Antifa

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Democratic lawmakers and commentators found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, most of them loathed Kirk. On the other, many felt that they should try to hold the line condemning the shooting through the throat of a young husband and father at an American university. These so-called ‘anti-fascists’ started behaving like nothing so much as the fascists they were searching for The New York Times’s Ezra Klein was among those who dipped his toe into the water, writing a piece within the day titled “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words: “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.” A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?

Why was Charlie Kirk murdered? After the horrifying killing of the right-wing activist last week, the focus of American law enforcement and the world’s media has turned to the political leanings and potential motive of his alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson. The 22-year-old former college student is facing the death penalty after being charged with aggravated murder on Tuesday. Given Kirk was a Christian conservative and leading MAGA figure, tipped by some as a future president, Occam’s razor would suggest that his murderer would most likely turn out to be on the far left. Indeed, every bit of evidence that emerged has pointed in this direction.

Since the 2024 presidential election, America has been braced for violence from the political far-left — and with good reason. Extremists like antifa, the “anti-fascist” group, are explicitly aggressive. They think looting, arson and intimidation are all acceptable, and until very recently they’ve had the support of the establishment. For a decade their liberal allies gave antifa carte blanche to cause criminal damage in the name of “resisting fascism” or opposing racism. So where is antifa now? What is it planning? It’s an understandable concern. The citizens of Portland remember all too well the bouts of rioting and violence by Black Lives Matter-antifa in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.

Worldwide unrest is great for those in the riot-gear business. Shields and batons have historically cornered the market as the cutting edge in crowd control, but in recent years it’s evolved to include robots, armored trucks and drones. Milipol Paris is the homeland security expo of all expos. This is the kind of giant showroom where you will find law enforcement and private security agents checking out the newest innovations in robot dogs, armored vehicles and unmanned turrets as if they’re going from painting to painting at the Louvre. The Milipol expo comes around every two years. In 2023, you would have seen men plugged into VR headsets killing terrorists with a pistol.

It was Saturday morning and MSNBC's Tiffany Cross had a bee in her bonnet. With Senator Lindsey Graham predicting riots in the streets, with Donald Trump reacting to the FBI raid on his home like the Archduke Ferdinand had just been offed, Cross told her audience, "These days, it feels like we are not just at the brink of a civil war, but that one has already begun." Six months ago, here's how I would have responded to Cross: of course this is what a hyper-partisan MSNBC host would say. Civil war fears are really just LARPing by Twitter elites who thrive on hatred of the other side and so assume everyone else must too. "WE'RE GOING IN!" screams Elie Mystal as he screeches up in a Power Wheels Jeep while waving around a purple and orange Nerf Kalashnikov.

Being something of a barfly, Cockburn is used to overhearing tall tales, braggadocious orations, and outlandish accusations, also known as “fightin’ words.” So imagine his astonishment in learning that what he heard over his breakfast stout this afternoon was not the consequence of some riled-up Hill staffer who’d had a few too many, but was really and truly uttered by the (presumably sober) president of the United States. “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history,” President Biden said. “Recent history,” he clarified. “Recent” is a relative term. Perhaps the explosive hate crimes of the Ku Klux Klan that reached their height in the 1920s are not “recent” enough for Biden.

When several Proud Boys attended a New Hanover School Board meeting about 175 miles from my North Carolina hometown, I was reminded of the night years ago when I woke to the sound of my mother weeping. Klansmen demonstrating outside our local library had made the late-night news. The sight of those ignorant men outside the doors through which I’d recently exited with Where the Wild Things Are proved unbearable to my mother. She sent a blistering letter to the editor, inciting Klan supporters to call our house hoping to discuss, as one woman asked me before my mother snatched the phone from my hand, just what exactly her problem was with the Klan. And, oh, did my mother tell them.

Preventing crime and punishing offenders is primarily the responsibility of local authorities. They have no greater obligation to the citizens who elected them and who fund the government. It is up to local police, supervised by political leaders and subject to the law themselves, to provide a safe environment for citizens to go about their lives, pursuing their own goals in peace and security. It is up to local politicians to ensure that police are adequately funded and properly trained. It is up to local prosecutors to follow up all justified arrests and prosecute offenders when the evidence is adequate. When police overstep their limits, prosecutors should pursue them too. The goal is a safe environment, subject to the rule of law.

Finding fault takes finesse. Oh, anybody can complain. We are a nation of complainers, carping at everything from breakfast vittles to late-night TV. We complain about our politicians, our prognosticators and our pop stars. But these complaints run like water down a windowpane in the same old channels to the same wet destination. Finding fault — finding new faults in a familiar subject — is much harder. It takes talent. It takes a critic. I am well aware that these days a lot of Americans complain that we are too divided. The nation bristles with parti pris. We revile the exponents of political views opposed to our own. We sneer at their provincialism, their pissant pettiness and their lack of civility, for which they should rightly be crushed.

The long-serving New York Times opinion writer Nick Kristof apparently now wants to be governor of Oregon. The 62-year-old media superstar seems to be a rather changeable sort of chap. It might almost seem he’s one of the many New York-area residents to have had their identities stolen. Perhaps it was an old platinum credit card, carelessly tossed in a Midtown trash can, which allowed the criminals to strike, or perhaps the purchase over the phone of a first-class air ticket to one of the exotic locales his business frequently takes him. Whatever it was, it’s difficult to reconcile the superbly cerebral, crusading double Pulitzer Prize-winner and regular CNN contributor with the self-styled ‘Oregon farmboy’ with his finger firmly on the Beaver State’s troubled pulse.