For nearly two decades, he has taught tens of thousands of police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and federal agents in every state to cultivate what he calls a “warrior mindset”—being mentally prepared to kill at any moment. Grossman’s goal, in essence, is to get cops to think more like soldiers, training them to regard the communities they serve as territory occupied by potential insurgents.

[…]

This is Grossman’s fifth presentation in as many days. He is on the road 300 days a year spreading the warrior gospel, because he believes that nothing less than the survival of our civilization depends upon it. “I get home one, maybe two nights a week,” he tells his audience, hitching his belt. “Conjugal visit, clean underwear, back on the road.” The assembled cops laugh. Then Grossman clasps the microphone close to his chest. “I have an intense sense of urgency,” he intones. “And I implore you to share this sense of urgency.”

The morning sessions contain a lot of Sturm und Drang delivered in a well-rehearsed, rapid-fire patter. “The murder rate exploded across America,” Grossman shouts, scribbling city names and percentages from 2015 on an easel. “An explosion of homicides like nothing we have seen since the American Civil War!”

Assertions like these, the kind that Trump deployed during his march to the White House, are misleading. Most of the increase in violent crime in 2015 was concentrated in just seven cities. Criminologists can’t explain precisely what fueled the spike in murders, but the uncertainty provides fertile ground for Grossman’s grim prescience. The future, he says, is mass murder. There will be massacres on school buses and in day-care centers, ultraviolence by Mexican drug cartels spilling over the border, the “systematic ambush, murder, and execution of cops,” ISIS-inspired butchery, September 11–scale terror attacks—and perhaps worst of all, in his estimation, the emergence of a “vicious generation of kids” raised on “the sickest movies and the sickest video games,” who will soon “give us crimes as adults we never dreamed of.”

[…]

“You see, the sheep are always trying to pull you down,” says Grossman, exhorting the audience to train as hard as Batman. “The average citizen of Gotham City watches the news—crime, death, violence! What do they do? Hunker down, cry, lock the door.”

In this worldview, it is the wolf—not the sheep—that gives the sheepdog meaning and purpose. Grossman emphasizes this point when he tells the cops what they must do if confronted by a school siege like the 2004 massacre in Beslan, Russia, which left 186 children dead. “It is your job to put a chunk of steel in your fist and go in that door,” he growls, “and kill the sons of bitches who come to kill our kids and destroy our way of life!”