Pennsylvania police stopped one of these crazies from harming ‘No Kings’ protesters. But the wildness persists.
But because I had been reading and studying a lot about the militia movement, especially in the West and South, even before Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building—thanks there to the indefatigable David Neiwert, who has been on that beat for longer than most people—I knew that the wildness predated Obama’s rise to the presidency, that it was fed by lunatic conspiratorial beliefs and a fringe form of American Protestantism that had taken to guns and the woods at the same time.
In retrospect, what I sensed in 2012 was that this vague wildness was beginning to gain focus. It needed a target and, in the long view, Obama really was only a temp worker. The wildness was beginning to organize itself, and its target was the entire democratic-republican governmental system.
Now we have hundreds of these individual warriors floating around. The president pardoned a couple regiments of these people who attacked the U.S. Capitol. They have friends at court now. They have too many allies in the state and federal legislatures despite all the public mewling about “political violence” that is all the rage today. The wildness has taken on human form. It now has a coherent shape. We can see it plain. We can see it through the Kevlar.
