to wait for him to get his shoes. (Does Trump usually stake off his shoes when he gives speeches? It’s apropos of nothing, but this is yet another weird tidbit that continues to tug at my befuddled mind.)

I scoured the internet for footage of the bullet actually hitting Trump’s ear, seeking to disprove this ludicrous theory and put it to rest. I found what I was looking for in a slow motion video of Trump getting shot; it showed the gash in Trump’s ear open up right where and when it was supposed to. What a relief to confirm that some things aren’t quite as crazy as they initially seem to be.

But then I discovered that the video was doctored. It was a taken from Trump’s left side, then reversed to make it look like it was taken from his right side where the ear was hit. The gash opening on his ear was a video-editing hoax. The reversal of the image is easy to spot—the lettering on his hat is backwards and the video shows an American flag on the hat above Trump’s visible ear (an insignia which was actually above his left ear) instead of the letters 45 47 which was actually on his hat above his right ear.

Back to the drawing board. Among all the people filming the rally that day, apparently nobody caught the actual bullet hitting the ear on video. Or perhaps such a video indeed exists, but it has merely been suppressed and confiscated. Nothing was helped when images of Trump’s ear were released from a meeting only days later showing no scars or marks on the ear at all— probably the scar is just too faint to show up on camera…?  But why wouldn’t Trump release close-up images of his ear wound and post those images everywhere? It seems like it would be great press. Maybe it’s normal for ears to heal without any trace of scars or marks only days after being hit by a bullet. It just doesn’t seem normal.

Nothing is normal about this case. There is almost no information available about the accused shooter, Thomas Crooks—little more than some footage of him as an extra in a BlackRock video and evidence of a few vaguely ominous internet searches and posts in a video game chat room. He seems to have no politics, and no motive. No one has any idea. The FBI and other governmental authorities have been a black box, releasing almost no information at all about their investigation while simultaneously assuring us that Crooks was a “lone gunman” who “acted alone.”

And yet he was spotted by authorities on multiple occasions acting suspiciously, hours before the shooting, over and over again, right up to the shooting. The numerous details of security taking no action in the minutes before the shooting are too tiresome to list. The most important security breach, however, was surely the fact that Trump was allowed to remain on stage while an active threat had been reported and identified. Even average everyday spectators spotted Crooks on the roof of a building with a gun and yelled their heads off to law enforcement to do something—still with minutes to go before shots were fired! Or perhaps the most glaring security breach was the assignation of that roof as outside the security perimeter to begin with. In Secret Service chief Cheadle’s jaw-dropping excuse for this, she claimed the roof was too steep to station counter-snipers on (let alone include in the security perimeter?!?)—even though the Secret Service counter-snipers who were deployed that day (and who fired no shots until after Crooks had already sprayed the rally with bullets) were stationed on roofs with markedly steeper slopes.

If you followed reports of the shooting at all, dear reader, you already know all these things. But maybe you’ve already forgotten them—after all, the corporate press quickly moved on as if it never happened, and the event was of no consequence. You have to scour and dig through the independent media to locate continuing coverage of this case. (If you would like to do so and don’t know where to look, I’d recommend back episodes of Chris Martensen’s Peak Prosperity Channel for in-depth reporting.)

The official excuse for the circumstances of the assassination attempt amounts to this: “Oh, there were some mistakes made. Perfectly normal. Let’s forget about it and move on.” Soon after the dust settled, President Biden ended his re-election campaign and Vice President Harris was anointed by Democratic Party insiders as the new candidate. The corporate press immediately dropped their (already anemic) coverage of the assassination attempt and launched a non-stop blitz of stories about how excited, joyful, and energized everyone is about Kamala Harris.

I Guess We’ll Just Forget About It And Move On

The last time a major US political party nominated a candidate irrespective of any popular vote was 1820, when every member of the electoral college (save one) ushered James Monroe into an uncontested second term during “The Era of Good Feelings.” The US system of national primaries and caucuses began in 1824 and prevailed for exactly 200 years—until this year. Kamala Harris has become the first presidential candidate in two centuries to never receive a single primary vote. Indeed, the last time she ran for president (in 2020), she dropped out of the race prior to the first contest in Iowa, having failed to garner adequate support from Democratic voters. She ended up receiving a grand total of 814 votes in the primaries that year. Well hey, at least it’s 814 more votes than she got in 2024.

The arbiters of public thought in our corporate press have instructed us to ignore this, of course. We are also instructed to ignore how we got here. We are meant to ignore or forget about how the DNC (Democratic National Committee) broke another storied presidential election norm by eliminating the first-in-the-nation status of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries. Since 1972, these contests have always been first, and for 48 years they were immortalized in political culture as representative of American Democracy itself. Iowa and New Hampshire were meant to equalize the electoral playing field for populist and dark horse candidates by facilitating direct contact and interactions between the candidates and the voters. They were a chance for candidates with limited funds to mobilize a grassroots following over the course of several months, making the case for their candidacy to the voters in person. Success in either of these two states could then launch a successful candidate to compete on the national stage in the contests that followed.

That once venerable tradition was unceremoniously scrapped by the DNC in 2024—another move that was almost entirely ignored by the corporate press. New Hampshire refused to delay their primary to facilitate the DNC’s 2024 demand that the Biden shoo-in state of South Carolina be the first contest of the primary season. So the DNC passed a rule that would strip delegates from any candidate who dared to defy the DNC by actively campaigning in New Hampshire. It was clear that all Democratic Party office-holders would be pressured and strong-armed to offer no resistance to Joe Biden’s renomination. We were meant to believe that Biden was so enormously popular that there was no need for a primary election. Democratic voters couldn’t possibly prefer any other candidate to run for election. The Florida Democratic Party went so far as to remove the office of the president from their primary ballot entirely. Biden would receive all of Florida’s delegates, and Florida Democratic voters would not be allowed to vote for a presidential nominee at all—not even for a write-in candidate. Never mind that Biden’s fourth-year approval ratings were worse than that of any president in history since the advent of national polling—including Trump. Obviously, rank-and-file Democrats would want him and no one else to be nominated: no need to test that premise with something as old-fashioned as a legitimate election.

The DNC did so much to stack the deck against the possibility of viable opposition to Biden in the 2024 primaries, Robert Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the Democratic primary race in 2023 and launched his bid as an independent. With the corporate press openly biased against him and completely ignoring his candidacy (other than to take occasional potshots at him), Iowa and New Hampshire would have constituted his only chances to compete—and that electoral avenue had been demolished by the DNC. Then, just weeks before the Democratic Convention, the whole party magically realized that Biden was senile, as if that hadn’t been evident for years. Now that it was too late to hold a primary election, Biden was shunted off the stage and Harris was able to receive the nomination without having to compete for it. (If 2020 was any measure of her ability to win the nomination legitimately, skipping the primaries would be an absolute necessity for her candidacy.)

But of course, our thought leaders in the corporate press have helped us to regard all this as a set of entirely normal and inconsequential circumstances. In fact, we’re told to suck it up and vote for Harris because “Democracy is on the ballot.” Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Candidate A is the first major candidate to be nominated without a single primary vote in 200 years. Democracy certainly didn’t put her on the ballot. And Candidate B was almost removed from the ballot by a sniper’s gun, having actually prevailed in the democratic nominating process of his party. But we’re supposed to ignore the staggeringly suspicious circumstances that allowed Candidate B’s removal from the ballot (and murder) to miss by a centimeter. We’re also supposed to ignore the relentless lawfare campaign to imprison Candidate B and literally remove his name from the ballot—a campaign waged by the incumbent party of Candidate A. I don’t know if Democracy is on the ballot or not in 2024, but if so, it cannot be on the ballot in the person or party of Candidate A.

Yet another assault on democracy (now embraced by the Democratic Party), is their full-throated ambition to stifle speech. Using the crusade to combat misinformation as their excuse, the Democratic Party has betrayed its legacy as protectors of free speech. Under the Obama Administration, governmental whistleblowers were targeted and persecuted in historic proportions. Official secrecy became jealously guarded, and censorship policies were eventually pushed on companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Corporate media and tech companies are now actively encouraged to censor policy discussion and debate among the citizenry on a wide variety of topics vital to the public interest, including matters of medicine, public health, war, and election integrity. Notwithstanding the aforementioned Federal actions to direct the censorship activities of private companies and the persecution of whistleblowers, defenders of the Democratic Party’s policy insist that private censorship and stifling of speech is a public good. As long as the First Amendment is not directly violated, we are meant to agree that censorship, reduced public discourse, and even a climate of fear around free expression are desirable. Oh wait, in the past few weeks, Democratic Party apparatchik John Kerry publicly admitted that he sees the First Amendment as an obstacle to the censorship he longs for. Well, sorry, John. I don’t know what to tell you.

The public is encouraged to forget that the First Amendment is not meant to be a roadblock to governance in search of a loophole. It is not an obstacle to be skirted by outsourcing censorship to oligarchs and the companies they run. The First Amendment, and the freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, and association are vital human rights and essential to democracy. Without them, democracy cannot and does not exist. A candidate or party who asks for our vote because “democracy is on the ballot” ought to support free speech and a free press as core values. These are not nuisances to find workarounds to thwart. They are values that should be vigorously defended under the law, and that ought to be encouraged by public officials above and beyond the extent to which they are protected by law. At least they ought to be regarded as such by anyone who actually supports a democratic society. Instead, those who sloganeer to us that “democracy is on the ballot” are stifling dissenting voices however they can, attacking ballot access, avoiding interviews, railroading political opponents, and hiding the circumstances and investigations of attempts to assassinate public office holders and candidates under a cloak of secrecy.

Another surreal footnote of this soul-crushing electoral season was the refusal of the Biden Administration to grant Secret Service protection to Robert Kennedy Jr. for over a year. This protection was only granted to Kennedy after the first assassination attempt against Trump—despite the fact that the successful assassination of Robert Kennedy’s own father in 1968 was the reason this protection had been extended to non-incumbent candidates in the first place. Oh yes, I almost forgot… I now have to signify the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, PA as the first assassination attempt against Trump because there was ANOTHER one in September of 2024. And of course, we’re meant to ignore this one too. The second attempt has been hushed up by the corporate press just like the first one was. The FBI has swept this one into another black box, just like with the first attempt, even though this time the accused suspect (Ukraine War fanatic and proponent of a Third World War, Ryan Routh) was captured alive.

This is all perfectly normal; there’s nothing to see here. In the Trump-Harris debate, the first attempt against Trump was not even raised by the moderators as an issue. Forget all about it, folks. You probably already have. Democracy is on the ballot, remember? Vote Harris.

The Great Disillusionment Continues

In the meantime, in the next turn of the Great Disillusionment, Robert Kennedy Jr. folded his cards, endorsed Trump, and joined the Trump campaign. So much for breaking out of the stranglehold of the two-party Hegelian dialectic machine. It’s not hard to understand why he did it, though. Based on the Orwellian anti-democratic actions of the Biden-Harris administration I’ve laid out above, along with the highly suspicious circumstances of the Secret Service stand down that almost resulted in Trump’s death, one can assume that all of this hit pretty close to home for Kennedy. If Trump becomes president again, Kennedy has a chance to join the administration and advance public awareness about public health issues, the biosecurity state, the out-of-control war machine, and even the covered-up assassinations of his father and uncle, John F. Kennedy and Robert K. Kennedy Sr.

RFK may even be able to effect significant policy changes in these areas if Trump wins and keeps his word. Trump now says he will reverse his prior actions as president and insist on the final release of the Kennedy assassination records still being withheld from the public. Can he be trusted to keep his word this time? After all, Trump said he would release those documents his first time around as president. In fact, the JFK Records Act required that all remaining records be released in 2017. On the other hand, as bad as Trump’s betrayal was on this point, his action was only to delay the final release of these withheld documents. When Biden became president in 2021, he announced his intention that the remaining documents would never be released. In effect, the mandate of the JFK Records Act to release all documents on the assassination was henceforth forever null and void, by executive decree. Harris has made no statements to the contrary.

Perhaps Trump has had a change of heart. Perhaps surviving two assassination attempts in the space of two months has helped to change his thinking on this issue. Perhaps inviting Robert F. Kennedy into his campaign can be viewed as evidence of commitment along these lines. Perhaps Trump was still trying to play the establishment game during his first term, and the ruthless and relentless way the establishment attempted to crush for four years hence has opened his eyes. Perhaps the false sense of security he once felt by playing ball with deep state ciphers like Mike Pompeo was whisked away along with a piece of his ear.

Who knows? And who knows what’s really going on anyway? These days, it’s almost impossible to tell. For the record, based on my best guesses and the paltry facts I’ve been able to gather from independent media sources, I believe that both attempts on Trump’s life were legitimate assassination attempts and not staged events. But many questions are left unanswered. I wonder, for instance, about the most glaring and unconscionable Secret Service stand down since John F. Kennedy was set up for a turkey shoot in Dealey Plaza 60 years ago. What are the chances that this would occur on the very day chosen by a mysterious 20-year old kid to take a shot at Donald Trump? But if this was not a product of chance, and Thomas Crooks was guided to attempt the assassination by manipulative conspirators who knew or arranged for the Secret Service to stand down that day, why would the operation be entrusted to some punk kid? Why wouldn’t a legitimate sniper be brought in to do the real shooting, leaving Crooks to be killed and blamed as the lone shooter?

Well, maybe that was the plan, but the part of the plan that included the legitimate sniper fell through. Maybe the deep state and its oligarchs aren’t what they used to be.  Maybe they’ve put all their energy into propaganda psyops, financial swindles, and gloating on dreams of post-human godhood for so long, they don’t have the chops to pull off good old-fashioned political assassinations the way they did back in the ‘60s. Or maybe this operation lacked a legitimate sniper because it was meant as a warning to Trump—sort of a statement to remind him he can be taken down whenever they choose. The kid they sent to shoot at him might have pulled it off, or he might have missed—but if Trump steps too far out of line, they’ll bring in the trained assassins next time. Kind of like how in 1981 John Hinckley Jr. came close to assassinating Reagan, but did not seem to have any external help despite his family’s longstanding ties to Vice President Bush. Reagan could have died and Bush would have become president, which would be a win for the spooks. But if Reagan survived, he would know not to step out of line while president and let the secret government and the oligarchs have their way. That kind of seems like what Reagan ended up doing in the final 7 years and 10 months of his presidency.

But why? What would make Trump so threatening? In my previous article, the Great Disillusionment, I made the case that Trump does not represent any significant deviation from the continued rule of the oligarchic-military junta that has run the US since 1963. I suppose I could be wrong about that. If they really do see Trump as such a big threat, it almost makes me want to vote for him. But is all this just another layer of the ongoing psyop? Is it simply the next necessary thing to sustain and restore the illusion that Trump actually matters? To suck stragglers like me back into the two-party puppet show again? Even Robert Kennedy Jr. got pulled back into it. The whole thing gives me a leery feeling—a queasy, sick, ugly, powerless feeling.

I even get the feeling that Trump isn’t even trying that hard anymore—as if he knows he won’t be allowed to win, and he’s just playing the part that’s been set for him. Doesn’t it kind of feel like that? Like the fix is in? We never had electoral reform. The 2000 election was stolen in front of the whole country, and everybody just let it happen. Since then, all that’s happened is the installation of more and more computerized voting machines. There’s absolutely no way to ensure those machines will produce final results in alignment with how people actually voted. There never has been, and there never can be. Have all our elections been total frauds ever since those things were first installed? Even the supposed surprise Trump victory in 2016? In many ways, he’s seemed like the perfect stooge. He broke the minds of half the country. Democrats and lefties who used to value free speech, medical freedom, and peace while opposing the war machine, the intelligence agencies, oligarchs, and giant corporations now favor censorship, forever wars, medical tyranny, pharmaceutical/tech/media oligarchy, and the CIA. All because they’ve been trained to believe supporting these things means opposing Donald Trump—and opposing Donald Trump is the most important thing in the world.

Who else but Trump could hypnotize what remained of the American Left to denounce and forget almost everything they ever believed in? The only values remaining to the Left are support for queer people and support for abortion rights. That’s it. Everything else is dead and gone. I am personally a strong supporter of both of those things, but if that’s all Americans have left, we might as well already be slaves, or serfs in the new technocratic feudalism. Guess what? Once you’ve ditched free speech, freedom of conscience, the free press, freedom of medical and bodily autonomy (with the sole exceptions of when you want an abortion or gender-affirming hormones or surgery), and you’ve dropped all opposition to the tech and pharma monopolies, the financial giants, the secret government, the military, and the national security state—you’ve played your last card. You’re at the total whim and mercy of the people who really run the country, and the world.

Once they’ve wiped away the last vestiges of the democracy they pretend (poorly) to support, they’ll probably still let us be queer and have abortions. Those things don’t actually threaten their power in any way. But more likely, they’ll continue to divide and rule the country by pitting us against each other on these issues. Every four years, they’ll warn us that the Handmaid’s Tale dystopia will definitely happen next year unless the Democrats win the election. But it won’t actually matter who wins or loses the election, because both candidates will continue to be selected by the technocratic autocrats. (I’m looking at you, Trump—and your ties to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Larry Fink, and the rest of the gang.)

You will have lost your free speech long ago by that point, but you won’t notice, because everything you read, see, and hear will come to you filtered by the tech and media oligarchs, who probably already provide you with 90% of everything you read, hear, and see. Through this control, they will continue to shape and mold your perceptions, your tastes, your beliefs, your reality, and your thoughts. Once this has gone on long enough, free speech will be useless to you even if you have it, even if you remembered what it was. That’s because you will no longer be able to think thoughts that haven’t been selected for you, and you won’t have anything to say that hasn’t been scripted for you by Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, TikTok, Wikipedia, and Amazon.  It won’t even feel like you’ve lost your freedom of speech, because forbidden forms of speech will have become literally unthinkable. You will never have the experience of wishing to say anything prohibited by your ruling technocrats in the first place.

The Ongoing Reality Disintegration

Perhaps the biggest assault on our minds and therefore our sovereignty and independence as free people is the destruction of our sense of reality. As I watch with growing horror and concern, AI grows in leaps and bounds in its ability to manufacture and duplicate any image, any video, any audio. As I watch with growing horror and concern, our pictures of reality are increasingly curated and filtered by tech oligarchies through addictive smart phone devices and computer screens. Lies have become the order of the day. The governing institutions increasingly lie to our faces. They barely try to even hide it from us. Increasingly, they don’t even need to protect their lies and secrets from exposure. They simply ensure that we don’t see it, hear about it, or think about it by putting other things to see, hear about, and think about in front of our faces.

They have progressively co-opted and distorted even the alternative and independent media. More and more, I see these alternative media sources flooded with divisive distractions, ludicrous disinformation, and agents of chaos. We are now shaped and guided both by traditional sources as well as supposed independent sources. The ruling technocrats are learning increasingly effective ways of gaining control of the opposition. Through search engines and social media “algorithms,” favored voices of the opposition can either be promoted or phased out. So-called viral content can be planned for and encouraged by the technocrats. Organically viral content can be countered by flooding the zone with preferred content and preferred narratives until the disfavored content fades out and is forgotten. Even the use of the word “viral” to describe widely shared original content is a clue. Non-controlled content is considered a disease—a virus to combat.

With the rise of AI, the targeted shaping of the internet by militarized intelligence and tech oligarchs has been exponentially enhanced. This will only increase. In addition, as AI-powered deep fakes exponentially improve in their ability to produce content indistinguishable from audio and video that originates in the real world, none of us will be able to know whether anything we see or hear from a computer screen is real or confabulated anymore.

Let’s take the example of an absurd inanity lifted from the Trump-Harris debate. Trump said that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are hunting and eating the dogs and cats of their neighbors. The debate moderators said they are not. Trump said that Springfield residents on TV are saying it is happening. The debate moderators said that the city manager is saying it isn’t happening. As for myself, the viewer, I have absolutely no idea whether this is happening or not. I have no idea if it’s happening a little bit, a lot, or not at all. I have no way of verifying whether it is happening or not. I have no idea if the city manager is lying about what is happening. I have no way of knowing whether the debate moderators are lying about what the city manager said. If I see a video of a Springfield resident saying it is happening, I have no idea whether that person is lying, whether that person is a crisis actor spreading a rumor, or whether they are even in Springfield at all. Once AI gets good enough, I will have no way of knowing whether the person who reported the crime is even a real person instead of a digital ghost. If I see video of someone hunting, killing, and cooking a pet dog or cat, I will have no way of knowing whether I am watching something that really happened, or if I am watching a digital creation, woven from whole cloth.

No one else knows how to know these things either. Everyone is in the same boat. Everyone is forced to do one of two things: One option is to believe someone, or a network of people or institutions, one has decided to trust. The other option is to believe whatever you want to believe—whatever fits the narrative you have become attached to. If you want to support immigrants and you don’t want to believe the immigration issue has spiraled out of control, you believe nobody is hunting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio and the whole story is a hoax. If you want to believe the immigration issue has spiraled out of control and people need to do something about it, you believe the stories about hunting and eating pets is true. Or you end up like me, and you just don’t know what to believe.

Although potentially of vital importance to the residents of Springfield Ohio, the question of fact delineated above is of minor importance as a matter of national public concern. (And that is certainly why it became a heated point of contention in the worthless presidential non-debate.) So allow me to offer a more sobering example of the problem we are beginning to face. Some weeks ago, I came across a news article about Israel launching massive bombs in Lebanon. This article was preceded by reports of an operation in which Israel was somehow able to remotely and simultaneously detonate the lithium batteries of thousands of pagers held by individuals in Lebanon, killing and wounding many of their targets. It was unknown how Israel was able to accomplish this. Had they previously sabotaged all these thousands of pager devices, and then found some way to get them in the hands of their targets? How could they ensure the pagers would only be carried by the people they were targeting? Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe it was just another example of state-sponsored terror. But what if Israel had developed some kind of new weapon that is able to target devices in this way without needing to sabotage them ahead of time? I have no idea. I’m not meant to know. None of us are.

Returning to the subject of Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon, the news articles I viewed were accompanied by videos of the bombs going off. The explosions I witnessed in these videos were unlike anything I had ever seen before—utterly massive in scope—some preceded by rings of light advancing from a source point on the horizon, followed by fireballs erupting from the ground of a size I’ve never seen anywhere, save from films of nuclear weapon explosions. The article stated that no one knew for sure what kinds of bombs Israel was launching in this deadly campaign. It was even speculated that the weapons could be tactical nukes.

I have no idea what tactical nukes look like when they go off. I don’t know if the word “tactical” is simply meant to convey that the nuclear weapon in question is simply smaller in scale, or if it means something else. I don’t know if tactical nukes render mushroom cloud formations in their wake like I’ve seen in nuclear test films before, or if they do something else. I had no idea what I was looking at. But I had the terrifying thought: “What if Israel just started a nuclear war?”

I didn’t have any better way of knowing whether Israel just launched a nuclear weapon strike on Lebanon than I have of knowing whether cats and dogs are being hunted in the streets of Springfield, Ohio. The videos I saw could have been AI deep fakes. Maybe AI isn’t sophisticated enough to deep fake something like that yet. But what about next year? What if, sometime in the near future, we all become accustomed to the fact that literally any video, still frame, or audio we encounter online could be a deep fake and we have no way to tell? In such a world, Israel (or some other nuclear power) could launch a nuclear strike, the explosion could be caught on video—and no one would know whether to believe it or not—no one other than the people near ground zero. But who would believe them? What if competing governments and competing news outlets released contradictory stories, each with their own AI-generated video and audio to support the narrative they wish others to believe? This is the world we are starting to live in. I never saw or read anything as a follow-up to these Israeli bomb videos. Presumably, I’m to conclude that I can safely stop thinking about it and just assume that everything is normal. Just like with the Trump assassination attempts. Just like with the Biden-Harris bait-and-switch. Just like with everything, I guess. Through learned helplessness, we are being conditioned to just tune everything out.

Or take the example of UFOs, for instance. The US government is increasingly spreading the story that UFOs are not only real, but they are of extraterrestrial origin. When these reports first began to surface several years ago, it didn’t result in a seismic shift in perception. There was no clamor from the people of the world to demand answers, to demand a world summit to discuss the implications of these reports. That’s because no one expects the US government to say anything true anymore. Based on their track record, US government reports of extraterrestrial spacecraft simply led me to doubt the presence of extraterrestrial intervention in our world more than I did before. If the US military and government wants me to believe something, it’s probably not true. But it could be true. How can I be sure? I can’t. And neither can anyone else. So when the US government starts to suggest  that they’ve recovered craft of extraterrestrial origin, we all just continue on as if they hadn’t said anything at all. We have become paralyzed in a sea of lies and deception.

Reclaiming Our Minds

Starting in January of this year, the Great Disillusionment and the Ocean of Lies had already settled in on me to the point that I became desperate to learn and study something I could actually be certain about. I am in need of an anchor to counteract the monumental gaslighting wounds and double fakes that have become legion in our present-day experience. My attention turned back to the Kennedy assassination, a subject I first explored in 2001. Through my research into this topic 23 years ago, I became convinced that JFK was assassinated by multiple conspirators acting in concert, and that the official lone gunman narrative promulgated by the US government, corporate press, and academia was a false cover story.

But there were so many loose ends. I couldn’t be sure of who had actually planned and directed the assassination. I had difficulty discerning the truth from false leads and trails of evidence that led to dead ends and continued mystery. I thought I had a basic sense of why it happened, a general sense of who stood to gain, and why it was covered up. But I was left with many questions I had no answers to. As history unfolded through 911, the War on Terror, the financial crash of 2008, Russiagate, and covid, I became increasingly frustrated with the public's adherence to each successive official narrative and coverup. Awash in a swamp of disinformation propped up by collusion in every corner of officialdom—as well as by competing clashes of evidence, conjecture, truth, misinformation, and chaos agent narratives from unofficial sources—the controlling narratives continued to lead the American public down the garden path at every turn.

But in January of 2024, I discovered that the landscape of JFK assassination research had changed. Incredible work had been done in the past 20 years—detangling the solid, corroborated evidence from the false trails and the story-spinning of the hucksters. The pertinent evidence in the case had been combed through, sorted, and collated by serious researchers dedicated to sober analysis. The mess of JFK assassination lore was finally beginning to cohere into verifiable history. Even back in 2001, when I first began studying the case, the JFK assassination had always benefited from a strong evidentiary basis and a wealth of information backing it up. But now, in 2024, it is possible to reach a level of certainty in the case that was previously more difficult to attain.

Studying the JFK assassination these past 10 months has been tonic for my soul. The false realities we’ve been living under all these years—the degradation of government, journalism, academics, and medicine—the rampant corruption in industry, commerce and finance—the endless wars and decimation of the middle class in America—all of it can be traced back to the Kennedy assassination. It was the initial gaslighting spell, public trauma, and secret coup that nullified the promise of America—and by extension, the entire dream of the Free World. The United States, the leading nation of that Free World, had been captured by ruthless warmongers, swindlers, and con-artists who made a disgrace of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. They made a disgrace of our republic, and of democracy itself. They brought this country under the spell of a lie, followed by a river of further lies that soon became a sea, and then an ocean. Henceforward, falsehood would be country’s ruling ethic.

The JFK Assassination was the original crime that ended US democracy, and the cover-up was the original deception that paved the way for every deception to come. To undo the nightmare of lies, avarice, and violence we have come to live under—we must face, reckon with, and integrate the falsehoods and crimes of that assassination. This is the key that unlocks the understanding of all that has come since. And today, in 2024, the truth about the JFK assassination is clearer and more accessible than ever before.

The coming world of deep-fakes and shattered realities would not be a threat if we could trust our public officials, if we could trust our corporate press, if we could trust our doctors and our medical establishment, if we could trust our military, if we could trust our academics and professors, if we could trust our history books, if we could trust our business leaders, and so on. We cannot trust them because we are all living under a lie. Under this regime of lies, power and leadership are forbidden to those who reject the lie.

I am set to embark on a series of articles on the JFK assassination following this one. My goal will be to synthesize the facts of the case with an emphasis on rigorous thinking and adherence to logic and reasoning—to the consequence of facts, the consequence of conclusions, the seductive allure of appealing narratives and false certainties, and the consequence of the contextual integrity that allows the truth to emerge from this whole tangled mess of deception. If you are longing to breathe and taste the crisp air of truth—the truth of what can be known, and what can’t be known—to discern between guesses and conjecture, and bring peace to your gaslighted mind, then join me.

There does seem to be something in the air. Everything seems to get weirder by the minute. Perhaps our lives and our world have become so unaccountably weird, the public is finally ready to insist that our rulers admit the truth. The facts and the labyrinth of the Kennedy assassination are very weird—at least they seem weird when we’ve been living most of our lives in a false reality. But by recognizing the truth within the weirdness of the Kennedy Assassination, the hopelessly corrupt mess of weird the world has become makes a lot more sense.

In brief, Kennedy was killed because he was bringing the United States and the world in the direction of peace. Peace is not weird. Although we are perennially deprived of it, peace feels like the most natural and familiar thing imaginable when we experience it. Peace feels like the fresh breath of sanity. And truth only seems weird when living under a regime of lies. Peace and truth are actually among the sanest, most rational of states to exist in. They are utterly normal.

The time has come for Peace and Truth. Let’s insist on it.