05 July 21
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he proliferation of digital video has exposed abuses of power that in the past often remained hidden. It has also allowed people to watch shocking footage and make pronouncements about it on social media before knowing all the facts. Last summer, Americans were still reeling from the excruciating sight of a Minneapolis police officer slowly killing George Floyd when another violent encounter unfolded, with seemingly similar clarity. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23rd, three police officers tried to arrest a man outside a fourplex in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A neighbor started recording on his phone when he saw the officers, who were white, scuffling with the man, who was Black. The confrontation began behind a parked S.U.V., so initially the neighbor couldn’t see everything. Then the man broke free, went around the vehicle, and opened the driver’s door. One officer grabbed him by his tank top and shot him seven times, from behind.
Kenosha did not equip officers with body cameras, and so the neighbor’s footage was the primary visual documentation of the shooting. The victim, Jacob Blake, survived, but the incident was instantly seen as another grim example of an urgent problem: according to a recent Harvard study, Black people are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter. The comedian Kevin Hart tweeted, “What’s the justification for 7 shots?????”
After Floyd’s death, Kenosha was among the scores of American cities where citizens marched in protest. Hundreds of people now assembled for Blake, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old who had been staying at the fourplex with his fiancée, Laquisha Booker. They had several sons, and the shooting had occurred on the eighth birthday of the oldest, Izreal. Blake had decorated the apartment for a party, and was cooking hot dogs when he and Booker started quarrelling. Blake left in the S.U.V.—Booker’s rental car. “Me and my sisters just saw him skirt off in it,” Booker told a 911 dispatcher. Blake returned, but when the police arrived he was leaving again—this time with the children. His sons witnessed the shooting from the back seat.
The protesters gathered outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, a limestone building facing Civic Center Park, an area surrounded by businesses and residences. Many people marched peacefully and held signs. But, that night and the next, rioters hurled bricks and fireworks at law-enforcement officers. Looters smashed shopwindows, and a Department of Corrections building was burned down. When an older man with a fire extinguisher confronted rioters, someone struck him with a hard object, splitting his nose and breaking his jaw. President Donald Trump had been highlighting the destructive aspects of such protests in order to malign the Black Lives Matter movement. At a Papa John’s, a man stood behind a shattered window and yelled, “Are they trying to get Trump reëlected?” A demonstrator replied, “These people don’t represent our movement!” But, at another moment, when a man told protesters, “What y’all don’t fucking understand is that people have their lives in these businesses,” a woman screamed back, “So what?”
Right-wing news outlets packaged the fieriest images as evidence of ruinous policies in Democratic-run cities, and criticized the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge the violence. Joan Donovan, the chief of research at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, identified One America News Network, Glenn Beck on BlazeTV, and Fox News—particularly the hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—as promulgators of “riot porn.” Writing in MIT Technology Review, Donovan said that such footage, designed to “overwhelm the sense-making capacity” of viewers, inspired militias and vigilantes to “live out fantasies of taking justice into their own hands.”
After Kenosha’s march for George Floyd, on May 31st, Kevin Mathewson, a former city alderman who had sometimes brought a handgun to city-council meetings, decided that the police needed civilian reinforcements. He started the Kenosha Guard, which was less a militia than an impulse with a Facebook page. But on August 25th, as the city braced for a third night of protests in the wake of Blake’s shooting, Mathewson, who is a private investigator, posted a call for “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” He invited “patriots” to meet him at the courthouse at 6 p.m., to defend Kenosha from “evil thugs.”
Mathewson’s post caught the attention of Kristan Harris, a streamer whose work included conspiracy content of the Pizzagate variety. All summer, he had been live-streaming protests, calling himself a “citizen journalist.” Harris wrote a blurb about the Kenosha Guard, which got picked up by Infowars. On Facebook, thousands of people indicated interest in joining Mathewson at the courthouse. Mathewson posted an open letter to Kenosha’s police chief, calling himself the “commander” of the Kenosha Guard and warning, “Do NOT have your officers tell us to go home under threat of arrest.”
Mathewson’s “Armed Citizens” post elicited such comments as “kill looters and rioters.” Facebook allowed the page to stand even after receiving well over four hundred complaints. A crowd was building when Mathewson, in a Chuck Norris T-shirt, showed up at the courthouse with a semi-automatic rifle. He soon went home, but throughout the evening others used his Facebook page, or similar ones, to spread rumors. One commenter predicted that if armed “untrained civilians” got scared, “someone’s getting shot.”
That night in Kenosha, as at many racial-justice protests, the crowd was a confusing mélange: B.L.M. activists, antifascists in black bloc, right-wing extremists in camouflage. Across factions, people carried guns, some more visibly than others. It was often challenging to tell friend from foe.
South of the courthouse, a group of libertarians flanked the gas pumps of the Ultimate Convenience Center. Dressed in camo, they were heavily armed, if not necessarily experienced: one member mocked another for holding his rifle wrong.
Harris, the “citizen journalist,” had shown up, to live-stream. He praised militias as “cool,” but not everyone shared his enthusiasm. A muscular man from Chicago told Harris, “These dudes are LARPers.” “LARP” refers to “live-action role-playing” games. The guns, though, were real.
Private militias and paramilitary organizations are illegal in every state, but throughout 2020 militia types inflamed about B.L.M. protests and pandemic lockdowns had been increasingly showing up armed on urban streets. Last June, a group called the New Mexico Civil Guard appeared at a protest in Albuquerque and “defended” a statue of a conquistador. According to the district attorney, the group’s members had trained in combat tactics and presented themselves at the protest as “indistinguishable from authorized military forces.” An armed man joined the militia in trying to drive protesters away, and then shot and injured one of them.
Mike German, a former F.B.I. special agent who once worked undercover to expose neo-Nazis and is now a fellow at N.Y.U.’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me that domestic extremists have learned that they can receive more “aboveground” support by calling themselves patriots and peacekeepers. Yet, German emphasized, “you can’t just nominate yourself as a security provider.” He compared this approach to tactics in prewar Germany, “when Nazi thugs rallied where they knew they had political opposition—they could attack and get media coverage, and gain a reputation for being tough and scary.”
Militias often outfit themselves with variants of the AR-15, a high-velocity rifle that has become both a popular sporting gun and a favored weapon of mass shooters. Since 2017, such firearms have been used in at least thirteen mass-casualty incidents. Only a handful of states prohibit citizens from openly carrying AR-style weapons. Even the National Rifle Association once called it unsettling to “see someone sidle up next to you in line for lunch with a 7.62 rifle.” This observation was published on the N.R.A.’s Web site in 2014, at a moment when Texans were ordering coffee at cafés while carrying battle-grade firearms. Two years later, a sniper in Dallas shot and killed five police officers during a B.L.M. demonstration. The city’s police chief publicly reiterated the reason that so many law-enforcement officials oppose open-carry laws: the profusion of visibly armed civilians complicated the task of quickly identifying the shooter.
An Army veteran named Ryan Balch, who lived near Milwaukee, heard about the Blake protests and decided that he was needed in Kenosha. The Kenosha Guard appeared frivolous to him, so on August 25th he drove to town on his own, equipped with an AR-type rifle. Balch later said that he and some friends had to “infiltrate” the city by circumventing roadblocks: “We were sittin’ low, trying to get past the cops, to get in there and do what we needed to do.”
Balch spotted a small group of armed volunteers at Car Source, a dealership whose main sales lot was now a landscape of smoldering metal. Despite an eight-o’clock curfew, the volunteers planned to guard the dealership’s two nearby mechanic shops. As Balch later explained in detail online, he “inserted” himself as a “tactical” adviser. He claimed that a Car Source owner “deputized” the group, but civilians have no such power, and law-enforcement agencies don’t grant that authority. (“What a scary, scary thought,” Kenosha County’s sheriff, David Beth, has said.)
Balch and several others positioned themselves at one of the mechanic shops, a low, flat-topped building. Men with rifles set up on the roof. Balch, who described himself as “anti-establishment,” had been immersed in far-right circles on social media. He seemed to view the police as the enemy, and said that “the cops wouldn’t have been able to defend themselves” against some of the weapons on the roof. According to him, when a police officer stopped and remarked on all the “friendly guns,” he replied, “We’re not here to be friendly to you.”
After dark, the crowd streamed away from the courthouse, where the police were firing tear gas and rubber bullets. As armored vehicles herded the protesters toward the mechanic shop, one of them said, “We in Call of Duty!”
Harris and other live-streamers had been chatting on camera with Balch and a member of his cohort: a talkative teen-ager in a backward baseball cap, with a semi-automatic rifle slung across his chest. A videographer said, “So you guys are full-on ready to defend the property?” The teen-ager, whose name was Kyle Rittenhouse, replied, “Yes, we are,” adding, officiously, “Now, if I can ask—can you guys step back?”
Rittenhouse’s chubby cheeks and high, arched eyebrows gave his face a bemused, childish quality. A first-aid kit dangled at his hip. He explained that he planned to provide first aid to anyone needing it, and said that his gun was for self-protection—“obviously.” He wasn’t old enough to be a certified E.M.T., yet he shouted, “I am an E.M.T.!,” and proclaimed, “If you are injured, come to me! ” Adopting the language of first responders, he told a streamer, “If there’s somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way.”
Rittenhouse’s intentions may well have been lost on demonstrators. In addition to the rifle, he wore an Army-green T-shirt and the Sport Patriot style of Ariat boots: part camouflage, part American flag. For all anyone knew, he or others at Car Source were among the Facebook users who had made such threats as “I have my suppressor on my AR, these fools won’t even know what hit them.”
According to a theory of social psychology called the “weapons effect,” the mere sight of a gun inspires aggression. In 1967, the psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage wrote, “In essence, the gun helps pull the trigger.” Their methodology had flaws, but later studies verified their premise. In one U.K. study, people were more inclined to assault a police officer who was visibly armed with a Taser. Brad Bushman, an Ohio State researcher who served on President Barack Obama’s committee on gun violence, told me, “We’ve found that it really doesn’t matter if a good guy or a bad guy is carrying the gun—it creates the bias to interpret things in a hostile way.” Citizens who openly carry firearms “think that they are making the situation safer, but they are making it much more dangerous.”
In front of the Ultimate Convenience Center, protesters set a dumpster on fire. After a member of the group at the gas station put it out, a demonstrator hurled a flagpole like a javelin. A man in a “Black Lives Matter” mask racked his pistol; another man said, “I say we jack them and take they guns.”
Protesters pushed the dumpster down the street and approached the mechanic shop, where the figures on the roof presented a menacing image: heavily armed white guys at a Black-justice demonstration, positioned like snipers. One protester decried the “pussies on the roof,” and the dumpster was soon burning again. One of the shop’s armed “guards” ran to extinguish the fire, screaming at the protesters, “You guys wanna fuck around and find out?”
Demonstrators were complaining that someone on the roof had pointed a “green laser” at them; a laser sight can be attached to a gun, to improve aim. Protesters lobbed stuff at the men on the roof. Rittenhouse stepped before Harris’s camera and claimed that demonstrators were “mixing ammonia, gasoline, and bleach together—and it’s causing an ammonia bomb!” One guard said that he wanted to “pump some rounds,” but someone talked him out of it.
Videos captured what was happening with surprising thoroughness: multiple angles, decent clarity. Among the crowd was an agitated bald guy in his mid-thirties, with a ginger goatee and an earring. He was wearing a maroon T-shirt, and had brought a plastic shopping bag containing socks, underwear, and deodorant. The man, who suffered from bipolar disorder, had recently been charged with domestic violence, and then had attempted suicide. Hours before the protest, he had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital. He apparently had wandered into the melee on the street, where it was difficult to perceive anything but his rage. At the Ultimate Convenience Center, he confronted the armed men, screaming both “Don’t point no motherfucking gun at me!” and “Shoot me! ”
A man yelled, “Somebody control him!”
During the chaos, Rittenhouse moved down the street toward Car Source’s second mechanic shop, where rioters had been smashing car windows. He crossed paths with the angry bald man, who chased him into the shop’s parking area. The man now wore his T-shirt as a head wrap and face mask, leaving his torso bare. Screaming “Fuck you!,” he threw his plastic bag at Rittenhouse’s back. Rittenhouse, holding his rifle, reached some parked cars just as a protester fired a warning shot into the sky. Rittenhouse whirled; the bald man lunged; Rittenhouse fired, four times. The man fell in front of a Buick, wounded in the groin, back, thigh, hand, and head.
The nearest bystander was Richie McGinniss, the video chief at the Daily Caller, the online publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson. McGinniss, who had been covering protests all summer, had been following the chase so closely that he had nearly been shot himself. He removed his T-shirt and knelt to compress the man’s wounds. Dying, the man breathed in a horrifying growl.
Rittenhouse stood over McGinniss for half a minute. Amid the sound of more gunfire, he didn’t stoop to check on the injured man or offer his first-aid kit. “Call 911!” McGinniss told him. Rittenhouse called a friend instead. Sprinting out of the parking lot, he said, “I just shot somebody!”
Demonstrators were yelling: “What’d he do?” “Shot someone!” “Cranium that boy!” Rittenhouse ran down the street toward the whirring lights of police vehicles. To those who had heard only the gunfire and the shouting, he must have resembled a mass shooter: they tend to be heavily armed, white, and male.
A demonstrator ran up behind Rittenhouse and smacked him in the head. When Rittenhouse tripped and fell, another man executed a flying kick; Rittenhouse fired twice, from the ground, and missed. Another demonstrator whacked him in the neck with the edge of a skateboard and tried to grab his rifle; Rittenhouse shot him in the heart. A third demonstrator approached with a handgun; Rittenhouse shot him in the arm, nearly blowing it off.
He rose from the asphalt and continued toward the police lights. A man screamed, “That’s what y’all get, acting tough with fucking guns!”
Rittenhouse tried to flag down armored vehicles that were now moving toward the victims, but they passed him by, even after witnesses pointed out that he’d just shot people. Next, he approached a police cruiser, but an officer inside apparently told him, “No—go.”
Two men were fatally shot. A third was maimed. Everyone involved in the shootings was white. The astonishing fact that Rittenhouse was allowed to leave the scene underscored the racial double standard that activists had sought to further expose: the police almost certainly wouldn’t have let a Black man pass.
Clips from Kenosha immediately went viral. Footage of a teen-ager loping around self-importantly with a gun was juxtaposed with video of the second set of shootings. In other posts, he could be seen bragging about his medical bona fides or accepting bottled water tossed from the hatch of an armored law-enforcement vehicle. Officers inside had offered the water just after authorities had gassed the area around Car Source, and before the shootings occurred, with one of them saying, via loudspeaker, “We appreciate you guys.”
Internet sleuths quickly identified Rittenhouse, and revealed that he was seventeen and lived with his family in an apartment in Antioch, Illinois. His social-media accounts—Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram—showed him handling long guns, cheering for Trump in the front row at a campaign rally, and participating in a Police Explorers program for teen-agers. He ardently supported Blue Lives Matter and wore a T-shirt from 5.11 Tactical (“gear for the most demanding missions”).
The Facebook posts about the Kenosha Guard led some of the sleuths to misapprehend Rittenhouse as a militia member. (He belonged to no such group.) Because he lived in Illinois, people assumed that he had travelled some distance, for nefarious purposes, and had “crossed state lines” with his rifle. (The Rittenhouse apartment was a mile south of the Wisconsin border, and Rittenhouse had been storing his gun in Kenosha, at the house of a friend’s stepfather.) Rittenhouse’s age led some to conclude that his mom had “dropped him off” at the protest. (He drove himself to Kenosha.) One widely shared image showed an armed, camo-clad woman, captioned “terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse’s mother.” (Some other lady, some other place.)
The day after the shootings, Ayanna Pressley, a Democratic U.S. representative from Massachusetts, tweeted that the shootings had been committed by a “white supremacist domestic terrorist.” This characterization stuck, even after the Anti-Defamation League scrutinized Rittenhouse’s social-media accounts and found no evidence of extremism.
After years of deepening political polarization, Americans were primed to see whatever they wanted to see in the Kenosha clips. It was beyond question that Rittenhouse had inserted himself into a volatile situation with a gun that he was too young to legally own. The footage also made clear that he’d killed and wounded people. But many liberals went further, characterizing Rittenhouse as someone who’d gone to the protest intending to harm others.
This view was buttressed when another kind of video surfaced. Weeks before the shootings, Rittenhouse had been hanging out with other teen-agers on the Kenosha waterfront when an argument erupted involving the younger of his two sisters, McKenzie. Reese Granville, a rapper who happened to be cruising past with a friend, filmed the altercation with his phone. (In the video, Granville and his friend could be heard debating what would happen if the police arrived: “It’s all white people, boy. We Black—we goin’ to jail.”) When a girl started to fight with McKenzie, Rittenhouse punched her, repeatedly, from behind. Bystanders broke it up by turning on Rittenhouse: “Don’t put your hands on a female!”
Conservatives largely ignored the waterfront video. The protest footage had convinced them that Rittenhouse was a patriot who, after months of destructive unrest in U.S. cities, had finally put “Antifa” in check by bravely exercising his Second Amendment rights. Carlson, on Fox News, declared, “How shocked are we that seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”
The glorification extended, weirdly, to Rittenhouse’s street instincts. Gun users praised his “trigger discipline,” noting that he’d fired only when “attacked.” A sportsman in Washington State blogged that Rittenhouse had “accomplished” the feat of hitting “several moving ‘targets’ closing in from multiple angles, throwing things at you, kicking you in the head, and hitting you in the head.” Another fan concocted a macabre “Kyle Drill” at a shooting range. On YouTube, a survivalist praised Rittenhouse’s “mind-set” during “urban warfare.” The worshipful tone intensified when Rittenhouse’s admirers learned more about Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man he’d killed. Rosenbaum wasn’t an antifascist, but he’d spent more than a decade in prison for child molestation. (As a boy, Rosenbaum himself was sexually abused.) After the shooting, someone tried to set up a GoFundMe account related to Rosenbaum, and a user commented, “YOU WERE A PREDATOR & A PIECE OF SHIT REST IN PISS!!!!”
Shops began selling T-shirts that depicted Rittenhouse with his gun and bore slogans like “Fuck Around and Find Out.” Online, memes spread—“Oh, I shot a pedophile? My bad”—and people declared that Antifa types and other troublemakers deserved to get “Rittenhoused.” The sudden notoriety made a line in one of Rittenhouse’s TikTok bios stand out: “Bruh I’m just tryna be famous.” He’d written the motto as a joke, for an audience of twenty-five.
There was more to Jacob Blake’s case than the viral video revealed. In 2012, police had charged him with battery and with endangering the life of a child after he had allegedly tried to choke Laquisha Booker and she fell while holding her baby, a son from a previous relationship. “Alcohol abuse appears to be the defendant’s primary problem,” a court document noted, explaining that if Blake “doesn’t drink he tends not to get into trouble.”
In May, 2020, Booker returned from a party and went to bed. According to police, she awoke to find Blake standing over her; he reached between her legs, sniffed his finger, and said, “Smells like you’ve been with other men.” Then he left, taking her car. Booker called 911. The responding officers found Booker “visibly shaken” and humiliated. She said that Blake assaulted her about twice a year, and that he had her keys. A felony arrest warrant was issued, charging Blake with domestic abuse and sexual assault.
This warrant was active on the day of Izreal’s birthday party, and the officers responding to Booker’s 911 call learned of it en route. The Kenosha Police Department’s policy was to detain anyone wanted on a felony warrant. According to an investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Blake repeatedly refused to be detained. (He told state investigators that he didn’t want his sons to see him handcuffed.) The officers Tased him multiple times, but the shocks had no visible effect.
Then one officer screamed, “Knife!” The officers drew their guns, yelling, “Drop the knife!” By now, the neighbor was recording the confrontation. The officer nearest to Blake was Rusten Sheskey, who later told investigators that he was determined not to let Blake leave, and was asking himself, “Will we have to pursue the vehicle with a child inside of the car? Is he going to hold the child hostage?” In a report summarizing the state’s findings, the district attorney, Michael Graveley, said that Sheskey had fired after Blake whipped around, “driving the knife towards Officer Sheskey’s torso.”
Scrutiny of the neighbor’s video footage confirmed that Blake was holding a knife. The location of Blake’s wounds—four in the lower back, three in the left side—corroborated Sheskey’s claim that Blake was hit while turning toward him. Sheskey had been trained to shoot until a threat was neutralized, and didn’t stop firing until he saw Blake drop the knife. Advocates of criminal-justice reform argue that such protocols do not make keeping a suspect alive a top priority. Kirk Burkhalter, a law professor at N.Y.U., told the BBC that resisting arrest “happens often” and does not offer “carte blanche to use deadly physical force.”
Blake was hospitalized for six weeks. Prosecutors dropped the domestic-violence charge after investigators had trouble getting Booker to coöperate. Sheskey was not charged: Graveley concluded that the state could not prove the officer hadn’t acted in self-defense. He also noted that, in 2010, Blake had waved a knife, “in a slashing motion,” at police who had stopped a vehicle he was in.
These revelations meant that an incident partly captured on video had been characterized without being fully understood. But they did not change the broader truth that police shootings of Black Americans occur with appalling frequency.
Blake can no longer walk. In March, he filed a civil lawsuit against Sheskey. His lawyers declared that “the hail of gunfire fired into the back of Mr. Blake in the presence of his children was excessive and unnecessary.”
Lately, gun-reform advocates have stressed the importance of focussing on the “how,” not the “why,” of gun violence. Instead of exploring sociological or personal factors that may have contributed to a shooting, they want to concentrate on shutting down the mechanisms that let guns fall into the wrong hands. But when an event becomes a distorted media spectacle, as Kenosha did, it can be useful to clarify both the “why” and the “how,” even if the latter is ultimately more important.
Kenosha, an old automotive city of a hundred thousand people, is on the western shore of Lake Michigan, between Milwaukee and Chicago. The lake is the main attraction: boats on the horizon, storm waves thundering at the riprap. The first time I visited, in January, buildings in the protest zone remained patched with plywood and tagged with optimistic graffiti (“Heal the World!”).
Just south is Lake County, Illinois. Rittenhouse’s parents, Wendy and Mike, got married there in February, 2000, and their daughter Faith was born six months later. The other two Rittenhouse children were born in 2003: Kyle in January, McKenzie in December. When the children were small, Wendy and Mike worked various jobs, including machine operator, housekeeper, and cashier. Mike, who struggled with alcohol addiction and sometimes experimented with drugs, was unemployed for a couple of years. When Kyle was four, Mike was charged with domestic battery after allegedly punching Wendy in the stomach. (He denies this; the charges were dismissed.) Twice, Wendy and the children briefly lived in a shelter.
Wendy and Mike eventually split up. (Mike says that he has been sober for years and wants to repair his family relationships.) Wendy had become a certified nursing assistant, but she continued to struggle financially. The family was repeatedly evicted.
Wendy sometimes felt too overwhelmed to help her kids navigate difficulties. In 2017, when Kyle was fourteen, she tried to resolve a conflict between him and two classmates, twins named Anthony and Jonathan, by seeking restraining orders. In a handwritten petition to the court, Wendy, who has dyslexia, wrote, “Anthony calls Klye dumb stupid say that going to hurt Kyle. Anthony follows Kyle around to take picture of Klye and post them on soical media.”
That fall, Rittenhouse, a pudgy ninth grader in dark-framed glasses, joined the Explorers program at the Grayslake Police Department, near Antioch. The police chief viewed the program as a way to “teach self-discipline, responsibility and other appropriate ‘life lessons’ ” to youths who “may have a challenging home, social, or school life.” Rittenhouse participated in a similar cadet program through the Antioch Fire Department. Jon Cokefair, the fire chief, told me, “Most of the kids that are doing this, they don’t play football, they’re not cheerleaders—this is their focus.”
Jeff Myhra, the deputy chief who ran Grayslake’s Police Explorers program, told me that participants trained with harmless replicas of service weapons. Explorers wore uniforms and often helped manage parade traffic. Rittenhouse went on police ride-alongs, a practice that may impart a false sense of competence, or authority. One brochure declared, “Like Police Officers, Explorers must be ready and willing to encounter any emergency situation such as first responders to accidents or injuries.”
In 2018, shortly after another eviction, Wendy filed for bankruptcy. She developed a gastrointestinal bleed that required hospitalization, and Faith was also hospitalized, after an attempted overdose involving over-the-counter painkillers. To make money for the family, Kyle worked as a fry cook and a janitor while attending school online. He also became certified as a lifeguard and found part-time work at a Y.M.C.A. Eventually, he hoped to graduate from high school and become a police officer or a paramedic.
In January, 2020, Rittenhouse, now seventeen, tried to join the Marines, unsuccessfully. Shortly after the pandemic arrived in America, the Y furloughed him. He applied for another lifeguard position, and while awaiting word he hung out with his sister McKenzie’s new boyfriend, Dominick Black, who was eighteen.
Rittenhouse had always wanted a brother, and he became close to Black. They camped and fished and attended car meets. Black’s family lived in Kenosha, but he often stayed in Antioch with the Rittenhouses. Upstate, where the Blacks owned property and liked to hunt, the boys practiced shooting at bull’s-eye targets and bottles.
Wendy had let her kids play with Nerf and paintball guns, but she didn’t allow actual guns in her home. Rittenhouse wasn’t old enough to buy a firearm, but he wanted one anyway. Black owned a Smith & Wesson M&P15—an AR-15-style rifle. In 1994, after a series of mass shootings, Congress banned many assault weapons. A decade later, the ban expired, and these firearms flooded the market. According to the Wall Street Journal, before 1994 there were an estimated four hundred thousand AR-15s in the U.S.; today, there are twenty million AR-15s or similar weapons.
In 2019, a Marquette University Law School poll revealed that Wisconsin residents overwhelmingly supported expanding background checks to include private sales. Yet Wisconsin’s lawmakers had been resisting stricter measures, and went so far as to remove a mandatory forty-eight-hour waiting period for handgun purchases. In many cases, an eighteen-year-old could legally buy a semi-automatic rifle without a permit or proof of training, and openly carry it almost anywhere, even at street protests.
In early May, 2020, Black bought a Smith & Wesson for Rittenhouse at an Ace Hardware in northwestern Wisconsin, using money that Rittenhouse had given him. Black’s stepfather insisted that the rifle be kept in a locked safe at his house in Kenosha. (Black, who faces felony charges related to having provided a weapon used in homicides, declined to comment, and his stepfather couldn’t be reached.) Rittenhouse had told his mother that he intended to buy a gun, but she assumed he meant a hunting rifle or a shotgun, like her father and brothers had owned. According to Wendy, when Rittenhouse told her what he’d bought, she responded, “That’s an assault rifle!” But she didn’t make him get rid of it.
Rittenhouse had just started a new lifeguarding job when Blake was shot. On the second night of the protests, he finished his shift at around 8 P.M., and hung out with Black at Black’s stepfather’s place, two miles west of the courthouse. On social media, people were spreading false rumors that rioters planned to attack residential neighborhoods. The teens watched live streams of events that were unfolding so close to home that, when they stepped outside, they could smell smoke and hear screams.
The next day, Rittenhouse and Black cleaned graffiti in the protest zone, then offered to help guard what remained of Car Source. The business was insured, but one of its owners, Anmol Khindri, said to reporters that it was devastating when the police “did nothing” to stop rioters.
Black kept his rifle disassembled in the trunk of his car. On the second day of the protests, the stepfather had removed Rittenhouse’s rifle from the safe, to keep it handy, he later told police. The gun was fetched from the stepfather’s house. Black later told a detective that this made him uncomfortable, but added that if he’d objected Rittenhouse “would have threw a fit.” The night of the shootings, the rifle was equipped with a thirty-round magazine and hung from a chest sling that Rittenhouse had bought that afternoon.
At dusk, Black was on the roof of the mechanic shop while Rittenhouse and others stayed on the ground. It was Black whom Rittenhouse called following the first burst of gunfire. After the second round of shooting, Black came down and found Rittenhouse sitting in a chair inside the shop, “all shooken up.” Rittenhouse had placed his rifle on the flatbed of a truck.
Black later told a detective that he drove Rittenhouse home to Antioch, where Wendy gave her son two choices: turn yourself in, or leave town. Around 1 a.m., she drove him to the police station in Antioch. They waited together for more than two hours, Kyle crying and vomiting. Finally, two Kenosha police detectives, Benjamin Antaramian and Martin Howard, took them into an interview room. When Antaramian explained that he needed to read a police form aloud, Rittenhouse asked, “Is it Miranda?,” and then said, “I know how Miranda works.” He did not know how Miranda works. He both wanted a lawyer and to talk—incompatible desires. The detectives halted the interview.
Rosenbaum, the man who had chased Rittenhouse into the parking lot, was dead. The man who had struck him with the skateboard, Anthony Huber, a twenty-six-year-old demonstrator from Kenosha County, was either dead or dying. The third man shot—the one with the handgun—was also a twenty-six-year-old demonstrator, Gaige Grosskreutz, who lived near Milwaukee. Videos were already starting to make their way online: Rosenbaum taking his final breaths; Huber clutching his chest and collapsing; Grosskreutz shrieking, his right biceps mangled.
Messages from strangers were appearing on Wendy’s phone: “Your son is a white supremacist murderer bitch. You and your family need to count your fuckin days”; “We going to make your home look like Beirut.” They knew where she lived. Wendy told Kyle, “We can’t go back.”
When Rittenhouse learned that he was being arrested, he exclaimed that someone had hit him “with a fucking bat! ” (Widely circulating videos show no such attack.) Antaramian explained that the charges could “range anywhere from reckless injury to reckless homicide to second-degree homicide.” Wendy wailed, “Murder?”
Rittenhouse, who had been speaking with the detectives in a familiar manner, requested a favor: “Can you guys delete my social-media accounts?”
On August 27th, the Kenosha County D.A. charged Rittenhouse with Wisconsin’s most serious crimes, among them first-degree intentional homicide, the mandatory punishment for which is life in prison. Other felony charges included reckless homicide, and he was also charged with a misdemeanor: underage possession of a dangerous weapon. Thomas Binger, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, has said, “We don’t allow teens to run around with guns. It’s that simple.”
Conservatives denounced the homicide charges as political, noting that both Binger and Graveley, the district attorney, are Democrats. Criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer are typically appointed a public defender, but so many conservative and far-right figures rallied around Rittenhouse that private counsel was all but assured.
Among the attorneys who stepped forward was John Pierce, a civil litigator in Los Angeles, who believed that, in the digital age, lawyers needed to “gang tackle, swarm, and crowd-source.” His firm, now known as Pierce Bainbridge, had reportedly received nine million dollars from a hedge fund, Pravati Capital, in what The American Lawyer called possibly “the first public example of a litigation funder investing in a law firm’s portfolio of contingent fee cases.” The firm would bring cases against big targets, and Pravati would receive a cut of any damages. Critics have called forms of this practice “legal loan-sharking.”
Pierce secured a few high-profile clients, including Rudolph Giuliani and Tulsi Gabbard, who sued Hillary Clinton for saying that the Russians were “grooming” Gabbard to run as a third-party Presidential candidate. But, by the spring of 2020, Pierce Bainbridge reportedly owed creditors more than sixty million dollars.
Last August, Pierce launched a charitable nonprofit, the #FightBack Foundation, whose mission involved raising money to fund lawsuits that would “take our country back.” A Trump supporter, he was hostile toward liberals and often expressed his views crudely. One Saturday, during an argument with his ex-wife, he unleashed a stream of increasingly threatening texts, including “Go watch an AOC rally. Fucking libtard”; “I will fuck u and ur kind up”; and “People like u hate the USA. Guess what bitch, we ain’t goin anywhere.” Not for the first time, she obtained a restraining order against him.
#FightBack was registered in Dallas, where one participant, a lawyer named Lawson Pedigo, had joined Pierce in representing the former Trump aide Carter Page. Pierce and Pedigo were also working with Lin Wood, a well-known defamation attorney. When the Kenosha protests began, #FightBack leaped into the fray, declaring that “law-abiding citizens have no choice but to protect their own communities as their forefathers did at Lexington and Concord in 1775.” The Rittenhouse shootings gave the foundation a face for its cause.
The Rittenhouses never returned home. Wendy and her daughters were staying with friends when Pierce tweeted an offer to represent Kyle, who had been transferred to a juvenile detention center in Illinois: “Will fly up there tonight and I will handle his defense with team of best lawyers in USA.”
The Rittenhouses’ experience with the criminal-justice system was limited to Mike’s history, and to a battery charge against Wendy: the month before Kyle was born, she pleaded guilty to spitting in a neighbor’s face. Pierce’s Harvard law degree impressed them, and, on Twitter, the family could see him discussing Kyle alongside elected officials such as the Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, who tweeted that Rittenhouse’s actions had been “100% justified self defense.”
Pierce met with the Rittenhouses on the night of August 27th. Pierce Bainbridge drew up an agreement calling for a retainer of a hundred thousand dollars and an hourly billing rate of twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars—more than twice the average partner billing rate at top U.S. firms. Pierce would be paid through #FightBack, which, soliciting donations through its Web site, called the charges against Rittenhouse “a reactionary rush to appease the divisive, destructive forces currently roiling this country.”
Wisconsin’s ethics laws restrict pretrial publicity, but Pierce began making media appearances on Rittenhouse’s behalf. He called Kenosha a “war zone” and claimed that a “mob” had been “relentlessly hunting him as prey.” He explicitly associated Rittenhouse with the militia movement, tweeting, “The unorganized ‘militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least seventeen years of age,’ ” and “Kyle was a Minuteman protecting his community when the government would not.”
Wendy often appeared with Pierce as a “momma bear” defending her son. “He didn’t do nothing wrong,” she told an ABC affiliate. “He was attack by a mob.” She publicly threatened to sue Joe Biden for using a photograph of Rittenhouse in his campaign materials, promising, “I will take him down.”
Such partisan rhetoric rallied support among conservatives convinced that liberals were destroying American cities with impunity. As donations streamed into #FightBack’s Web site, other contributions were offered directly to the family, for living expenses. Certain donors further yoked Rittenhouse to the militia movement: in September, the group American Wolf—self-appointed “peacekeepers” in Washington State—presented Wendy and Pierce with fifty-five thousand dollars in donations, after having taken a twenty-per-cent cut.
If Pierce seemed erratic and incendiary, he was more than matched by Lin Wood. A civil litigator in his late sixties, Wood rose to prominence in the nineties, when he won defamation suits on behalf of Richard Jewell, the security guard who was wrongly implicated as the Centennial Olympic Park bomber. Wood often went on TV to defend clients. In 2006, he told the publication Super Lawyers, “A media appearance is really a mini-trial. You may be advocating to a jury of millions.” After Wood represented the family of JonBenét Ramsey—the six-year-old girl murdered in 1996—observers characterized the family’s flurry of defamation lawsuits as “legal vigilantism.”
After Donald Trump was elected President, Wood’s work became noticeably ideological. He represented Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the white couple in St. Louis who pointed guns at B.L.M. protesters marching past their house. He represented Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky high-school student who sued various publications for their depictions of an interaction that he had, while wearing a maga hat, with a Native American activist in Washington, D.C. (Sandmann eventually fired Wood.)
People close to Wood noticed troubling changes in his behavior. According to a recent lawsuit by three lawyers who worked with him in Atlanta, Wood asserted that Chief Justice John Roberts would be exposed as part of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, and that Trump would name him Roberts’s successor. (Wood denies making these statements.) The lawyers, who were suing to cut their business ties with Wood, cited repeated “abusive” behavior. In a voice mail, Wood called one of the lawyers, Jonathan Grunberg, a “Chilean Jewish fucking crook,” and on another occasion he allegedly assaulted him in an elevator. (Wood has called the lawsuit “frivolous.”)
Wood, who became #FightBack’s C.E.O. on September 2, 2020, attempted to turn Rittenhouse’s legal case into a cultural battle, calling him a “political prisoner” and comparing him to Paul Revere. He tweeted, “Kyle Rittenhouse at age 17 warned us to defend ourselves.” Wood implied that patriots were needed for an even bigger fight—a looming “second civil war.” His Twitter bio included the QAnon slogan #WWG1WGA—“Where we go one, we go all”—and he became a leading promoter of a conspiracy theory claiming that a secret group of cannibalistic pedophiles has taken control of the United States.
In the first few weeks of #FightBack’s campaign, Wood announced, some eleven thousand people donated more than six hundred thousand dollars. The foundation paid Pierce and produced a publicity video, “Kyle Rittenhouse—The Truth in 11 Minutes,” which framed the case as one with “the power to negatively affect our lives for generations.” A narrator intoned, “This is the moment when the ‘home of the brave’ rise to defend ‘the land of the free.’ ” Wood called the case “a watershed moment” for self-defense; Pierce tweeted, “Kyle now has the best legal representation in the country.”
Pierce was a civil attorney, not a criminal-defense lawyer. A double homicide was “not the fucking case to learn on,” one experienced defense lawyer told me. In Wisconsin, a homicide case requires representation by a local lawyer. Rittenhouse hired two criminal-defense attorneys in Madison, Chris Van Wagner and Jessa Nicholson Goetz, who had the understanding that #FightBack would cover their legal fees. The Madison lawyers quickly concluded that the #FightBack arrangement wouldn’t work for them. Van Wagner told me, “When you have crowdfunding of a criminal defense, they take over—they have their own political agenda.” He recalled that one #FightBack conference call began with “Hello, patriots!”
The defense attorneys also found Pierce and Wood’s media presence compromising. On September 7th, they e-mailed Wood: “Almost all of the news today about Kyle’s case centers not on the case itself but on the two lawyers who have publicly identified themselves as his lawyers, as well as on the ‘cause’-oriented Foundation.” They reminded Wood that a “proper defense” of Rittenhouse should be the “lone objective.”
Around this time, Pierce announced that he was stepping away from #FightBack’s board, and tweeted that he wanted to “avoid any appearance of $$ conflict.” But, in the e-mail, Van Wagner and Goetz told Wood that they could not proceed unless the foundation addressed “financial questions swirling around” Pierce. They asked Wood to deposit the Rittenhouse donations into a conventional bank-trust account “under the sole control of Kyle’s mother along with a bank trustee.” This would “ensure that the funds are used solely for the purposes for which people donated them.”
These demands were not met, and the Madison lawyers left the case.
#FightBack’s Web site noted that contributions could be channelled to associated law firms, “for other purposes.” The foundation had announced a fund-raising goal of five million dollars, for bail and other costs, and at first the site displayed a progress bar—$1.9 million on September 23rd; $2.1 million on October 1st. The ongoing tally was then replaced with a simple “Donate Now” button.
On October 30th, Rittenhouse was extradited from Illinois to Wisconsin. His first Kenosha County court appearance was scheduled for a few days later. Wood tweeted that #FightBack needed to “raise $1M” before then. Wisconsin is a cash-bail state: a defendant must pay the full amount in order to await trial outside of jail. The court had set Rittenhouse’s bail at two million dollars. Given that #FightBack had supposedly reached that benchmark weeks earlier, Wendy wondered if the #FightBack lawyers were leaving Kyle in jail as a fund-raising ploy. (Wood calls the notion “blatantly false.”)
In mid-November, Wood reported that Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, had “committed $50K to Kyle Rittenhouse Defense Fund.” Lindell says that he thought his donation was going toward fighting “election fraud.” The actor Ricky Schroder contributed a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Pierce finally paid Rittenhouse’s bail, with a check from Pierce Bainbridge, on November 20th—well over a month after #FightBack’s Web site indicated that the foundation had the necessary funds.
The fact that a suspect in a double homicide could raise so much money and get out of jail struck many people as another example of an unfair system. The minister Bernice King, the youngest child of Martin Luther King, Jr., tweeted that Kalief Browder “was held at the Rikers Island jail complex, without trial, for allegedly stealing a backpack.” (Browder spent three years at Rikers, and later hanged himself.)
Moments after Rittenhouse was released, he jumped into an S.U.V. driven by Dave Hancock, a former Navy SEAL who now worked in security. Hancock told me that he started working for Wood in March, 2020, and became #FightBack’s executive director that September, but found Wood’s volatility untenable. “He has no filter, and no bottom,” Hancock told me. One night in October, during an argument, Wood grabbed Hancock’s handgun from his holster. Hancock and Wood parted ways.
Hancock was still on decent terms with Pierce, though, and had said yes when Pierce asked him to “extract” Kyle from Kenosha. In the S.U.V., Hancock gave Rittenhouse new clothes from Bass Pro Shops and an order of Chicken McNuggets, then drove to Indiana. Pierce, a Notre Dame graduate, had relocated Rittenhouse’s family to a “safe house” near South Bend. The arrangement astonished one attorney, who later said, “Why does Wendy Rittenhouse think she’s entitled to a free lawyer and free housing? Because John Pierce and Lin Wood told her she was.”
The night of the family’s reunion, Ricky Schroder showed up. Rittenhouse happily posed for a photograph with him and Pierce, who was staying nearby. Rittenhouse wore a T-shirt, bought by Hancock, that bore the image of a gun’s crosshairs and the words “Black Rifle Coffee Company,” a roaster that sells a blend called Murdered Out. The photograph wound up on Twitter. The family of Huber, the man shot in the heart, had released a statement decrying attempts to celebrate “armed vigilantes who cause death and chaos in the streets.” Black Rifle soon declared that it “does not have a relationship” with Rittenhouse.
The Rittenhouses had accepted #FightBack funds without hesitation, but they were growing uncomfortable with Pierce. They say that he drank excessively in front of Wendy’s kids; called Faith, who supported Bernie Sanders, a “raging liberal”; and billed the family for time spent shopping for a shirt to wear on Tucker Carlson’s show. Pierce also appeared determined to monetize Rittenhouse’s story, and had been exploring book and film deals.
Hancock, who expressed concerns that Pierce was exploiting the family, was sensitive about financial impropriety. In 2012, he’d been accused of mismanaging an online fund-raiser that he’d established to support SEAL families. Hancock showed me documents indicating that, after an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.
Wood, for his part, now seemed preoccupied less with Rittenhouse’s case than with exposing “election fraud.” #FightBack was asked to stop featuring Rittenhouse in its fund-raising efforts. Wendy says that she has pressed both the foundation and Pierce for a comprehensive accounting of donations and expenditures, but has not received the information. (Pierce refused to answer questions from this magazine.)
Last fall, Pierce sought a formal place on Rittenhouse’s criminal-defense team. #FightBack had hired Mark Richards, a veteran defense lawyer in Racine. Richards didn’t tweet and considered it “unethical as hell” to discuss cases on social media; he saved his arguments for court. Richards was also a liberal Democrat. He’d told conservatives involved in Rittenhouse’s case, “You and I aren’t going to be going to the same parties on Election Night.”
Courts routinely grant out-of-state lawyers pro-hac-vice status, allowing them to practice “for this occasion.” But the Kenosha prosecutors objected to Pierce’s petition to join the defense team. On December 3rd, they argued in a motion that the combination of his substantial debt and his connection to #FightBack—a “slush fund” with “unregulated and opaque” finances—offered “ample opportunity for self-dealing and fraud.” (#FightBack eventually must disclose certain financial details to the I.R.S., but there is no immediate avenue for public oversight.)
Pierce then abandoned his attempt to join the case and announced that he was “taking over all civil matters for Kyle including his future defamation claims.” He would also be “orchestrating all fundraising for defense costs.” On Newsmax, he said that the defense was “going to need millions of dollars” to litigate “probably the most important case, honestly, in the history of self-defense in the Anglo-American legal system.”
The Rittenhouses, with Hancock’s help, launched their own Web site and raised money by selling “Free Kyle” merchandise, including a $39.99 hoodie and a $42.99 bikini. The merchandise featured a slogan said to have been uttered by Rittenhouse: “Self-Defense Is a Right, Not a Privilege.” The attorney for Grosskreutz, the third man shot, complained to a Wisconsin news channel that Wendy was “trying to profit off of these tragedies,” adding, “It’s frankly vile.”
Eventually, the two million dollars in bail money could be returned to Pierce Bainbridge. A former client of Pierce’s recently heard about this possibility and posted an admonishment on YouTube: “You’re trying to boogie with his money, bro.” In June, Pierce announced that he had launched another nonprofit, the National Constitutional Law Union, as a counterpart to the A.C.L.U. The organization’s Web site noted that a “substantial amount of funds raised” would be “paid to a law firm owned and/or controlled by the founder.”
Throughout the pandemic, Rittenhouse’s pretrial hearings were held on Zoom. He usually sat silently in a mask next to Richards, in Richards’s office. One hearing occurred on January 5th, two days after Rittenhouse turned eighteen. His mother joined him, along with Hancock, who now oversaw the family’s safety and wore a handgun at the small of his back. Several volunteer lookouts, whom Hancock says that he met through Pierce, stood watch outside Richards’s building.
Afterward, Hancock drove the Rittenhouses to lunch. One of the lookouts also went to the restaurant, and was joined by friends. The group ate at another table and then offered to take Rittenhouse out for a beer. When Hancock balked, Rittenhouse pointed out that, in Wisconsin, someone his age can legally drink at a bar if a parent is present. Wendy agreed to go.
Hancock drove the Rittenhouses to Pudgy’s, a bar near Racine. Outside, Rittenhouse vaped. He had changed out of his dress clothes and into a backward baseball cap and a T-shirt bearing the message “Free as F--k.” When his drinking buddies arrived, they wanted photographs with him. Rittenhouse posed with a hefty guy in a Brewers cap, flashing a thumbs-up. A bearded man in a gray hoodie stepped up next, and made the “O.K.” sign. Rittenhouse noticed, then did the same.
Inside, the bartender handed him the first of three beers. Customers came up to Rittenhouse and shook his hand. Someone on the far side of the room surreptitiously took photographs, and these images soon surfaced online. To detractors, Rittenhouse, with his “Free as F--k” shirt and alcohol, looked like he was trolling.
Binger, the prosecutor, obtained the bar’s surveillance footage and could see that Rittenhouse’s group ultimately consisted of about ten people, all but two of them men. The party stayed at Pudgy’s for nearly two hours. Rittenhouse appeared unfamiliar with his hosts yet pleased to be there. Wendy, drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade, hovered off to the side with Hancock.
At one point, five of the men started singing: “I’ve been one rotten kid / Some son, some pride and some joy.” The larger group eventually took a photograph with Rittenhouse in which most of them made the “O.K.” sign. Both the gesture and the song—“Proud of Your Boy,” from the stage production of Disney’s “Aladdin”—are hallmarks of the Proud Boys. The organization, which originated in 2016 as a club for “Western chauvinists,” with a logo of a rooster weathervane pointing west, has become a home for right-wing extremists who embrace violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Proud Boys as a hate group, and in Canada they are considered a terrorist entity. Associates are known to wear T-shirts that say “6MWE”—“Six Million Wasn’t Enough,” a Holocaust reference—and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong!” The “O.K.” sign can be code for “white power.”
After the Kenosha shootings, the Proud Boys had made Rittenhouse an extension of their pro-violence message. At a far-right rally attended by many Proud Boys, the crowd had chanted “Good job, Kyle!” The group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio, was photographed wearing a T-shirt that said “Kyle Rittenhouse Did Nothing Wrong!”
Hours before the Pudgy’s outing, Pierce texted Wendy, “Just got retained by Chandler Pappas.” Pappas had been charged, in Oregon, with macing six police officers during an assault on the state capitol, in protest of COVID-19 restrictions. He was a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, and had appeared at a Proud Boys rally with Tarrio, who had been charged, in Washington, D.C., with property destruction and firearms-related offenses. In a tweet, Pierce gave the impression that he was representing both defendants.
The Rittenhouses say that they didn’t know who either Pappas or Tarrio was at the time. Hancock, who has become one of the family’s advisers, says that neither he nor the Rittenhouses grasped the meaning of “Proud of Your Boy” or the “O.K.” gesture, and didn’t realize that any of the men at Pudgy’s were Proud Boys. Though Hancock is a security professional, he told me that he hadn’t learned the names of the men who had volunteered as lookouts or invited Rittenhouse to the bar. Explicit clues about the men’s affiliations existed in plain sight. When I examined the Pudgy’s surveillance footage, I noticed “Proud Boy” tattooed on one man’s forearm; another man had a tattoo of the rooster weathervane from the Proud Boys logo.
The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol occurred the next day. Federal authorities have charged numerous presumed Proud Boys, including one alleged organizer, Ethan Nordean, who had publicly praised Rittenhouse as a “stud.” Lin Wood had tweeted that Vice-President Mike Pence should be executed by firing squad, and would later call him a “TRAITOR, a Communist Sympathizer & a Child Molester.” On the morning of the attack, Wood tweeted, “The time has come Patriots.”
Six days after the Capitol assault, Rittenhouse and his mother flew with Pierce to Miami for three days. The person who picked them up at the airport was Enrique Tarrio—the Proud Boys leader. Tarrio was Pierce’s purported client, and not long after the shootings in Kenosha he had donated a hundred dollars or so to Rittenhouse’s legal-defense fund. They all went to a Cuban restaurant, for lunch.
The Rittenhouses would not say what was discussed at the meal. Hancock, who wasn’t there, clearly understood that it didn’t look good. He insisted to me that the Rittenhouses were uncomfortable with the meeting, and blamed Pierce for orchestrating the encounter and exposing Rittenhouse “to elements that hurt him.” Hancock, who told me that the Proud Boys are “fucking losers,” said that Rittenhouse initially “may have thought it was kind of cool to see people fighting for him, but when he learned what they were all about it didn’t sit well with him.” He added, “He’s just as horrified by the white-supremacist part of it as anybody.”
The Miami lunch did not become publicly known. But the next day the prosecutors in Kenosha filed a motion—based on the surveillance footage from Pudgy’s—asking the court to make it a condition of Rittenhouse’s bond that he avoid contact with “known members of any violent white power / white supremacist groups.”
The Rittenhouses stayed at a Courtyard Marriott in Coral Gables. According to Hancock, the family didn’t see Tarrio again. The court soon accepted the modification to Rittenhouse’s bond agreement, and also restricted him from possessing or consuming alcohol.
Rittenhouse fired Pierce, via FaceTime, on February 1st. Since then, Hancock told me, he has advised the family to reject overtures from other extremist figures and to stop appearing on right-wing media programs. Meanwhile, he was battling Wood, who had accused him of hacking #FightBack’s network and taking the donor list. The police chief in Yemassee, South Carolina, where Wood lives, recently issued a felony warrant against Hancock. Hancock denies any wrongdoing.
The Kenosha prosecutors’ petition calling #FightBack a “slush fund” has led Hancock to establish a more conventional trust for the Rittenhouses, modelled on the arrangement that Van Wagner and Goetz described in their e-mail to Wood. According to Hancock, it has so far raised nearly half a million dollars. He told me that most donations are between twenty and fifty dollars, but, citing privacy concerns, he wouldn’t release a list of donors. He also wouldn’t discuss details of his payment agreement with the Rittenhouses. He said of the #FightBack debacle, “It was never meant to become this grossly political B.S. that morphed into ‘election fraud’ and militias adopting Kyle. The point was to fund his criminal defense.”
After breaking with Pierce, the Rittenhouses left Indiana. In April, I met them at their new place, whose location I agreed not to disclose. My request for an interview had repeatedly been refused, but Hancock had facilitated a meeting. There were substantial restrictions: the Rittenhouses would answer questions about their family history, and about such figures as Pierce, but—as is common with homicide defendants—we could not directly discuss the case.
When the Rittenhouses fled Antioch, they abandoned most of their possessions. Donors re-outfitted them: their current place had a new sectional sofa, a Keurig coffeemaker, and bed linens from Walmart. Each family member had a bedroom. All three siblings, including Faith, who is twenty, were back in high school, online, and using new computers that Hancock had provided.
Before I arrived, Wendy set out platters of deli meats, and made a dip of cream cheese and canned chili. Rittenhouse was in his room, but Wendy took me to meet him briefly. He had on a dark-blue hoodie and black Lululemon slacks. Behind him were PlayStation controls and a desktop computer. He had been researching where to apply to college, and said that he hoped to go into pediatric nursing. He later explained, “Seeing how my mom and her co-workers work with their patients, and how they treat their families—those people are having the worst day of their lives, and they need somebody to fall onto and rely on. That’s something I want to do.”
In the den, Wendy and Faith sat together on the sofa and Hancock perched at one end. The family clearly hoped to distance themselves from some of the people who had surrounded them. Wendy said of the Rittenhouses’ decision to break with Pierce, “Kyle was John’s ticket out of debt.” She was pressing Pierce to return forty thousand dollars in donated living expenses that she believed belonged to the family, and told me that Pierce had refused: “He said we owed him millions—he ‘freed Kyle.’ ”
The Rittenhouses, with considerable input from Hancock, described Kyle as selfless (“He has this nature to protect people”) and ideologically open-minded (“huge Andrew Yang fan”). The Rittenhouses did not see themselves as particularly political, but Faith considered herself an ardent advocate of Black Lives Matter. I was told that Kyle liked Trump because Trump liked the police.
They insisted that Kyle was not racist, and made a point of explaining that the Rittenhouses have Black relatives. The whole family agreed that the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had murdered George Floyd, and Faith said that she had attended a march protesting the killing. She had actively disapproved of her brother’s support of Trump, especially given Trump’s misogyny, but said that Rittenhouse knew “how to respect women.” I raised an obvious discrepancy: the punching incident. Wendy said, “I told Kyle, ‘Never hit a girl.’ I also told Kyle, ‘Always defend your sisters.’ ”
The Rittenhouses told me that Kyle used to travel with a combat-grade tourniquet tucked in his boot, and that he had distributed tourniquets to his family. When I asked what he had kept in his first-aid kits, Hancock called him out of his bedroom, and Rittenhouse instantly provided a list: airway kits, tourniquets, QuikClot hemostatic gauze, gloves, splints, bandages, cotton swabs, tweezers, C.P.R. masks—“not the cheap ones.” His determination to appear prepared, or strong, suggested an adolescent’s need to prove himself. At the Antioch police station, he had said, “I’m not a child anymore.”
The night of the shootings, Wendy had a bad feeling, and called Rittenhouse. “I’m doing medical,” he told her. The gunfire started moments later. “That day, I felt a part of me die,” Wendy told me. Faith said, “Because Kyle had to defend himself? And, if he didn’t, he would have died?” Wendy said, “Yeah.” She started to cry: “He didn’t want to kill them!”
Faith overtly acknowledged the deaths. “I’m sorry to the families—we all are sorry,” she said, adding, “We think about it—a lot.” Wendy remained stuck on the idea that if Kyle “didn’t have that gun he’d be dead.” She seemed unwilling to grasp that if a bunch of civilians hadn’t been carrying rifles that night, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
In 2017, Dwayne Dixon, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, heard about an upcoming Ku Klux Klan rally in Durham. He showed up to counter-protest with a semi-automatic rifle. Dixon belonged to Redneck Revolt, whose members believed in arming themselves in self-defense against white supremacists.
The rally never materialized, but the sheriff’s department charged Dixon with two misdemeanors: “going armed to the terror of the people” and carrying a weapon to a demonstration. There was precedent. In 1968, during the civil-rights movement, the North Carolina Supreme Court had upheld the need for restricting loaded weapons, noting, “In this day of social upheaval one can perceive only dimly the tragic consequences to the people if either night riders or daytime demonstrators, fanatically convinced of the righteousness of their cause, could legally arm themselves.” Public safety was jeopardized when firearms were “ready to be used on every outbreak of ungovernable passion.”
But times had changed. The first of Dixon’s charges was dropped, and a judge ultimately dismissed the count of “carrying a weapon,” citing Dixon’s First Amendment and Second Amendment rights.
After arresting Dixon, the sheriff had declared that he could not “ignore the inherent danger that comes with untrained individuals operating as a self-appointed security force in our streets.” The climate has only worsened since then. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence recently began compiling a list of demonstrations that attract visibly armed protesters or counter-protesters. Throughout 2020 and early 2021, there were more than sixty such events, in twenty-four states and in Washington, D.C.
Many state laws supersede city ordinances, making it impossible for cities and towns—even those with rising gun violence—to set constraints on guns. Not long ago, officials in Boulder, Colorado, banned “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, but in March a judge blocked the ban, saying that the local government had no control over the extent to which people can be armed in public. Ten days after the judge intervened, a shooter killed ten people at a Boulder grocery store.
In May, Washington State banned civilians from openly carrying firearms at permitted demonstrations. The ban’s primary sponsor, Patty Kuderer, has said, “The purpose of bringing a weapon to a public demonstration is not to protect yourself, it’s to intimidate.” Other states, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Texas, later this year, will allow people to carry handguns without a permit, and in California there are new legal challenges to long-standing bans on AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines. The availability of guns correlates with gun violence. During the ten years of the federal ban on assault weapons—1994 to 2004—the number of mass-shooting events diminished. Last year, the U.S. broke records for gun sales and reached the highest level of gun homicides in decades.
Thirty states have adopted “stand your ground” laws, further institutionalizing civilian use of lethal force. Robyn Thomas, the Giffords Law Center’s executive director, told me that such laws urgently need to be repealed, because, among other things, they distort the notion of civic responsibility: “You have this misconception of a hero with a gun being the answer to public safety, when it’s exactly the opposite.” Armed civilians assume that they are “doing good” partly because “the system propagates that mythology, by passing laws that allow for it.”
In Wisconsin, determining if someone acted in self-defense involves the question of who initiated the aggression. But, as in many states, there is no clear definition of provocation. As John D. Moore explained in a 2013 article in the Brooklyn Law Review, in some parts of the country a person forfeits the privilege of self-defense merely by having shown up at a “foreseeably dangerous situation.” Moore argued that the varying standards make it harder for citizens to “fairly distinguish between the vigilant and the vigilante.” Wisconsin’s law favors someone who “in good faith withdraws from the fight,” yet there is not always a duty to retreat. At Rittenhouse’s trial, which is scheduled to begin on November 1st, the jury may need to find only that when he pulled the trigger he reasonably feared death or great bodily harm.
Many people in Wisconsin expect the jury to determine that the D.A. overreached when he imposed the charge of intentional homicide. Yet Rittenhouse could still go to prison if jurors hold him accountable for the deaths. The Harvard law professor Noah Feldman recently wrote that, though Rittenhouse presumably will claim that he feared having his gun wrested away and used against him, it’s only “the presence of Rittenhouse’s own weapon” that gives him “the opportunity to claim that he was in fear of bodily harm.” Thomas told me that if Rittenhouse hadn’t concluded that it was his responsibility to venture, armed, into a “hot environment,” he “wouldn’t have been in harm’s way, and he certainly wouldn’t have hurt anyone else.”
In a recent hearing, Bruce Schroeder, the judge who will preside over Rittenhouse’s trial, stressed the importance of sticking to “the facts and the evidence.” He demanded “a trial that’s fair to the defendant, which is his constitutional guarantee, and to the public, which is my responsibility.”
But, thanks to the opportunists who have seized on the Rittenhouse drama, the case has been framed as the broadest possible referendum on the Second Amendment. No other legal case presents such a vivid metaphor for the country’s polarization. Many of Rittenhouse’s supporters have described the shootings almost in cathartic terms, as if they were glad that he killed people. If a jury appears to sanction vigilantism, it seems likely that more altercations between protesters and counter-protesters will turn deadly.
Thomas sees the case as “a bellwether,” putting “guns at the forefront of the stability of our democracy.” Protecting citizens’ safety “is a primary function of our government,” she said. “Yet it’s gotten to the point where this idea that you have a right to carry a loaded weapon is starting to literally overtake other rights—the right to express your vote, the right to assemble without fear.”
Anthony Fauci. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)
Around 99 percent of recent COVID-19 deaths in the United States involved unvaccinated people, the country’s top infectious disease expert said, characterizing it as a “tragic” situation. “It’s terrible, particularly for those of us who’ve dealt with diseases in which you don’t have an effective countermeasure,” Fauci said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “When you have a situation like you have today—where you have a formidable enemy in the virus that has tragically really disrupted our planet for a year and a half … and yet we do have a countermeasure that’s highly, highly effective.”
Even as general vaccination rates increase across the country, the delta variant could lead to a sharp rise in cases in areas where hesitancy is particularly high. There’s a “disparity in the willingness to be vaccinated,” Fauci said. “So there are some states where the level of vaccination of individuals is 35% or less. Under those circumstances, you might expect to see spikes in certain regions, in certain states, cities, or counties.” That likely increase means even fully vaccinated people should “go the extra mile” and make an effort to wear masks in areas where vaccination rates are low.
Fauci called on people to stop thinking about vaccines as a political issue and merely recognize that they save lives. “We’re dealing with a historic situation with this pandemic, and we do have the tools to counter it,” he said. “So for goodness’ sake, put aside all of those differences and realize that the common enemy is the virus.” In much of the world, Fauci said, there are people “who would do anything to get vaccines.”
Fauci’s plea came as a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Sunday revealed that only 45 percent of Republicans have received at least one shot, compared to 86 percent of Democrats. While only 6 percent of Democrats say they aren’t likely to get vaccinated, almost half of Republicans—47 percent—say the same thing. Almost four in 10 Republicans say they will definitely not get vaccinated against COVID-19 while 22 percent of independents feel the same way. Among the unvaccinated, 60 percent say U.S. officials are exaggerating the risk of the delta variant.
In May, President Joe Biden had set the goal of giving 70 percent of the population at least one COVID-19 shot by July 4. In the end, only 20 states, Washington, D.C. and two territories reached that goal.
Amazon workers. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
This is the most boring possible Terminator sequel - the robots are here to text you snidely that you won’t need to come into work ever again
e were initially anxious about the introduction of robots into our workforce because of the potential disappearance of manual labor jobs. Robots would take over factories, we were told, they’d drive our cars and trucks, and they would do all of the cleaning that janitorial and domestic workers are currently hired to do. But it turns out auto-pilots drive cars about as well as my cat when he’s drunk, and the way my friend’s Roomba always gets lost under the kitchen table, spinning uselessly, unable to find his way out, suggests we’ll still need people with brooms for a while now.
Instead, the robots are here not to replace this lower tier of underpaid and undervalued work. They are here to smugly sit in the middle, monitoring and surveilling us, hiring and firing us. Amazon has recently replaced its middle management and human resources workers with artificial intelligence to determine when a worker has outlived their usefulness and needs to be let go. There is no human to appeal to, no negotiating with a bot. This is the most boring possible Terminator sequel, where the robots aren’t here to murder or enslave you but rather to text you snidely that you won’t need to come into work tomorrow or, for that matter, ever again.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Flex drivers, who are Amazon contract workers and not granted the protections reserved for full-time employees, are being hired and fired via an app. A software program monitors each worker to determine whether they are working quickly enough, whether they are driving safely enough, and whether they are efficiently meeting their delivery quotas. That this program is rife with errors and punishes workers for things that are not their fault, from traffic problems to incorrect delivery directions, does not seem to concern Amazon. Workers have often complained about the unfair monitoring and lack of human oversight, but Amazon has maintained its system.
It’s not even difficult to figure out why. Jeff Bezos, who keeps promising us he is going to leave Earth and go to space but here he still is, seems to believe all workers are inherently lazy. And look, it’s always very helpful when our billionaire overlords just say the evil thing out loud so we don’t have to speculate. The man who designed Amazon’s warehouses has pretty much said that Amazon’s systems are set up to promote high employee turnover, because longer-term workers are more comfortable and less desperate to please.
The desperation is key. When human beings are uncertain about why things are happening to them, or feel a general loss of control over the outcomes of their own actions (because, say, they are doing their job to the best of their ability but are suddenly, mysteriously, fired), it causes anxiety and desperation. It makes superstitious pigeons out of all of us, flapping our wings wildly in the hopes we can recreate the conditions that once got us rewarded.
This system works for Amazon because the US maintains a large population of insecure and underpaid workers. (And by insecure, I don’t mean the same insecurity that drives our billionaires to compensate for a sadness deep down inside with extravagant wealth. I mean a lack of stability in finances and housing.) Bezos and others like him seem to think there is an endless supply of people available to be churned through their system and spat out when convenient. And, until recently, they were not wrong.
The terrible working conditions of Amazon delivery drivers has made headlines for years, but Amazon has not struggled to fill those jobs – even as delivery vans are targets of theft and looting, and delivery drivers are harassed and followed by residents through neighborhoods. In an open letter to Jeff Bezos last year, Abe Collier wrote about his experience working as an Amazon delivery driver and the pressures put upon him during a work day: intentionally dehydrating himself because of the lack of bathrooms, unrealistic expectations for speed of deliveries, hostility from passersby, physical strain. But Collier also wanted to make it clear that he was grateful for the opportunity to be mistreated in this way. He wasn’t eligible for unemployment benefits, and, he wrote, “Due to the pandemic, I was desperate for any income.” That gratitude was also behind the recent failure to unionize at an Amazon warehouse. Many workers spoke of being grateful for the work, as bad pay is better than no pay.
But thanks to the recent extension of unemployment benefits due to the pandemic, fewer workers are feeling the desperation that allows Amazon to treat its workers so cavalierly, as if they were disposable objects. Many employers who have overworked and underpaid workers are finding themselves without a staff to abuse, as people decide to prioritize their families or their health or just not being yelled at for $8 an hour over the “dignity of work”.
While politicians pout about the possibility of having to raise the minimum wage to $15, a level that would have sustained a decent life 10 years ago maybe, it’s likely these unemployment benefits will be allowed to expire and the safety net will be removed once again. Amazon isn’t going to change on its own unless forced to, and that means giving people the power – and the money – to say no to their own exploitation.
President Barack Obama speaks near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Saturday, March 7, 2015, in Selma, Ala. This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of 'Bloody Sunday,' a civil rights march in which protestors were beaten, trampled and tear-gassed by police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. (photo: Bill Frakes/AP)
In our country, criticism is constant, disagreement is perpetual, our understanding of our own history is constantly challenged. Every generation finds something — often many things — that previous generations left in a state of terrible disrepair.
Advertising’s “new and improved” trope speaks to a restless place where things are never good enough. We’re the land of new births of freedom, New Deals and New Frontiers.
We embrace patriotic symbols with such ferocity that our protests are frequently organized around them. Athletes who take a knee during our national anthem are wrongly described as disrespectful. On the contrary: They are taking the country at its word. If we’re going to sing that we’re “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” we ought to be that place.
So it should be no surprise that we have complicated attitudes toward our Founders. We can revere them for having established an extraordinary constitutional republic that grew, after much struggle and bloodshed, into something closer to a democracy. And we can also call out those among them who were slaveholders and note — it’s one of many disturbing facts — that the Constitution they wrote counted enslaved Black Americans as merely three-fifths of a person.
There is a long history, encompassing Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., of invoking our Founders’ aspirations to criticize them — and all of us since — for failing to deliver on their ringing assertion that “all men are created equal.”
“It is obvious today,” King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ”
Then he added: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
That refusal to give up is at once an act of protest and an act of patriotism. We continue to demand that promissory note’s redemption.
I should pause here to thank Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal for writing a column last week with the provocative headline: “Progressives Disdain America but Love Being Free to Do So.”
These reflections are inspired by two questions he asked those of us on the left: “Is there anything that would actually make them love this country?” And: “Do they understand why so many people — not only in America — admire it?”
I want Baker to enjoy celebrating this July Fourth weekend in the knowledge that progressives love this country for many reasons, not the least being the freedom embodied in the second half of his headline.
Progressives admire our country, too. Our criticisms of its failures, past and present, are part of a long, productive and morally grounded tradition of protest.
If Baker wants a glimpse of what progressive patriotism looks like, he might consult the speech President Barack Obama gave in Selma, Ala., in 2015, honoring the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights.
“America,” Obama said, is “not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes. We are boisterous and diverse and full of energy, perpetually young in spirit. That’s why someone like John Lewis at the ripe old age of 25 could lead a mighty march.”
Progressives love our country so much that we know it’s strong enough to acknowledge how racism, nativism, religious prejudice, and other forms of injustice and intolerance are embedded in our nation’s story.
True love can never mean pretending that the object of your affections is perfect, as Baker acknowledges. It means believing that the person or country you revere is capable of transformation — and having confidence that school kids won’t love their country any less if they’re taught honestly about its flaws, its failures and even its grave sins.
In the process, they’ll also learn about the courageous Americans who rose up to right wrongs, to battle smugness, to challenge oppression and to include everyone in the magnificent “We” that opens our Constitution.
Accepting that the United States embodies a never-ending argument might encourage us to treat each other a trifle more respectfully, to listen at least a little, and to acknowledge that it’s usually critics and dissenters who move us to take our country’s promises seriously.
Carol Anderson: 'For too long, the second amendment has been portrayed with a founding fathers aura swaddled in the stars and stripes.' (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
s gun violence soars in the United States, we look at the Second Amendment and its racist roots with Carol Anderson, author of the new book, “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.” In the book, Anderson details how the Second Amendment was written to empower local militia groups to put down slave revolts and protect plantation owners. She writes the Second Amendment is “rooted in fear of Black people, to deny them their rights, to keep them from tasting liberty.” Carol Anderson joined us from Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University. She is also the author of “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy” and “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
As gun violence soars in the United States, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the Second Amendment and its racist roots. Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh and I recently interviewed Carol Anderson, author of the new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. In the book, Professor Anderson details how the Second Amendment was written to empower local militia groups to put down slave revolts and protect plantation owners. She writes the Second Amendment is, quote, “rooted in fear of Black people, to deny them their rights, to keep them from tasting liberty.”
Professor Anderson joined us from Atlanta, where she teaches at Emory University. She’s also the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and also White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. I began by asking her to go back in time and talk about where the Second Amendment came from.
CAROL ANDERSON: This emerged out of the fear of Black people, from slavery, that there was this massive fear about the slave revolt, Black people demanding their freedom, being willing to have an uprising to gain their freedom. And what that meant then was that you had this language of “We’ve got to keep this ferocious monster in chains.” And you saw, with each revolt, with each uprising, a series of statutes being put in place to say that African — that the enslaved, that Black people could not own weapons, that they could not have access to weapons. And you also saw the rise in the structure of slave patrols and militias, that were there and designed to contain that Black population.
As the nation began to develop, as you had this war of independence, there was this fear of arming Black people, the fear that even freed Blacks who were armed would get — would provide a kind of sense of what freedom looked like to the enslaved. But the exigencies of war required that arming, required having Black folks in the Continental Army. But as the nation developed after that war, one of the things that you had happening was with the Constitution, with the drafting of the Constitution. Because the militias themselves had proven so untrustworthy, unreliable as a force to fight against the British invasion, that James Madison, in drafting the Constitution, had language in there that you would have federal control of the militias.
Well, when the Constitution went up for ratification to the states, by the time it got to Virginia, the Anti-Federalists in Virginia were in an uproar. George Mason and Patrick Henry were thinking about this militia being under the control of the federal government. They were like, “We will be left defenseless. We cannot trust the federal government, that has these folks from Pennsylvania and these folks from Massachusetts, to be willing to engage the militia when the slaves revolt. We cannot trust the federal government to protect us. We will be left defenseless.” And they began to demand a Bill of Rights that would provide protection, that would curtail federal power. And they began to demand, as well, a new constitutional convention.
That threat of what that meant sent James Madison into the 1st Congress determined to write a Bill of Rights that would quell that dissent, that would short-circuit that movement for a new constitutional convention. And we’ve already seen what the power of the South has meant, in terms of the — when the Constitution was being drafted itself, how the South said that “We will not sign on to become part of this United States of America if we don’t get the three-fifths clause, if we don’t get 20 additional years on the Atlantic slave trade, if we don’t get a Fugitive Slave Clause.” And so the South had already wielded its power in terms of being willing to scuttle the United States of America. And Madison believed strongly that this threat coming out of the Anti-Federalists in the South, out of Virginia, would do the same thing. And that becomes the basis for the Second Amendment.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about all of the players — I mean, you just mentioned James Madison, Patrick Henry, the slave states — and how this country came together based on this terror of slaves rebelling?
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. I mean, so —
AMY GOODMAN: Enslaved people rebelling?
CAROL ANDERSON: Yeah, enslaved people rebelling. And that fear that — you know, so you have George Washington, who is a slave owner, who brings, in fact, some of his enslaved people to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention. You have Thomas Jefferson, who is not there, but he is writing in to Madison, and Madison is writing to him. And one of the things that Jefferson is concerned about is slavery, is the way that it will be depicted.
And so you have this silence. There is a silence in the Constitution. It’s hovering over the formation of the Constitution, like Banquo’s ghost, haunting it, in shaping it, but not being explicitly said. But it is the power that is creating this sophistry, this really weird “We believe in freedom and equality, but we want 20 additional years on the Atlantic slave trade.” What they said in South Carolina was that “South Carolina would be just a backward place. Our wealth comes from the Negroes. That is our natural resource. And we must protect it at all cost.” So, this is what is part of the tectonic plates moving at this time in this founding of this nation.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Anderson, could you also explain the significance of the Uniform Militia Act of 1792 and its role in ensuring that weapons and guns remained in the hands of white people?
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And so, one of the first laws passed by Congress was the Uniform Militia Act of 1792. What it said was that all able-bodied white men between the ages of 18 and 45 would have to be part of the militia. And so, here in the law, it is specifying white men. And it said that they must own a gun. This is part of — the militia is part of citizenship. It is how you give your service to the nation, how you provide your bona fides, as it were, as an American citizen. And so, white men are the definition of American citizen in this framing, and that they must own a gun. And so, what you see here is that the militia is given this high status in terms of what it means to be able to control a unruly population, what is seen as a dangerous population.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Anderson, could —
CAROL ANDERSON: And interestingly enough — I’m sorry.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, please go ahead.
CAROL ANDERSON: Interestingly enough for me is that we have had Shays’ Rebellion, that happened right before the Constitutional Convention, where white men gathered together to attack the government because they didn’t like a taxation policy, and that the militia would not put down these white men. In fact, you had members of the militia joining this rebellion. And you had to have Boston merchants basically finance a mercenary army to put down Shays’ Rebellion.
But what you didn’t see coming out of that was a law saying, you know, “White men with arms are dangerous. White men with arms attack the government. So we need to ban white men from having access to weapons.” You don’t see that happening. But you do see that happening with slave revolts. You see the language, the laws coming in place, saying they shall not have access, Black people shall not have access to weapons, and that the militia and the slave patrol are there to ensure that Black people do not have access to weapons.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Anderson, it seems — I mean, you begin your book by talking about the police murders of Philando Castile, as well as Alton Sterling, and you point out that the NRA did not come to their defense, despite the fact that they were also killed for having guns in their possession, whereas in a comparable violence perpetrated by white mass violence, the NRA immediately leapt to the defense of the people responsible for that violence, who were white men.
CAROL ANDERSON: Absolutely. And so, there was a basic silence on Philando Castile. There was nothing said about Alton Sterling. And what was said about Philando Castile from the NRA was — and this was only after being pushed by their African American members — was that “We believe that everyone, regardless of race, sexual orientation, should have access to guns, to arms,” but nothing really substantive.
What happened after Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas, with the Branch Davidians, was that Wayne LaPierre called out federal officers as being jackbooted government thugs who believe they have the right to storm into people’s homes and take their guns and kill law-abiding citizens. Several officers had been killed in those events.
And so, to then label the response as jackbooted thugs, when you get silence with Philando Castile, it really led me to — you know, as journalists were asking, “Don’t African Americans have Second Amendment rights?” And that’s what sent me down this path, all the way to the 17th century, to be able to answer that question.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to 2016. And this, you write in your book, Carol Anderson, about how this inspired you to write this whole book. The immediate aftermath of the police shooting of Philando Castile was broadcast live on Facebook by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who’s speaking in the car next to her dying boyfriend as a police officer continues to point the gun into the car. Her little child is in the backseat. A warning to our viewers: The content is deeply disturbing.
DIAMOND REYNOLDS: They killed my boyfriend. He’s licensed. He’s carried to — he’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID in his wallet out his pocket, and he let the officer know that he was — he had a firearm, and he was reaching for his wallet. And the officer just shot him in his arm.
AMY GOODMAN: So, dashcam video released nearly a year later shows the 4-year-old daughter of Diamond Reynolds consoling her heartbroken mother, who’s handcuffed in the back of a police squad car minutes after the St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed Philando.
DAE’ANNE REYNOLDS: Mom, please stop saying cusses and screaming, 'cause I don't want you to get shooted.
DIAMOND REYNOLDS: OK. Give me a kiss. My phone just died. That’s all.
DAE’ANNE REYNOLDS: I can keep you safe.
DIAMOND REYNOLDS: It’s OK. I got it, OK? Come here. I can’t believe they just did that.
AMY GOODMAN: There we hear the crying of Diamond’s daughter. The video was released just days after the police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted of manslaughter. I wanted to ask you, Carol Anderson, to take us on that journey that you took, experiencing all of this, taking it in, telling us who Philando was, talking about the fact that he had a gun — legally had a gun — and told the police officer about it — in fact, had told his mother before, “I’m thinking of not carrying the gun, though it’s legal,” because of — well, I mean, just the day before, another African American man, Alton Sterling, had been killed by police in Louisiana. But you take us on this journey that led to this book.
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And so, it was the killing of Philando Castile. You know, I start off the book going, you know, it was like a snuff film, because we all saw that video image. And it was horrific. It was jarring. And to then get the back story, that this was a man who followed NRA guidelines, saying — letting the officer know that “I have a licensed-carry weapon with me. You have asked for my ID. I am reaching for my ID.” And the officer begins to shoot. So he is killed because he has a weapon, not that he is brandishing the weapon, not that he is threatening anyone. He simply has a weapon.
And that really led me to begin on this journey — as I saw the NRA’s virtual silence on this — on this journey to figure out: Do African Americans have Second Amendment rights? You know, we’re in this moment where the Second Amendment is like hallowed ground. It is sacred. It is one of those things that has been defined as the bedrock of citizenship. And so I started looking.
And as I went on this journey, what I saw was that it wasn’t about guns. It was about the fear of Black people. It was about the fear of Blackness. It was about the societal labeling of Black people as dangerous, as a threat to whites, and that this architecture comes in place in order to contain this Black population, in order to provide security and safety to the white community from this fear of Black people. And you get this really weird matrix happening where Black people are feared but needed. And so, it is the “How do we contain them? How do we snuff out their quest for freedom? How do we snuff out their quest for their basic human rights, while also keeping them as labor without rights? How do we do that? How do we make that subjugation happen? How do we talk about — in this land of the United States of America, how do we talk about freedom but try to keep it contained from this Black population? We don’t want them getting the ether that we’re talking about in this revolutionary moment about freedom and democracy and justice. We don’t want them hearing the words about equality. How do we do that?”
And when there was a revolt in Virginia in 1800 with Gabriel, and Gabriel had fed on the language, the revolutionary language from the United States, from the French Revolution and from the Haitian Revolution, that sent shock waves — shock waves — throughout the United States. And Virginia was trembling at the expansiveness of Gabriel’s revolt. And the response was, you know, the wrong people are getting the word about freedom and democracy. The wrong people are hearing this revolutionary language and thinking that it applies to them.
So, this was the journey that I was on to hear and to get into this milieu of how frightening, how dangerous Black people were seen as, and then to follow it all the way through to the 21st century by looking at: Do Black people have the right to bear arms? Do they have the right to a well-regulated militia? Do they have the right to self-defense? And seeing how in each of those, it has been used against Black people, and that the status, the legal status of Black folk, has not altered that significantly. So, whether enslaved, whether free Black, whether denizen — which was that halfway limbo land between enslaved and citizen — whether newly emancipated freed people, whether Jim Crow Black or whether post-civil rights African American, the right to bear arms, the right to a well-regulated militia and the right to self-defense are in fact fractured. That citizenship is fractured. It is hobbled by this intense anti-Blackness, this fear of Black people, this sense of Black people as a danger to white American society.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Professor Anderson, could you talk about that, in particular, the role of Black militias, which you talk about in the book, their role in the early 19th century, to what use they were deployed, and then how it is that whites stripped Black militias of their official standing?
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And so, in Louisiana, when it was still the Louisiana Territory — it was before the U.S. had purchased it, but it was on its way, it was on its way — you had a well-heeled, well-trained Black militia that had been very effective. Well, as the U.S. came in, one of the first cries coming out of white New Orleans was to strip the Black militia, disband the Black militia. Well, the governor, William Claiborne at the time, you know, at first he’s like, “Yes, you know, asking for more arms, because we have all of these free Blacks, and we’ve got these Black folks with arms,” and so he’s asking for more arms from the federal government. But then he starts noticing how effective this Black militia is, and so he tries to square the circle — white fear and the sense that the Black militia is the only real effective fighting force there, given all of the challenges that are happening in that territory at the time. And so, what he comes up with is to remove the Black officer class from this Black militia and put in white officers, thinking that that will be enough for whites in New Orleans who want the Black militia disbanded.
But then there is a massive, massive slave revolt coming from Charles Deslondes. And this massive slave revolt, that included somewhere between 150 to 500 people, headed to New Orleans, headed to what they believed was freedom, just sent terror through what is called the German Coast of Louisiana. And so, William Claiborne, seeing this massive movement, this massive slave revolt, in fact, begins to enlist the Black militia as part of the forces to take on this slave revolt. And the slave revolt is crushed. I mean, the U.S. Army comes in. The U.S. Navy comes in. You have the white militia that is there, but the Black militia is very effective. And so you have a Black militia fighting against Black folk who are enslaved and trying to be free. The reward that the Black militia received for this was a further push to be disbanded, further push to not have access to be able to purchase arms. They put a law in place that folks of color, Black people, could not buy arms.
Then came the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson is the leader, the military leader, and he sees the British coming in this Battle of New Orleans. And he sees this Black militia, and he’s telling Claiborne, “We need them. This is an effective fighting force.” And Claiborne is like, “Yes, they are. But I’m telling you, they’re just not feeling it right now, because of the way we treat them.” And he’s like, “I will treat them equally. I will treat them with the honor that all soldiers should have. And they will be paid equal to whites. They will receive the same pay. And besides the Black militia, I want two additional battalions.” Claiborne came back, and he said, “You can get the Black militia, but getting two additional battalions is going to be difficult, because whites in this area believe that arming them is arming the enemy.” So, you have Black folks who are identified as the enemy. And in that fighting force, that force beat the British. It was like 3,000 or so of Andrew Jackson’s troops against 8,000 British troops, and they won. And Andrew Jackson was like, “Wow! I knew you guys were good. I just didn’t know how good.” But the response, the reaction to that then, was to send them off as a labor battalion to work in the swamps, that white men didn’t want to go into to do the work.
So, you have this denigration of Black military contributions to fighting for America. And that was a consistent theme that we saw. So you get this erasure of this history and this erasure for the men themselves who are doing the fighting, who are being wounded, who are dealing with the loss of their fighting brethren. That has been the sense that Black men under arms, they’re a threat, and Black men who are trained how to use arms, they’re really a threat. So they must be disarmed after they have served our purpose.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Anderson, I just wanted to follow up on the term you used, “anti-Blackness,” that you’re actually saying that the Second Amendment is not about guns, but it’s about anti-Blackness. Explain.
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. It is about the fear. So, and the best way to do this is to talk about the kind of history that we have about the Second Amendment. We hear the history of the militia, about being this really effective fighting force to fend off a foreign invasion and also being there to fend off domestic tyranny. But what they knew at the time was that the militia had proven to be uneven, unreliable in the war of independence, the war for independence. George Washington was beside himself at the lack of reliability of the militias. Sometimes they would show up, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d fight, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they would just take off and run away. It’s really difficult to form a battle plan when your fighting force is like, “Mmm, I’m not feeling it today.” And it led Gouverneur Morris, who was out of New York and one of the Founding Fathers, to say, “To rely upon the militia against a foreign invasion is like to depend upon a broken reed.” And so, they knew that the militia was really not strong against a professional army. And then there was Shays’ Rebellion. What they saw with Shays’ Rebellion is that you could not really rely upon the militia in order to deal with an uprising and insurrections against government. You could not rely upon them for that.
Where the militia was consistently good was in slave revolts, in crushing slave revolts. And so, this is what led George Mason and Patrick Henry to talk about “We must control our militia. We will be left defenseless against slave revolts if the federal government controls it.” And so, it is that fear of slave revolts, that fear of Black rebellion, the fear of Blacks as a dangerous population that must be controlled by these militias, that was essential in the drafting of the Second Amendment.
When you think about the Bill of Rights, how you’ve got the right to freedom of the press, how you have no state-sponsored religion, how you have freedom of assembly, the right not to be illegally searched and seized, the right to a speedy and fair trial, the right not to have cruel and unusual punishment — and so you see these incredible rights. And then you’ve got this well-regulated militia? The right to bear arms for the security of the state? That amendment is an outlier in this Bill of Rights. And that outlier is because it was the payoff to the South to have a force under state control that could contain Black aspirations, Black freedom quests, that could contain what is seen as a dangerous Black population.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Carol Anderson, professor at Emory University in Atlanta. Her new book is The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. We’ll be back with her after a short break.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. We return to our conversation with Carol Anderson, professor at Emory University in Atlanta. She’s author of the new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. I recently interviewed her with Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Anderson, another issue that you raise in the book as absolutely critical has to do with the denial of the rights of citizenship to Blacks. So, if you could explain the crucial Supreme Court decision here, Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, and how even after the 14th Amendment was passed, Dred Scott continued to take precedence?
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And so, the Dred Scott decision was designed to try to stop the explosion that was happening, the secessionist crisis that was happening in the United States, because there had been a series of events — the Missouri Compromise, the war for Texas, the Kansas — and Bleeding Kansas. All of these things were about the expansion of slavery and the fight to contract slavery.
And so, the Dred Scott decision — so, Dred Scott was a Black man who was enslaved. And his owner had taken him to free-soil states, Wisconsin and to Illinois. And then he was taken to Missouri, which was a slave state. He had argued that because he had been on free soil for years, that he was free.
What this decision said, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, was that Black people were never considered citizens of the United States. They weren’t considered citizens at the founding, with the Constitution. They weren’t considered citizens in that there’s — with the Uniform Militia Act of 1792. They weren’t considered citizens when the secretary of state refused to issue Black people passports, saying they’re not citizens. They’re denied the ability to carry the mail. All of these things prove that they’re not citizens. He said, in this decision, “If they were citizens, they would be able to go easily from state to state. But there were laws that prevented that.” And he said, “And they would be able to carry arms wherever they went.” And so, in there, you see that being able to carry arms is a sign of citizenship in this framing, and is saying they’re not citizens. Dred Scott was the one that said that a Black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect. Dred Scott, in fact, did not stop the crisis. In fact, it added to it. And it helped lead to the Civil War.
After the Civil War, you had Andrew Johnson, as the president of the United States, basically issuing these mass amnesties to the Confederacy, to Confederate leaders, who then reassumed their positions in these states. And they passed constitutions and laws that denied Black people their rights. One of the laws that they passed were the Black Codes. The Black Codes — among other things, besides trying to control labor, the Black Codes said that Black people could not bear arms, they could not have weapons, and that they needed to be disarmed. You had the rise of these paramilitary groups working in league with these neo-Confederate states trying to disarm Black people. You had a bloody massacre, one right after the next. There’s a travelogue of carnage by Carl Schurz, who writes on the report of the conditions in the South that is just harrowing. Historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed calls it a “slow-motion genocide.”
And you have Black troops, Black Union troops, U.S. troops, who are part of the occupying army in the South. You have white Southerners absolutely outraged that you would have Black soldiers — Black soldiers — as an occupying force in what they see as their space. And so they begin to talk about the violence that we’re seeing, the violence that is happening, is because these Black soldiers are here. And if these Black soldiers weren’t here, then this killing wouldn’t be happening. And so Andrew Johnson removes the Black soldiers. First he removes them from the interior of the South and puts them on coastal fortifications, and then, shortly thereafter, removes them as an occupying force in the South altogether. Those Black soldiers saw themselves as a line of defense protecting the newly freed people from the terror that was raining down on them.
So, the denigration of Black soldiers, the attempt to disarm Black people after the war, the language that Black people aren’t really citizens, that Black people are dangerous, and they cannot have access to weapons because it challenges the safety and the security of white Southerners, I mean, that’s what was going on at this time.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Anderson, I wanted to leap forward to ask about how authorities responded to the Black Panthers, which urged Black people to arm themselves in the ’60s. This is Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Self-Defense Party, speaking in 1967.
BOBBY SEALE: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general, and the Black people in particular, to take full note of the racist California Legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could respond to this, Carol Anderson, to respond to Bobby Seale?
CAROL ANDERSON: Yeah, so, what Bobby Seale is talking about is the depth of the police violence and brutality that was raining down on the Black community. The uprisings that we saw in Watts, in Cleveland, in Newark, in Detroit were all fueled not only by those horrific conditions in those places, but also by police brutality. And the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded as a response to the brutality of the Oakland Police Department.
And so, what the Black Panthers did, they said, “We will police the police.” They knew what the law said about open carry in California. And they also knew what the law said about the distance that you had to maintain from a police officer arresting someone. So the Black Panthers would come to those arrests fully armed with the kinds of legal weapons that they were allowed to have. And the police did not like it. They did not like it.
And so, the Oakland Police Department went to Don Mulford, an assemblyman, a California assemblyman, and said, “We need your help. We need to make what the Black Panthers are doing illegal, because currently it’s legal. We stop them, but they’ve got the right kinds of weapons. We can’t arrest them for what they’re doing. We need to be able to make their work illegal.”
And so, what Mulford did, with the help of the NRA, was to write the Mulford Act, which banned open carry, which was a gun control act. And it was a gun control act targeted at the Black Panthers. So, Mulford said, “No, there’s no racial targeting in this at all. This is about the Klan, as well.” But it wasn’t. The letters make it really clear that the genesis for this, the catalyst for it, was the “How do we curtail the Black Panthers? How do we make them illegal?”
AMY GOODMAN: Fascinatingly, moving forward 20 years, I want to go to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, 1991, appearing on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.
WARREN BURGER: If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Which says?
WARREN BURGER: That a well-regulated militia being necessary for the defense of the state, the people’s rights to bear arms. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word “fraud” — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.
AMY GOODMAN: This has been the greatest fraud. We’re going to have to end with this final comment of yours, Professor Anderson.
CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And that fraud has been that swaddling of the Second Amendment in the flag, in patriotism, in a sense of — that the militias were there to protect and defend democracy, when in fact the militia were there, designed to control Black people and deny Black people their rights. So, in the Second Amendment, what we have in the Bill of Rights is the right to destroy Black people’s rights. That is anathema. That is what has been committed.
AMY GOODMAN: What most shocked you in your research?
CAROL ANDERSON: How consistent this anti-Blackness was and how it carries through to today with “stand your ground” laws, how it carries through with the ways that Black people are seen as threats, as monsters, as dangerous, simply because of their very being, and that puts a crosshairs on them. That is — writing this book was hard, because writing about the past and carrying it to the future, in the midst of the killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, was just — in the midst of the pandemic, was just a lot.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Emory University professor Carol Anderson, author of the new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Her other books include One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
And that does it for today’s show. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Carla Wills, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Adriano Contreras. Our general manager is Julie Crosby; our director, Becca Staley. Special thanks to Miriam Barnard, Paul Powell, Mike DiFilippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude and Dennis McCormick. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
Indigenous academic and activist Elisa Loncon was elected as president of the Constituent Convention during the body's first session on July 4 in Santiago. (photo: Javier Torres/AFP)
Elisa Loncon, 58, a political independent, is a Santiago university professor and activist for Mapuche educational and linguistic rights. She was picked by 96 of the 155 men and women, including 17 indigenous people, who make up the constitutional body that will draft a new text to replace Chile's previous magna carta produced during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Loncon accepted the position with fist clenched above her head, telling her colleagues to noisy celebrations: "I salute the people of Chile from the north to Patagonia, from the sea to the mountains, to the islands, all those who are watching us today," she said.
"I am grateful for the support of the different coalitions that placed their trust and their dreams in the hands of the Mapuche nation, who voted for a Mapuche person, a woman, to change the history of this country."
Her election represents a high point in a day of high drama which included the suspension of the delegates' swearing in after protests outside and inside the venue, and clashes with police forced a delay to the event.
Problems arose after marches organised by independent, left-wing and indigenous groups fielding delegates for the constitutional body, as well as other interest groups, met heavily armed police manning barricades outside Santiago's former congress building where the ceremony was being held.
Delegates inside the event then remonstrated with the organisers over heavy-handed police tactics, banging drums and shouting over a youth classical orchestra playing the national anthem.
Amid demands by delegates for "repressive" special forces police to be withdrawn, the electoral court official presiding over the ceremony agreed to suspend the event until midday.
The fracas underscored the intense challenges for the drafting of a new magna carta against a backdrop of deep divisions that still simmer after Chile was torn apart by massive protests that started in October 2019 over inequality and elitism and were fueled by a fierce police response.
The constitutional body was picked by a popular vote in May and is dominated by independent and leftist candidates, some with roots in the protest movement, with a smaller share of more conservative candidates backed by the current centre-right government.
The delegates have vowed to address topics including water and property rights, central bank independence and labour practices, prompting jitters among investors of potentially significant changes to the free market system of the world's top copper producer.
Before the ceremony began, Aymara and Mapuche delegates held spiritual ceremonies with song and dance in the downtown streets surrounding the body's new headquarters and on a nearby hillside.
Unrecognised in the current constitution, they are hoping a new text will afford their nations new cultural, political and social rights.
The commission has up to a year to agree a common rulebook, establish committees and draft a new text.
Leandro Lima, a Southern Cone analyst for Control Risks, said the independents brought "legitimacy" to the process given Chileans' deep mistrust in established politics but a paucity of policymaking experience and deep ideological divisions could cause critical delays to the drafting of the text itself.
Advocates say gray wolves' removal from the endangered species list was premature. (photo: Gary Kramer/AP)
Researchers blame poaching and hunting far beyond quotas after species dropped from endangered list
Poaching and a February hunt that far exceeded kill quotas were largely responsible for the drop-off, University of Wisconsin scientists said.
Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor, said his team’s findings should raise doubts about having another hunting season this fall and serve notice to wildlife managers in other states with wolves.
Removing federal protections “opens the door for antagonists to kill large numbers in short periods, legally and illegally”, Treves and two colleagues said in a paper published by the journal JPeer. “The history of political scapegoating of wolves may repeat itself.”
The US Fish and Wildlife Service dropped gray wolves in the lower 48 states from its list of endangered and threatened species in January, shortly before former Donald Trump left office.
Agency biologists have long argued that the predator has recovered from persecution that nearly wiped it out by the mid-20th century. But environmental and animal-rights groups contend the move was premature because wolves have not returned to most of their historical range. They are pushing the Biden administration to reverse it.
Wisconsin was the first state to resume hunting. Its department of natural resources (DNR) planned to wait until November but was forced to schedule a season in February after a pro-hunting organization won a court order. Officials cut it short after hunters killed 218 wolves, blowing past the target of 119.
Based on population models, Treves and the University of Wisconsin environmental scientists Francisco Santiago-Avila and Karann Putrevu estimate in their paper that people killed an additional 95 to 105 wolves in Wisconsin between 3 November, when the plan to lift federal protections was announced, and mid-April.
They say the deaths reduced the statewide wolf total to between 695 and 751, down from at least 1,034 in spring 2020. That upends the Wisconsin DNR’s objective of keeping the population stable even with hunting, the paper says. The department did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Treves and his colleagues blame more than half of the non-hunting deaths on “cryptic poaching”, or illegal kills in which the poacher leaves no evidence, hiding the animal’s body and destroying its radio collar. Other human-caused deaths could include automobile strikes and government-approved lethal controls for wolves harassing livestock, Treves said.
His previous research has concluded that such poaching worsens when legal protections are relaxed, based largely on numbers of radio-collared wolves that disappear well before the batteries are due to fail.
Treves argues that people who are hostile toward wolves may regard easing of rules as a sign that attacking them is acceptable. A 2017 paper responding to one of his earlier studies described the claim as “based on flawed analysis and unconvincing interpretation of scientific literature”.
Daniel MacNulty, an associate professor of wildlife ecology at Utah State University, questioned the methods Treves and his team used to calculate cryptic poaching for their latest paper, saying more direct evidence was needed.
“I would interpret the findings cautiously,” he said in an interview last week.
Treves said his conclusions were justified by a variety of wolf population and social science data.
The Wisconsin DNR says on its website that it is preparing for a fall hunt “through a transparent and science-based process” that will take into account the February results. The Natural Resources Board is expected to set a kill quota in August.
But that could drive the population dangerously low, Treves said. The February hunt had taken place during the wolves’ breeding season and it was unclear to what extent reproduction had been disrupted, he said.
“Without information on how many pups were born this summer, it’s really fumbling in the dark to plan another hunt,” he said.
Wildlife managers in Michigan and Minnesota are also considering wolf hunts. In some western states, Republican legislators are pushing aggressive methods such as night-time hunts, bounty-like payments and allowing shooting from motorized parachutes, ATVs or snow machines any time of year.
Treves said his paper should caution officials in those states that unreported poaching can be “massive” and should be factored into hunting quotas.
Ed Bangs, a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service wolf recovery coordinator, said it was too early to draw broad conclusions based on the initial Wisconsin season, which he described as a “killing spree” that violated hunting ethics. State wildlife managers were capable of designing science-based hunts that keep wolf populations healthy if politicians and judges let them, he said.
“I have a lot of faith in wolves,” Bangs said. “They’re very resilient and can bounce back.”
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