Members of the U.S. military have long had a tradition of giving or exchanging “challenge coins.” The medallions have no monetary value; they come in various shapes and sizes, but most are about the size of a silver dollar, and they carry the symbols and names of military units or commands. Members of those units carry them to give to others as tokens of esteem. (They are called challenge coins because they can be used to prove that you are a member of the unit; sometimes they are called “commander’s coins” when they’re given out by a senior officer.)
In my years as a professor at the Naval War College, I collected many such coins from military students and from organizations where I spoke. They’re a nice tradition, and it is always an honor when a service person passes you one during a handshake as a mark of respect or gratitude. Other organizations mint such coins, too, both inside and outside the government. I have a rather nice one, for example, from my visit to the National Counterterrorism Center, and another that was struck by a private group to commemorate Operation Iraqi Freedom.
FBI Director Kash Patel has created such a coin for himself that he’s now handing out, and Americans can only wish that he’d take them all and lock them in his desk, never to be seen again.
The coins are, to put it gently, ridiculous. On one side, they have what appears to be the symbol of the Punisher, a Marvel character. The Punisher is a vigilante who does … well, vigilante stuff, killing evildoers at will as revenge for the death of his family. The symbol is popular with a lot of people, including criminals, law-enforcement officers, soldiers, and some extremist groups such as the anti-government Three Percenters. None of this is good, especially because the character’s creator long ago admitted that the symbol was partly inspired by the Nazi SS’s Totenkopf, or “Death’s Head,” uniform insignia. (The author of the series also notes that the Punisher hates cops, something the police officers wearing the mark don’t seem to get.)
If you’re not a comic-book fan, the front of the coin looks more like a depiction of a space alien, or maybe a skull—or maybe a space alien’s skull—with spiders in the eye sockets and K$H on the forehead. (“Kash.” Get it? So edgy.) The face has a Greek or Roman helmet under the nose, and a pistol on each side, and together, it looks like a key or maybe a bottle opener. The other side carries Patel’s signature, the FBI seal, and a depiction of a tommy gun, perhaps as a romantic reminder of the days of J. Edgar Hoover hunting down John Dillinger or something.
This is not a challenge coin: It is something kids use to pop the caps off beer bottles at a gaming meetup or a cosplay convention. If someone pressed one of these into my hand at an official function, I’d think I was being pranked (or maybe being given a discount token to a local Halloween house). It is as unserious as the director himself, a metal symbol of the hollowness of Patel’s leadership. The FBI, prone to rogue operations under Hoover, has for decades been the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency. It is run and staffed by agents—serious men and women—who once struck fear into the hearts of bank robbers, kidnappers, and enemy spies. After Hoover, the agency’s directors were always drawn from the ranks of people with backgrounds in law enforcement or justice, people of significant accomplishment.
Patel’s coin does not convey this kind of gravitas. Instead, it says: “I am a grown man who has spent way too much time on the internet.” It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to get from someone with a lot of hardware hanging from their face and tattoos on their neck. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we might expect a bit more formality from a G-man.) Then again, maybe it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy who noted the death of Charlie Kirk by saying that he and Kirk would meet again in “Valhalla.” It’s sort of a Goth-horror movie-gamer coin that will never scare a bad guy or inspire respect in a colleague or a fellow law enforcer, but that might elicit a “Cool, dude” from an easily impressed middle schooler.
Please, Mr. Director. America has suffered enough indignities over the past several months, a few of them at your hands. Take the coins you’ve designed and throw them off the Key Bridge. On second thought, throwing them into the river risks them being found (or landing on a boat). Bury them somewhere, and then get back to the job the public is paying you to do.
