RADICAL CHIC, THE BOY BAND ERA: Luigi Mangione and the left’s warped choice of heroes.
Meanwhile the resistance was gearing up to back Mahmoud Khalil in a street fight, but Abrego Garcia’s story took precedence. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen made a big show of flying down to Central America to accomplish nothing, something I used to do in the 1990s when I wanted to boogie board and take drugs. Meanwhile, the US government was releasing information that made sure to label Garcia as the ultimate “bad hombre.”
The framing is absolutely horrible for the Democrats. I have serious doubts as to whether the Trump Administration’s policies will make Americans wealthier and safer. But at least they’re paying lip service to the problems that ordinary people in ordinary situations face. Meanwhile, the Democrats look like they’re mostly concerned about defending alleged assassins and gang members. Not ideal.
These aren’t obscure strategies, either. James Carville, the quotable Crypt-Keeper of Democratic messaging strategy, has said that they need to double down on the Abrego Garcia case. To him, it’s a winner, even if it’s obviously a big loser. These fellows will bear the standard for a long while.
We’ve never seen anything like this, in our political lifetime or any political lifetime. Imagine if the Democrats had thrown their 1972 lot in with Charles Manson. What if Bill Clinton had insisted we “free The Unabomber”? The optics are that disastrous, that ridiculous.
Regarding Manson, according to Jann Wenner’s biographer Joe Hagen in his 2017 book, Sticky Fingers:
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’”
And of course, Weather Underground member-turned-Obama booster Bernadine Dohrn famously said of Manson and his followers:
Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!
As Ed Morrissey wrote on Monday after Taylor Lorenz and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan each gushed over Luigi Mangione:
Mangione is nothing new. The Left has always turned violent psychopaths into cultural icons as long as they ostensibly supported the Left’s causes. Che Guevara got transformed into a literal fashion icon for decades, despite his bloodthirsty march through 20th century history in support of some of the worst regimes and terrorist groups of his era. My friend Nick Gillespie reminded everyone more than a decade ago of Guevara’s nature:
Born in 1928 and gunned down in 1967 by drunken Bolivian soldiers, Che rarely missed an opportunity to make life miserable for those who opposed him. During the fight against the Batista regime, Che ordered the summary executions of dozens of real and suspected enemies, becoming the very thing he said revolutionaries must be: a “cold-blooded killing machine.” As a leader in post-Revolution Cuba, Che became known as the “butcher of La Cabaña” prison, where he oversaw hundreds of murders of political prisoners and “counter-revolutionaries.”
When he became the effective czar of the Cuban economy and attempted to create a “new man and woman,” or workers fueled by revolutionary ideals rather than conventional workplace incentives, his plans failed catastrophically and helped make Cuba the economic basket case it remains to this day. Along the way, Che did more than his share to help ban rock and jazz music as “imperialist” forms of expression. Such actions mark Che less as the youthful idealist portrayed in the acclaimed film version of his own Motorcycle Diaries and more as a repressive, murderous thug, a Caribbean version of the Taliban.
By the mid-1960s, Che left Cuba to export armed revolution to Africa and South America, all without success. If his violent death at 39 secured his romantic martyrdom to a cause that now thankfully flourishes only in Cuba and North Korea, it is his iconic, beret-bedecked image from a 1960 photo that persists everywhere in popular culture, from Mike Tyson’s torso (the boxer sports a tattoo of Mao along with Che) to beer and booze labels to belt buckles to the T-shirts worn around the world.
Flash-forward several decades and Rolling Stone’s infamous 2013 radical chic hot take on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking totally cool and dreamy on their cover has its roots both in the magazine’s founding days, and the left’s ongoing obsession with those who kill for their approved causes.