Wisconsin Wolf Hunt Ends Early as Hunters Exceed Quota
Olivia Rosane February 24, 2021
A gray wolf is seen howling outside in winter. Wolfgang Kaehler / Contributor / Getty Images
Wisconsin will end its controversial wolfhunt early after hunters and trappers killed almost 70 percent of the state’s quota in the hunt’s first 48 hours.
“Wisconsin’s actions offer a tragic glimpse of a future without federal wolf protections,” the Wolf Conservation Center tweeted in response.
President Donald Trump’s delisting of gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act triggered the hunt. The DNR originally set a quota of 200 wolves to be killed between Feb. 22 and Feb. 28. Of the 200, 81 were allocated to the Ojibwe Tribes in accordance with treaty rights, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Hunters killed about half of the remaining 119 by Tuesday morning and 69 percent by Tuesday afternoon, The Associated Press reported. By Wednesday morning, hunters exceeded the quota by 16 wolves.
Hunters also exceeded the quota set for three of the state’s hunting zones, according to DNR. They killed 33 of an 18-wolf quota in zone 2, located in the northeast; 24 of a 20-wolf quota in zone 3 located in the center; and 30 of a 17-wolf quota in southern zone 6. The hunt ended Wednesday at 10 a.m. CT in the most depleted zones and will end at 3 p.m. CT for the remaining half.
The hunt is the state’s first since 2014, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. After wolves were returned to state management under Trump in January 2021, Wisconsin intended to plan a hunt for November 2021, arguing that it needed the time to study the population and consult with Native American tribes and the general public. However, pro-hunting group Hunter Nation sued the state to start the hunt earlier in the year, with a judge ruling in their favor. This past Friday, an appeals court dismissed the Wisconsin DNR’s appeal, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
“The reckless slaughter of 135 wolves in just three days is appalling,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Sound science was ignored here in favor of catering to trophy hunters who were all too eager to kill wolves even at the height of breeding season. It will take years for Wisconsin’s wolf population to recover from the damage done this week. And without federal protections, this bloody spectacle could easily play out in other states.”
The hunt killed about 12 percent of Wisconsin’s wolves, which last numbered between 1,034 and 1,057 according to 2020 DNR data.
Other conservation groups also raised concerns about the rushed hunt. At the same time, Indigenous communities criticized the lack of consultation. The state is required by law to consult with tribes on resources management.
“This hunt is not well-thought-out, well-planned, totally inadequate consultation with the tribes,” Peter David, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission wildlife biologist, told Wisconsin Public Radio. “And maybe the biggest concern of all is that this season is not so much a hunting season as it is a killing season. No justification, really, was given for what was the legitimate purpose other than killing wolves.”
But the extremists’ deadly siege of Congress didn’t happen only because individual agencies failed to defend the building, and the riot was not just born of rage or blind allegiance to a defiant candidate. It was an attack on voting—the very heart of American democracy.
Just as the pursuit of an impeachment conviction against Donald Trump required members of Congress to regard the former president as “singularly responsible” for inciting the mob, yesterday we asked which agency should be held singularly responsible for the security failures. Those are the wrong targets.
They are wrong not because the impeachment failed to produce a conviction—that result was preordained by Republican fealty— or because we should not suss out the security failures, but because the fixation on Jan. 6 in isolation has led Congress, the media, and much of the nation to lose sight of everything else that sparked the “Stop the Steal” uprising. And now, a fixation on which security oversight to blame threatens to take us further away from realizing that the problem has been decades in the making, while we are doing almost nothing to stop it from happening again.
The roots of this crisis and where it will lead next are clear to me because I’ve had a front-row seat to this drama for four years. As ProPublica’s voting reporter, I took on an unusual beat for the 2016 election, tracking not the stakes of elections but the process of voting itself: seemingly mundane proceedings like poll worker trainings, county purchasing meetings about voting machines, obscure legislative hearings on voting laws. ProPublica’s idea was to pool 1,100 local reporters to document how the vote played out in the first election after the Supreme Court’s landmark revisions to the Voting Rights Act. Then, in October, the story began to change when Trump, then the Republican nominee, alleged widespread voter fraud.
Even after his 2016 victory, Trump continued the charade — sowing the seeds of doubt that would allow him to claim victory in 2020, even if he lost. Today, we connect his motivation with whatever personal demons make Trump unable to admit defeat, but what’s just as important to understand is that Trump had picked up a playbook that was years in the making by his party’s local leaders.
The first place I saw that playbook really clearly was in Texas, where I traveled in 2017 to explain how the implementation of the state’s new voter ID law had gone so disastrously the year before. The assumed goal of voter ID was a policy move to make it more difficult to vote as the state’s rapidly changing demographics threatened power long held by white Republicans. But what really made the party embrace voter ID was its power to ignite the base.
I was especially struck by Doug Smith, the Republican chair of the Texas House elections committee when voter ID legislation passed. He described how claims of voter fraud first levied after the 2000 election by George W. Bush’s attorney general, John Aschroft, ricocheted in Texas, becoming such an obsession of Republicans that by 2009 Smith concluded no legislative activity could proceed until lawmakers tackled voter fraud fears.
After studying Ashcroft’s investigation, which found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Smith tried to craft moderate legislation. He eventually gave up after Tea Party organizing handed Texas Republicans a supermajority in the House in 2011.
A few years removed from elected office, Smith understood why his party had gone down such a dark hole. “If you persuade people that you are the party trying to make sure elections are controlled by American citizens, and that the Democrats are doing everything they can to make sure that illegal immigrants can vote by the busload,” he said, “that’s a good position to be in.”
And it is.
Fomenting anger based on election fraud claims proved effective in states like Wisconsin, North Carolina and Indiana, where voting laws were debated with increased fury and threats were made toward election officials. And then came Trump. The claims he made in the 2016 campaign aligned him early on with this lineage. Over the course of the 2020 election, Trump took fraud fiction to a new level. I increasingly found myself fielding phone calls from terrified election officials across the country. One Republican election official called me after midnight, a week before November 3, just to talk. She wanted to know what the country would be like after this election. I couldn’t find any words of hope to offer her.
I’ve been reminded again and again over the past four years of the major structural forces that made possible what we saw in January. One is the bigger shifts in voting laws that both opened the door to more restrictive voting laws and centralized voter-roll data, which conspiracy theorists and fraud commissions alike misinterpret to spin scary stories of illegal voting that appeal to the base foundations of the country’s ugliest, most racist roots. The other is changes in my own profession, the media itself.
The local news outlets my ProPublica colleagues and I worked with during the 2016 election were already husks of their former selves, poorly equipped to debunk the claims of vote fraud by local elected officials like Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. By 2020, many of those journalists had lost their jobs altogether.
It is no longer acceptable to pretend that we can cover claims about our election system without resourcing local reporters to examine and explain those claims thoughtfully and with nuance to local readers who understandably do not trust national sources. It is no longer acceptable to ignore the tedious and important work of our local election administrators, who are on the front lines of democracy.
As we move forward from the lowest point in modern American democracy, we need to reclaim a common understanding of truth. To do that, we need the journalism that helps voters understand the pivotal events just around the corner, whether bloody or not — from redistricting to legislative election reforms to whether to maintain vote by mail and early voting. That’s why I left ProPublica to join Votebeat, a new pop-up newsroom designed not only to support local reporters in covering voting and elections, as Electionland did, but to create full-time jobs to ensure somebody is doing that reporting.
The local and state level, after all, is not just where voter fraud claims began. It was also the early warning system for the Jan. 6 insurrection, with many reports of harassments of poll workers and death threats against election officials. And it is the stage where state Republicans first made national news for revealing their president’s illegal scheme to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory. Notably, it wasn’t Mitt Romney or a Cabinet member or a White House staffer who recorded and released a call in which Trump abused his power, seeking to falsify an election result. It was a Republican voting official in the state of Georgia.
‘This Is Some Crazy Nightmare’: Mom Recounts Last Moments With Her 3 Kids Who Died in Texas Power Outage
Kate Briquelet February 22, 2021
Last Monday, Jackie Pham Nguyen was grateful to still have power at her Texas home.
Her kids—Colette, 5, Edison, 8, and Olivia, 11—played in the snow that morning before coming inside for hot chocolate and leftover food from Lunar New Year celebrations. For hours, they played Bananagrams and other board games.
Their grandma, Loan Le, joined them. The 75-year-old, who’d lost heat at her own residence amid the state’s power failures, braved icy roads to take shelter at their Sugar Land house.
“Honestly it was an awesome day. We had lunch at home, hung out. The kids were excited that they didn’t have school because it was Presidents’ Day, and we just kind of had the news running in the background the whole time,” Jackie said. “The whole day, I felt grateful we were among the 10 to 15 percent of Houston that had power.”
When the lights went out at 5 p.m., the family was undeterred. They huddled together for warmth, Jackie lit the fireplace, and they continued playing games. Around 9:30 or 10 p.m., Jackie tucked the kids in bed upstairs and went to sleep in her room downstairs.
Four hours later, the house was in flames. Jackie said she doesn’t remember much about that night, except that when she woke in a hospital bed, a fire official informed her that the children—and her mother—were gone.
“After that, I couldn’t breathe. Even now, I can’t believe it. This is some crazy nightmare and I’m going to wake up any minute now,” Jackie told The Daily Beast.
“How did we all have this perfectly normal day and how did it end like this?” she said.
Authorities are investigating what caused the blaze, which comes amid extreme weather and a deadly power crisis across the state. Initial reports on social media suggested the inferno may have started from the fire the family lit to keep warm.
Dozens of people in Texas—and across America—have died in last week’s winter storms. The cold snap especially wreaked havoc on the Lone Star State, where millions of people lost electricity, heat and water because of the state’s infrastructure failures.
Among the dead are 11-year-old Cristian Pineda, who died of suspected hypothermia in his freezing cold mobile home in Conroe. The sixth-grader and his family came to the U.S. from Honduras two years ago. Cristian’s mother, Maria, has filed a $100-million wrongful death lawsuit against the state’s grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the utility company, Entergy Corporation.
Houston mom Etenesh Mersha and 7-year-old daughter Rakeb Shalemu died from carbon monoxide poisoning after they desperately sought warmth in their car.
Andy Anderson, a Vietnam veteran in Crosby died of hypothermia while trying to get a generator running; he relied on an oxygen machine, which doesn’t work without electricity.
There are many tragic stories of loss, and likely more to come.
Vanessa Kon, an aunt of the Nguyen children, told the Daily Beast she believed officials should have been prepared for the power grid disaster.
Courtesy of Jackie Nguyen
“We don’t know what happened,” Kon said. “We don’t know why the lights went out like that. The city should have been prepared for it. Why was the power off? If the power wasn’t off, this wouldn’t have happened.”
For her part, Jackie hasn’t even begun to consider accusations of negligence against Texas power operators. “I’m in this triage sort of crisis mode right now,” Jackie told us from an extended-stay hotel. “I’m just waiting for what people have to say.”
Jackie said she spent two days in a hospital burn unit before she left against the advice of doctors. For several days, she still smelled like the smoke from her burning house, until she finally found a hotel with running water.
“I don’t remember a whole lot from that night,” she said. “I suffered from a lot of smoke inhalation. It’s kind of impaired some of my brain cognition. I’m really just hoping a lot of it comes back. Because I want to be able to piece all that together.”
Jackie remembers letting Olivia talk over Zoom with her friends from a New York summer camp that night, despite wanting to conserve energy on their electronic devices in anticipation of outages. “I’m grateful that I did let up a bit on that, so she could have that. So her friends could have that memory,” Jackie said.
She remembers the kids trying to teach Loan to play the card game Speed, but Loan wasn’t catching on. She thinks of little Colette, nicknamed Coco, suggesting they mix chocolate syrup with milk because they ran out of cocoa mix.
Jackie said grandma Loan lived just five miles away and usually never spent the night anywhere but her own house. Even during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Loan stubbornly chose to stay by herself. “I thought it was so weird that she didn’t even give me a hard time about coming over,” Jackie said of Monday’s sleepover. “I kind of wonder… if things happened that way so that she would be there. She would not have been able to survive knowing what happened to her grandkids.”
The grieving mom—who suffered burns and smoke inhalation from the blaze—said one blip is replaying through her mind. She recalls standing in the foyer of her two-story house and encountering walls of flames. She screamed for the children but didn’t hear them. She only heard the crackling of fire, the noise of the walls disintegrating.
She believes her female friend, a light sleeper who stayed over that night, dragged her from the home. The friend tried calling 911 but her phone wasn’t working, so she ran out and banged on neighbors’ doors.
“Obviously, as a parent, you question yourself, if you could have done something,” Jackie said. “The way it’s been explained to me is just: I’m lucky to be alive. There was nothing else for me to do.”
As Jackie tries to piece together what happened that night, she said she wants people to know who her children were—and how important their grandmother was in their lives, an unsung hero and the glue that kept the family together.
Jackie’s parents moved to the U.S. in 1981 from Vietnam, where Jackie was born. Loan and her husband, Cau Pham, were refugees in Malaysia before coming to California and later moving to Texas. Jackie’s three kids were first-generation Americans.
“If it weren’t for my kids, I don’t think she would have made it as long as she has,” Jackie said of Loan, adding that Cau died several years ago. “They gave her a sense of purpose. She scheduled everything around their 3 o’clock pickup at school. Or she did grocery shopping for us.”
“I can’t say enough about how much my mom was a rock to me and saving grace to my children,” Jackie added.
Jackie’s coworkers at the tech company Topl, and her cohort at Rice University, where she’ll earn an MBA this spring, launched a GoFundMe that has raised more than $278,000. Right now, the fundraiser is a placeholder for a future foundation to honor Colette, Edison and Olivia. (Kon also created a GoFundMe on behalf of her brother, Nathan Nguyen, the children’s father.)
All of her kids, she said, were wildly different “little humans.”
First-born Olivia was witty and sarcastic, and loved skiing and listening to Queen, Journey, and other classic rock music. “She’s very much an old soul—stuck in this middle-schooler’s body,” Jackie said. “She’ll tell me what songs are about. Anything she was curious about she would dive in. Every song, she reads the lyrics, looks up the history, the band members. She could have been on Jeopardy or some sort of trivia.”
The mother and daughter shared a special connection; both were the oldest in their families. “She was such a good big sister,” Jackie said. “It was a love-hate relationship [being the oldest child]. It’s a burden. It’s another way she and I related.”
Edison had just turned 8 in November and was a sweet, gentle boy who enjoyed art and painting and was eerily attuned to other people’s moods. Jackie said Edison was mildly autistic and has struggled with social tact, but he was also incredibly considerate. “He always could sense if I was sad or if I was stressed, or if I was worried. He would just check in on me—my 8-year-old!”
“I’d ask him, ‘Are you happy, son? Are you having a good day?’ The things we say to each other a lot were: ‘If you’re happy, I’m happy,’” Jackie said. “If you spent a minute with him, you just knew he had such a warm heart.”
Colette, at 5 years old, was a girly-girl and unapologetically herself—especially when making videos for TikTok. She even made and presented a PowerPoint show for Jackie’s birthday, with a slide that read: “Top 5 reasons i love mama.”
“She was constantly dancing and talking to herself, as if she’s on a live show,” Jackie said. “She was not going to accept her birth order. There was no way anyone was going to knock her around and bully her in anyway.”
But she was also very loving and affectionate, always hugging her mom or holding her hand. “Even when she looks at you, she looks at you longingly and deep into your eyes, it’s adorable,” Jackie said.
Jackie said she wants the GoFundMe money to go to causes related to performing and visuals arts, autism awareness, and reading and literacy—themes that speak directly to who her children were as people.
“They are amazing little humans and they would have grown up to be awesome, to really contribute and make a difference,” she said.
“This is the legacy I could do for them. This is the goodness they would have potentially done had they been able to live out their lives.”
Democrats’ Top Priority Is To Reform Elections. Will It Be The Bill To Break The Filibuster?
Paul Blumenthal, Reporter
Democrats have control of the House and Senate, and they want to use it to reform elections and make it easier to vote. But first, they’ll have to get past Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Congressional Democrats are pushing a sweeping package of voting rights, gerrymandering, election, campaign finance and ethics reforms, called the For the People Act. It’s listed as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate, signifying that it is Democrats’ top legislative priority. For the past two decades, every bill labeled both H.R. 1 and S. 1 has become law.
If the For the People Act is to pass, though, Democrats will need to surmount the one obstacle clogging up almost all legislation that doesn’t directly affect the federal budget: the filibuster. Democrats hold only 50 votes ― plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ to break ties ― and Republicans could easily use the filibuster to prevent voting reform. McConnell, who previously called the legislation “socialism” and a “power grab,” blocked it from a Senate vote in 2019.
Debate over the filibuster ― that it is an archaic tool used mostly throughout history to block civil rights laws and is now preventing the government from operating as voters want it to ― is already at a boiling point. If the filibuster winds up killing democracy reform, it may be what finally drives Democrats to turn around and kill the filibuster.
Former President Barack Obama, Democratic lawmakers and activists are already paving the way to make that argument. At the funeral for civil rights hero and Democratic Rep. John Lewis last summer, Obama called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic” and said that if Republicans dared to filibuster legislation to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (a bill that is now named for Lewis), Democrats should not hesitate to eliminate the filibuster to pass the bill.
The same could be argued of the For the People Act: Lewis and his staff wrote the entire first section, which greatly expands voting rights and limits voter suppression tactics.
These reforms are all the more vital now, Democrats argue, as Republicans seek to pass new voter restrictions at the state level, spurred on by former President Donald Trump’s voter fraud lies. If Democrats don’t pull off these reforms now, they could be too late.
They intend that the For the People Act become law. Whatever it takes.
“It’s all systems go to try to make that happen,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), the bill’s chief sponsor in the House.
Former President Barack Obama called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic” in his eulogy at the funeral service for the late Rep. John Lewis at Ebenezer Baptist Church on July 30, 2020, in Atlanta. (Photo: Alyssa Pointer-Pool/Getty Images)
The Fight To Fix Democracy
Democrats didn’t expect to gain unified control of Congress after the voting ended on Nov. 3. Though Joe Biden had won the White House, they were two seats short of a 50-seat majority in the Senate with two runoff races in Georgia to be decided on Jan. 5. Then they won both runoff races, putting them in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Now, they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to enact their agenda. Just as when Obama came into office in 2009, the main obstacle is McConnell’s use of the filibuster to block any and all legislation that he can.
There was intense discussion around eliminating or reforming the filibuster back then, but that nascent effort could not overcome the hesitancy from old-line Democratic senators who did not understand that the Senate they had served in for decades had changed since the 1970s era of consensus.
A coalition did emerge around filibuster reform in 2010, which ultimately led then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to kill the filibuster for lower-court judicial nominees in order to overcome a Republican-led blockage in 2013. After Trump became president in 2017, McConnell ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in order to fill the seat he’d held open for more than a year after Justice Antonin Scalia died.
The groundwork laid down a decade ago gives today’s filibuster reform advocates a running start. The anti-filibuster coalition Fix Our Senate launched in 2019 with backing from some groups involved in the 2010 effort, including the Communications Workers of America, Common Cause and Public Citizen, as well as many new progressive and issue-oriented partners like Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress.
Fix Our Senate and the Declaration for American Democracy, a coalition of good government and progressive groups whose membership overlaps with that of Fix Our Senate, are now pressuring Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other key Democrats to pass the For the People Act no matter what.
Fix Our Senate has already run a full-page ad in The New York Times calling on Schumer to end the filibuster. More ads are planned in states represented by Democratic senators who are not currently on board with ending the filibuster, like Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.).
The Declaration for American Democracy intends to target its messaging in seven states: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. These states fall into four different but sometimes overlapping categories. There are the states with Democratic senators who are currently opposed to ending the filibuster (Arizona and West Virginia), states with potentially swayable Republican senators (Alaska and Maine), states whose election systems were attacked by Trump as part of his campaign to overturn the election (Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania), and states with moderate House Democrats who backed the For the People Act (Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Pennsylvania and Virginia).
The For the People Act “is shaping up to be a big flashpoint in the fight to eliminate the filibuster because it is both critically important and also absolutely clear that it will be filibustered,” said Eli Zupnick, spokesman for Fix Our Senate. He added, “If Democrats go two years without taking any steps to fix our democracy and tackle corruption and protect voting rights, this will be a failure. This will be a failure of two years.”
The fight in Congress over the For the People Act will begin in earnest in the coming weeks. The House plans to pass the legislation the week of March 1. After that, the Senate will hold hearings on the bill and likely bring it to the floor for a vote.
And that is where the bill is expected to be blocked by a Republican filibuster and become a flashpoint in the fight to change Senate rules.
Then-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (center) and then-Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) attend a news conference about the For the People Act on March 27, 2019, in the U.S. Capitol. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
The Democrats’ Plan For Passage
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is the lead co-sponsor of the For the People Act in the Senate, alongside Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and also the leading proponent of eliminating the filibuster. He is insistent that the bill become law. To do so, it must either gain support from 10 Republican senators, an unlikely feat, or overcome the opposition to eliminating the filibuster expressed by Manchin and Sinema.
“It has to pass in some way,” Merkley said, “but it could pass in multiple ways.”
One way to try to gain Republican support, Merkley suggested, is to put the bill on the Senate floor open to all germane amendments. Most bills hit the floor with a rule drafted by the majority party limiting amendments and debate. Showing openness to the other party’s amendments and debate is rare these days and might earn buy-in from the other side.
If that doesn’t work, then Merkley thinks Democrats need to immediately examine any and all ways to change the filibuster rule. This could include lowering the threshold for overcoming the filibuster from 60 to 55 votes, eliminating the 60-vote threshold but providing for a talking filibuster, or entirely ending the filibuster.
A majority party changing the rules to pass its top-priority legislation wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, Merkley noted. In fact, Republicans altered the rules for budget reconciliation in 2015 after winning control of the Senate. This change allowed them to pass their own H.R. 1 and S. 1 in 2017, a package of tax reforms and upper-income and corporate tax cuts.
Failure to pass the For the People Act wouldn’t just mean that Democrats failed to enact the centerpiece of their agenda; it would also clear the way for a new wave of state voter suppression measures driven by Trump’s election fraud lies.
Right now, Republican-controlled state legislatures are pushing bills to limit early and absentee voting, purge voters from the rolls, and toughen voter ID requirements. The For the People Act would ban almost all of these schemes to make it harder for certain communities to vote.
“Here we are with a very, very slim majority, a majority that we’ll probably lose if voter suppression goes on steroids as seems to be the path that so many state legislatures are on right now,” Merkley said. “And so this is the critical moment to pass this bill.”
Furthermore, the bill would ban partisan gerrymandering by requiring states to use independent, nonpartisan redistricting panels to draw House district lines. Given the extent of current Republican control of state legislatures, which exists thanks to district lines gerrymandered back in 2011, the Democratic House majority could theoretically be gerrymandered out of existence ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Passing the For the People Act quickly could potentially prevent this as well as blocking new voter suppression laws.
What remains to be seen is how many filibusters it will take to create the necessary pressure to tackle the filibuster. The For the People Act may be the first bill to be blocked in this Congress, but as long as there’s a filibuster, it won’t be the last.
House Democrats expect to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act this spring as well. If Republicans block that, too, they’ll be sending a clear symbolic message: that the GOP, fresh off trying to overturn an election by disenfranchising Black voters, is ready to stomp on Lewis’ legacy.
Democrats will have to decide whether to let Republicans block these bills, which will allow further disenfranchisement of Black voters, or to pass the legislation they ran on.
COVID-19 is circulating in some animals. What does that mean for us?
Dr. Jonathan Chan February 21, 2021
Last month, the nation watched as Winston the gorilla came down with COVID-19 and then recovered. So far, the virus has been detected in zoo animals like Winston, domestic animals like cats and dogs, and most worryingly, in farmed and wild animals like mink and ferrets.
Now, animal experts are warning that if the virus is circulating freely in wild animals, it might develop mutations and evolve into a new version – one that is capable of jumping back into humans.
January has been the deadliest month in the United States since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, as efforts to distribute and administer the new vaccines continue.
And just as the United States is ramping up its efforts to find new COVID variants among people, many scientists are speaking out that we should be doing the same for animals.
“In the current pandemic, we know that the virus originated in wildlife, most likely bats, then jumped to people,” said Dr. Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist and vice president for science and outreach at EcoHealth Alliance. “And we know that there are a lot of other animals that are susceptible to this virus.”
Epstein explained that the COVID virus is so widespread and so many people are infected that there is a significant possibility that wildlife could be exposed through the environment, contaminated waste water or direct contact with humans.
PHOTO: A dog is tested for COVID-19 in South Korea on Feb. 10, 2021. (Seoul Metropolitan Government)
Minks are small, carnivorous mammals that are raised mostly for their furs. So far, six countries, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Italy and the United States, have reported COVID virus infections in their mink farms to the World Health Organization.
While there is no evidence yet that the virus found in the farmed mink population is more dangerous than what has already been detected in humans, the virus does spread easily among minks that are housed closely together.
But infections in farmed and captive animals can be managed. Some farmed mink populations in Europe, for example, have been culled. Meanwhile, zoo animals like Winston are isolated and treated for their infections to limit the spread of disease.
But it’s a different story once the virus jumps into wildlife.
As scientists were investigating the outbreak of COVID among farmed minks, they discovered that the virus had already spread to wild minks as well.
“What we are seeing right now is known as a spill back infection,” said Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, a professor of veterinary medicine and ecosystem health at the University of California—Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. The virus, which likely originated from bats, spilled over to the human population and has now “spilled back” to infect other animal species.
According to Johnson, the threat of spill back includes both wildlife populations and zoo animals. Felines, including both tigers and domestic cats, are suspected to have been infected from their human owners or caretakers.
“Widespread transmission in any animal species could be a source of virus mutation,” she said.
While there is limited evidence that the virus can significantly spread to humans from animals, scientists are concerned that the virus could change while infecting other animal species. If it spills back, or returns, to infect humans again, it could come back as a new variant.
But more testing and research still needs to be done to better understand the extent the virus can spread in animals.
“We may never have the answer to the question about how COVID spreads in wild animals,” said Dr. Tracey McNamara, a professor of pathology at the Western University of Health Sciences College of Veterinary Medicine.
“Testing in animals was discouraged from the very beginning, largely because they were concerned that there were not enough supplies,” she said. “Testing in humans and wild animals use the same types of swabs.”
In a statement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not currently recommend routine, widespread testing among animals, and animal testing is available if “public health and animal health officials agree the animal’s case merits testing.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that we won’t be able to learn more about the spread of COVID in different species, through a process known as retrospective serologic surveys. As McNamara explained, every time a staff member interacts with or handles an animal at a zoo, they obtain a blood sample and store that in a blood bank.
A guard stands at the entrance to the Bronx Zoo on April 06, 2020, in New York City. A four-year-old tiger named Nadia at the zoo tested positive for COVID-19, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement on April 5. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Those samples are saved, and with enough funding and support, scientists could look back at those samples and potentially learn more about when COVID may have first appeared in different wild and domestic animal species.
“So much funding was poured into the development of the COVID vaccine,” said McNamara. “Creating a vaccine is very expensive, but there may be less expensive modes to decrease spreading between animal species.”
That includes treatment and prevention efforts specifically designed for captive and farmed animals. And for wild animals, it means more robust monitoring and testing — and reducing direct contact with wildlife when possible.
Ultimately, the threat of “spill back” is a reminder that almost all virus outbreaks are zoonotic, meaning they originate in animals and wildlife.
“These pandemics don’t happen by accident,” Epstein said. “They happen because of human activity that changes the environment around us and brings us into closer contact with wildlife.”
Jonathan Chan, M.D., is an emergency medicine resident at St. John’s Riverside Hospital and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.
North-central Minnesota lakes are getting murkier faster
Jennifer Bjorhus, Star Tribune February 20, 2021
Leif Olmanson has spent most of his career tracking Minnesota’s lakes from space, poring over decades of satellite images and crunching data on water clarity.
Now the University of Minnesota researcher is puzzling over a new question: What is driving the declining water clarity in Minnesota’s northern lakes, some of the jewels of the state?
“My big concern is that the areas that are more pristine are where things are changing quickly,” Olmanson said. “Why would these lakes be changing in northern Minnesota where there’s not a lot of land use changes going on?”
Olmanson quickly mapped the state’s late summer temperatures — the dog days when algae blooms — and saw they have risen fastest in Minnesota’s north-central regions where lakes have been warming the most. This is the home of deep, cold lakes. Bit by bit, the change in a few degrees could alter the state’s prized cabin country and angler havens.
“That’s some of the best walleye fishing in the country,” said retired DNR fisheries research biologist Peter Jacobson. “It’s a part of the state we’re very concerned about.”
Other scientists at the U, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) are monitoring the trend, too.
Casey Schoenebeck, a research scientist who runs the DNR’s sentinel lakes program, said Olmanson’s heat map is supported by what his team has found in the water. Lake water temperatures are rising statewide, but particularly in the state’s transition zone from the plains to forest and in the northern forest area.
“It’s all changing,” Schoenebeck said, “but the changes are happening the fastest in those two central eco-regions.”
Warmer water encourages the algae growth, including the toxin-producing cyanobacteria commonly called blue-green algae. It can clog fish gills, and when it dies and sinks to the bottom of a lake it consumes oxygen, starving fish and other aquatic life.
The murkiness can actually amplify the warming temperatures, said Gretchen Hansen, another U scientist studying the decline in water clarity. Murky surfaces absorb more of the sun’s radiation, warming surface waters even faster.
The most ominous sign of the impact is the plunge in cisco populations across the Midwest as lakes warm. Also called tullibee, the small silvery fish are a main source of food for prized game fish such as walleye. They thrive in bands of deep cold water, and are highly sensitive to temperature changes. The DNR has been working to try find “refuge” lakes for them.
There are multiple factors that can make Minnesota lakes murkier, that Olmanson, Hansen and others are trying to untangle, such as changes in precipitation and, perhaps more important, in land use.
Minnesota is losing forests to farmland as row crops spread north, for example, as timber is harvested and as communities grow with new homes, businesses and roads. Then there are cabin owners tinkering with shorelines.
Plus, more intense rainstorms wash more nutrients, sediments and solids, such as leaves, into lakes with tannins that turn water brown.
As Peterson, the retired DNR biologist, sees it, the solution to protecting water quality in the state’s deep clear lakes is to protect the intact forests around them. If 75% of a lake’s watershed is forested, you can protect it, he said.
“It’s critical that it does not get converted to agriculture or homes, and shopping centers and roads,” Jacobson said.
That’s what the Northern Waters Land Trust has been working on. Based in Walker, Minn., the nonprofit conserves private land on strategic tullibee refuge lakes in Cass, Crow Wing, Hubbard and Aitkin counties. It uses grants from the state’s sales-tax funded Outdoor Heritage Fund to arrange conservation easements for landowners and has protected nearly 2,500 acres that way since 2014. The trust also buys land outright.
Olmanson said the approach makes perfect sense: “It’s cheaper to protect the lake before it gets impacted than to try to restore it.”
To explore the effects of land-use changes on water clarity, Olmanson is analyzing new satellite-derived data that show changes in land cover. His goal is to build an automated data set to show which factors are most important in driving declining water clarity in different lakes.
“Different things are happening in different parts of the state,” he said. In the near term, he’s racing to finish a major update of the U’s interactive LakeBrowser tool in time for this year’s fishing opener May 15. It’s popular with anglers and real estate agents.
The tool, which Olmanson helped create, displays information about the clarity of all Minnesota lakes down to 10 acres in size. It shows a lake’s current and historic clarity measures and comparisons to other lakes in the watershed, for example, how much algae it has and the nature of the land around it, such as forest or fields. It complements the DNR’s LakeFinder tool.
The map Olmanson generated of late-summer temperature changes in Minnesota’s center north reflect a broader pattern, climatologists say.
Northern Minnesota is warming faster than southern Minnesota, with north-central and northeast Minnesota warming a little more than west-central Minnesota, said Kenneth Blumenfeld, senior climatologist in the state Climatology Office.
If you zoomed out from Olmanson’s map, Blumenfeld said, it would show that high readings in north-central Minnesota are part of a larger continuous belt extending north into Canada. In general, the farther north you go around the world, the faster warming is occurring. There are variations on our continent, he said, where the interior is warming faster than near the coasts.
“Northern Minnesota has some of the fastest warming rates in the contiguous U.S., including during the late summer,” he said. “The variations we see to the east and west are based on topography, elevation, land cover, proximity to water, and other factors climate scientists do not fully understand.”
Georgia Republicans File Sweeping Elections Bill To Limit Early And Absentee Voting
Items at a Gwinnett County, Ga., voting location on Jan. 5, when Democrats flipped two U.S. Senate seats after President Biden won the state in November. Georgia Republicans are proposing a sweeping new state law that would restrict early and absentee voting. Megan Varner/Getty Images
Republicans in the Georgia legislature have released legislation that proposes tougher restrictions on both absentee and in-person early voting, among other sweeping changes to election laws after an election in which Democrats won the presidential race in the state and flipped two U.S. Senate seats.
The bill, HB 531, filed by GOP state Rep. Barry Fleming was introduced directly into the Georgia House’s Special Committee on Election Integrity on Thursday, and the text of the bill was made available about an hour before a hearing.
Many of the changes in the bill would predominantly affect larger, minority-heavy Democratic strongholds of the state, constituencies that helped President Biden narrowly defeat former President Donald Trump in the state last November, then boosted Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s January runoff elections. In recent months, many Republicans at the local, state and federal level have pushed false claims of election fraud, and lawmakers in Georgia have vowed to change laws in response.
Part of the bill would provide “uniformity” to the three-week early voting period, Fleming said, requiring all counties to hold early voting from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday for three weeks before the election, plus a mandatory 9-to-5 period of voting the second Saturday before the election. It would allow counties to extend hours to 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., but would prohibit counties from holding early voting any other days — including Sunday voting popular in larger metro counties and a day of traditionally high turnout for Black voters through “souls to the polls” voter mobilization events.
Like other bills making their way through the GOP-controlled legislature, there would be a new photo ID requirement for absentee ballots. The bill would require voters to include their driver’s license number, state ID number or a copy of an acceptable form of photo ID. The driver’s license number or state ID number is already required for a new online request portal for Georgia voters, and photo ID is required to vote in person.
But the proposal would also shrink the window for Georgia voters to request an absentee ballot and limit the timeline for county officials to mail them out. No absentee ballot could be requested earlier than 11 weeks before an election or later than two Fridays before the election, and absentee ballots would not be sent out by mail until four weeks before day of the election.
The bill aims to restrict the location of secure drop boxes in the state to early voting sites and would limit the use of those drop boxes to just the days and times when early voting takes place. Another section would ban county elections offices from directly accepting outside funding for elections, after the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Schwarzenegger Institute gave tens of millions of dollars to counties across Georgia to run the November and January elections in the midst of the pandemic.
One section appears to target mobile voting buses in Fulton County, which includes part of Atlanta. They were used during early voting to provide several pop-up polling locations in the Atlanta area under a recent Georgia law that allows early voting sites to be held at any location that is an Election Day polling place.
Some changes would give county elections workers more flexibility and greater staffing for polling locations, such as a tweak that would allow poll workers to operate sites in adjoining counties instead of just the county of their residence. Another would allow officials leeway in the requirement of voting equipment for typically lower-turnout primaries and runoffs. However, the deadline for results to be counted and certified would move up four days sooner to the Monday after the election.
Fleming’s bill revives a measure supported by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger last year that would require precincts with over 2,000 voters and waiting times over one hour to add more workers, more machines or split the precinct.
Democratic state Rep. Rhonda Burnough expressed concern that Democrats did not have any input into the 48-page measure, as well as the quick timing of the bill.
“The public, people of color, they didn’t have opportunity to review or to give an opinion and there’s a lot of information in here that needs to be digested and looked at,” she said. “I think if we’re trying to really work towards restoring confidence that we should be working towards improving everything based on suggestions from the entire state of Georgia, not just us down here in the General Assembly.”
There will be more hearings on the bill in the coming days before it’s potentially sent to the floor of the Georgia House.
Minneapolis gardener transformed gritty city lot into productive urban farm
Kim Palmer, Star Tribune February 19, 2021
Andy Lapham has a knack for salvaging castoff things and transforming them into something useful.
“I do like junk,” said Lapham. It’s what he used to build his shed, his chicken coop and his one-of-a-kind trellis/gazebo, which is topped with a canopy of old bicycle wheels.
But Lapham’s biggest reclamation project is a formerly vacant, junk-strewn lot in Minneapolis’ urban core that he and others have nurtured into a lush, productive garden that grows apples, plums, berries of all kinds, sunflowers to nourish birds and bees and other pollinator plants.
Lapham doesn’t own the garden; its out-of-state owner has given him permission to grow there.
“They let me garden for free,” said Lapham, 35, whose laid-back demeanor belies his drive to produce. In return, he takes care of maintenance, snow shoveling and trimming branches that dangle into the street.
This compact oasis of urban agriculture at a busy corner in the Central neighborhood is Lapham’s passion. It’s a community garden and a demonstration site, where he leads tours and shares what he’s learned about permaculture — producing food sustainably within a system inspired by natural ecosystems.
Lapham and his gardens were one of six chosen in the Star Tribune’s annual Beautiful Gardens contest, selected by a panel of judges from more than 380 nominations from readers. In this year of pandemic and racial justice reckoning, the contest was changed a bit. Readers were invited to nominate gardens that are beautiful in spirit and contribute to the greater good.
Lapham’s passion for growing food has evolved, although the seed was planted in his bloodline. “All my grandparents were born on farms,” he noted. Growing up in Golden Valley, his family tended a vegetable plot. “We always had a garden, but it wasn’t really intense.”
His own interest intensified after a 2013 trip to Hawaii, where he visited an eco village in the jungle.
“It was so cool!” he enthused. “There was all this food growing, 30 to 40 people, a communal kitchen. I wished we had places like that.”
Back in Minneapolis, Lapham asked his landlord if he could install a garden at the home he was renting in Seward. The landlord balked. “He said, ‘If you move, the next tenant won’t want to take care of it, and it will turn into a weed patch.’ ” Lapham did it anyway. “I built a raised bed, got books and started learning different things.”
Later he took a class on permaculture, and learned more things, including water collection methods, sustainability techniques and low-tech building using recycled materials.
“Before that, it was just gardening,” said Lapham, who makes his living working on landscape jobs.
Finding the lot Lapham took over the vacant lot in 2015. At the time he was working for a food share program, Sisters Camelot, and helping tend its garden on a city-owned lot. When the program lost the use of the lot, Lapham called around and found the empty lot in Central. He tracked down its owner in Pennsylvania. “They loved the garden idea,” he said.
So Lapham cleaned up the junk and abandoned mattresses, and recruited friends and volunteers to help him clear buckthorn and brush.
“The soil was pretty poor,” he said, so he brought in better soil and compost and started brewing compost tea.
Then he began planting — apple, plum, apricot and pear trees, berries of all kinds, cherries, grapes and currants. Once the plants started producing, neighbors started to help themselves to the fruit. “People come and pick ’em, especially kids,” he said.
Tending the garden led Lapham to buy the house next door, a century-old fixer-upper. He was working in the garden with a friend when he noticed the tenants loading up a moving van.
Later the landlord stopped by. “He said, ‘I can’t believe what you guys have done [with] this lot. One of you should buy this [the house].’ ” Lapham told him he couldn’t afford a house. It sat vacant for two months.
By that time, Lapham’s lease was ending, and his roommates were moving so he asked the landlord if he could rent the house. After renting for two years, Lapham had saved up enough to buy the house on a contract for deed.
“Now I get to learn how to fix an old house, too,” he said. And owning the house next to his garden gave him more land for planting and for keeping chickens — four hens and a rooster.
Lapham also helps tend a third food-producing garden a block away. It’s owned by the Baha’i Center of Minneapolis, which asked Lapham to give its youth farm a permaculture makeover. He dug a swale [a trench for irrigation] and redesigned the garden, adding new crops.
“Neighbors come and pick them,” he said. “Corn disappears fast. We know it’s everybody’s favorite.” Pattypan squash and watermelon also have been popular. “But nobody touched the kale.”
Lapham’s latest hobby is plant propagation. “I’m learning how so I can give plants to neighbors, other community gardens and spread them around the neighborhood,” he said. Last March, he posted a plant giveaway on Facebook, and about 20 to 30 people showed up to get his plants.
Troubled timesAfter George Floyd was killed by police just two blocks from Lapham’s home, the neighborhood erupted in unrest and increased crime.
“It’s been real scary,” Lapham said last summer. “I woke up to gunshots.”
More recently, a neighbor was clubbed in the head with a gun and had his wallet stolen, and there’s been a spate of carjackings. “I’m lucky enough to own terrible cars nobody wants,” Lapham said, including two old Volkswagens and a work van.
He’s also had tools, equipment and plants stolen from the garden. He built a shed out of salvaged materials for storing his tools, but “I can’t put everything inside,” he said.
Sometimes the challenges of urban living make him dream of owning a small farm in the country. “I think about it a lot, with the crime in the neighborhood,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll turn around.”
But there are examples of caring and altruism in his neighborhood, too. The bench Lapham built at the corner bus stop on the edge of his garden has become a place where people drop off food for the taking to help neighbors in need. What doesn’t get taken by people, Lapham feeds to crows and other birds.
While most Minnesota gardeners take a break during the winter months, Lapham stays busy with garden-related chores.
“I’ve been trying to fix a lot of the tools,” he said earlier this month. “I took apart and rebuilt the tiller, the blower and the chain saw. I spend a lot less time out there in the winter but there are still things to do all the time.”
He’s been doing some pruning. “A lot of trees you can only prune in winter,” he said. “It’s safer for the plant, and helps it produce better. It wakes up in the spring and doesn’t even realize it is missing a limb.”
Soon he’ll start collecting cuttings to propagate. And he recently filled out an application to get seeds through the Horticulture Society’s Minnesota Green Program, with the aim of starting seeds in March and April.
“I’m excited to see what we’re going to do — more garden plans and more tours,” he said of the growing season ahead.
What motivates him to invest so much time and energy into urban farming?
Lapham paused to ponder that question. “I don’t watch TV, drink or go out or do anything,” he said with a smile. “I want to learn all these things and be an inspiration for others to try — build a better world instead of wasting time.”
Trump complained that he was served a smaller steak than a dining companion at his DC hotel restaurant: report
Eliza Relman February 19, 2021
President Donald Trump once complained that a steak he was served at his Washington, DC, hotel restaurant was smaller than the one given to his table companion, the steak house’s former executive chef told the Washingtonian. Bill Williamson, then the chef of BLT Prime at the Trump International Hotel, said the two steaks were virtually identical.
“It was the same steak. Both well done. Maybe it was a half ounce bigger or something, I don’t know,” Williamson said to The Washingtonian.
But after Trump’s complaint, Williamson switched from serving the president a filet mignon or bone-in rib eye to a 40-ounce tomahawk, which is larger than all the other steaks offered on the restaurant menu. The restaurant also ordered special extra-large shrimp for Trump’s appetizer dish, The Washingtonian reported.
Former first lady Melania Trump was also known to be picky with her food. Williamson said she once returned a plate of Dover sole, a fish that’s priced at $64 on the menu, because it was topped with chives and parsley, according to the report.
Trump always sat at the same table at the center of the dining room, which was always reserved for him and his inner circle, and ate the same meal every time he visited the restaurant, The Washingtonian reported.
Immediately after he was seated, a waiter would offer him a small bottle of hand sanitizer and ask him whether he’d like his Diet Coke with or without ice. Then the server would open the drink, according to a seven-step instruction manual The Washingtonian obtained, in front of Trump.
Donald Trump during the launch of Trump Steaks in New York City. Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images
The president would have two popovers, then jumbo-shrimp cocktail, his signature well-done steak, and fries. He’d sometimes have either apple pie or chocolate cake for dessert, the report said. Trump also required that an assortment of snacks and sweets, including Lay’s sour cream and onion potato chips and Milky Way and Snickers bars, be laid out for him.
Trump’s red-meat and fast-food-heavy diet has long attracted attention. His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski wrote that Trump would regularly eat a 2,400-calorie McDonald’s meal consisting of two Big Mac burgers, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and a chocolate milkshake on the campaign trail. In the White House, Trump would often be served two scoops of ice cream with his dessert, while his guests received one scoop, Time reported.
How a Hardcore Liberal Lawyer Joined the Pro-Trump Mob
Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson February 18, 2021
The law offices of W. McCall Calhoun in Americus, Ga., Feb. 8, 2021. (Audra Melton/The New York Times)
AMERICUS, Ga.— Over the past three decades, as the state around him turned ever more resolutely Republican, W. McCall Calhoun Jr. remained an outspoken and unwavering liberal. He gave money to Democrats, ran for office as a Democrat and zealously championed Democratic policies in social circles that were far from sympathetic. If friends admitted they voted for Donald Trump, his reaction could be blistering.
“He was hard core, there’s no doubt about it,” said Dr. Michael Busman, a physician who has known Calhoun for years. “He wouldn’t even want to talk to you if you were Republican.”
But last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.
“I have tons of ammo,” Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”
The sudden conversion of Calhoun, who is now in federal custody, was baffling to many who knew him. Indeed, Calhoun’s story seemed a walking embodiment of Georgia’s contradictions: a state where a rising multiracial coalition of voters sent two Democrats — a Black preacher and a Jewish millennial — to the Senate in January, but where thousands of voters also elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, vanguard of an incendiary brand of hard-right politics.
Some Black residents of Americus, Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local NAACP chapter. He knew Calhoun, who gave donations and regularly bought tickets to the group’s annual banquet. But Wright suggested that the racism deep at the root of Georgia’s history was still very much alive, even if white people, including some of those who saw themselves as progressive, did not want to admit it. “What President Trump did was allow it to bud and to grow,” he said. “A lot of people who had been suppressing it no longer felt that they had to suppress it.”
Before it fell away, Calhoun’s white progressivism had a homegrown flavor, steeped in Georgia’s history, countercultural currents and higher education system. He preached criminal justice reform and broadcast his support for Hillary Clinton.
Then came his abrupt turn, and a headlong descent into some of the darkest places in Georgia history. He peppered his social media posts with racial slurs, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “fake negro.” He saluted the Confederacy, and he seemed to thirst for civil war.
He was not an unlettered man: In his years at school, Calhoun had written a master’s thesis on the historiography of Napoleon’s peninsular war and had attended a law seminar in Belgium. His profile — a well-educated, white-collar white man — matched that of some of the other Georgians who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, radicals of the establishment from a state in the grips of a political identity crisis.
The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.
Calhoun, 58, was the grandson of a lawyer and the son of a doctor, in a family that counts among its ancestors John C. Calhoun, the 19th-century pro-slavery politician. He grew up in Americus, where he attended Southland Academy, one of the many private all-white schools that opened across the South during the wave of public school integration.
At the University of Georgia, in Athens, Calhoun found his place in the Greek system, a largely segregated world of columned fraternity and sorority houses, parties and privilege. His fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, was the longest continually active fraternity at the university, and boasted of producing two Georgia governors.
But he also found a place amid the distinctly Southern college-town bohemia that had emerged in the 1980s in Athens, which had become an incubator for idiosyncratic rock bands like the B-52s and R.E.M. While not always overtly political, the scene introduced a generation of white Southerners to new ways of thinking and living. Calhoun was one of them, and he became a mainstay in Athens as the bass player for a group called Fashion Battery, and later, the Kilkenny Cats.
Later he began a law career in Americus, an old Confederate cotton town and the seat of Sumter County, about 140 miles south of Atlanta. Sumter has for decades played an important role in liberal Georgia’s sense of possibility. A multiracial Christian commune, Koinonia Farm, was founded there in the 1940s. Jimmy Carter lives in the tiny town of Plains, and the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, founded by a Koinonia family, is headquartered in Americus.
Black residents in Sumter make up a reliable Democratic base, while whites are often divided, as one local put it, between liberal “come heres,” like Habitat employees, and conservative, locally raised, “been heres.”
Calhoun was a liberal “been here,” and he did not hide it. He ran, unsuccessfully, as a Democrat for district attorney. In 2004, he wrote a letter to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, praising a Black state Supreme Court justice in a tight reelection race and criticizing her opponent for running a “rather contemptuous and somewhat racist campaign.” People had no doubt about his politics.
“He would oftentimes talk about how our judicial system is too hard on people,” said Bruce Harkness, a lawyer in the mountains of northern Georgia where Calhoun spent a few years as a public defender. “He didn’t believe that drug offenses should be so criminalized.”
Calhoun was now moving with a neo-hippie crowd, playing in jam bands and going to festivals. When he returned to private practice, he was an all-purpose small town lawyer, and many of his clients had little income. From one, he accepted payment in tie-dye garments.
After the 2016 election, an old friend, Bob Fortin, remembers Calhoun excoriating him for voting for Trump. “He cussed me out in his kitchen,” said Fortin, who said he later regretted his vote. “He made me feel like a complete ass.”
Then, about a year ago, came Calhoun’s abrupt political shift. “I thought his Facebook was hacked,” Fortin said.
The trigger appeared to be gun control. Calhoun had not always been obsessed with guns, friends said. But in the fall of 2019, some Democratic politicians began talking of ambitious new gun restrictions and it seemed to flip a switch. Calhoun said as much himself.
“I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”
His conversion was total. By the fall of 2020 he was posting about a looming “domestic communist problem” and the “rioting BLM-Antifa crime wave.” Of Joe Biden, he wrote: “Hang the bastard.”
Old friends were baffled, and some grew nervous. “I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” Calhoun wrote on Twitter in October. Then, a few days later: “Standing by, and when Trump makes the call, millions of heavily armed, pissed off patriots are coming to Washington.”
After the election, Calhoun held a small gun rights rally in town, and the violent posts continued, with talk of civil war, mounting heads on pikes and showing the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar “what the bottom of the river looks like.” In December, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, found Calhoun buying a Confederate flag outside a Trump rally. “This is about independence and freedom,” Calhoun told the reporter, describing Trumpism and Southern secession as similarly justified fights against tyranny.
On Jan. 6, Calhoun’s posts showed he had made his way inside the U.S. Capitol with the mob. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” he wrote in one post. “Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
A week later, federal agents arrested him at his sister’s house in Macon, Georgia, where he had stockpiled two AR-15-style assault rifles, two shotguns, a handgun, brass knuckles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the testimony of an FBI agent.
David Lankford, an old friend and client, said that Calhoun, whose federal public defender declined to comment, had always been hot-tempered in debating his views. The two had sparred for years, said Lankford, a Republican, so he was surprised when Calhoun called him last year talking of Democratic “betrayal” over gun policy and other matters. But while Calhoun’s politics had changed drastically, Lankford said, his personality had not.
“He’s the same old banty rooster, just on the other side of the fence,” Lankford said.
At Calhoun’s Jan. 21 court hearing in Macon, Charles H. Weigle, the federal magistrate judge, ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Calhoun had committed crimes when he stormed the Capitol.
He declined to let Calhoun out on bond.
A man who had committed such “extreme violence,” the judge said — who believed that it was his patriotic duty to take up arms and fight in a new civil war — constituted a danger to the community.
Items at a Gwinnett County, Ga., voting location on Jan. 5, when Democrats flipped two U.S. Senate seats after President Biden won the state in November. Georgia Republicans are proposing a sweeping new state law that would restrict early and absentee voting. Megan Varner/Getty Images
