Killswitch Engaged

Murder is in the air

Curiosity killed the cat, they say. And not because he went out to prowl in Springfield, Ohio. It wasn’t the hard questions that got him killed, either, such as “Did the shooter act alone?” or “Was it an inside job?” Nope, that old puss choked to death on a glut of information. He got every question answered a thousand times over, mixed with lies and obfuscation. When they found his body, he’d chewed up his own tail in frustration.

Marshall McLuhan famously dubbed our interconnected planet a “global village.” It’s become a sort of catchphrase for how groovy the modern world is. But McLuhan’s perspective was always tinged with grim pessimism, at least in the short-term. “By electric speeds we have created a global village,” he mused in 1961, “and can move information faster around the world than across a room, and transformed ourselves, not into global citizens, but into global yokels of the most apathetic and zombie-eyed variety.”

The above quote comes from the McLuhan Institute, but don’t bother looking up the source on Google. It doesn’t exist. And who knows? Maybe it’s fabricated. In a digitized world of deepfakes, phony facts, and vicious rumors, it would be fitting if McLuhan’s most prescient critique was just made up.

Yesterday saw another assassination attempt on Donald Trump. This time it was by a pro-Ukrainian zealot with “gonna kill you” eyes and a 291-page manifesto on Amazon (now removed). According to the latest reports, the Secret Service spotted the would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, poking his rifle barrel through a Florida golf course fence while Trump played a few holes down. The keystone SS agents shot at Routh, missed, and only apprehended him after a bystander identified his vehicle.

Fortunately, no one was killed this time.

Before sunrise today, the X hivemind had assembled a compelling dossier on Routh. Imagine what can be accomplished once they’re all geared up with Neuralink implants! Routh had been a volunteer recruiter for the Ukrainian war effort, even appearing in an Azov Battalion promo video. To my surprise, the New York Times immediately admitted they’d interviewed Routh last year about his overseas mission.

His X account was an endless scroll of desperate spam and boomer Caps Lock rants. “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE-Will I be able to cross to border and fight without a Visa???” His account stayed up just long enough for the online swarm to pick it apart (and it’s archived here).

Routh’s manifesto, Unnecessary War, reads like the screeching Id of our globalist warmonger establishment. “The entire world runs and hides in fear because Putin has Nuclear weapons,” he writes in his chapter “Why not Nuclear War?” He goes on to insist, “We must strike first. … It must be quick and decisive and powerful blow [sic] to end it once and for all.” In addition to a nuclear holocaust, Routh wanted to see Putin and other media-made villains assassinated.

Many online are saying “He’s a FED!” Especially after one sleuth noticed Routh’s second follow on X was Soo Kim, whose now-private profile reads “ex-CIA, RAND Corporation | Yale.” Plus she’s hot, so it’s easy to imagine Kim as some sort of Bond-movie temptress. Either way, it certainly stands to reason that Routh’s Ukraine activities would bring him into contact with numerous intel agents. Hell, once he got their numbers, he probably spammed them like he did all the famous names on X.

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Every Outsider Knows It’s an Inside Job

As always, people are looking for the larger forces at play here—maybe even an “inside job.” Was Routh sent by the Harris campaign? A Haitian cat cartel? Dancing Israelis? World Economic Forum PR interns? China? Iran?

Was Routh set up by intel operatives in our own deep state? In the deeper state?? In the deepest state???

Maybe. But something doesn’t add up. What kind of shadowy operatives would activate a killer who has interviews in the New York Times and Semafor, an appearance in an Azov propaganda film, and a psychotic manifesto available on Kindle? Wouldn’t his handlers at least tell him to delete his X account and take down his e-book? Don’t “they” have any assets with zero digital footprint? Or was Thomas Crooks the last one in the stockpile?

If the deep state is this bad at deep stating, they should probably just shoot themselves instead.

A friend of mine thinks it’s plausible that the Azov Battalion put him up to it. “Azov is marked for extermination when (not if) the Russians get their hands on them,” he said. “Killing Trump is their last play.” Another friend who works with various Ukrainians thinks that explanation is unlikely. Once Florida investigators or the FBI crack into Routh’s phone, those questions should be easy to answer—assuming we ever hear a word about it.

So long as we’re shooting in the dark here, it seems this would be a perfect opportunity for apophenic theorists to propose another Russian conspiracy. After all, Russia would stand to benefit the most from having some Ukraine-loving screw-up try to assassinate a U.S. presidential candidate. I have yet to see this claimed myself, but I bet there are already entire social networks buzzing with that one.

By this time next week, you can be sure online dot-connectors will have assembled rows of esoteric symbols to indict the Luciferian Gnostic Marxist Neo-Integralist Fascist Theosophist Globalist cabal at the bottom of this attempted murder. After all, “they” orchestrate everything else. And this time, their “revelation of the method” was available on Amazon.

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The Copycat Effect

Personally, I think the copycat effect is a reasonable explanation for this second assassination attempt. I’m not saying it’s the explanation—it’s only Day One, man, so cut me some slack, Jack—but this mimetic model doesn’t require a lot of unseen moving parts. The term “copycat effect” was first used to describe Jack the Ripper’s imitators. It came into its own with Loren Coleman’s 2004 book The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines.

Basically, you have X number of psychos in any given society. During certain time periods, two or more are ready to pop off. Once the first psycho takes his shot, the media springs into action, blasting our collective consciousness with sensational coverage. If there are still more psychos out there ready to blow, then they are activated by the first sensationalized killer (or would-be killer).

This sets off a chain reaction until you run out of psychos. Don’t worry, though, more will be pushed to the edge soon enough.

The copycat effect was readily apparent in school shootings. The Columbine killers were inspired by TV coverage of a 1995 mass shooting at a school in Lynnville, Tenn. Many subsequent school shooters—such Seung-Hui Cho who shot up Virginia Tech in 2007—were obsessed with the Columbine shooting and copied their methods. After the dead-eyed Adam Lanza shot some twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, officers found in his bedroom a 7’ by 4’ spreadsheet of over five hundred previous mass murders—a sort of “score sheet”—which included everything from weapons used to clothing worn.

Rampage killing has become a twisted digital subculture all its own. It feeds on its own rotten flesh.

So it seems reasonable to me that Trump’s would-be assassin Ryan Routh was soaking up the endless commentary about Thomas Crooks’s foiled attempt in Butler, PA. Most likely, this firehose of sensationalism was blasted into Routh’s brain via social media, because the networks and newspapers did their best to ignore it.

It’s obvious from his digital trail that he was a loose cannon ready to go off. All he needed was a catalyst—he needed a role model to copy.

If in fact Ryan Routh’s murderous intent arose from the copycat effect, then you have to wonder how many psychos are still stewing out there—glued to their screens—waiting for their chance to take out the Orange Hitler presented to them in the media.

Or maybe we’ll learn that clandestine operatives groomed Routh for this moment but he blew it. And perhaps that story will turn out to be as fake as a Big Pharma ad. In any case, you can be sure that no one will take responsibility for amping up the levels of hatred in America. That is always going to be someone else’s fault.

“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself,” Lester Holt told his NBC Nightly News audience yesterday. “Mr. Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.” The coverage then shifted to alleged bomb threats in Ohio.

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Lost Your Marbles? Help is Available

With all this paranoid confusion in the air, at least we have AI-programmers working hard to anchor the popular narrative to a stable reality. Last Friday, Science published an MIT study entitled “Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI.”

The journal’s editors apparently believe that “beliefs in conspiracies that a US election was stolen incited an attempted insurrection” on Jan 6—which is itself tied to accusations that Trump was behind it. But of course, those accusations don’t count as “conspiracy theories.” The editors also fret about “beliefs” that “COVID-19 restrictions were motivated by nefarious intentions,” alongside wacky ideas about “the assassination of John F. Kennedy, aliens, and the Illuminati.”

Over two thousand Americans were subjected to this AI-based deprogramming and reprogramming experiment. Scientists believe the results are promising. Finally, conspiracy theories can be cured! “The AI chatbot’s ability to sustained tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months,” the Science editors gloat. “This intervention illustrates how deploying AI may mitigate conflicts and serve society.”

Coincidentally, last night a top OpenAI employee known only as Roon wrote on X: “It is very easy to end up in a world where AI is censoring wrongthink cheaply at unprecedented scales. The smarter it gets, the more precise a weapon can be employed.” He went on to write, “If multiple true facts and stories were forcibly removed from the digital Overton Window, then there can be no trust in the information environment—regardless of your politics.”

Yes, such a digital dictatorship is a nightmarish prospect. But it’s also convenient! Imagine a world of court-ordered chatbots. The subject will ask, “Was the recent assassination attempt an inside job? Tell me the truth.”

And the bot will reply, “What assassination attempt? You can’t believe everything you read.”

Some men have targets on their backs. All of us have targets on our brains.

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ICYMI

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