5️⃣ DC Rolled Its Eyes And Wolf Blitzer Lost A Shoe
The first thing the room did when the shots rang out was nothing. Wajahat Ali was outside the Hilton when it happened, held back by police as the perimeter went up. “Everything was chill,” Ali said. “The residents of D.C. just rolled their eyes. People are like, did someone try to shoot this mother effer? You think it’s real? You think it’s staged? No one cared.” Inside, Lev Parnas described after-parties continuing as the cops shut down every intersection. Steve Schmidt giggled. Dean Blundell, also inside, said the suspicion was universal. “It was, give me a fucking break.” The corporate-media reaction broke the other way. Wolf Blitzer told viewers he lost a shoe. He told viewers he thought the shooter was coming for him. “I said, just watch,” Ali said. “One of these corporate media reeks is going to make it all about themselves and talk like they’re in Fallujah. And right on cue, Wolf Blitzer.”
4️⃣ MAGA Got Its Threads
Within twenty-four hours, every right-wing influencer was on the same line. Rudy Giuliani, Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok, GOP lawmakers — we need the ballroom, in unison, before the ballroom had been cleaned. Ali pointed to Ashley St. Clair, the Elon Musk associate who has gone public about how the messaging works. “All these influencers are on the same threads, and they get told to do this, and it’s like pay for play. You do this, you’ll get rewarded. You’ll be a good soldier.” On Saturday it was the ballroom. On Sunday it was the ballroom and DHS funding. By Monday afternoon, Karoline Leavitt was at the lectern naming Hakeem Jeffries, Josh Shapiro, Alex Padilla, Elizabeth Warren, Adam Schiff, Ed Markey, JB Pritzker, Ayanna Pressley, Monica McGyver, and Jimmy Kimmel — declaring their words “indistinguishable from the manifesto.” The threads, in real time. “Donald Trump talks about the ballroom,” Ali said. “They all talk about the ballroom.”
3️⃣ Cole Allen Was A Hotel Guest
Cole Tomas Allen never reached the ballroom. The Washington Post reported Sunday he was on an upper floor of the Hilton, four locked doors and a flight of stairs away from where Donald Trump was speaking. He had been booked into a hotel room that night. “He’s a resident of the hotel that night,” Shalev said. “That gives you all sorts of access.” Allen has a Caltech mechanical-engineering degree, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory fellowship, a master’s in computer science, and a Teacher of the Month award from C2 Education in Torrance. He is described, in Ali’s words, as “a brilliant guy, Caltech, makes video games on the side for fun, a Christian, a teacher, very smart, very kind, very nice.” Lev Parnas allowed that radicalization explains some of it. Dean and Zev pushed back. “Why would he bother going all the way upstairs to the actual main entrance to get his way in when he was already inside?” Shalev asked. “The whole thing just reeks.”
2️⃣ Lev Said Butler Was Staged
Lev Parnas, who spent the first hours of the WHCD aftermath defending against staging conspiracy theories, said something different on the show. “After a lot of investigative work, a lot of listening and watching what transpired, I truly will say that I believe that the Butler assassination attempt was staged.” He said the same kind of operation had been planned for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and “didn’t work out.” He cited the survival of Cole Allen as evidence that this one was different — “they do not leave witnesses.” But on Butler, where Thomas Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper and Corey Comperatore was killed in the crowd, Parnas’s position is now on record. The first three armed men to come for Donald Trump in twenty-one months were, according to Wajahat Ali, all former Trump voters in their twenties who had been radicalized. The pattern is starting to settle into a sentence Parnas will say out loud.
1️⃣ The Crackdown Has Begun
Narativ predicted this morning, in The President Who Cried Wolf, that the manifesto framing would be deployed against the broader Epstein-investigative and political opposition.Hours later, Karoline Leavitt named the list at the lectern. Eight Democratic elected officials and one late-night host whose statements were, in her construction, “indistinguishable from the manifesto.” Trump on Truth Social demanded ABC and Disney fire Jimmy Kimmel for an “expectant widow” joke about Melania that ran four days before the shooting. The political product extracted from one Saturday night now stacks: the ballroom, DHS funding, the Kimmel scalp, the named list. Each new day produces another. “If indeed this was not staged, it is incredibly convenient,” Blundell said. “If there’s one thing the Trump regime knows how to do, it’s to take stuff like this and turn it into leverage, turn it into political capital.”
The Saturday-night security failure at the Washington Hilton became a Monday-afternoon target list. The list will widen.
History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.
The FiveStack is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The FiveStack is a co-production of deanblundell.substack.com and narativ.org.
Thank you Nicole, Amy Gabrielle, Lyudmila and Daniel, Eric Lullove, Cathy R. Payne, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali and Lev Parnas! Join me for my next live video in the app.
