On the evening of February 23, 1930, a law student and Sturmabteilung leader named Horst Wessel answered the knock to his door. He was expecting some SA comrades. Instead, he found himself facing a Communist ex-con and genuine streetfighter named Albrecht Höhler. Höhler, who was much more into breaking heads than wearing immaculate uniforms, promptly shot Wessel in the face.

Had Wessel been allowed to live, he probably would’ve been anonymously swallowed up on the Russian front. But the nascent Nazi party needed martyrs and Wessel was tailor-made for the role. An entire cult was created about his life and death. A propaganda movie was made honoring him. The Kriegsmarine named a training ship for him. One of the Berlin boroughs was renamed in his honor.

A song was composed commemorating his pissant life and meaningless death.

Movements need martyrs. The Communists knew it. Orwell, in 1984, has his hero, Winston, create the heroic Comrade Ogilvy from whole cloth. The Antifa know it.

Over the weekend, there was a street action in Austin, TX. One of the participants, a paunchy LARPer named Garrett Foster, was killed when the Antifa tried to block a car caught on a highway during a non-permitted street demonstration.

Foster, from available images, seems to have been an Air Force veteran, which made him a Special Operations Forces caliber “street fighting man” among the, as one Black federal agent in Portland called the Antifa thuglets, “scrawny, pasty white booger-eating communist sh**head[s].” When he went to demonstrations he carried an AK knockoff — I have to admit I can’t tell if this one is the Warsaw Pact 7.62×39 or 5.45×39 but people are actually arguing about that — and he referred to any counter-demonstrators as p***ies. Here he is not long before he was killed.

Garrett Foster, the Black Lives Matter supporter who was shot and killed tonight in Austin, TX, was interviewed with his AK47.

pic.twitter.com/fb0kNL0sij

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 26, 2020

Here is the sequence of events that resulted in Foster’s death.

BREAKING: There was a shooting in downtown Austin at the protest tonight. Someone opened fire on all of the #BlackLivesMatter protesters.

I’m so numb right now, at least 10 of my friends are protesting and NONE of them have responded to my texts yet. pic.twitter.com/pXfwFA971A

— Sāvion For Texas (@Savion) July 26, 2020

I’m not going to try to interpret events here. Foster may or may not have fired — the sound on the video sounds to me like he did but I don’t know — but what he did do was stick the muzzle of the AK into the face of the driver. In this frame, you can see Foster aiming his AK into the car.

yeah but #GarretFoster shot first dude. call a spade a spade. pic.twitter.com/27lp1D2B75

— WStracho (@DgBlacklisted) July 26, 2020

The driver lit him up, killing him. An Antifa member who was packing fired a couple of shots at the car as it drove away and somehow managed to not kill anyone. The driver called 911 and told the cops that he thought he’d just killed someone. To be clear, you don’t have to cheer for Foster’s death to acknowledge that this is on him entirely. He decided to go to a demonstration with an AK, a decision that he had a right to make even if the judgment is totally f***ed. He went there with the weapon for the purpose of intimidating any counter-protesters. He stuck the muzzle in someone’s face and he got killed for his brazen stupidity.

Our previous coverage of the incident:

Austin Police Chief Gives Update on Shooting of BLM Marcher, Garrett Foster

BLM Member Shot to Death, Apparently When ‘Protesters’ Surround Car

Foster was still on the sidewalk when this collage began circulating trying to make Foster into some sort of exemplar that would appeal to Middle America. White…check. Veteran…check. Believed in the Second Amendment (at least while he was not a part of the power structure)…check. Sympathetic girlfriend…check. Nobility of spirit inferred from all of the above…check.

Garrett Foster was murdered last night peacefully protesting at a BLACK LIVES MATTER protest in Austin, Texas with his fiance, whitney, who is a quadruple amputee because of serious medical negligence.

She was thrown off her wheelchair and he was shot 3 times.

SAY HIS NAME 😭 pic.twitter.com/q13r3JR35u

— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) July 26, 2020

The Austin police have not charged anyone in his death, and don’t seem likely to do so, and this has slowed down the beatification process substantially. Well, slowed it down at least as far as it goes towards convincing non-communists that he didn’t punch his own ticket by trying to act like a tough guy in the real world when he was obviously not suited to play that role. But the left has finally got their martyr. They’ve been pushing the envelope attempting to do this for weeks and have finally, but imperfectly, succeeded.

Had the incident not been caught on video from multiple angles, Foster would have been portrayed as a completely innocent young man out for an evening’s stroll with his wife and AK when a violent motorist shot him down like a dog. That story will still take hold on the left because the cause needs a martyr and as weak an example as Foster is, he’s really all they got.