US Politics

South Dakota’s governor told an audience of people that her two-year-old grandchild has several guns.While speaking on Friday at a National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbying leadership forum in Indiana, the Republican governor Kristi Noem told audience members her toddler grandchild has multiple guns, reported Mediaite.During her remarks, Noem spoke about her grandchildren: Addie, who is almost two, and Branch, who is a few months old. Noem then said that Addie already had a shotgun and a rifle.“Now Addie, who you know – soon will need them, I wanna reassure you, she already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too. So the girl is set up,” said Noem.Noem’s remarks on her grandchild have gone viral on social media, with many commenters decrying the governor promoting gun ownership among children.“Absolutely sickening. How the hell is this real life in America?” wrote the Tennessee Democrat Chris D Jackson on Twitter.Another user commented: “Call CPS”.Noem’s comments follow yet another recent mass shooting involving children. Last month, three children and three adults were killed by a shooter – a former student – at a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.Noem also signed an executive order during her remarks that seeks to “further protect the second amendment rights of South Dakotans”, and was joined on stage by the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre.“South Dakota is setting the standard for the most second amendment friendly state in the nation,” said Noem when discussing the executive order.The executive order would prohibit state agencies from contracting with any business that discriminate against a “firearm-related entity”, KELO reported.Former vice-president Mike Pence also spoke at the conference, but was booed loudly by audience members as he made his way to speak in his home state – possibly because some of the Republican base turned on him after he certified the 2020 election results. More

Jack Teixeira, 21 years old, clean-shaven, with buzz-cut hair and proudly uniformed, is the face of America’s newest security threat, one it is struggling to resolve.The formidable US counter-intelligence infrastructure is adept at finding spies and rooting out whistleblowers. Teixeira, charged on Friday on two counts of the Espionage Act, is neither spy nor whistleblower.His family history is the epitome of conservative patriotism. His stepfather served in the same unit, the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard, and his mother, who worked for years for veterans’ charities, celebrated the fact that her son was following the same path. The young recruit was an observant Catholic, who would pray with other members of his online chat group.But Teixeira’s outlook had taken the same dramatic turn as much of American conservatism, becoming conspiratorial and distrustful of the very institutions earlier generations revered. Friends quoted in the Washington Post said he had come to regret joining up, as his view of the military dimmed.His motive for allegedly sharing hundreds of top secret documents among the 20 or so young men and teenage boys on the Discord gaming server he moderated, at least as he explained it to them, was to alert them to shadowy forces driving world events. He reportedly posted the documents, photographed unfolded and laid on his family’s kitchen counter alongside glue and nail clippers, without commentary or any apparent underlying logic.It seems to have been a way to cement his status as the leader of the group, a man of mystery and action. It was as inchoate as the video he reportedly shared with his group, Thug Shaker Central, (named in apparently ironic spirit after a variety of gay porn), in which Teixeira shouts antisemitic and racist slurs then fires a rifle.This was the young man, clearly still living out his adolescence, who was given one of the nation’s highest security clearances – “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” (TS/SCI) – so that he could do his job maintaining the sealed infranet system at Otis air base on Cape Cod, through which the nation’s most closely guarded secrets flowed.To get that level of clearance you must, in theory, be extensively vetted. The process takes months, as investigators trawl through your history and interview friends and colleagues. But vetting standards differ across agencies, and those of the air national guard may not be on a par with the CIA, yet the staff at both see the same documents.Other security arrangements at the Otis base also appear to have been lax. Teixeira is alleged to have first copied out text from secret documents and, then, in January, began to print them and take them home.“The breakdown in physical security here appears stark and serious,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specialising in national security, federal employment and security clearance, said. “The after-action review will absolutely need to assess where the process broke down by which no one noticed his removal of the records.”There is another problem with trying to filter out people like Teixeira: the elastic limits of first amendment free speech rights, in a country where what was once extreme is increasingly mainstream.The far-right Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene got Teixeira’s first name wrong on Twitter but hailed him as “white, male, christian, and antiwar”.“That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene said.The Fox News talkshow host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira and complained the airman, arrested by armed FBI agents at his home and charged in a Boston court the next day, was being treated worse than Osama bin Laden, who was shot in the head by US special forces in his bedroom in 2011.The new Republican right views the state as an enemy when it is being run by Democrats or moderate conservatives. Part of the Trump legacy is a preference for foreign dictators over opponents in a democratic system. So weeding out enemies of the state within the intelligence and military community risks angering an increasingly significant and vocal part of the political arena.“It’s difficult to truly quantify the scope of the threat, and part of the problem is simply holding repugnant political views is not truly a security issue. It’s more of an HR issue,” Moss said. He added the vetting process was not “designed to flesh out the details of an individual’s personal political leanings”.“That’s deliberate: the government is largely forbidden from considering your political views in that context unless it implicates a separate concern [such as criminal conduct],” he said.The problem facing the vetters is magnified by the enormous scale of the numbers involved. According to the office of the director of national intelligence, there are more than 1.2 million government employees and contractors with access to top secret intelligence materials.Brianna Rosen, a former White House official, said that was a result of the 9/11 attacks, where some of the intelligence failings that allowed the hijackers to succeed involved a failure to share intelligence with law enforcement agencies.“It’s a double-edged sword because, in one sense, a lack of this kind of information sharing is, in part, what contributed to 9/11,” said Rosen, a senior fellow at Just Security, an online forum on security, democracy, foreign policy and rights. “As a result of all of these increased intelligence-sharing programmes, you do have a situation where there is a vast amount of people that have access to sensitive information that they probably shouldn’t have access to, and that may not have been vetted as thoroughly as they should have been.“It was really only a matter of time until something like this happened, which is why this is really a systemic problem that Congress and the Biden administration needs to address more closely.” More

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said on Friday that he will not run for president in the 2024 election.The devoted ally and defender of Donald Trump opted out of a contest that would have put him into competition with his former commander in chief.After saying he was weighing a run in January, the former Trump administration official and CIA director released a statement on the decision. “To those of you who this announcement disappoints, my apologies,” he said, calling it a personal choice.“And to those of you this thrills, know that I’m 59 years old. There remain many more opportunities for which the timing might be more fitting as presidential leadership becomes even more necessary.”Pompeo, who also spoke about his decision on Fox News on Friday, would have been the second former Trump cabinet member to enter the race to challenge the former president for the 2024 GOP nomination, joining former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, who announced her campaign in February. Former vice-president Mike Pence is also considering entering the race and has stepped up his travel and activity in early voting primary and caucus states.Where Haley and Pence have openly expressed differences with Trump, Pompeo has had no public split with the former president and hasn’t been rebuked by him, as many of his would-be rivals have. Pompeo recently referred to Trump as a “great boss”.The former congressman graduated at the top of his class from the US Military Academy in 1986 before spending five years on active duty, deployed for a time as a cavalry officer commanding tank movements along the border between Nato-backed western Europe and Soviet-occupied eastern Europe.The retired Army captain is a Harvard-educated lawyer who practiced law in Washington and founded two Wichita businesses – an aerospace firm and later a petroleum equipment manufacturer – before entering politics.Pompeo – a witty and sometimes gruff politician – easily won four consecutive terms in the US House representing southern Kansas. He sat on the House intelligence committee as well as the select committee investigating the deadly 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya.The 2018 withdrawal from the Iran deal and imposition of crippling sanctions have prompted death threats against Pompeo, who remains under 24-hour security protection provided by the state department.“I can’t tell you how heartwarming and humbling it has been when strangers have told me they pray that I run to defend our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage, our families and our country as the most exceptional in the history of civilization,” Pompeo’s statement said. More

Democrats have taken multiple actions in response to what they say is a “draconian” and “dangerous” decision by a federal judge in Texas threatening access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the US.Several Democratic governors have begun to stockpile doses of the drugs used in medication abortions. Nearly every Democrat in Congress signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to stay the decision, while some called on the Biden administration to simply “ignore” the ruling, should it be allowed to stand. A group of House Democrats introduced a bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) final approval over drugs used in medication abortion.Their fury over the ruling has been met with relative silence from Republicans.Only a handful of congressional Republicans offered immediate comment on judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision last week to revoke the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Just a fraction of Republicans on Capitol Hill signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to uphold the ruling. And among the party’s national field of Republican presidential nominees, just one – the former vice president, Mike Pence – unabashedly praised the decision.The starkly different reactions underscores just how dramatically the politics of abortion have shifted since last June, when conservatives achieved their once-unimaginable goal of overturning Roe v Wade.For decades, Republicans relied on abortion to rally their conservative base, calling for the reversal of Roe v Wade and vowing to outlaw the procedure if given the chance. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, abortion has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats, galvanizing voters furious over the thicket of state bans and restrictions ushered in by the decision.Republicans have struggled to respond, lacking a unified policy on abortion in the nearly 10 months since the landmark decision.“Dobbs really did get Republicans, especially elected Republicans, running scared,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the conservative American Principles Project.Polling has consistently found a clear majority of Americans believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases, though partisan divisions have deepened over the years. A new survey released by the Pew Research Center this week showed that by a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans believe medication abortion, which is at the center of the current legal battle, should be legal in their state.‘Let the states work this out’A post-Dobbs backlash fueled a string of victories for abortions rights, including in more conservative states, and powered Democratic victories in last year’s November midterm elections. And this month, just days before the Texas ruling on mifepristone, abortion rights were a dominant force in a liberal judge’s landslide victory in a key race for a Wisconsin supreme court seat.“It’s no surprise that GOP candidates are scared to tie themselves to a decision that is wildly out of step with what voters want,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice American told reporters this week. “They can’t be eager to repeat last week’s double-digit walloping of extremist judicial candidate, Dan Kelly, in Wisconsin.”In that race, Kelly’s opponent, judge Janet Protasiewicz, had effectively promised voters that if she won, flipping the ideological balance of the court from conservative to liberal, the new majority would overturn Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban.“People understood the stakes and they were ready to vote for Judge Protasiewicz,” said Timmaraju, whose group was active in the contest.Now, with the 2024 presidential election looming, an increasingly vocal group of Republicans are urging moderation on abortion, warning that the uncompromising positions of their party’s culturally conservative base risk alienating crucial swing voters.“This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” congresswoman Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, said in a recent appearance on CNN.Mace, who considers herself “pro-life”, said her party had “not shown compassion towards women” since the fall of Roe. She has urged flexibility, pushing Republicans to expand access to contraception and include exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk or the fetus is no longer viable.Since June, Republican-led legislatures have charged ahead with new restrictions. More than a dozen states ban abortion, with several other Republican-led state legislatures considering new restrictions this session.On Thursday, the Florida legislature voted to prohibit abortions after six weeks – before many women realize they are pregnant – delivering a major policy victory for the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Hours later, DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president in 2024, quietly signed the ban into law with little fanfare, underscoring just how complicated the issue has become for Republicans.In Nebraska, the state legislature is in the process of debating a six-week ban. But even in the reliably conservative state, some Republican lawmakers are floating an alternative that would expand the window to 12 weeks, a sign that a ban any earlier in pregnancy could stoke public outcry.One option floated as a politically palatable “compromise” is a proposal by South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham that would implement a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.But the legislation divided Republicans and ultimately only attracted a handful of co-sponsors when he introduced it last year ahead of the midterms. Several Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, argued that limits on abortion should be set by the states.Asked whether he supported Graham’s proposal, Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina who this week formed an exploratory committee for a 2024 presidential run, said was “100% pro-life” but declined to answer the question directly. He clarified later that he would back a federal ban at 20 weeks of pregnancy.Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador who is running for the nomination, urged Republicans to seek consensus on the issue, asserting that she was “pro-life” but did not “judge anyone who is pro-choice”.“Let’s let the states work this out,” Haley said, according to the Des Moines Register. “If Congress decides to do it – but don’t get in that game of them saying ‘how many weeks, how many’ – no. Let’s first figure out what we agree on.”DeSantis has sought to position himself as a reliable ally of the anti-abortion movement, hoping his support of a six-week ban will appeal to social conservatives searching for an alternative to Trump in the early-voting states Iowa and South Carolina.Earlier this year, Trump, whose conservative supreme court appointees enabled Roe to be struck down, angered abortion opponents when he warned that abortion is a political liability for Republicans and blamed extremism on the issue for their lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms.‘Ostrich strategy’In the escalating legal battle over access to medication abortion, supreme court justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily halted a federal appeals court ruling that would have reimposed restrictions on mifepristone. The stay will expire on Wednesday while the court deliberate next steps.Reproductive rights advocates say the ongoing threat to medication abortion nationwide makes clear that Republicans never actually believed abortion was an issue best handled by the states, as Alito wrote in his 2022 decision overturning the federal right to abortion.“They are seeking a nationwide ban – but they are not going to stop there,” Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told reporters this week. “We are already seeing attacks on birth control.”As a starting point, Schweppe believes social conservatives must be willing to compromise on a federal ban, possibly accepting legislation that falls well short of their long-held goal to end all abortions. He urged Republicans to adopt positions that are broadly popular with wide swaths of voters, including allowances for pregnancies that result from rape or incest, or when the health or life of the mother is at risk.“We have to be honest about where the fault lines lie,” he said. “Exceptions are what drives voter sentiment. That’s what Democrats are attacking us on.”Many leading abortion opponents blame recent losses on Republicans’ embrace of a so-called “ostrich strategy” – avoiding the topic or trying to change the subject – not their opposition to abortion.“Republicans have cowered in fear as the consultants and campaign advisors tell them not to talk about abortion,” Penny Young Nance, the chief executive and president of evangelical Christian group, Concerned Women for America. In the Wisconsin supreme court race, she said the conservative’s defeat was an example of what happens when Republicans are badly outspent and fail to “boldly” defend their position on an issue that has been a defining policy of American conservatism.“The winning strategy is to tell the truth about the left’s extremist position on the issue that is out of [sync] with the views of the American people,” Nance said in an email.As Republicans search for a path forward, Democrats, confident public opinion is on their side, are already preparing to make abortion a central theme of the coming election cycles.“Even though some in the GOP are trying to stay quiet about the Texas ruling, back home they’re still passing and signing abortion bans,” Timmaraju said.“They created this reality,” she added. “They cannot run away from it.” More

“We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.” These were the words of Justin Jones, a Black Democrat, to Tennessee Republicans after he and a colleague, Justin Pearson, were expelled for leading a gun protest on the state house of representatives floor.A week later, Jones and Pearson were reinstated amid applause, whoops and cheers at the state capitol in Nashville. But few believe that the assault on democracy is at an end. What happened in Tennessee is seen as indicative of a Donald Trump-led Republican party ready to push its extremist agenda by any means necessary.Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with mainstream sentiment on hot button issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. Accordingly, the party has suffered disappointment in elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Yet instead of rethinking its positions, critics say, it is turning to rightwing judges and state legislators to enforce minority rule.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The ballot box didn’t work – the voice of the people said, we’re not going to tolerate these kind of threats by Republicans. But Republicans are using other tools and shredding the fabric of American democracy. It’s a kind of minority authoritarianism.”Despite extraordinary pressures, democracy has proved resilient in recent years. It survived an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Joe Biden was sworn in as the duly elected president and declared in his inaugural address: “Democracy has prevailed.” And election deniers were routed in last year’s midterms.But while Democrats control the White House and Senate, Republicans have proved expert at finding workarounds, using cogs in the machine that have typically received less attention from activists, journalists and voters. One of them is the judiciary.The supreme court, which includes three justices appointed during Trump’s single term, last year overturned the Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly half a century, despite opinion polls showing a majority wanted to protect it.Lower courts have also flexed their muscles. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge nominated by Trump in Amarillo, Texas, has ruled against the Joe Biden administration on issues including immigration and LGBTQ+ protections. Earlier this month he blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, the most common abortion method in America.A legal battle ensued with the justice department pledging to take its appeal all the way to the supreme court. The political backlash was also swift.Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said: “One extremist judge appointed by a twice impeached, now-indicted former president, Donald Trump, was attempting to effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. The decision is a prime example of minority rule at its worst. These extremists will not stop until they control our reproductive health decisions.”Polling by Ipsos shows that two-thirds of Americans believe medication abortion should remain legal, including 84% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 49% of Republicans. Timmaraju added: “It’s obvious that anti-choice extremists and lawmakers are out of step with Americans. It’s really worth remembering how far out of step they are.”If judges fall short of the Republican wishlist, state governors have shown willingness to intervene. In Texas, Greg Abbott has said he will pardon an Uber driver convicted of murder in the July 2020 shooting of a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, the state capital.The case hinged on whether the shooting was in self-defence. A jury found that Perry, who is white, shot and killed Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man, who was carrying an AK-47, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. Abbott tweeted that he will pardon Daniel Perry, 37, an army sergeant, as soon as a request from the parole board “hits my desk”.Earlier this year Abbott also led a state takeover of Houston’s public school district, the eighth biggest in the country with nearly 200,000 students, infuriating Democrats who condemned the move as politically motivated.In Florida another Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has centralised power as he assails gun safety and voting rights, the teaching of gender and race in schools and major corporations such as Disney. On Thursday he signed a bill to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.In this he is backed by a supermajority in the Florida state legislature. State governments, which receive less and less scrutiny as local newspapers go extinct, are another key weapon in the Republican arsenal. In deep red states they have imposed near or total bans on abortion, loosened gun restrictions, curbed LGBTQ+ and voting rights and endorsed Trump’s false claims of election fraud.RaceMinority rule is, more than anything, about race. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%.Activists point to Republican-dominated state governments pushing legislation that would allow them to control Black-led cities and push hardline policies on crime. Examples include expanding the jurisdiction of state police in Jackson, Mississippi, and removing local control of the St Louis police department in Missouri. Republicans in the US Congress itself overturned police reform in Washington DC.Makia Green, a lead strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said: “A lot of it is not only taking away the people we sent to speak for us – to make sure that our voices are heard and that we are part of the process – but also to overwhelm Black voters, to instil apathy in Black voters so that it feels like, ‘I went out, I voted, I did what I had to do, and they took the power away from me, so why should I show up next year?’”Green, co-founder of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black community organisation in the Washington area, added: “Our democracy has holes in it, especially with the record number of attacks on voting rights and civic education. Republican and rightwing extremists have been making it harder and harder for our people to vote and so people are questioning, do I still live in a democracy?”Then there was Tennessee where, on 6 April, Republicans sparked national outrage by kicking out Jones and Pearson, two young Black Democrats, as punishment for breaking rules of decorum a week earlier by leading a protest inside the house chamber. The demonstration was prompted by a March school shooting in Nashville in which three children, three adults and the attacker were killed.Just as on abortion, Republicans are demonstrably at odds with public opinion on gun safety. A poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “It’s never the situation that the GOP moderates their position on something. It’s always a reflexive pivot to attacking and undermining democracy and that’s exactly what they did in this situation.”But Hatcher-Mays added: “If there’s any silver lining to the way that the GOP behaves it’s that they can’t hide forever from the bad and unpopular things that they do.”Republicans have long been struggling against demographic headwinds and political trends. They have lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They suffered another reminder of abortion’s potency when a Democratic-backed Milwaukee judge won a recent Wisconsin supreme court race with the fate of the state’s abortion ban on the line.Republicans remain competitive in the US Senate – the body that approves nominated judges – because small, predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse ones. In 2018 David Leonhardt of the New York Times calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, noted that the government was founded with checks and balances to ensure that minority viewpoints could be heard. “But it was not the intent of the framers and founders to have those minority views imposed on the majority and certainly not to have those in the minority attack the rule of law to try to unravel majority rule, which is what’s happening right now. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than expelling members from a legislative body for expressing themselves in a constitutionally protected way.“Republicans are inflicting injury and harm on democracy. It’s a continuation of what they started to do with the big lie [that the 2020 election was stolen] … which paved the way for an insurrectionist attempt. We’re seeing other extreme iterations of that play out in individual states. When you have a minority of people exercising power over the majority, that’s authoritarianism.”Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino More

Washington lawmakers have written off Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal” after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning praise from the political right.“He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.Federal prosecutors allege Teixeira took secret documents from the Massachusetts air national guard base where he worked as a low-ranking cyber specialist and posted them online. They first appeared on one of the gaming messaging platform Discord’s servers in January before spreading to other social media sites and being reported on by news outlets earlier this month.Shortly after he was taken into custody in Massachusetts on Thursday, the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has persistently called for the Joe Biden White House and Washington in general to cut off support to Kyiv – rallied to his defense.“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” she tweeted in an apparent reference to one of the leaked documents that indicates 14 US special forces soldiers were present in Ukraine during the past two months.“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen [sic]? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”Other documents have revealed details of how the United States gathers its information and how deeply its intelligence agencies have penetrated Russia’s military. Also among the leaked material is a pessimistic assessment of Ukraine’s prospects of recapturing territory from Russia this spring – a subject Carlson seized on.“Ukraine is in fact losing the war,” he said, citing other documents that indicate Washington’s concerns about Kyiv’s ability to defend its airspace.“The Biden administration is perfectly aware of this. They’re panicked about it, but they have lied about this fact to the public. Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is ‘waning’. In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime.”Congressional Republicans adopted a comparatively sober view of Teixeira’s arrest. He made his first court appearance on Friday in Boston and learned he was facing two charges under the Espionage Act.“Leaking classified information jeopardizes our national security, negatively impacts our relationship with our allies, and places the safety of US military and intelligence personnel at grave risk,” the House intelligence committee chair, Mike Turner, said in a statement. “While we seek to learn the extent of classified information released and how to mitigate the fallout, the House intelligence committee will examine why this happened, why it went unnoticed for weeks, and how to prevent future leaks.“Congratulations to law enforcement for locating and apprehending the alleged criminal.”Democrats generally kept their thoughts about Teixeira’s arrest to themselves. While visiting Ireland, Biden took an administrative tone in a brief statement issued on Friday afternoon: “I commend the rapid action taken by law enforcement to investigate and respond to the recent dissemination of classified US government documents. While we are still determining the validity of those documents, I have directed our military and intelligence community to take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information, and our national security team is closely coordinating with our partners and allies.”The best indication of where the aftershocks from Teixeira’s arrest could be felt next came from the Republican speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. His congressional allies have made investigating the Biden administration’s alleged misdeeds a priority, and in a tweet, he said the leaks would be their next focus.“The Biden administration has failed to secure classified information,” he tweeted. “Through our committees, Congress will get answers as to why they were asleep at the switch.” More

Hubris can be difficult to resist, no matter how well one appreciates the danger. Foremost, in his new book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them”, Timothy Egan indicates just how self-destructive hubris can be.It led to the downfall of David C Stephenson, a sadistic, grifting, backstabbing, vengeful, womanizing grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the center of Egan’s story of extremism and white rage, a tale with many parallels to our own time. Similar overconfidence might yet bring down Donald J Trump. For sure, reading Egan’s gripping book, my own hubris nearly waylaid me.At first, it seemed no writer could possibly offer anything different from what had already been compellingly presented on TV. In 1989, I was among rapt multitudes introduced by the miniseries Cross of Fire to this lurid tale from the second rise of the Klan.The KKK was born at the close of the civil war, in resentment of burgeoning African American independence. By the 1890s it was fading, with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, but the first world war “birthed” a more virulent second coming. Determined to keep Black people in their place, klansmen were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Native American, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-abortion and anti-communist.Cross of Fire, made 70 years later, concerned a rape and murder. Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old educator, unmarried and living with her parents. Stephenson, her assailant, led the Indiana branch of the Klan. Armed with a private force, 30,000-strong, wielding graft and bribes, he reigned supreme, the governor and many other officials firmly under his thumb. When he was brought to trial, he was in no doubt he would get off.Cross of Fire was shown in two segments, two hours each, and reached about 20 million viewers. Back then, I think, a certain optimism was still alive in America. With most social struggles behind us, it was broadly imagined, we were well on the way to rectifying our worst problems. In that context, a televised account of the Klan’s insidious rise across 1920s America seemed almost hard to believe.But the truth is chilling. At one point, the Klan reached millions of white Americans. Feeling threatened by newly enfranchised women, growing numbers of immigrants and African Americans made restive by commendable war service, many such white men felt certain they had been robbed of the position their fathers and grandfathers knew. Stevenson was a crusading would-be strong man. If not plain-spoken, he was at least an ignorant man’s idea of a wise one. Seemingly amiable, seemingly much like those who followed him, to some he felt like an answered prayer.If this is starting to sound familiar, back in 1989 it seemed outrageously implausible. Weren’t the 1920s the Roaring Twenties, the rebellious, modernizing Jazz Age? Was it not an era of prosperity and wellbeing? The problem is a matter of nuance. Setbacks or backlash attendant to progress are seldom acknowledged with the same emphasis as advancement. That’s why it is imperative to teach all American history, good or bad.The idea of making America great again is an old one, rooted in a nativist embrace of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy. A hundred years ago, many were throughly taken in by nationalist rhetoric and circus-like spectacle.Stephenson had no education beyond high school. He was an ardent fan of Mussolini. He claimed he had studied psychology and knew how to play on people’s emotions. Klan rallies whipped up followers, as frenzied as any at Nuremberg, into ecstatic orgies of cheering. Some called beseechingly for Stephenson to become president. In the flickering light of flaming crosses, large banners insisted: “America is for Americans.” It all planted a seed in a man convinced that everything – and anyone – could be bought.In his book, Egan explains how, much as with African Americans and the Black church, to many whites, Klan membership “gave meaning, shape and purpose to the days”.From neo-Confederates to hardline Brexiters, how perplexing is the malfeasance, the villainy, the rank hypocrisy of those who preach law and order and freedom and justice the loudest? It all brings to mind Churchill’s observation about Stalin and Russia after the pact with Hitler in 1939: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”Undaunted, Egan examines and sorts out the complexities and contradictions of the rise of Stephenson and the Klan. In doing so, unlike a writer for TV, he has no need for dramatic license.In Cross of Fire, Oberholtzer marries Stephenson – or so she thinks. It turns out the officiant is a henchman. This detail is important. It sets into motion a supposed honeymoon, a joyride on a private railway car to Chicago, a wedding trip that facilitates Stephenson’s crime.Dealing in fact, Egan reveals that not even a pretend wedding took place. Oberholtzer believed Stephenson could keep her state job from being cut but she never trusted him to the extent of getting married. She was drugged and taken by force.On her deathbed, she summoned the will to give an account of her ordeal. A transcript was presented in court. So was a doctor’s testimony. As much as the poison Oberholtzer ingested, the doctor said, sepsis, from deep bites on her face, breasts, tongue and elsewhere, resulted in Oberholtzer’s death. With timely attention, her life might have been saved.Another fact absent from Cross of Fire but featured in Egan’s account is yet more disturbing. Stephenson was found guilty of Oberholtzer’s murder and sentenced to life, but he was never chastened. He broke parole and was re-imprisoned but he ultimately died a natural death, in 1966, aged 74. He tricked, cheated, married and sexually assaulted many times more. It is this learning of the limits of the wages of sin that distinguishes A Fever in the Heartland as an honest look at what really happened.
A Fever in the Heartland is published in the US by Viking More

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