A Simple Question
Sometimes all it takes to start down a rabbit hole of no return is to ask one "simple question". If you ask the RIGHT question it just leads into another question and then another question and another, and next thing you know, you have more questions than answers. Such was the case with the mass shooting on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado which gave birth to the concept for this site you see here today, “The Devil’s Advocates”. This idea was born more than a decade ago and now is quickly aspiring to be the premier site offering critical analysis of the news media, government authorities, and all of the questions THEY refuse to ask and follow up on.
When the details of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado first started to come out, the first thing I remember focusing on was the statement by the press that the shooter was wearing head to toe full tactical gear including a helmet, face shield, and a gas mask. In my mind's eye, therefore, literally not a millimeter of the shooter's body (especially his face) was exposed. I then simply asked myself one of the dumbest questions I could probably ask, "What if it wasn't James Holmes in that suit? How can anyone positively identify him as the shooter if his face wasn't even visible to eye-witnesses?" For me it was more of a legal question. How does that go down in court later when no one can positively say "I saw THAT man pull the trigger"?
Now, I didn't mean to hurt anyone with this question and it certainly shouldn't offend anyone personally for me asking It. I was just looking for a blog topic and wondered out loud (or in written format as the case may be), "How can you positively identify someone as the shooter if they are wearing head to toe riot gear and their face was covered the entire time?" Playing “Devil's Advocate” here, what if James Holmes wasn't the actual shooter?
Now I’ll FULLY admit that the question seemed ridiculous even to me at first. I was grasping at straws...trying to find a topic to blog about in my newly launched blog, "The Devil's Advocate". According to my brilliant plan, I had to first find a currently trending news topic (and the shooting was ALL Over the news). Second, it had to be a story in which the public had already made up their mind (and in this case everyone was told the shooter had been identified as James Holmes). Then lastly, I had take a counter position of some sort and question the official position (i.e. "What if James Holmes wasn't the shooter?") I figured it would give me a day or two of interesting blog topics at best. To say that what happened next was a huge surprise would be a monumental understatement. With this one "simple question" I had apparently caught lightning in a bottle and my blog exploded.
What I never could have imagined, nor dare I say hoped for, was that eyewitnesses at the theater that night would begin coming forward claiming that there were indeed multiple shooters in the theater that night. In fact, eye-witnesses on the scene reported seeing shooters in two different adjoining theaters at the same time! Many witnesses described the shooter as being shorter and stockier than James Eagan Holmes suggesting HE was not the actual shooter.
Practically overnight I found myself pouring over eye witness accounts being aired on various news agencies and all over national television stations in the hours and days following the shooting. As can be expected perhaps, many who claimed to have seen the shooters were giving conflicting accounts of what he or she looked like. As noted earlier, several described the shooter as short and stocky while James Holmes himself is tall and lanky. And then, to my utter shock and dismay, raw audio recordings of the police and fire dispatch channels that night began to surface via the internet. Those audio recordings did NOTHING to dispel the multiple shooter theory and in fact corroborated and supported it as police and fire can be heard on various dispatch channels actively looking for MULTIPLE shooters and reporting that MULTIPLE suspects had been seen fleeing the theater wearing black tactical gear and carrying long guns!
To make matters more interesting, when James Holmes appeared on television cameras the following Monday for his arraignment, he appeared to be drugged out of his mind and unable to keep his eyes open. It appeared that Holmes was completely unaware of where he was or what was happening to him and his legal defense did all the talking because Holmes himself was checked out and clueless. The video link below has a brief look at Holmes condition at his arraignment. There are longer versions out there if you wish to look more deeply, but this is the reader's digest version of the video. But his condition in court made me wonder and ask new questions, "Did he look like this when they found him outside the theater that night? If so, there's no way in hell THAT man shot all those people. This guy wouldn't know his own name if you asked him!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87uN3hUGYJU
Over the next few months my life would get just a little too crazy for my tastes as I found myself increasingly dragged into the dark and mysterious world of conspiracy theory. The Devil's Advocate blog began to gain in popularity with the site reaching hundreds of people reading my latest blog posts every day.
Early in my "investigation" a recently released prison inmate would discover my blog and reach out to me privately, offering what he claimed was illegally obtained evidence from James Holmes himself supporting my theory that there were multiple shooters that night and that James Holmes was simply left in a car outside the theatre in a drugged up state to be the fall guy. Strange people began showing up in my personal life. I began receiving strange phone calls from unknown numbers in locations all over the country where I was researching at the time. I had unusual people showing up suddenly wanting to be my friend and help me with my "project" while others online began attacking me personally, trying to discredit me in the conspiracy community.
Then, to make my own personal paranoia worse, I was suddenly and unexpectedly promoted at work to a position that potentially threatened to be a conflict of interest for me. Now here is where I have to exercise a little caution because I cannot fully divulge the nature of my job or why my promotion was a potential conflict of interest. Trust me, even I cringe when I write that. I for one totally understand that not being able to fully divulge information is the very thing that makes people suspicious. Suffice it to say however, that my early investigations into the life of James Holmes started to lead me down a path of various theories related to certain "three letter agencies" within the US Government. My sudden new promotion at work put me in a position to potentially work with or for some of these said "three letter agencies" thus making it very dangerous territory to continue exploring theories related to the people you work with or for. Sadly, I became paranoid about why I was promoted NOW and whether or not the promotion was intended to do the very thing I did for a short time (which was to shut the blog down). Whether or not there was REALLY a conflict of interest or simply my own overactive imagination remains to be seen, but I'll discuss that later.
But perhaps the scariest personal moment of all came when a fellow conspiracy theorist I had never met created a 20 minute video trying to expose me personally as a secret government agent and claiming that I was trying to spread disinformation in an attempt to cloud the real facts in the case. Sadly, some conspiracy theorists are severely unstable people and you never know what one will do if they think you're a government snitch or disinformation specialist. In fact, a year or so later that same person would seemingly go into a heightened state of paranoia himself, go to a university campus and confront a professor, stab the professor multiple times for no apparent reason and then go on the run claiming that the government was after him. Considering that he had not long ago called me out as a government agent, I feared the worst. Would some other crazy person look into finding me now and stab me on my front steps?
The same day of the stabbing of the professor, this same conspiracy theorist would be gunned down in a parking lot in a confrontation with police and would be shot dead. All of this craziness only fueled the flames of the conspiracy community as some began to question whether conspiracy theorists like him and myself were being "silenced". Did the police execute a conspiracy theorist to keep him silent about the James Holmes case? Or worse yet, would someone think that this mysterious government agent he mentioned before being killed was myself and that somehow I was behind his murder? Would someone come looking for me next?
Twelve years later I still can’t stop myself from asking “one simple question. Then, when the UnitedHealthCare CEO, Brian Thompson, was gunned down execution-style on New York City street in front of a hotel I asked one more simple question. “What if the shooter wasn’t acting alone?”
Within days, Luigi Mangione, a rich ivy-league college graduate was implicated as the lone gunman and branded in the media as the monster who gunned an innocent man down, shooting him in the back for no reason. Once again, we had ourselves a “devil” in the eyes of law enforcement and the media. So once again, I started asking questions.
Today, we present to you “The Devil’s Advocate”.