Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani marked the 9/11 anniversary on Wednesday by tweeting out an ad with a depiction of Antifa protesters charging at police. The short video follows a white male police officer in riot gear through apparent flashbacks: Viewers see that he was once a military man, a high-school football player, and, at his origin, a little boy who watched on TV as the American flag was raised at ground zero. Back in the present, the officer snaps down his eye shield and deploys his truncheon, readying for a longhaired mob carrying vaguely anarchistic signage, all ending on a tag line that reads: “This we’ll defend.”
The video comes from an ad by Grunt Style, a clothing company founded by a former Army drill sergeant that appeals to members of the military and their supporters. The company claims in its YouTube intro that the February 2018 spot was originally intended to run during that year’s Super Bowl, but it ultimately decided against it, saying: “We weren’t denied or rejected by anyone, it was our own decision to not run it. In the end we just couldn’t take the big money risk.”
