On Saturday, former president Donald Trump came within less of an inch of being assassinated by a rooftop sniper during an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
A Secret Service counter sniper “neutralized the shooter,” but not before Trump and at least two rally attendees were injured. One rally attendee was killed.
The fallout has (and will continue to be) historical. There are a lot of questions being asked right now. Important questions. Disturbing questions. But the botched attempt on Trump’s life has already highlighted something that everyone, especially young men, should know: the state is a malevolent beast that preys on the heroic valor of men, particularly young men.
I was at a bar when I heard the news. The kind of bar frequented by off duty cops and firefighters, on duty bikers, people on probation, people on parole, and people who work hard jobs. Most of the female patrons were blonde, but most of the female patrons were not naturally blonde. That kind of bar.
One minute I’m drinking an espresso martini (the place isn’t that rough) and watching a baseball game in a state of contented distraction. Next minute everyone is showing everyone else videos on their phones. Trump had been shot.
The group I was with silently watched a video of an interview with a rally attendee who witnessed the shooter get into position. When asked if he saw what became of the shooter he said, “Oh, yeah, they blew his head off. Secret Service blew his head off.”
The men in my group looked at each other with visible approval. No one said anything, but the vibe was, “Hell yeah. Get some!” And for the first time in a long time, I felt proud to be an American. With the United States Imperial Government (USIG) running an ongoing genocide by proxy in Gaza (its second such recent genocide following its backing of Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen) it has been impossible to feel pride in my nation.
But here was one of our boys, an elite Secret Service counter sniper, staying frosty and “neutralizing” the bad guy. Or as the witness put it:
“Oh, yeah, they blew his head off. Secret Service blew his head off.”
I felt pride. It’s the same kind of pride I felt when I read about Al Qaeda coming up against the U.S. Marines in Iraq. Or how I first felt as a child learning about the young men who stormed the beaches in France during World War II. Hell Yeah! Get Some!
Now, the interesting thing is that an individual human being pulled the trigger and killed the assassin. A man kept calm and pulled the trigger. And “blew his head off.” But that man was a member of the corporate agent that is the Secret Service.
The American philosopher Kendy Hess described the “corporate agent” as a material object comprised of its individual human members:
“The corporate agent exists when a group of people effectively subordinate themselves to the imperatives of a Rational Point of View (RPV) not possessed by any individual.”
The man who pulled the trigger and neutralized the shooter had effectively subordinated himself enough that it was accurate for our witness to say:
“Oh, yeah, they blew his head off. Secret Service blew his head off.”
The individual man who pulled that trigger is a heroic warrior. One can imagine Hollywood making a movie about him. This summer it’s Overwatch! Take Your Best Shot!
At the same time, seriously sinister suspicions are being leveled at the corporate agent that is the Secret Service. Serious people, including former high-ranking members of the corporate agents that comprise the USIG, are directly asking if the Secret Service intentionally attempted to get Trump killed.
And this is the paradox we live with. The Secret Service is a monster. The FBI is a monster. The CIA, DEA, DHS and your local police department. All monsters. And yet there are individual men whose bodies form the material objects that are these corporate agents who are noble and heroic. You can’t find a bigger monster than the U.S. military. And yet we all have family and friends who serve or have served and who are the best people we know.
The state is a predatory corporate agent. It cannot exist without taxes. But it also cannot exist without warriors. It preys on young heroic men just as much as it preys on the hapless tax payer. And it makes sense that our young men would want to “go somewhere, do something.”
We can preach all we want about the non-aggression principle, voluntary association and exchange, and markets, but ours is not a species that evolved to peacefully provide goods and services to others.
As Joseph Schumpeter said:
“…capitalist civilization is rationalistic ‘and anti-heroic.’ The two go together of course. Success in industry and commerce requires a lot of stamina, yet industrial and commercial activity is essentially unheroic in the knight’s sense—no flourishing of swords about it, not much physical prowess, no chance to gallop the armored horse into the enemy, preferably a heretic or heathen—and the ideology that glorifies the idea of fighting for fighting’s sake and of victory for victory’s sake understandably withers in the office among all the columns of figures.”
And that’s our human nature when the economy is good. Once the state has destroyed peaceful private sector work, the lure of its corporate agents gets stronger.
The rally attendee killed Saturday night was Corey Comparatore, a heroic man who died shielding his family from the assassins’ bullets.
Comparatore “was a family man who loved to fish. He worked at a plastics manufacturing company, volunteered as a firefighter and went to church.”
This man had such a heroic ethos he volunteered to serve in a government corporate agent. It is men like this that the state sends to war for domestic politics and depraved foreign dystopias.
And on Saturday night the Secret Service, through malevolence and/or incompetence, got him killed.
