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Welcome to the News on News Press Briefing Room. We have slipped into… well, we’ve slipped into sthng,
& we know you all have a lot of q.s abt Patrick McMillan’s curious testimony, so let’s dive in.
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What do we make of Patrick’s “pro bono intelligence” career? It’s inherently incoherent.
“Pro bono contractor” is an oxymoron. Also, pro bono work is associated w/ medicine or law, typically. It’s not associated w/ intelligence work— this, at least, is what our research shows. His claim that he worked from home yet needed an immersive public-facing persona makes no sense. This claim abt his background insulates him from scrutiny while giving him an air of authority.
This is classic non-falsifiability, which he’s using to explain inconsistencies & past criminal convictions— & to disarm the defense: they can’t easily cross-examine him on his time as ~a ghost~ 👻
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What do we think abt his health concerns? If they’re all true, more power to him. It is a medical miracle to survive 8 strokes & 9 heart attacks.
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What abt his memory issues? 😮💨 His memory is a self-canceling testimony. He’s relying on it both for credibility, & as his alibi. He’s weaponizing unreliability— like he (or the prosecution) is saying, “I can’t be cross-examined bc I’m sick… but you still have to believe my one story abt the murder.”
If his old memories are erased, & his new ones are fine, but his testimony is still full of holes… either he’s lying, or his memory is compromised across the board, & his central testimony should be unusable.
Yet the prosecution treats his memory as selectively pristine— which is an impossible standard that only seems to apply to him. They want him to be both a reliable witness whose central claim is clear & trustworthy, & an unreliable narrator whose confusion explains inconsistencies. These 2 functions are logically incompatible, yet the court is going along & treating Patrick like a reliable vessel (ARV)— ARV for one story & one story only. That’s not legal logic, that’s narrative bias.
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What of his “cult people”? Here Patrick’s logic totally breaks down. He is not describing a cult; he’s describing marginalized ppl sharing housing, & hanging out together.
We also doubt if they, in 2022, were still sending Gwen as an envoy to Lind; but, on the off-chance that they were, this signals that they had a point of contact or organizer for their housing— not that they were a cult.
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Our opinion on Patrick’s line, “I never lied”? This is a snake eating its own tail. He admits to deliberately evading q.s, but insists this isn’t lying. This is a tortured self-defense strategy.
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Why is Patrick on the stand to begin w/— other than the fact that he’s the closest thing to a surviving witness? It seems like his function in this trial is to float above scrutiny. His contradictions are excused; his unreliability is framed as tragic, not disqualifying.
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What could he be up to? 🤷🏻♀️ It sounds like he’s trying to construct a timeline— but every brick he lays makes the wall weaker.
He’s overdescribing some things, & underdescribing other things. He wants the threat to be real enough to justify Lind’s actions, but vague enough to survive scrutiny.
Basically, Patrick’s acting like someone who believes that narrative is legal defense— & that, if he gets the right beats in (girls were aggressive, calls were made), it won’t matter if the details don’t sync. He wants to be the narrator, but his narration keeps slipping in its own oil.
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What of that 2am police phone call? Both rock-throwing & attempted forced entry are legally-actionable. Banging on a trailer's walls is not. You’d omit the first two only if you thought they wouldn’t stand up in court… maybe bc they never happened.
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What of @AFBNON’s claim that no calls were made in the area? Either @AFBNON didn’t check the logs; or the logs are faulty; or the call didn’t go thru official channels— ex. got made to a non-emergency line; or things get really weird:
• Was it made from a number not tied to Lind’s area, so not registered as local?
• Was it recorded ahead of time, or called in w/ the expectation that it wouldn’t get logged or acted upon?
These are wacky q.s, but Patrick’s version of events obliges us to get a little wacky.
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Do we think @AFBNON is Jamie? We have no clue! But it’s worth saying:
@AFBNON’s logic is evidentiary, cumulative, & sensory. They build a case w/ documentary materials & visceral testimony. Their logical posture is: “Here’s what the records say. These things don’t match. Someone is lying.”
Jamie’s logic is structural, interpretative, & speculative. They present motives, connections, & patterns of behavior. Their logical posture is: “These events weren’t spontaneous. They were planned & monetized. & the behavior of the key players fits a pattern.”
Unlike @AFBNON, Jamie doesn’t emphasize documentation. Instead they give us motive, context, & intention. This is narrative logic rather than forensic logic. They’re both valuable, but they’re coming from diff. epistemic places.
The 911 call acts as a stress test on the Jamie/@AFBNON question. If they’re the same person, they’ve let a major factual inconsistency sit there, unaddressed. If they’re the same person, why not integrate these 2 claims? Why not say, “I got the call logs, & saw that no calls were made. That’s how I know the ones they claimed to have made were fake.”
Jamie does not say this. Either:
• They don’t have access to the call logs.
• They don’t want to commit to that kind of fact-based argument.
That’s actually a big point in favor of them not being the same person. Their logics aren't just different: they are, in this moment, incompatible. One asserts absence, the other false presence.
If they’re not the same person, ofc the consistency of their big claims becomes much more impressive.
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What of those details in @AFBNON’s account which only Ziz would know? If these are false, they are a monstrous act of imaginative trespass. One more question.
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What do we make of the press coverage? 🙃
Patrick’s contradictions are glaring, but the press isn’t just failing to interrogate them; it’s absorbing them into the narrative as if they’re self-evident truths. His vulnerability has become the story, & suddenly the stakes aren’t, “Is he telling the truth?”, but, “Isn’t it tragic what he’s endured?”
They are treating his inconsistencies not like red flags, but like quirks. His story is being framed as “complicated,” not “implausible.” That choice helps the prosecution (TP)! It lets TP wrap unstable testimony in the guise of tragic heroism.
Why is the press doing this? Prob. bc Patrick’s testimony validates preexisting storylines 🤷🏻♀️ Mainly abt the girls’ dangerousness. The press is treating him like a narrative keystone, not like a witness. He’s being performed like a character, not vetted like a source.
When you look at his testimony, it starts to weave & wobble. So the press, instead of testing its strength, are building around it. They are not rlly doing journalism; they are doing narrative maintenance. They have loosened their “adversarial posture” tremendously in favor of pathos-driven storytelling.
If anyone aligned w/ Somni or Suri had gotten up & said they were an unpaid, WFH spy w/an unstable memory from 8 strokes, they’d be ripped to shreds. But Patrick gets gentle headlines & vaguely sympathetic coverage, bc he fits the role the press has already cast him in. This is, incidentally, sort of the role they were saving for Lind: the role of the victim-saint who ~met a monster~.
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That’s all we have time for tn, everyone! Ty all for coming, & once more, keep Somni & Suri in your thoughts as they prepare for their next hearing on 5/2/25 👋
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