For those who haven't been following the case of Michael Cravey aka "Thomas Brinkley", he was a so-called "conspiracy theorist" who stabbed a stranger in the neck (fortunately, not fatally), went on the run for three hours, and finally got himself shot dead when he raised a hatchet above his head and charged at a cop on Monday 3 March, 2014. Michael Cravey is his real name; his online moniker was Thomas Brinkley. The March 16 Gainesville Sun article by Monivette Cordeiro provides further clues as to what happened to Cravey. There is no evidence that unscrupulous operators were manipulating him until it became time to "cash in their asset", but it would not have been a wildly improbable task, and remains a possibility.
The Sun article has one or two inaccuracies, but a couple of inaccuracies don't make a conspiracy. For example, Cross City to Gainesville is 51.2 miles, and so Cravey would need to have averaged 122.88 mph to arrive by 6:55 a.m. if he'd really left Cross City at 6:30. The logical explanation is that his mother's estimate of "about 6:30" was inaccurate, and it was nearer 6:00. Also, Michael's younger brothers are Nicholas and "L.B." Cravey. Mather was his late father.
Disinformation agents love to cite the odd inaccuracy or two as 'proof' that an incident is a major conspiracy, with the police, the press, and hundreds of others collaborating behind the scenes in some type of false-flag or psy-op, probably involving mind control. Although psy-ops abound, along with socialbots such as the "journalist" Carina Santos, the only psy-op in relation to Cravey most likely did not begin until after his death, when disinfo propagators suggested that the events on March 3, 2014 were faked by the police, the press and other mysterious operators.
One new piece of evidence is that Cravey was making statements about a "Mike Potter" before he stabbed Cliff Preston, who goes in to the University of Florida on the holidays as a volunteer baby cuddler. The "Mike Potter" that Cravey referred to is not likely to be the meteorologist at WCJB TV-20, who is on air weekdays, between 5 and 7 a.m. and at noon. A more interesting "suspect" is the Mike Potter of Salt Lake City, Utah, who is open to some "conspiracy theories", and has posted on a couple of threads where "Thomas Brinkley" also commented. The salient point here is that Mike Potter advocates reform of marijuana legislation, as does Congressman Steve Cohen, whom Potter includes among his Facebook Likes.
And so did Cravey. On a Facebook page that ran a story of Morgan Freeman saying weed prohibition was "the stupidest law possible"; "Thomas Brinkley" agreed that it was "stupid".
However, that Mike Potter runs a boat service in Murray UT, south of Salt Lake City, and could hardly be expected to have made a 2,200-mile journey to supply an internet contact with a drug. There is no evidence that the two were ever in contact. And the White Pages lists 80 Michael Potters in Florida alone, albeit only one for Gainesville.
Cravey was restless on the Sunday night, and then got up early to drive to Gainesville. Another new piece of evidence is that Cravey had just received a letter informing him that his disability benefits application had been rejected.
Marijuana use can lead to paranoia, psychosis, schizophrenia and "other adverse effects, particularly among people with pre-existing psychiatric disorders", although junkies and "moderate" drug users alike will prefer to downplay the risks. For those who don't know, psychosis is a detachment from reality. (However, that doesn't mean the "war on drugs" solves more problems than it creates. Regulating people's behavior, supposedly for the "benefit" of society, will generally benefit the regulators rather than the people. But there are no easy answers.)
The best hypothesis to fit the data is that Cravey was a cannabis user who probably went on to a harder drug, needed a fix, and got up early to meet a dealer who uses the name of the WCJB-TV weatherman, who happens to be on air weekday mornings 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. when the dealer is getting up to go about his business. Meanwhile, Cravey's drug use had turned him basically into a raving nutjob - depressed, paranoid, unemployable, and incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy. Listening to Alex Jones was hardly going to help him. So he goes to see his dealer (who told him a license plate to look out for), and finds the dealer isn't there.
In a video where Cravey rants on whilst dressed in a towel, at around 1:24:55, he talks about the "0.1% that is really running things and they're all ****ing psycho evil". He goes on to say that he would "totally enjoy being a part of the 0.1% because of how the majority of people are so stupid", and says, "I hate humanity, but I love you". He says he loves the people that he saw supporting Ron Paul, because he "saw hope [for humanity]", and it meant that he wouldn't "have to be the Joker character any more". Ron Paul supports legalizing marijuana.
In February 2009 Michael Cravey, his younger brothers and others made a short film: "Difference Between a Joke and a Riddle: Joker vs Riddler Part 1" and "Part 2". On Nicholas Cravey’s Facebook page, those are the 5:13 and 9:41 videos. On the Part 2 (9:41) video, the brothers are playing the role of the villains the Joker and the Riddler. Their prisoners are tied up and Nicholas has a knife. At around 2:28 he gives a maniacal laugh.
Michael Cravey thought there was a connection between him and James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora shooter. He was right. Both imagined themselves to be the fictional Batman "Joker" character, and both became dysfunctional individuals with mental health problems including psychosis, which made them a danger to society. Cravey never sank to the same level as Holmes, a cold-blooded mass murderer, although he did stab and slash Cliff Preston about seven times, including three times in the neck.
At the end of July 2013, seven months prior to Cravey's death, his father had passed away, following years of paralysis after an aortic tear and a stroke. Michael Cravey couldn't even get a minimum wage job. He'd just received a letter informing him that his application for disability benefit had been rejected. And Cravey was not attracting enough interest amongst truth-seekers to make a career from selling material on conspiracy theories. It looks like Cravey finally flipped when he realised he wasn't going to get his fix - he took it out on a random stranger. And he took Preston's wallet - he needed money for his drugs.
Cravey used to help care for his sick father, and at that time, an assault on a stranger would have been quite out of character. But that went out the window. So Cravey acts out the role of the "Joker character" - complete with maniacal laugh (as heard by the eyewitness), and enjoys a brief taste of being "a part of the 0.1%" of evil psychopaths. Then, after evading the police for three hours, he elects to go for "suicide by cop".
According to Cass Sunstein, so-called "conspiracy theorists" are a group who "may create serious risks, including risks of violence". However, Sunstein and his shills would look silly if they were to cite Cravey as an example in support of Sunstein's claim, since the anti-truth propagandists would need to demonstrate that those who subscribe to theories about conspiracies present a high risk in relation to the population at large.
Firstly, as a group, those who seek truth and justice by exposing conspiracies and corruption have a sincere desire to make the world a better place for the vast majority who are not part of the conspiracies or corruption, and so would pose a low risk to members of the public. Secondly, an August 2013 poll showed that 60% of Americans are not completely satisfied with the government's account of 9/11, and 10% do not believe it at all. In 2012 there were 14,827 murders and 760,739 aggravated assaults in the US, and so if we class just the 10% who completely reject the government's own 9/11 conspiracy theory as "conspiracy theorists", they would have to be responsible for 1,483 murders and 76,074 aggravated assaults, merely to present an average risk. Michael Cravey did not kill anyone but himself. Finally, there is no evidence for, and no reason to suspect, any causal link between Cravey's beliefs about conspiracies and his non-lethal attack on a random stranger.
There are much more prosaic explanations that can account for the events surrounding the sad case of Michael Cravey. Maybe the balance of his mind was disturbed by the emotional trauma he'd been through over the last few years with his father's physical decline followed by death at 55, and then Michael himself became an increasing irrelevance - unemployable, ineligible for disability benefits, and accepted only by the lunatic fringe in the "truth" movement and the disinformation infiltrators whose job is to support the lunatic fringe, who rate a theory according to whether it sounds good rather than whether there is any evidence behind it. But that does not satisfactorily account for all the data, such as the restlessness on the Sunday night, the early drive to Gainesville before 7:00 a.m., the carrying of a knife, the checking of a license plate, the statement about meeting "Mike Potter", the assault and theft from Cliff Preston, the relatively rapid mental decline, and the final decision to get himself killed. By far the best hypothesis is that Cravey had nascent mental health problems, which were exacerbated by mind-altering drugs.
In controlled studies that examined the prevalence of psychotic symptoms in cannabis users and in the general population, one found that daily cannabis use doubled the risk of reporting psychotic symptoms, and another found that one in seven cannabis users reported "strange, unpleasant experiences such as hearing voices or becoming convinced that someone is trying to harm you or that you are being persecuted" after using cannabis. Two studies that found no correlation between cannabis use and psychosis were unconvincing because the sample sizes of cannabis users were low; one was 30 and the other 47. A 15-year prospective study by Andreasson et al, and conducted on 50,465 Swedish conscripts, looked for a correlation between those who reported using cannabis by age 18 and the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the next 15 years. For those who had tried cannabis by the age of 18, the risk was 2.4 times higher. And it was dose-dependent, being 30% higher for those who'd used cannabis up to ten times, three times higher for those who'd used cannabis up to fifty times, and six times higher for those who'd used it more than fifty times.
For cocaine use, especially in the "crack" form, association with paranoia, delusions, violence, suicide and homicide is much stronger than for cannabis.
There is certainly a possibility of a conspiracy in which Cravey was the target. A plethora of overwhelming evidence proves beyond the slightest shadow of doubt that 9/11 was a false-flag terror attack in which the Mossad played a central role. Clearly, a group such as the Mossad has a powerful motive to trash the image of truth-seekers and portray them as crazy conspiracy theorists. And it's a bonus for them if, after exploiting some unfortunate individual for as long as they are able, they can then "cash in their asset" by tricking some of the public into imagining that it supports Sunstein's claim that "conspiracy theorists" are a group who "may create serious risks, including risks of violence". All they need do is pose as "truth-seekers", find genuine truth-seekers who are willing to meet them, and then offer some drugs, eventually going on to something harder, and maybe deceiving the truth-seekers by supplying laced marijuana. The truth-seeker will promote convoluted, delusional, paranoid conspiracy theories, and will present a risk of violence, suicide or homicide. There is no evidence that the Mossad were ever in contact with Cravey, but they certainly had a motive, and it remains a possibility.
In conclusion, it must be stressed that there are two sorts of "conspiracy theorists". There are those for whom truth is the priority, who will place great emphasis on facts, and will not give any credence to an unsupported claim made by someone in a video, for example. Then there are those who will happily believe any conspiracy theory, however crazy, no matter how little evidence there is to support it, and no matter how much evidence there is that refutes it. Michael Cravey was one of the latter group. Furthermore, the latter group can be divided into two: those who are acting crazy, and those who really are crazy. The actors are disinformation agents who deliberately engage in deception as part of a program to portray conspiracy theorists as crazy. A good example of such an actor is Professor Jim Fetzer. But Cravey was not acting - at least, not at the end. An actor doesn't go on to stab a stranger and then get himself killed by charging at a cop with a hatchet.
