Over the course of the early twenty-first century, rightist agendas came to dominate the state legislature in ways that loosened gun laws, slashed public spending, blocked health care reform, and undercut social safety net programs. Meanwhile, racial tensions came to full boil in November 2014, after Darren Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old white police officer in Ferguson, shot and killed an unarmed African American teenager named Michael Brown.
