Who knows why he did it or what the hell he thought he was going to accomplish. All I can remark upon here is in what the context was in which Noah Green attacked the US Capitol and fatally wounded a police officer before being killed himself on Friday. And it isn’t much.

A young Black man, obviously mentally disturbed, with only the most tenuous but probably non-existent political motivations aside from some Facebook posts supporting Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. He’s got a car and a knife, not an AR-15. Weapons of opportunity, not weapons of war. As such it does not comport with the left-right divide as it is now.

MAGA Nation milks the Farrakhan angle a little bit, but quickly moves on – probably because whoever controls all the propaganda smartly realized that overdoing the outrage over the death of US Capitol Police Officer Billy Evans would only invite a backlash over their downplaying the death of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick at the hands of their voters.

Lib Land sees it as it is. Green was not a MAGA terrorist, as many had initially assumed, but a crazed lone wolf. The lack of a firearm takes away any renewed impetus for gun control, fading as it is now as the massacres in Georgia and Colorado recede from the news cycle, replaced by Matt Gaetz and the MLB All-Star Game. Noble intent dependent on attention driven by body counts.

We can only hope Billy Evans is given the same funerary honors as Brian Sicknick was, that members of Congress honor their protector felled by a madman as the same as they did the one felled by a fascist insurrectionist. That said, a failure to do so would be deeply lamentable, but not unforgivable. We’re not going to change this machine. We know the poison it runs on, the hate that fuels it (and it is hate, don’t kid yourselves – even when ours is righteous). Whatever happens, we’re going to move on. We don’t have to like it, but we can make peace with it.

Noah Green was not a Trump fan. He was not armed. We have no use for him. He’s gone from the news cycle already. We should not hide from that truth, however uncomfortable it is. Being honest with ourselves over this is, if nothing else, an important tool in this fucked up information ecosystem we live in these days.