"Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." —Samuel Johnson

Michael Reinoehl must have been concentrating wonderfully on his own death when he agreed to be interviewed by Vice News while on the lam.  Just days — maybe hours; the timing is deliberately unclear in order to obscure the exact whereabouts of the interviewee — before, Reinoehl had shot and killed a man in Portland, Ore., in a rough set-to between Trump-supporters and Antifa activists.  The man on the other end of Reinoehl's gun: Aaron Danielson, a "friend and supporter" of Patriot Prayer, a conservative protest group. 

Less than twenty-four hours after Reinoehl's interview premiered, he was gunned down by the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force.  He reportedly loosed off "forty or fifty shots" from a rifle in the direction of approaching law enforcement before taking a fatal bullet.

Reinoehl's on-the-run death makes his last living interview all the more fascinating, even macabre.  His face is drawn; his eyes are steely blue, concave within sunken sockets.  Toss him into a time machine and set the year to 1934, and he could easily be mistaken for a Dust Bowl roughneck.  The raised-fist tattoo on his neck, poking out of his wicking polo shirt, is not the ink typical of a humble conscientious objector.  On appearance alone, one might gather that Mr. Reinoehl is a wee bit truculent, a plug-ugly brawler who has had more than a few brushes with violence.

His rap sheet belies a checkered history: bringing a gun to a previous riot; resisting arrest; reckless driving with his teenage son while zooted on grass and yocky-dock.  Give him a pink-vulva hat, and Mr. Reinoehl is a honey recruit for the resistance army.  To put an even finer point on it, he once described himself as "100% [Antifa] all the way!" 

Antifa's comms shop may want to consider a press release distancing itself from its enthusiastic, and now deceased, flunky.  Reinoehl's description of himself, his views, and his deadly hand reveal a deeply disturbed man.

The interview reveals more revelatory details.  "Every time I see a big truck, especially with a flag on it, I immediately think they're out to get me."  That's how Reinoehl described the Trump banner–toting cavalcade that rolled through Portland last weekend.  This paranoid prattle of being hunted by rednecks from a white man in the Northwest suggests that something not quite right sat within Reinoehl's cerebral cortex.  Any credentialed alienist will tell you loons always feel besieged by massing forces.  Reinoehl doesn't differ from the mean. 

He also doesn't suffer from remorse over his deathly deed.  His interlocutor asks: "You feel that [the killing] was totally justified?"  Reinoehl waits a beat before answering: "Totally justified.  Had I not acted, I am confident that my friend and I'm sure I would have been killed."

Reinoehl was so confident of his innocence that he didn't care to stand trial or swear out his story to a judge and jury.  Instead, he repaired to the woods to avoid the law.  When the law did come, he tried to keep it at bay with a spray of bullets.  Had the fourth-rate Butch Cassidy taken Joe Strummer's advice, he might still be alive today.

It should be asked how Vice's interview may have assisted federal marshals in locating Reinoehl.  Donovan Farley, one of the irreverent outlet's reporters behind the scoop, is an Antifa apologist.  But shining a light on Reinoehl and the arboreal locale near where he was presumably holed up may have tipped off law enforcement to his location.  Technology being what it is today, with satellite-tethered chips wired into everything from phones to watches to sneakers, it wouldn't be hard for the feds to home in on his location using the devices of his interviewers.  Reinoehl was the subject of a murder investigation, after all.

Early on in the interview, Reinhold describes the arrival of the Trump-fan caravan as feeling "like the beginning of a war."  Well, it takes two sides to fight a war, and bullets to make it a real one.  Reinhold took the conflict within his head and manifested it into the street.  He was a short-lived folk hero among his Antifa compatriots. 

How ironic would it be if a left-wing outlet like Vice assisted the police in nabbing an infamous Antifa member?  About as ironic as the same defund-the-police Democrats supporting the author of the 1994 crime bill for president.  Twenty twenty is full of such strange coincidences.  The strangest may be yet to come: when Democrats burn their urban core to the ground, along with their chances at the White House.

Image: VICE News via YouTube.