Highland Park and Sandy Hook -- How To Use a Rebuttable Presumption

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

Today was an especially happy day for me, July 4, 2022. It was my first walkabout in this campaign season -- I aspire to the job of Congressperson from NH. I visited two small towns in the White Mountains. People spoke to me from the heart. One lady told me that she doesn't know what to believe anymore. "First, Trump kept saying it was fake news, but now he's the faker. So maybe it was never fake news...."

Oh dear. We can't let this confusion continue. And by the time I got home, there was yet another shooting reported. At a Fourth of July celebration in Illinois, a group of people (in Highland Park, a wealthy suburb of Chicago) were gunned down. About an hour later, a friend of mine -- code name Didgeridoo -- sent me some photos of the event from a British newspaper (DailyMail.co.uk).

One of the photos shows a person's foot stepping into blood. It is CLEARLY FAKE BLOOD. Stop right there. Halt! We need go no further, measuring up the various "believable versus unbelievable" particulars of the Highland Park case.

I propose that as soon as there is even one clue that would give pause to "a reasonable man," we should presume an entire story to be deceitful.

Do I mean that we must then all agree to its being fake? Certainly not. I am employing a legal concept here, known as a "rebuttable presumption." So, we start by PRESUMING that the killing was fake. But from there, anyone interested in showing it was real, can offer proof.

These days, the number of citizens that expect fakery is so high that, minutes after a new event is reported, there are skeptical comments written under it. In my recent book "Unreality: Sandy Hook Messes Minds," I listed some extremely sarcastic comments that I found under YouTube videos about the Sandy Hook school massacre that allegedly took place in December 2012.

The Respectability of Conspiracy Theory

I hold a PhD in Politics and consider it respectable to be "a conspiracy theorist." Political scientists are mandatorily on the lookout for the real motive behind governmental actions or policies. I have personally delved into enough cases of shootings or bombings to be able to boast to you that I can legally prove some of them to be fake.

My book "Inquest: Siege in Sydney," about a December 2014 event, is the only book published on that subject, to date. There were so many holes in the Coroner's Report that I felt obliged to submit to the court a list of 99 things that don't add up. But here I will name just one. The bad guy was a Muslim -- natch -- who held a dozen or so hostages in a "locked" cafe from 9am to 2am. Thus, for 17 hours, the police allegedly couldn't get in, and eventually two hostages died.

But look -- after the first 6 hours, a cook escaped. He could have handed his "swipe card" to the cops, to let them go in and grab the baddy. Couldn't he?

The fact that the police did not seek such an obvious way to stop the crisis tells me ALL I NEED TO KNOW. From that point on, I should have stated that it was a rebuttable presumption that the hostage crisis was being carried out as a trick on the public.

Note: I didn't think to use the concept of rebuttable presumption until today, the Fourth of July! For years I have trod the delicate path of trying to show people how this or that behavior proves malfeasance of this or that personage.

I am the co-author of another Australia-based book "Port Arthur: Enough Is Enough," about a 1996 massacre. So what is the "cook's swipe card" in that case? I mean: what item is so insulting to the public that it should have been embraced immediately as a SUFFICIENT SIGN that the authorities were pulling our leg?

-- and that the entire event (35 dead) was allowed to happen for a nefarious purpose?

There are dozens of items. I'll choose the fact that a top military man declared that the kill-to-wounded ratio at Port Arthur could only have been achieved by an expert marksman. The accused, Martin Bryant, was anything but a marksman.

Note: I'm not saying we can never get past that issue and establish guilt. I am saying that we are big boys and girls now; we can see chicanery when it is staring us in the face. This should be the first thing we do: demonstrate our intelligence. Don't accept nonsense.

When we state a rebuttable presumption ("The Sydney hostage crisis was a scripted event," or "The deaths at Port Arthur did not occur by the hand of Martin Bryant"), we should then sit back and wait for the rebuttal.

The rebutter cannot ignore our specific find, and hop along to other parts of the case. She can't divert the issue and try to persuade people of the broader theme -- e.g., the Muslim in Sydney took hostages because he hates the way Muslims are treated in Iraq. She has to deal with our complaint.

She, the rebutter, has to be seen to interrogate police as to their failure to obtain the swipe card from the cook who escaped. (He remained in police control for hours....) She must rebut our presumption that the whole deal was fake. In this Sydney case, she should have to rebut all of my 99 complaints! Why not?

Media's Role

In today's new killing in Highland Park, there was blood that does not look anything like blood. When my friend Didgeridoo sent me that photo, he noted that human blood does not turn that color, and it doesn't glob into a mass like that. But wait -- was it law enforcement that claimed that the blood in the photo is real blood? Possibly it's just the newspaper that's providing this evidence to us -- by publishing it as part of the news.

Here is what a newspaper (or TV network) can do, to promote a false story:

It can make the whole event up, using the ordinary talent of fiction writers.

It can say that it got the data from "the police' or "Washington" without even naming the name of that official.

It can question 'random people on the street' who are actually actors.

It can do relevant interviews with a professional, such as a psychiatrist describing the mental processes that may lead to mass murder.

It can show fake funerals. (The US military specifically talked about planning some fake funerals; see the 1962 "Northwoods Memo.")

It can dwell on the emotional fallout of the event with a bunch of human interest stories.

It can repeat the story, at first by saturation coverage and, later, by anniversaries.

It may arrange a full commercial movie, such as "Let's Roll," to further inscribe the event into people's brains.

Granted, the media's efforts would have to involve real police, mayors, etc -- otherwise we would hear police yelling that the media was faking a story. Come to think of it, it may indeed be that media is the higher player, and causes underlings to play along. These underlings could be governors, hospital administrators, etc. Imagine that!

More traditionally, we have thought that officials first create a fake story and then get media to play along, but wouldn't some media employees make a fuss by refusing to do this? They never do, though.

Acknowledgements

I thank two people for giving me my Fourth of July eureka about the rebuttable presumption. One is Didgeridoo, provider of the blood photo; the other is the NH lady who told me how bad it is that we have no way of knowing what to believe. She even said that she "doesn't want to go on anymore." Wow, I wonder if a majority of citizens feel that awful.

Of course I am also grateful to the many stay-at-home sleuths that have worked hard and endagered their lives to help the nation understand conspiracies.

I especially salute, posthumously, Elias Davidsson who appreciated my sharing with him the legal concept of "the reasonable man." Davidsson's work was remarkably thorough -- he sought to disprove many allegations made against Muslims as "terrorists."

Did Davidsson's findings make kings kneel down and apologize? That's asking a bit too much. Still, his writings are now part of culture. He was a layperson scholar of human rights, whose website juscogens.org is still online. The work he did is available in many books, including two about 9-11, one about supposed terrorist bombings in India, and one about a bus rampage in Berlin. You go, Elias!

A Little List

To repeat my new rule: When you see (as a hypothetical 'reasonable man' would see) that even one itty bitty element in an official narrative is a lie, you should venture to make a presumption that the case is deceitful in toto. Don't let any other aspect of the story force you to accept the whole kit and kaboodle.

Dig your heels in and insist that the purveyor of the story rebut your presumption by producing evidence. "Hey, FBI, let's see that globbed-up blood from Highland Park under a microscope. If we're not persuaded of its authenticity, you lose the whole case."

That was not my method for the last 16 years -- I laboriously tried to elucidate the technical wrongdoing of prosecutors and judges.

Let's look at a few things we could have jumped on as to the dishonesty of the "narrative." Granted, many activists did jump on such things -- all the way back to JFK's assassination, but today I re-list them under the new approach.

I will call these items "the swipe card" of the day -- each of them can stand alone to make a presumption that the official story can't be true:

1995 -- OKC bombing. Local police officer Terrance Yeakey found explosives in the building, and then he was murdered. Note: I think it's all right to make a rebuttable presumption that any whistleblowers death is a murder, but we'll save that for another day. For now, the finding of explosives in the OKC building is swipe card enough.

2001 -- The crash in Shanksville, PA on September 11, 2001. The lack of plane parts visible to the eye is swipe card enough. Nota bene: citizens should not fall for put-offs like "We are not allowed to show you the plane parts." Why the hell is it a secret? There is no reason to keep us from viewing the crash site when the government says it's definite that this hijacked commercial flight (AA93) crashed in Pennsylvania.

2013 -- Marathon bombing. "Hey, Boston medical leaders, tell us how Jeff Baumann was able to sit up, in a wheelchair, after losing two legs, and not die of blood loss. Come on, fancy doctors, Boston is the top medical city in the world, you can handle it!"

1996 -- Massacre at the Port Arthur historic site. An employee of that site, Ms Wendy Scurr, saw the dead bodies and helped the wounded, but she was not allowed by the prosecutor to appear as a witness. "OK, Crown Prosecutor, you lose. We Aussies are not so stupid that we can't see that your keeping Wendy out of court is proof of your chicanery. It's the swipe card of the century. Oh, and by the way, we citizen-arrest you right now for obstructing justice."

2012 -- Sandy Hook (unreal) school shooting in December. Wolfgang Halbig has long since got the proof that food supplies for Sandy Hook school had been diverted to another location since September, indicating that the school had been closed and thus no students were in attendance. It was a ghost school, so to speak. All right, Newtown Police Spokesman Kehoe, let's hear your explanation for the school closure. Or give us your proof that the food supplies did go to Sandy Hook -- show us where Mr Halbig is wrong. Or just admit now that the entire shooting was fake -- this may win you some leniency at your sentencing.

Anyone wishing to send me their fave swipe-card story, may do so to the contact page at my website: ConstitutionAndTruth.com. But please, no more that 100 words for each. And no photos for which the source is other than media or officials, as I would have no way to check out any personal photos or videos. You can observe my degree of fussiness in my book "Boston's Marathon Bombing: What Can law Do?" -- a pdf of which is linked below.