I remember Steve Scalise.
It is June of 2024, and I am becoming a connoisseur of police tackles. I now watch videos of cops smoothly yanking dismayed protesters to the ground while assessing angle of approach, velocity upon contact, and the proper amount of acceleration before closing with the suspect. I’ve come to appreciate the aesthetic value of a solid coup de grâce — a blindsiding from the rear or a body slam like a Mortal Kombat finishing move — and I can score them like an Olympic judge, having seen more than my share of legendary ones in recent weeks.
For it is June of 2024, people, and we are living through a new Golden Age of LEO crowd-suppression efforts in America. So I score protester takedowns the way an overcaffeinated high school football coach studies the form of a potential college recruit on his team, helpfully looking to correct for technical flaws, potentially dangerous moves, and bad sportsmanship. (Even worse: Every now and then, I secretly award extra points for bad sportsmanship instead of deducting them — especially if inflicted on whining Emory professors.)
Thus it was with great amusement that I read what NR’s Haley Strack wrote about last night’s adventure at the Congressional Baseball Game, where the headline otherwise should have been how the House Democrats — once dominant under the semi-pro baseball leadership of Louisiana’s Cedric Richmond (since traded to the Biden administration in a move he may regret if everybody’s fired after the season ends in November) — got horsewhipped by Republicans, 31–11. But no. Instead, the story of the night was of course that a bunch of hyper-radical, new-on-the-scene youth climate activists calling themselves “Climate Defiance” hopped the fence of Nationals Park wearing matching T-shirts and khakis and ran onto a field filled with federal lawmakers to demand the immediate cessation of all use of fossil fuels.
I hate to give away the endings to fun stories, but: It didn’t work. Your lights still go on and the wells are still pumping. It in fact went just about exactly as you might have expected — not one of these eight hapless Zoomer twerps even managed to straggle their way out of left field before being bodied to the ground by the Capitol Police, sometimes spectacularly. (According to Haley, Code Pink also staged a pro-Hamas protest in the stands later on during the game, but nobody noticed on social media because those gray-haired, osteoporotic harpies don’t have the guts to actually put their birdlike bodies out there on the field and earn their well-deserved hip replacements like grown-ups.)
Let’s laugh at these chuckleheads for at least a moment. It comes down, as always, to my tackle ratings — you didn’t think I was going to seriously address the merits of Climate Defiance’s argument, now, did you? — and some of these men and women were absolute pros, putting on a clinic. I invite you to judge the professionality and form of this security officer in particular, as he reduces a peroxide-dye-jobbed college student to two atoms of hydrogen and two of oxygen. (The clip comes complete with helpful “NFL Films”–style narration from the guy videotaping it, seeing the cop rushing forward: “Whoa—whoa—whoa—wh—[*BOOM*].”) Look at the absolute fire in that Capitol policeman’s eyes as he takes off — he probably saw the coif on that kid and instinctively reacted the same way I would have. I nominate him for Employee of the Month, especially compared to some of the sloppier corralling work by his peers. (I saw at least one female officer miss an easy clothesline takedown — why spare the neck, ma’am? Politics isn’t beanbag.) It took them somewhere around 120 seconds to fully secure all of these morons, which might impress you but to me can certainly be improved upon. Eagle eyes next time, team — I expect 60 seconds, max.
As delightful as all this was, it left me with a distinct sense of alarm. These kids are now being federally charged, and unlike in New York City — where Alvin Bragg declares that “no man is above the law” with respect to felonizing Donald Trump on 34 nonsense charges while dropping almost all claims against the protesters who vandalized Columbia — I suspect they will actually be in trouble. For, although something sad in my soul suspects that not a single one of these dumb eco-protester kids remembers it, I am both old enough and conservative enough to have it burned into my brain: I remember Steve Scalise.
Do you? Surely if you are reading this you do, and yet I suspect our mainstream media has successfully relegated it to a cultural footnote for most Americans, as opposed to one of the single most alarming portents in modern political history. I myself have not forgotten that horrifying time almost exactly seven years ago to the day — June 14, 2017 — when a left-wing activist, inspired by Bernie Sanders and the climate of apocalyptic progressive anti-Trump and anti-Republican rhetoric, picked up a rifle and a handgun and opened fire on the Republican congressional baseball team as they were practicing for the game, shooting several Capitol Police officers (who had heroically rushed the field to cover the congressmen) and nearly killing Representative Scalise.
In the immediate aftermath of that event, I remember how swiftly the media narrative sought to tamp down any idea that left-wing politics — with its quasi-millenarian tone that emphasizes the “urgency of now,” the need for immediate heroic action to avoid impending apocalypse — was involved and turn it into a story about “a crazy guy.” (Funny how that did not apply in media coverage of the 2011 Gabrielle Giffords shooting — an act legitimately committed by an apolitical psychopath, as opposed to a radicalized political actor.)
I was not fooled, and hopefully you were not either. That is why the Capitol Police manhandled each and every one of these legitimately dangerous fools who invaded the field last night, and why I hope they’re all charged and forced, at a bare minimum, to plead out on something that trails them for years. Because each one of these young people — with madness baked into their brains about the need to immediately end fossil fuels — is by definition already a crazy person. Who knows what other kinds of crazy they may harbor? Maybe they’re also prone to violence. Maybe they’re pro-jihad. Maybe they just have a knife and a desire to be famous. It doesn’t matter to me, and it can’t matter to the cops, who professionally are allowed to know only this: Once you cross that line, you get taken down. You may “support the protesters” because you love the innocent exuberance of youth. Me? I’ve seen what can potentially happen, so anytime some jerk hops the fence to “make a statement,” I’m rooting for injuries.