He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet with the words “When in Doubt, Pray”. Manke appeared at 9.30am, to cheers and applause. When I mentioned that officials were considering banning guns inside the statehouse, she laughed: “If they go through with that, they’re not gonna like the next rally.” She’d been at Lansing’s capitol on 30 April, and did not regret what happened there. Michelle had driven 90 miles, from her house in Battle Creek, to stand with her comrades. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she waved a Gadsden flag at the passing traffic. “He’s a national hero,” Michelle Gregoire, a 29-year-old school bus driver, mother of three, and Home Guard member, told me. Now it was Monday, and the folks in the parking lot had come to see whether Manke would show up. Over the weekend, Home Guardsmen had warned that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. That Friday, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared the barbershop an imminent danger to public health and dispatched state troopers to serve Manke with a cease-and-desist order. Photograph: Seth Herald/ReutersĪ week before, Manke, who was 77, had reopened his business in defiance of Governor Whitmer’s prohibition on “personal care services”. Some, dressed in fatigues and packing sidearms, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, a civilian militia.Ī militia group in front of the Michigan governor’s office in Lansing, 30 April 2020. Spring had not yet made it to Owosso, and people sat in their trucks with the heaters running. The neon Open sign was dark a crowd loitered in the parking lot. I arrived at Karl Manke’s barbershop a little before 9am. My first stop was Owosso, a small town on the banks of the Shiawassee River, in the bucolic middle of the state. In early May, I took an almost-empty flight to New York, then a slightly fuller one to Michigan. What accounted for such exquisite rage? And why was it so widely shared? It showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, mid-scream, his gaping mouth inches away from two officers gazing stonily past him, in the capitol in Lansing. One viral photograph struck me as particularly exotic. The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognised. I’d been a foreign correspondent for nearly a decade and during that time had not spent more than a few consecutive months in the US. Most businesses were closed (except those “essential to the life of the nation”, such as bakeries and wine and cigarette shops). I was living in Paris in 2020, where, since late March, we had been permitted to go outside for a maximum of one hour per day, and to stray no farther than a kilometre from our homes. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the capitol in North Carolina, a protester hauled a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh in California, a journalist covering an anti-lockdown demonstration was held at knifepoint ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City, a man wrote on Facebook: “Bring your guns, the civil war starts Saturday… The time is now.” The man replied, “I’ll use this,” grabbed the clerk’s sleeve, and wiped his nose with it.īy then, the movement that had begun with Operation Gridlock had spread to more than 30 states. Later that week, a clerk in a Dollar Tree outside Detroit asked a man to don a mask. The customer returned with her husband, who shot the guard in the head. The next day, a security guard in Flint turned away an unmasked customer from a Family Dollar. Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, who was pilloried for restricting businesses at the height of the pandemic. Most of the cases, however, were concentrated in Detroit, and the predominantly rural residents at Operation Gridlock resented the blanket lockdown. Around 30,000 Michiganders had tested positive for Covid-19 – the third-highest rate in the country, after New York and California – and almost 2,000 had died. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation, obliging a long list of businesses to close. Already – nine months before 6 January, seven months before the election, six weeks before a national uprising for police accountability and racial justice – there were a lot of them, and they were angry. Someone waved an upside-down American flag. Drivers leaned on their horns, men with guns got out and walked. On 15 April 2020, thousands of vehicles convoyed to Lansing and clogged the streets surrounding the state capitol for a protest that had been advertised as “Operation Gridlock”.
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