The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has led, predictably, to a groundswell of conspiracy theories. Everybody wants to know what’s going on and, since little information currently exists to explain Saturday’s shocking and violent incident, people are just making stuff up. One of the most viral targets of conspiratorial conjecture so far has been a corporate video produced by multinational investment conglomerate BlackRock in 2022, the likes of which bizarrely involved Thomas Matthew Crooks, the shooter from this weekend’s assassination attempt.
Not long after the shooting took place, online conspiracy theorists noticed that Crooks had appeared in a video produced by the company. On Monday, BlackRock confirmed to CNN that the person in the video was Crooks but also took it offline.
“In 2022, we ran an ad featuring a teacher from Bethel Park High School, in which several unpaid students briefly appeared in the background, including Thomas Matthew Crooks,” a spokesperson for the company revealed Sunday, the day after the shooting. “We will make all video footage available to the appropriate authorities, and we have removed the video from circulation out of respect for the victims.” Gizmodo reached out to BlackRock for more information but did not receive an immediate response.
The video in question wasn’t anything special: it was a 30-second advert for the company’s management of public high school teachers’ retirement pensions and involved a short clip of a teacher at Bethel High School, where Crooks attended as a student, speaking with a class. Crooks only appeared in the video for a few seconds. However, the more paranoiac elements of MAGA-land’s way-too-online crowd have wasted no time in claiming that the dead shooter’s appearance in the video is evidence of something nefarious. “The Trump shooter in a BlackRock ad…What a coincidence …” tweeted one account, whose bio describes it as “Anti-Woke” and “Anti-Fake News.” The more unhinged among them have seemed to claim that it was evidence that Crooks was an MK-ULTRA candidate—that is to say, some sort of government-brainwashed assassin.
The rabbit hole goes deeper..
The Shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was featured in a 2023 BlackRock Ad
• The BlackRock ad was filmed at Bethel Park High School, which Crooks attended.
• Crooks can be seen at the 19 second mark.
🔴 MY THOUGHTS:
This to me stinks of… pic.twitter.com/ag76CTuhhq
— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 14, 2024
This isn’t BlackRock’s first brush with rightwing anger. In recent years, the company has become a target of conservative rage, due largely to the company’s embrace of what are known as ESG investments. ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance,” and, as a framework, they represent corporate America’s tepid attempt to give a shit about anything other than making lots of money. As the Corporate Governance Institute puts it, ESGs are “used to evaluate a company’s sustainability and ethical impact.” Anyway, long story short, when certain individuals in MAGA-land got wind that a certain amount of companies were investing in ESG, they immediately freaked out, declaring it evidence of a widespread “woke” conspiracy.
So far, Crooks, who was shot by Secret Service gunmen on Saturday, has proven to be enigmatic when it comes to his personal politics. In the initial aftermath of the shooting, viral disinformation claimed that the shooter had been a member of “Antifa.” Those claims were quickly debunked. After Crooks was officially identified as the shooter, it was soon reported that he had been a registered Republican, and people from his high school who claimed to know him said he was “definitely conservative.” A complicating factor has been a reported $15 contribution Crooks made to a Democratic-aligned political action committee in 2021, on Joe Biden’s inauguration day.
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