How much all of human history hangs by a thread?

Have you noticed how completely our elite culture has memory-holed the assassination attempt on President Trump last July in Pennsylvania?

In the immediate aftermath, there were many questions.

How did the shooter get on that roof, that close to the president, with a rifle, without being seen or taken out by Secret Service or other law enforcement on site before he could fire off eight shots?

Why was there no aerial surveillance of the many nearby rooftops, by drone or other method?

What was the shooter’s agenda and ideology? Did he have organizational help? We later learned later that a Pakistani national with ties to Iran was arrested the day before the Butler rally. Asif Merchant was suspected—and later convicted—of planning to assassinate President Trump. There was a smattering of media attention to this in the aftermath of July 13, and a bit more in September when a second assassination attempt on the president, this one in Florida and involving a man with demonstrable interest in Iran, was foiled. This all quickly dried up and was also memory-holed.

Whether one is a full-throated supporter or a dedicated opponent of President Trump, one thing is clear: If Trump had not turned his head at precisely the moment he did,  the country may have descended into civil war. (Or perhaps, more accurately, the cold civil war that was already underway before July 13 would have gotten precipitously much more heated). I do not say that flippantly. I consider it a reasonable guess as to how his assassination might have affected both sides of our deepening political and moral divide.

It is deeply troubling that we came within inches of a political assassination that would have shaken the country to its roots and now—a full eight months later—somehow our media-saturated world still offers us little more information than we knew then.

Too much is hidden from our view on these questions to permit anything more than speculation and more questions. But another aspect of what happened on July 13, somewhat peripheral to the main event but still of great importance, was discussed afterward but has also faded from attention. The response of Secret Service agents to those events provided a textbook example of why the left’s commitment to absolute gender equality in all spheres of life is the purest insanity. What we saw in the video from that day was all the evidence we should ever need on that question.

Anyone who takes the time to closely watch it will see that as the would-be assassin fired the first three shots—the first of which nicked the president’s ear—and before he had time to hit the ground, three agents were up on the stage and on top of the president shielding him. Note carefully the sex of those first three agents to get to that stage, how quickly they arrive, how the president was shielded before the shooter is able to squeeze off his final five shots, and how far behind them the lone female is.

Split seconds count in this game. It’s a full two seconds between the first agent’s arrival and this woman’s, in a situation in which two seconds is an eternity because the shooter is still firing.  Unlike her three male comrades, she did not beat the final five shots to the target. If the assassin had been better trained, any one of those shots might have reached its mark if those three men had not been there to present themselves as human shields.

Note, too, how quickly the return shots eliminated the threat . The first bullet fired at Crooks was unleashed by a local—male—SWAT officer.  It shattered the stock of the would-be assassin’s weapon, and it came only six seconds after the first shot was fired at Trump. The second and final sniper bullet fired, by another male—this time a Secret Service officer—liquidated the shooter by exploding his skull. That shot came 10 seconds after the first sniper fire and immediately after the shooter, who had been forced to reposition and rearm after the first sniper shot, reappeared over the roof’s peak.

Is there a serious reason not to believe that a woman behind the sights of either of those two sniper guns would have been substantially slower to find the target or send the volleys that incapacitated the shooter?.

This should be an uncontroversial statement:

I want my child’s elementary school teacher to be female, because I know how much less likely men are to be suitable for that exacting and hyper-important labor, and I want the people guarding this country against its enemies to be male, for the same reason, with the sex reversed.

I understand there are a few men who can effectively teach young children, and a few women who can effectively deal with would-be assassins. I also understand that it is a fool’s errand to spend a bunch of resources and time to maximize the numbers of those men and those women—which will ultimately always be small—for idiotic ideological reasons (“We must have perfect equity!”). Those resources and that time are much better spent making sure the best elementary school teachers, who will always be overwhelmingly female, and the best guardians of the country against enemies, who will always be overwhelmingly male, have everything they need to do their equally important work well.

But American society still has not learned this lesson taught to us by July 13, just as we have not discovered the true depths of the plot to kill the president and throw the country into chaos.