The cock-up version of history

Imperfect people can’t produce a perfect world, which doesn’t prevent them from hoping. And when hopes get frustrated, people refuse to blame their own failings.

Proceeding from the presumption of their own infallibility, they have to ascribe all sorts of problems to some dark and unidentified forces conspiring against everything that’s good in the world.

In the distant past, the culprits nominated for the role of conspirators were all supernatural: demons, witches, the devil himself. The demons were exorcised, the witches were burned at the stake, the devil was told in no uncertain terms to go back where he had come from. Yet nothing worked: life went on and problems multiplied.

Since then mankind has moved onto a less mystical ground, and human candidates have assumed the role of conspirators in the public mind. Jews and Freemasons, the Bilderbergers and the Club of Rome, vaccinators and cryptocurrency mongers, the Deep State and the New World Order, the World Economic Forum and Skull & Bones all figure prominently among the likely conspiracies planning either to destroy or to dominate the world.

This leaves me frustrated at never having been asked to join. Every time a prominent individual is described as a member of one such group, I have to ask that popular rhetorical question: “And what am I, chopped liver?”

This levity shouldn’t suggest that I don’t believe any conspiracies have ever existed. They have, and communism springs to mind as an obvious example as a vast plot to take over the world. Yet, while specific actions planned by the communists were usually kept secret, their goals weren’t.

In fact, anyone scanning the works of communist chieftains will notice their commendable frankness: they never bothered to conceal their plan to foment a world revolution, which is to say a violent global conquest. It’s not for nothing that the Soviet state emblem featured the hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe.

However, that real conspiracy hasn’t satisfied the public’s hunger for mythical ones, those concocted so deeply underground that no evidence of their existence has ever been uncovered. Blaming the Soviets or the Chinese was too humdrum. On the other hand, blaming the Judaeo-Masons or the Illuminati tickled imagination into onanistic satisfaction.

Moving on from big to small, every attempt to assassinate a public figure has been blamed on a conspiracy even in the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And fair enough, some were indeed fiendish plots hatched by villainous groups.

Many other assassination attempts, however, weren’t. They usually resulted from a confluence of two factors: existence of a deranged individual with a firearm and a monumental lapse of vigilance on the part of the security detail. A cock-up in other words, and this version of history appeals to me more than any conspiracy theory.

With that in mind, let’s put conspiracy theories aside for the moment, whip out our Occam’s razor and try to cut the most direct path to the attempt on Trump’s life.

The first precondition was in place: Thomas Crooks with his AR-15 rifle. The lad is generally described as a deranged loner, and perhaps he was just that. Spy services have been known to recruit such people “in the dark”, to do their dirty work often even without knowing the employer’s true nationality.

The possibility of such a false-flag recruitment shouldn’t be discounted altogether. But first we must consider a simpler and likelier explanation: Crooks was an impressionable youngster who was misinformed.

Since before his teens he had been exposed to grownups highly placed in government and media telling him that Trump threatened to destroy American democracy and introduce a fascist dictatorship. Now, if you were certain that some individual harboured such dastardly designs, and that you could save your country with a well-placed shot, wouldn’t you at least consider it?

By the same token, as C.S. Lewis once explained, medieval people had no doubt that every natural disaster and pestilence was a result of witchcraft. Hence they burned witches as a way of saving the crops and livestock that fed their families. That was a failure of education, not morality: most people would kill to save their families from certain death.  

The same thought process might have led Crooks to believe he was a hero, dying so his country would live. He might have been led to this conclusion by wily conspirators, but it’s not beyond the realm of psychological probability that he reached it all by himself.

But why was he allowed to get those shots off in the first place? Again, one hears all sorts of theories involving plots hatched by Iran in cahoots with the Democratic Party. In the absence of concrete evidence, these proceed from the old cui bono principle.

If anyone wishes to investigate the crime on that basis, good luck to him. The number of groups wishing to see Trump dead runs into dozens, and the number of such individuals into millions. Hence I have to be sceptical about any such forensic investigation ever reaching an end other than a dead one.

The cock-up explanation lacks the cachet of an involved conspiracy theory, but it offers the advantage of simplicity and greater probability. The cock-up in question is produced by the pandemic of moral and intellectual corruption infesting every public institution in the West.

The source of that corruption might have been partly conspiratorial at the very beginning, a century or so ago. But by now it’s so all-encompassing that it has infected great swathes of Western public opinion. I’d describe that source as the primacy of ideology over reason and morality, or else as the triumph of virtual over actual reality.

Various ideologies have always made inroads on decent life, but society used to be robust enough not to cede its core even when accepting minor compromises at the periphery.

That strength has now been lost, and the West is reeling from the blows delivered by one cock-up after another. People like me, those who used to live under the sway of pernicious ideologies, shudder with recognition.

We’ve seen it before: important public jobs from government ministers all the way down to lowly cops filled not with the best candidates but those who pass the test of ideological purity. In Russia, one got ahead by mouthing Party drivel with eye-popping conviction and also by having simon-pure ancestry (no relations abroad, no capitalists, no Jews or other undesirable ethnics, ideally several generations of manual workers).

That eventually led to the whole country becoming one giant cock-up at every level, a megalomaniac exercise in ideology-induced incompetence and corruption. And now the West is going the same way and for the same reason, if led by an ostensibly different ideology.

It would be counterintuitive to expect the US Secret Service to remain an oasis of sanity keeping ideology off-limits. So, if such is your wont, you are welcome to ascribe the ease with which Crooks climbed that roof and started firing to a conspiracy. I ascribe it to an ideological cock-up.

First question: how come no agents were placed on the roof offering a perfect firing position just 150 yards from the target, practically point-blank for the AR-15? Kimberly Cheatle, head of the US Secret Service, explains that oversight was deliberate.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” making it dangerous for Secret Service agents to climb there, she says. British readers will instantly identify this reply as pervasive obsession with ‘elf and safety. People must be protected from every manner of danger – and their managers from every manner of lawsuit.

Now, Secret Service officers are expected to take a bullet aimed at their charges. Compared to that, climbing onto a sloped roof seems to be a doddle, and in fact the roof from which Secret Service snipers fired at Crooks was just as sloped.

Cheatle’s reply is thus nonsensical, or would be had it come from reason. But it came, in fact, from the visceral reaction of an apparatchik loyal to the dominant ideology, not to her job.

‘Health and safety’ is only a minor part of that ideology. Much more important is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), an eerie reminder of the Soviet accent on ideological purity. Cheatle wouldn’t be in her job if she weren’t a DEI martinet.

Thus, she said that by 2030 she wanted at least 30 per cent of all agents to be women: “We need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everyone in our workforce, particularly women.”

It has to be obvious to any sensible person that women have certain physical disadvantages that may curb their performance on the muscle end of law enforcement. It’s possible that some women may overcome such innate weaknesses and become, say, great Secret Service officers. Yet putting a percentage target on such overachievers suggests that women would be recruited simply on the basis of their sex.

In fact, when Cheatle took over and spelled out her life’s philosophy, many officers quit, leaving the service grossly understaffed. But Trump’s security detail did include three women, whose response strongly suggests they were DEI hires.

All three were short and overweight (chivalry prevents me from saying ‘fat’). After the shots were fired, they had no idea what to do. They were running around in circles, pointing their guns at all and sundry. One fumbled with her holster, unable to put the weapon back in. Another, about a foot shorter than Trump, embraced him and put her head under his armpit, leaving his head exposed.

Meanwhile, a male officer tall enough to shield Trump from another possible bullet was behind him, which showed a remarkable lack of coordination. Even worse was the lack of coordination between the Secret Service and local police, drawn in to secure the wider perimeter.

The whole thing was a cock-up, and the ideological explanation of it strikes me as more plausible than the conspiratorial one. One way or another, I fear we’ll never know the truth, which doesn’t prevent me from hoping we shall.