‘Completely Exasperated’: Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor Confronts Kenosha
“It takes political leadership to fix this sort of moment,” Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor says. But Trump, he suggests, “is only making things worse.”
Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s 33-year-old lieutenant governor, is only a few years older than Jacob Blake, who was shot seven times by a police officer in Wisconsin last month.
It’s hard, Barnes told me on the latest episode of The Ticket, to be months past the Black Lives Matter protests set off by the death of George Floyd and feel like nothing has improved. It’s harder, he said, to acknowledge this to others, as when he met with the Milwaukee Bucks in the conversations that initiated the temporary NBA and wider sports strikes late last month.
“‘What has changed since the death of George Floyd?’” he said the Bucks star George Hill asked him. “And I said, ‘Honestly, not a whole lot.’”
After a
