The man who attacked the Cincinnati FBI office last week died fighting what he thought was a war for American freedom. He was tragically misinformed.
The man who attacked the Cincinnati FBI office last week died fighting what he thought was a war for American freedom. He was tragically misinformed.
R icky Shiffer thought he was Ricky Revolutionary. Now, he’s Ricky Rigor Mortis, who died as he lived on social media: pointlessly, fruitlessly, and stupidly.
Shiffer is the nincompoop who, enraged by the spectacle of . . . a law-enforcement agency serving a lawful warrant . . . attacked the FBI office in Cincinnati — as everybody knows, the True and Hidden Occult Capital of the Satanic Deep State is somewhere in Cincinnati — Thursday with a rifle and a nail gun. If his posts on Donald Trump’s social-media service are any indicator, he planned the assault poorly, and doesn’t seem to have quite understood how bulletproof glass works. (The general idea is that it is bulletproof.) Afterward, he led the feds on a mad scamper through Ohio and then engaged in a desultory shootout with them, at which point his life came to an abrupt and appropriate end.
Say this for Ricky Revolutionary: At least he had the courage of his idiotic convictions. You can’t say as much for the people who make a comfortable living manipulating misfits like him. Take Charlie Kirk, the young radio host and TPUSA entrepreneur who insists that the FBI’s warrant-service at Mar-a-Lago was nothing short of “a military operation against a political dissident.” Kirk’s followers take this message seriously: “There’s no time for politics, we are at war,” one representative response declared.
This is standard Republican stuff right now: Florida governor Ron DeSantis insisted that the FBI was enabling the “weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents” — that capital-R “Regime” is telling — while Marco Rubio promised that those who use the government to “persecute political opponents” will, if he has his way, “face investigation and prosecution” by their political opponents, and he went on to describe the search as something we’d expect from “3rd world Marxist dictatorships.” Poor Marco Rubio — the senator from U.S. Sugar got out-boobed in 2016 and has vowed never to let it happen again.
Upon hearing the news from Cincinnati, Kirk, who argues that we are engaged in a literal war — “military operation,” etc. — declared that the Left is trying to manipulate radical rightists into doing something stupid and violent. Of course, these sad misfits are being manipulated and exploited — mainly by demagogues such as Charlie Kirk, whose po-faced protestations of peaceability are inconsistent with their account of the facts of the case, i.e., that this is war.
This isn’t war. Ricky Revolutionary wasn’t Crispus Attucks. January 6 wasn’t the Boston Massacre. And Charlie Kirk isn’t Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no matter how many times he calls himself a “dissident” between commercial breaks on his nationally syndicated radio program. In totalitarian societies, you find dissidents wasting away in labor camps, not stopping into the first-class lounge on their way to the next speaking engagement.
We are at a peculiar moment in history when “You support the regime!” is an indictment hurled at conservatives by people who think of themselves as conservatives. Supporting the regime — with qualifications, with the knowledge that it is not synonymous with the current administration or its policies, and with “conversation so nicely / Restricted to What Precisely / and If and Perhaps and But” — is pretty much what conservatives do: Keeping irresponsible radicals well away from the levers of political power is part of the conservative mandate. Which is what makes it so damned peculiar to see these callow little men citing Edmund Burke as the animating spirit of their reconstituted Jacobinism. Whatever it is to dream of storming some new Bastille and manning ranks of literal or metaphorical guillotines, it isn’t conservatism. What is happening on the right is a kind of reverse ménage à trois, a three-way divorce in which conservatives are going one way, rightist revolutionaries are going another way, and a few Republican true-believers are pretending that this is just a bump in the road of an otherwise healthy relationship, trying to convince the other two to keep it together for the sake of the kids.
One of the oldest conservative insights is that “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made” — that, because organizations are made of people, any organization that achieves any real power (the FBI, the Catholic Church, the New York Times, the United Fruit Company) will be vulnerable to corruption by that power. To the immature, adolescent mind, that is an invitation to nihilism, foot-stamping, and outrage — there is no puritan like a teenaged puritan. To the mature mind — which is what the conservative mind is supposed to be — it is an unnecessary reminder: that man exists in a fallen state, that reform is an endless project, that imperfection has to be expected, that utopia literally means “no place,” that “the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.”
The United States has real problems, and its federal government has some urgent ones. The United States is not the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, we are not building concentration camps, and there is no civil war here except in the warped minds of a few such as Ricky Revolutionary. Some of those cynical operators who would have you believe otherwise are people whose chosen profession is lying for money. It is part of the duty of the citizen to liberate himself from selfish childish things, to sober up, and to act like a human being worthy of the freedom he enjoys.
Or you could attack the FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun — a futile and stupid gesture if ever there were one — and see how that works out for you, our beloved revolutionary comrade.
¡Viva la revolución!