The Wall Street Journal Is Mad That Gritty Is Antifa Now

The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of capitalist America, set its sights on the latest symbol in the culture wars on Sunday: Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ new mascot.

Gritty is the wild-haired orange demon thing that Philadelphia, because it is a city that abides by the rules of neither man nor god, recently adopted to represent their ice hockey team. Our friends over at Deadspin did a post of Gritty getting into all sorts of antics if you want to look at him some more. When I first saw Gritty, I didn’t want to look at him at all, but now I have come around and decided that Gritty is extremely good.

Members of the American political left, it seems, have also determined that Gritty is good and that, as a good thing, he’s on the left. Here he is on a sign during a protest outside the Philly Convention Center while Trump was giving a speech inside.

Here is Gritty carrying an Antifa flag on a banner.

Unfortunately, all of this deeply offended Wall Street Journal editorial writer and National Review alum Jillian Kay Melchior.

Melchior’s piece is great, honestly. You can skip the first 400 words or so because they are just about Gritty being great and Philly being lawless, which I have already told you. Gritty is good. The latter part is when things really heat up. Man.

From her piece:

But this is 2018, and Gritty has inevitably become politicized. Two days after the mascot’s debut, the socialist magazine Jacobin tweeted that “Gritty is a worker.” The same leftists who want statues of Thomas Jefferson removed are now petitioning for Gritty to replace Mayor Frank Rizzo on a downtown mural.

That would be so good. I honestly cannot overstate how good it would be if Philly tore down a statue of their openly racist former police chief and mayor and installed one of Gritty, who is apparently antifa. Here’s more:

And when President Trump visited Philadelphia last Tuesday, antifa and other far-left groups showed up to protest. Many carried Gritty posters and chanted “Gritty hates Trump.” Radical Philly writer George Ciccariello-Maher tweeted a picture of Gritty along with the slogan “when our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.” He explained the tweet to me: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek quote from Marx, one of the many semihumorous appropriations of Gritty.”

Appropriation, indeed. Gritty belongs to Philadelphia, not to far-left activists. Still, in an era when everything from Nike and the NFL to your local restaurant is a political battlefield, this development is as predictable as it is sad. Not only can’t we have nice things, we can’t even have silly, creepy things.