Maureen Callahan’s ‘American Predator’ is a bone-chilling portrait of a monster

By Colette Bancroft
https://www.tampabay.com/books/maureen-callahans-american-predator-is-a-bone-chilling-portrait-of-a-monster-20190705/
July 5, 2019

I sat down with Maureen Callahan’s new true-crime book, American Predator, one night at about 11. The book was getting a lot of buzz, and I wanted to take a quick look to help me decide whether to put it in my review queue.

I jumped when my sleepy dog put his head on my knee. It was almost 1 a.m., and I had read 124 pages without stirring from my chair.

American Predator hooked me first with the disturbing story of the abduction of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig from a coffee kiosk in Anchorage, Alaska, one snowy night in February 2012. At first, police were slow to act, believing the teen had run away after a fight with her boyfriend. Then they got the surveillance video from the shop.

It showed a tall figure, face obscured by a hoodie. The person ordered coffee, then pulled a gun, bound Samantha’s hands, vaulted “like a cheetah” through the kiosk window and walked her away into the dark.

Three weeks after she disappeared, her boyfriend got a text from her missing phone that led investigators to a note demanding ransom, along with photos of Samantha. Now it was a kidnapping, a federal crime, and the FBI joined the Anchorage Police Department in the hunt.

None of them were prepared for what they found.

Use of her stolen ATM card led them to Texas, where they arrested Israel Keyes, a construction worker in his early 30s. He lived in Anchorage with his young daughter and girlfriend; he was in Texas for a family wedding. He had no criminal record, no connection to Samantha. When they searched his rental car, they found a hoodie and mask, a handgun — and Samantha’s driver’s license.

The core of the book is Callahan’s vivid recounting of the interrogation of Keyes once he’s returned to Anchorage. Members of the city’s police department jockey for position on the case, which is now drawing national attention, with the FBI team. Then all of them are bigfooted by the U.S. attorney, whose insistence on leading the questioning is a huge conflict of interest.

But skilled police and FBI interrogators manage to keep some control over the process. Now that he has been captured, Keyes wants to talk. And he has a lot to talk about — all of it the stuff of nightmares.

One of 10 children of parents who followed an assortment of white supremacist and fringe religious cults, Keyes was home-birthed, home-schooled and had little contact with the outside world as a boy. He was bright, resourceful, good at building or fixing anything, attentive to his younger siblings.

He also displayed, from childhood, a tendency toward such crimes as torturing animals, setting fires, committing burglaries and stealing and selling guns.

Callahan writes, “And somehow, in 1998, even without a birth certificate or a Social Security number, he talked his way into the U.S. Army.” There he was praised by superiors, called a “supersoldier” and easily passed the grueling training for Army Rangers. Even to the investigators, some parts of his military career remained obscure.

The interrogations are chilling, first as Keyes gradually reveals the horrific details of Samantha’s fate, then as it becomes clear she was far from his first victim — and might not have been his last, even though he was arrested a month after her disappearance.

Not only was Keyes a serial killer, one who might have been killing — men, women, children — for half his life. He was unique even among that vanishingly small group. Callahan writes, “The Bureau’s top criminal profilers were at a loss. The only thing they could tell the team was that Keyes was one of the most terrifying subjects they had ever encountered. There was no precedent for a serial killer with this MO: no victim type; no fixed location for hunting, killing, and burying; putting thousands of miles between himself and his victims; caches (of weapons and other tools) buried all over the United States. He avoided detection through travel.”

As he gleefully manipulates his interrogators, Keyes also opens up about his methods: flying to other states to find random victims, then transporting their bodies to yet another state for disposal; astonishingly meticulous preparation to avoid leaving DNA and other evidence; maintaining an apparently normal family and work life in between.

“I’m two different people,” he tells them.

Callahan has written for Vanity Fair, New York magazine and the New York Post, and she published two earlier books, one about Lady Gaga (Poker Face), another about ’90s fashion icons (Champagne Supernovas).

American Predator is a major shift in subject. It’s also part of the red-hot trend toward true-crime narratives, in podcasts, on television and in books. When you think about it, Callahan’s past reporting about celebrity culture isn’t so different from true crime, especially in a case like this one. In spite of all his efforts to keep his crimes secret, Keyes, like his hero Ted Bundy, craved fame.

So why have you probably never heard of him? Callahan ends the story with a pair of explosive shocks, and with this: “This case provoked the FBI to beg for the public’s help — but just as quickly, they decided to obscure much of the case and Israel Keyes from public view. Approximately forty-five thousand pages of case files remain unreleased by the Department of Justice, under claims of national security.”

In the end, American Predator is unsatisfying in the sense that any nonfiction book about a serial killer must be: Despite all the efforts of his interrogators, we never get inside Keyes’ head. If we come to true crime to try to understand how a monster is born, we finish still in the dark, and maybe it’s darker.

But Callahan’s portrait of this monster, and of the men and women who do their best to uncover his secrets, is one that will keep you up all night.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.

American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

By Maureen Callahan

Viking, 385 pages, $27

‘American Predator’ reveals the chilling playbook of a serial killer

By Dennis Drabelle
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/american-predator-reveals-the-chilling-playbook-of-a-serial-killer/2019/07/02/d4f2b5dc-8224-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html?utm_term=.2fc633141bfe
July 3, 2019

The serial killer’s Achilles’ heel is the very thing that makes him so fascinating: his urge to repeat himself. He either stages his murders as rituals, thus providing clues to why he is enraged with the world, or he falls into patterns, because devising a new modus operandi for each killing calls for unsustainable levels of creativity and flexibility.

But what if a serial killer has enough wits and self-control to fashion an amorphous M.O.? What if he reads and learns from FBI profiles of fiends like himself and from fiction such as “The Silence of the Lambs”? What if the very serialism of his “work” escapes notice? And what if he defies the stereotype of serial killers as sullen loners by being a family man?

All these exceptions were true of Israel Keyes, the subject of Maureen Callahan’s riveting book “American Predator.”

And Keyes had something else going for him: He barely left a trace. “No property records,” Callahan writes. “No documentation of parents or siblings. No address history, no gun licenses, no academic transcripts. . . . He had left nearly no digital footprints, no paper trail — and this was a guy with an unusual name.” Later it came out that Keyes had never even applied for a Social Security card, although he had served in the military.

Callahan, an investigative journalist, begins her narrative with the murder that spelled the beginning of the end for Keyes. In February 2012, a high school senior named Samantha Koenig went missing from the kiosk where she worked as a barista in Anchorage. A security-camera video showed her leaving with an unknown adult male. But the transaction looked so ordinary that at first the police wondered whether the girl hadn’t “staged [her own] abduction, and the man in the video was her accomplice.” The man had shown so little of himself to the camera that “tall and athletic” was as much of a description as could be gleaned. (Koenig’s sang-froid may have been an act she put on to keep her abductor calm.)

The first break in the case came when someone began using Koenig’s ATM card to make cash withdrawals in Texas. Then an alert small-town Texas police officer reported seeing a car parked near an ATM at 2:23 a.m. Callahan homes in on the nerve-racking moment when a highway patrol officer spotted the same make and color of car only to realize he lacked probable cause to pull it over. “Find a reason,” the officer’s superior insisted over the radio. He did: The driver exceeded the speed limit — by a measly two miles per hour, but that was enough. At the wheel of the stopped car was Israel Keyes.

[Harper Lee tried to turn a murder trial into a true crime masterpiece. What happened to the book?]

Kidnapping is a federal crime, and the FBI had been directing the case from Anchorage. Taken there, Keyes admitted to killing Koenig and to having done this sort of thing before, though how often and who his victims were he wouldn’t say. He was able to take charge of his owninterrogation, largely because of what Callahan sees as the ineptitude of a lawyer from the U.S. attorney’s office in Anchorage who insisted on being the alpha questioner, only to commit one blunder after another. Most damagingly, the bumbling lawyer failed to give the right impression: Make the suspect think you already know far more about him and his actions than you actually do.

Nonetheless, the other interrogators pieced together how Keyes got away with so many murders. He wasn’t picky. With the exception of young children, whom Keyes claimed to have left alone, he would just as soon target a portly middle-aged couple as he would a young woman such as Koenig. This randomness, along with Keyes’s vanishingly low profile, enabled him to kill undetected for years.

Nor was Keyes trying to make a point about his victims’ pasts or sexuality or any other personal characteristic, Callahan deduces after listening to tapes of his interrogation. He was after power and sick thrills. “When Keyes took people,” she writes, “he was acutely attuned to their animal response: the acid flush of adrenaline flooding the brain, color draining from the faces, pupils dilating in fear. He could smell it in their sweat. He liked to extend that response as long as possible.” He also got kicks from watching TV news clips about his murders and commenting on them (anonymously) online. He gloried in his superiority to the police.

[Review: ‘Beneath a Ruthless Sun,’ by Gilbert King]

Keyes had been raised in a fundamentalist sect, home-schooled and surrounded by guns. As a child, he exhibited the behavior that seems to be a common denominator among adult serial killers: a lust for torturing animals. So how did the grown-up Keyes get caught? Callahan suggests that it was only because he wanted to be, that he made the rookie mistake of repeatedly using Koenig’s ATM card because it was time for his brilliance to be recognized. But we’ll never really know: Keyes killed himself while in police custody awaiting trial for Koenig’s murder.

“American Predator” is a fine book — exhaustively researched and candid without being prurient — that should be as illuminating to law enforcement as it is fascinating to the general reader. If only there were some way to keep it from being read by would-be serial killers.

Dennis Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World.

AMERICAN PREDATOR

The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

By Maureen Callahan

Viking. 285 pp. $27

Speaking Ill of the Ted

By Mark Steyn
https://www.steynonline.com/9565/speaking-ill-of-the-ted
July 22, 2019



This weekend we were busy marking the demi-centennial of Apollo 11's moon landing with some thoughts onThe Lost Frontier and some appropriately lunar music. But 1969's giant leap for mankind coincided with one almighty flying leap for a very different kind of man: with his usual exquisite timing, Senator Edward Kennedy chose the day before Messrs Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin reached the Sea of Tranquility to drive Mary Jo Kopechne into a pond of tranquility, at least until he came flying off that bridge. And, by the time America was paying attention, Teddy had been fitted with his neck brace and the minders had everything under control.

Last year there was, very belatedly, a fine feature film about Chappaquiddick, which I reviewed here, and which contains a dialogue exchange taken almost verbatim from a ten-year-old column of mine:

As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe: 

'Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.' 

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than 'betrayed' him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

That bit turns up in the movie:

Joan Vennochi's words are put in Ted's mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed - 'Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus.' And my cheap riposte - 'Moses didn't leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea' - is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he's not a man.

He wasn't - and nor were those who went along with it. I have rarely been more disgusted by the public discourse of a free society than by the obsequies that attended Kennedy's passing a decade ago. Yet, even so, I would not have bothered re-posting the column below were it not for the fact that they're still doing it. On this fiftieth anniversary, the Associated Press, purveyors of unreadable J-school sludge to America's dying monodailies, are still reflexively playing oleaginous courtiers to a dynasty that no longer exists. In a country that now vaporizes careers for an infelicitous tweet, Ted Kennedy killed a woman and dared us to call him on it. Thanks to the likes of the Associated Press, America failed that test:

~from Mark Steyn's syndicated column, August 28th 2009:

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Senator Edward M Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At The Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by such a death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his "progressive" agenda, up to and including health care "reform." It was an odd kind of "redemption": In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted's "favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, 'Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?'"

Terrific!

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

Beats me!

Why did the Last Lion cross the road?

To sleep it off!

What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond?

A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! "He was a guy's guy," chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in. And in fact setting a new moral standard in which a drunken adulterer's appetites can cause a woman's death and he pays no price is also an end to civility.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky & Co do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting and finishing with the aforementioned lunar commemorations, The Lost Frontier and Fly Me to the Moon. Kathy Shaidle's film column celebrated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and our marquee presentation was a brand new edition of The Mark Steyn Show, with former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and Mrs Thatcher's former speechwriter John O'Sullivan discussing populism and globalism, both generally and more particularly - as in the Somalification of Minnesota. If you were too busy visiting the new madrassah at Lake Wobegon this weekend, I hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.

As the third year of The Mark Steyn Club cranks into top gear, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and have been so eager to re-re-subscribe for another twelve months. We thank you all, and hope to see at least a few of you to thank personally on our Second or Third Steyn Cruise. For more information on the Club, see here.

Jeffrey Epstein Should Cancel the Culture’s Humbert Humberts

By Kyle Smith
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-roman-polanski-hollywood-sexual-exploitation/
July 9, 2019

Federal prosecutors announce case against Jeffrey Epstein. (AP/Richard Drew)

Perhaps the most historic, in the sense of era-defining, moment in the history of the Academy Awards was that standing ovation Roman Polanski got when he was given Best Director honors in 2003. There they are, leading Hollywood liberals, leaping to their feet to cheer for a man who, at age 43, gave a 13-year-old girl Quaaludes for the purpose of having sex with her and sodomizing her. Polanski suffered in no significant way for his crime, and today it seems obvious he should at the very least be denied the highest honor his profession can bestow.

In 2018, Polanski (along with Bill Cosby) was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which suddenly discovered 40 years after his crime that he was no longer in accord with “ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values of respect for human dignity.” They meant “moral standards,” but acknowledging the existence of morality is still too much to ask of the Academy. Before Harvey Weinstein, the only person ever expelled from the Academy was Carmine Caridi, an actor who appeared in The Godfather. His crime was sharing a DVD screener with a friend, who put it on the Internet.

The Jeffrey Epstein case should end a nearly 50-year era in which the mandarins of our cultures — the intellectuals, writers, and artists — almost unanimously ignored, laughed off, or even outright celebrated sexual exploitation of girls and very young women, even in many cases prepubescent ones. Humbert Humbert somehow became the culture’s idea of a barrier-breaking hero whose predilections provided jokes such as the nickname for Epstein’s infamous ‘Lolita Express’ jet, the one stocked with young flesh. Epstein’s habits were so unremarkable that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were happy to be associated with him. Clinton and Trump were not outliers. They were simply symptoms of a disease.

Hugh Hefner fired up a flare lighting the way to an almost anything-goes view of female sexuality, and it reached its apex at the 2003 Oscars. Under the regime of Hefnerism, conservative prudes and often the law stood charged with being uptight and repressive about sex involving girls just over or even under the age of consent. That Polanski became an exile from this country after his crime made him Hollywood’s favorite martyr. The Academy was eager to give him the Oscar both to showcase its view that he had been victimized by prudery and to dunk on conservatives. Attendees didn’t just applaud, they let out a mighty whoop of approval when Polanski’s Oscar was announced by a smiling Harrison Ford. Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese, Weinstein, and others all jumped to their feet to participate in a chilling standing ovation. Jack Nicholson, at whose house Polanski’s assault took place, looked confused and joined in the applause, but remained seated. So did Nicolas Cage. No one captured by the cameras looked particularly peevish. As far as I know, no one in Hollywood had any problem with lionizing Polanski at the time.

Harrison Ford presented Polanski with the Oscar in Deauville, France in 2003. (AP)

Polanski is a man of his era. At 33, Ringo Starr had a No. 1 hit singing “You’re 16, you’re beautiful, and you’re mine.” Woody Allen made what felt like an autobiographical movie about a 42-year-old television writer having an affair with a 17-year-old high-school student, and nobody blinked. Time magazine put him on the cover under the legend “American Genius.” (It turned out Allen had had affairs with two teenagers around that time). Urged on by her horrible mother, Brooke Shields built a career around being jailbait, posing nude at age 10 for a Hefner publication called “Sugar and Spice,” then starring as a 12-year-old hooker in Pretty Baby (which began filming when she was 11), then at 14 starring in a film about two teens discovering their sexuality, The Blue Lagoon (though a double did her nude scenes). At 15, she starred in Endless Love, which as filmed initially received an X rating, before most of the nudity was cut to achieve an R. Whatever “controversy” attached to any of this was reported by the press solely to pump up the box office, as though conservative naysayers were aliens from a quaint, slightly daft foreign country. The media itself had no problem with it.

Look at the response to Pretty Baby, which features a nude Shields as a prostitute’s daughter who grows up in a brothel and joins her mother’s profession. (Pretty Baby, like Endless Love, enjoyed the cultural camouflage of being directed by an artistically unimpeachable European, Louis Malle. It can’t be smut if it’s arty, was the general view.) The film “takes a robust and humorous approach to life in a brothel,” wrote then–film critic Judith Martin in the Washington Post, before she became advice columnist Miss Manners. That “a daughter of the house should go into the communal family business is natural,” Martin ruled. “And the fussing and excitement surrounding her debut seem not much different from those associated with more respectable ceremonies to launch young girls. Tea dances, packing to go off to college, weddings — those, too combine titillation with finery and giggles.” Child prostitution, you see, was much like a tea dance. Penelope Gilliatt’s New Yorker review of Pretty Baby combines a panting quality with a yearning to sound tasteful that would have enthralled Humbert Humbert:

The most beautifully intelligent picture to have come out in America so far this year . . . A jammy-mouthed little girl of twelve, who is the child of a whore in the brothel, uses her virginity as a lure. . . . For all her look of the nubile, though, she could nonetheless not pass for a grown-up. . . . This may be a film set in a brothel, but it is no more lewd than a Bonnard of a naked woman in a bath. . . . There are many scenes that buzz gently with the giggles of children in the background.

In years to come, anyone learning about the Jeffrey Epstein case will ask: Why didn’t anybody raise the alarm? “What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and just blithely overlooked it,” the journalist Vicky Ward, who profiled him for Vanity Fair, told the New York Times. “All mentioned the girls, as an aside.” Epstein’s acts had deep cultural roots. But things don’t always stay the same, or get worse. Sometimes attitudes take a turn for the conservative. We should be grateful that standards have evolved in the right direction. The next Epstein or Roman Polanski will have considerably more difficulty getting people to shrug off their deeds, much less join in a standing ovation.

Antifa: Terrorists of the Bourgeoisie

By Matthew Boose
https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/04/antifa-terrorists-of-the-bourgeoisie/
July 4, 2019

The savage assault on journalist Anti Ngo by leftists in Portland, Oregon, has brought renewed attention to the barbaric Antifa organization.

Ngo, a journalist for center-left online magazine Quillette, was beaten by a mob and sent to the emergency room with a brain bleed while filming demonstrators from the group. He is the victim of a criminal, terrorist act. The only normal, appropriate response is to wish him a speedy recovery—and to demand the swift arrest and prosecution of his attackers.

Here is the danger that journalists like CNN’s Jim Acosta constantly warn about from the comfort of their sinecures. But instead of blaming Antifa, the media responded to an actual assault on a journalist with equivocation and muted indifference. Reporters latched onto a “concrete milkshake”rumor to downplay the fact that Ngo was assaulted. Outside of a few token denunciations, the media ignored the attack, joining the ghoulish scolds who blamed Ngo, the victim, for “provoking” Antifa.

Why this response? Journalists know that Ngo is not one of them, which is to say they are safe. They are “real journalists,” liberal activists who evangelize their “truth” behind a mask of neutrality.

Many on the Right have noticed, with alarm, that the media turns a blind eye to leftist violence, and this is no mistake. Antifa are the untamed, unhygienic foot soldiers of the bourgeoisie. It’s an unfortunate position for so-called Marxists to be in, but it’s true: Antifa does the dirty work that’s too low for even the professional smear artists behind Covington Catholic, Russiagate, and the slander against Brett Kavanaugh.

Instead of calling Antifa “fascists,” which they are not, it would probably upset them more to call them what they really are: communists and anarchists pretending to be dissidents, while enjoying the protection of those in power. They’re rebels without a cause, with all of the adolescent angst that title implies.

Antifa members are plainly terrorists, and their violence is no joke, yet their activism is superfluous, narcissistic roleplay. Antifa justifies violence by appealing to an urgent threat of “bigots” having a platform, as if Big Tech corporations were not already taking care of that for them. Their “revolt” is happening from the top-down, not the bottom up.

The most prestigious papers and universities, the most powerful corporations, share in common with these malcontents a liberal monoculture that has hollowed out and colonized American culture. Their most relevant political ideas—open borders, kooky gender theory—have already been co-opted by the mainstream. Marxism, on the other hand, is an academic philosophy with virtually no relevance to the political world anymore.

Historically, Marxists railed against the bourgeois. Today’s “revolutionaries” are the bourgeois. What could be more horrifying, more injurious to a Marxist’s self-esteem—to be on the same side as Nike?

Leftist revolt is, these days, a contradiction in terms. But a veneer of dissidence is politically necessary for their project. A dominant Left takes up the mantle of the underdog to justify chasing conservatives out of the public square.

Antifa shares with their journalist sympathizers a romantic, misplaced sense that they are persecuted rebels. It must pain Antifa and their cheerleaders in Brooklyn to know that their ideas have been absorbed into mass culture. Having the same viewpoints as Fortune 500 companies and Stephen Colbert isn’t so punk, is it? It’s obviously not edgy or cool, but a desire to role-play as turn-of-the-century labor agitators persists.

The Left therefore has a dilemma: how to be transgressive, when the opportunities for transgression have been taken away? Answer: invent an imaginary, omnipresent threat of Nazis in need of being punched.

This is where the revolutionary make-pretend of Antifa and persecutory delusions of elite journalists solemnly intoning “Democracy dies in darkness” converge: leftism is culturally dominant, but the Left can’t give up the label of the dissident to the very people they are forcing their ideology upon. So the Left convinces itself, and tries to convince everyone else, that there is an ascendant “fascist” threat. Violent public tantrums are rationalized as the necessary pushback.

But these fancies of persecution are all backwards. Even the fringiest leftism is boring, milquetoast, and safe. Despite Trump’s attacks on the “free press,” journalists—at least liberal journalists, anyway—incur no risk when they tattle on Catholic high school boys from the heights of power for “smirking” at a Native American, or print libels about the president of the United States with impunity, or publish op-eds about how toxic the West is.

For journalists in the era of Trump, Trump’s attacks on their largely unchecked power to influence public opinion is imagined as an assault on democracy. But journalists have worked to stifle democracy, not merely by discrediting an election but by forcing their unpopular ideas on a population that has rejected their elite ideology.

Journalists have a grandiose tendency to style themselves martyrs for democracy, but really they are paladins of the powerful, agents of the illiberal liberalism that Americans voted to reject in 2016. Trump’s election was a true bottom-up rebellion at the ballot box against this oppressive monoculture. Their vote was for common sense over political correctness, national identity over open borders.

Despite Trump’s rise to power, the Left remains firmly in control of the culture. So they invent an imaginary rampant bigotry and romanticize the danger faced by the brave journalists and activists “fighting for democracy” to justify the indefinite advance—by violence, if necessary—of progressivism. What “fighting for democracy” actually means, it turns out, is fighting for leftism at any cost, whether by encouraging violence against dissenters or preaching about the pressing need for Portland, Maine, to accept Third World refugees.

On some level, it must bother the next generation of progressive activists-in-training at elite universities to recognize that they enjoy vastly more privilege than the downwardly mobile whites they castigate as the spawn of Satan. That projection soothes the conscience, keeps the obvious contradiction out of mind: America’s most privileged people are constantly reminding everyone else, especially those on the decline, of privilege they don’t have.

While Antifa’s “revolution” is a complete joke, the movement’s methods are not, and the mainstream Left is still wise enough to maintain a careful distance with token criticism of its violence. But Antifa offers something too useful to be rejected for the bougie progressives who occupy the halls of power. They are a threat, a warning, for those Americans who refuse to bow down before Progress and History.

The media will go to any length to defend the fringe left against even the most moderate conservative. Andy Ngo is hardly right-wing: Quillette prides itself on being a bastion of classical liberal centrism. But liberal centrism, failing to be progressive, is an aberration that the Left hates like a true believer hates a heretic.

More and more conservatives are alarmed by a growing tendency on the left to tolerate worse and worse violence against them. “Milkshaking” is fast giving way to blaming the victims of mob beatings—because they’re on the wrong side. In tolerating Ngo’s attack, the liberal establishment has sent an ominous message: the future of the United States has no room for conservatives or their “bigoted” notions, and conservatives who do not surrender now should expect the worst.

One can only speculate about what motivates individual members of Antifa to wake up every morning, but quite a few of them seem to be mentally ill, maladjusted dropouts. To hazard a guess, activism for Antifa members is a kind of public therapy, an excuse to be terrible people and unleash violent resentments on a scapegoat for their personal problems.

They have a desire to terrorize and inflict harm, but there is nothing for them to fight for that has not already received the sanction of those in power. This is, admittedly, a frustrating situation for people who are desperate to be a part of history, but whose role has already been usurped by Silicon Valley, the FBI, Yale, and CNN.

Such people make for perfect attack drones, and the bourgeois is only too glad for their help.

America Takes an Antifa Beating

By Michelle Malkin
https://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2019/07/03/america-takes-an-antifa-beating-n2549435
July 3, 2019


Andy Ngo (C.K. Bouferrache/The Federalist)

I will not be in much of a celebratory mood this coming Independence Day.

Our borders have collapsed. Our educational system is a wreck. And our constitutionally protected freedoms of assembly, speech and the press are under siege in the streets and across the internet. The ability of patriots to warn, expose and combat the threats to our national sovereignty is eroding daily.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, my fellow Americans, but this is no time for a parade.

In Portland, my young journalist friend Andy Ngo was hospitalized over the weekend after a brutal assault at the hands of Antifa thugs who rule the streets and run the city. Ngo has been smeared as a "provocateur" and a "propagandist" for exposing the bloody violence and anarchy of far-left "resisters." He has been doxxed and physically threatened by anti-Trump, open borders radicals menacing him online. On Saturday afternoon, armed only with his smartphone, hand-held GoPro, bodycam and reporter's backpack, Ngo braved a mob of black-masked agitators purportedly marching against "hate."

As they passed the county courthouse and sheriff's office, the anarchists taunted Ngo by name and hurled cups with unknown substances at him. One violent attacker dressed like a ninja, donning black gloves with reinforced knuckles, punched Ngo in the eyes. Another black-cloaked punk kicked Ngo in the groin multiple times as others pelted him with liquids, sprays and eggs. During the melee, as police stood by, his electronic equipment was stolen. He sustained brain bleeding and wounds to his head, face and neck.

Ngo was not alone. Two Oregonians who had come to support conservative speakers at a downtown rally nearby were set upon by black-masked vigilantes. Adam Kelly was hit in the head with fists, nunchucks, a metal Hydro Flask and a crowbar. Two massive gashes on his skull required more than 25 staples. John Blum was also overrun by people in black masks, who aimed bear spray or mace at him when he, Kelly and two others tried to come to the aid of others being assaulted by Antifa. The elderly Blum had carried a baton to defend himself, but was blinded and incapacitated while being hit, punched and dragged across the street with blood pouring down his face.

Antifa's apologists in the liberal press scoffed at the savagery, mocking Ngo as a "f---ing snowflake" and downplaying the gang ambushes harmless "milkshaking." In total, medics treated eight people, including three police officers. "Three community members received treatment at area hospitals after they were assaulted with weapons. Two officers were pepper sprayed during the incident and were treated. Another officer was punched in the arm by a demonstrator and sustained (a) non-life-threatening injury. Another officer sustained a non-life-threatening head injury from a projectile," the city blandly reported.


Antifa members attack Andy Ngo in Portland

Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, a notorious social justice grandstander, spent Monday railing not against the barbarians who've hijacked the public square in his town, but against Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, who called out Wheeler's history of stand-down orders. Portland Police Association president Daryl Turner amplified the critique, pleading with the City to "remove the handcuffs from our officers and let them stop the violence through strong and swift enforcement action." Those handcuffs have endangered Portland's citizens in multiple ways. Wheeler has declared Portland a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, and himself a guardian against all foreign criminals evading deportation. In February, the city withdrew the police force from the Joint Terrorism Task Force's partnership between the feds and local law enforcement -- turning the Pacific Northwest metropolis into a safe space for jihad.

Will there be a federal investigation? Concerned citizens who can't afford to wait have taken matters into their own hands. After just three days, more than 5,700 individuals have contributed a whopping $178,000 to a GoFundMe campaign I spearheaded to help with Andy Ngo's security, medical and work costs. A separate fundraiser for Adam Kelly raised more than $11,000. On another front, internet sleuths are analyzing video to try and identify Antifa assailants -- crowdsourcing the job Portland officials have failed to do.

But the social media battlegrounds, like the streets, are rigged against the law-abiding.

One Twitter user, LucetVeritas, who posted video of Portland violence this weekend, disappeared from the site on Monday. I was able to track her down. She told me that her tweet "had millions of impressions and almost 12,000 retweets. Within 24 hours, Twitter suspended my account offering no explanation. As an avid researcher, I have witnessed bias by employees of Twitter who were tied to Antifa accounts. Jack Dorsey himself has admitted his own conservative employees do not feel safe to express their opinions. Our First Amendment right of freedom of speech is in danger more now than ever before."

Just minutes after finishing up my conversation with her, I learned that another researcher and investigator I've admired for years, Ann Corcoran, had her invaluable 12-year-old website, Refugee Resettlement Watch, terminated by WordPress this week. Poof. Gone.

With patriots being silenced all around me, it's getting harder to feel patriotic. Who needs fireworks when our rights are going up in flames?

Michelle Malkin's email address is writemalkin@gmail.com.