Great Men and Small Minds

The assassination attempt and delusional responses to it are really bound up in the issue of greatness

Once again Trump is the lightning rod, the point in the world where the energy strikes and we see a flash of light showing everything. Whether called to it by Fate, or by God, or whether it is simply the case that nobody else stands tall enough to serve this purpose, Trump and reactions to Trump tell us more about what is happening and what matters than a million pages of erudite commentary or a million lectures in the halls of academia would.

Let’s start with the level of derangement and delusion in our culture today, which is the most obvious point. Assassinations and attempted assassinations occur at points of cultural crisis and change, intended to prevent or speed that change depending on the motivations of the assassin.

The change which is occurring today is the realignment of the People towards populism, and the Elite towards globalism. The gap between the ruling class and the rest of us has widened. It has, rather obviously, widened materially. There’s been a squeezing of the middle class and huge profits for the billionaire class, rapidly speeded by corrupt wealth transfer projects like COVID and Ukraine. But there has also been a huge gulf develop spiritually and morally, a gulf in how we see the world and what we consider to be good or evil. This gap is now so vast that the moral attitudes of the Elite and the People are directly opposed.

What they consider good, we consider evil. And what we consider good, they consider evil.

This is a sincere difference. It is not a slight disagreement, or even a large disagreement on methods still united by a shared moral understanding of what good is. The shared understanding of the Judeo-Christian heritage is gone. The false consensus of the ‘Free World’ is gone too. The countries we still see as the West are not aligned on shared moral principles and ethical standards regarding democracy, freedom, individual rights, the importance of free speech, the independence and integrity of the free press or the honesty and standards of free elections. All of that is gone.

The western world is now aligned by the interests and power of Globalists. These nations say the same things and enact the same measures because they are all controlled by globalists, not because they have ‘shared values’ that were inherited and as comprehensible to the average citizen as they are to the average politician. In almost every case, the inherited shared values directly contradict the things now being done in their name.

Globalism represents the world view of an elite who have broken with those inherited shared values, and now worship and conduct the opposite whilst still pretending to adhere to the things they have betrayed. Populism represents the world view of those who have not moved away from the old inherited values and the real, true moral responses that their parents or grandparents could understand.

It’s not just a material gulf. It’s not just about a disparity of wealth and power. It’s about a moral and spiritual gulf where the things we value and the things they value are diametrically, fundamentally opposed.

What happens when the rich and powerful adopt a new religion, or a new world view, that is diametrically opposite to the religion or values of the general populace? They use their existing power to try to force conversion on their subjects. In some ways the scale of change from the worldview of Christian nations to the worldview of Post-Christian nations is as vast as the change from a Pagan West to a Christian one. That’s the scale of cultural shift we are talking about.

Those worrying about geopolitical international shifts away from the petrodollar or towards a Chinese and BRICs dominated future or a ‘multi-polar’ future rather than an international order secured by US superpower dominance, are right to acknowledge those hugely significant changes. The US is in decline and China, India and Russia are rising. But that’s not the biggest change we face.

Those worrying about the growth of technologies which pose a potentially existential threat to human life, technologies that would fundamentally reshape our experience of life and our basic freedoms like a social credit system does, or technologies which contain within them species level threats the way geoengineering does, or technologies that could replace us as a species the way AI could, are also right. Untrammelled and unwise technological development, development controlled by the malign or the shortsighted, poses an enormous risk to us as a species. But that’s still not the greatest threat and the biggest challenge.

It is moral revolution that is the truly great threat and the truly great challenge. Because ultimately the decision of every individual to conform to evil or fight against evil is an individual moral choice. If our morality is successfully altered, WE are successfully altered. And if our morality is wrong, or indeed delusional and twisted to be the exact opposite of true morality, then we will not only submit but do so gladly. And everything that is truly dangerous to us as a culture and as an entire species only comes about by moral revolution, by enough people considering evil to be good.

How does all of this relate to Trump and the assassination attempt on Trump? Why is Trump the lightning rod?

Well look at the moral responses to the assassination attempt. Look at them as moral issues, not merely political ones.

The reality is that possibly millions of Democrat voters would have been delighted if the assassination succeeded. They would have celebrated it, and they would have celebrated it exactly the same way that much of the Muslim world celebrated the Oct 7th torture, rape and murder of Israeli Jews. Some may consider such a comparison crass, but it really isn’t. It’s a considered comparison talking about how these people would respond and who they remind me of (note too that Democrats voters overwhelmingly favour the ‘Palestinian cause’, even Jewish Democrat voters).

On the other side, MAGA voters and Trump supporters of course see the assassination attempt as a terrible indicator of how bad things have got, how dangerous and extreme the situation now is, and can look at and read thousands of tweets and posts from Democrats lamenting that the attempted murder failed or offering insane commentary trying to find ways to blame Trump for political violence aimed at Trump.

Those two sets of responses are not political differences within an overall shared moral understanding. They are totally opposed moral attitudes, irreconcilable moral worldviews that are the direct opposite of each other.

For the Democrat, you can only support Trump if you are morally compromised yourself. Trump is an evil, wicked person and you are an evil, wicked person. Trump is a racist, a bigot, a demagogue, and a potential Hitlerian dictator.

That’s what the shooter believed. But that’s also what mainstream media has been telling us for nearly a decade. And it’s also what the entire Democrat Party leadership and a fair chunk of the Republican Party leadership have been telling us for a long time. The hate that the shooter had for Trump is a hate that large numbers of Democrat voters and all of the Democrat leadership have as well. The hate that inspires someone to try to murder Trump is a hate they spent nearly a decade creating.

For half the shooters life, he was hearing that Trump was an existential threat. That Trump was pure evil. That Trump must be stopped. Here is Joe Biden on Trump:

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic….there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country….
 
MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution.  They do not believe in the rule of law.  They do not recognize the will of the people. 
 
They refuse to accept the results of a free election.  And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
 
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
 
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

In a 2019 article ‘An American Fuhrer: Nazi Analogies and the Struggle to explain Donald Trump’ Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Cambridge University Press laid out the then already extensive history of people hysterically comparing Trump to Hitler. The article is clear both on the extent of these comparisons and shows that the author shares some level of prejudiced agreement with them:

“Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar European fascism, especially the National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler….As Trump continues to violate democratic political norms, and as instances of right-wing extremist violence continue to erupt, concerns over the future of US democracy remain high. Comparisons with the Nazi past thus remain more relevant than ever.”

Thus, and rather typically given the enormous leftwing dominance of academia, the scholar tasking himself with describing how many others have used the Hitler analogy towards Trump, himself considers such an analogy at least partly justified.

The reality, of course, is that the Global Index of Terrorism shows that the most common form of terrorism is (surprise, surprise) Islamic in nature. The second most common is from leftwing groups. The leftwing Antifa have been involved in more violent incidents over the last decade than any rightwing group in the US. Several Trump supporters have been murdered over the past ten years, some by the authorities (Ashli Babbitt for example) and some by Antifa or similar leftist activists (Aaron Danielsohn). Other Trump supporters have been driven to suicide in custody or while under investigation by the Biden administration and ‘justice’ system (Mark Aungst, Matthew Perna).

Far more people have died for supporting Trump than for opposing him, if ANY have died in that direction at all (one might say that the Antifa members who were killed by Kyle Rittenhouse might qualify, but they were trying to kill Rittenhouse when he shot them).

When it comes to the violence levels of their respective supporters, the objective historical record is that the people who hate Trump are more violent than the people who support him and you can also find more violent rhetoric from their leaders than you can from Trump.

The situation is similar with regards to an administration acting in an authoritarian and dictatorial manner, either at home or abroad. Trump did not launch any new wars or extensive military engagements. All of his Presidential predecessors and his successor did so. Trump and the justice system under Trump did not launch criminal proceedings against any political opponents. Trump did not have a militarised inauguration with close to 30,000 troops present. Trump did not deliver any Presidential address demonising Democrat voters whilst flanked by military personnel. Trump did not even enact the worst authoritarian measures during the COVID scam, which were all enacted by Democrat governors. Trump did not impinge on civil liberties or invoke emergency measures or send in the National Guard against political opponents and protestors even after months of rioting encouraged by his Democrat rivals. Throughout his term he kept strictly within the limits of Presidential authority, and the means by which he challenged a stolen election were strictly within normal democratic bounds (by challenging in the courts, by holding rallies, and by seeking to persuade relevant authorities to show due investigatory diligence).

When violence was provoked by tear gassing the crowd on Jan 6, and as soon as Trump was notified of violence, he added to previous calls for peace. Before the rally he urged peaceful assembly. After the violence he asked for peaceful departure.

So every count on which we can consider whether Trump acted dictatorially when in power, we find that despite enormous provocation and violence directed at his supporters, he chose to limit himself to lawful responses.

By contrast, multiple Democrats encouraged violence whilst Trump was President. And by contrast when in power, the Biden administration swept up hundreds of people for minor offences or no offence except political protest and put them in prison for years without charge, with multiple claims from those prisoners of torture. That is a fascist, dictatorial action. Similarly, direct comparison of political violence through rioting and violent civil disturbance, when we compare pro and anti Trump protests, shows a huge preponderance to such violence from ANTI Trump forces.

Rioting and political violence did not occur from Trump supporters when Trump was raided by the FBI. It did not occur when political witch-hunts were conducted against him. It did not occur when Trump supporters were held for years without charge. It did not occur when Trump was put in court, or photographed as a common criminal, or indeed when Trump was shot by an assassin. It has not occurred when Supreme Court rulings or lower court rulings went against Trump. All of the evidence shows that Trump and MAGA are the least dictatorial and the least violent movement in US politics today, not the most violent or the most dictatorial.

Comparisons of Trump with Hitler, which were already widespread enough to be the focus of academic articles in 2019 and which only continued and escalated from 2020, are proof not of Trump’s perfidy, extremism and contempt for democracy, but of all three qualities in his opponents who are prepared to indulge the most reckless political rhetoric imaginable in doing everything in their power to prevent the People electing or re-electing a populist President.

The 2019 article is instructive on how early and how insane these Hitler comparisons were. Talking about 2015, before Trump had even won an election or held any power whatsoever, we had this level of delusional fear mongering and hysterical and demonising rhetoric about Trump:

“The former Republican governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, rejected Trump's comments as “the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward,” while the Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, said Trump had “taken a page from the playbook of Hitler.” Several months later, two former Mexican presidents echoed these comments: in February 2016, Vicente Fox responded to Trump's crude criticism of Latino immigrants by saying he “reminds me of Hitler,” while his successor, Felipe Calderon, accused Trump of “exploiting [popular] feelings like Hitler did in his time.” Similar comparisons flooded the mass media and popular culture. Already in the summer of 2015, journalists unearthed a 1990 Vanity Fair story in which Trump's ex-wife, Ivana, reported that her husband kept a book of Hitler speeches in a cabinet near his bed. Other reporters discovered the disturbing fact that Trump's signature phrase, “Make America Great Again,” resembled Hitler's slogan, “Make Germany Great Again.” Trump's alleged similarity to Hitler also found expression in political cartoons and comments by comedians, such as Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, and Louis C. K., who told the New York Daily News: “It was funny for a little while. But the guy is Hitler.”

Pure fantasies, like Trump having a bed time penchant for reading Hitler, are treated as authoritative fact even by an academic discussing all this hysteria, with the basic principles of objectivity and evidence based scholarship of course ignored (even the idea that an ex wife might lie about an ex husband not occurring to minds predisposed to hate Trump). Anyone who has actually read Hitler knows just how turgid that writing is, that one might read him for reasons other than agreeing with him, and that Donald Trump is about the least likely person to go to that effort (this is a man who extemporises in all his speeches and prefers bullet point treatments and factual summaries rather than long explanations. There are no short Hitler speeches).

What the 2019 article shows us though, even from someone who shares the kind of globalist prejudices that react to a populist President or candidate in this hysterical way, is that there has been an unprecedented degree of demonisation of Donald Trump, that the mainstream opponents of Trump have devoted huge media and publishing resources to this demonisation, and that this is the kind of treatment that prompts assassination attempts.

The comparison of Trump with Hitler is a direct incitement towards the assassination of Trump, since once you have conditioned enough people to strongly believe this comparison then one or two or more of the people you have programmed to think this way will be already damaged and dangerous enough to act on that comparison and consider it normal and good to try and kill that person. The very people who talk about misinformation and dangerous rhetoric have been wildly (or more cynically, deliberately) reckless in their hysterical and delusional commentary on Trump. Whether they were spitting that malice from hyperbole or from genuinely sharing the delusion they were advocating, this Globalist hatred of a Populist figure and this pretence that a person who acted moderately in power is a nascent dictator builds the conditions of assassination.

Mainstream politicians and mainstream media and mainstream academics all loaded the bullets of that assassination attempt, and ANOTHER innocent Trump supporter (Corey Comperatore) died because of it.

The important thing here, morally, is to acknowledge that death. To acknowledge all of the Trump supporters already dead merely because they wanted a populist political approach instead of a Globalist one. To acknowledge that ‘Trump is Hitler’ rhetoric is at least partly responsible for those deaths, and certainly far more responsible than Donald Trump is. These are deaths that probably would not have occurred if mainstream media and mainstream opponents of Trump had confined their language to rational limits.

If the Globalists still shared the same moral hinterland as the Populists, if those shared inherited values were the same, they would have morally judged their own side long ago, they would have morally known too how absurd and irrational and untethered from reality their attitudes to Trump and his voters had become.

Today, the Democrat leaders who partly put the hate in the shooters heart, pretend to be horrified by the end result of their own actions. They pretend to condemn what they helped to create. But it’s a very insincere reaction. The hate they showed before the attempt to kill Trump is a far truer reflection of them and their attitudes, and of how Globalists generally think of Populist opposition. These are the people who were prepared to label concerned parents ‘domestic terrorists’. It was never aimed solely at Trump, that level of insanity. It was aimed at all of us who peacefully and democratically oppose Globalist policies and power.

The moral gulf is not going to be papered over by these temporary and dishonest sops to moderation and restraint, offered by the most cynical with the least sincerity. The Globalist project of recasting good as evil and evil as good has been too successful with their own supporters, which is why so many of these people can go online and celebrate assassination attempts that kill innocent bystanders.

This is what happens when you set about scrapping everything once considered normal. Ironically, in the same speech where Biden spoke about how MAGA threatens everything, Biden said that what we are seeing isn’t normal. Which is true. But the departure from normality, the trajectory towards tyranny, the kind of society in which people celebrate or support assassinations, ALL came from the fact that Globalists decided that a total moral revolution was going to happen and then decided that any Populist pushback would be stopped by any means necessary.

THEY broke the shared values and the shared norms and the peaceful transfer of power and the rational limits on what people will believe or how they will act in a civilised society. THEY injected insane levels of hate and delusion into our political discourse without any thought of the consequences. Trump did not do these things. They did in their determination to prevent Trump or destroy Trump and what he represents.

Trump acquired greatness by responding to the moral revolution that told us that loving your own nation was evil, and that murdering your own child in the womb was good. Trump could only emerge at the moment that the People looked for a champion when the Elite have already gone insane. What Trump was and is about, what Populism is about, is restorative justice and restorative normality. Populism isn’t a call for radical extremism, it’s a call for non-radical sanity, a return to sanity. The mainstream went radical and extremist, and under Globalism will inherently always be radical and extremist in terms of traditional morality and traditional understandings of good and evil.

The Elite, and those lower down professional groups entirely dependent on the Elite and desperate to ape them (like academics, or paid for scientists) all set off on this radical extremist journey towards a utopia where the people never ‘get the chance to elect a Hitler’. In doing so, they all became the authoritarian fascists they claimed to be preventing. They all adopted Hitlerian methods, while making videos warning that Trump would adopt Hitlerian methods (such as Robert Reich’s How Trump is Following Hitler’s Playbook, available on YouTube if you want to see one of the worst examples of Democrat and Globalist psychological projection).

The anti-racists became the most virulent and vicious of racists. The LGBTQ+ lesbian feminists became the strongest supporters of patriarchal Islam. The Marxists became fans of huge corporations, and the huge corporations became fans of the Marxists. Business hopped in bed with radical leftism. ‘Progressive’ anti-fascists started chasing Jews across campuses. The Be Kind people became the people hoping that a rival politicians child would be raped in prison. Cutting off children’s genitals for profit became affirming their gender. Up is down, and down is up, male is female and female male, and the most empathetic and caring people, apparently, want their political opponents murdered.

All of this is where moral revolution AND elite attempts to prevent democratic power transferring to people they don’t like gets us.

Here’s the final secret in all this. What was it about Trump that they hated the most? What was it about his populism that is such a threat to them that they will do anything at all to stop him. After all, Trump wasn’t always successful in opposing them. He was fooled by the ‘expert advice’ on vaccines. He let a large number of Globalist traitors like Mike Pence and Bill Barr get close and ultimately facilitate his removal by theft in 2020. Is just being populist, is just opposing perpetual war and other wealth generation for the Elite at national expense enough for the level of hate it generated?

Or is it that vast moral gulf, in which for all his flaws (and his moderate liberalism is the most dangerous of those flaws) Trump has greatness, and they do not? Just as our moral visions are opposite ones, our view on what constitutes greatness is opposite too. Where they see a man as degenerate as themselves, a man of multiple divorces, a man of greed and hunger for power, a man of racism and pure ego, we see a man with human flaws who has overcome those weaknesses to be a father, a leader, a symbol greater than himself.

They lament the assassin’s failure. We see the Hand of God in a bullet grazing an ear, in the turning of Trump’s head just at the right moment to save his life. We see the fist pump and the now instantly iconic image as a proof of Trump’s greatness. We smile that he plays golf the next day. We marvel that he retains his courage and humour. We are humbled but grateful that he is prepared to risk his life for his nation. We see in him that human weakness does not prevent human greatness, that both can fill the same vessel and that a man can choose to embody either one, can turn from one to the other.

The Globalist worldview is not just that Trump cannot be trusted with power, but that you can’t be trusted with it either, it is that the People have no greatness about them, and the Past has no greatness, and the family has no greatness, and America or England or the West has no greatness. They despise exceptionalism because none of them are exceptional. They hate Trump because he has greatness and wishes US to have it too.

The Globalist has wealth and power. But for them the very notion of greatness is a threat and a psychic wound. They can’t believe it in others, because they don’t possess it themselves. They don’t believe it of the average voter, because that would deny their own purely material and purely social superiority over that voter. So for them democracy becomes denying the choice of the people. The people are too stupid to judge. But Trump offers not only his own greatness but the return of national greatness and the idea that all of us share it, and all of us may own it. Can you imagine what a threat that is to small minds and small men who only have their social position and bank balance as the measure of themselves? To an elite that only manages decline, or profits most from decline? To an elite now shackled to anti human ideas and to a sort of sneering, irreligious, contemptuous view of humanity as a whole which sees us as just another mechanistic animal, or even as a polluting cancer on the Earth?

Neither nations nor men are allowed to be great by the petty tyrants that rule today. Trump reminds them that they are small, petty and morally bankrupt, just as Populism does. That’s what they hate more than anything, and that’s what they cannot forgive.