I hope y’all appreciate my self-restraint on this website. I have refrained from publishing a column entitled “Donald Trump Didn’t Try to Kill Himself.” It was tempting, believe me, given the fact that some leftists are actually peddling the theory that Saturday’s horrifying attack on the former president was a sympathy-seeking hoax.

Look at these pictures, tell me what you see….

If this were truly an assassination attempt, do you think the Secret Service would allow an open, clear target like this? C’mon, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

You can try using that, “they had already neutralized… pic.twitter.com/wqc7pgAFHl

— Gene Trevino (@GenoVeno73) July 14, 2024

Or that Trump on Saturday somehow reaped what he sowed, for speaking too forcefully and on behalf of the wrong Americans, who don’t deserve a champion at all because they’re deplorable.

“You reap what you sow”— Galatians 6:6-10

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 15, 2024

The Babylon Bee, of course, nailed the situation perfectly and within minutes on Saturday:

Of course the attack was predictable, and got predicted by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon months ago. It was the very likely outcome of eight years of our elites brainwashing the nation that Trump is “a threat to democracy” or “another Hitler.” Or (as in my favorite squeal from a drama queen) that Trump summons and unleashes literal “demons” of racism among us, as Rod Dreher warned us before flouncing off into exile in Hungary.

Trump Didn’t Put a New Target on His Own Back

But if Trump had chosen Nikki Haley, Doug Burgum, or Marco Rubio to be his running mate, it really would have raised concerns for his ongoing safety. With the most powerful forces in the land seeking to bankrupt and imprison him (at least), and a plausible case to be made that the FBI and Secret Service will cover up the facts about Saturday’s attack, choosing anyone who doesn’t scare the Deep State as much as Trump does might have signaled a death wish. J.D. Vance definitely scares them, as Jeremy Carl points out:

In choosing @JDVance1 , Trump has not chosen a risk-free pick, but he’s made what I think is an outstanding big money bet when the odds were in his favor. That’s what great entrepreneurs do.

In choosing Vance, Trump has done the one thing that he needed to do to make Trumpism… pic.twitter.com/WqzPeRMybj

— Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) July 15, 2024

Yes, there are candidates I would have preferred over Vance, but none were really in the running. General Michael Flynn, for instance, or heroic attorney Sidney Powell. (Or as I’ve suggested only half-jokingly for years, the “QANON Shaman” Jacob Chansley, now rightly freed from prison.) But out of the politically plausible choices, Vance is by far the best for several reasons.

A Thumb in the Eye of the Diversity Fascists

As a Catholic New Yorker with a funny last name whose grandfather fled here on a boat in 1916 and then shoveled coal for 50 years, I like to joke that “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants built America, they paid for it, it’s theirs.” To which the obvious rejoinder is “George W. Bush.”

Well, yeah. By producing whole generations of dilettantes, liberals, and ne’er do wells, America’s core ethnicity pretty much sold their country off for a mess of pottage. And my assimilated Catholic brethren largely joined right in. The most Catholic state in the Union, Rhode Island, is probably also the most pro-abortion. Our bishops have decided that the Church is an immigration pyramid scheme, netting $3 billion in 15 years from government contracts, mostly for settling illegals in our cities. Most of them eagerly cooperated in closing our churches and forcing the Dead Baby Vax into our arms. And so on.

But there is something still to be said about white people and Protestants in America: They don’t deserve to be demonized, persecuted, scorned, flagellated with fake guilt for ancestral sins, or intentionally dispossessed and turned into a legally disadvantaged minority in this wonderful country they founded. It’s wrong that the Civil Rights Act doesn’t protect white males from open, flagrant discrimination in education and employment (to the point that it might make sense only to hire white males, since they’re the only ones you can safely fire if you need to. See Jeremy Carl’s new book, The Unprotected Class, for grueling detail of how and why this is true.).

It’s outrageous that no evangelical Christian has been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in … how many decades? Instead, we get leftist apostate Jews, leftist apostate Catholics, a few brilliant faithful Catholics like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito … and mushy mediocrities from Notre Dame like Amy Coney Barrett (whom I warned people against at the time). This must change. It’s frankly unjust. Christian Right groups should be grooming judicial candidates from an array of church traditions, and frankly I’d like to see a hard-core Calvinist for a change. After all, a deep belief in man’s fallenness lies at the heart of our very system of government.

America Is More Than a Lab Experiment

America’s freedom and prosperity can largely be traced to the influence of the Christian churches that shaped our settlers and founders. Those churches are the reason America isn’t already like Mexico or Morocco. It’s staggering that I have to say this, but culture matters, and (let me unpack this slowly since it’s sensitive) people’s worldviews … shape how they view the world. That might sound obvious to you, but it’s an unspeakable taboo among the open-borders crowd who call America a “propositional nation,” built like the Soviet Union merely as a laboratory to test out abstract principles on live human subjects.

For more on that, see this fascinating column at CatholicVote, which shows how Vance explicitly rejects the neoconservative reduction of American identity to a few cheap Cold War slogans. As a bonus, the column draws the parallels between a recent speech by Vance and a column I wrote in 2003 predicting that the neocons would wreck first Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then America … as they promptly went on to do.

So let me say it bluntly: I’m glad that Trump didn’t feel compelled by White Guilt or Male Guilt to pick a woman or a minority as his running mate, much as I would have welcomed a talented candidate of merit such as Dr. Ben Carson or Sidney Powell. But despite what some of our federal agencies, including the Secret Service, have been doing under the Biden administration, politics isn’t a DEI initiative designed to count out the right number of beans. Given that our elites are risking open war with Russia and flooding our country with dangerously unvetted foreigners by the millions, it is now a deadly serious business.

Vance is a bestselling author, a self-made multimillionaire investor, and a patriot. He’s loyal not just to the abstract formulas we find in dusty civics books, or to some fantasy future of total “inclusion” and friction-free multiculturalism (i.e., the crack Obama sold us), but to his ancestors and his neighbors, especially the “hillbillies” for whom he wrote his “elegy.” He knows that millions of his fellow Americans have been dispossessed, impoverished, demonized, and driven not to have children by a government that despises them.

He speaks up for them. And that’s good enough for me.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.