I read a very troubling story this morning about a fellow who decapitated his own father in the family home, and then posted a video of him, holding dad's severed head aloft, (it was in a clear plastic bag), while going on a YouTube rant about how this action was justified because dear old dad was a traitor to his country. His crime? He was a longtime employee of the Army Corps of Engineers.
Justin Mohn, 32, was apparently motivated by a hatred of the Biden Administration, the current situation on the southern border with the US and, interestingly, declared himself "Acting President of the United States", under Martial Law. He was arrested at a National Guard armory armed with a handgun, but did not resist arrest and is currently being held without bond pending arraignment. He left the bloody machete and the kitchen knife that he used to take his father's head in the bathtub for his mother to find.
This is where the overheated and increasingly violent rhetoric of Mr. Trump and his followers takes you. To a dystopia where disputes are settled with threats of violence and other forms of intimidation and, in the case of already mentally ill folks, to actual violence. Mr. Mohn is an extreme example of this tendency, but he's not alone. The Anti-DefamationLeague, (ADL), estimates that the majority of 'terroristic events' are perpetrated by those from the right side of the political spectrum. And while some violence does come from the left, it seems to be directed less at individuals and more toward institutions. In the past couple of years there have been assaults on peace officers that resulted in the death of the perpetrators. Ricky Shiffer, a 42 year old Navy veteran from Columcus, Ohio, attempted to storm an FBI office in Kenwood, Ohio, where the agency's Cincinnati office is located. The assault took place in the wake of the FBI's service of a search warrant on Donald Trump's residence at Mar-A-Lago that attempted to recover certain documents to the National Archive that Mr. Trump had repeatedly refused to return. Three days later, Mr. Shiffer showed up at Kenwood, armed with an AR-15 and a nail gun, and wearing body armor. From what I've read, the nail gun was supposed to be Mr. Shiffer's 'secret weapon' that would take care of the bulletproof class in the field office. It didn't work. After a high speed chase and an armed standoff during which shots were fired at the police, Mr. Shiffer was killed. For what it's worth, Mr. Shiffer was also part of the assault on the US Capital on 1/06/21.
In another incident, a man named Craig Robertson. was shot and killed by FBI agents attempting to serve a arrest warrant on the very angry Mr. Robertson, then a resident of Provo, Utah, who had made what the Secret Service believed to be credible threats against the life of President Biden, who was scheduled to make a trip to Utah a few hours before the incident in question. Mr. Robertson was a self-described "MAGA Trumper", who had exhibited violent tendencies in the past.
I've said before in these notes that the current political climate reminds me of the 1850's and the runup to the American Civil War. If you recall, over 700,000 Americans perished in that war. I wouldn't necessarily predict a 21st century civil war, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if such a thing came to pass. For me, this political climate reminds me of the 1960s, when asassination was a reality, rather than something that one read about in a history book. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that someone will be assassinated during this year's election, simply because there are too many guns in the hands of too many angry and mentally ill people.
