Chapter One Let Us In It started in Michigan. On April 15, 2020, thousands of vehicles convoyed to Lansing and clogged the streets surrounding the state capitol for a protest that had been advertised as "Operation Gridlock." Drivers leaned on their horns, men with guns got out and walked. Signs warned of revolt. Someone waved an upside-down American flag. Already-nine months before January 6, seven months before the election, six weeks before a national uprising for police accountability and racial justice-there were a lot of them, and they were angry. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan''s Democratic governor, had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation, obliging a long list of businesses to close. Around thirty thousand Michiganders had tested positive for COVID-19-the third-highest rate in the country, after New York and California-and almost two thousand had died.
Most of the cases, however, were concentrated in Detroit, and the predominantly rural residents at Operation Gridlock resented the blanket lockdown. On April 30, with Whitmer holding firm as deaths continued to rise, they returned to Lansing. This time, more were armed and fewer stayed in their cars. Michigan is an open-carry state, and no law prohibited licensed owners from bringing loaded weapons inside the capitol. Men with assault rifles filled the rotunda and approached the barred doors of the legislature, squaring off against police. Others accessed the gallery that overlooked the Senate. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat from southern Michigan, tweeted a picture of a heavyset man with a Mohawk and a long gun in a scabbard on his back. "Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us," she wrote.
The next day, a security guard in Flint turned away an unmasked customer from a Family Dollar. The customer returned with her husband, who shot the guard in the head. Later that week, a clerk in a Dollar Tree outside Detroit asked a man to don a mask. The man replied, "I''ll use this," grabbed the clerk''s sleeve, and wiped his nose with it. By then, the movement that had begun with Operation Gridlock had spread to more than thirty states. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the capitol; in North Carolina, a protester hauled a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh; in California, a journalist covering an anti-lockdown demonstration was held at knifepoint; ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City, a man wrote on Facebook, "Bring your guns, the civil war starts Saturday . The time is now." I was living in Paris, where, since late March, we had been permitted to go outside for a maximum of one hour per day, and to stray no farther than a kilometer from our homes.
Most businesses were closed (except those "essential to the life of the nation," such as bakeries and wine and cigarette shops). Few complained. Every night at eight o''clock, we opened our windows and banged metal pots with wooden spoons to celebrate French medical workers; down the block from my apartment, a pharmacist stepped into the street and waved. I''d been a foreign correspondent for nearly a decade and during that time had not spent more than a few consecutive months in the US. The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets, and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognized. One viral photograph struck me as particularly exotic. It showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, mid-scream, his gaping mouth inches away from two officers gazing stonily past him, in the capitol in Lansing. What accounted for such exquisite rage? And why was it so widely shared? In early May, I took an almost-empty flight to New York, then a slightly fuller one to Michigan.
My first stop was Owosso, a small town on the banks of the Shiawassee River, in the bucolic middle of the state. I arrived at Karl Manke''s barbershop a little before nine a.m. The neon Open sign was dark; a crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet made it to Owosso, and people sat in their trucks with the heaters running. Some, dressed in fatigues and packing sidearms, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, a civilian militia. A week before, Manke, who was seventy-seven, had reopened his business in defiance of Governor Whitmer''s prohibition on "personal care services." That Friday, MichiganÕs attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared the barbershop an imminent danger to public health and dispatched state troopers to serve Manke with a cease-and-desist order.
Over the weekend, Home Guardsmen had warned that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. Now it was Monday, and the folks in the parking lot had come to see whether Manke would show up. "He''s a national hero," Michelle Gregoire, a twenty-nine-year-old school bus driver, mother of three, and Home Guard member, told me. She was five feet four but hard to miss. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump''s name, she waved a Gadsden flag at the passing traffic. Car after car honked in support. Michelle had driven ninety miles, from her house in Battle Creek, to stand with her comrades. She''d been at the capitol on April 30, and did not regret what happened there.
When I mentioned that officials were considering banning guns inside the statehouse, she laughed: "If they go through with that, they''re not gonna like the next rally." Manke appeared at nine thirty, to cheers and applause. He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet with the words "When in Doubt, Pray." He climbed the steps to the front door stiffly, his posture hunched. The previous week, he''d strained his back working fifteen-hour days, pausing only to snack on hard-boiled eggs brought to him on paper plates by his wife. When the Open sign flickered on, people crowded inside. Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century and at his current location since the eighties. The phone was rotary, the clock analog.
An out-of-service gumball machine stood beside a row of chairs. Black-and-white photographs of Owosso occupied cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac. Also on display were flashy paperback copies of the ten novels that Manke had written. Unintended Consequences featured an antiabortion activist who "stands on his convictions"; Gone to Pot offered readers "a daring view into the underbelly of the sixties and seventies." As Manke fastened a cape around the first customer''s neck, a man in foul-weather gear picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a wicker basket on the counter. "My father was a barber," he told Manke. "He believed in everything you believe in. Freedom.
We''re the last holdout in the world." Manke nodded. "We did this in seventeen seventy-six, and we''re doing it again now." Like the redbrick buildings and decorative parapets of Owosso''s historic downtown, there was something out of time about him. During several days that I would spend at the barbershop, I''d hear Manke offer countless customers and journalists subtle variations of the same stump speech. He''d lived under fourteen presidents, survived the polio epidemic, and never witnessed such "government oppression." Governor Whitmer was not his mother. He''d close his business when they dragged him out in handcuffs, or when he died, or when Jesus came-"whichever happens first.
" He had a weakness for pat aphorisms, his delight in them undiminished by repetition. "I got one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel"; "Politicians come to do good and end up doing well"; "You can''t fool me, I''m too ignorant." Nearly every interview Manke gave concluded with a recitation of the serenity prayer, which he delivered with theatrical Zlan, as if oblivious to the possibility that anyone might have heard it before. "You''re getting a scoop," he assured me when I introduced myself. "American rebellion." Customers continued to arrive, and the phone did not stop ringing. Some people had traveled hundreds of miles. They left cards, bumper stickers, leaflets, brochures.
A security contractor offered his services, free of charge. So did a scissors sharpener. (Manke: "You do corrugations?" Sharpener: "Of course. God bless you, and God bless America.") A local TV crew squeezed into the shop, struggling to social-distance in the crush of waiting men, recording Manke with a boom mic as he sculpted yet another high-and-tight. Around noon, Glenn Beck called, live on the air. "It''s hardly my country anymore, in so many different ways," Manke told him. "You remind me of my father," Beck responded, with a wistful sigh.
Manke seemed to remind everybody of something or someone that no longer existed. Hence the people with guns outside, ready to do violence on those who threatened what he represented. You could not have engineered a more quintessential paragon of that mythical era when America was great. One day at the barbershop, I was approached by a man clad from head to toe in hunting gear, missing several teeth. He hadnÕt realized I was press. Manke had first come to the attention of the attorney general, the man informed me, because of a reporter from Detroit. He held out his arms to indicate the woman''s girth. "A big Black bitch.
" In the 1950s, when Manke was in high school, Owosso was a "sundown town": African Americans were not welcome. Like much of rural Michigan, it remained almost exclusively white. Detroit, an hour and a half to the south, was 80 percent Black. Because politics broke down along similar lines-less-populated counties voted Republican; urban centers, Democrat-partisan rancor in the state could often look like racial animus. While conservatives tended to ridicule.