Something strange happened to me the other day. In a fever dream, I remembered a scene in that ill-fated movie Cloud Atlas (2012), where they kill one of the clones using a small explosive charge attached to her artery in her neck. That’s the same place Charlie Kirk was shot in.

By Emad Aysha
Then another strange recollection/realisation happened, also while I was asleep and slightly unwell. Thomas Crook, the poor kid blamed for trying to kill Trump, was able to move into position and stay there for a considerable length of time because of some administrative screw up.

The police and the secret service waited for each other to move into position to block the would-be assassin that they had seen scoping the area beforehand.

That’s near identical to a situation in Robert Ludlum’s The Osterman Weekend (1972). The family of the hero, John Tanner, is being protected around the hour, and then one of the security people gets killed, horribly. Turns out a ‘gap’ happened between shifts, with one security team being late to take the place of the other. A gap the bad guys exploited.

Of course, afterwards, you discover that it’s all an inside job. The gap was manufactured, which brings us back to Charlie Kirk, a guy who hurt no one—a guy who wasn’t even a politician. A friend of his (Carson Carpenter) was interviewed on Redacted straight after the shooting, and he explained that there were two individuals filmed at the event who looked like they were sending signals through curiously repeated hand movements.

REALITY IN CHARGE: 1970s conspiracy theory cinema is still ahead of its time, sadly as we keep finding out.

This is the umbrella man all over again, and makes perfect sense. The (presumed) assassin didn’t seem to have any telecoms on him telling him where the target was, and yet he knew precisely where to shoot from to get him, right in the neck, with exactly one shot and fired from a WWII bolt action rifle. How did he know where the target would be, that there wouldn’t be guards in front of him, and that nobody would have binoculars?

These were private security, so no bureaucratic incompetence is to be expected. Commentators are divided on the weapon Tyler Robinson is supposed to have used, a German Mauser, whether it can be split up and hidden or not. (See Valhalla VFT, Kim Iversen and Larry Johnson).

But why on earth would the guy use a World War II bolt-action? A semiautomatic would make more sense, unless you knew beforehand that one bullet was enough because you were sure it wouldn’t miss.

And this guy, Robinson, didn’t look flustered, nervous, or in a rush as he left. And why was he wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, if not to hide his identity from the cameras?

Yet he left his fingerprints everywhere on his escape path and confessed to what he’d done to his family. If he wanted to get caught, he would have handed himself over to the nearest cop?

Remember the Austrian rifle in The Package, itself a nod to the Mauser that was found in the School Book Depository, only to mysteriously disappear. (Thomas Crook’s body was cremated without his family’s knowledge or permission, and the same with the cops.)

That brings me to another Gene Hackman conspiracy movie, The Domino Principle (1977), adapted from the 1975 novel of the same name by Adam Kennedy. Hackman is Roy Tucker, a career criminal and former Vietnam vet serving a 20-year sentence, and some mysterious benefactors spring him out of prison in exchange for an unspecified job. They reunite him with his wife (Candice Bergman), get him a fancy house in Costa Rica, a bank account and fake papers.

PORTRAIT PERFECT: Candice Bergen, the true face of an America we all loved and hate to lose.

All he has to do is shoot at a target with an M-16, firing from a helicopter, he later learns. They never tell him who, but he figures it out when he’s on a practice run. He says no, but they kidnap his wife, and he does the dastardly deed. In fact, he didn’t.

He’s experienced enough to know that he was out of range, and yet the unnamed politician gets riddled with bullets. He was a patsy all along, a decoy for two other shooters.

Needless to say, the bad guys come after him afterwards, stealing his money and papers and killing his wife. The movie ends on an open note with a rifle aimed at him in Costa Rica.

If only he’d listened to his friend in prison, a guy who warned him not to get involved with such shady individuals. People that powerful and determined have access to the best guns in the business, so what would they need an inmate for, somebody the authorities are going to be looking for from day one?

In the novel, you have a critical scene in Chicago where the recently released hero is half-propositioned in a bar by a young, attractive woman with grey hair. Her ex-husband, ‘Lefty’, is the barman. A very well-educated guy who fell on bad times, and he’s constantly talking about politics and the poor guy in the White House.

A country gone to the dogs, in other words. Tucker himself is a squandered opportunity, having been sent to Japan at one point with a preachy doctor who tried to reform him. (Oswald was also in Japan.) In another scene in a taxi, the driver again tells him how the country has gone to the dogs, making him wonder why he fought in WWII.

Candice Bergen’s character is the country, abused by her original upper-class husband, which is why Roy fell in love with her. (He was blamed for murdering the husband, but turns out to be innocent; a guy who had gone straight thanks to love, but people’s perceptions intervened.)

She steals the show, even more than Hackman, fragile and forever trusting and broken on the inside, which is more than I can say for Mickey Rooney’s character.

Here’s another disturbing movie tie-in – The Happening (2008). When the mainstream media is talking about the plant toxin possibly being a CIA concoction, you see these armed individuals, presumably militiamen, getting ready to take the law into their own hands.

SPEECH MARTYR: One more farewell to Charlie Kirk, and condolences to his loved ones.

Paranoia breeds violence, and not just the individualistic kind. And that’s how they want it!