The reaction in the media to this attack is as predictable as it is revolting.
The reaction in the media to this attack is as predictable as it is revolting.
R esponding to the news that a crazed asylee from Afghanistan had shot two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer concluded that the attack was “so tragic” and “so unnecessary,” before proceeding to identify the real culprit of the abomination: President Donald J. Trump. “These poor guardsmen,” wrote Mayer, “should never have been deployed.”
In this ugly asseveration, Mayer was swiftly joined by a bunch of other political commentators, each more desperate than the last to train their fire on the current occupant of the White House. In The Atlantic, Juliette Kayyem wrote that “there are costs to performatively deploying members of the military, one of which is the risk of endangering them.” On Twitter, the author John Pavlovitz explicitly proposed that “Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are culpable for endangering the National Guard by putting them in harm’s way.” Not to be outdone, MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian followed this path to its revolting terminus by suggesting that the guardsmen were “walking around with uniforms in an American city,” that “there are some Americans that might object to that,” and “so, apparently, this shooting has happened.”
I’m sorry . . . what? In what possible universe could that be an appropriate response? Washington, D.C., is a federal city over which the federal government has plenary control. If, as has been the case this year, the federal government decides that it is necessary to deploy federal agents to enforce the law, it is permitted to do so without the expectation that those agents will be murdered. Certainly, the American social contract has become more complicated over time than it was back in 1787, but at no point has it come to tolerate the proposition that officials who have been sent to keep the peace should expect to be gunned down by assassins if their deployment is disapproved of by the progressive intellectual class. Politically, one can believe that Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard was a good one, a bad one, or a middling one and that postulate will not change one whit. Whether they are there to pick up trash, fight an alien invasion, or solely to smile for foreign tourists, there is no circumstance in which killing them is appropriate.
A common refrain of those who believe otherwise is that the two guardsmen who were targeted would not have been hurt if they had been at home in West Virginia. Taken literally, this is of course true, and yet, in our republic of laws, the observation serves no more to mitigate the crime at hand than does the suggestion that if JFK had declined to go to Dallas in the November of 1963 his head would not have been blown open. The alternative to there being no National Guard troops in D.C. is not the establishment of a perfect world, in which there is no crime or sin, but the persistence of the same world, in which other law enforcement agents have been tasked with performing the same role. If one would not say that the mayor of Washington, D.C., is to blame when one of the police officers she has hired is gunned down, then one should not say that President Trump is to blame for using the National Guard in loco vigilum. Ultimately, that exercise becomes infinitely recursive. In Dallas, in 2016, a man who “wanted to kill police officers” shot twelve cops, killing five. It would have been ridiculous for the officials in that city to have responded to that horror by concluding that, henceforth, they should replace the police with some other organization, and it would be ridiculous for the authorities in Washington, D.C., to do the same with the National Guard.
Trump’s critics in this realm are obliged to explain their broader philosophy. The implication offered up by Mayer, Kayyem, Pavlovitz, and Dilanian is that, by simply being there, the troops of the National Guard were inevitably transmuted into a target. That being so, it might be useful to know which other agents of the state are now fair game for political radicals. Do the men who perform the vigil at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier qualify for the same treatment? How about IRS officials who have been sent to conduct audits? Are National Park rangers in danger? Where’s the line? Does one merely have to disagree with the decision to employ them for one’s actions to become informative and nuanced? Are federal emissaries at risk only when their conduct is ceremonial? Perhaps the New Yorker has a list that it would consider sharing with the rest of us: “Cops off-limits; National Guard acceptable; check with Jane Mayer for exact details”?
It may be rather unfashionable these days to believe that there are some questions whose answers are refreshingly simple, but, at the risk of outing myself as a simpleton, I think that we would all be considerably better off if we internalized the presumption that when a man shoots two innocent people in cold blood, it is he — and not they or their superiors — who deserve our opprobrium. Upon hearing about such an event, one’s reaction ought to be heartfelt, straightforward, and unadorned with partisan sophistry. What happened in D.C. last week was unequivocally terrible, and, as such, the full share of the anger I feel in connection must be aimed not at the young lady who lost her life, or at the young man who remains in critical condition, or at the duly elected president who wields control over the federal district, but at the evil bastard who attacked all of them, and who must, if the law is to remain intact, be the only figure in the drama who is punished by the polity for his crimes.