Anti-government Lunatics Used to Be on the Fringe. Trump Has Allowed Them to Operate in the Open.

Sometimes, there is nothing like having cops who listen to bystanders and quickly act on their observations. In other words, cops who act like servants of a grateful public. From The New York Times:

The man, Kevin Krebs, 31, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, first caused alarm among people in the crowd at the protest in West Chester, Pennsylvania, when he tried to hide a Sig Sauer P320 handgun under his raincoat and another layer of clothing, the authorities said. The protesters pointed him out to law enforcement officers, who said that they found nine fully loaded magazines, a bayonet, pepper spray and a ski mask on him and an AR-15-style rifle on the back seat of his Ford Explorer. Mr. Krebs did not have a license for the handgun he had on him, the police said.

So, having busted the guy, they searched his home. And boy howdy did this guy ever have plans for the future.

During a search of Mr. Krebs’s home on Monday, the police discovered thirteen improvised explosive devices, in addition to military-style body armor vests and several drawings of grenades, the authorities said on Tuesday. According to a probable cause affidavit, the cache included pipe bombs and explosives that were made from a glass Coke bottle and a can the size of an energy drink. Some were filled with nails, screws and pellets. All of them were disposed of by the bomb squad from neighboring Montgomery County, said prosecutors, who noted that night vision goggles and a gas mask had also been recovered from Mr. Krebs’s vehicle on Monday night.

In the very first year of this blog, which coincided with Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, I wrote a lot about the vague feeling of wildness out in the land that attended all the events of the campaign, especially all the Obama events. Like many people, I felt that a lot of it had to do with our having elected a Black man as president.

But because I had been reading and studying a lot about the militia movement, especially in the West and South, even before Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building—thanks there to the indefatigable David Neiwert, who has been on that beat for longer than most people—I knew that the wildness predated Obama’s rise to the presidency, that it was fed by lunatic conspiratorial beliefs and a fringe form of American Protestantism that had taken to guns and the woods at the same time.

In retrospect, what I sensed in 2012 was that this vague wildness was beginning to gain focus. It needed a target and, in the long view, Obama really was only a temp worker. The wildness was beginning to organize itself, and its target was the entire democratic-republican governmental system.

Now we have hundreds of these individual warriors floating around. The president pardoned a couple regiments of these people who attacked the U.S. Capitol. They have friends at court now. They have too many allies in the state and federal legislatures despite all the public mewling about “political violence” that is all the rage today. The wildness has taken on human form. It now has a coherent shape. We can see it plain. We can see it through the Kevlar.