In Kansas City last week, an elderly white man who lives alone heard the doorbell ring. He didn’t need to open the glass front door to see that a young black boy was standing there. He reacted instantly, firing two shots through the glass, one of which struck 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in the head. Ralph had set out to pick up his younger siblings at a nearby house with a similar address: he’d made a mistake, for which he is now fighting for his life. Meanwhile, 84-year-old Andrew Lester has entered a plea of not guilty on a charge of first-degree assault. But listen to the words of Lester’s grandson.
He said they used to get on well, but in recent years his grandfather spent more and more time watching TV, specifically conservative cable channels: “He’s become staunchly rightwing, further down the rightwing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and Covid conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News … kind of line.” The way he saw it, his grandfather had been immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia”.
