Flowers at Farragut West
On the murder of SPC Sarah Beckstrom
On Wednesday, November 26, 2025, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan asylee, drove from Washington state to Washington, DC, and shot two West Virginia National Guardsmen outside the Farragut West Metro. Twenty-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom is dead and laid to rest with full military honors; twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe is grievously injured but recovering. This White House has not sounded so gleeful since the assassination of Turning Point USA podcaster Charlie Kirk. They must have thought, “This will surely change the subject from the president’s swollen feet and mental decline, the Epstein files, rising grocery prices, and the failure of the James Comey prosecution!”
There is no known reason why Mr. Lakanwal, who fought since he was fifteen alongside CIA-backed “Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams” or “Zero Units” in Afghanistan before escaping to the U.S. through “Operation Allies Welcome” and having his asylum approved by President Donald Trump’s Department of State, killed and wounded American servicemembers. Something dark, I suspect—Zero Units were elite Afghan special operations teams that carried out night raids against insurgent, al Qaeda, ISIS, and Taliban targets during the war. The Associated Press reports he had severe mental health problems, was not “functional as a person, father and provider,” and was prone to “periods of dark isolation,” “reckless travel” and suicidality.
The Trump administration rightly called this terrorism, but instead of blaming the terrorist, they saw in this disaster an opportunity to scapegoat other groups of innocent people. Evil.
When I reminisce, I think of the War on Terror as 2001 to 2008, the Bush years, when Green Day was pop, marijuana was very illegal, Stephen Colbert was still Stephen Colbert, and the name “Scooter Libby” made me giggle, but “America’s longest war” was only concluded a few years ago, in August 2021.
On the day of the shooting, I was sorting the Hexmobile’s trunk in a DC parking garage when my phone buzzed with alerts of a gunman. Were there more? Would this be bad? I checked my holiday luggage, which doubled as a go-bag: a thin blanket, two changes of clothes, three balls of socks, some Clif Bars, a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and an old ThinkPad. In a worst-case scenario, if I could find a reasonably priced Marriott, I was ready to be locked down. Because of the holiday, there was no need—feds were stuffing their turkeys instead of clogging the roadway—but when things go bad, escaping the District can be a nightmare.
I flashed back to September 11, 2001. When the planes hit the towers, classes at schools near DC halted, and the whole DMV was thrust into sclerosis. Students were dismissed for the day—everybody needed to get the hell home, especially if you had family near the Pentagon—but we could not yet leave because the buses were stuck in hours-long bumper-to-bumper traffic. The sun was out when the towers fell, but it was night long before we saw our beds. The world we woke up in was worse than we knew then—it led to this one.
Meanwhile, Vice President Jim Dave Vance cheerfully yapped to hundreds of America’s brave men and women in uniform at Fort Campbell that he hates turkey, said anybody who claimed to like turkey was a liar, before serving them turkey. Not atypical for him—he called Mr. Trump “America’s Hitler” only a few years before endorsing him. For once, I can relate to Mr. Vance. The aftermath of what his administration categorizes as an act of terror is a poor time to practice irreverent comedy. We share that fault, but the vice president should be held to higher standards than I.
I know Farragut West. When I was Ms. Beckstrom’s age, I fell at the same spot because I was drunk as hell. I slumped in every station entrance downtown before I was twenty-one. Happy hours did not check identification if you looked overworked enough. Most of those places are gone now, replaced by juice bars and gyms. Near L Street, there used to be a Borders bookstore. I would use their Wi-Fi, talk shit about Republicans on Reddit, then sink into a chair and nap before finding the next party. I wasted my twenties because the city was safe enough to be stupid in the same place where she fended off a murderer.
On the Saturday night after the shooting, I canceled plans to drink with college classmates to go to the scene of the crime and try to understand it. There was a memorial to Ms. Beckstrom at the 17th and I Street entrance to Farragut West Metro, with more than a dozen bouquets of red and yellow roses and mixed pink, peach, and white flowers; a red poinsettia; a heart-shaped wreath; American flags; a quilt captioned: “Patience,” “Kindness,” “Faithfulness,” “Gentleness,” “Love,” “Joy”; a blue IBM mug; small figurines; service insignia; a West Virginia baseball cap; a green Christmas stocking; and many sunglasses. Was she so young that “wears sunglasses” was still her signature trait? Shards of a decorative mirror were arranged intentionally on the ledge. I dared not touch them.
All weekend, soldiers and District residents took this same pilgrimage. Many left handwritten notes of gratitude, sorrow, and condolence:
“SPC BECKSTROM,
THANK YOU FOR THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE YOU MADE FOR OUR COUNTRY AND OUR FREEDOMS! WE WILL NEVER FORGET!”
I had not brought a gift, so I offered a moment of silence. I have no religion except love for the Constitution, so calling it “prayer” feels alien. But the least I owe her is to let the weight of the moment hurt me.
I wanted to see if anybody got mixed up and paid tribute at the wrong spot, so I cut through the park at Farragut Square to get to the other Metro entrance at 18th and I Street. I stopped at the statue of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut. Tourists and out-of-towners will not know this, but in times of crisis, DC locals will often stop and consult these stone figures for patriotic inspiration. The Commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron was a legend—he captured New Orleans and secured the Mississippi River from the Confederacy, but his name disturbed me that night. It invoked his famous cry: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” A dangerous motto in the context of the present. Instead, I suggest slowing down and avoiding mines.
If anybody wants to honor Ms. Beckstrom with something other than the administration’s misguided fire and fury, Farragut West Station could be dedicated to her. DC has both a Farragut North and West. Do we need two? One could be Farragut Station and the other Beckstrom Station. That seems right. Let the corner be a monument so everybody working downtown will, instead of going “full speed ahead,” remember human lives were lost because the government misused its powers. No bureaucrat en route to execute the president’s orders should arrive at his office without a reminder that this tragedy happened because GOP leaders lacked the will to oppose Mr. Trump’s bloodthirsty delusion that he can set the military against the citizenry.
An example of that misuse: FBI Director Kash Patel, or as I call him, “Kush Patel,” because that fool has got to be smoking something, is already “in the barrel” for demanding an FBI SWAT team (which responds to such shootings) guard his long-distance girlfriend, National Anthem-singer Alexis Wilkins, and drive her drunk friends home. Maybe Ms. Beckstrom’s murder was preventable if the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated something federal instead of babysitting Mr. Patel’s “boo,” or if its counterterrorism division was countering terrorism instead of conducting bullshit investigations of Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, as well as Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan, for reminding servicemembers not to follow illegal orders. Mr. Patel ought to resign for this corrupt, unconscionable incompetence.
At the second Farragut West station entrance, a Metro police officer parked and stared at his laptop screen—how soon in the aftermath our hypervigilance slackens. The escalator ground, groaned, and squealed, and that noise was amplified and echoed in the wide, vacant concrete forecourt outside the moving stair’s mouth. A memorial sign was posted on the nearby elevator:
“PRAYERS AND LOVE TO THE NATIONAL GUARD SOLDIERS & THEIR FAMILIES. HEARTBROKEN & STRONG WITH YOU.
WHY ARE THEY HERE?”
A good question. Ms. Beckstrom renewed her deployment twenty-four hours before her life was lost. Senseless. She guarded a Metro next to the park, CQ hotel, Truist bank, Subway, and an upscale liquor store—a place with little to do but errands and work. She died heroically, but nothing on those blocks was worth her life.
“Operation D.C. Safe and Beautiful” makes the city and nation less so. The National Guard’s deployment to the capital is wrong. The president’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement violates every American ideal. DC is not a war zone, but the “mission” invites chaos that makes it one. As Batman creates the Joker, armed men in the street attract those who want to fight them.
Ms. Beckstrom’s Marine ex-boyfriend, Adam Carr, told NBC Washington that “people would spit at her, throw things at her and cuss her out and wish death upon [the Guard] and just simply be outrageous and assault them.” Maybe that happened on occasion, but I doubt with regularity. I am in these streets every day. Guardsmen typically stand in pairs on the sidewalks outside donut stores, coffee shops, or other businesses with public restrooms. The occasional rapscallion may be rude, but in the months of watching soldiers loiter at chain restaurants, people give them practiced disapproving looks, ignore them, and pose with them for selfies, but nobody spits.
The administration will use Ms. Beckstrom’s death to advance very bad shit. Republicans hope Americans accept this tragedy as retroactive justification for their plans. After the shooting, Mr. Trump already had outrageous demands unconnected to the real details of the event, and he spent his Thanksgiving holiday spewing racist bile. Entirely unrelated communities of immigrants and refugees, such as Somalis, were “catching strays” and queued for demonization before any investigation was convened.
Why did Mr. Trump start ranting about the Somalis? “Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.” This is not real, relevant, or sane.
Governor Tim Walz, who Mr. Trump called “seriously retarded” in the same diatribe, responded that the president ought to “release [his] MRI results.” I concur.
How did this country allow itself to be governed again by such villains? The damnable attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing, brutish attacks on immigrants by masked ICE thugs, cruelty, sadism, racism, hatred—none of this tripped our civic immune system? What have we done to deserve a world where all pain is an opportunity to cause more hurt? So many deaths are exploited by right-wing operatives, including Kate Steinle, David Dorn, Eliza Fletcher, Laken Riley, Charlie Kirk, and Iryna Zarutska. Once a crime happens, commentators license themselves to remix their most dehumanizing thoughts.
Before Ms. Beckstrom passed from her wounds, Mr. Trump demanded a “review” of every Afghan admitted under former President Joe Biden (though again, it was his administration that gave Mr. Lakanwal asylum), ordered the State Department to stop processing Afghan visas, then raved that he would “permanently pause migration from all [t]hird [w]orld [c]ountries,” “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” and “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our [c]ountry.”
Venomous nonsense. Fuck him. “Most” immigrants are not “on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” People from “all [t]hird [w]orld [c]ountries” did not do this, nor does nationality make anyone “incapable of loving [America].” If he wants rid of anyone not a “net asset,” he can get the hell out. Mr. Lakanwal did this. Nobody, especially not arbitrarily chosen ethnic groups—should be punished in his stead. Random denaturalization, deportation, and more masked ICE thugs are non sequiturs, make nobody safer, and, in the net, increase horror.
Mr. Trump ordered five hundred more troops to the capital. Why, when the ones already here are neither needed nor wanted? This is not rational. Nothing additional soldiers could have done would have deterred Mr. Lakanwal’s assault, because he likely did not plan to return alive. A crazed but trained combat veteran came to shoot Guardsmen—more would have only made them easier to find.
The president’s goal is to punish the city. Mr. Trump hates Washington, DC; he calls it a “lawless” “wasteland,” a “dirty and disgusting” “death trap,” “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world,” “horribly run,” a “filth[y] and decay[ing],” “graffiti-stained,” “shithouse,” a “nightmare of murder[,] crime,” “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” “Hell on Earth.” I feel the same about his White House. He confabulates that the Guardsmen are “his” violent, skull-cracking stormtroopers—at the strange September 30 gathering of the generals Mr. Trump hosted with Secretary of Defense and DUI Hire Pete Hegseth (described by TechDirt as a “two-person circlejerk”), Mr. Trump fabricated a story about “military guys” “pounding” teenagers for being “disrespectful.” (“10, 12, 15 [‘Tren de Aragua’] kids, and these military guys walk up to them, and they treat them with disrespect, and they just got pounded. They just got pounded.”) The Intercept quotes Defense officials saying this did not happen and was “obvious bullshit.” But it seems like the president wishes to see it
The so-called “Big Balls Beatdown” of former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine on 1400 Swann Street NW, short blocks away from a Trader Joe’s and Jeni’s Ice Cream, was the casus belli for the Guard deployment. Former President Elon Musk lied when he announced Mr. Balls fell valiantly protecting a stranger—a damsel in distress!—from a carjacking. The DC Metropolitan Police report at once contradicted him and identified that woman as Mr. Balls’s girlfriend and co-worker. Why a fake story, except to advance a cause that honesty could not? Mr. Musk never apologized for falsifying a narrative to support the “federalization” of the nation’s capital, though it would have made no difference if it were true. Mr. Balls is not a victim that the citizens of the District would surrender their freedom to avenge.
When the president initially called on the United States National Guard to occupy DC, liberty seemed on a razor’s edge—was this a “stunt” or the “end of America?” The first “show of force,” intimidation, and photo-ops collapsed into parody thanks to one brave man, Sean Dunn, who threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer and made the whole effort look ridiculous. “Ain’t shit” was what people up and down 14th Street said about the occupation after United States Attorney and ex-Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro risibly sent a team of armed federal agents in riot gear to arrest Mr. Dunn for “assaulting a federal officer.” He was later acquitted.
During the first days of the occupation in August, federal agents set up vehicle checkpoints on K Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and other major roads, stopping and searching cars for minor traffic violations (pro tip: check your tag lights). Not ideal for a six-foot-tall donkey in a leather jacket with a stack of “TRUMP IS A BITCH” stickers and draft essays including “Throat Goat Donald Owes America the Epstein Files,” and “No Kings 2: Rise of the Trump Kingdom” in his passenger seat. I expect more hassling now, so I detailed the Hexmobile over the holiday weekend—even using one of those “CarX Ooey Gooey Cleaning Gel” crevice tools.
I hate unreasonable searches and seizures—I am a Fourth Amendment superfan, and I still have not forgiven the overzealous campus police officer who opened my bag of hamburger rolls looking for drugs when I was en route to a 4/20 picnic. Americans deserve to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, and I am especially concerned about papers, which are organized in a specific fashion.
In 2008, DC Metro Police piloted a program where they randomly rifled through bags at station entrances. This was unwelcome, invasive, and inconvenient. If you asked the officer who tried to search my briefcase, I was the most annoying about it—he let me go after I insisted that my manuscripts stay collated.
The second Saturday after the shooting was DC’s first snow of the season. I went again to Ms. Beckstrom’s memorial to take photographs, this time at 3 AM. I am uncomfortable haunting places where friends and family grieve. I am more at ease at night when I can document unhurriedly.
The scene was wet but mostly undamaged. The memorial had grown over the week to include a banner that said “IN HONORING OF A FALLEN HERO SARAH BECKSTROM,” with her portrait and a message of support from the Afghan Uzbek community in the U.S.; two standing wreaths made of white chrysanthemums, white roses, and pink carnations around another poster of her face; and yet more memorial boards—one of Ms. Beckstrom in uniform, one in a graduation cap, and three of Mr. Wolfe. Another ten or so bouquets lined the pavement with new notes and little flags. Red and blue balloons were tied to a condolence sign, and around fifty tea lights dotted the display.
I went to look at the shattered mirror on the ledge. What was its purpose? Why was it still here? I touched my finger against one of the knife-like shards, then pulled back. In the frigid air, blood welled, but I felt no wound. I shoved that hand into my coat pocket and went back to inspecting the main display. I pressed my knee to the cold, dank sidewalk and crouched. Someone had stood up The Last Giant, a CD anthology of music by John Coltrane. Next to it was a snow-covered, spiral-bound sketchbook. Its pages were damp, and pink and green inks were smeared. It was used to communicate dates and times for vigils and contained a child’s drawings. I thought about a small boy or girl, learning the reality of violent death and terrorism for the first time. I flipped the pages carefully, considering how I could convince the station manager to dry it with one of their industrial fans.
A discomfort rooted between my shoulder blades and into the nerves of my neck. I was watched. An SUV had parked in the middle of 17th Street, though the light was green. The driver’s eyes fixed on mine, and there was enmity in his gaze. He might have been an unmarked police, a fed, a mugger, another blogger, a concerned citizen, or nobody. I left the block to escape his view and heard his engine quietly ignite. Why was it shut off at 3 AM in downtown DC in the snow? In hindsight, I had forgotten that automatic start-stop technology existed, but you cannot be too careful in an occupied city.
I hopped back into the Hexmobile and took the US-50 corridor out to the highway. In my rearview, I noticed an MPD vehicle U-turn and braced myself before it instead pulled into the Ivy City hotel lot. Likely, I had imagined adversaries—another bad trait of mine I recognize in this government—but it is strange for a driver to stop and glare at pedestrians. Most fates portended by that were ill.
I experienced this foggy panic before, during the summer of Pokémon Go. I noticed a big, black car in my shadow, creeping onto each block as I did. I prepared to beg for my phone and wallet, but then saw they were catching Pikachu. I uninstalled the app the next day.
I hate that I felt forced into a sneaky, defensive posture, like a teenager smoking weed, while interacting with a public display. If the administration operated in good faith, I could have approached the man in the SUV and said: “This display could be ruined by the elements; let’s do something about it.” In that better world, he and I could have gone to a 24-hour department store and split the cost of a canopy tent. But Walmart is no longer open 24 hours, and I could not trust that he would not “black bag” me.
Gentle readers must think it was inflammatory to say Republicans have enjoyed the aftermaths of this terror attack and the Kirk assassination, but please consider how the regime gives that impression. Responsible politicians have been careful, compassionate, and precise, but Mr. Trump and his servants instead relish the opportunity to be their grossest selves. If they were mourning, they would have mourned. Instead, they regurgitated every vile canard they ever practiced, insisting the U.S. has been “importing” people from “failed states who do not share our values,” and ranting about “demigration” to “send[] people back by the millions.” Bluntly, they are giddily more racist.
When Mr. Kirk was shot dead at his debate booth, Mr. Miller branded left-wing groups “a vast domestic terror movement” and vowed the administration would “use every resource [they] have at the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks” “in Charlie’s name.” Notoriously corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi then signaled her plans to “target” speech that “praises, rationalizes, or makes light of” the podcaster’s death as “hate speech.”
The administration thought they gained cause to “obliterate” their political rivals’ organizations and punish dissent, but that political capital dissolved after they wasted it trying and failing to remove Jimmy Kimmel Live! from broadcast. To most of America, Mr. Kirk was a political entertainer, like El Rushbo, Joe Scarborough, or Jon Stewart, not a saint—his death also did not make a military takeover by the Trump regime acceptable.
This administration may be stuffed nuts-to-butts with goons who bitch about Star Wars Episodes 7-9, but the American people have seen Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. TVTropes.com has lists of books, movies, and television programs where events are exploited by those seeking power. If anything, we over-index on “false flags.” We are a paranoid country, suspicious that secret cabals will incite incidents for nefarious reasons. On AM radio, every school shooting is an “inside job,” part of a story whose ending is taking AR-15s from “patriots.” Canon on the left is that former President George W. Bush misled the public about weapons of mass destruction to “sell” the Iraq invasion for oil, or Halliburton, or something. If proposed solutions to a crisis happen to align with a politician’s Christmas list, exploitation is an obvious conclusion.
I went to the memorial a third time on the two-week anniversary of the shooting. This time, the walk was colored red and blue by police lights at every intersection. I counted dozens of dark-colored SUVs, and while none were the man who spooked me, any of them could get me. Nothing was “going down,” but the accumulation of strobing was a mood.
To resolve my nerves, I called Mr. J., a friend who used to have a mohawk. I thought a chat would relax me, but he was more jangled—he confessed he was nauseated with worry about National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which explicitly claims to target wrongthink: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
Mr. J. said, “They are making lists.”
I laughed, “I thought they made that list in 2002,” then reminded him that he worked every day, and on weekends, he went to Costco to buy his children cheap hot dogs. He spent his rare free hours posting memes about the president that were no spicier than Late Night with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live. He goes nowhere unusual and does nothing criminal. Sure, he might listen to Anti-Flag, but he was no Antifa Supersoldier.
Mr. Trump’s press releases and orders were worded to imply that liberal and leftist ideologies will be policed, but while I fear this administration’s malice, I scoff at the thought that they could execute their threats.
At the Comey hearings, I saw fake U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan rattle like a marionette after she was called a puppet. This clownish DOJ could not even adequately persecute its most hated political enemies. What hope do they have to stop Mr. J. or me from talking shit, our #1 protected right? Nobody will convince a jury that a wisecracking guy is equivalent to a terrorist. Political shitposting, known in the Revolutionary era as pamphleteering and broadsiding, is our nation’s oldest anonymous art, practiced and perfected by our Founding Fathers. While the threat is serious, laughing it off is not bravado—Americans ought not give away their fear cheaply.
A multicolored, striped woven mat was laid on the ground in front of the public tribute. Neatly arranged on it were service coins and medallions, a Princess Aurora Funko Pop, another framed photograph, and small wood blocks. The display had expanded further to include a cross, a black memorial mailbox, crime scene tape, pink and orange teddy bears dressed like astronauts, more flowers, more flags, and the mirror shards again. Softly illumining the sidewalk was a small Christmas tree in a faux-barrel pot, topped with a large silver bow and decorated with white lights. That was probably a gift from family or friends—for them, the Yuletide is bloodstained. Whatever joy they planned for Christmas, they left at the corner.
When does this stop? Nothing happens that the Trump regime will not call proof that they should harass and brutalize their enemies, any enemy, even the giraffe-costumed Roddy Roadsteamer. It fucks me up to look at this shrine so clearly built with love and see in it the foundations for ethnic cleansing. I doubt that the smiling girl—woman, soldier, specialist—photographed would want her face to be the banner under which people who were innocent of her death were hurt. Though even if she did, or her family does, it would still be wrong.
When will our politicians be punished for using tragedy to support their worst ends? I have only seen that happen once—when Mr. Birden’s jeer “a noun, a verb, and 9/11” so magnificently savaged “America’s drag queen ex-Mayor” Rudy Giuliani’s career that he became a drunk.
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s collapse, the national mythology says Americans came together listening to Enya’s “Only Time.” I remember it differently. I was an early and vocal critic of the Iraq War. When the Bush administration pretended the invasion would be fast and free, I was hung up on “blowback”—the idea that every action has a reaction, every bullet creates a mourner, and every mourner is a future enemy. It is clearly a truism, but the U.S.’s reckless foreign policy made it seem novel and revolutionary before my drinking was legal. For that, I was called “Johnny Walker,” and it was whispered that I rooted for the Taliban. (Shouting: “Gotcha! The Taliban are in Afghanistan, not Iraq!” scored me no points either.)
Nobody has been a greater friend to the Taliban than Mr. Trump. He called them “tough” and “smart,” invited them to Camp David, set thousands of their warfighters free from prison, and practically agreed to turn Afghanistan over to them. While Mr. Biden may have “fumbled” the withdrawal, enough blame is not aimed at his predecessor and successor, who promised the Islamist warlords the very conditions they would exploit.
I was not wrong, though that is a joyless told-you-so. Mr. Bush’s March 2003 speech in support of the invasion invoked 9/11 six times. When the “shock and awe” campaign began, and cruise missiles first struck Baghdad, 70 percent of the country had been wrongly convinced that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the World Trade Center attack. In hindsight, Americans recognize they were deceived, and even in death, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not escape critique for repeatedly claiming Iraq had “long-established ties” to Al-Qaeda. The president, our Mandarin Mussolini, has attempted to repeat this trick at home at least three times now, and will continue to do so unless stopped.
The Trump-Vance regime lusts for more reasons to turn the weapons of government against the citizens. Wherever a death is tragic or violent, you can presume Messrs. Trump and Miller will ask themselves: “How does this profit us?” Mr. Balls’s big beatdown purchased an occupation, and Mr. Kirk’s assassination was exchanged to justify a persecution apparatus. Ms. Beckstrom’s death will pay for whatever fresh atrocity Mr. Trump had waiting in his shopping cart. His objective is not “public safety” or “order”—he wants the chaos, crackdowns, tear gas, and arrests. He wants the fear. He wants Americans hurt.
Each of us must make clear that this shit cannot be done in our name. Nobody is protected from random catastrophe—while I am nobody’s hero, if I became both sympathetic and the victim of a crime, what would that be used to endorse? Tomorrow, I could be run over by a drunk Canadian with an expired passport. If the administration wanted to make that a “thing,” a pretext for some next new horror show or injustice, they could never name their law after me, because I have strict instructions to be buried in a “TRUMP IS A BITCH” t-shirt.
Admiral Farragut’s order assumed torpedoes were obstacles to overcome, but steering us into them is this government’s objective. The USS Hartford was a warship built to advance and absorb damage. Our Republic once seemed sturdy, but we cannot damn the torpedoes, weather damage, and hope to survive to a better day, when House and Senate Republicans find the courage to impeach, convict, and remove their mad king.
Happy Holidays, everyone!