US Politics

Graham predicts ‘riots in streets’ if Trump is prosecuted over classified recordsRepublican South Carolina senator cites ‘the ‘Clinton debacle’ and claims the FBI failed to investigate Hunter Biden Amid growing fears about political violence in the US, a senior Republican senator predicted “riots in the streets” if Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling classified information.Of all the legal threats Trump is facing, is this the one that could take him down?Read moreLindsey Graham, of South Carolina, made his remarks about the ex-president while speaking to Fox News’s Sunday Night in America, hosted by Trey Gowdy, a former Republican congressman from the same state.Graham said: “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him. There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump.”Alleging a failure by the FBI to investigate Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, Graham added: “I’ll say this, if there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”As a House committee chairperson, Gowdy investigated Hillary Clinton’s work as secretary of state, including her handling of the attack on a US facility in Benghazi in 2012 and her use of a private email server for government business. Clinton was not charged over the email issue.Trump is under investigation and could be indicted over the handling of classified White House records he took to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, in contravention of federal law.On Friday, an affidavit released with redactions showed how concerns about illegal activity and obstruction of justice merited an FBI search at Trump’s resort earlier this month.Trump seized on the search to claim unfair treatment and whip up supporters. He is reportedly close to announcing another White House run. He is eligible to do so because he escaped conviction in his second impeachment trial for inciting the Capitol attack.Graham’s remarks were widely condemned.Law professor and former White House ethics chief Richard Painter referred to Trump supporters’ deadly attack on the Capitol when he said: “A senator who calls for ‘riots in the streets’ if Trump is indicted should be expelled from the Senate. He’s inciting January 6 all over again.”The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, said the “prediction that violence may follow any prosecution of the former [president] may not qualify legally as incitement but it is irresponsible all the same as it will be seen by some as a call for violence. Public officials are [obliged] to call for the rule of law.”Graham was on friendly terms with Biden when they were senators together but his dogged support for Trump has reportedly prompted the president to ice Graham out. In his interview with Gowdy he slammed Biden’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then returned to his theme.Saying that as “a simple-minded guy” he thought “people want to be treated the same without regard to political ideology”, Gowdy asked about his guest’s own legal problems.Graham is resisting attempts to force him to testify about his involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn his electoral defeat in 2020 by Biden in Georgia, a swing state.Graham said: “If we let county prosecutors start calling senators and members of Congress as witnesses when they’re doing their job, we’re out of … constitutional balance here.“I’ve got a good legal case. I’m going to pursue it … I love the law. I’ve never been more worried about the law and politics as I am right now.”US political violence is surging, but talk of a civil war is exaggerated – isn’t it?Read moreHe continued: “How can you tell a conservative Republican that the system works when it comes to Trump? … If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there will literally will be riots in the streets. I worry about our country.”Trump indicated his approval, posting video of Graham’s remarks to Truth Social, the platform Trump set up after being suspended from Twitter over the Capitol attack.Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, who has emerged as a Trump critic, predicted that there will indeed be violence if Trump is indicted.“I see and hear those threats all the time,” he wrote. “But threats of violence should NEVER stop the pursuit of justice. NEVER. And you KNOW that Lindsey. But you’re too much of a coward to say that. Shameful.”TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Billions in ‘dark money’ is influencing US politics. We need disclosure lawsDavid Sirota and Joel WarnerA donor secretly transferred $1.6bn to a Republican political group. Because of America’s lax laws, the donation was never disclosed in any public record or database This week, the Lever, ProPublica and the New York Times discovered the largest known political advocacy donation in American history. We exposed a reclusive billionaire’s secret transfer of $1.6bn to a political group controlled by the Republican operative Leonard Leo, who spearheaded the construction of a conservative supreme court supermajority to end abortion, block government regulations, stymie the fight against climate change and limit voting rights.This anonymous donation – which flowed to a tax-exempt trust that was never disclosed in any public record or database – was probably completely legal.Whether you support or abhor Leo’s crusade, we should be able to agree on one larger non-partisan principle: such enormous sums of money should not be able to influence elections, lawmakers, judicial nominations and public policy in secret. And we should not have to rely on a rare leak to learn basic campaign finance facts that should be freely available to anyone.Unfortunately, thanks to our outdated laws, those facts are now hidden behind anonymity, shell companies and shadowy political groups. America is long overdue for an overhaul of its political disclosure laws – and news organizations in particular should be leading the charge for reform.In the early 1970s, leaks and shoe-leather reporting by news organizations uncovered the Watergate scandal – the modern era’s foundational dark money exposé. That debacle birthed the original federal disclosure laws and a golden age of journalism. For a time, the new statutes allowed campaign finance reporting to become systematic, methodical and based on required disclosures, rather than sporadic, random and reliant on the goodwill of courageous whistleblowers.A half-century later, however, the dark money practices of 50 years ago have again become normalized. In 2020 alone, more than $1bn worth of dark money flooded around weak disclosure rules and into America’s elections, financing Super Pacs, ad blitzes, mailers and door-knocking campaigns. As millions of votes were swayed, reporters and the public had no knowledge of the money sources, or what policies they were buying.Heading into the 2022 election, the situation is getting worse. The two parties’ major Senate and House Super Pacs are all being funded by anonymous dark money groups that are not required to disclose their donors.These problems aren’t unique to the campaign arena. Front groups are also shaping public policy, leaving reporters unable to tell voters who exactly is funding what. In the last few years, an anonymously funded group used post-election ads to successfully pressure lawmakers to water down landmark healthcare legislation designed to eliminate so-called “surprise” medical bills.Similarly, Leo’s anonymously funded network spent tens of millions to boost the nomination campaigns of three conservative supreme court justices, after leading a campaign supporting Republicans’ refusal to hold a vote on Barack Obama’s 2016 high court nominee, Merrick Garland.To be sure, news outlets can still cover the shrinking portion of the political finance system that still discloses some money flows to politicians, lobbyists and advocacy groups. And thankfully, there are occasionally disclosures like the Leo leak, which provide a fleeting glimpse into the real forces influencing sweeping policy decisions.But for every sporadic leak, there are scores of secret donors systematically funneling ever more dark money into elections and legislative campaigns without ever being exposed – and they are reaping the rewards of corrupted public policy.That’s the bad news. The good news is there is already a legislative blueprint for reform.The Disclose Act, sponsored by the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse, would force dark money groups to disclose any of their donors who give more than $10,000, require shell companies spending money on elections to disclose their owners, and mandate that election ads list their sponsors’ major contributors. These requirements would extend not only to election-related activity, but also to campaigns to influence governmental decisions – including judicial nominations.A separate Whitehouse bill would additionally require donor disclosure from shadowy groups lobbying the supreme court through amicus briefs designed to tilt judicial rulings without letting the public know which billionaire or CEO’s thumb is on the scale. And other pending legislation would finally allow the Securities and Exchange Commission to require major corporations to more fully disclose their political spending.Journalists should proudly advocate for laws like these, which allow us to tell the public what its government is doing. Our industry has done that before in defending open records laws, and we must do it now in advocating for new campaign finance disclosure rules.In practice, that means reporters elevating the transparency issue and demanding answers from politicians about where they stand on disclosure laws – rather than ignoring or downplaying the rising tide of dark money now shaping every public policy in America.It means newspaper editorial boards advocating for campaign finance reform.It means media organizations lobbying for stronger disclosure laws at the federal, state and local levels.It means the journalism industry participating in – and at times leading – this fight, rather than using objectivity as a cop-out.This battle to update campaign finance disclosure laws and bring sunlight to the darkest of dark money already faces powerful opponents. In recent years, the US Chamber of Commerce and Koch Industries – which represent some of America’s biggest dark money spenders – have been lobbying against the Disclose Act, preventing it from advancing for more than a decade.The Koch network recently convinced the supreme court’s conservative bloc to strike down a California law requiring non-profit dark money groups to at least disclose their major donors to state tax regulators, after spending to back some of those justices’ confirmations to the court.Most recently, conservative groups and Republican state attorneys general have been trying to block a proposal to force companies to disclose greenhouse gas emissions by arguing that it is unlawful “compelled speech” – a preview of the argument they might use against new campaign finance transparency legislation.Just as alarming, segments of the journalism industry itself have opposed transparency efforts. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — which represents the major media outlets making huge profits off of dark money ads — tried to block a rule at the Federal Election Commission a decade ago to require TV and radio stations to disclose ad buys from political groups, arguing it would cost them advertising revenue. The NAB has recently successfully opposed the Federal Communications Commission’s requirements that broadcasters disclose when foreign governments sponsor material. NAB is right now lobbying on the Disclose Act.But this week’s revelations about history’s largest dark-money donation should be an alarm telling us that the status quo must change – and indeed it can change, even within the confines of the supreme court’s own precedents.In the landmark Citizens United ruling that unleashed the modern era of big money politics, the majority noted that while it was unwilling to permit political spending restrictions, it still held that “government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements”.Those requirements are so desperately needed now – for the free press to play its vital role, and for voters to make informed decisions when they go to the polls.But the only chance it will happen is if news outlets and reporters get off the sidelines and enter the battle to secure what they need to do their jobs – and what we all need to preserve our democracy.
David Sirota is an award-winning journalist who founded the investigative news outlet the Lever
Joel Warner is the Lever’s managing editor
TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansUS supreme courtUS political financingcommentReuse this content More

Four countries, six years, 7,000 miles: one Afghan family’s journey to the US Zahra Amiri is among 41,000 working-age Afghans who have resettled in the US and are set to contribute $1.4bn to the US economy in their first year of work, according to new data The distance from Afghanistan’s south-western province of Nimroz to Iran’s historical city of Yazd is 480 miles (773km). To survive the journey, Zahra Amiri and her family ate snow.Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, more than 76,000 Afghans have been resettled as part of the US government operation labeled Allies Welcome. Zahra, 21, and her family are among the newly arrived Afghans, relocating from the cities of Kabul and Nimroz to Yazd and Tehran in Iran, then to Ankara, Turkey, before finally resettling in Denver, Colorado, in February.Zahra and the rest of this new Afghan community are set to contribute nearly $200m in taxes and $1.4bn to the American economy in their first year of work, according to new data released this month by the International Rescue Committee (IRC).Since their arrival, more than 41,000 working-age Afghans have been placed into various industries including accommodation and food services, retail trade, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing. This new community of Afghans arriving in the US with a multitude of skills and degrees has the potential to contribute significantly to the American economy, especially as the country grapples with inflation and supply chain issues.Zahra Amiri’s trek, spanning four countries and more than 7,000 miles, illustrates what these refugees had to endure to begin their new life.Zahra’s father, who held a government-related job, was killed in a 2014 suicide attack. After her father’s death, Zahra and her four siblings in Kabul had lost not only a parent but also their family’s chief provider – and with that, the sense of peace that he helped shroud them with had been shattered.Being the eldest, Zahra was suddenly confronted with two options: either forcibly marry a husband who could financially support her or flee.“I did not want to end up … jobless and uneducated, so I chose to become a refugee,” Zahra told the Guardian.One day in 2016, Zahra sat down with her mom and revealed her plans to her.“Let’s move out of here,” she said about Afghanistan, where 65% of all civilian casualties from suicide attacks globally occur and where 57% of girls are married before the age of 16. “We are not in a situation where we can live out our lives in peace in Afghanistan.”Her mother agreed. That year, Zahra, her mother and her siblings – the youngest of whom was two at the time – journeyed from Kabul to Nimroz, a south-west Afghan province that lies east of Iran. From Nimroz, Zahra and her family traveled to Yazd, one of Iran’s largest cities, with scarcely any food or water, forcing them to eat snow in a desperate attempt to nourish themselves.Border officials in Yazd turned Zahra and her family away, deporting them back to Nimroz. They tried the trip a second time and finally made it through to Tehran where the next leg of the sojourn awaited: Ankara, Turkey.“They would just throw families in each truck,” Zahra said, recalling how she was separated from her family for nearly two weeks on the way from Iran to Turkey before finally reuniting with them in Ankara in March 2016.In Ankara, Zahra and her family filed for refugee status with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and submitted a visa application to the US. In the six years that it took for her family’s application to be approved by the US government, Zahra completed her high school education while working as a dishwasher and a coffee maker, earning between $1.10 to $1.93 daily.“It’s not unusual for an application to take that long, especially considering that she applied during [Donald Trump’s presidency] where refugee arrivals were repeatedly cut, where we had things like the travel ban that really damaged the US government’s ability to process refugee applications,” IRC spokesperson Stanford Prescott told the Guardian.The US government approved Zahra’s family’s visa application early this year. On 2 February, Zahra donned a knitted sweater and pushed two pink quilted suitcases across the terrazzo tiles of the Istanbul airport.She was finally bound for the United States.Federal immigration services chose Colorado as the state in which to resettle Zahra’s family. With the IRC’s assistance, Zahra and her family arrived in Denver, initially to stay at a hotel for two months before being relocated to an apartment.As with many of its refugee clientele, the IRC provided financial literacy classes, job training courses and an interpreter to Zahra and her family. The IRC helped Zahra lock down a job with the airline caterer Sky Chefs about a month and a half ago, building on the skills she had amassed while working in restaurants and kitchens.At Sky Chefs, Zahra earns $19 an hour as she takes orders, packages them and gives them to customers. She earned a promotion to a manager assistant’s position two weeks ago and now trains new hires.“I can move up positions here, unlike in Turkey where even when I gave my 100%, I could not move up because I am a woman and because of my refugee status,” she said.Top job titles held by newly arrived Afghans include general production, warehouse worker, food preparer, driver and security guard, according to data from the IRC.Typically, Afghan refugees are placed in their first jobs within 126 days of their arrival and earn an average of $16.67 an hour – which amounts to an annual income of $34,673.“For most of these families, this is their very first job,” the IRC’s director economic empowerment, Erica Bouris, told the Guardian. “They are getting lots of things situated in the first year.“In a lot of ways, this is very much step one in that much longer process of rebuilding their home, their life and integration into the communities.”Bouris added: “We see lots of really interesting pathways, whether it’s that they try to pursue a certification so that they can work in a job that’s similar to what they had back home, or they might, as they settle into a new community, see for example that there are a lot of jobs in healthcare in this community and they pay well so they might pursue education and training so that they can move into a healthcare job.“Each story is really individual, but people absolutely do take steps towards additional education, skills and training and have medium and long-term career goals that they pursue.”Zahra is currently taking English as a second language (ESL) classes as she prepares to enroll in Aurora University’s dentistry program at the start of next year.As many Afghans carve out new lives for themselves in the US, many still face the possibility of losing their legal right to reside in the country. The US government allowed them to enter the nation in attempts to bring thousands of fleeing Afghans to safety as quickly as possible.But humanitarian parole lasts only two years. It is not like the US’s refugee resettlement program, where participants have a clear path towards American citizenship.Afghans on humanitarian parole must seek other paths of obtaining permanent immigration status, such as asylum, at the end of the two-year period in question.However, without the assistance of specialized lawyers, the Byzantine asylum process is particularly difficult to navigate. Many Afghans who fled their country were also advised to destroy identification documents, professional certifications and other information that could support their asylum claims, further complicating their situation.Although organizations like the IRC have launched various programs and collaborate with pro-bono lawyers to assist Afghans with their asylum claims, there’s another hurdle: The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is facing its own mounting backlog of asylum applications.With the pandemic exacerbating processing delays, the USCIS is currently struggling with a backlog of nearly 5.2m cases and 8.5m pending cases. The backlog was significantly lighter – 2.7m cases – in July 2019.“This year, even though the [Joe Biden White House] set an ambitious goal of [admitting] 125,000 [refugees], they’re only going to admit a fraction of that amount and what that shows is that refugee admission is broken and needs a lot more work so that ambition can be reality,” the IRC’s senior director of resettlement, asylum and integration policy, JC Hendrickson, told the Guardian.As a result, the IRC has been calling on Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan bill introduced earlier this month that would provide Afghan refugees with a pathway to lawful permanent residence in the US.“This bipartisan legislation will provide a pathway to lawful permanent status for certain Afghan civilians, offering them a way out of legal limbo and the looming threat of deportation with great risk to their personal safety,” said senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a co-sponsor of the bill. “Congress has a track record of passing similar legislation on humanitarian grounds, and we must swiftly do so again.”Many Afghans remain optimistic as they settle into American society’s fabric and rebuild their lives. To Zahra, being in the US means more than just experiencing upward economic mobility.“I know I’m new,” she said. “I know at the moment I have no voice, but in the future, I would like to raise my voice and let people know that men and women can work equally.“If anyone needs help now or in the future, I’m willing to show them a way that they can pursue. I want to let Afghan women know that they can do what a man can do. It’s my dream to let Afghan women know that we are as equal as men.”TopicsAfghanistanUS politicsRefugeesUS immigrationfeaturesReuse this content More

‘Artemis generation’: Nasa to launch first crew-rated rocket to moon since 1972Test flight that will have no human crew aboard aims to return humans to the moon and eventually land them on Mars For the first time in 50 years, Nasa on Monday is planning to launch the first rocket that can ferry humans to and from the moon.The giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is scheduled to take off from Nasa’s Cape Canaveral, Florida, complex at 8.33am ET (1.33pm UK time) atop an unmanned Orion spacecraft that is designed to carry up to six astronauts to the moon and beyond.The 1.3m mile Artemis I test mission – slated to last 42 days – is aiming to take the Orion vehicle 40,000 miles past the far side of the moon, departing from the same facility that staged the Apollo lunar missions half a century ago.Artemis 1 rocket: what will the Nasa moon mission be carrying into space?Read moreNasa’s Space Shuttle program in the intermediary launched manned missions orbiting the earth in relatively near outer space before its discontinuation in 2011. Private American space companies such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have since flown missions similar to the shuttle program. But Artemis I’s job is to begin informing Nasa whether the moon can act as a springboard to eventually send astronauts to Mars, which would truly bring the stuff of science fiction to life.US taxpayers are expected to put up $93bn to finance the Artemis program. But in the days leading up to Monday’s launch, Nasa administrators insisted that Americans would find the cost to be justified.“This is now the Artemis generation,” the Nasa administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Bill Nelson said recently. “We were in the Apollo generation. This is a new generation. This is a new type of astronaut.”For Monday’s debut, the only “crew members” aboard Orion are mannequins meant to let Nasa evaluate its next-generation spacesuits and radiation levels – as well as a soft Snoopy toy meant to illustrate zero gravity by floating around the capsule.TopicsNasaSpaceThe moonMarsFloridaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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At the end of July, it was reported that Fox News and other publications owned by Rupert Murdoch were starting to abandon their extensive coverage of Donald Trump. However, after the FBI launched an unprecedented raid on his Mar-a-Lago home as part of an investigation into Trump’s potentially unlawful removal of White House records when he left office, the former president was back to getting some favourable coverage, at least on Fox News.
This week, Joan E Greve speaks to former Republican congressional communications director Tara Setmayer about how in the long term, this ongoing scandal could be beneficial to Trump

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

Archive: CNN, Fox News, CBS Miami This episode first aired on Politics Weekly America More

Kinzinger: Republicans ‘hypocritical’ for defending Trump over taking classified materialParty spent years chanting ‘lock her up’ at Hillary Clinton for private email system, says congressman, a vocal critic of Trump Congressman Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who has been one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump, called out his party for criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while continuing to defend the former president’s decision to take sensitive government information to his home at Mar-a-Lago.Kinzinger’s comments came days after the FBI released a redacted version of the affidavit the agency submitted to a federal judge to justify a search of Trump’s home. The document details how Trump retained classified material at Mar-a-Lago and that the government had been working for more than a year to retrieve those materials. A batch of documents returned earlier this year contained 184 documents marked as classified, including 25 marked as top secret.“The hypocrisy of folks in my party that spent years chanting, ‘Lock her up,’ about Hillary Clinton because of some deleted emails or – quote/unquote – ‘wiping a server,’ are now out there defending a man who very clearly did not take the national security of the United States to heart,” Kinzinger, who is retiring from Congress after this term, said on NBC’s Meet The Press. “And it’ll be up to [the US justice department] whether or not that reaches the level of an indictment.“But this is disgusting in my mind. And, like, no president should act this way, obviously.”It’s not yet clear whether Trump will face criminal charges in the matter. But during the 2016 presidential campaign that propelled him to the Oval Office, Trump and his Republican allies said his Democratic rival Clinton should be punished for her use of a private email server while she was serving as secretary of state.“Lock her up,” became a rallying cry at Trump rallies on the campaign trail. A US state department investigation ultimately found there was “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information”.The former justice department official who oversaw the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material, David Laufman, told Politico earlier this month that case and Trump’s were different.“For the department to pursue a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago tells me that the quantum and quality of the evidence they were reciting – in a search warrant and affidavit that an FBI agent swore to – was likely so pulverizing in its force as to eviscerate any notion that the search warrant and this investigation is politically motivated,” Laufman said.Trump has asked a federal judge to appoint a so-called special master who would determine whether materials that the FBI seized from his Florida resort can be used in any criminal investigation into him. The judge late Saturday issued an order indicating an openness to appointing a special master in the case, though that ruling is not final and called for a Thursday afternoon hearing to further consider the matter.Kinzinger is one of two Republicans on the US House committee investigating the deadly January 6 Capitol attack that Trump supporters staged in a desperate attempt to prevent the congressional certification of Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.The other Republican on the committee, the Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, recently lost her bid for re-election in a party primary against Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman.TopicsRepublicansDonald TrumpHillary ClintonUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Bernie Sanders rebukes GOP for backing corporate tax breaks but not student debt relief‘I don’t hear any of these Republicans squawking when we give massive tax breaks to billionaires, Vermont senator says Senator Bernie Sanders chided Republicans on Sunday for backing tax breaks for corporations and wealthy Americans while criticizing Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan.“Look, I know it is shocking … to some Republicans, that the government actually, on occasion, does something to benefit low income families and working people,” the progressive from Vermont said during an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News’s This Week. “I don’t hear any of these Republicans squawking when we give massive tax breaks to billionaires.””I don’t hear any of these Republicans squawking when we give massive tax breaks to billionaires.” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @GStephanopoulos that Pres. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan will benefit working families. https://t.co/bCe89FMKPb pic.twitter.com/691muFSDeL— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 28, 2022
Biden’s plan forgives $10,000 in debt for those who make under $125,000 per year. Those who receive Pell Grants are eligible for up to $20,000 in forgiveness. The White House estimates the plan will affect up to 43 million Americans. Republicans have criticized the measure as an unfair bailout for college-educated Americans at the expense of those who chose not to go to college or worked for years to pay off their loans. They have also said the measure will increase inflation, which some economists and Wall Street analysts dispute.“You can’t forgive that much debt and assume people won’t spend the money for other things – it’s gonna take $24bn that should have been coming into the federal government every year in payments and make that available for spending,” Senator Roy Blunt, a retiring Republican from Missouri, said on This Week.The White House has rebuked some congressional critics of the plan by pointing out that the members themselves had benefitted recently from loan forgiveness.Using its official Twitter account, the White House highlighted six Republican members of Congress who had between hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars forgiven in loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, a government relief program designed to stimulate the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Those loans were designed to qualify for forgiveness as long as they were used for permissible costs.“We’ve never hesitated to call out hypocrisy, and we’re not going to stop now,” White House spokesperson Alexandra LaManna said last week.TopicsBernie SandersUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Reporter Luke Mogelson: ‘I was surprised by the lunacy of the conspiracy theories in Michigan’ The New Yorker writer, whose new book follows the militarised rightwing protests in Michigan that prefigured the Capitol attacks, on extremism and the possibility of civil war

Read an extract from The Storm Is Here by Luke Mogelson
Luke Mogelson is a contributing writer for the New Yorker magazine, reporting from conflict zones, and the author of a 2016 short story collection, These Heroic, Happy Dead. In his mid-20s, he served for three years in the New York national guard. His new book, The Storm Is Here: America on the Brink, draws on nine months of reporting in the US in the run-up to the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021. He lives in Paris.How did the book come about?I hadn’t reported in the US for at least 10 years. I was living in France and had been covering the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. During that time, I had the impression that Americans felt quite insulated from the risk of civil conflict and societal collapse that those countries were experiencing. So when the early cracks started to show in the US, I was eager to go there and see how it would play out.Which cracks in particular?Early in the pandemic, in April 2020, when the first organised anti-lockdown demonstrations started to be held in Michigan, there were a lot of images going around the internet of men with assault rifles entering the state capitol in Lansing and yelling at lawmakers. As soon as that happened, I sent an email to my editor asking if I could go to Michigan. I spent time with militarised groups mobilising against the Democratic governor’s public health measures to control the virus. While I was there, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, so I spent three weeks there reporting on the protests and the riots. When I came back to Michigan, I was surprised to discover that the groups I’d been spending time with were now holding armed rallies in opposition to [Black Lives Matter] protests. Then you add the election, and 6 January, and many of the same people were storming the Capitol. Now, some of them have gotten into Michigan politics.When you first arrived in Michigan, were you surprised by some of the stuff you were hearing in Karl Manke’s barbershop?I was surprised by the extent of the conspiratorial thinking. The reactionary, angry, white, conservative mindset, I’m pretty familiar with – there’s plenty of it in my family and I’ve been around it my whole life. But I was surprised by the prevalence and just the lunacy of the conspiracy theories.Are things still escalating?Absolutely. I’m more concerned now than I was a year ago. On the political side, there was an opportunity after 6 January for the country and for Republicans to have a meaningful reckoning with rightwing extremism and the threat that it presented to the future of our democracy. Instead, conservative politicians made a conscious choice to minimise and distort what had actually happened. Beyond that, the rhetoric that’s been adopted by the right to characterise their political opponents has become so absolute that any compromise or engagement between these two halves of the country is basically impossible. Partisan politics has been defined now, for a large part of the country, as an almost cosmic struggle between good and evil.What are your expectations for the midterms in November?It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the overturning of Roe v Wade has an impact. But the Republicans have already nominated a lot of rightwing extremists in their primaries. And if they do manage to capture a significant number of seats, in states like Arizona and Michigan, it’s going to be a major problem going into 2024, because a lot of them will exercise some degree of influence over the way that the elections are conducted and certified.Is it outlandish to worry about civil war breaking out in the US?I don’t think it’s outlandish given that so many people – people with considerable influence and power – are calling for exactly that. But I think that the more imminent danger is more frequent and larger-scale eruptions of gun violence. For a lot of folks on the right, 6 January was emboldening. At the US Capitol, I heard more than one person say: “Next time, we’re coming back with guns.” We would be pretty foolish to assume that they’ll just choose not to. TopicsPolitics booksThe ObserverMichiganUS politicsUS Capitol attackfeaturesReuse this content More