The grandson of the Missouri man charged with shooting Black teenager Ralph Yarl in the head after Yarl rang the doorbell at the wrong address spoke to the Kansas City Star and described his 84 year-old grandfather Andrew Lester as exactly the kind of MAGA maniac you would have expected.

Klint Ludwig, 28, said he used to be close with the old man, “but in the last five or six years or so, I feel like we’ve lost touch. I’ve gotten older and gained my own political views, and he’s become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line. I feel like it’s really further radicalized him in a lot of ways. And then the NRA pushing the ‘stand your ground’ stuff and that you have to defend your home. When I heard what happened, I was appalled and shocked, but I didn’t disbelieve that it was true. I was like, ‘Yeah, I could see him doing that.'”

When asked if his grandfather is racist, Luwig said “I believe that there have been some positions that he’s held that have been bigoted or sort of disparaging. But it’s stock Fox News, conservative American stuff. It’s ‘anybody who gets an abortion is a murderer.’ And ‘fatherless Black families are the reason why crime exists in this country.’ It’s stuff everybody’s heard at the Thanksgiving table every year… I hesitate to say he got more extreme, because all this stuff has been extreme, and it’s been the same story for decades and decades, and generation to generation of people believing the same things. It’s just nowadays people are acting on it a little bit more.”