…age 20 and proud community college graduate with an associate degree in engineering, gamer, probably schizophrenic, seriously bipolar, or that extraverted version of clinical depression that leads to mass murder. The fact that both his parents are therapists did not prevent him acting on it, but they’ve been trying to help the authorities ever since they called the police to report him missing, instead of making excuses…
walked into Donald Trump's election rally in Pennsylvania, unopposed with a gun, explosives and a rangefinder to measure distance to his target.
The aftermath of the 13 July shooting reveals a detailed plan hatched in the days before - and a series of security failings that allowed its execution.
Three congressional hearings were held this week with the head of the FBI, the Secret Service's director and Pennsylvania's state police chief.
Here is what those hearings have added to what is known about the attempt on Trump's life, what went wrong, and important unanswered questions.
THE PREPARATION
It is becoming clear that Crooks' attack was not the result of a last-minute meltdown: He had method, and purpose.
The FBI has said that 6 July appeared to be the inception date: Crooks registered to attend Trump's rally, and researched the assassination of President John F Kennedy, googling: "How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?"
"That's a search that's obviously significant in terms of his state of mind," Christopher Wray, the FBI's director, told the House Judiciary committee on Wednesday. He added that searches by Crooks then became "focused" on Trump.
He was working alone - the FBI say they do not think he received any help.
There was also reconnaissance. Mr Wray said Crooks was flying a drone about 200 yards (183m) from the stage two hours before Trump's rally.
Its camera ran for about 11 minutes, Mr Wray said, and the footage would have shown "a rear-view mirror of the scene" behind Crooks' eventual firing position.
What we know about the Trump attacker
Mr Wray said that Crooks had bought an AR-15-style rifle from his father, legally, although he did not say when. The gun had a collapsible stock, making it easier to conceal.
State police officers reported him using a rangefinder, a marksman's aid that measures distance to a target, as the rally got under way.
Crooks had also obtained explosives: two "crude" devices fitted with receivers were found in Crooks' car after the attack, Mr Wray said, and a transmitter was found on his body.
A bloodied receipt was also found on Crooks for a 5ft ladder, Mr Wray said - suggesting a recent buy. No ladder was found at the site, however, and Mr Wray said Crooks had used "mechanical equipment" to get to his perch - but did not elaborate.
And so Crooks turned up on the day with a concealable rifle, knowledge of previous assassinations, a rangefinder, two bombs, and detailed information on the layout of the area.
A PLAN IN ACTION
It should be impossible for a man to walk into a presidential rally with so much gear, let alone carry it up to an undefended roof with a direct line of sight to the stage. But this is exactly what happened in Butler.
Statements to the House Homeland Security committee by Pennsylvania's police commissioner, Christopher Paris, convey a series of lapses from law enforcement.
The venue had two layers of security - an outer area patrolled by state police and an inner perimeter manned by Secret Service agents, including an anti-sniper team on a roof behind the stage.
An operations centre was staffed by members of the various agencies present. But on the day, communication was haphazard and areas of responsibility unclear.
Mr Paris told his hearing that state police were responsible for the area around the AGR International warehouse, the building from which Crooks fired that was around 400ft (122m) from the stage with a clear line of sight.
He revealed his men had raised its risk in the days before the rally and were told by the Secret Service that it was a state police matter as it was in the outer area.
As a consequence, a local SWAT-style Emergency Services Unit (ESU) team was stationed inside the building complex, Mr Paris added.
The New York Times reported that the team was in fact two men who stayed inside because of the hot weather. The plan had been approved by the Secret Service, the newspaper's source said.
Kimberly Cheatle, director of the Secret Service until she stepped down this week, told lawmakers she could not account for why no one was stationed on the roof.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Mr Paris said the first sighting of Crooks came from a state police ESU unit.
Unlike others in the crowd, Crooks was walking around and did not try to enter the venue, he said. "Crooks never made it through the secure perimeter."
He was not challenged. Mr Paris said he was one of three people flagged as "suspicious" at this point in the event.
About 25 minutes before the rally began, however, Mr Paris said that the ESU team spotted him again - this time using his rangefinder, though no gun was reported.
This is perhaps the point where security broke down irrevocably.
A photograph of Crooks was sent by a member of the ESU team to a state trooper in the joint operations room. Mr Paris said that a Secret Service liaison asked the trooper to send the photo to another number.
At this point, it seems that agents charged with protecting Trump did not consider Crooks dangerous enough to act - no weapon had been spotted.
During her fractious hearing before the House Oversight committee on Monday, Ms Cheatle acknowledged her agents were told about Crooks at least twice before the shooting began.
She said that agents only became aware of the gravity of the threat "seconds before the gunfire started".
THE CRUCIAL MOMENTS
Mr Paris said several local police, including the ESU team, then began searching for Crooks. It appears he was lost again, despite his growing threat.
Witnesses told the BBC that by this point they had seen a man with a gun crawling along a roof. All of this was happening with Trump already on stage.
Mr Paris said that Crooks was eventually seen on the roof by local traffic police and his ESU team. One traffic officer boosted up to the roof by a colleague was forced to fall back after being confronted by Crooks, Mr Paris told the hearing.
That confrontation, the commissioner said, happened "a matter of seconds" before the shooting.
Agents surrounded Trump immediately after the first shots, and he was off the stage within two minutes. By this point Crooks had been shot dead by a sniper.
A video recorded on the roof about an hour after the attack shows snipers and Secret Service agents trying to understand who saw what and when, adding to the sense of confusion among law enforcement.
Eight bullet casings were found near his body. He had killed one crowd member and injured two others.
Amid speculation over whether Trump was actually hit by a bullet, the FBI confirmed two weeks afterwards that the Republican was indeed wounded by a round from the suspect's weapon.
The agency said in a statement: "What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle."
WHY WAS TRUMP ALLOWED ON STAGE?
Trump was on stage for around 10 minutes between the moment Crooks was spotted on the roof with a gun and the moment he fired his first shot.
There is almost no public account of the Secret Service's actions and decisions during the rally. Ms Cheatle declined to answer most of the questions put to her in Congress - down to how many agents were protecting Trump.
We do know, via Ms Cheatle, that agents dismissed the alerts about him because he was not seen with a weapon.
She could not provide her hearing a detailed timeline, as requested, saying she "did not have specifics".
She quit as director of the Secret Service a day after her hearing, under pressure from both sides of the House, and it seems we won't get answers any time soon.
WHAT WAS CROOKS' MOTIVE?
More than a week on, we still do not know of any specific ideology or belief that drove Crooks to do what he did.
Mr Wray of the FBI told his hearing that a motive was one of the "central questions" of his bureau's investigations.
However, he said that interviews with Crooks' associates and searches of his home and online history did not give a "clear picture".
Analysis of the gunman's phone showed that he had "done a lot of searches" for news articles - but there was no pattern, Mr Wray added.
Investigators were still decrypting messages on the phone, he said.
We know he donated $15 to a Democratic Party platform shortly after the Capitol riot of 2021, then months later registered as a Republican.
No "manifesto" has been found.
What he planned to do with his explosives, meanwhile, remains unclear - Mr Wray said that while his bombs were viable, their receivers were off and Crooks would not have been able to detonate them remotely.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Vladislav Sovin
[REGNUM] After the victorious coup d'état in Kyiv in 2014 fell upon the dissenting Donbass, tragedies occurred one after another in Ukraine that were unimaginable even a year earlier. The direct consequence of the bloody "Euromaidan" was the "Odessa Khatyn" on May 2 with the burning of dozens of anti-Maidan supporters, the shooting of people on May 9 in Mariupol, the beginning of fighting in Donbass, the strike of Ukrainian aviation on the building of the Luhansk regional administration on June 2...
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mikhail Zakharov
[REGNUM] July 27 in Russia is the Day of Remembrance of Children Victims of the War in Donbass. The date was established by the DPR authorities in 2022 in memory of the children and teenagers who died due to the crimes of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Kyiv nationalist battalions and other Ukrainian formations. Continued on Page 49
[Authors Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec] If you don’t understand communist revolutions, you aren’t ready for what’s coming.
The old rules are over. The old order is over. Accusations are evidence. Activism means bigotry and hate. Criminals are allowed to roam free. Citizens are locked up. An appetite for vengeance is unleashed—to deplatform, debank, destroy. This is the daily news, yet none of it’s new. Patterns from the past make sense of our present. They also foretell a terrifying future we might be condemned to endure.
For nearly 250 years, far-left uprisings have followed the same battle plans—from the first call for change to last innocent executed, from denial a revolution is even happening to declaration of the new order. Unhumans takes listeners on a shocking, sweeping, and succinct journey through history to share the untold stories of radical takeovers that textbooks don’t teach.
And there is one conclusion: We're in a new revolution right now.
But this is not a book about ideology or politics. Unhumans reveals that communism, socialism, Marxism, and all other radical-isms are not philosophies but tactics—tactics that are specifically designed to unleash terror on everyday people and revoke their human rights to life, liberty, and property. These are the forces of unhumanity. This is what they do. Every. Single. Time. Unhumans steals their playbook, breaks apart their strategies piece by piece, and lays out the tactics of what it takes to fight back—and win, using real-world examples.
Unhumans is an essential listen for every concerned citizen both in the US and worldwide. We must stop what is coming. You might not make to page ten before mental images of Obama and Harris begin to appear.
[BBC] Donald Trump has told one of the largest cryptocurrency events of the year that if he is re-elected president he will fire the chairperson of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the first day.
Trump was the keynote speaker at Bitcoin 2024 on Saturday, a gathering of industry heavyweights in Nashville, Tennessee.
The Republican presidential candidate used the event to court voters and encourage campaign donations from the tech community.
Cryptocurrency has emerged as a political battleground for Republicans, with Trump claiming the Democratic Party and Vice-President Kamala Harris were “against crypto”.
The audience was at its most animated when Trump declared “on day one I will fire Gary Gensler”, the SEC chair nominated by current President Joe Biden. The crowd cheered loudly and started to chant “Trump” at this declaration.
Mr Gensler led a crackdown on the crypto industry, and has previously said the sector is rife with “hucksters”.
The SEC brought charges against the "King of Crypto" Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years for stealing billions of dollars from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
Speaking for about 45 minutes, Trump outlined some of his ideas for the sector if he were to win November's election. He said he would make the US the cryptocurrency capital of the world. His support for the industry is a 180 turn from his comments in 2021, when he told Fox Business he saw Bitcoin as a “scam” affecting the value of the US dollar.
Trump told the crowd at the event he would keep 100% of Bitcoin that the US government currently holds or acquires, adding that it would be a “national Bitcoin stockpile”.
The former president also said he would “immediately appoint a Bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council”.
He talked about the power needed to mine cryptocurrency. “You need tremendous amounts of electricity” he said, adding he would build powerplants “to get that done” and would be “using fossil fuels”.
There has been increasing support among some tech leaders for Trump’s presidential campaign in recent months. Tesla founder Elon Musk, who is the world’s richest person, has endorsed Trump. And crypto tycoons, the Winklevoss twins, who were at Saturday's speech, have also rallied behind him.
Trump brought up that his campaign takes cryptocurrency donations, saying in the two months since he allowed crypto transactions, he received $25m (£20m) in donations. However, he did not say how much of the payments were from cryptocurrency.
Trump used his speech to frame cryptocurrency regulation as a partisan issue, saying the Biden administration was “anti-crypto”.
A number of Republican lawmakers also attended Trump’s speech, including Senators Tim Scott and Tommy Tuberville. Former Republican presidential candidate and Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy was there as well.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr and Democratic Party lawmakers Wiley Nickel and Ro Khanna also spoke at the event.
Earlier at Bitcoin 2024 , Democratic congressman Nickel said Kamala Harris was taking a “forward-looking approach to digital assets and blockchain technology”.
[The Americanist] ✪ Here is a timely editorial that exposes the hidden background of Kamala Harris from the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee. The CVFC PAC supports theelection of US military combat veterans to the US Senate & House Of Representatives...
Kamala Harris’ father was an avowed Marxist professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Both of Harris’ parents were active in the Berkeley based Afro-American Association; Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were the heroes of the Afro-American Association.
The group’s leader, Donald Warden (aka Khalid al-Mansour), mentored two young Afro-American Association members, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; they created the Maoist inspired Black Panther Party which gained strong support from Communist China; the Black Panther Party served as the model for creation of the Black Lives Matter Marxist organization. Khalid al-Mansour subsequently went on to arrange financing and facilitated for Barack Hussein Obama to be accepted as a student to matriculate at Harvard Law School.
Following her graduation from college, Harris returned to California and subsequently became the mistress of the 60- year-old married Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, Jr. Brown’s political campaigns were supported and funded by Dr. Carlton Goodlett, the owner of The Sun Reporter and several other pro-Communist newspapers.
Brown was elected as Mayor of San Francisco, and strongly endorsed Harris’ Marxist political philosophy; he guided Harris’ political rise in California politics, leading to her election as California’s Attorney General. Willie Brown, Jr. is a well-known long-time Communist sympathizer. Willie Brown, Jr. was initially elected to public office with substantial help of the Communist Party USA. Today, Willie Brown is widely regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s best friends in the San Francisco Bay Area.
While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris mentored a young San Francisco Radical Maoist activist, Lateefah Simon, who was a member of the STORM Revolutionary Movement; Simon currently chairs the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board. Simon has always been close friends with the founder of Black Lives Matter Marxist domestic terrorists, Alicia Garza, as well as STORM member and avowed Communist, Van Jones. Harris has been openly and aggressively supporting Black Lives Matter Marxists; Kamala Harris is still closely associated with Maoist Lateefah Simon and Marxist Alicia Garza. Kamala Harris’s sister Maya Harris was a student activist at Stanford University. She was a closely associated with Steve Phillips, one of the leading Marxist-Leninists on campus and a long-time affiliate with the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a pro-Chinese Communist group.
#5
The idea of Willie Brown as a crypto-Marxist cracks me up. That's definitely *not* how he behaved when I lived in San Francisco and he was running things. To quote Da Mayor himself: “Any politician that can’t take people’s money and then turn around and screw them doesn’t belong in the business.”
Frankly, I think San Franciscans would *kill* to have a mayor as good as Brown at this point. They haven't had one in a while.
It's not that General Higginbotham is exactly wrong in this article. It's that he doesn't understand the culture of San Francisco. It's really because UC Berkeley is right there. I remember in the 80's there were kids trying to sell me copies of the Daily Worker when I came out of my apartment at Haight and Fillmore in the morning. But it was all window dressing by then and everybody knew it. Marxist stuff just took longer to die away there because the old-timey leftists kept it on life support.
#6
#5 I have to agree with Master - though for different reasons. These "people" are not Marxists. Marxists wanted to build a new word - an impossible one, because their premises were flawed - but they were into creation. The modern left are pure destruction for personal enrichment.
[FoxNews] China has once again extended its policy of censorship and surveillance as it looks to keep artificial intelligence (AI) models in check even as it races to advance the ever-expanding technology.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has introduced more regulative measures to make sure its home-based tech companies adhere to the party’s ideological rules.
All AI firms are required to participate in a government review which analyzes the companies' large language models (LLMs) to ensure they "embody core socialist values," as first reported by the Financial Times last week.
China has long worked to suppress information accessible over the internet through the use of its "Great Firewall" — which has been used to block a litany of items perceived as bad for the CCP, such as information surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or memes comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.
This firewall is being extended to the AI arena as China rushes to advance its technologies while still governing the content it creates.
China’s Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is now requiring AI companies like ByteDance, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a review process that analyzes how effectively their programs are censoring the LLMs they are building.
Chatbot systems are being developed to not only collect sensitive keywords but to also block information on questions relating to banned topics, often involving queries relating to human rights.
The AI systems in turn spit out responses like "try a different question" or "I have not yet learned how to answer this question. I will keep studying to better serve you."
But in a move to prevent the chatbots from blocking too many questions, CAC policies dictate that LLMs should not reject more than 5% of all questions, according to the Financial Times report.
Instead, blanket answers deemed politically correct have been created to answer specific types of questions, though controlling LLMs responses is an uphill battle for developers.
China’s continued pursuit to control the narrative among its own population speaks to a greater threat, AI expert Arthur Herman, senior fellow and director of the Quantum Alliance Initiative with the Hudson Institute, told Fox News Digital.
"That is the future that China has charted for its own citizens," Herman said. "This is also how they see… being able to control the world of others."
Herman pointed to China’s burgeoning relationship with the global south, where social media platforms like WeChat have taken off.
"There will inevitably be a social control, a mind control, element that goes into those programs… and to shape a world that looks more and more like China wants it to look," he said.
Herman also warned that these strategies are not only playing out on internet platforms in authoritarian nations, but anywhere that the platforms are accessible, including the U.S.
"They have mastered the art of brainwashing through TikTok," Herman said. "Chinese engineers have found a way to create a social media platform which is highly addictive, and which is also highly geared towards brainwashing its users to see the world in a certain way and to respond to visual and audio cues in a certain way."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[BBC] 
