As distrust in the government and its elected officials rises, a growing number of Americans are taking the law into their own hands.
It is widely understood that, among the many ways Jan. 6, 2021, changed everything, it served as a marker of how far America has traveled on the path to vigilantism. As Sam Tanenhaus so ably explained, the real hallmark of Jan. 6 wasn’t insurrection, defined by Garry Wills as taking up arms “against the government because it is too repressive.”* No, Tanenhaus argues, Jan. 6 was an act of vigilantism, characterized as citizens who “take arms to do the government’s work because the authorities are not repressive enough.”
Chillingly, he writes, the objective of the Jan. 6 rioters was not to push back against an authoritarian House and Senate. It was to substitute the mob’s authority for that of the forces they believed had stolen the 2020 election, including election officials, state authorities, federal and state judges, and the entire Justice Department. The rioters felt justified in storming the seat of government because the government was not doing its job. Because Vice President Mike Pence had declined to decertify the election results, they were persuaded that they needed to do it for him. Hence the gallows. It’s why “Hang Mike Pence” became the battle cry. Having failed to “stop the steal,” the state had failed them. So it was time to take matters into their own hands. Restoring individual liberty by overthrowing a hapless government was the new freedom.
2021 was a banner year for citizen vigilantism, from the self-styled insurrectionists, who believed that freedom required maiming and killing police officers at the Capitol, to Kyle Rittenhouse, who believed that if the police in Kenosha couldn’t put down a race riot, it was incumbent on teens to take up weapons of war to do it in their stead. It was a banner year for violent vigilantism, as a young man at a rally in Idaho this fall stepped up to ask when it would be OK to start shooting Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” The questioner asked Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Election workers describe violent threats from stop-the-steal “patriots” that have driven them from office in record numbers. The menace of those who believe that the time has come to take the law into their own hands has become part of the daily political calculation of what it means to be part of a democracy.
2021 was also a banner year for vigilantism blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted not once but twice to permit Texas’ novel S.B. 8 to remain in effect. S.B. 8 is an anti-abortion law, sure, but also one that supplanted virtually all state enforcement with citizen vigilantes, who are now tasked not just with suing abortion providers but also anyone who aided or abetted an abortion, up to and including counselors and Lyft drivers. (These vigilantes stand to collect at least $10,000 in cash for their efforts.) During oral arguments in the case in November, it was Chief Justice John Roberts, no fan of abortion rights, who asked Judd Stone, the solicitor general of Texas, to “assume that the bounty is not $10,000 but a million dollars.” That Roberts himself used the word bounty confirmed that this is precisely what the state put in place. Texas built a bounty system, allowing citizens to be deputized as law enforcement, not simply because the state sought to evade judicial review but also because who’d be better to turn in their friends and neighbors than a vigilant, empowered citizenry?
“It is beyond unfortunate that the Supreme Court’s reaction to a country that is so torn apart that it had an insurrection on Jan. 6, their reaction is ‘oh, this seems like a good time to allow vigilante litigation,’ ” appellate lawyer Richard Bernstein told Courthouse News after S.B. 8 was approved by the majority. “They have sanctioned a form of state-sponsored political warfare that the rest of the society is left to keep from getting out of hand with no help from the Supreme Court.” And yet merely through this act of sanctioning the political warfare, the Supreme Court is very much helping the ascendant vigilante faction.
At the time it was enacted, I classed S.B. 8 as part of the larger trend of rewarding and encouraging vigilantism, whether through an ever-widening definition of what “stand your ground” defenses can mean or newly passed election laws that allow citizens to police how their fellow citizens vote. Scott Pilutik, writing this fall, flagged multiple state laws that would conscript ordinary Americans into law enforcement proxies:
In April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that creates civil immunity for people who drive their cars into crowds of protesters (later declared unconstitutional). This past fall Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed an elections bill into law that broadened protections for partisan poll watchers, allowing them to sue poll workers hired by the government. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, politics chair at Pomona College in California, described the regime as creating an “alternative structure of government.” The object of these enforcement mechanisms is to “invite intensely organized partisan interest groups to basically organize the behavior of citizens and funnel that through the courts rather than the state.”
This shifting of powers, from police to private actors, and from state actors to the courts, is part of the broader rise of vigilantism that sometimes goes unnoticed in the larger debate over public mistrust of institutions. It’s not just a rolling loss of public confidence in free and fair elections, or in law enforcement, or in educational policies set forth by school boards, but a move to the courts system to enforce private causes of action.
It is hardly shocking that as American trust in any and all institutions collapses, what surges into the vacuum is self-help of the sometimes-armed variety. “If our election systems continue to be rigged, and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed,” GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn promised this past summer. That is the language of Jan. 6 and it’s the language of early American policing and a long American history of extrajudicial violence from the Fugitive Slave Acts to state-sanctioned lynchings to the Tulsa race riot. So deeply is the spirit of vigilantism braided into American ideas of power and law enforcement that it is readily mistaken for patriotism and rule of law.
The spirit of vigilantism is encouraged—paradoxically—by government power at the same time it blossoms with the mistrust of government. But through another lens, it becomes clear that even this paradox is nothing of the sort. The sense that white skin affords anyone and everyone the right to be a law unto himself, and that Black skin comes with no such privileges, is part of America’s founding legal principles. When you hear that there has been an explosion in laws allowing you to hit protesters with your car, or shoot unarmed people at a racial justice march, or stride around public spaces armed to the teeth, you can be certain that the self-appointed law enforcers will be treated differently based on race.
Reporting recently on the growing lawlessness of the self-styled “constitutional sheriffs” who arrogate to themselves the power to decide what the law is, the Washington Post’s Christy E. Lopez warns that recent activities ranged from supporting the Jan. 6 rioters to recruiting other constitutional sheriffs to seize Dominion voting machines in 2020. And in this high water moment of QAnon and the cult of do-your-own-research, the sense that there are no facts, there is no science, and no agreed-upon norms of conduct allows citizens to substitute their own subjective views about what the law should be in the place of mutually agreed-upon and fixed ideas about what the law actually is. Just as COVID turned every American into a licensed epidemiologist, legally sanctioned vigilantism turns everyone into an expert on and arbiter of whatever law or institution they’re railing against at the moment. And if the Rittenhouse verdict taught us anything at all, it may be that jurors are evermore inclined to accept those subjective judgements as reasonable. This is not, in other words, a static state of affairs. Vigilantism creates doubt about state authority, and doubt about state authority fosters evermore vigilantism.
The court didn’t begin to greenlight citizen self-help in the S.B. 8 decisions. This is a decadeslong project. At oral arguments about vastly expanding the rights of gun owners this fall, Justice Samuel Alito suggested that state licensing agents were apt to grant gun rights to “celebrities and state judges and retired police officers” but not to “the kind of ordinary people who have a real, felt need to carry a gun to protect themselves.” Alito further noted that “all these people with illegal guns, they’re on the subway, they’re walking around the streets. But the ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding people I mentioned, no, they can’t be armed.” The bad guys, in Alito’s telling, aren’t the criminals anymore. The bad guys are the corrupt or clueless state licensing agents and the corrupt and clueless police departments. This is the language of bad faith and incompetence that pervades their discussions of public health officials and election officials.
It would be a special kind of tragedy if the very same Supreme Court that relies wholly on public confidence in its institutional legitimacy were helping plant the seeds of institutional mistrust of other democratic pillars of representative democracy—the sanctity of elections, the rule of law, the urgency of public health, regulatory authority, and the continued need for, as Justice Elena Kagan has tartly put it, “most of government” to be viewed as constitutional and vital. The long strain of individualism, libertarianism, vigilantism, and citizen law enforcement that has characterized the American legal story for centuries has always had the capacity to reassert itself on a dime. Jan. 6 was proof positive that it bubbles forever just under the surface and explodes periodically into violent, lawless action.
The Supreme Court will either play a role in quelling that tendency in the year ahead, or continue to signal that every citizen is largely a law unto themselves, that the rule of law is for sheeple and suckers and socialists and atheists—but for everyone else, the sole remaining question might just be only “when do we get to use the guns?”
Having spent my entire professional life as a county and state criminal prosecutor and now retired federal judge, I claim a certain level of expertise in commenting on the Kyle Rittenhouse criminal case.
It is difficult to understand how a 17-year-old male resident of Illinois can cross state lines into Wisconsin carrying an assault-type weapon purchased for him by an older friend and kill two men and grievously injure a third and escape any responsibly. This is, of course, what followed from an acquittal by a jury of all charges after trial earlier this month.
Yes, the weapon possession charge apparently was properly dismissed due to an unusual Wisconsin law. Yes, self defense is a legal defense if proven which, I urge, was not done here. Yes, as a democratic society, it is critical the public accept the findings of a jury as the backbone of our judicial system based on our Constitution and state law.
However, that public is entitled, as is the defendant, to a fair and impartial trial free of bias. I submit that did not occur in this proceeding. The loud scolding of the prosecutor on several occasions by an irascible judge — long overdue for retirement, often in the presence of the jury — was disturbing.
Further, while I, as a retired military officer, approve of offering gratitude for one’s military service, for the judge to call for a round of applause for a veteran who was about to testify for the defense, was grossly prejudicial. In doing so, he was potentially extending additional credibility to that witness. I assure you that jurors can be influenced by such improper behavior.
While I personally believe the jury verdict was incorrect, I am very displeased by the conduct of the trial, which, again, I do not believe was a fair one.
As a further observation, the partisan nature of the public discussion of the facts of the case goes beyond rational discussion. Not unlike too many aspects of today’s society, the partisan approach to the circumstances and handling of this incident and its perpetrator is troubling.
There are those who think this young man’s behavior was totally acceptable and that he should never have been charged with a crime and have gone so far as to deem him an appropriate candidate for an internship in Congress. Others view him as no more than an armed vigilante previously, at least on occasion, associated with the white supremacist group, the Proud Boys, which exemplifies the increasing acceptance of violence as a means of enforcing principles and settling disputes.
This trial did nothing to resolve that division but instead sends the message that others may arm themselves and play vigilante without consequences.
A Wisconsin self-defense law made it difficult for the jury to convict—an outcome that was celebrated by the Republican Party’s violent fringe.
On Thursday, as the jury deliberations in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial stretched toward day four, the defense appeared worried. Mark Richards, the lead counsel for Rittenhouse—the teen-ager who faced life in prison for killing two men, severely injuring a third, and recklessly endangering the safety of others during last year’s civil unrest in Kenosha—noticed that the jurors were sitting in a new pattern. Richards later remarked to news reporters that perhaps this indicated a divided jury.
The jurors were debating whether Rittenhouse committed felonies or acted in self-defense when, just before midnight on August 25, 2020, he fired an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle eight times. Rittenhouse, who was then seventeen, lived just across the Illinois border. After watching live streams of the violent protests that erupted in Kenosha following the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, he joined his best friend, Dominick Black, in guarding Car Source, a downtown business whose main sales lot had been torched. Both were armed with rifles that they had been keeping at Black’s stepfather’s home in Kenosha.
At trial, Rittenhouse faced a charge of first-degree reckless homicide for killing Joseph Rosenbaum, an enraged but unarmed man who had chased him; first-degree intentional homicide for killing Anthony Huber, a demonstrator who had struck him with a skateboard and then lunged for his rifle; two felony counts of recklessly endangering the safety of the Daily Caller’s video chief, Richie McGinniss, and a demonstrator who had kicked him in the head; and first-degree attempted intentional homicide for shooting Gaige Grosskreutz, a demonstrator and paramedic who was armed with a Glock pistol.
Initially, Rittenhouse also faced a misdemeanor count of unlawfully possessing a dangerous weapon. He was too young to have bought the rifle—Black bought it for him and now faces his own felony trial—but, to the surprise of many, the judge, Bruce Schroeder, dismissed it.
Two portraits of Rittenhouse emerged during the two-week trial. The defense portrayed him as a selfless teen-ager and aspiring law-enforcement officer or paramedic who wanted to help defend Kenosha and provide first aid. Prosecutors argued that Rittenhouse courted trouble by hubristically inserting himself into a volatile situation—he volunteered to help guard property that he did not own, in a city where he did not live, while flaunting, confusingly, both a first-aid kit and a semi-automatic rifle.
The Rittenhouse trial will be remembered for its voluminous video evidence and for live streamers’ role in either documenting, or negatively influencing, historic events. The footage—captured also by demonstrators, a civilian-operated drone, and an F.B.I. surveillance plane—showed every shooting from various angles. The jurors watched numerous clips of Rittenhouse in the moments before and after the shootings. He was interviewed by live streamers and shown yelling, “Anybody need medical?” Not long before the gunfire started, he lied about being an E.M.T. and bragged that, if there was trouble, “I’m running into harm’s way.”
There were also notable, and loud, rebukes. After Rittenhouse’s attorneys moved for a mistrial, accusing the state of overreaching, the lead prosecutor, Thomas Binger, tried to explain himself, but Schroeder boomed, “Don’t get brazen with me!” In one motion, Rittenhouse questioned the integrity of footage that prosecutors alleged showed him provocatively pointing his gun at people first. (One of the prosecutors wearily remarked, “We did not alter the file,” adding, “None of us know how to alter the file.”) The judge acknowledged that the footage made him “very queasy,” but he allowed it.
Putting a criminal defendant on the witness stand is always risky, but Rittenhouse, who had wanted to tell his side of the story since police detectives first questioned him, took the stand for nearly an entire day, last week. When he appeared to break down, his supporters credited his courage; his detractors compared him to Brett Kavanaugh, ridiculing “white male tears.”
The public’s assessments of Rittenhouse’s performance coalesced, predictably, around the hyper-partisanship that distinguished the reactions to the Kenosha shootings from the start. As I reported, in detail, over the summer, opportunists seized on the case—often inaccurately—as a referendum on constitutional freedoms and American racial progress. Schroeder instructed the jurors to treat the defendant like any other witness, assessing him on such factors as credibility, conduct, appearance, demeanor, and apparent intelligence. He told them, “In everyday life, you determine for yourselves the reliability of things people say to you. You should do the same thing here.”
The jurors could be forgiven if they were confused about how to go about their deliberations—the judge sure was. On Monday morning, Schroeder was in the middle of reading thirty-six pages of instructions aloud when he said, “If you decide unanimously that the defendant did not commit the greater crime and was acting lawfully in self-defense”—then stopped. He paused for nineteen seconds, staring off into space and rubbing his fingers together, as he pondered how to explain a pathway to convicting Rittenhouse on lesser counts. Then he said, “I’ve got myself into a midsentence, and I don’t like it.” They worked it out, not to everyone’s satisfaction. At one point, Schroeder declared, “This is a more complicated case than most—than any, frankly, that I can remember.”
Americans had spent the past fifteen months debating Rittenhouse’s culpability, character, proclivities, motivations, and intelligence, and the extent to which he symbolized the country’s shifting relationship with guns—and with one another. The judgment that mattered was that of the seven women and five men of the jury, who were responsible for working through the complexities and nuances of each felony count, one by one.
Around lunchtime on Friday, after four days of deliberation, the jury reached a verdict. The parties were summoned to the courtroom. Rittenhouse took his place at the defense table. His mother, Wendy, and his two sisters, Faith and McKenzie, sat together, in a rear pew, alongside Dave Hancock, a security specialist and military veteran who has become the family’s most visible advocate. Across the aisle, loved ones of the dead clutched one another’s arms. The judge warned the audience to remain unemotional: “Many people do have strong feelings, but we can’t permit any kind of a reaction to the verdict.”
The mood was more tense than at any point during the trial. Rittenhouse, wearing the attentive expression that he had displayed all along, watched the jurors come to their chairs. The forewoman handed a bailiff a set of papers containing each charge—collectively known as “the information”—and each corresponding verdict. Schroeder leafed through the pages, then aligned them with one sharp crack. He said, “The defendant will rise and face the jury and hearken to its verdicts.”
Rittenhouse stood. The court clerk said, “As to the first count of the information—Joseph Rosenbaum—we, the jury, find the defendant, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, not guilty.” Wendy Rittenhouse jolted backward in her seat. By the third “not guilty,” Rittenhouse was losing his composure. On the fifth and final “not guilty,” his knees appeared to buckle.
The jurors were—and are—not required to reveal their calculus. By tradition, even their identities may not be made public. The Rittenhouse jury was known, by sight, only to those who physically attended the trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse. They were not sequestered. They were driven to and from the courthouse in what the judge called a “sealed” vehicle—a bus with blacked-out windows.
It was ultimately impossible to deduce meaning from their demographics or their behavior during the trial—juries are notoriously unpredictable. Was it better or worse—for the prosecution or the defense—that women outnumbered men? What did it mean that the jurors wanted to rewatch certain footage? And that, less than twenty-four hours before issuing the verdict, some of them were smiling? As he dismissed them, the judge told the jurors that they could talk to the media, if they wanted, about their deliberations. But they did not have to. He said, “Your job is done.”
The courtroom was half filled when the trial began, on November 2nd. By the end, the room was crowded, and a “zoo” had appeared outside. The Racine Journal Times clocked the presence of a man in a “pro-Second Amendment hoodie” and an enthusiastic trial watcher in a red fedora and matching boa. Mark McCloskey, the lawyer who pleaded guilty to pointing an “AR” at Black Lives Matter demonstrators, last year, outside his home in St. Louis, materialized in Kenosha, though he is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Missouri.
The public discourse that surrounded the trial bore little resemblance to the matter of law. A “Free Kyle” contingent saw no reason to hold Rittenhouse accountable for any of his actions in Kenosha. The true villains, in their eyes, were Antifa, the Black Lives Matter movement, and Democrats—whose actions, or lack thereof, forced civilians to defend communities against destruction and violence. Rittenhouse rejected the term “vigilante,” but some of his supporters baldly embraced it. On Wednesday night, the right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, “When you don’t have rule of law, when the cops are nowhere to be found, vigilante justice is the only kind of justice you have.” The chyron read “Rittenhouse Trial Reveals a Culture in Decline.”
If the right saw the verdict as an affirmation of vigilantism, so, too, did their opponents. Moments after the verdict, the political consultant David Axelrod tweeted, “A dangerous, dangerous precedent.” Jake Spence, the state director of Wisconsin Working Families Party, called the outcome “an abject failure” of the criminal-justice system, whose presumed goal is “to promote well-being, public safety and justice for all.” The Atlantic contributor David French, a conservative and an Iraq War veteran who has written about his decision to carry a concealed weapon, recently observed that “one of the symbols of the American hard right is the ‘patriot’ openly carrying an AR-15 or similar weapon.” He described Rittenhouse as “the next step in that progression. He’s the ‘patriot’ who didn’t just carry his rifle; he used it.”
President Joe Biden, whose 2020 campaign used an image of Rittenhouse to disavow Donald Trump’s support of “white supremacists,” commented only that he stood by the verdict. His press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that the President believes “we shouldn’t have, broadly speaking, vigilantes patrolling our communities with assault weapons. We shouldn’t have opportunists corrupting peaceful protest by rioting and burning down the communities they claim to represent, anywhere in the country.”
Rittenhouse did not have formal firearms training, yet Wisconsin’s law allowed him to openly carry a semi-automatic rifle, the type of weapon that is colloquially known as an AR-15. The “AR” stands not for “assault rifle,” as some believe, but rather for ArmaLite Rifle; ArmaLite was the company that manufactured the weapon in the nineteen-fifties, as the Pentagon sought a lightweight alternative to the M14 infantry rifle. As C. J. Chivers explains in “The Gun,” Colt’s firearms division bought the rights to the AR-15 in 1959 and field-tested it in the Vietnam War, promoting its “devastating” ability to penetrate almost anything. Chivers writes that “five to seven soldiers armed with AR-15s produced more firepower and were more dangerous than eleven soldiers provided with M-14s.”
When the patent expired, gun manufacturers mass-produced derivatives. Once the federal assault-weapons ban expired, in 2004, they became the most popular rifles in America. Rittenhouse was armed with Smith & Wesson’s version of the AR-15, which Chivers describes as “small, dark, lean, and synthetically futuristic.” Rittenhouse testified that he wanted an “AR” because he thought it “looked cool.”
In his reflections on the trial, French worried that “a political movement that turns a deadly and ineffective vigilante into a role model is a movement that is courting more violence.” And, in fact, it was far-right figures like the Proud Boys and Marjorie Taylor Greene who appeared most ardent in their support of Rittenhouse. After the verdict was announced, Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina congressman who has advocated “bloodshed” and “storing up some ammunition” in defense of combatting “tyranny,” released a seven-second selfie-video celebrating Rittenhouse’s acquittal. On January 6th, Cawthorn spoke at Trump’s Stop the Steal rally, moments before insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol. In his Rittenhouse video, he told followers, “You have a right to defend yourself! Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.” Cawthorn, as well as his colleagues Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, expressed interest in offering Rittenhouse an “internship.”
Kyle Rittenhouse's comments about his former lawyer, a top leader in the QAnon world, has unleashed a toxic battle within the conspiracy movement.
While most Americans are preparing to have a nice day with their families on Thanksgiving, pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood is spending the holiday on Telegram, complaining about his children, and sparking a civil war in the QAnon world.
Wood, who said on Thursday that his children would once again not be spending Thanksgiving with him, has spent the last three days in an increasingly toxic battle on the encrypted messaging app where Wood has blasted his critics and praised his defenders.
The spat, which began when Kyle Rittenhouse publicly accused Wood of “taking advantage” of him, has consumed the QAnon world, sucking in almost every major figure in the Q universe, including disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell (who is currently in the middle of a four-day live stream marathon), and right-wing talking head Dan Bongino.
QAnon followers, who had until now almost universally seen Wood as a leading figure within the movement, have been divided, unsure whether to continue to follow Wood or turn their backs on him.
As some QAnon believers spend Thanksgiving in Dallas awaiting JFK’s return, the Wood controversy threatens to cause a schism within the QAnon church that could irrevocably change the course of the movement.
The controversy began, as many things do these days, with Tucker Carlson. The increasingly far-right adjacent Fox News host secured the first interview with Rittenhouse after he was acquitted of all charges in the killing of two people and wounding another with an assault rifle during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer.
During the interview, Rittenhouse said Wood, who briefly represented the teenager last year, had “taken advantage” of him, had been the reason he spent 87 days in jail, and said the $2-million raised by Wood’s Fight Back group for Rittenhouse’s bail was "for their own benefit."
Almost immediately the Wood pile-on began.
“I’ve told everyone what a horrible person Lin Wood is,” Greene tweeted moments after the interview aired, adding that Wood’s actions were “evil” and said he “should go to jail for what he did to Kyle.”
Many others joined in such as Bongino, former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, and Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, but what really sparked a wider split in the QAnon world was Wood’s criticism of Flynn, seen by many within the movement as the de facto leader of QAnon today.
When Flynn didn’t come out swinging in defense of Wood, the lawyer lashed out, making wild accusations about Flynn and his links to Israeli spying company NSO, his meeting with Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, and his use of an obscure prayer during a religious conference in September that some believed was Satanic.
Wood does not blame Rittenhouse for what has happened, but instead blames Dave Hancock, the former executive director of Wood’s Fight Back fundraising group.
Wood alleges that Hancock (who he has referred to variously as Fraudcock, Bellycock, Thiefcock, and Liarcock in recent Telegram posts) is part of an orchestrated campaign to defame him which is being perpetrated by the “mockingbird media.” He also alleges that Hancock is in a relationship with Rittenhouse’s mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, and has used this relationship to influence what the teenager says.
As usual, Wood has provided no evidence to back up his claims.
While many major figures have blasted Wood, there are some who have sided with the lawyer.
These include Lindell, who thanked Wood for “all of his efforts and for reaching out to me and others to bail out Kyle Rittenhouse.” Also part of Team Wood is QAnon John, the influential organizer of the QAon-centric Patriot Roundup events that took place in Dallas and Las Vegas earlier this year.
Jordan Sather, another influential QAnon figure, however, has sided with Team Flynn, claiming Wood has promoted “numerous frauds, clickbait accounts, and highly questionable individuals” on his Telegram channel. Sather, for context, has promoted the use of bleach to treat COVID-19.
With the anonymous leader of QAnon now silent for almost a whole year, and with Trump languishing in Mar-a-Lago without a Twitter account, QAnon followers have been left to find new leaders to follow.
Flynn and Wood, who have appeared multiple times on stage together over the course of the last year at MAGA conferences, have become two of the biggest and most influential voices in the movement.
As a result, any falling out between the pair will have a significant impact on the wider QAnon movement and what direction it takes in the future. Many have predicted that QAnon is likely to break off into smaller factions, and we have already seen this happen with the JFK cult in Dallas in recent weeks.
But maybe there is still a chance for reconciliation. On Wednesday night Wood said that he forgives his enemies and on Thursday morning, he booted up Telegram and told his 725,000 followers: “I find peace of mind in knowing that informed, non-brainwashed people who love America know that the false accusations against me should be thrown in the garbage can like the turkey bones after Thanksgiving lunch.”
In a last-ditch attempt to rescue Democrats from their own worst instincts, Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent from Vermont) is working to try to limit the party’s politically toxic initiative to enrich wealthy property owners in liberal locales. If his maneuver fails, Republicans will have a potent political weapon heading into the 2022 midterms, as evidenced by a new video the GOP just released on Monday.
At issue is corporate Democrats’ proposal to raise the amount of state and local taxes (SALT) that can be deducted from households’ federal taxes. The $275 billion proposal is now the second largest part of the Build Back Better legislation, even though it would only benefit the 13 percent of Americans who itemize their tax returns.
For months, our reporting has warned that a repeal of the $10,000 cap on such deductions would be a massive tax cut for the superrich, including for key Democratic lawmakers who are championing the measure. The GOP has been hammering Democrats over the proposal, saying it proves Democrats are trying to help the wealthy. Their new video previews how Republicans will depict themselves as populist critics of regressive tax cuts ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, if Democrats pass their current SALT initiative.
But that’s where Sanders — a longtime critic of raising the SALT deduction cap — comes in.
After House Democrats last week passed President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill with provisions raising the SALT caps to $80,000, the Vermont senator joined with New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez to propose a more limited version. Though their proposal is not finalized, it is intended to phase out the new tax breaks for those making more than $400,000 a year. The proposal broadly mimics a plan released by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).
A new study from the Tax Policy Center (TPC) shows how the plan stacks up.
As the TPC graph illustrates, one of these proposals is clearly better from a policy and messaging standpoint — while all of them would deliver most of their benefits to the wealthiest quintile of the country, the Sanders-Menendez compromise (represented by the yellow bars) would specifically reduce the amount of tax breaks given to the richest of the rich.
“The big difference would be at the very top of the income distribution,” wrote TPC’s Howard Gleckman. “Nearly one-third of the benefit of the $80,000 cap would go to the top 1 percent of households (those making nearly $870,000 or more). But the top 1 percent would get only 0.1% of the benefit if the $10,000 SALT cap is gradually restored starting at $400,000.”
Corporate Democrats Keep Lying
Democratic proponents of simply raising or repealing the cap have continued to deliberately promote fact-free misinformation about their proposal’s effects, pretending the new deductions would mostly help firefighters, teachers, and other middle-class households. Tax data prove that assertion is a flagrant Donald Trump–esque lie — the vast majority of the benefits of proposed new SALT deductions would flow to the very rich.
In addition to blatant lying, Democrats promoting a higher SALT deduction cap have refused to embrace the ITEP plan. That refusal suggests that corporate Democrats’ real goal in raising the SALT cap isn’t to protect the middle class, but is instead to enrich the wealthy blue-state donor class — a charge that Republicans will no doubt intensify if nothing changes.
For his part, Sanders has called the House-passed proposal “bad policy” and “bad politics” — and his initiative seems designed to make the politics at least a bit better, although his plan is hardly perfect.
“If you actually cared about (the middle class), you could set the cutoff at say, $150,000,” Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “That would still mean the biggest benefit would go to people making $150,000, but it would address that actual middle class population. If you’re setting the [cutoff] at $400,000 or $500,000, you’re not doing this for the middle class.”
The higher caps would be designed to simultaneously limit the benefits to the rich, but also keep enough wealthy-district Democratic lawmakers from voting to kill the entire Build Back Better legislation. And if the Senate adopts the Sanders-Menendez proposal, it would at least deprive Republicans of their new talking points that depict Democrats as more focused on enriching their billionaires than on helping the country.
“Democrats Now Are Easier On Millionaires”
The recent Republican criticism of Democrats’ SALT proposals already has salience amid polls showing most Americans see Democrats as out of touch with the country. At least some of Sanders’s Democratic colleagues seem to see the political problem with passing the $80,000 SALT cap increase, which would give an average tax cut of $16,000 to two-thirds of Americans who make more than $1 million a year.
“Republicans are making the argument vociferously and repeatedly that they’re going to say that Democrats now are easier on millionaires than they were in 2017,” Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat from Oregon) told NBC News.
“It would be preposterous if this legislation ends up cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America,” Democratic senator Michael Bennet of Colorado told Business Insider.
If Senate Democrats adopt the Sanders-Menendez provision as part of that chamber’s version of the Build Back Better legislation, it would force corporate Democrats into the position of either accepting the measure and letting Biden’s bill pass, or holding up the legislation and fighting exclusively for tax breaks for households that make more than $400,000.
In that scenario, Republican lawmakers and the wealthy would be hoping corporate Democrats choose the latter course. If they do, the GOP would get its political bailout — and wealthy donors would get their financial one, too.
A painted mural of Ahmaud Arbery is displayed on May 17, 2020, in Brunswick, Ga., where the 25-year-old man was shot and killed in February. Arbery was shot and killed by two men who told police they thought he was a burglar. (photo: Sarah Blake Morgan/AP)
Three men were convicted of murder Wednesday in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black man who was running empty-handed through a Georgia subdivision when the white strangers chased him, trapped him on a quiet street and blasted him with a shotgun.
The February 2020 slaying drew limited attention at first. But when video of the shooting leaked online, Arbery’s death quickly became another example in the nation’s reckoning of racial injustice in the way Black people are treated in their everyday lives.
Now the men all face a mandatory sentence of life in prison. The judge will decide whether their sentences are served with or without the possibility of parole.
As the first of 23 guilty verdicts were read, Arbery’s father had to leave the courtroom after leaping up and shouting. At the reading of the last criminal count, Arbery’s mother dropped her head and quietly pumped her fists.
“He didn’t do nothing but run and dream,” Marcus Arbery Sr. said of his son. Outside the courthouse, dozens of Black supporters hugged and cried.
The jury deliberated for about 10 hours before convicting Greg McMichael, son Travis McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan.
The McMichaels grabbed guns and jumped in a pickup truck to pursue the 25-year-old Arbery after seeing him running outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick. Bryan joined the pursuit in his own pickup and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery.
The father and son told police they suspected Arbery was a fleeing burglar. But the prosecution argued that the men provoked the fatal confrontation and that there was no evidence Arbery committed any crimes in the neighborhood.
“We commend the courage and bravery of this jury to say that what happened on Feb. 23, 2020, to Ahmaud Arbery — the hunting and killing of Ahmaud Arbery — it was not only morally wrong but legally wrong, and we are thankful for that,” said Latonia Hines, Cobb County executive assistant district attorney.
Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski added: “The jury system works in this country. And when you present the truth to people and they see it, they will do the right thing.”
Travis McMichael, 35, stood for the verdict, his lawyer’s arm around his shoulder. At one point, he lowered his head to his chest. After the verdicts were read, as he stood to leave, he mouthed “love you” to his mother in the courtroom gallery.
Greg McMichael, 65, hung his head when the judge read his first guilty verdict. Bryan, 52, bit his lip.
Speaking outside the courthouse, Ben Crump, attorney for Arbery’s father, repeatedly said that “the spirit of Ahmaud defeated the lynch mob.”
“It’s been a long fight. It’s been a hard fight. But God is good,” she said, adding that her son would now rest in peace.
Travis McMichaels’ attorneys said both he and his father feel that they did the right thing, and that they believed the video would help their case. But they also said the McMichaels regret that Arbery got killed.
“I can tell you honestly, these men are sorry for what happened to Ahmaud Arbery,” attorney Jason Sheffield said. “They are sorry he’s dead. They are sorry for the tragedy that happened because of the choices they made to go out there and try to stop him.”
They planned to appeal.
Bryan’s attorney, Kevin Gough, said his team was “disappointed with the verdict, but we respect it.” He planned to file new legal motions after Thanksgiving.
Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley did not immediately schedule a sentencing date, saying that he wanted to give both sides time to prepare.
In a statement, President Joe Biden said Arbery’s killing was a “devastating reminder” of how much more work the country has to do in the fight for racial justice.
“While the guilty verdicts reflect our justice system doing its job, that alone is not enough. Instead, we must recommit ourselves to building a future of unity and shared strength, where no one fears violence because of the color of their skin,” Biden said.
Though prosecutors did not argue that racism motivated the killing, federal authorities have charged them with hate crimes, alleging that they chased and killed Arbery because he was Black. That case is scheduled to go to trial in February.
The disproportionately white jury received the case around midday Tuesday.
Soon after returning to court Wednesday morning, the jury sent a note to the judge asking to view two versions of the shooting video — the original and one that investigators enhanced to reduce shadows — three times apiece.
Jurors returned to the courtroom to see the videos and listen again the 911 call one of the defendants made from the bed of a pickup truck about 30 seconds before the shooting.
On the 911 call the jury reviewed, Greg McMichael tells an operator: “I’m out here in Satilla Shores. There’s a Black male running down the street.”
He then starts shouting, apparently as Arbery is running toward the McMichael’s idling truck with Bryan’s truck coming up behind him: “Stop right there! Damn it, stop! Travis!” Gunshots can be heard a few second later.
The graphic video emerged two months later, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case, quickly arresting the three men.
Defense attorneys contend the McMichaels were attempting a legal citizen’s arrest when they set off after Arbery, seeking to detain and question him after he was seen running from a nearby home under construction.
Travis McMichael testified that he shot Arbery in self-defense. He said Arbery turned and attacked with his fists while running past the truck where McMichael stood with his shotgun.
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, speaks at the 6 January rally in support of Donald Trump in Washington. 'We will not quit fighting,' he said. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Watchdogs and ex-prosecutors have strongly criticised the Republican Attorneys General Association’s $150,000 donation
A key group of Republican attorneys general that donated $150,000 to co-sponsor the 6 January rally where Donald Trump pushed his false claims of election fraud before the Capitol attack could draw scrutiny from a House committee investigating the events on or in the lead-up to the riot.
The group – a part of the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga) called the Rule of Law Defense Fund – has attracted strong criticism from watchdogs and ex-prosecutors even as Raga looks forward to next year’s midterm elections and many of its members are fighting on numerous fronts against Joe Biden’s agenda.
The controversy around Raga appears to be yet another way that Trump and his supporters have increased their grip on more mainstream elements of the Republican party, and involved them in efforts to further their agenda.
The RLDF, the policy arm of Raga, ponied up $150,000 for the 6 January rally, and arranged robocalls the day before informing people that “we will march to the Capitol and tell Congress to stop the steal,” a message that was probably reinforced by Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who told Trump’s rally: “We will not quit fighting.”
Watchdog criticism of the Raga policy arm that backed the rally stresses that the group’s funding and robocalls occurred after dozens of court rulings rejected Trump’s claims of fraud. They say it undermines respect for the nation’s laws, as well as departing from the group’s main focus of helping get Republican attorneys general elected.
Further, the rally funding and robocalls by the RLDF sparked resignations of high-level officials, including the Raga chairman, the Georgia attorney general, who broached concern about the group’s direction when he stepped down.
The controversies about Raga’s rally activities come as the group has received a hefty $5.5m from the dark money Concord Fund since the start of 2020, which can help Republican attorneys general in the 2022 elections, and as many Republican attorneys general including Paxton have filed lawsuits to thwart Biden’s energy, immigration and vaccine policies.
The $150,000 check that the RLDF donated to the rally came from the Publix supermarket heir Julie Jenkins Fancelli, funds that ProPublica reported were arranged by the Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, a “VIP adviser” to the rally who has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the 6 January Capitol attack.
Asked about scrutiny of Raga and its big donation for the rally, a House select committee spokesperson told the Guardian that it “is seeking information about a number of events that took place in the lead-up to the 6 January attack, including details about who planned, coordinated, paid, or received funds related to those events”.
Some watchdog groups deplore Raga’s role in the rally. “It was clear before 6 January that the planned rally was based on lies, partisanship, and disrespect for the rule of law,” Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight said in a statement.
“That’s what Raga and its corporate sponsors chose to fund. The fact that the rally turned into a violent assault on democracy itself makes Raga’s involvement worse … Raga and its funders should be held accountable.”
Likewise, some ex-prosecutors express strong concerns about the message that the robocalls by Raga’s political arm conveyed.
“Attorneys general are supposed to support adherence to the law,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section at the DoJ. “By the time of the rally every court in the country had affirmed the lawfulness of the election results and had specifically rejected charges of fraud. At that stage, it seems Raga, by urging protesters to ‘stop the steal’, was simply promoting an unlawful attack on our democracy – the antithesis of their mission.”
Raga’s then executive director, who resigned soon after the Capitol attack, denounced the violence by the mob, which resulted in several deaths and ore than 140 injured police officers, and in a sweeping denial stated that neither Raga nor the RLDF had any “involvement in the planning, sponsoring or the organization of the protest”.
But campaign finance watchdogs don’t buy Raga’s denial.
“Raga’s policy arm and other groups helped organize a rally that preceded a riot and an attack on democracy,” said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of Open Secrets.
The fallout at Raga over its 6 January role increased in April when Chris Carr, the Georgia AG who chaired the overall group, announced suddenly he was stepping down as chair, and noted a “significant difference of opinion” about Raga’s direction in a resignation letter.
Later in April, Raga announced that Peter Bisbee, who had overseen the RLDF when the robocalls occurred, was being promoted to become Raga’s executive director.
Since Biden took office many Raga members, including Paxton and others from Missouri and Louisiana, have filed a wave of lawsuits to block several Biden priorities.
The surge of lawsuits is seen as potentially helpful in the runup to 2022 campaigns when 30 Republican and Democratic attorneys general will be running for re-election after serving four-year terms. In the 2020 elections, Raga for the first time targeted incumbent Democratic attorneys general with ads, and may try to oust Democratic attorneys general who were key Biden allies last year in states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan where Trump and his allies pushed false claims of fraud.
While Raga this year witnessed some corporate backers hold back checks after 6 January, its fundraising was bolstered when it pulled in $2.5m, by far its largest contribution and more than a third of the total raised for the first half of 2021, from the dark money Concord Fund, which the Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo helped create.
Raga also received $3m in 2020 from the Concord Fund.
Raga roped in low-six-figure checks in 2021 from oil and gas giants like Koch Industries and the Anschutz Corp and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
Over the years, Raga has garnered financial support from industries, including fossil fuels and pharmaceuticals, which GOP AGs have backed in major litigation.
Trump himself is slated to host a fundraiser next month at his Mar-a-Lago club for Paxton, which appears to underscore his gratitude and the tough re-election campaign the former Raga chairman is facing as three Republican challengers to him have emerged. Those opponents are focusing on Paxton’s legal problems: he was indicted on securities fraud six years ago and the FBI reportedly has been investigating allegations of bribery and other misconduct.
Last fall, some of Paxton’s former deputies accused him of improperly helping an Austin real estate developer and donor, prompting more FBI scrutiny.
Paxton, who has not been charged, has broadly denied any wrongdoing. Paxton’s office this August released an unsigned 374-page report rebutting the charges of former aides and claiming he was exonerated, but attorneys for the ex-employees responded the report was “full of half truths, outright lies and glaring omissions”.
“Just left Mar-a-Lago a little while ago and he should never have been put through that. That was prosecutorial misconduct,” the former president said
Donald Trump wasted no time inviting Kyle Rittenhouse to his resort at Mar-a-Lago. The former president appeared in a Fox News interview Tuesday night in which he revealed that the teen and his mother met with him, mere days after he was acquitted of homicide and other charges for shooting three people, killing two, at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“I got to know him a little bit,” Trump said. “He called, he wanted to know if he could come over and say hello. He was a fan. He came over with his mother. That was prosecutorial misconduct. He should not have had to suffer through a trial like that. He was going to be dead. … He’s a really good, young guy. He’s 18 years old. Just left Mar-a-Lago a little while ago.”
Donald Trump Jr. posted an image of the meeting on Twitter. “GOATs,” he wrote.
Trump also cheered when the teen — who has been photographed flashing an “OK” white power sign with the Proud Boys — was acquitted. “If that’s not self defense, nothing is!” he wrote in a statement.
Rittenhouse appeared in a Tuesday night interview as well, on NewsNation Now with Ashleigh Banfield. He said that when he flashed a white power sign, he didn’t know what the sign meant. He also blamed his attorneys for introducing him to the Proud Boys.
“I didn’t know that the ‘OK’ hand sign was a symbol for white supremacy, just as I didn’t know that those people in the bar were Proud Boys,” he said. “They were set up by my former attorney who was fired for putting me in situations like that with people I don’t agree with.”
Coastal GasLink is likely trying to weaken Indigenous claims to the land, experts say.
Wet’suwet’en land defenders fighting a pipeline in their territory say the oil and gas company behind the pipeline is asking two people who’ve been arrested to “prove” they’re Indigenous.
Coastal GasLink (CGL), a subsidiary of TC Energy, is asking Sleydo’, or Molly Wickham, to “provide documentation to ‘prove’ she is Wet’suwet’en, and is seeking conditions that would bar her from returning to her home,” says a statement released by Wet’suwet’en Gidimt’en camp.
The statement says the company is also challenging the status of Hereditary Chief Woos’ daughter, Jocelyn Alec, as a Wet’suwet’en person.
TC Energy told VICE World News in an email that “under no circumstances” would CGL ask people to prove they’re Indigenous. But the company then confirmed its lawyers asked “relevant contemnors,” a person found guilty of contempt, to confirm to the courts that they are Wet’suwet’en.
“This was to ensure access to allow the relevant contemnors to practice their Indigenous rights while under the court’s conditions,” the company said. (VICE World News asked TC Energy what this means and will update the story if we hear back.)
Sleydo’ and Alec are two of about 30 people arrested last week after a two-day RCMP raid on Wet’suwet’en territory. Earlier this month, pipeline resistance leaders with the Wet’suwet’en Gidimt’en Clan evoked an eviction order against CGL workers, giving them eight hours to “peacefully” leave the territory. After the deadline passed, they seized a Coastal GasLink excavator and dug up a road—the only route that gave access to several work sites and camps.
Four days later, police moved in and enforced a B.C. Supreme Court injunction order, which protects the pipeline’s development, and made the arrests. Multiple people, including Sleydo’ and Alec, are appearing in court Tuesday, where they’ll face conditions of their release.
“Coastal GasLink’s proposed conditions of release are punitive, unreasonable, and, in targeting Sleydo’ and Jocelyn, completely racist and sexist,” said Jennifer Wickham, a Wet’suwet’en spokesperson and Molly Wickham’s sister.
“Allowing a private corporation to determine two Indigenous women’s identities and allowing this corporation to deny our inherent rights to be Wet’suwet’en on our territory is a very dangerous precedent,” she said.
Staff lawyer Eugene Kung with West Coast Environmental Law told VICE World News that he doesn’t know CGL’s exact motivations, but he said, “it would be my guess they are trying to weaken a claim to being on the land, and any restrictions resulting from the (legal) proceedings, including conditions, could be challenged on that basis.”
“My guess is that they are nervous and trying to throw anything at the wall and hope it sticks, which to me shows a little bit of desperation,” Kung said.
University of Alberta professor Kim TallBear told VICE World News it’s not Coastal GasLink’s place to ask whether a person is Indigenous, unless it's for hiring purposes.
“Who is CGL to ask? If they were offering a job to somebody who was Indigenous and there was a preference for that, but this is not their place to ask,” TallBear said. “I don't even know why anyone is entertaining this demand or request… Settlers will stick their noses into this stuff wherever they can, but it’s not their business.”
According to Jennifer Wickham, Sleydo’ and Alec are facing charges of civil contempt for breaking the injunction, while CGL is seeking conditions of release, including a vast exclusion zone that would deny arrestees access to a large portion of their Wet’suwet’en territory.
TC Energy said it respects individual rights to “lawfully, safely, and peacefully express their point of view.” The company said it relies on authorities to safeguard individual rights in the area when others “act outside the law.”
“When the safety of our workforce is compromised and our ability to build our fully authorized and permitted project is stopped by individuals acting outside the law, we must rely on the authorities to ensure that the rights of all individuals in the area are respected and protected,” the statement says.
But Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs never ceded or surrendered their territory to settlers, and Wet’suwet’en people maintain that colonial courts have no jurisdiction over their territory.
Many, including Gidimt’en Clan, also say Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have a constitutional right to reject energy projects on their territory anyway. The Supreme Court of Canada’s 1997 Delgamuukw decision affirmed Wet’suwet’en land title rights, but also said they are “not absolute.”
For years, Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, land defenders, and allies have been on the front lines, blocking the $6.6 billion natural gas pipeline. Wet'suwet'en elected officials have approved the pipeline project, but hereditary chiefs, viewed by many as the rightful leaders, haven’t.
Last week’s RCMP raids mark the third year in a row of militarized police enforcement—by canine units and assault rifles—targeting resistance camps on site.
The Kremlin’s propaganda campaign at home is getting people ready for a ‘reluctant’ move into Ukraine.
Domestic propagandists and state TV pundits are promoting the idea of an inevitable confrontation with the West as Russia’s military posture grows increasingly hostile, causing major concern for its nearest neighbors and NATO. Ukraine remains the crown jewel for the Kremlin and the Russian public is being primed for the intended absorption of more territories under the umbrella of the Russian Federation, while NATO is being accused of fomenting the potential escalation.
“World War III is knocking at our door,” warned one top propagandist.
Whether or not the Kremlin is planning to speed up its creeping assault against Ukraine’s Donbas region in the near future is a mystery even to the most knowledgeable experts with close access to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nonetheless, they eagerly fulfill the Russian leader’s express intent to keep NATO—and the West in general—in a state of hypervigilance.
Ukraine’s non-affiliation with NATO remains at the top of the Kremlin’s long wish list, with Putin demanding “serious long-term guarantees that ensure Russia’s security” in the region. The real issue is not that NATO presents an acute threat to the Kremlin, but rather that its involvement stands in the way of Russia swallowing additional Ukrainian territories. Putin’s objectives with respect to subverting Ukraine remain the same, with two different paths to getting there: by securing Ukraine’s submission and undermining its sovereignty through unwarranted concessions from the West, or by escalating Russia’s military aggression.
State TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov—notorious for boasting that “Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash”—explained that Moscow’s moves are explicitly designed to affect the U.S. and NATO. On his Sunday show, Vesti Nedeli, Kiselyov said that Russia’s tests of its Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile and its recent anti-satellite test were “arguments” to reinforce Russia’s “red lines” with respect to Ukraine.
Kiselyov boasted: “By stepping over the “red line,” NATO risks losing all 32 GPS satellites at once, which will blind all their missiles, planes and ships, not to mention the ground forces. Americans are paying attention to this—they can’t afford not to.”
State TV experts equivocate between two conflicting messages: on one hand, claiming that Russia is not planning to invade Ukraine, but then immediately pointing out that “the Ukrainian problem” could be solved “very quickly,” due to Russia’s superior military might. They argue that the U.S.-led NATO needs to be taught a lesson and brag that “underpaid and underfed American soldiers” are no match for the Russians. Blustery proclamations are promptly followed up by the claim that none of the participants are interested in a hot war.
Igor Korotchenko, a member of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Public Council and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine, said the military movements that concerned Western and Ukrainian officials served as an intentional signal, designed to elicit a reaction. In a message addressed to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the state TV show 60 Minutes this Monday, Korotchenko said about Russia’s military buildup: “If your satellites are seeing this, that means it is being shown to you. Any American military analyst at the Pentagon can tell you that. You don’t know—and won’t know—Russia’s real plans and goals. Your HUMINT [intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact] is either blocked, neutralized, or is feeding you disinformation, in course of the operations conducted by Russian intelligence services. You need to relax and aim towards constructive interaction.”
Calling out the U.S. for being concerned with Russia’s activities, the rabidly anti-American host of 60 Minutes, Olga Skabeeva, insisted: “Mind your own business.” However, Russian state media does not abide by the same principles, with obsessive interest in American elections and internal affairs, dwelling on everything from QAnon and turkey prices to the sentencing of Jacob Chansley and the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. America is at the forefront of the Kremlin’s attention, so resorting to provocation in order to be acknowledged as an equal and to extract concessions would almost make sense.
During a speech to Russian diplomats last week, Putin complained: " We understand that our partners are very peculiar and, to put it mildly, do not take all our warnings and talks on red lines seriously." He added: “Our recent warnings have had a certain effect, tensions have risen... It is important for them to remain in this state for as long as possible.”
Russian state TV pundits and propagandists took Putin’s message to heart and snapped into action. Appearing on 60 Minutes the day after Putin’s speech, Igor Korotchenko warned: “Let’s be straightforward about it: World War III is knocking at our door. It will come from the direction of Poland and Ukraine.” Korotchenko argued that Russia can fight back against alleged Western provocations by demonstrating its military might: “We need to grab the West by the udders, they should feel our hand and we should feel their fearful pulse... The best defense is an offense... Our military fist should be at the face of every Western politician.”
On state TV show Sunday Evening with Vladimir Soloviev, lawmaker Oleg Morozov asserted: “The level of relations is so catastrophically low... that the possibility of a local hot conflict in the Ukrainian region is higher than ever. If this conflict takes place, it will break the entire construct of world relations. It will redraw the geographical map of Europe and change its political lines. The result will be what was promised by our president: the end of Ukrainian statehood... It will lead to total sanctions against Russia and the breakdown of all negotiations.”
Adding fuel to the fire, host Vladimir Soloviev asked: “Then why should we stop at Ukraine? Why not solve all of our problems at once?” Soloviev argued that since it’s unlikely that the major world powers would resort to nuclear war, Russia can move forward with achieving its objectives undeterred: “If we have to end up behind the Iron Curtain, why not collect some more lands and peoples first?”
The head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, Andrei Kartapolov, suggested on the same show that the Ukrainian problem could be solved militarily in a matter of hours. He said: “If they intend to turn us into a pariah, there is no reason to stop at Ukraine... If they want to make us tremble, we should make them tremble.” Morozov chimed in with a sly grin: “Which is what Putin said. Keep them on the edge of their seat.”
Janis Elliott lives in the unincorporated Iowa town of Avon. She put a reverse osmosis system in her home after she found nitrate levels almost double the EPA health standard.(photo: Clay Masters/Iowa Public Radio)
Janis Elliott started testing the private well water that comes out of the faucets in her home for nitrates after she attended an environmental meeting more than five years ago. Elliott lives in the small unincorporated town of Avon, Iowa not too far south of Des Moines.
Nitrate finds its way into surface and groundwater that eventually becomes drinking water. Studies have linked ingesting too much nitrate in drinking water to cancer and that concerns the retired teacher. Too much nitrate also can cause blue-baby syndrome and birth defects.
She points to neighbors' houses where people have died from cancer. Her husband had prostate cancer (and overcame it).
One year, the nitrate level got up to 19 parts per million.
"Which is almost double the federal legal limit for drinking water," Elliott says. "So, we were drinking poison for a year."
Elliott invested in a $1,000-reverse osmosis system in her home to treat the water her family drinks. She questions whether the nitrates in the water caused cancer among her husband and neighbors.
"Who knows? I do know that drinking that water for years did not help," she says.
Climate change and polluted sources for drinking water are creating an increasingly challenging problem in farm country. Des Moines Water Works is preparing for a very wet spring after almost two years of drought. While nitrate occurs naturally, it is also a byproduct of nitrogen fertilizer and farmers in the Midwest use lots of it to grow corn and soybeans. That finds its way into surface and groundwater.
The drought makes it more difficult for utility companies to source water
Larger water utilities – like Des Moines Water Works – have been treating nitrate for years. In the 1990s, the utility built a facility to extract nitrates from the rivers. Water Works gets most of its water for its 600,000 ratepayers from the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers, which converge downtown.
"The drought obviously makes it more difficult for us to source water," Des Moines Water Works CEO and General Manager Ted Corrigan says. "This summer, especially we had concerns about toxins on the Des Moines River and we had concerns about available flow on the Raccoon River."
Add to that, swings in the weather brought on by climate change are adding another problem.
"We also see issues with the quantity of nutrient that is stored on the landscape because of the drought," Corrigan says. He says all that excess nutrient stored in the soil upstream makes for the potential for extremely high nitrates flushing into the rivers.
"It's not a sustainable situation," Corrigan says.
Dozens of other public water utilities in Iowa also treat drinking water for nitrates. Water Works has upgraded its facility and constructed deep wells to store more water and it's looking at building additional groundwater wells. Federal clean water laws exempt agricultural runoff. The utility filed a lawsuit five years ago to try and amend the Clean Water Act, so farmers would have to implement more environmental practices but it was ultimately dismissed.
Farmers know what tools to use but they are costly and cumbersome
More than 90 miles upstream from Des Moines, Mark Schleisman farms with his father and kids in Calhoun County near the Raccoon River. He has a number of water quality projects on his diversified farm. He has buffer strips and plants cover crops. He even has a wetland on his property that is hooked up to an irrigation system so he can re-use water from his fields.
"It helps the river because we're keeping nitrates here, reducing them, but also helps me because I'm getting water on this field and I'm reusing the nitrogen," Schleisman says.
He says farmers know what tools to use but they are costly and can be cumbersome.
Politicians in Iowa say the state's farmers are making progress since 2013 when the state issued the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy: a list of environmental practices farmers are encouraged to implement.
"We've got a long ways to go and I don't sugar coat that at all," Iowa Secretary of Agriculture and Land Stewardship Mike Naig said earlier this year on the Iowa PBS show Iowa Press. "The strategy calls for a 45% reduction in nitrogen and phosphorous loss off of Iowa farms and landscape but the evidence is moving in the right direction."
University of Iowa geographical and sustainability sciences professor, Silvia Secchi, says the reduction from farms is not moving fast enough. She argues that the federal farm bill essentially subsidizes farmers to pollute.
"What we need to do is we need to ask for some environmental outcome for all the money we give to farmers," Secchi says. "That will reduce the load so that the utilities don't have to spend so much money cleaning up the water that we drink."
And Secchi says it's a bigger concern for utilities in smaller cities and residents who rely on their private wells that may have nitrate-tainted water. The challenges in Iowa could soon be felt in other cities surrounded by farmland especially as they increasingly face drastic weather swings that effect drinking water.
