![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/CrimeScene.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The scene outside a 2017 subway derailment in New York.<\/p>\n
(Spencer Platt \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
On a recent freezing night in Manhattan, visiting a historic Upper East Side townhouse, I plopped into a folding chair near a massive American flag and drank Cherry Coke from a red plastic cup as a retired FBI agent explained why he preferred to sit in a restaurant near the kitchen facing the front door. According to a mailer advertising his appearance, the former agent, Rob Chadwick, was here to educate an audience at the Metropolitan Republican Club, one of the city\u2019s oldest conservative associations, about \u201cthe spread of ANTIFA-style political violence from Portland to NYC.\u201d<\/p>\n
The recent violence in Minnesota, where ICE officers killed two protesters in widely filmed tragedies whose conditions the federal government repeatedly lied about, was in the air\u2014but mostly in the abstract. A Metropolitan Republican Club official who introduced Chadwick complained of \u201ccoordinated attacks\u201d against federal law enforcement in Minnesota. The ad for Chadwick\u2019s talk promised he would address \u201cthe escalating wave of targeted political intimidation and terror.\u201d<\/p>\n
It turns out, according to the narrative favored by elderly Manhattan Republicans and retired FBI agents turned personal security gurus, that any wave of political terror that might be roiling America is mostly targeted at Republicans and people who use deadly force to defend themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cAsk the ICE agents we\u2019ve seen on TV. Their life is over,\u201d said Chadwick, without mentioning that some of these agents had in fact killed people\u2014eight in the last month alone<\/a>, who died either by shooting or while in immigration custody. \u201cThese are human beings who want to go home to their families.\u201d<\/p>\n Chadwick held a variety of roles with the Bureau before retiring and transitioning to a career lecturing the lay public about personal security while acting as an adviser to the US Concealed Carry Association. (The relative strictness of New York\u2019s gun laws was a recurrent complaint from Chadwick and audience members.) Now he was standing at a lectern in a building where conservative New York politicos had convened for decades, teaching the audience the same skills he had taught members of FBI SWAT teams. \u201cI want you to think about tonight as your training,\u201d said Chadwick. It was mostly about mindset, he explained\u2014a means of developing a bias for action when the next mass shooter could be just around the corner.<\/p>\n An audience member asked about Daniel Penny, the subway vigilante who strangled Jordan Neely to death before being found innocent of all charges and moving on to a career in venture capital. \u201cNineteen months they tortured that hero,\u201d an elderly man said to rumbles of agreement from the room.<\/p>\n Current Issue<\/p>\n Another man, leaning on a cane, described an assault he had suffered 23 years earlier, in which he had fought back. \u201cHe didn\u2019t make it,\u201d he said. But if the attacker had survived, the questioner wondered, \u201ccould he sue me?\u201d<\/p>\n There was a shared sense that the world had gotten irremediably more dangerous in recent years, especially in New York and other big cities. \u201cWe\u2019ll make it through this,\u201d said the club\u2019s president before Chadwick\u2019s talk. \u201cWe\u2019ll make it through Mamdani.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, you guys live in a very dangerous city,\u201d said Chadwick, referring what is, by some statistical measures, the safest big city in the United States, where violent crime in particular has been on the decline for years<\/a>. (Nationwide, meanwhile, murder rates are at their lowest point in more than a century<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Someone asked how to be safe on New York City\u2019s crowded streets. \u201cCrowds are very dangerous,\u201d said Chadwick, before encouraging people to have an established \u201crally point\u201d with friends if they go to a protest or ballgame and find they have to flee.<\/p>\n An elderly woman asked about how to stay safe on mass transit. \u201cMass transit is extremely dangerous,\u201d said Chadwick, the author of a book called The Practical Guide to Personal Security, which one could order by scanning a QR code on a tablet on a merch table. He said that whenever he went on the subway, he walked around the subway car and scoped out the passengers. If he didn\u2019t like what he saw, he got off the train to catch another one that didn\u2019t trigger his Spidey sense. He explained further that he applied a similar heuristic practically every time he was in public\u2014for example, describing the safest time and place to get gas (daytime, massive gas stations doing steady business, when your tank is half full).<\/p>\n It was essential, Chadwick repeatedly emphasized, to trust one\u2019s intuition. Be sure to put \u201ctime and distance\u201d between yourself and a potential attacker, he said. It didn\u2019t matter if you were being overly cautious or seemed irrational. Anything could happen. \u201cAt the end of the day the priority has to be you going home to your loved ones,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Sporting a striped blue jacket, jeans, white Oxford shirt, and sneakers, Chadwick showed himself to be a polished speaker, comfortable at the podium, mixing horrific accounts of mass shootings (some of which he investigated as an FBI agent) with the occasional joke. He described an America in which the \u201csecurity situation\u201d has worsened, particularly since 2019. \u201cThe defund-the-police movement was devastating,\u201d he said\u2014in spite of the fact that police budgets in most major cities have continued to spike since then<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Chadwick insisted that, thanks to the burgeoning threats in their path, civilians need to prepare themselves for the worst. Although he praised local police forces, Chadwick lamented that 911 response times had increased. Many people, he said, might call for help and find themselves on their own. He played a recording of a disturbing 911 call in which a dispatcher told a woman, whose abusive ex-boyfriend was at her door, that she could not send an officer to help. The crowd at the Metropolitan Republican Club groaned. \u201cThis is not an isolated incident,\u201d said Chadwick. \u201cThis is happening everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n Ad Policy<\/a><\/p>\n Chadwick talked about responding as an FBI agent to the mass shooting at Charleston, South Carolina\u2019s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2017. He was struck that \u201cnobody in that room moved,\u201d even as the shooter repeatedly reloaded. The moral of that episode, he said, was that people needed to think about the possibility of being caught in a mass shooting and prepare their minds to react\u2014ideally, to flee. \u201cIt will happen to you,\u201d Chadwick said. \u201cYou must stop outsourcing your personal security. You must. It\u2019s a foolish thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n During the Q&A portion, an elderly man asked whether he could buy a Byrna gun, a \u201cless lethal\u201d firearm, in another state and then bring it into New York City, where they\u2019re illegal. He then began a second question, asking about ICE shooting Alex Pretti. He wasn\u2019t aggressive, the questioner said, referring to Pretti. It was the sole note of dissent in an evening of practiced paranoia, and the question, which provoked some unhappy murmuring in the crowd, was quickly picked up by Chadwick, who declined to answer the nonagenarian\u2019s other query about the potentially illegal trafficking of less-lethal guns.<\/p>\n \n Popular Chadwick didn\u2019t pass judgment on the shooting of Pretti, instead falling back on the 1989 Graham v Connor Supreme Court decision, which helps determine legal standards in police shootings. \u201cWhat did that officer perceive reasonably?\u201d asked Chadwick. \u201cIt looks rough but we have to step back\u201d and wait for an investigation to play out. (Recently an FBI agent resigned<\/a> after trying to investigate the ICE killing of Renee Good and hitting major roadblocks within the agency.)<\/p>\n The point was to respect authority, which was apparently infallible until someone violated its precepts.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone we\u2019ve seen killed on camera over the last couple weeks would be alive if they\u2019d just complied,\u201d Chadwick said at one point. \u201cAny law enforcement interaction is dangerous. Go into it thinking that. Your job is to survive it.\u201d<\/p>\n The event ended with hearty applause and Chadwick mingling among admirers. I left the 83rd Street building, which was being guarded by two NYPD officers for the occasion, and got on the subway for an hour-long ride back to Brooklyn. I didn\u2019t scope out the car for threats. A couple, wearing matching Air Jordans, motioned for me to take out my ear buds. They were falling over each other a bit, maybe a little drunk. They said something about my shoes\u2014dirty Converse high-tops. It was loud and hard to hear, but they were smiling. I said I liked their shoes. He said I should get some. It was a cheerful, low-stakes exchange, the prosaic kind that helps stitch together the threadbare communal fabric. I felt good about it. If I had listened to Chadwick\u2019s advice, I probably would have run away.<\/p>\n Jacob Silverman<\/a><\/p>\n Jacob Silverman is the author most recently of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He is also the host of Understood: The Making of Musk, a limited podcast series from CBC.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tMore from The Nation<\/p>\n The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.<\/p>\n \n Chris Lehmann<\/a> <\/p>\n Thinking of political violence solely as a safety issue is not enough to address the harm that follows. \u201cThe patient is the community.\u201d<\/p>\n \n StudentNation<\/a><\/p>\n \/<\/p>\n Fareed Salmon<\/a> <\/p>\n Sook-Yin Lee\u2019s new romantic comedy, Paying for It, explores Platonic love and prostitution.<\/p>\n \n Jeet Heer<\/a> <\/p>\n
\n ![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/cover2602.jpg\")
\n <\/a><\/p>\n
\n \u201cswipe left below to view more authors\u201dSwipe \u2192\n <\/p>\n
\n ![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/david-brooks-atlantic-getty.jpg\")
\n <\/a><\/p>\n
\n ![\"Should](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Political-Violence-Public-Health.jpg\")
\n <\/a><\/p>\n
\n ![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screenshot-2026-01-28-at-11.13.02\u202fAM.jpg\")
\n <\/a><\/p>\n
![\"Protesters](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-2257868805.jpg\")