by Scott McKay
There’s a term, and an acronym, that every American interested in following the rank stupidity of this summer’s occurrences in America’s blue cities ought to be familiar with.
The term is Live-Action Role Playing, and the acronym is LARPing. What you’re seeing on the streets of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, and other cities are textbook examples of this phenomenon playing out.
Long ago LARPing was something the Dungeons & Dragons crowd was commonly found doing. Now, it’s the usual province of the Antifa/Black Lives Matter Left as they pretend to be Che Guevara on our city streets.
You’re seeing losers whose lives are going nowhere fast, products of a failed, obsolete, and septic educational system and insufficient parental character development, sucked into a make-believe revolution put on by a failed, obsolete, and septic political party so devoid of 21st-century ideas that it has settled on all the failed ones from the 19th and 20th century as its future.
And those losers are in the streets playing Dime-Store Revolutionary without the faintest idea of what a revolution means.
Over the weekend in Austin, some of these losers got the first real education of their lives.
Specifically, one of them, a pasty-faced troglodyte named Garrett Foster, won’t be able to profit from the lesson. According to police reports, Foster was packing an AK-47 as he rolled his wheelchair-bound fiancée through the streets of Austin’s downtown on Saturday night at a “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protest. The procession blocked a street, and Foster and several others thought it would be a good idea to menace and beat on a car they were blocking in that street.
According to police reports, Foster brandished his weapon at the driver of the car.
He paid the ultimate price for that stupidity, as his assault with a deadly weapon resulted in battery with an even deadlier weapon. The driver, who honked his horn repeatedly as a warning to the protesters that it was time for them to scatter, responded to Foster’s attempt at bullying him by firing multiple shots with a handgun, killing Foster. The crowd scattered and the driver sped away, but not before another as-yet-unidentified protester fired three rounds at the car.
News media reports have since attempted to cast Foster as a lovable hero of the make-believe revolution. A GoFundMe account has been set up for the family, which raised him to be the kind of guy who brandishes Russian-designed weapons at civilian motorists on city streets; some $100,000 has been donated to that account. On Sunday there was an outpouring for the martyr of the make-believe revolution at which signs spouting inanities like “Glory To Garrett Foster” and, of course, “Black Lives Matter” on the spot where he got himself killed.
Was this a sad occurrence? Sure. It’s never a happy thing that a 28-year old is gunned down on a city street in America.
Yet what happened to Garrett Foster was bound to happen to someone, because too many Americans, particularly among the participants in the make-believe revolution, haven’t learned a real lesson yet.
Which is that people get killed in a revolution.
Point a gun at the driver of a car you’re blocking in on a city street, after footage of drivers being pulled out of cars and beaten in similar circumstances is everywhere on the internet, and you will be one of the lives claimed in that revolution.
Stupid lives don’t matter. Not when those lives are risked so irresponsibly.
It’s too soon to know whether or not the driver who defended himself by shooting Garrett Foster will face criminal charges. Hopefully he doesn’t. In doing what he did perhaps he imparted some wisdom to the “mostly peaceful” protesters in the streets — drivers of cars on the streets in which you’re protesting have rights just like you do, and they’re going to defend those rights if they have to.
Some of them will defend their rights with their lives. If they’re properly equipped, they’ll defend their rights with your life.
I’m trying to be upset about this. But not that hard. And this week, when the media attempts to make Garrett Foster into the white-boy version of Michael Brown or Alton Sterling or George Floyd, I’m going to yawn uncontrollably.
So will most of America.
And when the political party that is trying to re-gift all the failed ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries as though they were Christmas fruitcakes past their expiration date begins to babble about the need for gun control as the lesson of Garrett Foster’s death, I know I won’t be alone in offering a hearty retort:
Shaddap, jackasses.
The man who killed Garrett Foster used his weapon precisely as it was intended. Had he no gun in that situation, he could easily have become another Reginald Denny, the truck driver pulled out of his cab and beaten within an inch of his life during the L.A. riots, or Bogdan Vechirko, the Minnesota truck driver beaten by a mob of protesters blocking an interstate highway after he miraculously managed to stop his 18-wheeler without injuring any of them. Vechirko declined to press charges against any of his assailants after local authorities threatened to charge him with reckless endangerment or some other such idiocy. Or the unidentified driver shot by an Antifa thug in Provo, Utah, during a Black Lives Matter protest at the end of June; luckily the driver lived.
No one owes the Black Lives Matter movement his or her life. Especially not innocent civilians the LARPers in that movement are putting in jeopardy by their riotous behavior.
It’s time the LARPing stops. It’s time for the protesters to go back to their meaningless, underperforming, unfulfilling lives and challenge themselves to become productive.
If they want to think of what happened to Garrett Foster as the “Eureka” moment that triggers that change, fine. Put up a statue of him. Make him the patron saint of Justifiably Abandoned Causes.
But if Garrett Foster is the make-believe revolution’s new mascot, don’t ask the rest of us to join in the crowd of mourners. We’re doing all we can not to say something awful as it is.
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Scott McKay is publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics. He’s also a novelist — check out his first book “Animus: A Tale of Ardenia,” available in Kindle and paperback.
