Hate as his guide

The letter arrives postmarked from Memphis, Tennessee, but its journey began in Virginia, deep within the bowels of U.S. Penitentiary-Lee, behind the iron door of a small cell, where inmate #10899-090 signed and sealed the handwritten communique days before.

The letter is one of a dozen or so 35-year-old Joseph Jakubowski has sent me since December 2017. At 12 pages, it is also the briefest. He is longer on opinions than he is on answers to the questions I sent, including one that has inadvertently rankled him.

In April 2017, Jakubowski seized a small arsenal from a Janesville gun store, sent a 161-page handwritten manifesto to President Donald Trump, and set out to lead the nation in open rebellion against the government. His revolt ended less than two weeks later when government agents seized Jakubowski and put him on a 14-year time out.

Of the 18 firearms taken in the heist, just five have been recovered. He suspects I am trying to tease out where he has stashed the missing booty.

It’s the only topic he refuses to discuss — “No one will ever know where those guns are” — with one exception — “unless I’m entirely confident they will be used in eliminating government officials.”

Jakubowski certainly isn’t the first to try to put his stamp on the American experiment. Throughout the country’s history, the idea of an armed rebellion against the powers that be has been an enduring romantic notion.

Just three years after independence was secured, a Massachusetts farmer led a 4,000-man insurrection that terrified the new nation’s elite. From John Brown to the Symbionese Liberation Army to Cliven Bundy, taking up arms against the government is seemingly part of the American psyche.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in response to Shays’ Rebellion. “It is its natural manure.”

Jefferson’s quote has frequently been an invocation for anti-establishment types, a raison d’être for violent resistance against government encroachments on individual liberty.

But held up to an electorate polarized by identity politics, gun violence, and extreme class disparities, it becomes difficult to discern the patriots from the tyrants when all parties claim to represent the nation’s founding ideals.

“Populism is back,” says UW-Madison psychology professor Markus Brauer. “People want simple messages and people want to have outgroups they can dislike. This isn’t unique to America; look at the recent elections in Europe.”

Two hundred and thirty six years, and 45 presidents after a small cabal of colonial elites declared America’s independence, there may be more cause for concern than celebration. The Founders envisioned a country without foreign entanglements, and without political parties, fearing the kind of partisanship fueling animosities today.

“Ours is a democracy of the dead, the living and the unborn,” says Ryan Owens, a UW-Madison law professor. “It’s a continual discussion over what’s best for society, and the world.”

At his federal sentencing in December 2017, Jakubowski demanded of the judge: “Give me freedom or give me death.” U.S. District Judge William Conley instead gave Jakubowski 14 years in prison and ordered him to pay $16,941 in restitution to Armageddon Supplies, where he stole the guns from.

After his federal sentencing, while he awaited trial on state charges, Jakubowski wrote to several Madison-based journalists. His first letter to me topped off at 72 pages. I began writing back and our correspondence continued after he was sent to federal prison. 

For a kid raised on the wrong side of the poverty line, prison can be a form of upward mobility, a notoriety that money cannot buy.

“It was constant war with my dumb-fuck parents,” he writes about growing up in the Janesville area, where he spent most of his life. “I used to think about killing them, too, but instead I ran away.”

Jakubowski was bullied throughout school. He eventually dropped out, drifted around, and dabbled in drugs. In January 2008 he was charged with domestic battery, an incident he circles back to often. As he tells it, the allegation was “the greatest betrayal of my life.”

“When I was set up by the love of my life and her friend … I fell into a severe depression,” he writes. “Many nights I had to talk myself out of suicide. It’s the only thing I was [ever] charged with that I didn’t do.”

Three months later, while out on bail, he returned to jail after assaulting and trying to disarm a cop.

His depression deepened and his drinking worsened. In 2015, an injury left him unable to do his job roofing houses. But his cynicism flourished. 

“When my back went out, I lost everything I ever worked for,” he writes. “When the landlord seen I was starting to walk … well, here comes the eviction.”

He moved in with his aunt, but was forced out when his sister came to stay. She had kids; he didn’t. On the eve of becoming homeless, Jakubowski became unhinged.

“I stayed up all night debating whether or not to murder my sister’s boyfriend and cut her fingers off for stealing from me,” he writes. “I tried to have sex with the fat stripper I met, but couldn’t relax enough to do anything.”

The next morning, he went to a park. There, as he finished making a fake bomb, his troubles vanished in a maelstrom of nihilistic clarity.

“I sat there for three hours, watching teens skateboard, just thinking about how stupid people are.”

After Trump took Office clashes between the white-nationalist right and the anti-fascist left began growing. The people were in a fighting mood. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, more than 8,700 protests were held in 2017, 74 percent of them against Trump or his policies.

The Unite the Right rally held by white nationalists in Charlottesville in August 2017 was preceded by days of online chest-thumping by both neo-Nazis and anti-fascist counter-protesters. Demonstrators were hyped on arrival and ready for battle. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old who sympathized with the white supremacists, drove his car into a crowd, killing one person and injuring dozens.

Politically motivated violence is on the rise. The Washington Post recently analyzed acts of domestic terror between January 2010 and December 2017, using data provided by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database.

Out of 263 attacks, 92 were motivated by right-wing extremism; 38 by Islamic jihad, 13 by left-wing extremism and 92 by offenders, like Jakubowski, with vague motivations.

Last year, researchers at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland published “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” a study that examined different levels of partisan hostility. In the most violent category, “explicit support for partisanship violence,” 9 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said, in general, “violence is at least occasionally acceptable.” The differences between Republican and Democratic views on violence between 2016 and 2017 were too small to say it was trending in one direction over another.

The authors also found growing support for less lethal animus. In the middle category, schadenfreude — German for finding delight in the misfortunes of others — about 20 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans believed the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition “just died,” a sentiment the authors found “shockingly brutal.”

The least violent category of animosity — “moral disengagement” — is the most prevalent today. Sixty percent of respondents in both parties believe “the opposing party is a serious threat to the United States and its people.” And 25 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats say “that their own party needs to break a few rules to oppose the other party for the sake of the country.”

And just under half of both Republicans and Democrats believe the other side lacks “the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.”

Brauer, the UW psychology professor, says that while social media has fueled this partisan animosity, it’s part of human nature.

“We human beings are experts in biased information processing,” says Brauer. “Once we have expectations of how people are, or how they’re going to behave, we’re going to adopt behaviors that make it more likely that these personality traits actually come out in the other person.”

Jakubowski’s grievances are incoherent and random, but, like the founding fathers, he writes about the oppression of a power structure and a need to be free.

“With the threat of violence from the system’s terrorist force, the people pay government taxes!” he complains in his manifesto. “Taxes that are theft! Basically strong-armed robbery on a mass scale! Think about it. If the people do not pay the system its taxes, what does the system do? The system sends in [its] terrorists to take away the people’s right to freedom!”

And so Jakubowski declared his own revolution. “Up to that point, my life had no purpose,” he says.

His motive or goals have never been particularly clear. He isn’t political beyond his f-word-prefaced admonishments of one thing or another. In his letters, some days he wants to save the world, on others he wants to blow it up.

On April 4, 2017, with his fake bomb in tow, Jakubowski drove in silence around Janesville. He had given away most of his possessions, symbols of a corrupt society he was turning his back on.

“Sometimes it’s not a major event that leads to change,” he writes. “Sometimes it’s the pile up of multiple small events. This was nothing more than a change of heart. I refuse to support the system.”

Later that afternoon, two of his buddies jumped into his truck to film Jakubowski mailing his 161-page manifesto to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“Here we go guys,” he says to the camera. “Game time.”

He tweeted at President Trump, “asking for explanations to certain topics,” then tossed his phone in the trash. He drove around some more, casing the gun shop.

He set his fake bomb outside a nearby gas station that evening. It was a decoy to distract police while he committed the burglary at Armageddon Supplies. (The decoy failed — a gas station clerk simply tossed it in the trash.) Meanwhile, Jakubowski lit a cigarette and lurked for a while outside the gun shop waiting for his moment to break in, which came shortly before 9 p.m.

“I’m at the window banging on the glass with a hammer,” he explains. “Seemed like it wouldn’t break and the alarm is going off. Then suddenly, the glass just kind of shattered. I reached in to unlock the door.”

But it was a double-sided deadbolt that also withstood his attempts to kick open the door. So he instead crawled in through the window, cutting himself in the process.

“Once inside, I just started grabbing stuff,” he writes. “After I filled my backpack with goodies, well, out the back door I went.”

The sun had set by then. He hurried back to his truck and drove off. “The focus was so pure,” he writes. “Once I made it to F Road, the headlights came on… Job well done!”

Jakubowski might have believed a violent uprising would solve the country’s problems, but violent revolutions have rarely turned out as successful or been as lauded as the American Revolution has. A week after George Washington’s first inaugural address, in 1789, women stormed Versailles and revolution swept away the French monarchy, sparking a decade-long period of unrelenting upheaval. Under Maximillian Robespierre, a lawyer like Jefferson but more radical, terror was used to hasten the revolution, which aimed to recreate society from the ground up.

“Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice,” he wrote. “It is thus an emanation of virtue …”

More than 16,000 French aristocrats, intelligentsia, and citizens deemed enemies of the revolution were executed. The Reign of Terror ended when the people turned on Robespierre, who ironically became the last victim of his own terror.

Owens, of the UW Law School, says that the American Revolution succeeded because it kept the existing system, infrastructure and all. “In France, the pendulum swung substantially and you can’t have a stable society when you switch from one institutional structure to another.”

But that structure evolved into another type of powerful government that some people would soon be railing against and calling to be overthrown.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author Gordon S. Wood tells Isthmus that what the American government would look like after the revolution was never clear at the time.

“When you stand in 1776, there is no one in the country who imagines, not in their wildest dreams, the strong central government that emerges 10 years later,” Wood explains. “Now we take that for granted, but they didn’t. It really was a big deal to create a big strong government.” 

In Wood’s 1969 book, The Creation of the American Republic, citizens of the planet’s newest nation can hardly believe a revolution has occurred. Moreover, they had, with an assist from France, defeated the greatest military in the world, transforming 13 original colonies into sovereign states bound by a European-style “league of friendship.”

“After the Revolution, we had some real problems in this country,” Wood says. “States were not governing like they should be [and] they weren’t providing revenue to the federal government. The people running the legislatures had enormous amounts of power.”

A decade later, in 1786, it was clear that the United States of America was floundering. The states were saddled with debt that many tried to pay down through taxation, but at greater rates than Britain had imposed.

As debate raged over what kind of government the United States should adopt, another rebellion was brewing in Massachusetts.

Daniel Shays, a farmer and revolutionary war veteran, had yet to be paid for his war service when he lost his farm due to problems that arose from the state writing off its debts too quickly.

“It put pressure on the whole credit structure,” says Wood. “People couldn’t pay the mortgage on their farms and the courts were going to seize them, and in those days the farm was your life. So they took to the streets, and shut down the courts, and organized as an army.”

The uprising took nearly a year to suppress.

“It was a serious rebellion and it scared the elites everywhere,” says Wood. “It reinforced the idea that a Constitution was essential. When they heard about this rebellion, it was all the more reason we needed a strong government.”

Shays’ rebellion helped persuade those opposed to creating a big central government to support the new Constitution.  

“It just barely squeaked by,” Wood says. “It came down to this or nothing, and you didn’t want nothing, because that’s anarchy. The idea of creating this distant government was not what the revolution was about.” 

As for a shared vision or singular intent of America’s Founding Fathers, it isn’t there.

Today, Owens sees the splintering, the increasingly polarized ideas about what America is or should be, as a new existential threat to the republic. And social media, he adds, is “one of the biggest threats to stability.”

“It gives a platform and voice to people who might otherwise not have one,” says Owens. “That’s where a lot of the noise comes from and some people feel they must respond to it immediately, so it creates this snowball effect.”

After stealing the guns, Jakubowski fled in his truck. Less than 30 minutes later, he ditched his truck and set it on fire. For the next 10 days, he roamed the rural Wisconsin countryside.

“I did most of my moving around at night,” he writes. “I had to sneak around a lot of farms to get deeper in the woods. It was a constant adrenaline rush! All and all, I was chilling, exploring, camping on the run.”

With his newly acquired arsenal, Jakubowski actually had a chance to inflict some serious pain. Instead, he went camping, shooting a turkey and roasting it for dinner.

“For once, I was something no one else is,” he says. “I was free.”

More than 250 local and federal law enforcement officers from 26 agencies fanned out from Janesville in search of the rebel. Schools were locked down and residents were told to stay calm, but vigilant.

Special measures were taken to protect then-U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, because no one, not even the FBI, had any idea who Joseph Jakubowski was or to what purpose the stolen guns would be put.

“I knew there were a lot of people looking for me,” he writes. “I knew once my position was compromised it was game over.”

Around 9:30 p.m. on April 13, 2017, a Vernon County SWAT team was activated after police were tipped off to a man matching Jakubowski’s description, observed on private farmland.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, the SWAT team encircled Jakubowski and then closed in. He was taken into custody without incident. “No regrets,” he says. “The only regret I have is that I didn’t do this sooner.”

Jakubowski doesn’t expect to get out of prison, not alive anyhow, but if he does, he says his arsenal will be waiting.

“If the day ever were to come of my release, I will be ready to pick up where I left off,” he says. “For the sake of a lot of lives, it may be good if I don’t get released.”

He now spends his days expanding his manifesto into a book. And while his revolution might have failed, he has attracted something of a following. When not working on his book, he responds to letters from admirers, one of whom called me after Jakubowski gave her my number.

Carleen Kurns was initially drawn to Jakubowski when she stumbled across video of the rant he gave at his state sentencing in February 2018. “I thought, ‘oh my God he gets it!’” she recalls. “What he said about the government really made a lot of sense to me. I was interested in his mind, is what it was.”

Kurns, who lives in Merrill, is troubled by the direction the world is heading and something about Jakubowski’s rant initially resonated with her. So she began corresponding with him. She blames the government for the death of two of her sons.

“My son Brandon had some felonies and when you have felonies it’s nearly impossible to get hired,” she says. “Then he was facing prison because of back child support and Brandon is like, ‘I want to work, but no one will help me.’”

Unable to find work and facing imminent prison time, 30-year-old Brandon Kurns hung himself. Six months later, her son Jason died of a prescription opioid overdose.

 “All those years of doing cable and being under houses ruined his back,” she says.

She claims that the cable company employed him for only 38 hours a week, in order to avoid providing him health insurance. Unable to see a doctor, he began buying pills off the street to help him through the workday. Soon, he was addicted — and he was also expecting a baby. 

“He was having a baby shower and he came home and went to sleep and never woke up,” she says.

Kurns eventually soured on Jakubowski’s anti-government rhetoric. “He says he will shoot a police officer just because he wears a badge,” says Kurns, who has another son who works in law enforcement. “I said, ‘What about their family?’ And, he says, ‘Doesn’t matter, it’s government.’”

But others see in him a glimmer of hope. “I have a 14-year-old boy …” wrote a woman named KC. “His father killed himself. And, I’m obviously in jail … anyway, he was locked down at his school for a day … he and his friends have mad respect for you … would you please write something for him?”

Her postscript reads: Fuck the system!