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Amid national grief and anger over the Nashville elementary school shooting in which three children and three adults were killed, members of Congress clashed angrily in Washington while protesters demanded action in Tennessee.In Washington, while speaking to reporters on Wednesday evening, Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat from New York and a former school principal, called Republicans “gutless” for refusing to support meaningful gun control reform.Thomas Massie, a far-right Republican from Kentucky, overheard.“What are you talking about?” he asked, adding: “There’s never been a school shooting in a school that allows teachers to carry guns.”Massie is one of many Republicans to have released, often as holiday cards, images of family members holding assault weapons.Bowman responded: “Carry guns? More guns lead to more death. Look at the data. You’re not looking at any data.”The New Yorker told the Kentuckian states with open-carry laws have more gun deaths. Massie told Bowman to calm down.“Calm down?” Bowman asked. “Children are dying!”Elsewhere in the Capitol, Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, responded angrily to Marjorie Taylor Greene, after the far-right Georgia Republican advocated that teachers be armed.Moskowitz said: “You know, there are six people that are dead in that school including three children because you guys got rid of the assault weapons ban. Because you guys made it easy for people who … are mentally incapable of having weapons of war, being able to buy those weapons and go into schools.“… Did the good guys with the guns stop six people from getting murdered? No. But you know what? AR-15s, you’ve seen what those bullets do to children. You know why you don’t hunt with an AR-15, with a deer? Because there’s nothing left. And there’s nothing left of these kids when people go into school and murder them while they’re trying to read.“You guys are worried about banning books? Dead kids can’t read.”On Thursday there were angry scenes in Nashville, as protesters gathered at the state capitol while the Republican-dominated legislature took up work for the first time since the shooting.Chants of “Save our children!” echoed in hallways between the senate and house chambers, with protesters inside and outside the building. Some filled the senate gallery, including children who held signs reading “I’m nine”. Most were removed after some began yelling: “Children are dead!”There were quieter scenes on Wednesday night, at a candlelight vigil.The victims at the Covenant School were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all nine years old; Katherine Koonce, the head of the school, who was 60; Cynthia Peake, a substitute teacher who was 61; and Mike Hill, the school custodian, who was also 61.Speakers including lawmakers and religious leaders led prayers and gave condolences. The first lady, Jill Biden, was there. The Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, was not.Nashville residents offered musical performances. Sheryl Crow, who has called for gun control reform, sang I Shall Believe. Margo Price performed Tears of Rage. Ketch Sector, of Old Crow Medicine Show, performed Will the Circle Be Unbroken?The Nashville police chief, John Drake, expressed gratitude to officers who killed the shooter.“Many of us hoped and prayed these evil acts we saw would never happen in Nashville,” Drake said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShaundelle Brooks, whose 23-year-old son was a victim of a shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018, was present.“I know what it’s like to be a parent – what it feels like, like you’re drowning and can’t move, and that weakness and that hole that comes in your stomach,” she told the Associated Press.Another parent, the actor Melissa Joan Hart, said in an Instagram message she and her husband helped kindergartners to safety on Monday.“We helped all these tiny little, little kids cross the road and get their teachers over there,” Hart said, fighting tears.Hart, 46, also said her family lived near Sandy Hook elementary when that school, in Connecticut, was attacked in December 2012. Twenty young children and six adults were killed then.In Nashville, officials continue to seek a motive. The 28-year-old shooter, Audrey Hale, was a former student of the Covenant School. Police said the school reported no issues when Hale was a student.Police said Hale was a transgender person. On Tuesday, Drake said Hale had been put under a doctor’s care for an “emotional disorder” but police had not been contacted. He also said Hale purchased seven guns and hid them. Three guns were used in the attack. Drake has said the shooting was “calculated”. Officials have said Hale had weapons training and seemed to be prepared to face law enforcement.On Thursday, authorities released 911 calls that captured the terror inside the school. Callers pleaded for help in hushed voices as sirens, crying and gunfire were heard.One caller told a dispatcher she could hear gunshots as she hid in a closet. The caller noted a pause in the shots. The dispatcher said two other callers had reported shots at the school.“I think so,” the caller said, as children could be heard in the background. The caller said she could hear more shots. Muffled thuds could be heard.“I’m hearing more shots,” the caller said. “Please hurry.”Another caller said: “I think we have a shooter at our church … I’m on the second floor in a room. I think the shooter is on the second floor.”Another man said he was with a group including several children and they were walking away from the school. The tension and confusion were obvious, adults speaking over each other, with children in the background.
Associated Press contributed reporting More

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has urged Joe Biden to reinforce federal oversight of large corporations, increase wages for working people and address the climate crisis.Outlining its 2023 executive action agenda on Thursday, the CPC offered Joe Biden an opportunity to deliver on a range of Democratic policy priorities, and stifle recent criticism from the left wing of his party, using the power of the executive pen.“The list that we have arrived at is not just a messaging exercise,” Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the caucus, told reporters. “These are actions that we believe the White House and federal agencies have the authority and the ability to take now and should do so.”Biden’s executive power has taken on new significance now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, hindering Democrats’ ability to advance their legislative agenda. Without his party’s full control of Congress, Biden’s best hope of enacting reform in the next two years probably lies in executive orders, and those actions could help Democrats draw a contrast with Republicans in the 2024 elections.“Republicans have made it perfectly clear they do not want to govern,” said Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, deputy CPC chair. “Thankfully, we have a Democratic president in the White House, one who has passed the boldest agenda in a generation to help working people. In the face of Republican obstruction, we do not have to be silent.”The CPC’s announcement comes as Biden has found himself increasingly at odds with progressive activists over some of his recent policy decisions. Biden’s decision to approve the Willow oil project in Alaska has enraged climate activists, and immigrant rights advocates remain frustrated and alarmed about the White House’s efforts to restrict asylum applications. On Monday, Jayapal signed on to a comment expressing “deep concern” over the proposed asylum policy.Asked about the recent clashes, Jayapal praised Biden as a “real champion on many issues”, celebrating the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But she acknowledged that “there are issues we don’t see exactly eye to eye on”.“And on those issues, we’ve continued to push hard – sometimes in private, sometimes in public – to make sure that we are not only fulfilling his campaign promises, but most importantly delivering for people and what they need,” Jayapal said.Among other proposals, the CPC is calling on Biden to address the rising cost of living by expanding the pool of workers eligible to receive overtime pay and lowering prescription drug prices. In regards to the climate crisis, the CPC wants the president to implement new federal rules on fossil fuel-fired power plants and accelerate the transition to clean energy.Some of the CPC’s other proposed actions read as a direct response to recent news events, such as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The caucus has urged Biden to expand federal oversight of financial institutions by subjecting large banks to the Federal Reserve’s supervision. The CPC has also called for “aggressive action to improve worker and community safety in the rail industry”, amid ongoing concerns about the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.Biden has shown a willingness in the past to act on the CPC’s suggestions. Last August, months after the CPC released its 2022 executive action agenda calling on Biden to cancel student debt, the president announced his administration would provide up to $20,000 in student debt forgiveness, though his plan is now tangled up in lawsuits.Despite significant legal hurdles, the CPC and its supporters hope that Biden will not only act on their proposed executive orders but that those policies will actually have the chance to be implemented. More

A dispute between the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney over control of the company’s Florida theme park district hinges on a clause referencing King Charles III and his descendants.The row began after DeSantis in March 2022 passed a “don’t say gay” law banning classroom teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity. The law was highly controversial, with LGBTQ+ activists saying it was discriminatory. Joe Biden denounced it as “hateful”.Under former chief executive Bob Chapek, Disney was initially hesitant to state public opposition to the bill, but did so after pressure. That prompted DeSantis and Florida Republicans to try to revoke privileges Disney has had for decades at its theme park, which employs 75,000 people.However, a new governing board appointed by DeSantis on Wednesday reportedly said it will need to overturn last-minute agreements which would prevent it from taking control.The document states that its provisions will stand until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England living as of the date of this declaration”.“Royal clauses” of this kind are used to avoid rules in some places against contracts which last in perpetuity. The British royal family was chosen for the clauses because information about the family tree was readily available, but also because of the “better healthcare available to, and longer life expectancy of, a royal family member compared to a non-royal”, according to the law firm Birketts.In February, the Florida state house passed a bill to end the unusual status that allowed Disney World to govern itself. Under the status, Disney World had its own police and fire departments, planning powers and some other public functions.The bill gave DeSantis the power to appoint the five members of the board that controls government services for the Reedy Creek district.“We’re going to have to deal with it and correct it,” board member Brian Aungst said of the last-minute agreements on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. “It’s a subversion of the will of the voters and the legislature and the governor. It completely circumvents the authority of this board to govern.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement, Disney said: “All agreements signed between Disney and the District were appropriate, and were discussed and approved in open, noticed public forums in compliance with Florida’s ‘Government in the Sunshine’ law.”Buckingham Palace declined to comment. More

When he was running for president in 2020, Joe Biden promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period”. This month, he approved an $8bn oil project in Alaska, violating that campaign pledge.Biden had said he wholeheartedly supports granting statehood to the District of Columbia. Last week, he signed a Republican bill overturning changes to the DC criminal code, which critics attacked as a violation of home rule.Biden previously accused Donald Trump of waging “an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants” because of his handling of the US-Mexican border. This month, reports emerged that the Biden administration has considered reinstating the practice of detaining migrant families who cross the border illegally. Immigrant rights advocates have denounced the idea, as well as another proposal to further restrict who can seek asylum in the US.Biden’s recent policy decisions have sparked speculation that he is preparing for the launch of his re-election campaign for the 2024 presidential contest by moving to the political center on key issues like crime, immigration and energy. The potential pivot has frustrated progressives, who warn that the strategy risks alienating the voters who helped deliver Biden’s victory in 2020. Despite their concerns, progressive leaders say Biden still has time and options to deliver crucial policy wins.“I would say the base isn’t overly enthusiastic about Joe Biden being the [2024] standard bearer,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution. “So it would be important for the president to keep giving the base some red meat and keep folks energized early versus trying to deflate that.”Although Biden has not yet formally announced his plans to seek re-election, he is expected to do so in the coming weeks. So far, he has only attracted one primary challenger – the self-help author Marianne Williamson, who has launched a long-shot bid – and his likely nomination gives him the leeway to focus on the general election. Some have suggested that Biden’s recent policy decisions, such as his approval of the Willow project in Alaska, are a clear attempt to pick off centrist voters who may be up for grabs. The appointment of Jeff Zients as Biden’s new chief of staff has also been seen as a possible explanation for the president’s move to the center.“Oil? Oh, I love oil, especially American production. Re-election? What re-election?” former Republican congressman Billy Long jested on Twitter earlier this month. “I’ve been a Willow fan all along, yeah, that’s the ticket, I love oil, I love the Willow project, yeah that’s the ticket!”But progressives say Biden is making an unwise and ultimately risky choice. They argue that the strategy could fracture the young, diverse coalition of voters who carried him to victory in 2020 and helped Democrats maintain control of the Senate in 2022. According to an analysis from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, 50% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 cast a ballot in 2020, marking an 11-point increase from 2016. The same organization found that the 2022 elections saw the second-highest youth voter turnout for a midterm in almost three decades.“Moving to the center on issues like fossil fuel extraction could be problematic because it might actually not just dilute enthusiasm, but it might engender active opposition, when the president’s goal would be to keep the movement that he’s built in formation,” Geevarghese said.The Willow announcement in particular attracted the attention and concern of progressive activists, who have emphasized the importance of reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Biden’s decision came days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its report warning that the world must take swift action to address the climate crisis or risk catastrophic damage to the planet.The White House has claimed that Biden’s options were limited in terminating ConocoPhillips’ leases because they were approved under prior administrations, but that explanation has not appeased climate activists, who have filed lawsuits to prevent the project from moving forward.Michele Weindling, electoral director of the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said the Willow decision was especially demoralizing for young activists, who took to TikTok to criticize the project. Videos with hashtags like #StopWillow were viewed tens of millions of times in the days leading up to Biden’s announcement.“I think the Democrats’ only winnable strategy is to embrace and get behind the largest voting bloc for them, and that is young people. That’s people of color and working people,” Weindling said. “Casting our needs aside to appeal to a smaller faction of centrist voters is pretty foolish before a huge election cycle like 2024.”While progressives express disappointment in Biden’s recent policy decisions, his apparent 2024 strategy is not wholly surprising. Biden has always identified as more of a centrist than some of his progressive opponents in the 2020 Democratic primary, such as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven so, Biden has secured some important policy wins for the more liberal wing of his party since taking office. Perhaps most notably, Biden successfully lobbied last year for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which represented the US’s most significant legislative response yet to the climate crisis. His efforts to cancel some student loan debt have also won praise from progressives, although that executive order has faced legal challenges.Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said he still considers Biden’s most recent policy decisions to be “exceptions” rather than the rule of his governing philosophy. Pointing to Biden’s State of the Union address in February, Green said the president still appears committed to economic populist proposals like affordable healthcare and paid family leave.However, Green added, Biden’s potential pivot to the political center could create an optics problem for the 2024 election if Trump wins the Republican nomination and “absurdly tries to claim the mantle of economic populism”. If Biden is perceived as being friendly with big oil or going soft on banking executives in response to the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, then it could create an opening for Trump to challenge Biden’s economic credentials, Green warned.With more than a year and a half to go until the election, Biden still has time to deliver more policy wins for his progressive supporters. Republicans now control the House of Representatives, complicating Democrats’ efforts to advance Biden’s legislative agenda, but the president still has the power of the executive pen. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is expected to soon release its updated list of suggested executive orders for Biden to sign, providing the president with an opportunity to shore up some goodwill with the more liberal members of his party.Weindling already has some ideas for how Biden should put his executive power to use before his next election.“He should use his full executive power to declare a climate emergency and to create bold solutions right now,” Weindling said. “2024 is still a little ways away, and our generation is looking for solutions.”Geevarghese seconded that idea, and encouraged Biden to issue executive orders aimed at raising wages, strengthening union rights and lowering healthcare costs.“You’re going to start to see, I think, progressives mobilizing to keep Biden’s feet to the fire,” Geevarghese said. “And if they are thinking about going centrist, they should think twice because we’re not going to pull our punches in this moment.” More

Jeff Sharlet and I meet outside the Titanic museum in sleepy Springfield, Massachusetts. It seems an opportune place to meet Sharlet – journalist, author and professor – halfway between his home in Vermont and mine in Brooklyn. We are here to talk about the fragmentation of American democracy, and I knew the Titanic museum would strike Sharlet as an apt spot: a reliquary of dissolution, another ship lost at sea.Sharlet’s latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the culmination of more than a dozen years’ reporting on the US religious right and its machinations. The core of the book is Sharlet’s reporting from the midwest and the high plains, talking to ordinary people about their extraordinary predilection for violence. They see a country gone wrong under decades of “immoral decadence” and often see the expansion of rights for women, the poor and people of color as proof of this turpitude.Sharlet has been sounding the alarm for a long time – but in this moment, when newscasters and senators alike use “Christian nationalism” and “fascism” fluently, the rest of us are finally catching on.His reporting has at times been mischaracterized as sensationalist or unduly obsessed with the bleakest, darkest fringes of the US’s raiments. This criticism – in the wake of our climate crisis, millions of Covid deaths and the withdrawal of the Republican party from any effort at governance – simply no longer sticks. The stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it’s a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary.Sharlet’s work has turned out to be a warning, not of the grief to come but of the grief that is here, in places urban and rural, large and small, at the hands of politicians, police, the January 6 “protesters”, Proud Boys and the ongoing plagues on national health. “I’ve got to figure out their grief,” he says.The book has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade. How did you pull it together?I’ve been writing about the right for a long time; I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is.I’ve watched you change your stance on the question of American fascism. You once denied that we were a fascist state.Two years ago, when I started traveling for The Undertow, suddenly civil war language, which had been fringe even on the right, was now mainstream right. Today we hear Marjorie Taylor Greene use it. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t lead, she follows. Trump doesn’t lead, he follows.Trumpism makes its own direction out of an organic flow of information, ideas, the conflation of story and fact. It’s like a swirl of ideas and language, like a bird flock, a murmuration.Even a decade ago I was so cautious because if I say, “This is fascism,” I’m going to be dismissed as hysterical. Now here we are: conservative David French, from the National Review, is writing in the New York Times, partly because the undertow has left him behind. It’s moving rightward, and he’s no longer the right. The New York Times is also moving right. Julie [Sharlet’s wife, the academic historian Julia Rabig] has colleagues, historians, who are very cautious and very aware that history moves slowly. They are saying, “This is as fragmented as we’ve ever been.”You started approaching people with signs or stickers that showed their allegiance, like Trump flags or Blue Lives Matter flags. People who were literally flagging their allegiance to the myth of the big lie, to Trump, to white supremacy. You describe your interviewees as normal, otherwise compassionate people with fully rationalized – or, at least, self-justified – violent obsessions.Near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I met a nice-looking family, dad, mom, son. You would never tag them for who they were. I see a little “Let’s go Brandon” sticker – a meme that rose among the right which means “Fuck Joe Biden”. And I get to talking to them. We talked for a long time. [The father said] he had a “Let’s go Brandon” sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son. They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions.You call the prelude to the book Our Condition. You mean the status of our political and social health amid various crises?It’s time for us to let go of the word crisis. And that’s hard. Like we go from climate change to climate crisis, which suggests a rising arc, like now we’re going to come to the resolution. This is our condition because there is no resolution here. As a person with a heart condition, this is a condition I live with. There’s loss in it, right? I learn from that.It’s livable, is what you’re saying. Survivable.Might be. It is until it isn’t.The two pieces that open and close the book are about music, the first about Harry Belafonte, published by the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the last chapter, about Lee Hays, published by the Oxford American.I thought, “I can’t start this book with darkness,” and I tried to pull a thread of beauty and art through it. Lee Hays was part of a band called the Weavers, which people don’t necessarily know any more, from the 1940s and 50s. But they do know songs like If I Had a Hammer, or even On Top of Old Smoky. I wanted to find a kind of hope, but I did not want to find a hope of like, “We can do it!” Because I don’t know if we can. But I know that we can struggle. Lee Hays was incredibly brave at a moment in his life and was broken by it, and Harry Belafonte was brave every moment of his life. He wasn’t broken, but he didn’t win.If we’re going to pay attention to the right, we need to pay attention to the deep strata of the struggle for freedom, right? Because this fight isn’t new, it’s old. And it’s ongoing, although it does take new shapes. We are in one of the scarier moments that we have ever confronted – all the more reason to understand what came before and how they endured; not how they survived, because they didn’t win. As we confront this fascist moment – I see this as a global fascist moment – we’re going to need some imagination. There is little on the table right now.You write about how both artists coded their music with messages of resistance; they used their music for the fight for civil rights, equality, real democracy.Code works for a lot of different groups, left or right. We’re in a time where the right is reveling in code. “Let’s go Brandon.” It’s just “funny”, right? And the left is shying away from code.It wasn’t always the case. Like Belafonte, Hays understood his songs as code songs, too. He called them zipper songs. He would take a gospel song and he would zip a freedom struggle into it. Harry Belafonte bankrolled the civil rights movement; he is absolutely essential to the freedom struggle in American history. There’s a story where Belafonte and Sidney Poitier almost get killed by the Klan. [They had to get as much money as they could collect to the organizers of the Freedom Summer in the south in 1964. When they landed, members of the Ku Klux Klan chased them. They reached a safe house without getting caught.] They just made it through and they dump the money that they brought for the activists on the table. And they all start singing [Belafonte’s hit song] Day-O, but they turn it into a freedom song: “Freedom is gonna come.”The second section of the book is titled Dream On. What’s the Aerosmith connection? I mean, I know it’s on heavy rotation at Trump rallies.“Dreaming” is a word we use as positive, right? Well, they’re dreaming. That’s, to me, the whole thing about Trumpism – and maybe Trump himself – but the movement goes on without him. (He was necessary at the beginning, he was needed. Lenin was needed at the beginning too, but the Soviet Union went on a long time without him.)The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic. One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife [a common Trump story told at rallies to reinforce the idea that the country is not safe and that guns are necessary], and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, “Lock her up.”This is dream logic. And there’s vanity in it, right? “I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.” It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough.You know Susan Friend Harding’s The Book of Jerry Falwell [about the conservative preacher and popular televangelist]? She would go to Jerry Falwell’s church and he would tell a story, and the next week he would tell the same story, but with different details. You would expect people to be distressed by it in real time, right? But no! There’s enough space within it for them to interact.This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left. The intellectual rightwingers are like, “Fuck democracy, we don’t need it.” But the everyday people, they’re like, “This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.”The Tick-Tock chapter rocked me. It’s a close account of the radicalization of a woman you call Evelyn. I’ve heard the deranged accusations of pedophilia from the right, even the meme that the Clintons and other Democrats eat children, but you bring us into Evelyn’s webwork of closely held conspiracies without losing her humanity. You take these individuals seriously, not in their wild ideas and beliefs, but in their conviction, in their commitment and faith. They believe they are called to save lives. This doesn’t absolve them, as you write, but it prevents them from being dismissible, from being caricatured, from being ignored.Don’t you think this is a failure of the left? Many, not all [pro-choice advocates] are like: “They just want to control women’s bodies.” Yes, the project is misogynist to the core. But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children [and not fetuses, who are harmed by doctors and politicians], what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence. I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America.Adam Fleming Petty at the Washington Post called the book a “form of travelogue”. This is likely due in strong part to The Undertow, the long title chapter about Ashli Babbitt, the pro-Trump veteran who died on the day of the storming of the Capitol. How did you write this section?Because of my heart condition I’d been tucked in during Covid, and I live in a rural area. I remember sitting there at my kitchen table, watching January 6 on the computer, texting furiously. We heard about a white woman being killed. It was very soon after that we knew the cop was Black. And I thought, holy shit, it’s The Birth of a Nation [a 1915 movie that justifies organized white-on-Black violence with a racist depiction of Black people, including them being sexually predatory toward white women; such accusations were the pretext for lynchings for decades, with echoes remaining today]. They just did a live re-enactment of their fantasy!They would say Babbitt wore an American flag, but it’s not true. She wore a Trump cape, which is the new American flag. They would say she’s unarmed, but it’s not true. She was carrying a knife. There’s a photo of [Babbitt’s knife] on the cover of the book. You could say, well, it’s a small knife. Really? That knife is plenty big enough.You write that, almost immediately, the right tried to diminish Babbitt’s agency, to make her younger, smaller, quieter. It reminded me of Terri Schiavo [the 26-year-old woman who was found unconscious in 1984 and was the subject of a family battle for her medical decision-making, which became a national debate dominated by the Catholic church and the religious right until her death in 2005]. We see the efforts on the right to project a childlike acquiescence on to the adult woman.Yes! Ashli Babbitt’s “martyrdom” is tied up in her remaking as an innocent. You realize that the gun and the fetus, it’s an innocence cult. It’s not a death cult, people misunderstand this. It’s an innocence cult, which is to say, it’s also the erasure of history. It says, “No, no, no, there’s no original sin in American history. We were always good.”Babbitt was hurting. She was in her mid-30s, after serving eight tours of duty. She was in massive debt. And she fell in love with Trump.Babbitt resolved her grief by getting certainty. She could not mourn.You mean she was angry, hurting – but not reckoning with her circumstances, embracing her condition. What did she want? She wanted justice?She just wanted to be a person and serve her country.So what we’re talking about is a whole lot of unrealized pain, and about how we metabolize pain in different ways. You write in the prelude that “loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate or denial and delusion. Especially delusion.”Yes. I’ve been thinking about how we metabolize pain, about my own ability to metabolize pain. My new therapist is trying to figure out why I do the work I do. She thinks it must be so bad for me. But no, it’s fucking sustained me! It gives me agency. States everywhere, the forces of darkness, are moving against you. You are not imagining it, they are real. And I do not have any power.But this is my little piece of power: I can go tell the story.
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (Norton, 2023) is out now. Ann Neumann is the author of The Good Death More

In bizarre scenes in a US House hearing, the far-right Republican Lauren Boebert asked if a revised Washington DC criminal code was now law – only to be reminded that Congress overturned it earlier this month – then fixated on whether that code would have decriminalised public urination.The revision was meant to give the District of Columbia a first code update in 120 years, but it became subject to fierce debate over crime as a political issue. Republicans said the code was soft on violent offenses. Angering progressives, Joe Biden said he would not veto a Republican measure to overturn the code.Charles Allen, a city councilman, chaired the DC judiciary committee which considered the revisions.On Wednesday, Allen was one of four witnesses at the mercy of House Republicans in a hearing entitled “Overdue Oversight of the Capital City”.Allen, DC council chair Phil Mendelson, chief financial officer Glen Lee and Greggory Pemberton of the DC Police Union faced aggressive Republican questioning, mostly regarding policing and crime, including the stabbing last weekend of a staffer to the Republican senator Rand Paul.But Boebert’s fixation on public urination made the biggest splash.The pro-Trump Coloradan, who has a history of inflammatory behavior, asked: “You led the charge to reform DC’s crime laws. Is that correct?”Allen said: “I chaired the committee that proposal came from, yes.”Boebert said: “You led the charge, yes sir. And these changes are now law here in DC. Correct?”Allen said: “You mean the revised criminal code? No, those are not the law.”Boebert appeared confused. Mendelson said: “The revised code was rejected by – ”Cutting Mendelson off, Boebert pressed Allen.“Did you or did you not decriminalise public urination in Washington DC? Did you lead the charge to do so?”Allen said: “No. The revised criminal code left that as a criminal.”Boebert repeated: “Did you lead the charge to decriminalise public urination in Washington DC?Allen said: “No, ma’am.”Boebert said: “Did you ever vote in favor of decriminalising public urination in Washington DC?”Allen said: “The revised criminal code that was passed by the council kept it as a criminal offense.”Boebert said: “Did you ever support this criminal” offense status?Allen said: “I voted for it, yes.”Boebert said: “You voted to keep it as a criminal offense?”Allen said: “That’s correct. The full council did.”Boebert claimed to “have records” showing Allen favored “allowing public urination”.Allen said: “No. The –”Boebert asked: “Is that something you intend to pursue in the future?”Allen said: “No. The legislation you’re referring to came from the criminal code reform commission that changed public urination from a criminal to a civil offense. The council then changed that, to maintain it as a criminal offense at the request of the mayor.”Boebert yielded her time.Addressing the witnesses, Becca Balint, a Democrat from Vermont, lamented: “Rather than addressing a number of serious concerns our constituents have, [Republicans] are choosing to waste our time talking about public urination. Do you have anything additional you want to say about public urination?”Boebert said: “I do.”Balint said: “No, not you. It’s not your time. It’s a question to these people.”In conclusion, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the panel, said: “This has been a degraded, tawdry discourse today, with obsessive questioning about public urination.”“I hope the public doesn’t see this hearing and regard all of it as an episode of public urination in which the people of Washington are the ones getting rained on.” More

The top executive at Fox News was furious one of the network’s reporters was fact-checking Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, writing in a December 2020 email that it was “bad for business”.Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News, was responding in early December 2020 to an on-air fact-check by Eric Shawn, one of the network’s anchors. “This has to stop now,” she wrote to Meade Cooper, another Fox executive. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding [sic] what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”Scott also asked other Fox employees to alert her if the network booked Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, or Mike Lindell, a serial promoter of election misinformation. “They would both get ratings,” she said.The message is part of a tranche of internal communications obtained by the voting equipment company Dominion in its $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox. Dominion displayed a copy of the message a court hearing last week as its lawyers argued that Fox knowingly aired false statements about Dominion because it was concerned about losing viewers to rival networks such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN). The Guardian obtained a copy of the message and the slideshow that was presented in court.Weeks earlier, on 19 November, Scott also complained about a different fact-check on air. “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories,” she wrote.“The audience feels like we crapped on [sic] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us,” she wrote, adding that Fox nation had lost 25,000 subscribers. “We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”The reporter who did the fact-check, Kristin Fisher, later said she felt she was punished for telling the truth, NPR reported.Fox says it was reporting on newsworthy allegations by the former president and his lawyers, and that its viewers would not have understood its broadcasts about Dominion to be statements of fact. It also says top executives at the company and others who expressed concern about the accuracy of its statements about Dominion were not directly involved in determining what went into each show.Dominion’s slideshow also included messages from Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, whose show was a hotbed for false claims about the election. In one message, Bartiromo appeared to be aware that Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, would come on her show the next day to make specious claims about Dominion software switching votes, saying: “OK, Sidney will say it tomorrow.” In notes to herself, Bartiromo noted that Powell was being shut out from meetings with Jared Kushner at the White House because he did not want to hear about “conspiracy theories”.Dominion also revealed a key 13 November 2020 internal fact-check from Fox from a team known as the “brain room” that debunked false claims about Dominion. Even though executives testified that claims debunked by the brain room should not have been aired, Fox continued to make false claims about Dominion after the fact-check.The documents also show internal concern about statements being made by Jeanine Pirro, another host who aired false Dominion claims. In one message, fact-checkers went over a script for one of her shows and highlighted inaccurate statements about Dominion. “The brain room is going through this now. Jeanine dictated it to Tim. It’s rife with conspiracies and BS and yet another example of why this woman should never be on live television,” Jerry Andrews, a Fox executive, wrote in an email.Jury selection in the trial is scheduled to begin on 13 April in Wilmington, Delaware. The trial is scheduled to begin 17 April and last six weeks. More