If you watched the entirety of the State of the Union speech last Thursday, you will remember the shouting from the gallery that happened while Joe Biden was discussing the crime rates. The camera panned to see a man being escorted out by security.


Very quickly, we learned via Twitter/X that the man shouting was Gold Star Father Steve Nikoui, whose son, Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, was killed in action at Abbey Gate during the catastrophic withdrawl from Afghanistan on August 26, 2021. In a shocking contrast with Fred Guttenberg, who heckled Donald Trump in much the same fashion during the State of Union in February of 2020, Steve Nikoui was arrested by Capitol Police for his outburst.

Steve Nikoui gave an interview to the Spectator’s Matthew Foldi, and it will break your heart. Not because he was arrested by Capitol Police, even though the entire situation was clearly distressing. The heartbreak is because these Gold Star Families are looking for an acknowledgment from the Commander-in-Chief that the country that their beloved ones died for actually cares about their memory and their service. All of Joe Biden’s actions up to this point scream that he just doesn’t give a shit. We have heard the testimony of the families before, especially after the disrespect they felt from Joe Biden at Dover Air Force Base during the dignified transfer, and the stories they told at the roundtable held by Congressman Michael McCaul last August about how angry and hurt they felt at Biden’s actions, and the military’s lack of honesty when it came to the circumstances around the bombing at Abbey Gate. Steve Nikoui spoke at that roundtable, and what he said then tells the tale of how close he was to his son.

Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui’s father, Steve Nikoui, accused Biden of using his Marine son “as a pawn so we can meet his Sept. 11th deadline and get the optics he wanted” with regard to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago.

“My life and that of my family’s has been on pause since the early morning of Aug. 26, 2021,” the emotional father said. “The difference between the minutes of my life before that and the minutes that passed after that day are contrasted drastically.”

Closing out his remarks, Steve Nikoui told an anecdote of a game he and Kareem shared when he would return to his base.

“I would be [at] the other end of the house far away, and I would wait to hear the door creak because of the hinge, the front door. And as soon as I heard that, I would yell as loud as I could his name, Kareem. And this was to pay homage to every father-son movie ever made. … I’d be like, ‘Avenge me!’ And, you know, and I would come and look at him, and he’d have the biggest smile,” Nikoui said.

“And now all I hear is him in his soft voice, ‘Avenge me.’”

That “Red Dawn” quote is just heartbreaking in this context. Which makes Steve Nikoui’s story of trying to get some accountability and recognition for his son’s sacrifice just that much more emotional to read.

Wow https://t.co/5lFBpLnba6 pic.twitter.com/SpMxgzRqNy

— quodscripsi, suffering no fools (@thoughtsofquod) March 11, 2024

Steve Nikoui had gone to the State of the Union as the guest of Representative Brian Mast of Florida, and he recounts what happened right after he was brought out and arrested.

Nikoui recalled what happened right after he was detained, and the reaction of the officer who apprehended him. “He was charged up, I apologized to him. I said, ‘Hey, did I get you in trouble? I’m sorry.’ He says, ‘sir, you don’t have to apologize to me at all. You’ve done nothing wrong.’… There was no physical contact. I wasn’t resisting or anything.” Nikoui said that the officers were “very courteous.”

“They put the cuffs on me, he double locks them so they don’t get tightened,” he recounted. “I’m being escorted by the two that were standing by me and also by a lady, their sergeant. And we’re walking down many halls, getting down into the ground level, the basement. Down in the basement, there’s more officers now and they have like a sub, little central station, and this is where they’re going to frisk me, so they start frisking me three times. They have some trainees there so they utilize this time to get some experience on both trainees. So both trainees got to frisk me and then I got to get frisked by the the senior Capitol Police, you know, to double check because I was first frisked by the juniors and he had to double check their work. They got my information, Social Security number… I believe at that time they ran the [background check]… the cuffs are already on.

“I was probably there for like twenty-five minutes getting frisked and then they put me in like a van. And he said, ‘Hey, you know, don’t worry about it. It’s gonna be like, two blocks. We’ll be there real fast.’ Cuz I was like, ‘Hey, man, do you think he could give me like one more notch on my handcuffs because [the cuffs are] hurting me.’ He checks with his fingers in there. ‘It’s all right.’ And he says, ‘what I normally tell people if you don’t like the way the handcuffs feel then don’t get arrested.’ That’s great advice.”

Nikoui did find sympathy among the Capitol Police, though, as they questioned him.

Next Nikoui went through a couple of rounds of questioning. “At this time, they don’t know who I am,” he said. “The Capitol Police questions were just very basic. It wasn’t: ‘Hey, why did you do this? Why’d you do that?’ The second guy asked, ‘Why? Why did you do what you did?’ He wanted to talk about ‘why did you voice out’ and then I told him my story. And he was a soldier. Both him and the Secret Service were soldiers and one of the cops was a soldier. One was Air Force, so he’s not a soldier. The other two boys, maybe they were in the armed services or something.

“So as I’m telling him my story, and crying, he’s relating to me. He’s knowing. Because it’s hard for me to talk about my son, even though I’m arrested, I’m crying, talking about my kid. God bless him. I mean, I could just feel the love from him. He said, ‘Kareem Nikoui’ and ‘so tell me about your son.’ I tell him and every, every four minutes or five minutes, he would say, ‘Kareem.’ He would just say his name and look at me. He told me I was a great dad, he was very comforting. After ten minutes, he would just look at me, ‘I’m never gonna forget that name, Kareem, I’m never gonna forget that, I’m never going to forget your son.’”

The other Gold Star Families, plus Representatives Brian Mast and Darrell Issa, are standing by Steve Nikoui. Mast went to the police station after the State of the Union and walked out with Steve Nikoui. Issa released a joint statement with the Gold Star Families, and is demanding that all charges be dropped.

I’ve seen enough.

All charges should immediately be dropped against my friend and Gold Star father Steve Nikoui who was arrested for speaking out at Biden’s State of the Union.

Steve did nothing wrong.

— Rep. Darrell Issa (@repdarrellissa) March 11, 2024

One of the more shocking parts of Nikoui’s interview is him recounting the Dover trip for the dignified transfer. The military apparently dropped the ball when it came to helping the families after Abbey Gate, and there are some pretty awful details that Nikoui is revealing now.

“I mean, here’s the second day my son dies. I’ve got these military guys at my house. ‘Do you gotta sign this paper?’ ‘No, you have to sign this paper and you’re leaving tomorrow.’ ‘Where am I going?’ I mean, there’s no booklet that they give to families when their kids join the Marines saying, ‘For sure, if your son or daughter loses their life, we will send someone to your house.’ You know, I had to spend six hours that day Googling that to find out that answer. They don’t tell you, ‘you’re gonna have to fly to Dover, Delaware, to do a dignified transfer.’ I had no idea what a dignified transfer was.

“When I look back at all of it, I’m here thinking, ‘I’m honoring our country, I’m honoring our government following these protocols.’ And when it was all said and done, after we came back from Dover and looking back, I realized they had taken advantage of me, they use me for their photo ops, basically to say, ‘this was a horrific thing, but look how we’re honoring or honoring with stateside praise, we’re doing a dignified transfer.’

“The bus that I rode to school on when I was a kid in 1972; those big yellow buses are what they transferred us from Motel Six to Dover. It was 110 degrees in blistering Delaware humid heat, and I wanted to wear a suit for my son. I was the only one there that was wearing a suit, and I was sweating in this frickin’ 1975, you know, yellow school bus that had been painted gray, and had no air conditioning, no seatbelts, it’s raining. The undocumented people that are coming across have luxury buses that they’re being transported in. They take us to a Motel Six that has fecal matter on the walls. There’s freaking cockroaches…There didn’t seem to be any protocol. When I came home, I felt violated. I felt used by our country. They used us for these photos ops to show that they care and that we’ve gotten all this honor and this and that, and that wasn’t the case at all. It was a photo opportunity, it was a lie.”

That is beyond horrifying. There is supposed to be immediate help from the Department of Defense. But somewhere, somehow, these families fell through the cracks – and the buck has to stop with the Biden administration.

One can’t help but contrast the lack of acknowledgment from Joe Biden, with the attention from Donald Trump. The Gold Star Families met with the former president last September, and he gave them an evening of his time and attention.

Late last month, the former president hosted the Gold Star families of the 13 US military members who were slain in the 2021 Kabul Airport suicide bombing.

I spoke with many about their Trump-filled evening, which went beyond their expectations.https://t.co/LlZ152HBU8

(2/xx)

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) September 12, 2023

Does anyone remember how Donald Trump was bashed at the Democratic National Convention by a Gold Star Family in 2016? Turnabout is fair play, and Joe Biden could find himself on the receiving end of some well-deserved scorn come convention season this year.

We owe it to Steve Nikoui, and the other grieving Gold Star Families, to give their beloved ones the honor and respect their sacrifice deserves. And that means continuing to tell their stories, and not letting them be forgotten.

Featured image: Steve Nikoui via screenshot from LibsofTikTok’s Twitter/X post, cropped