What I Believe

The gift of life

Night and Day, photogravure etching

I don’t attend religious services and don’t believe in miracles. I do believe that mere human knowledge cannot encompass all that exists. Therefore there are things or spirits or essences beyond our understanding. Philospher Roger Scruton puts it this way: ‘The world has a meaning which is greater than what is revealed through to our ordinary scientific inquiries, but it is revealed directly in an everyday way to all of us, if only we would keep our attention ready for it.’ That there is a higher power than ourselves is not only self-evident from our lack of complete knowledge, it also gives us the humility to accept that we are not gods; that all our wonderful science and technology and weaponry is inferior to the Creator or Life-Force or however we may characterize the Divine.

Occasionally we witness something outside our mental grasp that is inexplicable yet super-real. A man turns his head 0.3 seconds before a supersonic bullet whizzes by, piercing his ear. A millisecond’s difference, a millimeter to the left, a puff of wind not arising, and the man would have been killed. ‘I’m supposed to be dead’, Donald Trump observed, after his July 13appointment in Butler Pennsylvania. God spared him on that day, to resume freeing the nation from the tyranny that has strangled it for decades. Donald Trump is alive today thanks, it would appear, to Divine intervention, as there is no other ‘reason’. ‘I want you around to continue doing My work’, I imagine God saying, ‘and listen up, take care of that ear’.

It’s a cliché that God works in mysterious ways. Calling on this serial violator of the niceties of polite discourse, this outer-borough billionaire, to act as the everyman of Divine purpose has to be one of the more mysterious of those ways. And then subjecting him to the implacable — diabolical is the only word that fits here — hostility of his enemies, as if to enact a morality play pointing out unmistakably to everyone where Good and Evil are located, seems to have been the only way to get everyone’s attention. The would-be assassin’s bullet is simply the physical manifestation of the relentless harassment of President Trump during and after his term of office, the all-of-government censorship of any mention of the thorough fraud of the 2020 election, and the marshaling of the coordinated legal resources of Federal and State Governments to drain his resources, time, and energy. All this only made him more popular, as large numbers of people recognized that these attacks on Trump were really attacks on them. Finally the only recourse for those seeking to expunge his presence was the logical sequel to character assassination, actual physical murder. This didn’t work either, but it revealed the truly violent intentions of his adversaries. They were out for blood all along. Those experiences have humbled Trump, made him aware of his own vulnerability, and at the same time made him realize anew the enormous latent energy of the ordinary people for whom he has sacrificed so much. They have also shifted the political grounds visibly, as Matt Crawford notes.

The glaring security lapses around the July 13 rally trespass the frequently noted border between gross incompetence and something more sinister: A pitifully small security perimeter of hardly more than 100 meters from the podium; the shooter getting his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle past magnetometer checkpoints and climbing up to a rooftop by means of a conveniently placed ladder; the rooftop only 130 meters from the podium entirely devoid of Secret Service or police; numerous attendees pointing out the shooter to police, who ignored their warnings; failing to get Trump off the stage as soon as the shooter was spotted; Secret Service counter-snipers focusing on the shooter with their rifle-mounted telescopes for three minutes before any shots were fired; then and only then dispatching him after he had fired eight or nine shots, killing one rally attendee and wounding others; and so on. The excuse offered by SS Director Cheatle for failing to secure the rooftop would be laughable were it not of such tragic consequence — she cited the sloping roof. In photos, the roof-slope looks like 15 degrees, if that. Thus the mindset of a diversity hire, who set out to hire women regardless of ability or merit, prioritizes averting the risks of a slightly sloping roof over protecting the target of an assassin’s bullet. One of the female agents seen in a video cannot even find the holster for her gun, another takes time out from her duties after shots were fired to put on her sunglasses. They are both much shorter than Trump, leaving him exposed to more rounds from the rooftop shooter or any backup shooter who might also be within range.

To appreciate the amazing grace that spared Donald Trump’s life, the rooftop only 130 meters (about 140 yards) from the podium would give a moderately-skilled shooter a can’t-miss vantage-point, even with iron-sights. Iron-sights as I remember them consist of a V-shaped piece on the near end of the rifle barrel and a small bearing-sized ball on the far end. Aligning the ball with the bottom of the ‘V’ makes a primitive range-finder to direct the bullet to a target. This device is so primitive I could not find any pictures of it on the Web. At summer camp as a 12-year-old, I could reliably hit the center of a target 100 yards distant with a simple 22-caliber rifle equipped with this primitive iron-sight. I wasn’t particularly skillful, you know how it is at summer camp, every kid gets an award for something. My Japanese friends are surprised that I ever did this, and that it was just another recreational activity like archery or horse-riding. (I was awarded badges for those too.) The point of this little vignette is that an AR-15 with a telescopic sight is far more accurate than a .22 with iron-sights. Allowing someone with a scoped AR-15 to be that close to the podium is very nearly equivalent to inviting him to assassinate President Trump.

The Secret Service has been in this territory before — the borderland between gross incompetence and something more sinister. As I wrote in

this post,

Detailed examination of ballistic evidence by gunsmith Howard Donahue, reported by Bonar Menninger in 2017, reaches the astonishing conclusion that Oswald's shots missed their target, but they caused Secret Service agent George Hickey in the car following the presidential limousine to fire his AR-15 accidentally.

The inexperienced agent had been employed for only four months, and his AR-15 was a new model with a unique 'signature' matching the size and destructiveness of the entry and exit wounds. Jarred by the driver's sudden braking to avoid a collision with the presidential limousine, Hickey, standing, pitched forward, and as he did so, in Donohue's analysis, accidentally fired only five feet away from President Kennedy. Several witnesses, including Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, stated they smelled gunsmoke along the route of the motorcade. The subsequent behavior of the Secret Service in rushing the president's body away from Parkland Hospital and fabricating an X-ray with pasted-on bullet fragments, indicate a coverup…

Accident or intention? Who knows? Motivation matters a great deal in a criminal trial, but the only official ‘verdict’ on the assassination of President Kennedy is the lone-gunman thesis of the obfuscatory Warren Commission Report. Few people outside of official circles believe this. Regarding the attempted assassination of President Trump, mass psy-ops have apparently afflicted significant numbers of people with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). On July 13, TDS went kinetic, and it appears from social-media chatter that the line between character assassination and actual murder has been — and still is — quite tenuous. A sufficiently high volume of vituperation can apparently ‘trigger’ murderous desires in some, a few of whom may try to actualize their thoughts. The social experiment underlying the global covid clinical trial showed how suprisingly easy it is to get about two-thirds of the populace to harm themselves with a gene-modifying injection. Similarly, constant high-pressure targeted messaging can cause vulnerable people to think and do things that they would never consider in their right minds. The talking-points media — a more accurate term than ‘mainstream’ or ‘legacy’ media — have taken on the job of conveying such messages to their readers and viewers.

President Trump will know now that he cannot rely on the Secret Service for protection against such widely dispersed threats, nor even to follow the most elementary event-security precautions. He would be well-advised to organize competence-first (not woke-DEI-enforced) staffing of his own security detail, and to coordinate it with local public law-enforcement that has not been defunded or intimidated.

De-toxifying the talking-points media and overall discourse can best be done not by papering over differences with a false unity, but by simply stating the truth, unreservedly, without apology, and with humility toward the gift of life and freedom endowed by our Creator.