310 / Vigilante Veneration / Paul Street

[Intro: 7:46] Award-winning journalist, policy researcher, author, and historian Paul Street joins me to discuss the highly controversial and divisive Kyle Rittenhouse case and subsequent acquittal. Along with providing a substantive exploration of the broad sociopolitical context of this trial, we also touch on the case of the modern day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery and the recent conviction of the men that murdered him in Georgia, the concerted legislative push in Republican dominated states across the U.S. to impose harsher voter restrictions and roll back reproductive rights on the national level, and what these trends mean for the upcoming elections of 2022 and 2024, and electoral politics as a whole. In this interview, Paul Street and I don’t so much as dwell on the gruesome, and often tedious, details of the trial of Rittenhouse (such as whether the act of shooting three protestors could be justified as self-defense or not), but rather the broader context these events fit within. Specifically, how the veneration of vigilantes and so-called vigilante justice, which Rittenhouse has been applauded for within conservative, right-leaning spaces, speaks to how utterly fascist the conservative right has become. Paul Street is an independent progressive policy researcher, award-winning journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois.  He is the author of ten books to date, and most recently 'Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement,' and 'This Happened Here: Neoliberals, Amerikaners, and the Trumping of America.' Paul writes regularly for Counterpunch. Episode Notes: - Learn more about Paul’s work: https://www.paulstreet.org - Read his Counterpunch articles: https://www.counterpunch.org/author/paul-street - Purchase his books 'Hollow Resistance' and 'This Happened Here' on Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3Djg1YA / https://bit.ly/32U066l - Music by Epik The Dawn WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast / https://venmo.com/LastBornPodcast BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast EPISODE 300: https://lastborninthewilderness.bandcamp.com BOOK: http://bit.ly/ORBITgr ATTACK & DETHRONE: https://anchor.fm/adgodcast DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior