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Why I’m reluctant to discuss the latest assassination attempt · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greetings on this Monday, May the 4th, 2026, and welcome to Denison Forum's Daily Article Podcast.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today's Daily article is authored by Archie Fish and Officer Dr. Jim Denison, and narrated by yours truly, Reselkin.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The FBI and prosecutors have released new footage of the man charged with attempting to assassinate President Trump during the White House Correspondence dinner.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're like me, however, this news is not how you prefer to begin your week.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would be more fun to discuss golden tempos come from last place of victory in Saturday's Kentucky Derby, making Sheri Devo the first female trainer to win the most famous
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're a basketball fan, you might want me to write about yesterday's Game 7 wins by the 76ers, the Pistons, and the Cavaliers.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm with you.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have chosen in recent days not to focus on the latest assassination attempt beyond the event itself for two reasons.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is that the story makes me feel helpless.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other is that avoiding it makes me feel empowered.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I see that both sentiments while understandable are fallacious.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin with the understandable part.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three attempts in 21 months to kill the most protected person in America, the first of which would have succeeded if Trump had not turned his head at precisely the right moment, cause me to despair that anyone is truly safe in these bitterly antagonistic times.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that there seems to be nothing I can do about it.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I doubt that if anyone is planning another assassination attempt, if they're reading my words right now, but I can refuse to think about such things.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can try to empower myself by focusing on what I would rather think about and what I have some measure of control over.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I resonate with Caitlyn Flanagan who writes in the free press that when the news broke of the shooting, quote, I glanced at my phone, took in the essential facts and didn't really feel anything at all.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just seemed like one more event that hovered on the edge of the real and the unreal, in quote.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So she returned to her dinner party and quote, we went on to other things.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, to the fallacious part, you would not have wanted to hear about cultural evolutionary theory today, which would make two of us, except for an article I read over the weekend that captured my attention.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Henrik directs Harvard's Department of Evolutionary Biology and is the author of the weirdest people in the world how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a brilliant analysis of Henryk's argument, Atlantic staff writer, Judith Schulovitz, summarizes.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, where just about everyone else in the world was and still is, emmashed in family and more likely to stay put.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: in quote, who compress a very large subject, the Catholic Church came to insist on monogamy at a time when many societies were polygamous and on vertical identity toward the church in an era when others were horizontally oriented towards clan and place.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was that property began to spread beyond the extended family and people began to spread beyond their ancestral roots, collecting intangents and cities where they bonded with others of similar skills and interests.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over time, cities wrote charters and yields elected leaders, leading to representative democracy.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Merchants learned to trade with strangers, fostering capitalistic economies based on consensual morality, you couldn't treat a stranger and make a living.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Protestantism then gave the people a Bible they could read, democratizing literacy and education.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: A focus on personal salvation led to an insistence on personal rights.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Weird.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This cultural evolution begin with two principles of the Church Champion at Transform Society, Anagomismarage, and Church Focus Compassion.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today, of course, our secular eye society has largely abandoned both.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have rewritten the rules with regard to gender, sexuality, marriage, and the sanctity of life.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we have abandoned a church-directed communal focus in our quest for self-directed success.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is important to note that such secularization with the sexual revolution and its accompanying embrace of personal truth and subjective morality began to capture our culture at the same time political violence begin to accelerate.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slantigan points to the 1960s assassinations of
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Red Hampton and many others.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, as she notes, quote, the 60s dissolved into the 70s and political violence rolled on often in the form of acts committed by what seemed like endlessly proliferating radical groups who tied the possibility of enormous political change to limited acts of great violence.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote,
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now we are witnessing the rise of single perpetrator radicalism, such as Charlie Kirk's murderer, and the would be assassins of President Trump.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Flanagan writes, quote, an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility, but of the unremarkable, and we now understand such violence as an aspect of the known world, in quote.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Avoiding all of this is fallacious, because such evasion barely ensures the continuing victimization of our society.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: As John Stuart Mill observed, bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, and that good men should look on and do nothing.
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The good news is that you and I are not helpless in the face of this cultural era.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The movements, Henrik and Shilovitz discuss were transforming not just because they were fostered by the church.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: but because God's Spirit uses God's Word to change human hearts.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jesus made clear, God's design for marriage in Matthew 19, verse 5, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He similarly taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves in Matthew 22, verse 39.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now he stands ready to empower our marriages and our ministries, referencing John 155 and Galatians 5 verse 22, when we seek an intimate, continuing relationship with the Living Lord Jesus, he manifests his love in and through us.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And referencing 1 Corinthians 12 verse 27, when we are surrendered to him, we are the living expression of his continuing presence in our world as we become catalysts for the change our culture so desperately needs.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But only then, I'm writing these words in the pre-done morning, as I look out the window of my study, all is darkness.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But soon the sun will rise, and a world I cannot presently see, will come to life.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This fact calls to mind, the words of our Lord from John 8, verse 12, I am the light of the world, who ever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.