Blood on My Doorstep (An Old Man's Stories, I)

I mean to write up a series called “An Old Man’s Stories”, even though perhaps I’m not qualified to do so at age 63. I figure I can start writing now, though, and read them later to remind me of the details so I can tell the stories over and over again when I’m *really* old.

The Fake Blood story comes to mind because of the obnoxious protests at the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices after the Dobbs Draft of the abortion opinion was leaked in May 2022. Is it ethical to protest at people’s homes? Is it ethical to try to scare their families so as to make your opponents bend to your will? Does it even work? It does, I’m sure, but how often, and how can you tell who will be intimidated instead of invigorated?

Those are hard questions, so I’ll retreat to just telling my story. It was December, 2019. I was a professor at Indiana University, and I had been cancelled in November over a Twitter post. I’d retweeted an article titled, “Are Women Ruining Academia—Probably?”, and quoted one sentence to the effect that geniuses tend to be males with high IQ and low Agreeability. A 500,000-person Twitter site specializing in bad-boyfriend stories took it up, and people complained to the Indiana Administration, and it got in the Washington Post (with error— they said I’d written the article!), The New York Times, Manchester Guardian, et cetera. That’s a long story in itself, but, in brief, the woman who was provost, Lauren Robel, and the woman who was business school dean, Idalene Kesner, both of whom knew me pretty well, were highly offended. They made public statements calling me reprehensible, ignorant, 18th century, vile, racist, and unchristian (not something Lauren really knows much about). They called for informers to come forward to reveal the disgusting campus rule infractions I was no doubt constantly committing, even though nobody had come to complain in the previous twenty years. (See how scary I am?) A campus policeman was installed in my office hallway for a couple of weeks to prevent violence. But things gradually died down, as they had when I’d been cancelled back around 2005.

Then one Saturday night when I was asleep , my wife shook my shoulder and said, “I think I hear something”. It was 1 a.m., and I was groggy, but I got up and turned on the light. She told me she thought it was something outside our windows in the front yard. She thought she’d heard a car. I pushed aside the curtains and looked out. I didn’t hear anything, but there seemed to be some shadows on the front walk, just outside the front door and the dining room window.

I went downstairs to see what the shadows were. It turned out they were some kind of red paint on the cement walkway. I looked a bit more, and found a heavy balloon on the grass, and the remains of a burst balloon. I thought it might be some ANTIFA person, but there was no cross painted on the door or anything, just streaks on the cement. I thought nobody would be dumb enough to send a threatening message that was so obscure the target couldn’t tell he was being intimidated, so, since it was Saturday night, it must be that some teenager intended to play a prank on some friend but had got the address wrong and ran away in embarassment.

My wife thought we should call the police. Though I argued briefly against it, because I wanted to go back to sleep, we did. A mistake. The city police came. Then the campus police, whom we hadn’t called, sending a lieutenant or some similar grandee. They asked, apologetically, if they could go check on the kids, saying that was a policy rule they had whenever they had a midnight call like this. They checked, and the kids were fine. So, in the end, we had to stay up for an hour and they couldn’t do anything except say how sorry they were.

The next day we learned that there had been several other home attacks that night. One was a country lady who sold vegetables at the Farmer’s Market. She’d been outed by progressive detectives who found out that she was the pagan hippy who had an anonymous account on QAnon or somewhere. I think they sprinkled nails and such on her driveway, rather than fake blood. Another was a liberal freelance photojournalist who had been taking unwanted pictures of progressive rallies. I think they painted his doorstep, but I might be wrong. There may have been a couple more.

So we can deduce what had happened. The progressives had decided to go to Professor Rasmusen’s house and paint some slogan like “Speech Kills” in fake blood on his front door, and maybe lob a couple of blood balloons against the windows. Mrs. Rasmusen heard their car, and when the bedroom light was turned on, they panicked and ran. One blood balloon burst, no doubt wrecking an expensive set of designer jeans, some fancy boots, and a down jacket. Some more careful trotskyite dropped his balloon on the lawn his rush to get away before Rasmusen, very likely a gun nut as well as a racist and sexist, opened up with his assault rifle to get another trophy for his wall.

That was the last I heard of them. The aftermath was that I finally got round to buying a gun. I also got some security electronics, an air rifle, and a sign from Rural King saying, “If you can read this, you’re within range” that I stuck on the back porch. I won’t reveal anything about the security electronics, except to say that it’s non-nuclear. The gun is fun for target practice when I get a chance outside city limits, and my teenagers like it too. The air rifle is even more fun. I recommend air rifles because ammo is cheap, they’re quiet, you can legally shoot them within city limits, and they’re powerful enough to kill obnoxious animals and rabbits. I haven’t actually killed a real person. And I need to check what Indiana’s self-defense laws allow as far as shooting from bedroom windows.

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