The day before Thanksgiving, U.S. Army National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe were attacked in a cold-blooded terrorist assault by an Afghan refugee while on patrol in Washington, DC. Beckstrom later died of gunshot wounds to the chest and head, while Wolfe is fighting for his life, having been shot multiple times while coming to her aid.
Beckstrom was 20. She enlisted with the West Virginia National Guard just after graduating high school two years ago. She volunteered for the DC deployment to “ensure the safety and security of our nation’s capital,” the West Virginia National Guard said on Facebook. “She exemplified leadership, dedication, and professionalism.”
Wolfe, 24, is the son of a Berkeley County, West Virginia, deputy sheriff, and he joined the military before graduating high school. His family is asking for prayer.
The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was shot and wounded by a third National Guard member. He faces numerous charges, including first-degree murder and likely terrorism charges, after driving all the way across the country from his home in Bellingham, Washington, to carry out his murderous assault.
Why did this husband and father of five, a former U.S. ally, turn on American troops? His specific motive is unknown, though we do know a few things from which we can draw analytical conclusions.
Lakanwal was one of roughly 180,000 Afghans brought to the U.S. by Joe Biden’s administration after the disgraceful surrender and retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas eventually admitted that not all of them were fully vetted, though Lakanwal did aid U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was vetted at the time by the CIA, and faced retribution from the Taliban after Biden gave the country back to that terrorist outfit.
Lakanwal could have been radicalized after coming to the U.S. But he also yelled “Allahu akbar” during his assault.
President Donald Trump posted a picture on Truth Social along with this comment: “This is part of the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked. We will fix it, but will never forget what Crooked Joe Biden and his Thugs did to our Country!”
The president quickly promised to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” as well as to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Naturally, that and the planned review of all of Biden’s refugees “sparks worry and uncertainty” for the Associated Press and other left-wingers.
I wonder if the AP is worried about unvetted foreign nationals killing Americans.
Meanwhile, Democrats are also upset that someone shouldn’t have been in DC, but to them, the problematic presence is that of the National Guard. They’re far more angry that Donald Trump sent the National Guard to DC in August than they are about the former president flooding the country with dangerous people from other countries. To be sure, many Democrats were quick to condemn this murderous attack and offer appropriate condolences to the families of Beckstrom and Wolfe. But they have spent recent months castigating and suing the president for his supposedly tyrannical move to send National Guard troops to the capital and other cities, and they seem to believe that the deployment provoked this attack.
Never mind that Democrats run the cities where crime spiraled out of control in large measure because of their anti-police, soft-on-crime policies. They think fighting crime is racist, but they also pretend like they were already fixing the crime problem before Trump intervened.
Their warnings about the presence of troops are troubling. “It makes me incredibly nervous that we’re about to see people in law enforcement, people in uniform military get nervous, get stressed, shoot at American civilians,” said Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin a few days before the DC assault.
Oregon Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Dexter rejected National Guard deployments as “tyranny” and, though she did tell protesters to “stay peaceful,” she called it an “extraordinarily dangerous precedent by militarizing our city [Portland] and moving towards a dictatorship.”
Gavin Newsom, governor of the sanctuary state of California, called the Guard deployment “right out of the dictator’s handbook.”
What do radicals do with “information” about such threats?
So just to briefly recap this, Joe Biden, a Democrat, surrendered and retreated from Afghanistan, creating a global humanitarian crisis. Democrats run every American city where crime got so bad that Donald Trump decided to deploy the National Guard in an effort to restore safety and the Rule of Law. Democrats warned about those troops literally opening fire on American civilians.
But when a Biden-created refugee, likely an Islamic radical, assaults Guard troops, it’s Trump’s fault?
