Warren B. Kanders, who resigned from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in 2019 following protests towards his firm’s sale of tear fuel, stays within the chemical weapons enterprise regardless of saying that he was exiting it. Based on an investigation by The Intercept, relatively than divesting his firm Safariland of divisions that promote tear fuel, as Kanders had stated he would do, the military-supplies mogul reportedly as an alternative rearranged his holdings.
Company data reviewed by The Intercept present present connections in Kanders’s portfolio between the weapons producer Protection Expertise and Safariland. Protection Expertise was one in all two enterprise models Safariland deliberate to promote in June 2020, following widespread studies that riot police in Minneapolis and Washington, DC had been utilizing its munitions towards demonstrators protesting the homicide of George Floyd. Nonetheless, Protection Expertise—which as we speak affords 117 “chemical agent gadgets”—is a subsidiary of Cadre Holdings, the place Kanders has served as CEO since 2012. Cadre additionally usually operates beneath the Safariland model, which this previous January bought Protection Expertise ammunition to the US Bureau of Prisons, The Intercept discovered.
Kanders is a veteran of the defence trade, and his firms’ merchandise have been deployed by state brokers towards individuals world wide, from Standing Rock to Egypt. His weapons connections drew elevated scrutiny in 2018, when images emerged of tear fuel canisters with Safariland and Protection Expertise logos on the US-Mexico border, fired by border patrol brokers upon asylum seekers. Requires him to resign because the vice chairman on the Whitney, a place he had held since 2006, subsequently got here from museum staff, artists and students and a whole bunch of protesters led by Decolonize This Place who criticised Kanders’s contributions as artwashing. Eight artists later withdrew their works from the Whitney Biennial, together with the collective Forensic Structure, whose movie Triple Chaser (2019) investigates the usage of Protection Expertise’s Triple-Chaser tear-gas grenade at websites together with Gaza and the US-Mexico border, and traces the canisters again to Safariland and Kanders. Kanders stepped down in July 2019.
Whereas the multimillionaire has since publicly severed ties between Safariland and Protection Expertise, Cadre disclosed its connection to the latter in its March 2022 annual shareholder report. That very same month, Protection Expertise filed its personal annual report that listed Kanders and Safariland as company officers. The three firms additionally share the identical mailing handle in Jacksonville, Florida. Moreover, The Intercept discovered that Safariland and Protection Expertise’s internet domains have the identical registration data and the businesses share the identical main telephone quantity. The publication’s calls to Safariland’s extension led to automated messages from Protection Expertise, and vice versa.
Kanders can be making headlines this week within the Sunshine State for an actual property deal. South Florida Enterprise Journal reported {that a} Palm Seashore mansion bought for an eye-watering $39.9 million, gaining 57% in worth because it was bought in Could 2021. Property data title the proprietor as not Kanders himself however a agency he leads, Three Palm Bushes, which doesn’t seem to have any lively enterprise operations.
