In a column titled “Is Obama ‘Weaponizing’ Vulnerable Citizens?,” Erik Rush of WorldNetDaily writes that he is just asking the question as to whether government agents groomed, recruited and manipulated the perpetrators of the recent mass shootings in Tucson, Arizona; Aurora, Colorado; and Newtown, Connecticut.
While Rush is mostly vague about possible government ties to such shootings, at the end of the column he makes it clear that he believes such claims: “The political left and the current administration made a mockery of America’s intelligence efforts when they condemned the use of enhanced interrogation techniques against some of the most deserving scum the intelligence community has ever encountered – yet they appear willing to countenance even worse horrors perpetrated upon U.S. citizens in the name of their diabolical agenda.”
In lifestyle and temperament, spree killers share significant psychological commonalities. Loners, or people with few friends, socially awkward and often with a well-nurtured beef against some demographic, faction or the government. Their relative isolation would make them easy targets for any nefarious group; “at-risk” is the term that would be used if they were minor children.
Loughner, Holmes and Lanza in particular fit very handily into this classification; in fact, the cases of Holmes and Lanza positively reeked of what intelligence operatives I know would call the tell-tale signs of recruitment and conditioning.
Adam Lanza’s father, Peter Lanza, was the vice president and tax director at GE Financial; Robert Holmes, father to Colorado theater shooter James Holmes, was the head scientist of the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO). Both had been implicated in a banking scandal involving the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). As such, it is highly likely that everything about them would have been known to the government.
To a government in the habit of collecting inordinate amounts of information on its citizens, as well as recruiting vulnerable individuals for psyops, their sons would have been tempting acquisitions indeed.
Given our current state of societal dysfunction, it may not seem too odd that a quasi-cult of self-described “beta males” has developed online. Of a type that a dearly departed friend of mine would have called “spoiled, lazy suburban white boys,” these mediocre mom’s-basement dwellers are apparently irritated because they don’t have Kanye West’s money and supermodel girlfriends, and that men of their age group who do put effort into improving their lives (whom the “betas” call “alpha males,” of course) actually have lives. These losers fume on Internet forums ad nauseum, advocate violence, anarchy – and idolize spree killers.
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The Internet forum milieu would be the perfect opportunity for covert psychological operations (i.e., grooming disaffected individuals to commit violence) on a mass scale. It would be child’s play for a government (ours, for the sake of argument) to set up or infiltrate such venues and enlist online “handlers” to cultivate relationships with the losers present, manipulating them psychologically with an expertise similar to that of, say, President Obama’s celebrated Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST).
My guess is that it would be the handlers themselves who occasionally leak information concerning acts of violence about to be executed by their protégés, in order to energize the remaining contingent of “beta males” when the mayhem does in fact take place.
The political left and the current administration made a mockery of America’s intelligence efforts when they condemned the use of enhanced interrogation techniques against some of the most deserving scum the intelligence community has ever encountered – yet they appear willing to countenance even worse horrors perpetrated upon U.S. citizens in the name of their diabolical agenda.
For my part, I’d rather be waterboarded.
