Happy birthday, First Sergeant Leonard Alfred Funk Jr.

By James J. Devine

On what would have been his 110th birthday, we are to remember First Sergeant Leonard Alfred Funk Jr.—paratrooper, Medal of Honor recipient, slayer of Nazis, and the original Antifa operative that every pearl-clutching conservative pretends never existed.

Make no mistake: the United States Army in 1944 was the most formidable anti-fascist organization on Earth.

Funk didn’t jump into Normandy to “preserve heritage” or “debate both sides.” He jumped to exterminate a genocidal, white-supremacist, authoritarian death cult—the very ideological ancestor of today’s MAGA movement, which now wraps itself in the flag while systematically dismantling the democratic values that flag once represented.

The Trump administration, through Attorney General Todd Blanche, secured an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that for 55 years has been fighting white supremacy and injustice.

As Rep. Jerry Nadler said, “The SPLC won a $14 million judgment against the founder of a neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer… (and) filed suit against the white supremacist extremist group Goyim Defense League, an openly antisemitic group that calls for the return of the Nazi party.”

Let us be brutally candid: Funk landed 40 miles inland on D-Day, not to “own the libs” or stage a photo-op at a border wall, but to kill actual fascists—the kind with swastikas, not suitcase emojis.

His unit, lost and outnumbered, fought for days, broke through German lines, and survived. He earned a Silver Star not for performative toughness or bullying civil servants or speaking for 25 hours, but for leadership under fire—a quality so utterly absent in today’s elected leadership that they wouldn’t recognize courage if it bit them on their donor-funded posteriors.

Then came Operation Market Garden. Funk and three men—three—assaulted a German battery of 20-mm flak guns shredding Allied gliders.

He didn’t negotiate. He didn’t form a bipartisan commission. He attacked, killed 20 Nazi soldiers, wounded scores more, and saved hundreds of lives.

The Distinguished Service Cross citation speaks of “overwhelming enemy superiority in both numbers and firepower.” Read that again. Overwhelming. And he charged anyway.

Today, our bipartisan ruling class—Republican and Democrat alike—cowers before a single angry tweet from a megadonor while this man waded into hell with a submachine gun and a will of tungsten. Where is the moral courage to hold rogue insurrectionists accountable? Where is the spine to disqualify traitors from public office?

It has been outsourced to campaign finance attorneys and super-PAC strategists.

But the crowning indictment—the one that should sear our collective conscience—is Holzheim, Belgium, January 29, 1945.

Funk, outnumbered 80-to-1, confronted a pack of escaped German prisoners who had just overwhelmed their American guards. A Nazi officer pressed a pistol into Funk’s belly and ordered surrender.

Funk’s response? He pretended to comply, then emptied an entire magazine into the officer and his cohorts, shouting for his men to grab enemy weapons. In minutes: 21 dead Nazis, dozens wounded, the rest recaptured. Not a single American casualty.

Let that sink in. One man, facing certain death, chose aggression over appeasement, action over equivocation, victory over vacillation.

He did not ask for polling data. He did not check which lobby had funded his last re-election. He did not “both-sides” the issue of whether Nazi prisoners should be recaptured. He acted—with the kind of moral clarity that today’s Congress couldn’t muster if a putschist marched through the Rotunda with a bullhorn and a Bible.

And that is the sickening irony of 2026.

We honor Funk’s physical bravery—the raw, bloody, breathtaking courage of a man who killed fascists with his bare hands—while our elected leaders of both parties lack even the moral courage to enforce the 14th Amendment against insurrectionist office-seekers.

They cater to billionaires, hedge-fund managers, and crypto-lobbyists while rogue politicians openly flout judicial rulings, subvert electoral outcomes, and normalize authoritarian dog whistles.

The GOP plays footsie with neo-fascist sentiment; the Democratic establishment responds with courteous letters and fundraising appeals. Neither dares to wield the constitutional artillery that Funk would have unhesitatingly fired.

Funk left the Army, worked for the Veterans Administration, raised two daughters, retired, and died quietly in 1992.

He did not grift on cable news. He did not sell gold-plated sneakers or conspiracy theories. He served, he bled, he conquered fascism, and he went home—without demanding a pardon, without staging a coup, without asking for a single loyalty oath. That quiet, principled patriotism is now so alien to our political class that we might as well be reading about a Spartan king.

So on this 110th anniversary of his birth, I do not offer a hagiography.

I offer an indictment: Leonard Funk—the original Antifa paratrooper—would look at today’s MAGA movement with the same contempt he reserved for the SS.

He would see their coded racism, their worship of strongmen, their contempt for the rule of law, and he would not “reach across the aisle.”

He would reach for his submachine gun—metaphorically, at least—and he would demand that we recapture our republic from these modern-day collaborators.

But he would also turn his fury on the feckless, donor-captured opposition that treats fascism as a “branding problem” rather than an existential threat.

Where Funk faced 80 armed Nazis with a single magazine, our leaders face a handful of seditionists and fold like cheap lawn chairs. They lack the moral equivalent of that trigger pull—the courage to disqualify, to prosecute, to condemn, to win.

We do not deserve his legacy. But we desperately need it. Because the next D-Day is not coming with gliders and grenades—it’s coming with disinformation, judicial sabotage, and the slow-motion coup of democratic norms.

And when it arrives, we will not have 80 Germans at close range. We will have 80 million algorithm-addicted citizens, and a political elite too craven to defend the Constitution they swore to uphold.

Happy birthday, First Sergeant. You earned your rest at Arlington—while your country’s elected heirs trade your sacrifice for campaign checks and cowardice. The fascists you killed are gone. Their spiritual successors are in committee hearings. And the men and women who should be stopping them are too busy counting donor dollars to pull the trigger.