What Should America Do About Political Violence?

Everyone has their own opinion about the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. Some individuals/sites claim that the assassination attempt was “staged.” Mehek Cooke, Senior National Security and Legal Analyst at The Daily Signal, said that the attempted assassination “should be treated as a clear, intentional act of political violence and a warning sign of a broader national security crisis.” 

In an appearance Monday on NewsNation’s “Katie Pavlich Tonight,” Cooke addressed the legal consequences facing the suspect, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, who is now charged with multiple offenses, including attempting to assassinate the president – a crime that carries a potential life sentence. She said prosecutors will focus heavily on intent, which she argued is already evident in the case.

“This is almost like a mosaic,” Cooke said, explaining that investigators will examine travel records, weapons purchases, and the fact that the suspect discharged his weapon multiple times while attempting to enter the ballroom at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where Trump and administration officials were presiding. “This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a fluke. And then he left a manifesto. All of this ties into intent.”

Cooke said the case should be a “slam dunk” for prosecutors and argued that anyone who had advance knowledge of the attack should also face legal consequences. She expressed confidence in U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, saying the American people expect full accountability and transparency.

Beyond the courtroom, Cooke warned that the attack cannot be dismissed as an isolated incident. She said increasingly aggressive political rhetoric – now echoed not just by fringe figures but by prominent Democrat leaders – has created a dangerous environment.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you have podcasters and influencers doing the same,” Cooke said of the rhetoric, pointing to what she described as a strategy to exploit societal weakness.

Cooke specifically criticized Democrat leaders for doubling down on rhetoric portraying Trump as an existential threat, while simultaneously continuing normal political and media engagement around him.

“If he’s a Nazi, if he’s a fascist, if he’s all these terrible things, then why are these reporters showing up?” Cooke asked. “It just goes to show they are lying to the American people.”

She also emphasized that Trump faces heightened threats not only domestically but from foreign adversaries, including Iran, and said federal agencies must reassess security failures and follow through on promised reforms.

“We were promised that they would not happen again,” Cooke said. “The American people deserve to know that those changes are.”

Cooke concluded by urging Americans and conservative leaders to continue speaking clearly and forcefully. “We have a moral obligation, Katie, to continue to speak the truth,” she said.

 

 

What Is Causing Leftist Violence in America?

With the third assassination attempt of President Donald Trump, many Americans wonder why there is so much leftist political violence. In addition to Trump, other members of the Trump administration have also faced violent threats, and Charlie Kirk, a prominent Trump supporter, was assassinated last year. Even though the Right has its problems, the violence traces back to the ideological foundation of the Left, according to Tyler O’Neil at The Daily Signal.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explained it well when he contrasted the vision of Progressivism with the principles of the Declaration of Independence earlier this month.

“Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement –with the possible  exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War – to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration,” Thomas said. “Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.”

Under Progressivism, “liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.”

Thomas noted that President Woodrow “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it form Otto von ‘Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired.

Progressives like Wilson argued that America need to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power.”

This arguable opened Pandora’s box. Totalitarian governments in Germany, Russia, Cambodia, and China utilized state power to remake society, causing the deaths of millions. In the U.S., Wilson re-segregated the federal workforce and launched sterilization programs.

Immanentizing the Eschaton

Of course, the Left has rejected Wilson’s racist vision but preserved the overall worldview. The Marxist theory that capitalism constitutes a form of oppression expanded in the 1960s to a social vision, in which the “oppressed” classes – racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, women, and others – must rise up and overthrow the current system.

The Left has weaponized a culture of grievance to paint its opponents as oppressors. The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] – which just made news last week because the Justice Department accused it of lying to donors by secretly funding members of the KKK – maintains a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside Klan chapters. This map demonizes conservatives as agents of “the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” Such a claim only makes sense if you follow critical race theory, which starts with the assumption that America is systemically racist and urges people to deconstruct our colorblind laws to find a hidden “white supremacy.”

This demonization is bad enough, but the Left also maintains that it is the government’s job to achieve near-perfect, effectively bringing the kingdom of God to earth. That’s why they misquote Martin Luther King Jr. on the ‘arc of the moral universe.”

King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He grounded this statement in his faith in God, citing Isaiah 40.

Today, however, leftists say they need to “bend the arc.” President Joe Biden said his party had “a giant opportunity to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

President Barack Obama praised civil rights marchers as people who did “their part” to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently said that Americans have a “responsibility to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.”

That’s not what King meant, however. King meant that, because God is the ultimate author of morality and the universe, his justice will ultimately prevail.

It is vain hubris to believe that we ourselves can alter the moral structure of the universe. That’s the grandiose language of a tyrant who considers himself “king of the universe,” unbound by “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

If you legitimately believe that the morality of the universe is up to you, and you legitimately believe that your political opponents are hateful on the level of the KKK, is it any wonder you might take the law into your own hands?

 

 

Who Are the Secret Service Agents Protecting Trump?

My VIPs for this week are Secret Service agents in general and those protecting President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and others at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday evening. Live footage shows the agents doing their jobs. 

In an article published at Blaze.com, Rebeka Zeljko shared the following information in a developing story about chaos at the dinner. 

Chaos erupted at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner after President Donald Trump was rushed offstage by the Secret Service Saturday following possible gunfire.

Live footage showed Secret Service swiftly evacuating Trump, the first lady, and Vice President JD Vance after a loud noise rang out during the dinner. According to multiple reports, Secret Service spotted a suspected gunman attempting to get through security who has since been taken offsite.

“Law Enforcement has requested that we leave the premises, consistent with protocol, which we will do, immediately,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “I will be giving a press conference in 30 minutes from the White House Press Briefing Room. The First Lady, plus the Vice President, and all Cabinet members, are in perfect condition. We will be speaking to you in a half an hour. I have spoken with all the representatives in charge of the event, and we will be rescheduling within 30 days.”

For those who are counting, this is the third time that a crazed person has attempted to kill President Trump. This time the guy was so crazy that he was going to kill as many people as possible. Since he shot a Secret Service agent – an agent who was wearing a bullet-proof vest and is healthy, the man who shall remain nameless on this blog will face federal charges.

The shooter is lucky to be alive but, if convicted, will most likely be in federal prison for the rest of his life. The shooter who shot Trump in Pennsylvania is dead, and the would-be shooter in Florida received a sentence of life in prison. 

What Did Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Say?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is how to celebrate America’s 250^th birthday anniversary. Star Parker believes that learning about the Declaration of Independence is a good way to start the celebration. In her article published in The Daily Signal, she shared some material from a speech delivered by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. 

The force of Thomas’ words does not just result from his deep understanding of what the United States is about, and how the Declaration of Independence defines it.

The force flows from Thomas’ personal reality. He has lived what the declaration is about. His words are not just the product of thought and study, but of Thomas’ entire life experience.

Thomas grew up poor in America’s Jim Crow South.

But he says, “Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that wreaked a bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education, that in God’s eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal.”

“When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God,” he continued….

Thomas’ life, career, and education were trial by fire.

By the time he became chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the country had already been captured by progressivism, particularly on matters of race.

His principled adherence to the eternal God-given truths of the declaration, and refusal to fold to the progressive agenda – which he calls the “then-prevailing orthodoxy on race” – was a lonely battle, which left him under constant attack.

It was then he realized that carrying out the agenda was more than knowing the principles, but having the courage to fight, and even, if necessary, die for them.

Thomas notes that the principles stated in the opening of the declaration – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights” – could have gotten nowhere without the last paragraph of the declaration.

There the signers conclude “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

“What changed the world,” per Thomas, “was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives” for what Lincoln called at Gettysburg “the last full measure of devotion.”

Thomas asks, “Do any of us have what it took for our young soldiers to storm Normandy Beach, to fight at Guadalcanal, to later fight at Chosin Reservoir?”

He discusses the emergence of progressivism, which challenged the core principles of the Declaration. As Thomas notes, its pedigree is not American but was born in 19^th century Germany of Otto von Bismark.

It’s a worldview that rejects the notion that God-given truths govern our lives, but rather politics and government so-called experts.

It’s deeply ironic and unfortunate that the civil rights movement – a movement about human freedom, a movement about moving black people out from the distortions of political control, and to our regime of freedom defined by our declaration’s principles – itself saw progressivism as the answer to problems of race.

We are in a great struggle today for the future of our country.

The movement toward progressivism has delivered to us a new time with massive government, deficits, debts, and bankrupt entitlement programs. The assault of progressivism on the God-given principles of the [D]eclaration of Independence has also taken a great toll on our culture, with the traditional family and our birth of children in dangerous decline.

To restore the vitality of our nation, we for sure today need a “new birth of freedom.”

A good start for all is to listen to Thomas’ message. 

 

Did the Children of Israel Keep Their Covenant with God?

My Come Follow Me studies for this week took me to Exodus 19-20; 24; 31-34 in a lesson titled “All That the Lord Hath Spoken We Will Do.” The following information introduced the lesson. 

Although the children of Israel had murmured and wavered in the past, when Moses read the law at the foot of Mount Sinai, they made this covenant: “All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Exodus 24:7). God then called Moses onto the mountain, telling him to build a tabernacle so “that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8).

But while Moses was at the top of the mountain learning how the Israelites could have God’s presence among them, the Israelites were at the bottom of the mountain making a golden idol to worship instead. Soon after promising to “have no other gods,” they “turned aside quickly” from their promise (Exodus 20:3; 32:8; see also Exodus 24:3). It was a surprising turn, but we know from experience that faith and commitment can sometimes be overcome by impatience, fear, or doubt. As we seek the Lord’s presence in our lives, it is encouraging to know the Lord did not give up on ancient Israel and He will not give up on us and the people we love—for He is “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6).

Some of the principles taught in this scripture block are: (1) The Lord’s covenant people are a treasure to Him (Exodus 19:3-6); (2) Sacred experiences require preparation (Exodus 19:10-11, 17); (3) Obedience to God’s commandments brings blessings (Exodus 20:1-17); (4) Making covenants shows my willingness to obey God’s law (Exodus 24:1-11); (5) Sin is turning away from God; repentance is turning toward Him and away from evil (Exodus 32-34); (6) The Sabbath is a sign (Exodus 31:13-16), and (7) What was the difference between the two sets of stone tables Moses made? (Exodus 34:1-4). All the principles deserve some discussion, but this essay will discuss only principle #3 about obedience to commandments brings blessings.

While the Israelites were gathered at the base of Mount Sinai, they heard the voice of God give the Ten Commandments (see Deuteronomy 4:12-13). We know that these are not God’s only commandments because there are many other commandments in the scriptures. However, this discussion will concentrate only upon the Ten Commandments, which are as follows.

1 And God spake all these words, saying,

2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:

5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

7 Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

12 ¶ Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

13 Thou shalt not kill.

14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.

15 Thou shalt not steal.

16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

17 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s. (Emphasis added.)

The first observation is about a division among the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments have to do with our relationship with God. The last six commandments have to do with our relationships with other people. The Ten Commandments are an enlargement on the two great commandments taught in Matthew 22:36-40.

36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Emphasis added.)

If you choose to learn more about the Ten Commandments and how they can bless your life, I suggest that you study them. You might make a simple table as you ponder the significance of the Ten Commandments in your life.

Commandment	In other words, what does God want me to do	Blessings that come from living this commandment

 You could consider the following questions as you study:

·       How does keeping these ten commandments help you keep the two great commandments that Jesus gave in Matthew 22:34-40?

·       What are things that you may be tempted to put before God? What blessings have you seen from putting God first?

·       How would you respond to someone who says the Ten Commandments were given a long time ago and do not apply today? What examples from your life would you share as part of your response?

·       How has the Lord fulfilled the promise in Exodus 20:6 in your life?

Why Should Economics Be Required to Graduate from High School?

Families who understand economics will be stronger. Therefore, it is good for high schools to require their students to acquire “a basic knowledge of economics.” With such knowledge students can strengthen their parental family as well as their chosen family and then strengthen their community, their state, and their nation.

Jamie Wagner, PhD, is a Professor and Teaching Fellow with the Foundation for Teaching Economics (FTE), a nonprofit educational organization that promotes experiential learning and the economic way of thinking. He believes that April – National Financial Literacy Month -- is a suitable time to consider the study of economics to the curriculum. 

Across the country, states are starting to mandate that students take a personal finance course to graduate high school, often in place of economics courses. In 2022, only 23 states required students to take a financial literacy class in order to graduate; by 2026, that number had rocketed to 39 states.

Meanwhile, only 22 states now mandate the same for economics classes, a number that seems to decline each year.

Some argue that financial literacy is a more practical subject than economics. With limited classroom time available, who doesn’t support teaching the life skills of budgeting, borrowing, and investing?

While the goal is admirable, the method is not. Positioning financial literacy as something separate from – or even more important than – economics misunderstands what financial literacy actually is and sets up students for failure.

Financial literacy is not a standalone subject; it is actually applied economics.

While economics has a bade reputation for being complicated and irrelevant, at its heart, economics is simply the study of choices. This means that economics is the basis for all decisions we make in our lives: financial, civic, and even personal.

Every decision we face – whether to rent or buy a home, when to pay down debt or invest, whether to accept a job offer – requires the analytical tools that economics provides, such as opportunity cost, marginal thinking, time value of money, incentive structures, risk, and return. Teaching financial literacy stripped of economics leaves students with little more than a collection of rules, lacking the reasoning to apply them.

Research on financial education has consistently found that only teaching students “rules” produces modest, short-lived behavioral change. Students learn the rule and pass the assessment, but within months, the knowledge has faded. This is because it was never anchored to a conceptual framework, like economics.

Practically, you can’t teach about the stock market and how stock prices change without using the idea of markets and prices. Or, why home, auto, and other loan rates change without understanding the role the Federal Reserve plays in maintaining stable prices and employment. Students won’t be able to make spending and saving decisions absent an understanding of the costs and benefits of these choices….

The most effective programs integrate economic reasoning as the connective tissue that makes financial concepts coherent and transferable. Teaching how interest rates work is financial literacy. Teaching why central banks adjust them, how those decisions flow through to mortgage markets, and how a household should respond is economics and financial literacy working together.

Sound financial decision-making necessitates a capacity for reasoned judgment under uncertainty, built on a foundation of economic principles. Students deserve that foundation, and we can’t provide it by treating financial literacy as a standalone subject. If students are ever to make sense of the rapidly changing world around them, they need the economic way of thinking as a grounding.

Wagner believes that keeping “basic economics in the classroom,” it will strengthen both the students’ and the nation’s economic future.

 

What Should Be Done with Trump?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is that sometimes war is necessary to bring about peace and prosperity. Hitler and his armies killed millions of Jews before World War II stopped them, and he is just one example of one person seeking more power by taking it from other people.

If Iran were close to having nuclear power and missiles powerful enough to reach the United States, no one doubts that they would use that power and those missiles to render “Death to America,” as they so often shout.

Up until the present conflict, American presidents have just shrugged their shoulders and tried to appease the power-hungry Iranians – and thus kicked the can down the road. Iran probably thought that Donald Trump would continue the same way. Even some Americans thought that he would. Keith Koffler at The Daily Signal says that no one should be surprised with what Trump says and does.

One of the most stunning and yet tediously repetitive features of America’s Donald Trump Experience is the expectation that President Donald Trump is going to become someone else. People across the political spectrum seem permanently immune to the realization that the country has elected a man who says and does extraordinarily shocking things. With metronomic consistency, they exclaim, “Can you believe what he said? He’s just completely nuts! Where’s my 25^th Amendment?”

And then, everyone recovers, reverts to their prevailing view of Trump, and buckles up for the next outrage, which lands with no less unjustifiable surprise.

But it seems Trump may have gone just a bit too far, even for conservatives, with his most recent aggravations of the natural order. Their odiousness, along with the alleged rancid smell of the Iran war, is causing a slow slinking away from a president they perceive as gone stinky.

[Koffler named several “odious” words and actions: (1) the AI image of himself as Jesus healing the sick, (2) Trump saying Pope Leo XIV is “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” before telling him to “get his act together, and (3) Trump saying “a whole civilization might die tonight” rather than “threatening to bomb Iran.”]

None of this is great. People have a right to be offended. But they should consider a few things before withdrawing support for Trump.

Conservatives during the presidential primaries in 2016 ceded some of the moral high ground they felt they always held by choosing Trump, a great but imperfect man.

They had a choice closer to moral perfection in Jeb Bush, but they concluded, correctly, that these harrowing times demanded something else. America’s self-destruction seemed too near for a conventional candidate. It was time to get a little rude and go on offense.

We got what we asked for. Over the course of two terms, Trump has altered the course of U.S history, diverting and even reversing leftist agendas that seemed hopelessly unstoppable.

·       He revamped the Supreme Court, resulting in myriad decisions favorable to conservatives, most prominently the demolition of Roe v. Wade, something long thought a lost cause.

·       He completely plugged up the massive hole in the border – which presupposes that there still was a border – ending the ceaseless waves of illegal immigration into the U.S. that threatened to swamp our culture with something else.

·       He changed the entire conversation on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” polite terms for dropping our Judeo-Christian culture into the Memory Hole and replacing it with a Marxian, totalitarian dictatorship commanding obedience to dissolute collectivism and relativism. In high schools, college, and the workplace, woke equity is now on the defensive.

·       He defeated the Islamic State caliphate, and he dawned a new age of Arab-Israeli cooperation with the unprecedented Abraham Accords.

·       He withdrew from the Paris climate accords and refocused the country back toward fossil fuels, ensuring Americans’ pockets wouldn’t be picked by European internationalists while China cheerfully burned through its coal.

These are pivotal realignments that eclipse ephemeral measures such as a point added or subtracted to gross domestic products or an increase or decrease in the crime rate, as important as those things are.

I would personally add ending—or at least vastly delaying – Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the list, but that’s exactly what some conservatives don’t agree with. And that’s the point. It’s a disagreement. An argument. Not grounds for divorce….

To repeat, we got what we asked for: Trump.

Let’s also remember that much of the outrage Trump mobilizes is pure Madison Avenue, designed preponderantly for effect, manufactured in the vast PR-generating region of his frontal lobe. He’s selling – propaganda for friends, deception for enemies.

Unlike many other presidents, he’s arm to actual human beings whom he has no political use for. He says hello to the janitor. His exaggerations and insults can be unpleasant and outrageous, but there’s a humanity and even an honesty within them.

He does things I don’t like. But he’s prevented many worse things I don’t like.

Trump is a towering figure who will be written about for centuries. Sometimes that indecorous tower – excessively embroidered with Trump gold – reflects sunlight. Sometimes it casts very dark shadows. It sways a bit with the wind, but in the end, it has stood for conservative values more resolutely than any of the smaller edifices, easier on the eye and ear.

We conservatives made our bargain with Trump long ago. Let’s own it.