WARNING: This Page Contains Graphic Images of Gore!

Naturally Dave McGowan has responded to… my review of his Jeff Bauman Boston Bombings conspiracy theory, though disappointingly he decided to take things to an immature and personal level at times. Like the original I will proceed to quote and reply to his ponits. Just watch his toys, because they all seem to be flying out of his man-sized pram.

So I’m guessing that there must be a special ‘debunking’ school out there that all the fucktards on the internet must have attended. I say that because another ‘debunker’ has now emerged from the fetid slime to offer up essentially the same bullshit that others have already tried to pass off as good coin. In fact, much of it reads like a cut-and-paste job that combines Quinn’s Orwellian logic with Fucktard’s overwrought appeals to emotion. This new ‘debunking’ – and I am using the term ‘new’ rather loosely here because though the piece is dated July 20, it reads as though it were written back around the first week of May and treats my series as though it began and ended with the initial two posts on May 1 – was penned, albeit very poorly penned, by a guy by the name of Keelan Balderdash.

I’m not personally aware of “Quinn” or “Fucktard”, but I’m encouraged that so many people are taking McGowan to task for his delusional “research” and coming to similar conclusions. Perhaps he should take this as a sign that he might need to reevaluate his position…we can only dream.

I reject the notion that I’m a debunker, for the same reasons as I explained in the original article. I run an alternative news website concerned with reaching the truth regardless of mainstream or alternative dogma or nonsense. In the process of finding truth, critiquing others is simply part of the process.

Anyway, Balderdash has, like Quinn, taken a decidedly Orwellian approach to debunking my work. He begins by boldly stating that he hasn’t actually read my series: “As I write this sentence I have yet to engage with the series beyond a quick scan, thus I’ve titled this article a ‘review’ instead of a ‘debunking.’” It’s actually neither a review nor a debunking but rather a craven hit piece that utilizes the same ‘talking points’ already trotted out by others. But what is important here is that he is claiming to have not even bothered to read my posts. If I may be so bold, I’d say that Balderdash’s claim basically translates as follows: “I’ve read through McGowan’s work and there is no way that I can even begin to ‘debunk’ the body of evidence that he has put together without coming off sounding like a complete asshat, but my paymasters are insisting that I give it a go so I’m going to just copy off of some other people’s failed ‘debunkings’ and pretend as though about 90% of the research he has done over the last few months doesn’t exist.”

As clearly explained in the article I chose to approach McGowan’s piece step by step so the reader could go through the motions of the review with me with an open mind. I did not want to come to my conclusion before beginning writing for the express purpose of not coming across as a disingenuous debunker. After all it was one of my readers who linked me to his pages, so I approached it as respectfully as possible. However perhaps I was being too nice, because McGowan clearly hasn’t grasped my methodology and would prefer to believe I wasn’t reading what I was reviewing, regardless of the fact that I quoted what he wrote and the pictures he presented in the article!

The idea that I have “paymasters” (whether he was joking or being serious) is just typical arrogant conspiracy theorist mentality. McGowan believes he is so important that people are paid to debunk him. Tragically the truth it seems, is that several of us fools have wasted our time on McGowan for free.

I’m not going to bother responding to most of Balderdash’s feeble arguments, primarily because I already have – when they were originally penned by Quinn and Fucktard.

So I guess people clearly aren’t buying his “theory”, no matter how many times he claims to have responded to them.

I will though catalogue some of Balderdash’s more egregious lies and misrepresentations, beginning with this one: “this is the problem with a lot of the Boston bombings theories. They are based on ambiguous interpretations of a handful of photographs.” The reality, of course, is that to date I have presented into evidence and analyzed no fewer than 216 photographic exhibits. Balderdash’s attempt to dismiss all of that clearly reveals that he is either “willfully ignorant” or simply a brazen liar. And since it is readily apparent that he is feigning ignorance to try to avoid being caught in an outright lie, let’s just cut to the chase and acknowledge that this guy is a lying sack of shit. He strikes me as a guy who has spent his entire adult life trying to convince any woman who will listen that 4 inches is really 8 inches.

What McGowan fails to realize (or deliberately ignores) throughout his response is that my particular interest as stated and titled in the article is with bombing victim Jeff Bauman, and thus my reference to other theories and “a handful of photographs” are obviously in regard to the handful of photographs of Bauman he and others have used in their theories. I am not obliged to address the rest of his series, though as I’ve said I may do if time permits. If this is his foundation however, I don’t hold much hope that he has the “smoking gun” evidence he claims.

It’s particularly telling that instead of actually responding to what I wrote in my review about the pages that deal with Bauman, he decides to broaden the topic.

The pages I reviewed (the first couple), which dealt with the immediate scene of the first blast and those in and around Bauman (who he calls ‘accomplices’), is frankly, full of baseless crap. That’s not going to change no matter how many other pages he writes. Either his interpretation and claims quoted in my review are right or they’re wrong, regardless of whether he wants to swamp them in other material. If you’re going to respond Dave…then actually respond.

A psychologist once explained to me the theory of projection, so with that I’ll leave the last comment in the paragraph as it is. A man that can’t upgrade his website from some hideous 1996 coding probably can’t upgrade much else in his life either.

In this next short passage, Balderdash manages to squeeze in a couple more very obvious lies: “This lady in blue, named as Krystle Campbell, died. You can see her laying [sic] legless near Bauman and so called [sic] “accomplices” in the photo below. Another man in the middle (towards the top) of the photo has a serious leg wound. Why is McGowan ignoring these people?” As the photographic record makes very clear, Campbell was not lying legless. Had Balderdash done even the most rudimentary research, he would have known that. The other guy he is referring to is, of course, The Other Jeff, aka Patrick Downes, but Balderdash either has no clue who any of these people are or he is just a compulsive liar. The notion that I ignore Campbell and The Other Jeff in my series is without question yet another absurd lie. Balderdash’s audience, to the extent that he even has one, is apparently quite gullible.

Here McGowan quotes my response without even mentioning what I was responding to. He implied that people around Bauman didn’t “appear to have received any significant injuries despite having been right alongside a guy who supposedly got both his legs blown off.”

So to reiterate my response to this claim…for no apparent reason McGowan just refuses to acknowledge the injuries in some of the photos are real injuries, saying things like a man lying on the ground with torn trousers soaked in blood is laying “comfortably”, and he also completely failed to mention Krystle Campbell or Patrick Downes as being injured (or pretending to be injured) at all, despite them being close to Bauman. You can’t ignore them when it suits your argument (however delusional it is) and then mention them later on. And you can’t point your finger at me for not knowing who they are, when it was me who mentioned them and you who ignored them when it didn’t fit your argument!

And ok Campbell’s legs weren’t completely blown off, but forgive me for being hyperbolic at the sight of a gruesomely injured dying lady that you refused to even factor in to statements such as nobody appeared “to have received any significant injuries despite having been right alongside a guy who supposedly got both his legs blown off.” Her injuries were very serious, in that she died!

Since Balderdash is such an entertainingly ridiculous figure, let’s take a look at some more of his completely nonsensical and very poorly-written commentary: “The aftermath of a bombing is a very shocking and confusing time, there’s no telling what was going through the minds of those in the photo, but creating a baseless theory is not going to enlighten us any further. That being said there isn’t a constant stream of photos.” There isn’t?! Really? So the scores of sequential photos that I have presented exist only in my mind? Or is this just another example of Balderdash talking out of his ass?

Again like a true politician McGowan ignores what I’m even responding to. So lets recap. He said “Jeff is being ignored by everyone”, and “Jeff, just a couple of feet away, is apparently invisible”, and other similar statements.

Well short of there being video or a literal second by second photo account, McGowan doesn’t know if anyone looked at Jeff, or spoke to Jeff, or approached Jeff briefly. I happily conceded in my article that we “can all agree that Bauman needed immediate medical attention,” but I also quite reasonably followed that by saying “However that’s not evidence that he was an actor,” even if we assume he was completely ignored until Arredondo got there.

Who’s the “entertainingly ridiculous figure” here?

Let’s now listen in as Balderdash tells some more lies, this time about the heroic rescue of Jeff Bauman by Carlos Arredondo: “But why is it ridiculous that he’s in a wheelchair? If that’s the only thing his rescuers could come by in that immediate instance, so be it … If you’ve followed the story you’ll know that Arredondo tied up his arteries and can be seen holding on to the end of one of them.” Actually, if you’ve followed the story you know that even Arredondo has attempted to distance himself from the ridiculous claim that he was pinching shut one of Bauman’s femoral arteries. You also know that the notion that a wheelchair was “the only thing his rescuers could come by” has been completely and thoroughly debunked. You know that Carlos and company can be seen pushing Bauman right past an empty gurney and that several other gurneys had already left the scene. The ‘debunkers’ though seem to think that if they keep repeating the same easily refuted lies that it will somehow make them true.

The problem with McGowan’s obsession with the gurneys is that his conclusion is absolute, i.e. Because Bauman wasn’t on a gurney he was acting, it was staged etc. Whereas I can happily accept that Arredondo chose to use a wheelchair for completely reasonable reasons. Such as he didn’t see the gurnerys, he wasn’t medically aware enough to think a gurney was better than a wheelchair, he didn’t think there were enough people nearby to carry the gurney, or he thought he could save Bauman faster by wheeling him off in a wheelchair. There are umpteen different reasonable explanations, and none of them involve the idea that it was fake.

And if we assume it was fake, why use a wheelchair Dave?

And Arredondo hasn’t distanced himself from the artery story. It would appear McGowan has chosen to use an unsourced Wikipedia sentence instead of the various interviews where he states that he was pinching or blocking the artery. As the photo shows he’s tied it up, it’s not necessarily the pinching from his fingers that’s stopping the blood, but he is clearly holding it.

Note that there is no citation number after the statement above from Wikipedia. Arredondo explains the artery situation in This Interview.

McGowan’s aggressive and authoritative tone may continue to fool some people, but strip away his rhetoric and assertions and all that’s left is irrationality and a completely baseless theory.

So let’s recap.

Top 10 points Dave McGowan ignores about my rebuttal:

1) Dave says the media’s use of such gory images is odd, despite this being a mass public event where the majority attending would have personal camera technology. He also ignores the fact that the likes of the New York Daily News actually photoshopped out gore “out of sensitivity to the victims, the families and the survivors.”

2) Dave says photos of Bauman do not resemble the man photographed in the Wheelchair. I show side by side comparisons that clearly show them to be the same person, or at least that they look extremely similar.

3) Dave says everything about Bauman came from an unverified Facebook page, as if nobody would have realized all the information was incorrect. He jumped the gun and says there’s been no follow-up interviews, though Bauman has since appeared on the Today Show.

4) Dave focuses on small discrepancies in Arredondo’s rescue story, disputing that he was at Bauman’s side within “moments” as if such a subjective term somehow sheds doubt on the fact that Arredondo did end up at Bauman’s side once the fencing was removed as per the photos. Dave has yet to explain what the significance of any of this even is, because he clearly doesn’t dispute Arredondo’s presence.

5) Dave says there were few witnesses and the fencing prevented people seeing the staging of the incident taking place. In truth many many people were at the scene of the first blast and the fencing was neither high nor opaque – staging of the incident would have been in clear view of a lot of people.

6) Dave says Bauman’s stumps look significantly different directly after the blast than later in the wheelchair. NO THEY DON’T.

7) Dave says a victim putting on his sun glasses after the blast is suspicious, as opposed to several reasonable explanation such as dust or strain, or simply that it’s a free country and he can do what he wants with his sunglasses.

8) Dave says not a drop of Bauman’s blood landed on people nearby, despite photos of them with blood on them and blood all over the floor. Did Dave test for the presence of Bauman’s blood?

9) Dave says people aren’t injured, or should be more injured, when lots of photos show them injured.

10) Dave says two people near Bauman reeling after the blast are making dubious hand signals…LOL

Whether Dave McGowan is just delusional or has an agenda, I cannot determine, but his and similar disinformation is poisoning the alternative media.

Further Reading:

Review of Jeff Bauman (legless man) Boston Bombing Conspiracy Theory (GRAPHIC IMAGES)