Shoes and Ladders
Q'onspiracy?
I’m not a conspiracy theorist.
That said, I'll admit to having wondered about imagination-stretching explanations of how WTC7 collapsed free-fall on September 11.
But, unable to imagine a sustainable conspiracy vast enough to execute such a farce, I accept that fire took down a 47-story steel-framed building which housed, among others, offices for DOD, CIA, Secret Service, SEC, IRS, and then-Mayor Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management.
In any event, I’m now suffering similar confused curiosity about last Saturday’s “ladder."
Ladder?
Like many, I am a tad puzzled by various elements of the attempted shooting of former President Trump at a rally last Saturday.
Let's start by putting aside other oddities:
- The kid failed to make the JV shooting team in high school;
- Like everyone, he had little advance notice of the rally location, for planning purposes;
- Law enforcement has said he drove himself to the rally in his Hyundai Sonata, yet there are also purported government pictures of a white van with Arizona plates he’s said to have parked in the lot of the building from which he fired, and - wait for it - video of the same van, post-shooting, supposedly being towed from a location a mile from the parking lot near the rally venue.
Needless to say, there's a lot of weirdness associated with the whole happening, but, for me, yeah, it's the ladder, and that’s notwithstanding newly burped-up theories about a blob on an image of the side of a nearby water tower.
Hardware store receipts show that the shooter purchased a five-foot ladder just before the shooting. I suppose such a ladder could be transported in either a van or atop a Sonata, but I find it hard to imagine that, after parking a stone's throw away from the rally venue, a kid trundling a ladder across a parking lot less than two football fields from the President's podium would go unnoticed.
Yet, there are images and videos of a ladder leaning up against the building from which roof the kid’s said to have fired at Trump; From the photos. the ladder's clearly somewhere between eight and twelve feet long, and, given its tapered shape, not extendable/telescopic – in other words, it's not the five-footer referenced on the Home Depot receipt, somehow extended.
Was the ladder already in place before the kid arrived? Would that placement not have been noticed? Perhaps not, if done overnight; but it would be hard to imagine it wouldn't have been noticed by law enforcement or otherwise at some time between, for instance, when the rally venue opened at 1:00pm and the hours later when Trump finally took the stage.
I mean, there had to be a ladder, right? An executive at the company that owns the building was quoted: “If they were on the roof they’d need a ladder." And, media reports after the shooting reported that “rally attendees” told officers they had seen the gunman use a ladder to gain access to the rooftop.
Yet, at the same time, other media and official reports say the kid climbed on top of the building by stepping on an air conditioning unit. Yet further, local media reported that an armed municipal officer was "hoisted by another officer onto the roof," only to fall off when the shooter pointed his weapon at him. This would seem to confirm the absence of a ladder, or perhaps that no ladder may have been needed.
Maybe rally attendee ladder-"sightings" just reflected confusion about how someone could have scaled the building otherwise.
Except for the photos and videos featuring, yep, a ladder.
And it’s weirder than that.
Rally bystander snapshots and videos taken of the kid on the roof in the two-to-three minutes before the shooting clearly show an absence of any ladder IN THE SAME SPOT in which the eight-to-twelve-foot ladder appears in post-shooting images and video.
Weird.
In its reporting on the matter referencing the ladder in the post-shooting pix, the Washington Post presciently notes: "It is not clear when it was placed there."
What we can know for certain:
- Something happened to Trump.
- Given his well-established cowardice, it should be inconceivable that he was party to a plot to have his ear winged by a bullet as a false flag to drive election momentum.
- A man was shot dead protecting his family.
- At least two others were reportedly injured by bullets.
What we don't know is "why?"
We're certainly not going to learn that from the kid; I must say, among other things, I'd love to learn why he stopped for the five-foot ladder and/or receipt along the way to a shooting where it would have offered no purpose.
We're further unlikely to learn more given all of the post-shooting chaff:
Searching the shooter's car and home post-whatever, investigators reportedly found a bulletproof vest, three fully loaded magazines, and two remote-controlled explosives in his car (which one?) and a detonator on his body. They also found bomb-making materials in his home, an additional remote-controlled explosive device and another bulletproof vest.
Who the f*ck was this kid? Seems remarkably well-provisioned for a community college loner nerd living with his parents. While it's certainly (and sadly) possible in this day and age for pretty much anyone (in the U.S.) to arm themselves to the teeth – God knows, we've seen it before - the goddamn ladder anomaly nettles me.
As is the case with WTC7, I suspend my skepticism because the scope and scale of the operation seems an impossible conspiracy to sustain in an age - unlike, for instance, JFK's - where digitalization of everything makes everything discoverable, with the appropriate resources.
MAGA leadership is still pushing its base to ride the "Biden's three-letter guys did it" hobby horse, but even they know that's just silliness and distraction, and are shifting tack to “it was the deep state," or other such nonsense.
The problem with monolithic bogeymen scenarios is that they unfailingly collapse of their own weight.
While I'm inclined to shake my head in frustration and just file this away as yet another whacked-out, far-right extremist gun-nut loner with a chip on his shoulder and a death wish, if I were to imagine a conspiracy, it would be a tidy, ultra-right cabal hoping to launch and leverage Trumpian martyrdom to push some even more-dangerous threat to our Republic.
Let's hope not.
And WTF was the deal with Trump's obsession with his shoes?