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"Officer Sheskey fired seven shots into an unarmed man's back, on a block where our children walk to school and our families go to church," she continued, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. "All of us — Black, white, brown, native and newcomer — deserve to be safe in our own neighborhoods, and that means holding police officers accountable when they brutalize us."

In February, Schroeder refused to issue a new arrest warrant or increase Rittenhouse's bail, after he failed to update his current address with the court. But he did prohibit the shooter from associating with white supremacists.

On Wednesday, Rittenhouse's lawyers said they needed extra time to finish up a public opinion poll "to get a feel for whether Rittenhouse can expect to get a fair trial in the county, or if there might be reason to seek a change of venue or a jury pool from another county," the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported.

Rittenhouse's lawyers argued that because he had allegedly acted in self-defense and has no prior criminal record, the bond should be set at $750,000.

He noted the national network of supporters who have taken up Rittenhouse's cause and said he considered him a flight risk.

Rittenhouse faces up to life in prison if convicted.

Give Send Go, a self-described "Christian crowdfunding site," raised nearly $550,000 to help cover Rittenhouse's legal fees before organizers say they were forced to stop receiving donations.

"We believe that Mr. Rittenhouse has already proven that he is a significant flight risk and his reckless actions against my client who he severely injured, as well as the victims killed demonstrate that he is a significant risk to the public," Motley added.

Rittenhouse took off running and Rosenbaum chased after him. Videos of the incident show Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, threw a plastic bag at Rittenhouse, who responded by firing about five shots into the 36-year-old.

Police later explained that they didn't arrest him at the scene because it was chaotic.

“The defendant doesn't want to be here and if released won't come back,” Binger said.

A legal defense fund for Rittenhouse has attracted millions of dollars in donations.

“Kyle Rittenhouse thinks he's above the law,” Huber said. “He's been treated as much by law enforcement. For him to run wouldn't surprise me.”

President Donald Trump has said Rittenhouse's actions might have been warranted, suggesting that the protesters might have killed him.

Grosskreutz's attorney, Kimberley Motley, asked for $4 million bail, calling Rittenhouse's behavior “inexcusable.”

Keating set bail at $2 million, saying Rittenhouse has no ties to Kenosha, he fled the state after the shootings and he faces life in prison if convicted.

The shootings happened two days after a white police officer trying to arrest Jacob Blake shot the 29-year-old Black man seven times in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. Video of the shooting sparked several nights of protests in Kenosha, a city of about 100,000 on the Wisconsin-Illinois border.

n the winter of outrage that followed, gun owners poured into Richmond, crowded county board meetings and formed paramilitary groups in one county after another.

Throughout one of the most tumultuous political years in memory, armed paramilitary groups have marched: crowding into statehouse galleries, violently defending public monuments and now planning to show up at the polls on Election Day.

“Virginia is not the Virginia it used to be,” lamented John Sharp, a supervisor in Bedford County, which passed a militia resolution in May. “We’re outvoted.”

“Biden’s coming for us; there will be a war,” said Paul Cangialosi, who works with the Virginia Militia Alliance, created after last year’s election to organize armed groups across the state. “We don’t fix this at the ballot box, I hate to say it. We’re too divided.”

The founders saw militias, Mr. Abbott explained, as preventing “governments who had the majority from being able to impose their will on people who didn’t want their will.”

“If we do this tonight, what we’re doing is we’re just provoking or enhancing the possibility that we’re going to have civil unrest,” he said, talking of the fatal shootings at the August protests in Kenosha, Wis.

All 50 states prohibit private militias. They are illegal. Such organizations were banned starting with the Militia Act of 1903, and then amended by the National Defense Acts of 1920 and 1933.

So, to the media, by all means use the word militia for the National Guard, but don’t use it for vigilante groups that go by the name Oathkeepers or III%ers or the Wolverine Watchmen or any other name.

These groups use the name militia as a camouflage for their often violent and anti-democratic views. The term evokes the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War, citizen-soldiers who fought the British. But these guys are not heroes; they don’t deserve that historical cover.

In the middle of a national pandemic, in a nation riven by social justice protests, with historically high levels of unemployment, and with a contentious presidential election days away, we are at a moment that experts say is a perfect launchpad for acts of intimidation and violence by unlawful militias.

These groups saw Barack Obama not only as a Black man, but as a foreigner, an alien, un-American, and not of this country. This belief was aided and accelerated by the birther movement, whose primary promoter was none other than Donald J. Trump.

Oh, but doesn’t the 2nd Amendment protect them? Unlawful militias always cite the Second Amendment as providing the DNA of their founding and the justification for their continuation. This, too, is wrong.

For these unlawful militias, Election Day could become their Super Bowl. “Local officials, law enforcement, and voters,” says McCord, “need to know that groups of armed individuals have no legal authority under federal or state law to show up at voting locations claiming to protect or patrol the polls.”

The First Amendment’s provision of free speech and free assembly is not in conflict with the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Yes, burly white guys in camouflage can own guns, they can freely express their opinion that the federal government is going to confiscate their guns, they can “peacefully assemble” to protest that idea, they just can’t do so brandishing their guns and intimidating people, especially voters.

“twisted patriots.” They are overwhelmingly white men who appropriate Revolutionary War imagery to cloak their anti-government views.

These groups mushroomed in 1990’s after the federal government launched sieges in Ruby Rudge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. But their appeal dimmed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.

it is regulated by the State. The Supreme Court, in 1886 and in the Heller decision of 2008 written by Justice Scalia, explicitly permits the states to prohibit “private paramilitary organizations.”

Trump’s role in the resurgence of unlawful militias is impossible to measure, but according to both Holt and McCabe, he is seen as a kindred spirit.

“there has been a major realignment of militia movement in the U.S. from anti-federal government writ large to mostly supporting one candidate.” That candidate is Donald Trump. When Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”; when he said the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by”; when he expressed sympathy for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year old vigilante charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha; when he smiled as his supporters cheered “Lock her up” about Gov. Whitman—after the kidnapping plot was revealed—he is seen as an inspirational figure and a cheerleader for violence.

With the election days away and a possible indeterminate or contested result, what can and should states do? It is a bedrock of our civil law that the government—and only the government—is able to legally and legitimately use force in the maintenance of public safety.

“Local authorities in all 50 states,” says McCord, “should know that the law empowers them to restrict paramilitary activity during public rallies and elections, while preserving the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly.”

Rittenhouse faces multiple felony charges of homicide and recklessly endangering the safety of others, along with one misdemeanor count of possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor.

On Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, traveled a short distance from Illinois in response to a call from a Kenosha-based militia group saying it hoped to protect businesses from protesters.

Conservatives immediately took to social media with some painting Rittenhouse as a martyred patriot and others lionizing him.

Most recently, he upheld a long-standing rule in his courtroom that the men whom Rittenhouse shot can't be called "victims" during the hearing. He did say the defense can refer to them as "rioters, looters and arsonists."

Despite Rittenhouse's reported ties to white nationalist groups, including the Proud Boys, Simpson doesn't believe he belongs in jail.

But it's not a normal case. It will determine whether Rittenhouse was a defender of law and order during violent unrest, or a vigilante responsible for needless deaths.

Americans have grown more comfortable ordering everything on the internet, including bulky wares like canoes and refrigerators. Warehouses, as a result, have become gargantuan, doubling in size since 2010, according to CBRE, a real estate services firm.

A significant chunk of that growth has occurred outside large metropolitan areas, in counties that had relatively little of the picking-and-packing work until recently.

“We are at the very beginning of a rather large transformation, and the humble warehouse is the leading edge of this,” said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “These fulfillment center jobs are not being created in the tech hubs that were growing before. We’ve broadened the winner’s circle.”

And while robots have started to intervene in the process, it still takes a lot of bodies to move hundreds of thousands of boxes in and out of these buildings every day. Warehouses serving the largest e-commerce sites typically employ upwards of 2,000 people.

The hubs of this network are far-flung. In Bullitt County, Ky., south of Louisville, warehouse employment surged to 6,000 in 2017 from 1,200 in 2010, according to the Labor Department. In Kenosha, Wis., once a manufacturing hub whose auto plants turned out Nash Ramblers and Plymouth Horizons, warehouse jobs grew to 6,200 from 250 in the same period.

Those places have the advantage of being surrounded by highways and rail lines that lead to some of the nation’s largest cities. They also have an abundance of cheap land and labor, two assets that have become increasingly vital to companies selling online.

Remember that when he accepted the party's nomination at the 2016 GOP convention, Trump uttered these now-infamous words: "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it."

Except that Trump can't a) stick to the script or b) avoid saying whatever happens to flash through his mind at that very moment. And so, he flips the script to make the exact opposite point that his speechwriter would have wanted: That the election is, in fact, all about him.

A majority of Americans neither like Donald Trump personally nor approve of the job he is doing. And the way in which Trump has conducted himself as president as well as the way he has positioned himself in his reelection campaign have made it clear that this is -- and always has been -- about him and him alone.

Trump offered himself up as the only person able to fix what ails not just Washington, DC, but the country at large.

He has turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality rather than a group of people gathered around a set of shared ideological principles. He has weaponized race for his own political purposes.

Color me alarmist, but that sounds like an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, which is of course blatantly against the law.

On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t. He prattled anew about mail-in ballots and voter fraud and, perhaps alluding to all of the election-related lawsuits that his minions have filed, said: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

“sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just as deep.

This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no.

Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy

On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t

“There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

We’re in terrible danger. Make no mistake.

Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground.

The week since Ginsburg’s death has been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party,

Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

Most politicians — and maybe most Americans — now look across the political divide and see a band of crooks who will pick your pocket if you’re meek and dumb enough not to pick theirs first.

“If the situation were reversed, the Dems would be doing the same thing.”

Ugliness begets ugliness until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?

The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

What’s the far side of a meltdown? America the puddle? While we await the answer, we get a nasty showdown over that third Trump justice. Trump will nominate someone likely to horrify Democrats and start another culture war: anything to distract voters from his damnable failure to address the pandemic.

University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.

“I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”

“Tribal,” “identity politics,” “fake news” and “hoax” are now mainstays of our vocabulary, indicative of a world where facts and truth are suddenly relative.

“The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,”

But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground. The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.

At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

So the lesson for Democrats should be to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate. Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list

And who the hell are we anymore? The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

he might contest the election in a manner that keeps him in power regardless of what Americans really want.

The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,

this election might well degenerate into violence, as Democratic poll watchers clash with Republican poll watchers, and into chaos, as accusations of foul play delay the certification of state vote counts

headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

“The republic is in greater self-generated danger than at any time since the 1870s,” Richard Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me, saying that Trump values nothing more than his own power and will do anything that he can get away with

“If you had told Barack Obama or George W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.

What gave Primus that idea? Was it when federal officers used tear gas on protesters to clear a path for a presidential photo op? Was it when Trump floated the idea of postponing the election, just one of his many efforts to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own system of government?

Or was it when he had his name lit up in fireworks above the White House as the climax of his party’s convention? Was it on Monday, when his attorney general, Bill Barr, threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that the president considers “anarchist”? That gem fit snugly with Trump’s talk of blue America as a blight on red America, his claim that the pandemic would be peachy if he could just lop off that rotten fruit.

The deadly confrontations recently in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., following months of mass protests against racial injustice, speak to how profoundly estranged from their government a significant percentage of Americans feel.

Litigation to determine the next president winds up with the Supreme Court, where three Trump-appointed justices are part of a majority decision in his favor. It’s possible.

Rush Limbaugh — you know, the statesman whom Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year — has urged McConnell not even to bother with a confirmation hearing for the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and to go straight to a floor vote. Due diligence and vetting are so 2018

You know who has most noticeably and commendably tried to turn down the temperature? Biden. That’s of course its own political calculation, but it’s consistent with his comportment during his entire presidential campaign, one that has steered clear of extremism, exalted comity and recognized that a country can’t wash itself clean with more muck.

He’s our best bid for salvation, which goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.

Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back up.But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governor’s mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands.

From the South Front of the White House, Donald Trump broke the law in order to communicate to his supporters that a crime is not something you do; a criminal is something you are. And by you, of course he means them.

Trump’s big reelection pitch is “law and order.” He delivered that message while himself defying the laws and rules governing the use of government resources for partisan purposes. He delivered that message after another of his 2016 campaign chairs was indicted. He delivered that message while furiously battling in court to defeat subpoenas from New York prosecutors apparently investigating him, his family, and his companies for bank fraud. He delivered that message while running out the clock on congressional subpoenas investigating him, his family, and his companies for tax fraud. No president since Richard Nixon has seen so many of his closest associates convicted of, or pleading guilty to, criminal wrongdoing.

Trump spoke not a word to his followers urging them to put down their guns and quit the provocateur tactics that have so often accelerated disorder into violence. He knows that millions of his fellow Americans regard an armed white vigilante as an honorary law-enforcement officer. He wants them to know that he agrees. That’s something else they love about him.

Lincoln insisted in the throes of civil war that he was the president of the whole United States, and all of its people—even those in armed rebellion against his authority.

Trump is a secessionist from the top. As my colleague Ron Brownstein often observes, Trump regards himself as a wartime president of Red America against Blue America. That’s how he can describe riot and disorder as happening in “Biden’s America,” even when it happens under his presidency.

Since we are two countries, we can have two sets of laws and rules: one for friends, another for enemies

That’s why so many prominent Trump supporters can look at the shooting in Kenosha and perceive the gunman, who went to a city where he did not live with an AR-15-style rifle in hand, as acting in self-defense. The gunman had legitimate rights that must be respected.

The dead men did not, and neither did all the many victims this year of police shootings. If those victims had criminal records, then they were criminals—unlike, say, Michael Flynn, who remains a rights-bearing American despite his criminal record. Two countries, two classes of citizen, two systems of law.

that’s the question on the ballot this November, too: Is the law a set of obligations and rights binding for all, or a tool of power for the benefit of some?

Likewise with the five largest countries in Latin America, where only Argentina stands out as a clear success, while Brazil and Peru have worse death rates than ours, Mexico is just below us and Colombia a little further down.

Having lived through the last six months, I am sure some lives would have been saved if Trump had encouraged his own voters to take Covid-19 seriously at the outset, or if he had prodded his bureaucracy during the lost month of February, or if he had discouraged early reopening in the Sun Belt, and so on. If those failures add up to 20,000 lives lost instead of 145,000 it’s still a tragic record of avoidable mass suffering.

the same is true if you look at overall excess death statistics (the number of deaths above normal levels), which fewer countries keep, but which are probably a more accurate measure than a Covid-19-specific count. Again, Germany looks great, but Britain, Spain and Italy all have worse numbers than the United States.

Overall, once you observe the general pattern where the Western Hemisphere and Western Europe have been particularly hard hit, it’s hard to distinguish the big countries run by centrists or socialists from the country run by Donald Trump

the peer-country evidence suggests that to take the pre-emptive, creative and draconian steps that might have actually suppressed the virus, and in the process saved that hundred thousand or more extra lives, would have probably required presidential greatness, not merely replacement-level competence.

distinguishing between Trump’s incompetence and what an average president might have managed is harder, so long as so many peer-country death tolls look like ours.

Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose. And so they have learned to think of biased rules as necessary, proper, and just—and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival.

What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

“No one could do anything to stop him.” No one has stopped Trump from directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses.

Trump’s clemency to Stone reminded others who might hold guilty knowledge—people like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell—of the potential benefits to them of staying silent about Trump.

How did Trump get away with using a public power for personal advantage in this way? There’s nothing to stop him. The Constitution vests the pardon power in the president.

a second-term Trump could demand that associates break the law for him—and then protect them when they are caught and face punishment. He could pardon his relatives—and even try to pardon himself.

Abuse of Government Resources for Personal Gain

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him,

No one has stopped him from defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws. No one has stopped him from hiring and promoting his relatives.

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media

No one has stopped him from using government resources for partisan purposes. No one has stopped him from pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign.

No one has stopped him from using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him.

The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

“No one could do anything to stop him.” In his first term, Trump purged the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punished whistleblowers. In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security.

The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Directing Public Funds to Himself and His CompaniesIn the 230-year history of the United States, no president before Trump had ever tried to direct public dollars to his own companies—so no Congress had ever bothered to specifically outlaw such activity.

Trump’s superpower is his absolute shamelessness. He steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented.

A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity, like wearing cowboy boots during the George W.  Bush administration

The result of this almost-universal Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the neutering of Congress’s ability to act when corruption is disclosed.

Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs, setting a precedent that probably will someday be used against them.

Abuse of the Pardon PowerOn July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses.Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Inciting Political ViolenceTrump has used violence as a political resource since he first declared his candidacy, in the summer of 2015. But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people best positioned to regulate the level of political violence in the country are local police, whom Trump has again and again urged to do their work in ways that support him, no matter how “tough” that requires them to be. The police are represented by unions often aligned with the Trump campaign

“I can tell you,” Trump said in a March 2019 interview with Breitbart News, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Trump’s appeal is founded on a racial consciousness and a racial resentment that have stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland

It’s a trick of authoritarian populists like Trump to proclaim themselves leaders of “the people,” even as large majorities of the electorate reject them. The authoritarian populist defines “the people” to exclude anyone who thinks differently. Only his followers count as legitimate citizens.

Legend has it that in the 1870s, “Boss” William Tweed, the famously corrupt New York City politician, taunted his critics by saying, “What are you going to do about it?”* Trump’s relentless defiance of law and decency does the same. Congress has done nothing. So it’s up to voters.

Not since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 run had the state gone for the GOP nominee.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker, after all, had a lock on the state for years, and proved that the GOP could prevail there with the right mix of muscle, moxie and money.

His message to white, working-class voters plainly resonated. Clinton, notably, never visited the state as the nominee. Black voters’ enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee sank through the basement.

“But Wisconsin!” was only second to “But her emails!” in the annoying outbursts political reporters have been using as shorthand for the last four years.

Heading into 2020, Democrats knew they needed to offset the Republican suburban counties northwest of Milwaukee, but not by much. Trump in 2016 underperformed Mitt Romney’s numbers in those suburbs by 7 percentage points.

Biden appears on better footing than Clinton — in no small part due to his running mate Kamala Harris whose historic run is expected to energize Black voters.

Clinton at this point four years ago was up 6.5 percentage points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages. Biden is up 6.4 percentage points in the same meta-analysis. A Washington Post/ ABC News poll released yesterday suggested Biden’s lead to be an actual 17 percentage points.

Very, very few political pros believe this to be the case, citing the fact no other polls show it to be that much of a runaway for the former VP. The most plausible reason Republicans aren’t despondent about Wisconsin comes down to who is expected to show up: While Democrats have almost doubled their early voting numbers from 2016, Republicans are up four-fold.

That year, they had a three-point increase in their support of Obama over 2008. But, according to one study, Black voter participation in Wisconsin fell 20 percent between 2012 and 2016.

In August, police responding to reports of a domestic incident shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back four times, leaving him paralyzed. Deep unrest followed in Kenosha, about 45 minutes south of Milwaukee. Protestors took to the streets, demanding justice for Blake.

Both Trump and Biden visited the state after the shooting, giving Black voters a clear view of what their choices were come November. Trump stood with the police, who say they were responding to a call about someone with an outstanding arrest warrant and, they say, had a knife. Biden called for compassion and police reform.

“Everybody says your vote is your voice, so I feel like if you don’t vote, you are comfortable being silenced.”

In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense

Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”

Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.

Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.

In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.

The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.

The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”

After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.

But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.

Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.

“He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”

“To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.

The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.

Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”

The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.

Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.

“He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”

In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”

The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated.

the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day!

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence

n the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds.

But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would”.