Animals need infrastructure, too

$350 million of Biden’s INVEST in America Act isn’t for people. It’s for wildlife that needs help crossing the road.

By Ben Goldfarb  Nov 12, 2021

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A bear crosses a wildlife bridge in Banff National Park. AP Clevenger, courtesy of ARC Solutions

This story is part of a group of stories called

The biodiversity crisis, explained

Fifty miles east of Seattle, a bridge crosses a steep stretch of Interstate 90 known as Snoqualmie Pass. This is no ordinary bridge, meant for automobiles or pedestrians. Covered in topsoil, boulders, and seedlings, it is intended to convey wild animals from one side of the highway to the other — and it’s working.

Since 2018, when the bridge opened and the first animal, a coyote, scampered over the six lanes below, the structure has carried creatures as large as elk and as small as toads. And it should attract even more users as the seedlings grow into trees and animals acclimate to its presence.

“As we get more shade, it’s going to be different,” Patty Garvey-Darda, a Forest Service wildlife biologist, told Vox during a recent visit to Snoqualmie Pass. “Hopefully someday we’ll see the exact same species up here as we see in the forest.”

The Snoqualmie Pass bridge is one example in a broader category of infrastructure, known as wildlife crossings, that help animals circumvent busy roads like I-90. Crossings come in an array of shapes and sizes, from sweeping overpasses for grizzly bears to inconspicuous tunnels for salamanders. A body of research demonstrates that crossings can reconnect fragmented wildlife populations, while protecting human drivers and animals alike from dangerous vehicle crashes. “This structure is paying for itself because of the accidents we haven’t had,” said Garvey-Darda, as trucks roared by 35 feet below.

The construction of such crossings has never been more urgent. Roadkill rates have risen over the past half-century; today, around 12 percent of North American wild mammals die on roads. And new satellite-tracking and genetic technologies have revealed subtler harms. Busy interstates prevent herds of elk and mule deer from migrating to low-elevation meadows in winter, occasionally causing them to starve. In California, freeways have thwarted mountain lions from mating, leaving the cats so inbred that they’ve fallen into an “extinction vortex.” Wildlife crossings allow animals to find food and each other across sundered landscapes, and help them access new habitats as climate change scrambles their range

But despite crossings’ benefits, they remain scarce in the US. Around 1,000 wildlife crossings currently dot America’s 4 million mile road network. (For comparison, the Netherlands’ road system is only 2 percent as large but boasts over 600 crossings.) The reason for their rarity? Money. The Snoqualmie Pass bridge cost $6.2 million, and even humble turtle tunnels can run up multimillion-dollar price tags. This kind of expense explains why wildlife crossings were once a punching bag for some conservative politicians, who decried animal passages as government waste.

Now that’s beginning to change. Earlier this month, the House passed the INVEST in America Act, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden is expected to soon sign into law. The bipartisan package earmarks billions of dollars in funding for highway maintenance, broadband internet, and airport upgrades — as well as $350 million for animal-friendly infrastructure like bridges, underpasses, and roadside fences. Although that provision is a tiny slice of the bill, it’s easily the largest investment in wildlife crossings in national history.

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These innovations are not only wildly effective at preventing roadkill, they’re also an underappreciated way to protect people. Hundreds of Americans die annually in car crashes with animals, and tens of thousands more are injured. “Whether it’s human safety or habitat connectivity or fiscal responsibility, there’s something in this bill for you,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and promotes crossings. “This has become a staunchly bipartisan issue.”

When the US interstate highway system was constructed more than half a century ago, ecosystems were damaged in ways we’re only now beginning to fully understand. Wildlife crossings and other animal-friendly infrastructure help mend that damage, and accommodate the creatures whose lives our highways have disrupted. Even within a bitterly divided Congress, it’s a rare area of consensus. One of the few things uniting some fiscal conservatives with climate-concerned Democrats is a literal bridge.

How wildlife crossings went mainstream

Roads have few equals as a destroyer of animal life. Vehicles claim more wild terrestrial animals — perhaps more than a million per day in the US alone — than any other form of direct human-caused mortality, like hunting, oil spills, or wildfires. And it’s not just common critters like squirrels that get flattened (though we should worry about their welfare, too). At least 21 species are imperiled by cars in the US, and one recent study found that collisions may soon wipe out globally threatened creatures like maned wolves, brown hyenas, and leopards. We are, quite literally, driving some of the world’s rarest animals to extinction.

For more than half a century, countries have attempted to solve this problem using wildlife crossings. France constructed the world’s first crossings, known as passages à faune, in the 1950s, followed by Germany and the Netherlands. During the 1970s and ’80s, a handful of American states, including Wyoming, Florida, and New Jersey, built their own crossings. Many showed promise: After a 100-foot passage was installed beneath I-70 in Colorado, for instance, hundreds of mule deer trotted through each summer.

A new section of the German Autobahn 14 and a wildlife overpass between the Colbitz and Tangerhütte junctions. Ronny Hartmann/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Yet crossings were slow to catch on in the US, for several reasons. Few states rigorously collected data on animal collisions, masking the problem’s severity. Some early structures were poorly designed or monitored, casting doubt on their efficacy. And even when agencies did document successful crossings, tight budgets rarely had room for more. “The unfortunate thing to date is that the most effective solution is also the most expensive,” wrote one California official in 1980.

Over time, though, collisions became impossible to ignore. As human populations grew, traffic spiked in rural areas. Meanwhile, elk, bear, moose, and especially deer were bouncing back after centuries of exploitation. When speeding cars struck these hefty mammals, the crashes could be catastrophic for both parties. In 1995, researchers estimated that deer collisions caused 29,000 injuries and around 200 human deaths every year in the US. Animal crashes had become a public safety crisis.

In 2005, Congress ordered the Department of Transportation to study the situation. Its report, published three years later, put some firm figures on the issue. The authors tallied all the expenses of a crash — the hospital bills, the vehicle damage, the value of the animal itself, and so on — and found that the average deer strike dinged society more than $6,000. Moose and elk were even pricier. All told, animal crashes were estimated to cost America over $8 billion a year.

Against that backdrop, wildlife crossings were no longer viewed as frivolous expenditures, but vital public safety measures. In Wyoming, underpasses on Highway 30, paired with roadside fencing that guided animals toward them, cut mule deer collisions within a critical migration corridor by more than 80 percent, offsetting construction costs in just five years. In Arizona, underpasses and fences prevented enough elk crashes to do the same.

Prongorn antelope approach a wildlife overpass across route 191 at Trapper’s Point near Pinedale, Wyoming. William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images

New technology advanced the cause, too. Motion-activated cameras snapped high-quality photographs of animals moving through crossings, winning over skeptics, says Patricia Cramer, an ecologist who has studied crossings in Florida, Utah, and other states. “We could finally show the engineers that structures work,” she said. “Suddenly, they believed us.”

Money for animal infrastructure has been hard to come by — until now

As wildlife crossings proved their worth, transportation agencies took a new interest. Highway acts in 2012 and 2015 expressly allowed states to spend federal dollars on wildlife infrastructure. New overpasses and underpasses popped up, particularly in western states like Wyoming and Montana, where deer and elk followed predictable migration routes that highways happened to bisect. Their approval ratings soared, too: One poll found that more than 90 percent of voters in Nevada — hardly a state that habitually embraces government interventions — were in favor of more crossings.

But crossings remained underfunded. Wildlife projects drew from the same pots as basic transportation needs, like lane repaving and highway repairs. Pitted against America’s crumbling infrastructure, animals got short shrift. (This was especially true for small species that didn’t endanger drivers — it’s likely no one has ever totaled their truck by slipping on a salamander, for example.) In 2013, when researchers asked nearly 500 officials why crossings weren’t more common, two-thirds chalked it up to money.

In the face of chronic fiscal shortfalls, some states got creative. Colorado allocated lottery revenue. Wyoming sold specialty license plates. In California, where engineers will soon break ground on a massive bridge for mountain lions, the conservation group National Wildlife Federation solicited private donations. (Leonardo DiCaprio was an early contributor.) But these revenue streams were piecemeal and unreliable, and many otherwise worthy crossings never got built.

In 2013, road ecologists, led by ARC Solutions and a group called the Western Transportation Institute, began to discuss securing more permanent funds. Conservationists and scientists wrote policy papers, met with congressional aides, and hammered out the basic framework for wildlife-crossing legislation. As the proposal developed, it gained supporters. Animal welfare groups like the Humane Society backed crossings to reduce wildlife deaths and suffering. Conservation organizations like the Wildlands Network touted crossings as a way of stitching up fragmented ecosystems. Even pro-hunting organizations trumpeted the restoration of healthy deer and elk herds as a selling point.

“WE USE THE LINGO ‘WIN-WIN’ A LOT, BUT IN THIS CASE THIS WAS TRULY A WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN” —SUSAN HOLMES

“We use the lingo ‘win-win’ a lot, but in this case this was truly a win-win-win-win,” said Susan Holmes, federal policy director for the Wildlands Network. “Almost everyone could see the value in this.”

With backing from hunters and highway safety advocates alike, animal-friendly infrastructure racked up unlikely congressional support. In a 2019 hearing on crossings, Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming and a former surgeon, said that he’s taken care of patients injured in collisions with wildlife. “It happens every year,” he said. Although Barrasso has a history of impeding climate-friendly initiatives — and a 7 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters — he included a wildlife crossing program in the highway bill that he sponsored later that year. (That version of the bill never passed.) Crossings also garnered support from Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator who chairs the chamber’s Environment and Public Works Committee — perhaps because Capito’s home state of West Virginia leads the country in deer crashes.

The years of lobbying paid off this month, when the $350 million wildlife-crossing provision made it into the final infrastructure bill — the largest federal public works program since President Dwight D. Eisenhower kick-started the interstate system in the 1950s. (Thirteen GOP House members and 19 senators voted for the bill; despite Barrasso’s affinity for crossings, he wasn’t one of them.) The funding will be disbursed through a five-year competitive grant program, through which states, Native tribes, and other entities will submit proposals for new crossings within their jurisdictions. Now animals will have a separate pool of money from which officials will be able to draw.

“This is finally approaching a scale that’s needed nationwide,” said Rob Ament, road ecology program manager at the Western Transportation Institute. “We can’t treat every mile of highway, but we can take care of a lot of the areas that are seriously affecting wildlife populations.”

The future of wildlife crossings is mobile

The new funding comes at a crucial moment. As the climate warms, it’s imperative that animals are able to move freely around landscapes. Think of moose shifting their ranges northward to escape infestations of hungry ticks, or bears fleeing wildfires intensified by drought. Crossing structures allow these creatures to navigate roads in search of novel habitat.

Then again, crossings only go so far: An elk migration corridor might drift northward over decades, but a bridge or tunnel can’t follow. At least, not yet — but that, too, may change.

According to the INVEST Act, the wildlife crossing program will prioritize structures that incorporate “innovative technologies” and “advanced design techniques.” Among those techniques, says Callahan, might be the use of fiber-reinforced polymer, or FRP, a plastic that’s lighter and stronger than regular concrete, and should soon be cheaper as well. The Western Transportation Institute and the California Department of Transportation are currently designing America’s first FRP wildlife bridge, and experts say that future iterations could someday be modular and mobile, capable of being disassembled and relocated in response to changing animal movement patterns. “That would be a game changer,” Callahan said.

Eastbound Interstate 90 traffic passes beneath a wildlife bridge under construction on Snoqualmie Pass, Washington. Elaine Thompson/AP

As exciting as all that may be, it’s important to remember that the new funding for wildlife crossings is merely a good start. While $350 million may sound substantial, it is, as Cramer puts it, “decimal dust” compared to national transportation budgets. It’s also a fraction of what’s ultimately needed: According to one recent report, it would cost $175 million to deal with roadkill hot spots in California alone. What’s more, wildlife crossings can’t do much about traffic noise, salt pollution, stormwater runoff, or many of the other byproducts of roads — some of which will, ironically, be exacerbated by the infrastructure bill, which allots millions to highway expansion projects. And all the crossings in the world won’t help unless we get better at protecting the habitats that animals must move between.

“We can build a bridge,” said Matt Skroch, project director for public lands and rivers conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, “but let’s not build a bridge to nowhere.”

Correction, November 12, 10:40 am: A previous version of summary text for this story misstated the amount of INVEST in America Act funding that is related to wildlife crossings. It is $350 million.

One-third of Iowa deer test positive for SARS-CoV-2, scientists see a new stream of mutations

Free-living animals can act as a reservoir for the virus, allowing it to multiply and mutate into variants with increased transmissibility and virulence, before spilling back into the human population

Author of the article: Devika Desai
Publishing date: Nov 12, 2021 

Nearly one-third of Iowa deer are infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus, 

which causes COVID-19 in humans, a study has found. 

PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES


With COVID-19 caseloads on the decline and vaccines rolling out around the world, nations have begun preparations for the next phase of the pandemic — learning to live with the virus.t

However, we may not be fully in the clear, scientists say after a study found the first evidence of animals transmitting the virus in the wild, with troubling implications for the spread of the disease and emergence of new variants.

Released on November 6, the preprint study found that one-third of the white tail deer population in Iowa over the past nine months has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans — indicating that not only can deer catch the virus from humans but can also transmit it within their population in overwhelming numbers.

The study has not yet been peer-reviewed or published.

The transmission, it added, most likely resulted from “multiple zooanthroponotic spillover events” and “deer-to-deer transmission”, arising from herds in close proximity to humans.

The analysis was prompted by a recent report that found 40 per cent of free-living white-tailed deer in the U.S. contained antibodies against the virus.

Researchers were still “astonished” by the high viral loads detected in the animals, said Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, clinical professor of virology at Penn State and the coauthor of the study.

“What was certainly surprising is the level of positivity we saw,” he said. “The amount of virus we detected in each of the animals was quite astonishing. We weren’t expecting that.”

Kuchipudi couldn’t say whether the deer displayed symptoms of the virus, instead pointing to the results of an earlier analysis conducted by Kansas State University researchers on adults and fawns, in which they injected the virus into healthy deer. While those animals didn’t appear to be affected by the virus, Kuchipudi acknowledged that environmental factors affecting health, access to resources could alter those results in the wild.

“We don’t know (if) the deer will actually express or exhibit any symptoms in the natural settings,” he said. “But based on the experimental set, infections, we know that they do not show any clinical symptoms.”

Can humans catch the virus from the infected deer?

The study, Kuchipudi acknowledged, comes with its ‘limitations’ and it could not say whether people living near herds or hunting the deer could catch the virus from the animals.

But it’s entirely possible, he said, pointing to studies done on infected mink populations that showed the virus “spilling back” into human populations in contact with the infected animals.

“Based on what we know about viruses when they spill into animals … the possibility of spilling back into humans cannot be ruled out,” he said.

Which could make learning to live with the virus more complicated than originally hoped. For one, it’s entirely possible that Iowa deer aren’t the only animals getting infected with the virus.

An analysis conducted in Ohio also found a similar level of infectivity among white-tailed deer. Previous studies in general have found that several animal species could be potentially susceptible to the virus, including cats, dogs, pumas, gorillas and snow leopards in zoos, and farmed mink.

A week ago, hyenas at the Denver zoo recently tested positive , marking the first confirmed cases in those animals.

The biggest concerns lay in what we don’t know about the virus transmission among wild animals, Kuchipudi said. Left uncontrolled, the virus could jump from one host to another and in the process, undergo mutations long enough to create new variants, some of which “could undermine the existing vaccines.”

“Now the chances of virus mutation has become twice as complicated because now it is also happening, at least in one animal species …. and perhaps in other animals that we do not know yet,” he said.

Many wild animal species, the study explained, already harbour a number of endemic coronaviruses, presenting all the more opportunities for a residing SARS-CoV-2 virus to ‘recombine and acquire or evolve increased fitness traits such as increased virulence, transmissibility, pathogenicity, and immune evasion.”

In other words — a virus that can freely circulate among animals is much harder to eradicate among humans.

Which means governments and infectious disease experts are now tasked with a new challenge two years into the pandemic — assessing just how widespread the virus is and the risk that arises from that. “What other animals (in the vicinity) could be getting infected,” Kuchipudi asked.

The evidence for virus spread within the free-living animal population also highlights the importance of the ‘One Health’ approach, a concept that advocates the need to consider animal, human and environmental health when fighting emerging infectious diseases. “In order to protect human health, we must also protect animal and environmental health,” Kuchipudi said. “But this should be done in a concerted effort rather than silos that do not talk to each other.”

Rare Antarctic penguin travels an incredible 3,000 km to New Zealand

An Adélie penguin named Pingu was found on the shores of New Zealand — far away from its natural habitat in Antarctica.

© Provided by National Post An Adelie penguin is seen at the coast of 

Banks Peninsula after travelling from his natural habitat of Antarctica

 in New Zealand Nov. 12, 2021.

National Post 4 hrs ago

After accidentally travelling 3,000 kilometres away from his home, Pingu has become only the third Adélie penguin to have been found on New Zealand’s coasts, the first two making their visits in 1962 and 1993.

“First I thought it (was) a soft toy, suddenly the penguin moved his head, so I realized it was real,” Harry Singh, the resident who found him, told BBC News .

Singh and his wife were walking on the beach at Birdlings Flat, a settlement south of the city of Christchurch, when they came across Pingu.

Singh remembers the penguin looking exhausted, and said it did not move for an hour. The bird also looks lost and alone in footage shared on Singh’s Facebook page .

“We did not want it to end up in a dog’s or cat’s stomach,” Singh said.

VIDEO Antarctic penguin releases into wild after travelling 3,000 km to New Zealand

So, they called penguin rescuers .

Singh got a hold of Thomas Stracke from the Christchurch Penguin Rehabilitation, who has been rehabilitating penguins on New Zealand’s South Island for about 10 years.

“Apart from being a bit starving and severely dehydrated, he was actually not too bad, so we gave him some fluids and some fish smoothie,” Stracke told The Guardian .

© Allanah Purdie, Department of Conservation New Zealand/Handout via REUTERS An Adelie penguin is seen at the coast of Banks Peninsula after travelling from his natural habitat of Antarctica, in New Zealand Nov. 12, 2021.

Otago University zoology professor, Philip Seddon, said Pingu was potentially a younger bird that became entangled in a current that swept him into New Zealand waters.

“I think if we started getting annual arrivals of Adélie penguins, we’d go; ‘Actually, something’s changed in the ocean that we need to understand’,” Seddon told The Guardian. “All species of penguin are like marine sentinels … when they’re doing badly, they’re giving us an early signal – canaries in coal mines – an early signal that things are not good.”

While Adélie penguin populations appear to be stable at the moment — increasing in some areas while decreasing in others — Seddon told The Guardian that changes in penguin behaviour could be an early warning sign that the marine ecosystem was in trouble.

“More studies will give us more understanding where penguins go, what they do, what the population trends are like — they’re going to tell us something about the health of that marine ecosystem in general,” he said.

Pingu was eventually released onto a safe beach on the Banks Peninsula south of Christchurch in hopes of helping him to complete his journey home.

Tony Cliff

Rosa Luxemburg

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Rosa Luxemburg’s place in history

Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx, did not exaggerate when he called Rosa Luxemburg the best brain after Marx. But she did not contribute her brain alone to the working-class movement; she gave everything she had – her heart, her passion, her strong will, her very life.

Above all else, Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist. And among the great revolutionary socialist leaders and teachers she has a special historical place of her own.

When reformism degraded the socialist movements by aspiring purely for the “welfare state”, by tinkering with capitalism, it became of first importance to make a revolutionary criticism of this handmaiden of capitalism. It is true that other Marxist teachers besides Rosa Luxemburg – Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and others – conducted a revolutionary fight against reformism. But they had a limited front to fight against. In their country, Russia, the roots of this weed were so weak and thin that a mere tug was sufficient to uproot it. Where Siberia or the gallows stared every socialist or democrat in the face, who in principle could oppose the use of violence by the labour movement? Who in Tsarist Russia would have dreamed of a parliamentary road to socialism? Who could advocate a policy of coalition government, for with whom could coalitions be made? Where trade unions scarcely existed, who could think of considering them the panacea of the labour movement? Lenin, Trotsky and the other Russian Bolshevik leaders did not need to counter the arguments of reformism with a painstaking and exact analysis. All they needed was a broom to sweep it away to the dungheap of history.

In Central and Western Europe conservative reformism had much deeper roots, a much more embracing influence on the thoughts and moods of the workers. The arguments of the reformists had to be answered by superior ones, and here Rosa Luxemburg excelled. In these countries her scalpel is a much more useful weapon than Lenin’s sledgehammer.

In Tsarist Russia the mass of the workers were not organised in parties or trade unions. There there was not such a threat of powerful empires being built by a bureaucracy rising from the working class as in the well-organised workers’ movement of Germany; and it was natural that Rosa Luxemburg had a much earlier and clearer view of the role of the labour bureaucracy than Lenin or Trotsky. She understood long before they did that the only power that could break through bureaucratic chains is the initiative of the workers. Her writings on this subject can serve as an inspiration to workers in the advanced industrial countries, and are a more valuable contribution to the struggle to liberate the workers from the pernicious ideology of bourgeois reformism than those of any other Marxist.

In Russia, where the Bolsheviks were always a large and important part of the organised socialists, even if they were not always the majority, as their name signifies, the question of the attitude of a small Marxist minority to a mass, conservatively-led organisation never really rose as a problem. It remained for Rosa Luxemburg largely to develop the right approach to this vital question. Her guiding principle was: stay with the masses throughout their travail and try to help them. She therefore opposed abstention from the main stream of the labour movement, no matter what the level of its development. Her fight against sectarianism is extremely important for the labour movement of the West, especially at present, when welfare-stateism is such an all-pervading sentiment. The British labour movement, in particular, having suffered from the sectarianism of Hyndman and the SDF, later the BSP and SLP, then the Communist Party (especially in its “third period”) and now further sects, can gain inspiration from Rosa Luxemburg for a principled fight against reformism which does not degenerate into flight from it. She taught that a revolutionary should not swim with the stream of reformism, nor sit outside it and look in the opposite direction, but swim against it.

Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the structure of the revolutionary organisations – that they should be built, from below up, on a consistently democratic basis – fits the needs of the workers’ movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin’s conception of 1902-04 which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by the Stalinists the world over.

She understood more clearly than anyone that the structure of the revolutionary party, and the mutual relation between the party and the class, would have a big influence, not only on the struggle against capitalism and for workers’ power, but also on the fate of this power itself. She stated prophetically that without the widest workers’ democracy “officials behind their desks” would replace the workers’ hold on political power. “Socialism”, she said, “cannot be decreed or introduced by edict.”

Rosa Luxemburg’s blend of revolutionary spirit and clear understanding of the nature of the labour movement in Western and Central Europe is in some way connected with her particular background of birth in the Tsarist Empire, long residence in Germany, and full activity in both the Polish and German labour movements. Anyone of smaller stature would have been assimilated into one of the two environments, but not Rosa Luxemburg. To Germany she brought the “Russian” spirit, the spirit of revolutionary action. To Poland and Russia she brought the “Western” spirit of workers’ self-reliance, democracy and self-emancipation.

Her The Accumulation of Capital is an invaluable contribution to Marxism. In dealing with the mutual relations between the industrially advanced countries and the backward agrarian ones she brought out the most important idea that imperialism, while stabilising capitalism over a long period, at the same time threatens to bury humanity under its ruins.

Being vital, energetic and non-fatalistic in her approach to history, which she conceived of as the fruit of human activity, and at the same time laying bare the deep contradictions of capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg did not consider that the victory of socialism was inevitable. Capitalism, she thought, could be either the ante-chamber to socialism or the brink of barbarism. We who live in the shadow of the H-bomb must comprehend this warning and use it as a spur to action.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the German labour movement, with decades of peace behind it, sank under the illusion that this situation was everlasting. We who are in the throes of discussion about controlled disarmament, United Nations, Summit Meetings, could do no better than learn from Rosa Luxemburg’s clear analysis of the unbreakable tie between war and capitalism, and her insistence that the fight for peace is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

A passion for truth made Rosa Luxemburg recoil from any dogmatic thought. In a period when Stalinism has largely turned Marxism into a dogma, spreading desolation in the field of ideas, Rosa Luxemburg’s writings are invigorating and life-giving. Nothing was more intolerable to her than bowing down to “infallible authorities”. As a real disciple of Marx she was able to think and act independently of her master. Though grasping the spirit of his teaching, she did not lose her critical faculties in a simple repetition of his words, whether these fitted the changed situation or not, whether they were right or wrong. Rosa Luxemburg’s independence of thought is the greatest inspiration to socialists everywhere and always. In consequence, no one would have denounced more forcefully than she herself any effort to canonise her, to turn her into an “infallible authority”, a leader of a school of thought or action. She loved the conflict of ideas as a means of coming nearer to the truth.

During a period when so many who consider themselves Marxists sap Marxism of its deep humanistic content, no one can do more to release us from the chains of lifeless mechanistic materialism than Rosa Luxemburg. For Marx communism (or socialism) was “real humanism”, “a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle”. [96] Rosa Luxemburg was the embodiment of these humanistic passions. Sympathy with the lowly and oppressed was a central motive of her life. Her deep emotion and feeling for the suffering of people and all living things expressed themselves in everything she did or wrote, whether in her letters from prison or in the deepest writings of her theoretical research.

Rosa Luxemburg, however, well knew that where human tragedy is on an epic scale tears won’t help. Her motto, like that of Spinoza, might have been, “Do not cry, do not laugh, but understand”, even though she herself had her full share of tears and laughter. Her method was to reveal the trends of development in social life in order to help the working class to use its potentialities in the best possible way in conjunction with objective development. She appealed to man’s reason rather than to emotion.

Deep human sympathy and an earnest desire for truth, unbounded courage and a magnificent brain united in Rosa Luxemburg to make her a great revolutionary socialist. As her closest friend, Clara Zetkin, wrote in her obituary:

In Rosa Luxemburg the socialist idea was a dominating and powerful passion of both heart and brain, a truly creative passion which burned ceaselessly. The great task and the overpowering ambition of this astonishing woman was to prepare the way for social revolution, to clear the path of history for Socialism. To experience the revolution, to fight its battles – that was the highest happiness for her. With a will, determination, selflessness and devotion for which words are too weak, she consecrated her whole life and her whole being to Socialism. She gave herself completely to the cause of Socialism, not only in her tragic death, but throughout her whole life, daily and hourly, through the struggles of many years ... She was the sharp sword, the living flame of revolution.

 

Note

96. K. Marx, Capital, vol.I, p.649

First published as a pamphlet in 1959 (International Socialism, No.2/3).
Reprinted 1968, 1969 and 1980) (note on editions).
Reprinted in Tony Cliff, International Struggle and the Marxist Tradition, Selected Works Vol.1, Bookmarks, London 2001, pp.59-116.
Transcribed by Artroom, East End Offset (TU), London.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Proofread by Anoma Cartwright (march 2008).

Tony Cliff: Rosa Luxemburg (1959) (connexions.org)

Kyle Rittenhouse’s tears

The 18-year-old who shot three men at a protest took the stand and resorted to a tried-and-true strategy for white men in trouble.

Kyle Rittenhouse becomes emotional as he testifies during his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Wisconsin on November 10. Mark Hertzberg/Getty Images

SCOTUS JUSTICE KAVANAUGH AT SENATE CONFIRMATION HEARING 

CRYING OVER BEER AND RAPE

By Jamil Smith@JamilSmith 

 Nov 11, 2021

What Kyle Rittenhouse displayed in a Kenosha, Wisconsin, courtroom this week as he testified in his homicide trial was what folks like to call an “ugly cry.”

Charged in the killings of two men and injury of another amid days of racial justice protests last summer, the defendant started to falter on the stand as he described that fateful night last August, when the then-17-year-old was armed with a rifle, patrolling the streets of a town that was not his own. Rittenhouse’s eyes shut almost completely, save for an occasional glance to his left in the direction of the jury. Then came the sobbing, which kept the rest of his response to his attorney’s questioning about that evening from escaping his quivering lips.

Rittenhouse’s blubbering was the headline of the day after the defendant offered his much-awaited testimony in the case Wednesday, recalling the night he shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber to death and “vaporized” much of the bicep of medic Gaige Grosskreutz, according to Grosskreutz’s testimony. Rittenhouse wasn’t weeping with regret; he was claiming self-defense, and recounting how he felt his life was in danger.

The trial and pretrial proceedings had already sparked a national outcry after Judge Bruce Schroeder decided last month that prosecutors may not refer to Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz as “victims,” and that defense attorneys could call them “looters” or “arsonists.” Now with his tears, Rittenhouse has cast himself as the lone victim in his own homicide trial.

When he wasn’t crying, Rittenhouse explained why he had traveled the roughly 20 miles from Illinois. Earlier that day, he allegedly offered “condolences” to a business owner for cars that were set afire the previous night, and he said that he and a friend agreed to help provide armed protection for the business that night. The defendant also testified that he gave a bulletproof vest in his possession — issued by the Grayslake, Illinois, police department’s Explorer program for young people interested in law enforcement careers — to a friend, saying he felt he wouldn’t need it because, he recalled in the courtroom, “I’m going to be helping people.”

The Illinois teenager faces two counts of first-degree homicide and one of attempted homicide, along with three other charges in the shooting on August 25, 2020, just a couple of nights after a Kenosha police officer shot Black motorist Jacob Blake seven times in the back in front of three of his children. The killings of the demonstrators caused a national shock wave last summer, highlighting the powder keg of emotion surrounding arrests, clashes, and tense exchanges as tens of millions of Americans took to the streets to protest racial injustice.

The debate this week has centered on whether the defendant’s spectacle was authentic. Whether or not the crying was real, it was a performance, and it had an audience. Like many white men accused of violent crimes and misconduct before him, Rittenhouse appealed with his tears not merely to the 12 fellow citizens who will decide his fate, but also to certain white members of the American public who too often see emotion like that and imagine only the faces of their sons — not any born to mothers who look like mine.


 A former Oklahoma City police officer was convicted Thursday of raping and sexually victimizing eight women on his police beat in a minority, low-income neighborhood.

There is evidence that Rittenhouse conspicuously aligned himself with the “blue lives matter” crowd, so it’s worth considering his sobbing within the context of the toxic and limited view of manhood that remains so popular in America, particularly among the modern political right. Some compared Rittenhouse to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reaction when questioned during his confirmation hearings about Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegations of sexual assault. Wednesday’s display from Rittenhouse bore some similarities to Kavanaugh’s sanctimonious anger, which he often dotted with cracks in his voice. As I wrote at the time, the future Supreme Court justice took advantage of the leeway that his gender and privilege affords to him, and Rittenhouse did the same.

It is a particular privilege to be considered a “boy” after you’ve become an adult — and when you’ve made decisions like Rittenhouse’s. In Rittenhouse’s case, he was generously characterized by the New York Times as someone “who has idolized law enforcement since he was young” and went to Kenosha “with at least one mission: to play the role of police officer and medic.” The prosecution noted a number of his lies Wednesday, including false claims to the press about being an EMT. Part of the discomfort as we watched him emote, to say nothing of the suspicion, may be that we’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.

However, Rittenhouse’s emotion on the stand should be an indictment of his behavior, not an excuse for it. By law, he was too young to have the weapon he used to kill. He told the court that the reason he picked the AR-15-style rifle, as opposed to a handgun, is he thought “it looked cool.”

Legal experts I spoke with judged Rittenhouse’s testimony to be a positive for him, because the defense must have it both ways: While admitting to the facts of the shootings, they must show that Rittenhouse was the good guy that night, and that he feared for his life. If Rittenhouse provoked the conflict and shooting with his actions, he has no credible claim to self-defense. But if he can convince the jury that, as he told the court, it was either him or them, perhaps he created sufficient reasonable doubt. Time will tell.

American jurisprudence has bigger problems than Kyle Rittenhouse. This trial, however, is shining light on a few. Our legal system tends to treat young white men like him as sob stories rather than cautionary tales, especially if they exhibit anything approximating fear or remorse. The resentment and accusation of melodramatics is due in part to the reasonable presumption that another 17-year-old who isn’t white, committing the same act, wouldn’t receive the same sympathy. They wouldn’t be able to be caught in false statements — such as Rittenhouse’s claim on the night of the killing that Rosenbaum was armed when he allegedly threatened Rittenhouse prior to the shooting (Rosenbaum wasn’t) — and have any expectation that tears could secure their acquittal.

Rittenhouse’s victims were all white men, making them somewhat of an exception in American jurisprudence. Typically, such prejudgment is saved for people of color, and is handed out by law enforcement. If people of color even survive encounters with law enforcement and live to see the inside of a courtroom for the chance to be wrongfully convicted or disproportionately sentenced, it feels like a small miracle.

The self-styled militia patrolling the city that night were, by several accounts, mostly white men, yet another example of the unequally enforced protections of the Second Amendment. It isn’t that they didn’t have the right to do so, though Rittenhouse technically was too young (among the charges he faces is possessing a dangerous weapon under the age of 18).

Is it reasonable to think that a Black person similarly outfitted with a weapon of war during a civil rights protest in Kenosha would not have been arrested or potentially harmed by the police swarming the streets? If that person shot someone, would they be able to use the defense so many police officers use when killing Black and brown people — that they feared for their  Life? Tears on the stand didn’t work for the Exonerated Five in New York City back in 1989. Would they work for anyone who looked like us?

This speaks to much of the negative reaction to Rittenhouse’s display on the stand Wednesday. It isn’t simply that a killer cried about his own fear, rather than the lives he took. It represented the exercise of entitlement, the enduring perception of the youth of white men and boys who commit illegal acts.

Racial favoritism remains one of the many cancers afflicting our jurisprudence. By the late summer of 2020, there were fewer children incarcerated in the United States than at any point since the 1980s — but then a survey, released in March by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, revealed that even during a pandemic, the racial disparity in youth detention grew even wider, with white children in 30 states being released at a rate 17 percent higher than Black youths.

“America’s mistreatment of Black children is chronic and casual,” NYU law professor emerita Kim Taylor-Thompson wrote in May. “The ‘Black person as criminal’ stereotype, which equates dangerousness with skin color, has demonstrated remarkable resilience over time. It persists even in light of conflicting data.”

Kyle Rittenhouse can’t reverse that stereotype by himself, even if he’s convicted. It isn’t bad if Rittenhouse receives a fair trial. Everyone should. That’s the point. However, it’s the exploitation of the leeway too often given to young white defendants that makes people resentful, and rightfully so.

The manner in which Rittenhouse has been granted grace is astounding, but not necessarily bad. But Jacob Blake is paralyzed today, in part, because he didn’t receive the benefit of the doubt from a police officer that Rittenhouse has received from a legion of supporters (with even a judge seeming to tip the scales in his favor). If all lives truly mattered, that wouldn’t be the case.

Correction, 6 pm: A previous version of this story stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought the AR-15-style rifle he used from Illinois. A friend of Rittenhouse’s is alleged to have purchased the gun for him in Wisconsin.

The political issues in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial

Tom Carter
WSWS.ORG

The murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, currently underway in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has become a focal point for a nationwide campaign to legitimize vigilante terror against left-wing protests and lionize the far-right youth as a hero.

The trial itself has been transformed into a kind of courtroom version of a Trump rally, with the American-flag-tie-wearing judge breaking with all semblance of propriety Thursday to lead the jury in a round of applause for Rittenhouse’s defense expert on the ground that he was a “veteran” and “served our country.”

Throughout the trial, the judge has gone out of his way to exclude all of the evidence that would undermine Rittenhouse’s claim that he was acting in self-defense when he killed two people and wounded a third during a protest against police brutality on August 25, 2020.

Before the killings in Kenosha, Rittenhouse openly boasted that he planned to gun down purported shoplifters with his assault rifle. After he posted bail, he was caught flashing “white power” signs, posing for selfies with Proud Boys members, drinking beer, and belting out a song associated with the Proud Boys at a pub together with top Proud Boys leaders.

Rittenhouse displays a white supremacist hand gesture while meeting with members of the Proud Boys

The claim that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense, which turns reality completely on its head, has been taken up by Trump and the Republican Party, together with sections of the American media, carrying along in their wake disoriented pseudo-left and libertarian figures like Glenn Greenwald, who seek to blind the population to the political forces behind this fascistic campaign.

The only legal right to self-defense involved in the Rittenhouse case is the right of the protesters to defend themselves from an unstable right-wing extremist youth who showed up to their protest, brandished an illegal gun at them, and even pointed it at them while it was loaded. At the point Rittenhouse pointed his loaded assault rifle directly at a protester, the protesters would have been fully within their legal rights to forcefully disarm him, or if necessary, to shoot him.

If Rittenhouse is acquitted, it would embolden the violent paramilitary militias that have been cultivated in the orbit of Trump and the Republican Party. It would effectively provide legal sanction for neo-Nazi and fascistic militias to march into future left-wing protests armed to the teeth, to terrorize workers, students, and youth with assault rifles, and to shoot protesters whenever they “feel threatened.”

The politics of Kyle Rittenhouse

Kyle Rittenhouse, who was 17 years old at the time he carried out the killings in Kenosha, is the product of an utterly toxic political and cultural environment. Decades of unending war, attacks on public education, and a generally deranged cultural and political atmosphere have produced many such brutalized, broken, and disoriented young people in America—a phenomenon doubtless accelerated by the pandemic and by the official indifference to mass death.

Without any progressive outlet for their energies, cut off from all culture and historical knowledge, many young people see no future to look forward to except a hopeless grind of oppressive and exploitative jobs that pay less than survival wages. Under these conditions, some of these damaged, atomized young people can become vulnerable to the influence of the far-right, as was the case with Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse was not a native of Wisconsin. Instead, he traveled there from his hometown of Antioch, Illinois, about 60 miles north of Chicago, where he was born into a troubled family. His father struggled with alcoholism, experimented with drugs, and was periodically unemployed. At one point his father was charged with domestic battery, and on two occasions, according to TheNew Yorker, his mother stayed in a women’s shelter.

A cellphone video taken weeks before the shooting that subsequently came to light provides a glimpse of a bleak existence. Rittenhouse was filmed on the Kenosha waterfront repeatedly punching a girl who had gotten into a fight with his sister. The family frequently faced eviction and teetered on the edge of financial ruin.

During his teenage years, Rittenhouse gravitated to right-wing politics, supporting Trump’s reelection campaign, the pro-police “Blue Lives Matter” movement, and participating in police ride-alongs. While a teenage police cadet, he was trained by the police with “replica” guns. He played paintball and was attracted to all of the trappings of militarism and military violence.

Rittenhouse bought his black AR-15 assault rifle, a close relative of the M16 assault rifle that has seen widespread use by the American military, “because it looked cool.” During the trial, he admitted he never intended to hunt with it. The gun was purchased illegally, since Rittenhouse was too young to own it, but America’s gun control laws are unevenly enforced and often easy to evade. In similar fashion, he drove a car without a driver’s license.

On August 23, protests exploded in Kenosha, Wisconsin against the killing of Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man who was shot seven times at point blank range in front of his children as he was attempting to get into his car. Coming three months after the murder of George Floyd, the killing of Jacob Blake uncorked a “geyser of social anger in Kenosha,” as the World Socialist Web Sitewrote at the time. Protesters were subject to violent police attacks and viciously labeled as “rioters” and “looters” in the media.

Rittenhouse, 17 at the time, was already immersed in far-right politics on social media. Before the shootings, Rittenhouse was recorded openly boasting that he wished to shoot people he saw coming out of a CVS store, who he believed were shoplifting. “Bro, I wish I had my f—ing AR. I’d start shooting rounds at them.”

On August 25, as the Jacob Blake demonstrations continued to unfold, a right-wing “patriot” militia that had formed on Facebook, calling itself “Kenosha Guard,” posted a call for volunteers: “Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property.” The formation of the militia was endorsed by a city council member, who called for the “Kenosha Guard” to oppose “evil thugs.” The supposed “commander” of the militia sent a message to the police chief stating, “We are mobilizing tonight and have about 3,000 RSVP’s.” The police chief made no effort to dissuade him.

On the same day the “Kenosha Guard” posted its call for volunteers, Rittenhouse and a friend traveled the 20 miles from Antioch to Kenosha. According to a brief filed by prosecutors summarizing Rittenhouse’s political background as well as his conduct after the shooting, the prosecutors concluded: “The fact that he has since celebrated his notoriety strongly suggests that he set out to achieve the goal of becoming famous.”

After the killings, Rittenhouse was immediately elevated as a far-right icon. Fascist and QAnon conspiracy adherent Lin Wood, who later supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, helped to raise money for Rittenhouse’s defense, together with lawyer and right-wing zealot John Pierce. Pierce tweeted that Rittenhouse had fired the “shot heard around the world” and that: “A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun.”

Rittenhouse posted bail following a fundraising campaign led by these far-right figures, after which he was spotted in a bar in Racine County where he celebrated with leading members of the Proud Boys organization in Wisconsin, joined by his mother. Surveillance video and photos of this meeting at Pudgy’s Pub obtained by prosecutors show Rittenhouse flashing “white power” hand signs, grinning and posing for selfies with other Proud Boys members, and belting out the Proud Boys anthem.

According to prosecutors, after the shootings, Rittenhouse’s “family has sold merchandise with his image on it that celebrates his acts of violence.”

The events of August 25, 2020

The Kenosha shootings took place against a backdrop of massive protests against police brutality touched off by the killing of George Floyd and a runaway pandemic that was claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, with workers raising demands in their workplaces for measures to combat the spread of the disease.

The far-right militias were brought forward to oppose the coronavirus lockdowns, storming the Michigan Capitol on April 30, 2020. In October, a plot was exposed by far-right militia members to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor. These militias would go on to play a significant role in the violent attempt to overturn the elections and install Trump as president on January 6, 2021. The mobilization of far-right militias to assist the police in crushing protests in Kenosha in August 2020 was one point on this trajectory.

On June 1, Trump infamously demanded that governors “dominate” the protests, and the police took him at his word. Images circulated around the world of what amounted to a national police riot, with police ramming protesters with their cars and indiscriminately shooting protesters and journalists with “less-lethal” munitions.

As protests exploded in Kenosha in August, members of the pro-Trump far-right militias mobilized on social media, openly boasting about their intent to shoot protesters. One post read, “Armed and ready. Shoot to kill tonight.”

While confronting what amounted to a police riot, residents, organizers, and protesters were justifiably fearful of the added danger of violence from the right-wing vigilantes making their way into the city with the tacit support of the police.

Trump would go on to openly solidarize himself with the Proud Boys during the September 29 presidential debate, declaring, “stand back and stand by.”

On the night of August 25, Rittenhouse joined a group of far-right militia members that had given itself the mission of “protecting” a car dealership. Rittenhouse’s own behavior that night was immature and unstable. He was captured on video earlier that evening boasting that he was an “E.M.T.” (which was not true) and also claiming that protesters were creating a bomb (also not true). At one point, Rittenhouse told police he was hit in the head with a baseball bat (also not true).

The presence of these armed far-right militias at a protest against police brutality was an extreme provocation and itself a violation of the protesters’ rights to demonstrate without being subjected to violent threats and intimidation.

When far-right militia members positioned themselves on the roof overlooking the protests like snipers, some demonstrators called out that the militias were pointing laser sights at them. The act of pointing a loaded gun at a person is an extremely dangerous act by itself, and a further provocation, compounded by the use of a laser sight. In another confrontation, one armed vigilante screamed, “F— around and find out!”

The police made no effort to restrain the right-wing vigilantes, with whom they were in open sympathy. Instead of arresting Rittenhouse for carrying an illegal rifle, for being out past curfew, or for brandishing the illegal rifle at protesters, at one point the police brought water to the militia members, infamously saying, “We appreciate you.”

Rittenhouse’s first victim was Joseph Rosenbaum, a homeless man who had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital hours before the protest and, according to a report in the New Yorker, had wandered into the scene of the confrontation carrying a plastic bag with a few of his belongings in it. It is undisputed that Rittenhouse was brandishing his AR-15 and pointed it towards at least one protester.

Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, followed Rittenhouse into a parking lot where, according to prosecutors, Rittenhouse pointed the rifle at him, and Rosenbaum tried to take it from him. Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum in the groin, the hand (gunpowder residue was found on Rosenbaum’s palm), and the back, killing him. Rittenhouse ran away, saying “I just killed somebody” on his cellphone.

After Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum, protesters collectively reacted, in the words of Gaige Grosskreutz, on the belief that Rittenhouse was an “active shooter.” Protesters charged Rittenhouse and knocked him to the ground. Anthony Huber courageously pushed his girlfriend out of the way and charged Rittenhouse, striking him with a skateboard and struggling for control of the rifle. Rittenhouse shot Huber through his heart and right lung, killing him.

Gaige Grosskreutz, a volunteer medic who was armed, pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse, and Rittenhouse shot him in the arm, resulting in a gruesome wound that nearly severed his entire right bicep. Then Rittenhouse approached police with his hands up, but the police drove past him. Rittenhouse fled back to Illinois, where amid a popular outcry he was labeled a “fugitive from justice” and ultimately extradited back to Wisconsin to face murder charges.

The killing of Trevon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery

The legal issues in the Rittenhouse trial bear a strong resemblance to those in the killing of Trevon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman, a wannabe cop, decided that Martin looked “suspicious,” aggressively pursuing Martin even after a dispatcher told him not to. After provoking a confrontation with the unarmed black teenager, Zimmerman shot Martin in the heart, killing him instantly.

Zimmerman, like Rittenhouse, was celebrated as a right-wing icon, and was only arrested several months later after a campaign by Martin’s parents attracted nationwide support. He was charged with murder and manslaughter but was acquitted after a travesty of a trial, during which the police barely concealed their sympathy for him, and in which Zimmerman asserted that he was acting in “self-defense” and claimed the benefit of Florida’s “stand your ground” statute.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, if anyone had a right to self-defense in that case, it was Trevon Martin. “Zimmerman had no cause to get out of his car in the first place and pursue Martin while wearing a firearm—especially after being told not to do so,” we wrote. “The young man had every right to use force to defend himself against such a provocation, and the fact that Zimmerman may have been getting the worse in a fight he picked does not excuse lethal force.”

The prosecution of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was killed in February of last year by three armed white vigilantes near Brunswick, Georgia, is proceeding at the same time as the Rittenhouse trial. After the vigilantes provoked a confrontation, Arbery allegedly struggled over a shotgun carried by one of the vigilantes before they shot and killed him. The vigilantes claimed that Arbery was a “burglary suspect” and that they had shot him in “self-defense” while attempting to carry out a “citizen’s arrest.” Notwithstanding these claims of self-defense, Arbery’s killers currently face multiple charges, including murder and aggravated assault.

In the same way, if anyone had a right to self-defense in the Rittenhouse case, it was protesters who collectively confronted a far-right youth illegally carrying and brandishing an assault rifle and pointing it at them. Simply by carrying the rifle to the protest as an associate of a far-right militia, Rittenhouse’s conduct constituted an implicit death threat and a reckless and extreme provocation. Having recklessly provoked a violent confrontation, Rittenhouse cannot legally claim to have acted in self-defense in the confrontation that he provoked.

The Rittenhouse trial

The judge in Rittenhouse’s case, Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder, has gone out of his way to exclude all of the evidence that would undermine the narrative presented by Rittenhouse’s attorneys and their far-right allies.

In February, Rittenhouse violated a court order by concealing his whereabouts from the prosecutors, but the judge denied a request by Kenosha prosecutors for a warrant to rearrest him and increase his bail.

In September, the judge entered orders excluding all of the evidence of Rittenhouse’s political activities and motivations from the trial, including his affiliation with the Proud Boys and his declaration that he wanted to kill shoplifters with his rifle two weeks before the protests.

In October, the judge ruled that prosecutors could not call Rittenhouse’s victims “victims” or even “alleged victims.” At the same time, he permitted Rittenhouse’s defense attorneys to refer to the victims as “arsonists,” “looters” or “rioters.”

During the trial itself, the judge wore an American flag tie. If any more evidence was needed of his political bias, his cellphone rang during the trial and the ringtone was the country-music song “God Bless the USA” that has been the theme song of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rallies, also known by its lyrics “Proud to be an American.”

When he took the stand, Rittenhouse conformed his testimony to the jargon of police officers who testify after having shot someone: “I used deadly force to stop the threat that was attacking me,” he said. When Rittenhouse appeared to break down on the stand, the judge came to his aid by solemnly excusing the jury.

When the prosecutors attempted to cross-examine him, suggesting that he had conformed his testimony to what earlier witnesses had said, the defense attorneys jumped up and demanded that the judge declare a mistrial “with prejudice,” meaning that the judge would toss out the charges and bar the prosecutors from ever bringing them against Rittenhouse again. The judge then proceeded to yell—not at the defense attorneys for making such a frivolous request—but at the prosecutors when they attempted to cross-examine Rittenhouse regarding his political motivations: “Don’t get brazen with me!”

As trial opened yesterday, Schroeder carried out what amounts to a provocation of his own. As Rittenhouse’s “use of force” expert was about to take the stand, the judge declared that he wanted to know if there were any veterans in the room.

When nobody answered, it was clear that the judge knew the answer to his own question: “Well, that’s unusual not to have at least somebody in here, but Dr. Black [Rittenhouse’s next defense witness] is – what branch?”

Black replied, “Army, sir.” Then the judge proceeded to lead the jury in a round of applause for Black: “Okay, and I think we can give a round of applause to the people who have served our country.”

Black, an expert hired by Rittenhouse who routinely testifies on behalf of police officers, went on to testify about his military service and background as a veteran police official. Just as he would in a case involving a police officer, Black then provided a second-by-second breakdown of the shootings that emphasized how quickly they happened, which aimed to underscore how Rittenhouse allegedly made a split-second decision to shoot.

Black previously testified the shootings were “reasonably necessary.” Another of Rittenhouse’s witnesses was Drew Hernandez, who attended the January 6 riot, and who bolstered Rittenhouse’s claim that he fired in self-defense.

The campaign to legitimize vigilante terror

The campaign to lionize Rittenhouse follows in the wake of the largest protests in American history last year, which brought between 15 and 26 million people into the streets, together with a pandemic spiraling out of control, a mounting strike wave and emerging signs of combativeness among workers in the automotive, logistics, education, and health care industries.

Under these circumstances, right-wing vigilante groups are being brought forward to act as a battering ram against working class opposition.

In this context, Rittenhouse has been embraced as “our boy Kyle” by the Daily Stormer, the website of the neo-Nazi and anti-Semite Andrew Anglin. A Republican state representative from Florida tweeted, “Kyle Rittenhouse For Congress,” and far-right-wing provocateur Anne Coulter tweeted: “ALL THE BEST PEOPLE #StandWithKyle.”

In the wake of Kenosha shooting, then-president Trump instructed Homeland Security officials in a subsequently leaked memorandum to frame the case in a manner sympathetic to Rittenhouse, ordering them to emphasize that Rittenhouse “took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.”

Days after the shooting, Trump himself came to Rittenhouse’s defense: “I guess it looks like he fell and then they very violently attacked him,” Trump said.

The response of the Democrats and their media satellites to the far-right campaign around Rittenhouse has been ambivalent to sympathetic, generally accepting the entire right-wing “self-defense” framework. Many of the news headlines have featured sympathetic coverage of Rittenhouse’s supposed sobbing fit on the stand.

When Ayanna Pressley, a Democratic congresswoman from Massachusetts, called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist domestic terrorist” and denounced media outlets for whitewashing his politics, Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and candidate for the 2020 presidential nomination, responded by defending Rittenhouse on the grounds that he only wanted to “protect people.”

Where there is criticism of Rittenhouse from the Democratic camp, it is couched in racial categories that simply do not fit the facts of the case—Rittenhouse’s three victims were all white.

Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, has appointed himself to the task of championing the case for the right-wing extremist gunman, celebrating on Twitter how “genuine liberals” are “expressing shock and horror upon realizing, after watching the trial, that so much of what the media told them about the Rittenhouse case is false.”

Greenwald is taking advantage of the fact that all of the evidence of Rittenhouse’s political motivations was excluded from the trial by the judge. Greenwald also implied that Rittenhouse had been unfairly labeled a “racist,” dishonestly concealing the fact that Rittenhouse was caught flashing “white power” signs after being released on bail.

Reading Greenwald’s tweets, one would have no way of knowing that Rittenhouse is an “honorary member” of the Proud Boys, whose founder Gavin McInnes was an open “Western chauvinist,” misogynist, and anti-Semite who shouted on his show in 2016: “We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We will kill you … We will assassinate you.”

Attacking the World Socialist Web Site for its coverage of the trial yesterday, Greenwald wrote: “You’re literally on the side of the state, its prosecutors, and the carceral system: the engines of fascist power. That’s who you cheer and applaud. I maintain my pro-defendant principles regardless of the ideology of the defendant,” adding “Communists 4 Prosecutors.”

It is Greenwald who is “on the side of the state” and of “fascist power.” Building up the legitimacy of the far-right militias with which Rittenhouse is associated is, in reality, a political objective of a substantial section of the American ruling class, who plan to use these militias to terrorize left-wing social opposition.

In Rittenhouse’s case, his militia was mobilized specifically to aid the police in violently crushing a left-wing protest, in the context of violent assaults on protesters by police nationwide. Prior to the shooting, another militia member with whom Rittenhouse was in contact named Ryan Balch openly boasted: “You know what the cops told us today? They were like, ‘We’re gonna push ’em down by you, ‘cause you can deal with them, and then we’re gonna leave.’”

Greenwald, now a frequent guest on Fox News, has employed similar sophistry to justify his defense of the participants in the January 6 coup attempt as well as the participants in the plot to kidnap and assassinate the Democratic governor of Michigan.

Under conditions of rampant police and vigilante violence, there is absolutely nothing unprincipled about demanding the prosecution of those who perpetrate right-wing violence—and with exposing and denouncing, in this case, a right-wing judge’s extraordinary efforts to derail that prosecution.

It is necessary to warn that in the same way that the German ruling elite embraced the Freikorps and subsequently the brownshirts to suppress the danger from below, sections of the American ruling class are bringing forward the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups to serve a similar purpose: to suppress left-wing opposition through terror and violence.

The open support for Rittenhouse by Trump and the Republican Party, the extraordinary and provocative behavior of the judge, the willingness of a former police official to support and collaborate with Rittenhouse’s defense—together with the hopeless disorientation of middle class pseudo-left and libertarian figures represented by Greenwald—all underscore the real danger of right-wing terror becoming normalized in America.

As was the case in the last century, the international working class, organized and acting collectively, is the only social force which can stop and reverse this danger.