Early in the morning on May 11th, the neon “Open” sign in the front window of Karl Manke’s barbershop was dark. A crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet arrived in Owosso, Michigan, a small town an hour and a half northwest of Detroit; people had on heavy coats and snow gloves, or sat in their trucks with the heater running. Michelle Gregoire, a twenty-nine-year-old school-bus driver and mother of three, looked unbothered by the cold. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she smiled and waved a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag at the passing traffic. She said of Manke, “He’s a national hero.”
Seven weeks earlier, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, had added “personal-care services” to the list of nonessential businesses required to temporarily close in the interest of containing the coronavirus. Since then, COVID-19 had killed nearly five thousand Michiganders—at the time, the fourth-highest death toll in the country—but most of the cases were in Detroit, and some residents of rural areas had come to resent the statewide lockdown. In April, thousands of people had attended a pair of protests at the state capitol, in Lansing, and hundreds of thousands had joined anti-lockdown groups on Facebook. On May 4th, Manke, who is seventy-seven, had reopened his barbershop. Four days later, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared it an “imminent danger” to public health, and state troopers had served Manke with a cease-and-desist order. That had been Friday. Now, on Monday, Manke’s supporters waited to see if he’d defy the order.
A number of them, including Gregoire, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, an armed militia with more than a thousand members. Over the weekend, some Home Guardsmen had said that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. Gregoire, who lives in Battle Creek, had driven ninety miles to stand with her comrades. Several of them were dressed in fatigues and carried sidearms.
Manke arrived at nine-thirty, to cheers and applause. He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet bearing the words “When in Doubt, Pray.” As he stiffly climbed the steps to the front door, his posture was hunched; the previous week, he had injured his back working fifteen-hour days, pausing only to snack on hard-boiled eggs that his wife brought him. Customers had travelled from all over Michigan, and some from out of state—a fact highlighted by Nessel to underscore the extent of the viral hazard.
When the “Open” sign flickered on, people crowded inside. Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century, and at his current location since the eighties. The phone was rotary, the clock analog, the gumball machine out of service. Black-and-white photographs of Owosso, where he graduated from high school in 1960, sat on cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac. Also on display were paperback copies of the ten novels that Manke had written. “Unintended Consequences” features an anti-abortion activist who “stands on his convictions”; “Gone to Pot” offers “a daring view into the underbelly of the sixties and seventies.”
As Manke fastened a cape around the first client’s neck, another man picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a basket on the counter. “My father was a barber,” he told Manke. “He believed in everything you believe in. Freedom. We’re the last holdout in the world.”
“We did this in 1776, and we’re doing it again now,” Manke said.
He had a weakness for pat aphorisms, his delight in them undiminished by repetition: “Politicians come to do good and end up doing well”; “You can’t fool me, I’m too ignorant.” In the several days that I spent at the barbershop, I heard Manke give countless customers the same stump speech. Until the pandemic, he’d never witnessed such “government oppression”; Whitmer was not his mother; he’d close his shop when they dragged him out in handcuffs, or when he died, or when Jesus came—“whichever happens first.” His admirers could not have asked for a better paragon of the mythical era when America was great.
Around noon, Glenn Beck called, live on the air. Manke told him, “It’s hardly my country anymore, in so many different ways.”
“You remind me of my father,” Beck said, with a wistful sigh.
Outside, I met a sixty-eight-year-old retiree named Roger Ball. We had to raise our voices to hear each other over a family of evangelicals singing hymns. “This has nothing to do with the virus,” Ball said. “This has to do with power. They want to take power away from the people, and they want to control us.” Ball considered the effort to shut down Manke’s barbershop an affront to America’s most sacred ideals—and he knew that he wasn’t alone. “We’re a trigger-pull away,” he told me. “We’re getting to the point where people have had enough.”
From the start, President Trump resisted a national pandemic strategy centered on federal resources, preferring instead for each state to tailor its own response. By early April, all American governors had declared states of emergency, a move that granted them the power to issue executive orders (which, unlike the sometimes tedious legislative process, can allow leaders to keep pace with quickly evolving circumstances). In Michigan, the legislature voted unanimously on April 7th to extend Governor Whitmer’s state of emergency—a rare instance of bipartisan consensus. The Senate majority leader, a Republican, opened the session by singing “It Is Well with My Soul.” The lieutenant governor, a Democrat, presided over the vote in a T-shirt that read “EVERYBODY VS COVID-19.”
The comity was short-lived. Two days later, Whitmer imposed additional restrictions, which went beyond those of most other states: she banned travel between counties, any work “not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and the sale of paint, furniture, and garden supplies. The following week, the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative organization partly financed by the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, rallied thousands of protesters in Lansing. It was the first major anti-lockdown demonstration in America, and not by chance. Michigan, a swing state that is as divided as it is diverse, contains many of the national fault lines that the pandemic has deepened.
The Michigan Freedom Fund was created in 2012, to lobby for legislation that curbed the collective-bargaining powers of organized labor. A so-called right-to-work bill, which would forbid making union membership a condition of employment, had been promoted by Americans for Prosperity, the national Tea Party advocacy group supported by the billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch. The governor at the time, Rick Snyder, was a Republican, and the day that he signed the bill into law Whitmer, then a state senator, joined a raucous protest in Lansing, which turned briefly violent. Backers of the law framed the debate as a matter of individual autonomy; opponents, such as Michigan’s automotive unions, saw a cynical campaign to sacrifice the common good for capitalist gain. COVID-19 has pitched these same ideological camps against each other, and, just as right-to-work laws spread from Michigan to other parts of the country, so has the anti-lockdown movement. Within a few weeks of the Michigan Freedom Fund rally, similar events were held in more than thirty states. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the statehouse; in North Carolina, a protester carried a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh; in Texas, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones beseeched demonstrators to resist a “Chinese globalist Bill Gates attack on our freedom.”
On April 30th, Michigan lawmakers reconvened to vote on extending Whitmer’s state of emergency a second time, and protesters again converged on Lansing. Many were armed. Michigan is an open-carry state, and no law prohibits licensed owners from bringing guns inside the capitol. Dozens of men with assault rifles filled the rotunda and approached the barred doors of the legislature. Facing a police line, they bellowed, “Let us in!”
A widely circulated photograph of the confrontation showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, his gaping mouth inches away from two young police officers in blue masks, who gazed stonily past him. The historian Heather Richardson, in her popular political newsletter, summed up what the image represented for liberal audiences: “This is a man who punches down, not up, and who wants to have the power to decide whether his neighbors live or die.”
In fact, the man was yelling not at the police but at the chief sergeant at arms for the Michigan House of Representatives, David Dickson, who stood outside the picture’s frame. The previous afternoon, Dickson and two of his colleagues had forcibly removed three female protesters—Michelle Gregoire among them—from a public gallery overlooking the House chamber. Access had been curtailed in order to maintain social distancing; when Gregoire and her friends refused to leave, Dickson dragged Gregoire through the doors, telling her, “Stay out.” One of the women filmed the encounter and posted the video on Facebook, alongside the caption “We are living in NAZI Germany!!!” Many of the protesters inside the statehouse the next day had watched the clip. When the bearded man was photographed, he was shouting at Dickson, “You gonna throw me around like you did that girl?”
Various protesters, arguing that Dickson had been the one punching down, characterized the photograph to me as proof of the media’s bad faith. “Camera angles are a bitch,” one man said. But the image also omitted another piece of information. Whereas all the women in the gallery—like most of the protesters in the rotunda—were white, two of the three men who ejected them, including Dickson, were Black. When I met Dickson, in June, he declined to assign importance to this detail. “I don’t play the race card,” he told me. He said of his expulsion of Gregoire, “I didn’t sleep for weeks. You don’t feel good about those kinds of things.” Yet, Dickson added, he was duty-bound to enforce the statehouse rules. In his opinion, the armed white men who had screamed at and insulted him had simply failed to grasp that.
Others saw a more pernicious force behind the rage. Protesters had displayed a Confederate flag and a noose. The state representative Sarah Anthony, who is African-American and could hear the yelling demonstrators from inside the House chamber, told me, “Those symbols mean something very, very clear to a Black woman. No one can convince me that the Confederate flag or a noose means something different now. It just felt like, if they had rushed that door, I’d be one of the first to go down.”
Anthony was born and raised in Lansing. In 2000, when she was seventeen, she participated in an after-school internship program at the state capitol, “for nerdy kids who had too many credits and needed something productive to do.” After shadowing Mary Waters, a Black representative from Detroit, Anthony resolved to become a politician. “To see a woman that looked like me in a leadership position—I didn’t know we could do that,” she said. In 2012, at the age of twenty-nine, Anthony became the youngest Black woman in America to serve as a county commissioner. Six years later, a landslide victory made her the first Black woman to represent Lansing in the Michigan legislature.
Anthony took me on a tour of the statehouse, her eyes visibly brightening above her mask. “There’s a sense of awe,” she said, pointing out its painted murals, limestone floor, and ornate chandeliers. Her reverence for the space had made the April 30th protest that much more disturbing. She had since acquired a bulletproof vest. Although she was an optimist by nature, her outlook concerning Michigan, and the country in general, had dimmed. “People are angry about being unemployed, about having to close their businesses—I understand that,” she said. “But there are elements, extremists, who are using this as an opportunity to ignite hate. Hate toward our governor, hate toward government, and also hate toward Black and brown people. These conditions are creating a perfect storm.”
In the nineteen-fifties, when Karl Manke was in high school, Owosso was a “sundown town”: African-Americans were not welcome. Today, it remains almost exclusively white, as does much of rural Michigan. For as long as Sarah Anthony has had a license, her parents have told her, “If you are driving from Detroit, and it’s too late, you stay in Detroit.” Some white Michiganders give one another the opposite advice.
Nationwide, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected African-Americans, and in Michigan nearly a quarter of coronavirus-related deaths have been in Detroit, which is eighty per cent Black. On April 30th, Anthony live-streamed a video on Facebook from her office. She was clearly upset by the presence of armed protesters—but it was their dismissiveness about COVID-19 that most offended her. “It’s infuriating to me because I feel as though they aren’t taking this seriously,” she said, wiping a tear away. She was similarly frustrated with the legislature, which that day voted against extending Whitmer’s emergency powers.
Although the political tension between Michigan’s urban, Democratic residents and its rural, Republican residents can look like racial animus, the latter group often ridicules any such interpretation as liberal cant. After the intense negative attention that the April 30th demonstration received, its organizers, a few Michiganders calling themselves the American Patriot Council, insisted that Whitmer had unfairly branded them as racists in order to discredit them. Two and a half weeks later, they held a rally in Grand Rapids—at a plaza known as Rosa Parks Circle.
This time, there were no Confederate flags. A video from the previous protest, which had sparked backlash online, had shown two adolescent girls dancing on the state capitol’s steps in rubber masks: one of Trump; the other of Obama, with exaggeratedly dark skin. In Grand Rapids, the same two girls danced—without masks—to “Bleed the Same,” by the gospel singer Mandisa. Their performance was followed by a sermon given by a Black minister.
The keynote speaker was Sheriff Dar Leaf, from nearby Barry County, who had refused to enforce Whitmer’s executive orders. A short, plump white man with a high-pitched voice and an unruly mop of curly blond hair, Leaf captivated the several hundred attendees by inviting them to imagine a version of the past in which Alabama law-enforcement officers, loyally upholding the Constitution, had not arrested Rosa Parks. To facilitate the thought experiment, Leaf channelled a hypothetical deputy sheriff. “Hey, Ms. Parks, I’m gonna make sure nobody bothers you,” he said. “And you can sit wherever you want.”
The overwhelmingly white crowd erupted into cheers. “Thank you!” a white man cried out.
In Alabama, during the sixties, sheriffs and deputies were especially ruthless toward Black protesters—the sheriff Jim Clark led a horseback assault against peaceful freedom marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and habitually terrorized African-Americans with a cattle prod that he wore on his belt. Leaf, however, saw himself as heir to a different legacy. “I got news for you,” he told the crowd. “Rosa Parks was a rebel.” And, in case anybody hadn’t understood his point: “Owosso has their little version of Rosa Parks, don’t they? Karl Manke!”
According to this narrative, police brutality against African-Americans, and the weaponization of law enforcement to suppress Black activism, were not manifestations of institutional racism; rather, they arose from the same infidelity to American principles of individual freedom that, in our time, defines the political left. The false equivalency of the anti-lockdown movement with the civil-rights movement appeals to the libertarian conviction that all government interference is inherently oppressive. It also elides the fact that the civil-rights movement demanded government interference on behalf of oppressed people.
Leaf belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which holds that county sheriffs retain supreme authority within their jurisdictions to interpret the law, and that their primary responsibility is to defend constituents from government overreach. Cracking down on illegal immigration is also paramount. The group’s Web site asserts, “Immigrants are not assimilating into our culture as they once did. This results in devastating consequences culturally and economically.” The notion of the “constitutional sheriff” was first proposed in the late fifties, by William Potter Gale—a Klansman, a leader in the white-supremacist Christian Identity church, and the founder of the Posse Comitatus movement. (In Latin, the phrase means “power of the county.”) Signed into law in 1878, the Posse Comitatus Act prevented federal troops from insuring the rights of emancipated slaves in former Confederate states. In 1957, when Arkansas refused to desegregate its schools, President Dwight Eisenhower mobilized the Army to protect Black students from white mobs. Gale decried the deployment as the very “evil” that the Posse Comitatus Act “was written to prevent.” In the seventies, he built a network of rural resistance to federal authority. This organization, which he called Posse Comitatus, recognized county sheriffs as “the only legal law enforcement” in America.
Daniel Levitas, in his 2002 book, “The Terrorist Next Door,” describes how Gale expanded the model of white vigilantism in the South to a national scale, using fears of Black integration and adding the spectre of governmental infiltration by Communists and Jews. Posse Comitatus groups across the country were instructed to convene “Christian common-law grand juries,” indict public officials who violated the Constitution, and then “hang them by the neck.” Gale’s guidance on what kinds of transgression merited such punishment was simple: any enforcement of the Civil Rights Act (African-Americans being subhuman “mud people”) or of tax laws (the I.R.S. and the Federal Reserve being sinister instruments of international Jewish bankers).
In Grand Rapids, Sheriff Leaf said, “We’re looking at common-law grand juries. I’d like to see some indictments come out of that.”
Was this a crafty dog whistle? Historical ignorance? Or was Leaf convinced that the racist and anti-Semitic provenance of such ideas no longer pertained? Although the violence and explicit bigotry of the Posse Comitatus fell out of favor during the eighties, much of Gale’s thinking continued to inform right-wing movements, which sanitized his rhetoric while extending his influence. The menace of immigration supplanted the evil of desegregation; the New World Order replaced Jewish cabals. For more than a century and a half, antipathy toward the federal government was virtually synonymous with the subjugation of Black people, but since the Clinton Administration many conservative white Americans have enlisted the Second Amendment to cast themselves as victims of persecution. In 2008, when Barack Obama’s election incited a resurgence of anti-government groups that championed such Posse Comitatus tenets as “sovereign citizenship,” their members claimed that they objected to the President not because he was Black but because he wanted to take their guns. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association was founded around 2010, by Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Arizona who propounded the debunked theory that Obama was born in Kenya. In 2014, Mack joined the rancher Cliven Bundy in his standoff with federal authorities, in Nevada. “This was Rosa Parks refusing to get to the back of the bus,” Mack later said.
At the end of his speech, Sheriff Leaf called onto the stage Phil Robinson, the forty-three-year-old co-founder of a militia that had been providing security at Rosa Parks Circle. With a shaved head and a graying beard spliced into long braids, Robinson lives up to his nom de guerre and Facebook handle: Odin Heathen. I saw him at several events, always in black cargo pants, a flak jacket, and tactical gloves, with a sidearm and a long gun. “This is our last home defense right here, ladies and gentlemen,” Leaf said. Glancing at Robinson’s assault rifle, he added, “These guys have better equipment than I do. I’m lucky they got my back.”
“That’s right!” Robinson said, laughing.
The original Michigan Militia was formed in 1994, during a national wave of white paramilitary mobilization prompted by the government’s deadly assaults on the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, and on the white supremacist Randy Weaver’s cabin at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. Two months after federal agents killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and their son, Sammy, hundreds of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Christian Identity adherents met in Estes Park, Colorado, where, many historians say, the American militia movement was born. The Michigan Militia quickly became the largest in the country, with an estimated seven thousand members. But a year after its establishment Timothy McVeigh, who had attended several of its meetings, detonated a bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people. The Michigan Militia soon collapsed. Not until Obama was elected did rural Michiganders again feel called upon to muster. Currently, there are more than a dozen militias in the state, some with only a handful of members, others with thousands.
At Rosa Parks Circle, members of the group to which Michelle Gregoire belongs, the Michigan Home Guard, stood on the periphery of the crowd. A few held flags with a large Roman numeral III—a reference to the dubious contention that only three per cent of American colonists fought the British. Several Three Percenter organizations were created after Obama’s election, when the number of militias in America leapt from around fifty to more than two hundred. Some Three Percenters are openly hostile to Muslims and immigrants; others concentrate on gun rights and opposing big government. A Home Guardsman wielding an AK-47 with a flash suppressor told me, “It only takes three per cent to defend from tyranny. We’re here for everybody.”
Every militia in Michigan now adamantly disavows racism and anti-Semitism. Robinson created his outfit—the Michigan Liberty Militia—in 2015, after “seeing what happened with the Bundys,” he told me. With twelve members, it is one of the smallest groups in the state, but Robinson’s involvement in the anti-lockdown protests has brought him notoriety. In interviews, he has expressed outrage and puzzlement at being labelled a racist. “I’m tired of the fake news,” he told me, with seemingly genuine indignation. Robinson practices Odinism, which is popular among white supremacists, some of whom embrace it as a more racially pure alternative to Christianity. But he says that it infuriates him to see others “using my religion for hate.” Like Sheriff Leaf, he presents himself as an impartial guardian of the Bill of Rights.
This strikes many people of color as disingenuous. “How about when the rights of Hispanics, Black Americans, and Muslims are trampled on?” an activist in Lansing said. “Where are these rallies? Where is all this outcry? We don’t see it.” Attorney General Nessel, who, as a private lawyer, successfully challenged Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage in a case that, along with others, was upheld by the Supreme Court, told me, “You didn’t see these people who now refuse to enforce the Governor’s orders saying, ‘Well, if you’re a county clerk and you don’t like the law, go ahead and start handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples.’ These same sheriffs would have been horrified had that happened.”
Most militia members I met subscribed to a version of constitutional fundamentalism that is inseparable from their Christian faith. The only legitimate role of government, they believe, is the protection of individual liberties vouchsafed to humanity by God. Plenty of mainstream Republicans share this philosophy, and during the pandemic they have struggled to reconcile it with the need to manage a public-health catastrophe. In Michigan and elsewhere, some Republican politicians have adopted the position, often espoused by militias, that no scenario warrants infringing on divinely given rights.
After the April 30th rally, Mike Shirkey, the Republican Senate majority leader who sang “It Is Well with My Soul” before voting to extend Whitmer’s emergency powers, released a statement criticizing the demonstrators for using “intimidation and the threat of physical harm to stir up fear and rancor.” He added, “At best, those so-called protesters are a bunch of jackasses.”
But the national divide over COVID-19 had since grown sharply partisan, and Shirkey, perhaps fearing for his political survival, had come to Rosa Parks Circle with hat in hand—or, rather, with a Bible and a bound copy of the Constitution in hand. After Sheriff Leaf left the stage, Shirkey took the microphone: “One book gives us our rights, assigns them to us, is inalienable. The other book is supposed to defend our rights.” Sometimes politicians got it backward, he said. Gesturing at the armed men around the square, Shirkey concluded, “That’s when these groups need to stand up and test that assertion of authority by the government. We need you now more than ever.”
The Senate majority leader’s volte-face suggested that, however fringe some anti-lockdown protesters might seem, they were more ahead of the Republican Party than to the right of it. Trump had intuited this early. After the first anti-lockdown protest at the capitol, he tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”—distilling into two words the Three Percenter world view.
If the comparison of Karl Manke to Rosa Parks captures how some conservative Americans perceive themselves, their frequent insistence that lockdown measures are analogous to the policies of the Third Reich suggests what they believe to be at stake. Though Nazi imagery was common at the rallies, most protesters used it to accuse Whitmer—whom some of them have taken to calling Whitler—of governing like a dictator, not to endorse fascism. The Nazis were also a topic of conversation in Manke’s barbershop, which, for his supporters, represented a bulwark against the kind of creeping authoritarianism that gradually engulfed Germany during the nineteen-thirties. Manke, who grew up attending Lutheran services in German and speaking German with his grandfather, often cited the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale.
“They would trade their liberty for security,” he told a customer one day. “Because the Nazis told them, ‘Get in these cattle cars, and we’re gonna take you to a nice, safe place. Just get in.’ ”
“I would rather die than have the government tell me what to do,” the man in the chair responded.
In mid-May, after the local sheriff declined to arrest Manke, Attorney General Nessel suspended his business license. “It’s tyrannical!” Manke told journalists. “I’m not getting in the cattle car!” (Several weeks later, the Michigan Supreme Court decided that Manke could keep his shop open. One justice admonished that judges should follow the “rule of law, not hysteria.”)
Manke’s 2015 novel, “Age of Shame,” recounts the travails of Rhena Nowak, a thirteen-year-old Polish Jew, during the Second World War. After her family is killed by the S.S. and she is raped by a German sergeant, Rhena is loaded into a cattle car. Manke writes, “Millions of Jews have already been moved through this process with little to no resistance, holding true to their centuries-old compliance to their weakness toward fatalism.” However, he adds, a few outliers “are not cut out to become willing participants in this collapse of strength.” Rhena pries loose the wooden slats nailed over a window and leaps from the train, earning her freedom. In my signed copy of “Age of Shame,” Manke wrote, “History unheeded is history repeated.”
Manke and his customers were not only fighting against tyranny; they were also fighting for something. Everyone in the barbershop harbored a uniquely American veneration of work—which, especially in Michigan, the Republican Party has succeeded in equating with freedom. The first right-to-work campaign was spearheaded, in the nineteen-thirties, by the Christian American Association, which condemned the New Deal as a Jewish plot and organized labor as a threat to Jim Crow segregation, warning that unions would force white and Black workers into alliance. By 2012, when the Koch brothers and the Michigan Freedom Fund resurrected the term “right to work” for their own anti-union crusade, its origins had been forgotten. Today, for many Americans, working is an expression of liberty as sacrosanct as the right to bear arms.
Though lockdown advocates accuse detractors of refusing to make personal sacrifices during a national crisis—and, therefore, of being the opposite of patriotic—detractors reject the premise that we are in a crisis. Doubt about the seriousness of COVID-19 circumvents any question of selfishness: social distancing is for benighted conformists, or “sheeple.” This may explain why otherwise reasonable conservatives who object to lockdown measures on ideological grounds can sometimes be receptive to conspiracy theories and outlandish quackery.
Jane Ward, a middle-aged resident of Owosso and one of the few women at the barbershop, told me that she had come for the company, after experiencing depression while isolated at home. “I’ve had all-time lows,” she said. “The Governor doesn’t address mental wellness—only the virus.”
A man sitting beside us told her, “That’s what they’re counting on, that people don’t talk to each other.” He wore a leather racing jacket, an American-flag bandanna tied around his neck, and a hunting knife on his belt. A crucifix was tattooed on the back of his hand. “That’s what the social distancing is for.”
“Right,” Ward said.
The man explained that the government was working with a “facial-recognition company in Israel” to conduct “mass-scanning”—but people needed to be “spaced apart for it to work.”
I was about to cite the potential benefit of masks in thwarting such technology when another customer said, “They have refined it to the point where all they need to see is the eyes.”
Ward said, “Like, what’s the movie—‘The Matrix’? I mean, I can relate so much of this to so many movies.”
The online video “Plandemic,” which features Judy Mikovits, a former biochemistry researcher whose career was dogged by accusations of misconduct, has accrued a devoted anti-lockdown audience. (Mikovits denies any wrongdoing.) The video posits that Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and one of the leaders of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, was complicit in the release of COVID-19, and has suppressed effective treatments and falsified epidemiological data in order to benefit patent holders of harmful vaccines.
On May 20th, the Michigan Freedom Fund organized a second protest at the state capitol, where Manke and more than a dozen female stylists gave free haircuts on the steps and lawn. Hundreds of people attended. Marlene Palicz, an elderly protester in a MAGA hat, told me that “Faux-Fauci” and the “Demoncrats” had orchestrated the “plandemic” to prevent Trump’s reëlection. Bill Gates wished to depopulate the world by fifteen per cent, which is why Palicz would never submit to a COVID-19 vaccine. “They’d have to tie me down,” she said. “But they’d have a problem doing that. I used to be a member of the Detroit Judo Club.”
The daughter of a coal miner, Palicz had “evolved from Democrat to Republican to Libertarian to Tea Party.” Now she was a diehard Trumper. She’d attended at least a dozen of the President’s rallies. “I’ve been to them in blizzards!” she said. “That’s when I feel most alive. The people, the energy—it’s unbelievable.”
Barack Obama easily carried Michigan in both of his elections, but in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost there, by a little more than ten thousand votes. For Trump to defeat Joe Biden in the general election, he will likely have to repeat the upset in Michigan. Throughout the pandemic, Trump has shown a special interest in the state, encouraging protesters while belittling Whitmer and Nessel. White House officials have also cultivated the loyalty of science skeptics like Palicz by disparaging Fauci, who recently joined Biden in calling for a temporary nationwide mask mandate. “Trump is the only one who can handle what’s going on, the only one,” Palicz told me—something no Democrat has been known to say about Biden. Although Trump’s consistent undermining of his own experts makes his Administration look dysfunctional, it has reinforced his outsider status—a singularly important quality to Americans who are more concerned about government overreach than they are about COVID-19.
In current polls, Biden leads Trump by nearly eight points in Michigan, but if 2016 was any indication turnout will be a decisive factor in November, and residents inflamed by Whitmer’s policies are highly motivated to get out the vote. Moreover, the relatively modest number of protesters at anti-lockdown rallies likely belies a much larger demographic. On April 9th, before any protests had occurred, Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor from Onsted, created a Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine. He expected to attract perhaps a few hundred followers. Within a month, the group had more than four hundred thousand members. As enrollment skyrocketed, Soldano told me, he spoke with Republican state senators, via Zoom, “to figure out what we needed to do.”
In early May, Facebook deleted several similar accounts whose comments sections had devolved into profane, misogynistic attacks on Whitmer. Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine was more stringently moderated, but Soldano said that he couldn’t keep up: “There was obviously a lot of hate comments on there, because people are frustrated.” (Soldano added that he and his family had been relentlessly harassed by “the other side”; one anonymous caller threatened to slit his children’s throats.) On May 12th, a member of the group remarked, “Hopefully, Nuremberg style hearings will commence to shine the light on everyone who has had a hand in this whole pandemic.” Another said, of Whitmer, “She is literally killing people, she must be stopped.” That afternoon, Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine vanished.
In an e-mail, a Facebook spokesperson said that the group had been removed “for repeated violations of our Community Standards,” but wouldn’t specify which ones. Soldano told me that Facebook reprimanded him for “advocating the spread of disease” after he live-streamed a video from Manke’s barbershop. When Soldano set up a new page on Facebook, his followers joined him there. Facebook’s censorship had only intensified their sense of dispossession: “They took away our stories, our truth! Disgusting!” It had also deepened their belief that invisible forces were out to control them, galvanizing their determination to fight back: “You just added fuel to the fire”; “THERE’S AN INFERNO BURNING.”
In addition to owning two chiropractic offices, Soldano is a motivational speaker and the author of a self-help book, “God’s True Law,” in which he writes that disease can be “caused by interferences in the natural vibrational frequencies.” Last year, Soldano became a national director of Juice Plus+, a dietary-supplement company with a multilevel marketing strategy. (Such business models have been likened to pyramid schemes.) Two days after Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine was expelled from Facebook, Soldano launched a Web site called Stand Up Michigan, whose home page includes a video of him wearing a blue suit with a pocket square. “We want to be the lantern in the darkness of today’s challenges,” he proclaims.
The Web site promised paying subscribers “relevant and timely information on current issues” and “expert insight and education.” An online store sold backpacks (a hundred and ninety dollars), yard signs (a hundred and fifty dollars), and other merchandise. Most of the products showcased the Stand Up Michigan logo: a silhouette of Paul Revere on a galloping horse, holding a lantern.
Across America, seemingly grassroots mobilizations against lockdown policies have turned out to be partly financed or directed by Republican donors and operatives. The chairman of the Michigan Freedom Fund is a former political adviser to Betsy DeVos’s husband, Richard, who is the heir to Amway—another multilevel-marketing company. The DeVoses have contributed at least half a million dollars to the organization. According to Soldano, Stand Up Michigan has received no outside financial support. (He also told me that he has “not taken a penny” from the Web site’s proceeds.) He said that the Republican state senators with whom he spoke advised him to launch a petition to repeal a 1945 law that allowed Whitmer to issue executive orders without legislative approval. “That gave us a goal that we needed to achieve,” Soldano explained.
On May 21st, Soldano put on an event called the Freedom Festival, in Newaygo, a town on the Muskegon River. In a park with an outdoor amphitheatre, hundreds of people congregated. Corporate-looking banners read “EQUIP AND EMPOWER”; tables under tents offered Stand Up Michigan apparel. Soldano led the crowd in chants of “U.S.A.” He then issued a confounding series of words with such ardent emotion that it was hard not to be moved by them: “Every action is a call set in motion, and its effects build on past effects, to move us into a definite direction. That direction is our destiny. That direction is the new America!” Later, he implored, “Buy some T-shirts—support the movement.”
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. Everyone seemed thrilled to be outside, breathing freely. As at the barbershop and in the deleted Facebook groups, a shared experience of feeling shamed and ostracized had fostered embattled solidarity. It wasn’t only the government that had lost its bearings but society as a whole. Whitmer’s overzealous restrictions were symptomatic of the same ubiquitous insanity that afflicted people who wore masks while alone in their cars, or who refused to hug loved ones. The folks in Newaygo, many of whom had travelled from distant counties, were clearly gratified to be in the company of like-minded citizens. I spent most of the Freedom Festival next to a middle-aged man in a Stand Up Michigan hat and shirt, who had a revolver in a leather holster on his belt. His happiness was palpable. He resembled a worshipper at a Baptist revival, punctuating the speeches with “Yes!” and “All right!”
At one point, the owner of a mixed-martial-arts studio told the crowd that he had reopened his gym after researching COVID-19 and concluding that widespread exposure to it would “perpetuate and move the species throughout history.” My neighbor applauded as fervently as he had for an attorney who had denounced the unconstitutionality of executive orders. When Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” came on, he turned to me and said, “I love this music! I love this, brother!” He scanned the park, taking it all in. “These are my people.”
In 1964, the year that Barry Goldwater won the Republican Presidential nomination, Richard Hofstadter published his celebrated essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which cautioned against dismissing as a marginal phenomenon the tendency toward “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Hofstadter also identified a dangerous consequence of this mentality: “Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”
The belief that such a battle is forthcoming, and maybe desirable, underlies a growing subset of the broader anti-government scene. In 2012, users on the Web site 4chan appropriated the title of “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”—a 1984 movie about break dancing, starring Black actors and directed by an Israeli-American—to ironically dub their anticipated armed insurrection Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. White supremacists, envisaging the Boogaloo as a race war, popularized the meme online, and since then the concept has been adopted and modified by Second Amendment advocates, preppers, survivalists, and conspiracy-minded youth. An alternative name for the Boogaloo is the Big Luau, and every anti-lockdown protest I attended in Michigan had at least a few so-called Boogaloo Bois, who were easily identifiable by their signature ensemble: Hawaiian shirt, flak jacket, assault rifle.
When I asked them for their names, most responded, “I am Duncan Lemp.” Lemp was a twenty-one-year-old software developer who, in right-wing chat forums, called himself a Three Percenter. On March 12th, a SWAT team searching for illegal firearms killed Lemp while he was asleep in his house, in Potomac, Maryland. (The team had a no-knock warrant, like the one used by the police who, on March 13th, killed Breonna Taylor, in Louisville, Kentucky.) Lemp’s death has energized Boogaloo enthusiasts in the way that Vicki and Sammy Weaver’s did the modern militia movement, in the nineties. So, too, have COVID-19 lockdowns.
“It seems like it gets closer every day,” a twenty-eight-year-old named Justin Mishler told me, at the rally in Grand Rapids. Although he lives in Illinois, where he is a full-time student, Mishler rarely missed a protest in Michigan, driving in alone in his S.U.V. He was different from other Boogaloo Bois, many of whom resembled heavily armed cosplayers more than dangerous revolutionaries. (One Hawaiian-shirted kid wore green Army ammo pouches that were usually stocked with Slim Jims.) Mishler had joined the Marine Corps after high school and had deployed to Afghanistan, as an infantryman. The M16 that he brought to the protests had the same pistol grip, magazine, charging handle, and bolt carrier with which he had customized his rifle overseas. He didn’t wear Hawaiian shirts. “The way I look at it, joining the service was patriotic, and this is just an extension of that,” Mishler told me. “A lot of people like to call it Civil War 2, but it’s more American Revolution 2.”
The Boogaloo movement can be divided into two camps. One looks at America, decides that war with the state is inevitable, and deems it prudent to be ready. The other looks at America, decides that such a war is necessary, and deems it righteous to hurry things along. Adherents of this latter view are sometimes called “accelerationists,” and they differ from most militia members, who hew to a principle of “no first use of force.” To date, accelerationism has largely been restricted to the Internet. On May 29th, however, a gunman fired an assault rifle at security guards outside a federal building in Oakland, California, killing one and wounding another. About a week later, investigators surrounded the home of a suspect: Steven Carrillo, a thirty-two-year-old sergeant in the Air Force. Carrillo fired on the officers, killing a deputy, then hijacked a car in an attempted escape, which ended with his capture. During the shootout, Carrillo was wounded, and he used his blood to write “BOOG” on the hood of the stolen vehicle.
The next month, Facebook banned Boogaloo proponents from its platform, erasing more than a hundred groups. I had been monitoring several of them. The discussions had tended to revolve around defining Boogaloo priorities—a debate often reduced to who should be “yeeted,” or killed. The general tone of trollish causticness and misanthropy was distinct from anything I heard at the anti-lockdown rallies, whose participants could often be defensive, earnest, and shrill. The online groups were rife with racism, and anti-Semitic postings were prevalent: Jews were behind all manner of diabolism that the Boogaloo would remedy, from the media to child pornography. At the same time, nearly every hateful comment was met with incensed responses from other Bois, for whom the Boogaloo meant universal emancipation from government oppression.
When I asked Mishler what political system he hoped to see emerge post-Boogaloo, he answered, “Extreme libertarianism.” He repudiated any talk of racial violence and, like many Bois, seemed to assume that maximum freedom would lead to maximum equality. “We want gay married couples adopting Chinese kids to be able to protect their marijuana fields with their machine guns,” I heard him say, at a rally in Lansing, to a Jewish counterprotester who wore a Star of David armband.
That day, Newsweek published a photograph of Mishler standing outside the statehouse with his rifle. Hillary Clinton tweeted the image. “Armed men storming a legislature to disrupt its democratic proceedings is domestic terrorism,” she wrote. “It cannot be tolerated.”
I later asked Mishler how it felt, as a combat veteran, to be called a terrorist by a former U.S. Secretary of State.
He smiled. “It takes a lot to make me upset,” he said.
When Sarah Anthony, the state representative, live-streamed the video from her office at the capitol, one of her constituents, Michael Lynn, Jr., watched it with a rising feeling of anger at the protesters. Lynn, an African-American firefighter who, like Anthony, grew up in Lansing, could see that she was afraid. “I took that personally,” he said. “I feel like, when Black and brown people elevate a person from our community to that level, we can’t allow her to be intimidated to speak for us.” A week later, Lynn, his wife, Erica, and their twenty-year-old son, Michael III—all licensed gun owners—escorted Anthony from her office to an Appropriations Committee hearing. Lynn and Michael III carried assault rifles; Erica, a pistol. Anthony, an advocate of gun-law reform, had been reluctant at first. But she later told me, “I will say that I felt safer.”
In 1967, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panthers, led a group of armed African-Americans into the California statehouse, in Sacramento, to protest a Republican-sponsored bill that would criminalize guns in public. Photographs of the demonstration shocked the country. After Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bill—which received the endorsement of the National Rifle Association—he declared, “There’s no reason why, on the street today, a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” Like the Panthers—and, before them, Malcolm X—Michael Lynn treats gun ownership as a means of empowerment. After escorting Anthony, Lynn and his wife and son lingered on the capitol steps, posing with their weapons for journalists. Lynn told me that he wanted to “change the narrative—show that we can do this, too.”
I met Lynn on May 15th, the day that Hillary Clinton called Justin Mishler a terrorist. The Lansing legislature had adjourned in anticipation of the rally, forestalling the possibility of armed protesters again filling the rotunda. Lynn disapproved of the closure. “That shows people that ‘Damn, we can go down there and get whatever we want, if we bring guns,’ ” he said.
Anthony and other Democratic lawmakers had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade their Republican colleagues to ban weapons from the statehouse. But, for Lynn, the pandemic had revealed a more ominous danger, which no amount of regulation could neutralize. He had recently created a Facebook page, Black and Brown 2a Advocates, to help encourage and expand minority gun ownership in Lansing. “You see these white groups—they’re stockpiling ammunition while everybody else is stockpiling toilet paper,” he said. “We need to protect our own.”
Ten days later, George Floyd was killed, in Minneapolis. I crossed paths with Lynn again that week, at the first protest that Floyd’s death inspired in Michigan: a rally at the state capitol, organized by a Black firearms instructor from Detroit. All the attendees carried weapons, and most belonged to the National African American Gun Association, which promotes “the usage of the Second Amendment to protect our community when all other methods fail.” Lynn, wearing an assault rifle slung across his chest, addressed the crowd, saying that what saddened him most about Floyd’s murder was the fact that no bystander had intervened. “I’m here to swear to all of you that, if I see that happening, I will do as I’ve been trained, and I will stop the threat,” he vowed. He recited a litany of now famous names—Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—and, at the end, he added one that is less familiar: his childhood friend Aldric McKinstry.
In 1999, when Lynn and McKinstry were teen-agers, they were at a party in a Lansing apartment when squad cars arrived. McKinstry fled, was pursued, and hid in someone’s basement. The police released a German shepherd through a storm hatch. Later, they claimed that McKinstry fired on the dog. Officers shot him six times. Lynn insists that McKinstry had no gun. An article in the Lansing Journal showed a photograph of Lynn at McKinstry’s funeral. “They are just trying to justify killing him,” Lynn was quoted as saying. None of the officers involved were disciplined.
Since McKinstry’s death, much of Lynn’s life has been consumed by community activism. He and Erica, whom he met in high school, run a nonprofit organization, the Village Lansing, which provides mentoring and other services for local youth. Lynn became a Lansing firefighter in 2014, but last year he sued the city, alleging that racial discrimination pervaded the department. He says that he lodged numerous complaints, all of which resulted in further retaliation. The abuse culminated with someone placing a banana under the windshield wiper of his truck.
At the capitol, Lynn sounded exasperated: “We can no longer throw our hands in the air and say, ‘I can’t breathe.’ ” He went on, “When we start taking up arms, and people start dying in the streets when they are killing us, that’s when change will come.”
During the next several weeks, demonstrations for racial justice took place across the state. In Grand Rapids, a peaceful march that began in Rosa Parks Circle gave way to rioting at night. Businesses were looted and cars were burned. Similar unrest occurred in Lansing. On June 4th, Governor Whitmer—after weeks of admonishing anti-lockdown protesters for potentially spreading COVID-19—joined thousands of marchers in Detroit. For her critics, photographs showing her shoulder to shoulder with Black community leaders proved that she had politicized the virus.
Whitmer’s supporters, meanwhile, pointed out that her policies appeared to have worked. By mid-June, Michigan’s economy had begun to reopen, and COVID-19 cases had fallen significantly. Hospitalizations had decreased to a tenth of their peak. On July 5th, Michigan reported zero COVID-related deaths for the first time since March, even as the virus surged in states that rejected early lockdowns, such as Texas, Arizona, and Florida. Michigan’s numbers have stayed relatively low in August, though the restrictions have been costly: unemployment, at almost fifteen per cent, far exceeds the national rate, and more than eight hundred small businesses have permanently closed in Detroit alone.
After George Floyd was killed, there were no lockdown protests in Michigan for several weeks. But on June 18th the American Patriot Council held another rally in Lansing. This time, the theme was not anti-Whitmer but, instead, pro-militia. Attendees were encouraged to bring weapons and flags. The event was scheduled for the eve of Juneteenth—the day when African-Americans celebrate the end of slavery—which was difficult not to interpret as a provocation.
In Lansing, rioting connected to Floyd’s death had lasted a single evening. Every night since then, protesters had gathered at the state capitol and marched peacefully through downtown, led by a thirty-four-year-old named Paul Birdsong. Unaffiliated with Black Lives Matter or any other activist organization, Birdsong had attracted a following after confronting aggressive police officers at an early Floyd demonstration. The role came naturally to him. His father was one of the founders of the West Side Piru, a Los Angeles street gang that evolved into the Bloods; today, Birdsong oversees Bloods in multiple states and describes himself as a gang leader. The impetus for the West Side Piru was to defend Black neighborhoods from the Crips, an older and larger Los Angeles gang. Although many Bloods came to engage in the same rapacious activities as their rivals, Birdsong claims to uphold the original Piru code: “To live, love, and learn, and to keep each other off strong drugs, out of jail, and from dying.” He sees no distinction between fighting Crips and demonstrating against police brutality. “We will stand up to any destructive forces that attempt to invade and pollute our communities,” he told me.
Birdsong also emulates Malcolm X, who grew up in Lansing and whose family home was burned down by a white-supremacist militia in 1929, when he was four. During marches, Birdsong usually carries a handgun; other protesters bring assault rifles.
When I arrived at the capitol on June 18th, at 6 P.M., hundreds of armed white citizens were already at the base of the steps. A man and a woman wearing Stand Up Michigan T-shirts collected signatures to repeal the 1945 state-of-emergency law. The petition had grown considerably more ambitious since April, and now proposed extensive amendments to Michigan’s constitution, including abolishing the state’s civil-rights commission. Michelle Gregoire, of the Michigan Home Guard, chatted with Phil Robinson, of the Michigan Liberty Militia; each had a semi-automatic rifle. When I mentioned to Robinson that Birdsong had been protesting at the capitol every night, and would probably be arriving soon, he said, “That would be awesome.” I asked if he was worried about potential conflict. He laughed. “Have you looked around? You’d be a fool to come here and start shit.”
Three days earlier, in Albuquerque, members of the New Mexico Civil Guard militia had confronted protesters attempting to topple a statue of a Spanish conquistador. When the altercation led to somebody shooting a protester—he survived—the militia members formed a protective circle around the gunman, who was charged with aggravated battery but has claimed self-defense. Robinson told me that, if anyone assaulted him, he was “gonna do the same thing” as the gunman in New Mexico.
The head of the American Patriot Council, a real-estate agent from Grand Rapids named Ryan Kelley, hurried about, greeting attendees. I asked him why he was putting on the event. “Chaos across the United States,” Kelley replied. “Antifa taking over areas of the country. People not feeling safe.” President Trump—who can be seen standing beside Kelley in Kelley’s Facebook profile picture, giving a thumbs-up—had recently announced his intention to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. Although no national organization called Antifa exists, some activists who identify as anti-fascists have responded to the rise of right-wing ideologues by impeding them—at times violently—from publicly speaking and assembling. Trump has increasingly invoked Antifa as evidence of a vast left-wing menace bent on sowing discord in America. In casting the widespread mobilization against racism as the work of state enemies, he has echoed such segregationists as William Potter Gale, who ascribed the civil-rights movement to a Communist plot to divide Americans.
I asked Kelley why his rallies had evolved from addressing COVID-19 policies to addressing domestic security. “COVID is nonsense,” he said. “And so the evolution of that is the Democratic Party continuing to do anything they can to get Trump out of office—including hiring people to riot and loot in our streets.”
A young African-American with an assault rifle, who had been following Kelley around, now stood silently beside him. When I asked Kelley if the man was his bodyguard, he said, “You can say that. Yeah, we’ll roll with that.”
“I’m an independent American,” the man told me.
A few minutes later, Kelley climbed the steps and spoke to the Lansing police officers monitoring the scene: “We say thank you for being here. Thank you for standing up for our communities.”
I was surprised by the applause this tribute received. Before Floyd’s death, much of the anti-lockdown anger had been directed at law enforcement. Protesters at the April 30th rally had called the officers guarding the Michigan House chamber “traitors” and “filthy rats.” Karl Manke’s customers had told me that the state police who served Manke with a cease-and-desist order were “Storm Troopers.” When officers issued citations to some of the female stylists at the second Michigan Freedom Fund rally, protesters likened them to the Gestapo. “People like me used to fucking back you!” an Iraq War veteran carrying an American flag had shouted. “But you are trash!” Several of the officers being praised by Kelley were the same ones who’d been berated that day.
“There’s a lot of chaos right now,” Kelley said. It broke his heart “to see elected politicians telling police to stand down.”
Suddenly, a group of young people appeared on the lawn. Among them was Birdsong. Notably taller than those around him, he had the thick but rounded build of a former athlete, and he wore red Chuck Taylors, black shorts, and a red bandanna tied around his wrist. Walking into the crowd of pro-militia demonstrators, he lay face down and crossed his hands behind his back, reënacting George Floyd’s final minutes. The other counter-protesters followed his lead. None had weapons. Some wore empty holsters. Birdsong later told me that he had forbidden guns.
“What are we gonna do here, guys?” Kelley said into the microphone. “What are we gonna do?”
The militia members and their supporters called Birdsong and the counter-protesters “faggots,” “pieces of shit,” “pussies,” and “fucking inbreds.” Birdsong lifted his head from the pavement and told those lying around him, “Don’t say anything.”
Kelley shouted, “We will not stand for the destruction of our state, of our country, of our citizens! You will not terrorize us!”
An older man in a Michigan Home Guard hat appeared enraged by the passivity of the demonstration. Leaning over the prostrate bodies, he barked, “Stand up! Your grandfathers and your uncles and your brothers—every one of them that fought for our country is ashamed of you!”
Eventually, Birdsong rose. When a woman yelled at him, “This is our state!,” he replied, “This is our city. We live here. You don’t live here. In my city, you don’t threaten anybody.”
“A mouth, that’s all you are,” a man in an ammo vest and a Hawaiian shirt said. In the middle of his chest was a patch with the Latin adage Si vis pacem, para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” He told Birdsong, “I can look at you and tell you’re a weak fucking man.”
Birdsong silently held the man’s stare, then turned his back. Later, when I asked about this moment, he said, “That’s the Piru training. I refuse to be provoked.”
One of the American Patriot Council organizers walked through the counter-protesters, filming them with his phone. Standing over a white man who was clothed in black and wearing a face mask, the organizer announced, “This is Antifa!”
At first, Phil Robinson and the rest of the Michigan Liberty Militia attempted to de-escalate tensions, urging people to give the counter-protesters space. But when Birdsong and others raised their fists Robinson lost his equanimity. “Coming here, disrupting our event?” he yelled. “They have no respect for anybody!”
A heavyset man with a rifle in a scabbard on his back told Robinson, “Don’t fucking worry about it, brother. This fucking shit ain’t nothing.”
Robinson jabbed the man in the sternum. “If these motherfuckers wanna go up a calibre, I am ready,” he said. “I am ready.”
After a while, Kelley and several other rally organizers pulled Birdsong aside. When Birdsong stated that the Constitution meant something different for African-Americans, whose enslavement it had allowed, Kelley said, “Slavery has been abolished. That has all changed.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Birdsong said. “The torture, the oppression, the beatings—it’s just done in a different way.”
A discussion of sorts ensued, but Kelley seemed most interested in being photographed, and kept interrupting Birdsong to demand that journalists take their picture. At one point, he suggested that Birdsong recite the Pledge of Allegiance with him on the capitol steps. Birdsong agreed—if Kelley would raise his fist with him. Kelley declined. Shortly afterward, he said, “I gotta get back to the rally.” Smiling for the cameras, shaking Birdsong’s hand, he told him, “I think this conversation should continue.”
Three days later, the American Patriot Council published an article on its Web site describing Birdsong as a “local thug” and “an ongoing problem in the community.” The article also mentioned Michael Lynn, Jr., calling the Lansing firefighter a “gang banger.”
According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis of American gun purchases, “almost three million more firearms have been sold since March than would have ordinarily been sold.” Most of the people I met in Michigan, no matter their politics, had one thing in common: a diminished faith in the government as a reliable authority, whether to administer justice or to keep its citizens safe and healthy.
In the first days of the pandemic, Trump attempted to do what Presidents traditionally do in a crisis: unify the country. “We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together,” he said. Presenting himself as a “wartime President,” he called COVID-19 “the invisible enemy” of all Americans.
By the summer, Trump had set his sights on a different enemy. On the eve of July 4th, he addressed the country from Mt. Rushmore. Barely mentioning the virus, which had killed more than a hundred and thirty thousand Americans, he instead warned of “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” The people behind this scourge were agents of “far-left fascism” determined “to overthrow the American Revolution.” He intimated civil conflict: “Tonight, before the eyes of our forefathers, Americans declare again, as we did two hundred and forty-four years ago, that we will not be tyrannized—we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”
It was the language of the Boogaloo. ♦
More on the Coronavirus
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