Now hear me out. It is a dicey thing to propose that a given incident is a
false flag attack -- perhaps precisely because a well-executed one is nearly indistinguishable from the very "
enemy" action it is purported to be, and because sometimes an event innocent of this specific nature coincides with signs which make it appear to be one. But a number of signs point to the possibility that the
Alexandria,
Virginia, Congressional
baseball practice shooting was indeed a false flag attack, like the famous
Reichstag Fire, coordinated by those who would most benefit from claiming the mantle of being the ones under attack -- in this instance,
Donald Trump and his allies.
First, let's run through the facts.
Everything begins with James Thomas Hodgkinson, a 66 year old small-town Southern
Illinois resident. Hodgkinson had a long record of instability, with local
police being called to his house a half dozen times beginning in the late 1990s, including a 2006
domestic battery charge against his foster daughter -- a charge which had to be dropped because the girl refused to testify. Hodgkinson volunteered with the
Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, with no inkling of any such incident, but after the election outcome he exhibited great agitation. In March 2017, police were summoned to deal with Hodgkinson shooting at trees in his neighborhood. So here we have a person who is "in the system." His volatility is known to the authorities under Trump's command. His ability to be triggered to
violence with the proper
manipulation, his ownership of a
firearm, and some knowledge of his political leanings. In the terminology of those who study such things, Hodgkinson was the "regular guy" who could be transformed into a "lone gunman" -- possibly programmed through any number of mental trickery techniques.
And indeed, not long after this neighborhood shooting incident, Hodgkinson suddenly relocated to the Alexandria area, spending weeks living out of his van and becoming a regular at the local YMCA. What -- or who -- made that relocation come about? It was during this time -- late in May -- when Hodgkinson wrote on social media "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co." This was language tailor-made to be used to underscore a victimization claim on the part of Trump and his supporters. And it was only about a week thereafter that Trump tweeted his infamous "
covfefe" tweet, which White House personnel intimated had a meaning known amongst themselves. Was "covfefe" wrapped up in signalling something like this?
Further oddities litter this timeline. Hodgkinson told his wife earlier in the week that he was done with the DC area, and was turning around and heading home to Illinois. But then he stopped by a
gas station, and the attendant happened to complain of having to work six days a week -- which turned out to be a trigger in itself, instantly making Hodgkinson apoplectically sputter about the evils of Trump. Within days, Hodgkinson was dead -- killed in his own attack on a Congressional baseball practice, and so unable to provide an account of how exactly it was that he came to be the shooter.
Another quite remarkable thing is the attack itself. All kinds of breadcrumbs are left to paint this as violence inherent in the "left" directed at the "right." As he headed into the ballpark, Hodgkinson asked a passerby whether it was Democrats or Republicans practicing. But how did he know that it would be either? How did he know there were Congressional baseball training sessions going on, and that these would be a point of relative vulnerability to go forth so? Did somebody tell him? Did somebody simply put the information in his thought process some other way? How did his time in the area happen to run until just the time that this baseball game was to take place (since he had already decided to leave town)?
The next sign of something amiss is the surreal marksmanship of a shooter, with no apparent training needed to have such marksmanship. And, yes, it takes considerable marksmanship to wound targets
without killing any. And so, as this man walked into a "target-rich" zone with a semi-automatic weapon, he managed to fire a hundred rounds and inflict many wounds, yet did not kill anybody. The most serious injury incurred (other than Hodgkinson's own deadly receipt of a barrage of bullets) was a shot to the hip of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise -- who was by happenstance more severely injured than might have been expected by the location of the injury. Simply put, the people Hodgkinson shot were shot as if by somebody attempting to make it look convincing, but without actually taking any lives.
And now, the most damning aspect of this as a possible false flag: Both the timing and the framing of the attack are massively politically advantageous for one political group. The timing comes on the heels of Senate testimony by
Jeff Sessions, Trump's
Attorney General (which, everybody knew well in advance would be at best a stonewalling fest), and with a new investigation underway and discontent in the polity over it. Not to mention the day was Trump's 71st birthday, when questions about his mental stamina have been bubbling ever since certain behavioral oddities during his Saudi Arabia trip.
And speaking of Trump.... well, Trump's own behavior suggests
advance knowledge of the crisis, and executive preparation and staging for his response to it. Trump, it must be noted, likes taking time away from the White House, whether to rally the base with turbulent speeches or symbolic gestures, or to golf. But on the evening preceding this attack, he hurried back to Washington DC from a visit to Wisconsin, as if to be sure to be in the White House to respond to something which was going to happen that day. Not only that, but despite being infamous for his prolific late night and early morning
Twitter activity, Trump tweeted
nothing at all after 9:53 PM the night before, keeping quiet up until after the attack had happened. Simply put, the airwaves were kept clear, as if to open the way for a coming big story.
And not only was Trump's Twitter feed clear, so was his
calendar. Think about that, the calendar of the US President, in the middle of the week when he'd been away from work the previous day and was going away again towards the end of the week (to
Miami, to announce a cosmetic rollback to Obama's Cuban Thaw), had nothing of significance on it. The most high-profile thing scheduled for the day was a Department of Labor stop and photo-op, the sort of thing that a President might actively plan to cancel at the last minute to tackle a crisis.
Again, all of this is simply speculation, connecting of dots which even if true probably will never yield a complete picture. But what we do know is that Trump is a President who believes in
conspiracy theories -- who has intimated that
9/11 was an inside job, and commiserated unquestioningly with radio host
Alex Jones, who insisted that the
Sandy Hook shootings were an
Obama-staged
hoax designed to legitimize gun-grabbing. This is a President who has perpetuated rumors of horrors as if these were normal elements of governing, who has since taken control of governing. Who now controls the CIA and all of its mind programming efforts. And who has, at a very opportune time, received a very opportune gift of a crisis to pin attention upon and use as leverage for pushing of a personally highly profitable
agenda.
Stranger things have happened.