“Staged!”: Psyop Fatigue in the Panopticon
We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house.
“A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”
—Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House
Panopticon
A panopticon is a system in which people can be surveilled anytime but never know when. This means they have to behave as if they are being watched at all times. The term originally referred to an 18th-century prison design by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham: a central watchtower with concentric rings of cells around it.
The design was first implemented in America in 1925 when Stateville Correctional Facility opened in Illinois, and was soon followed by Presidio Modelo in Cuba.
Michel Foucault extended the meaning to represent a diagram of political technology—a system of domination, not a building.
But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.
— Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977)
Another example of this idea comes from the movies. When a Stranger Calls (1979) is best known for the line “the calls are coming from inside the house.” In it, a babysitter starts receiving calls from a psychopathic killer. After she contacts police, they trace the call, and in that instant the house flips from shelter to trap. Suddenly, she knows she’s being watched but cannot see her watcher.
Whether it’s a prison guard or a serial killer in the basement, the panopticon projects dominance over a target by controlling information. The target receives just enough to feel endangered and modifies their behavior to match the threat.
Panoptic Government
All governments with functional law enforcement use panoptic logic to some extent. The difference between authoritarian control and law enforcement is whether you trust the watchers—or not.
You may not drive too fast because there might be a cop with a speed gun over the next hill. But in Trump’s regime, if you’re not white you might not leave the house for fear of being kidnapped by ICE. Either way, you modify your own behavior based on who might be watching.
The U.S. federal government is attempting to build a panoptic (all-seeing) system of control as quickly as it can. This effort includes its accelerating embrace of Palantir and the adoption of draconian policies like NSPM-7 which targets anyone on the left as a dangerous radical.
But like the watchtower in a panoptic prison which represents a constant threat to the inmates, a panoptic government requires a constant threat to keep the population under control.
On Saturday, April 25th, Cole Tomas Allen—a 31-year-old tutor, scientist, game developer, and devout Christian from Torrance, CA—ran towards a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The checkpoint was one floor above the ballroom where nearly the entire line of presidential succession was gathered. Shots were fired and a Secret Service member was hit in his bulletproof vest.
The Trump regime portrayed Allen as a leftist assassin who shot a Secret Service member just outside the ballroom before he was heroically stopped. The media simply went along with this narrative.
Staged!
Almost immediately, from all parts of the political spectrum, the chorus rang out: “Staged!” On the website formerly known as Twitter, this was typical of the sentiment:
Nevertheless, it was not “staged.” We now know a lot about Cole Allen, 31, most of it pointing to how normal he seemed to be to the people around him. His tutoring company had recently named him “Teacher of the Month.”
Just before the event, Allen sent a manifesto to his family which gave his motivation as a “friendly federal assassin” and laid out his political targets including Trump (“a pedophile, rapist, and traitor”)—but for some reason excluded “Mr. Patel.”
Allen also specified his biblical rationale for murder, and described his plan to limit collateral damage. Despite the propaganda of the regime after the incident, Allen was not anti-American or anti-Christian in any coherent sense. He was a radicalized Trump hater who gave himself ideological and religious permission to kill.
Trump released a grainy video of the incident which shows a figure running through a security checkpoint. No other video has been released. It does not appear that the suspect is holding a weapon. Instead it appears the agent in the lower left of the video shot an agent across the hall as the suspect crossed between them.
Monday, Trump’s personal defense lawyer and Acting AG Todd Blanche gave a press conference that made it clear there was something being hidden about the “shooting.” He refused to say that the suspect shot his gun, and acknowledged that a Secret Service agent had discharged his service weapon five times. Also, the charges brought by DOJ do not support a “shooting” at all.
Enhance!
“People for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… no longer exist[s].”
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The available evidence shows that Cole Tomas Allen did not fire his weapon, did not get anywhere near the ballroom, and that the agent that was hit was the victim of a friendly fire incident. But the Trump regime has deliberately suppressed information about it to build a narrative of a heroic near-miss.
This is exactly how a panoptic government tries to control its population. It releases only what it wants the population to see, to make the world seem maximally dangerous, so it can justify maximum government surveillance.
Just like the near-assassination in Butler, PA, this incident was not “staged” but it was distorted, amplified, and mythologized into an alternate history of the event.
As the situation unfolded, you could see Trump’s most loyal sycophants trying to manufacture a “moment” in real-time, like Dan Scavino, who tried to get a chant of “USA! USA!” going in the ballroom while it was not clear the danger had passed yet.
PSYACT
In military parlance, a psychological action or PSYACT is a planned and coordinated action—lethal or non-lethal—conducted to produce a psychological effect as part of a larger psychological operation (PSYOP). A staged assassination attempt to produce a psychological result would be a textbook example.
But a panoptic government does not necessarily need to execute a false flag attack, it just needs to create the conditions for violence, and then be prepared to capitalize on it faster than the full truth can be distributed.
Cole Allen’s actions were not technically a PSYACT, because they were not planned by the regime. But they were near-perfect PSYACT material: a real violent event useful to drive a narrative, except for the Secret Service agents shooting each other. That part did not create a compelling story—so they simply left it out. In a sufficiently sealed information bubble, a panoptic regime can do this kind of information alchemy on almost anything.
Build the Ballroom!
As everyone following the regime knows, Donald Trump really really wants his $400 million ballroom with the Palantir bunker beneath.
Within minutes of the incident, where security mostly worked as designed, nearly the entirety of Trump’s propaganda operation simultaneously started calling to build the White House ballroom—because obviously it’s needed for security.
On X, where Trump officials use DM rooms to coordinate messaging, there was a tsunami of Trump supporters having the exact same idea at the same time.
The DOJ also publicly leaned on the plaintiff in a lawsuit currently holding up construction of the ballroom—calling it “dangerous litigation” because Trump won’t have a safe space. And numerous regime officials have used their platforms to sell the ballroom as a solution to the epidemic of Cole Allens—despite the fact that the event could not have been held in a government building.
Trump invited himself to a private event. Protecting him there was the Secret Service’s responsibility. They did protect him. They also appear to have shot each other in the process.
Psyop Fatigue
The reason so many jumped to “staged” is that in many ways, it was. It’s just that Trump’s panoptic government repurposed a real attack into a theatrical production, leaving out the inconvenient details, and adding valor-under-fire as liberally as possible.
It was a PSYOP by any other name: a real, if futile, assassination attempt repurposed as a PSYACT to extract taxpayer goodies for Donald Trump.
Here is the unhinged motion filed by the actual Department of Justice that is nothing short of a giant Truth Social post, complete with ALL CAPS epithets and Trump-authored insult lines.
And finally, as I write this, the same DOJ is doing a press conference to indict James Comey for the second time for posting a picture of rocks spelling out “86 47.”
Unlike the WHCD incident, this PSYACT by the government actually is a manufactured theatrical performance. It is designed specifically as narcissistic fuel for Donald Trump, and to give MAGA something to focus on other than Epstein.
No one, not a single person, believes Comey meant his photo as a threat to Donald Trump. The DOJ indictment is self-consciously frivolous—which doesn’t matter for their purposes because it is not the Justice Department; it is a royal theater troupe.
But the regime’s commitment to rearranging the world to match Donald Trump’s demented model of reality, whether through distorting real events like the WHCD or manufacturing felony cases against former FBI directors, will ultimately be limited by the objective world.
The wheels are off the bus of the regime; the rims are on the pavement, throwing up sparks. How long it lasts before breaking down completely is impossible to know. But the fatigue is real. The psyops are exhausting. Living in a panopticon is frightening by design—not because everything is staged, but because anything real can be captured, edited, and made to serve the watchers.
“Every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
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Adam Kinzinger noted that trump has no problem attending WWE events without the massive security measures he feels he must have in a “ballroom.” Interesting point.
Once again, thank you for your very keen insights, Jim. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was a constant war raging in the background. Now Trump has that too.