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      ‘American rebellion’: the lockdown protests that paved the way for the Capitol riots

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      ‘American rebellion’: the lockdown protests that paved the way for the Capitol riots In this extract from his book The Storm Is Here, New Yorker writer Luke Mogelson follows rightwing militias in Michigan protesting Covid restrictions in 2020. It was a lesson in the attitudes that led to the US Capitol attack the following January

      Read a Q&A with Luke Mogelson
      It started in Michigan. On 15 April 2020, thousands of vehicles convoyed to Lansing and clogged the streets surrounding the state capitol for a protest that had been advertised as “Operation Gridlock”. Drivers leaned on their horns, men with guns got out and walked. Signs warned of revolt. Someone waved an upside-down American flag. Already – nine months before 6 January, seven months before the election, six weeks before a national uprising for police accountability and racial justice – there were a lot of them, and they were angry.Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation, obliging a long list of businesses to close. Around 30,000 Michiganders had tested positive for Covid-19 – the third-highest rate in the country, after New York and California – and almost 2,000 had died. Most of the cases, however, were concentrated in Detroit, and the predominantly rural residents at Operation Gridlock resented the blanket lockdown.On 30 April, with Whitmer holding firm as deaths continued to rise, they returned to Lansing. This time, more were armed and fewer stayed in their cars. Michigan is an open-carry state, and no law prohibited licensed owners from bringing loaded weapons inside the capitol. Men with assault rifles filled the rotunda and approached the barred doors of the legislature, squaring off against police. Others accessed the gallery that overlooked the senate. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat from southern Michigan, tweeted a picture of a heavyset man with a mohawk and a long gun in a scabbard on his back. “Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” she wrote.The next day, a security guard in Flint [a town about 50 miles north-east of Lansing] turned away an unmasked customer from a Family Dollar. The customer returned with her husband, who shot the guard in the head. Later that week, a clerk in a Dollar Tree outside Detroit asked a man to don a mask. The man replied, “I’ll use this,” grabbed the clerk’s sleeve, and wiped his nose with it.By then, the movement that had begun with Operation Gridlock had spread to more than 30 states. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the capitol; in North Carolina, a protester hauled a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh; in California, a journalist covering an anti-lockdown demonstration was held at knifepoint; ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City, a man wrote on Facebook: “Bring your guns, the civil war starts Saturday… The time is now.”I was living in Paris in 2020, where, since late March, we had been permitted to go outside for a maximum of one hour per day, and to stray no farther than a kilometre from our homes. Most businesses were closed (except those “essential to the life of the nation”, such as bakeries and wine and cigarette shops). Few complained. I’d been a foreign correspondent for nearly a decade and during that time had not spent more than a few consecutive months in the US. The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognised. One viral photograph struck me as particularly exotic. It showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, mid-scream, his gaping mouth inches away from two officers gazing stonily past him, in the capitol in Lansing. What accounted for such exquisite rage? And why was it so widely shared?In early May, I took an almost-empty flight to New York, then a slightly fuller one to Michigan. My first stop was Owosso, a small town on the banks of the Shiawassee River, in the bucolic middle of the state. I arrived at Karl Manke’s barbershop a little before 9am. The neon Open sign was dark; a crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet made it to Owosso, and people sat in their trucks with the heaters running. Some, dressed in fatigues and packing sidearms, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, a civilian militia.A week before, Manke, who was 77, had reopened his business in defiance of Governor Whitmer’s prohibition on “personal care services”. That Friday, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared the barbershop an imminent danger to public health and dispatched state troopers to serve Manke with a cease-and-desist order. Over the weekend, Home Guardsmen had warned that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. Now it was Monday, and the folks in the parking lot had come to see whether Manke would show up.“He’s a national hero,” Michelle Gregoire, a 29-year-old school bus driver, mother of three, and Home Guard member, told me. She was 5ft 4in but hard to miss. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she waved a Gadsden flag at the passing traffic. Car after car honked in support. Michelle had driven 90 miles, from her house in Battle Creek, to stand with her comrades. She’d been at Lansing’s capitol on 30 April, and did not regret what happened there. When I mentioned that officials were considering banning guns inside the statehouse, she laughed: “If they go through with that, they’re not gonna like the next rally.”Manke appeared at 9.30am, to cheers and applause. He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet with the words “When in Doubt, Pray”. He climbed the steps to the front door stiffly, his posture hunched. When the Open sign flickered on, people crowded inside. Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century and at his current location since the 1980s. The phone was rotary, the clock analogue. An out-of-service gumball machine stood beside a row of chairs. Black-and-white photographs of Owosso occupied cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac. Also on display were flashy paperback copies of the 10 novels that Manke had written. Unintended Consequences featured an anti-abortion activist who “stands on his convictions”; Gone to Pot offered readers “a daring view into the underbelly of the 60s and 70s”.As Manke fastened a cape around the first customer’s neck, a man in foul-weather gear picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a wicker basket on the counter. “My father was a barber,” he told Manke. “He believed in everything you believe in. Freedom. We’re the last holdout in the world.” Manke nodded. “We did this in 1776, and we’re doing it again now.”Like the redbrick buildings and decorative parapets of Owosso’s historic downtown, there was something out of time about Manke. During several days that I would spend at the barbershop, I’d hear him offer countless customers and journalists subtle variations of the same stump speech. He’d lived under 14 presidents, survived the polio epidemic, and never witnessed such “government oppression”. Governor Whitmer was not his mother. He’d close his business when they dragged him out in handcuffs, or when he died, or when Jesus came – “whichever happens first”. “You’re getting a scoop,” he assured me when I introduced myself. “American rebellion.”Customers continued to arrive, and the phone did not stop ringing. Some people had travelled hundreds of miles. They left cards, bumper stickers, leaflets, brochures. A local TV crew squeezed into the shop, struggling to social-distance in the crush of waiting men, recording Manke with a boom mic as he sculpted yet another high-and-tight. Around noon, [rightwing political commentator and radio host] Glenn Beck called, live on air. “It’s hardly my country any more, in so many different ways,” Manke told him. “You remind me of my father,” Beck responded, with a wistful sigh.Manke seemed to remind everybody of something or someone that no longer existed. Hence the people with guns outside, ready to do violence on those who threatened what he represented. You could not have engineered a more quintessential paragon of that mythical era when America was great. One day at the barbershop, I was approached by a man clad from head to toe in hunting gear, missing several teeth. He hadn’t realised I was press. Manke had first come to the attention of the attorney general, the man informed me, because of a reporter from Detroit. He held out his arms to indicate the woman’s girth. “A big Black bitch.”In the 1950s, when Manke was in high school, Owosso was a “sundown town”: African Americans were not welcome. Like much of rural Michigan, it remained almost exclusively white. Detroit, an hour and a half to the south, was 80% Black. Because politics broke down along similar lines – less-populated counties voted Republican; urban centres, Democrat – partisan rancour in the state could often look like racial animus. While conservatives tended to ridicule any such interpretation as liberal cant, the pandemic had created two new discrepancies that were hard to ignore. The first was that Covid-19 disproportionately affected Black communities, in Michigan as well as nationwide. The second was that the people mobilising against containment measures were overwhelmingly white.On 30 April, the state representative Sarah Anthony had watched from her office across the street as anti-lockdown protesters filled the capitol lawn. Anthony had been born and raised in Lansing. In 2012, at the age of 29, she’d become the youngest Black woman in America to serve as a county commissioner. Six years later, a landslide victory made her the first Black woman to represent Lansing in the state legislature. As Anthony walked from her office to the capitol, she had to navigate a heavily armed white mob. She noticed a Confederate flag.A man waved a fishing rod with a naked Barbie doll – brown-haired, like Governor Whitmer – dangling from a mini noose. Men screamed insults. A sign declared: tyrants get the rope. Anthony was in Lansing’s House of Representatives when the mob entered the building. “It just felt like, if they had come through that door, I would’ve been the first to go down,” she recalled. We were in the rotunda, where she had insisted on giving me a tour. Her eyes brightened above her mask as she pointed out the starspeckled oculus in the apex of the dome 160ft above us. “It’s designed to inspire,” Anthony explained. Her reverence for the building had made 30 April that much more unsettling. A sanctum had been violated – its meaning changed.The structure was an equally potent symbol for the people whose cries she’d heard on the other side of the door, however. On the eve of the rally, Michelle Gregoire, the school bus driver and Home Guard member, had visited the capitol. Wearing a neon safety vest scrawled with “Covid-1984”, she and two friends filming on their phones had climbed a marble staircase to the gallery in the House of Representatives. A sergeant at arms informed them that the legislature was not in session, the chamber closed. “This is our house,” responded one of them, striding past him and sitting on a bench. The chief sergeant at arms, David Dickson, arrived and grabbed the woman by her arm, attempting to remove her.“You are not allowed to touch me!” the woman howled. Dickson turned his attention to Michelle. When she also resisted, he dragged her into the hallway, through a pair of swinging doors. “Stay out,” he told her. That night, the women posted their footage on Facebook, with the caption: “We are living in NAZI Germany!!!” Many of the protesters at the capitol the next day had watched the clips, including the man with the shaved head and blond beard in the viral photograph. He was not accosting the two officers in the image, it turns out – he was shouting at Dickson, who stood behind them, outside the picture’s frame. “You gonna throw me around like you did that girl?” the man was shouting. Other protesters called Dickson and his colleagues “traitors” and “filthy rats”.I left several messages for Dickson at his office, but he never called me back. Eventually, I returned to the capitol and found him standing guard outside the legislature. His hair was starting to grey, and beneath his blazer his collared shirt strained a little at the midriff. In 1974, Dickson had become the first Black deputy in Eaton County. He’d gone on to serve for 25 years as an officer in Lansing. After some polite conversation, I asked whether he thought that any of the visceral acrimony directed at him on 30 April might have been connected to his skin colour and to that of the white women he’d ejected the day before. Dickson frowned. “I don’t play the race card,” he said. Given his deprecating tone, I wondered if he’d been dodging my calls out of concern that I would raise this question. It was a question you could not really help raising in Michigan. To what extent was the exquisite rage behind the anti-lockdown fervour white rage? Dickson had no interest in discussing it. Of his encounter with Michelle, he told me: “I didn’t sleep for weeks. You don’t feel good about those kinds of things.” For others, the answer to the question was self-evident. After 30 April, Sarah Anthony acquired a bulletproof vest. Though she was an optimist by nature, her outlook had dimmed. “People are angry about being unemployed, about having to close their businesses – I get that,” she said. “But there are elements, extremists, who are using this as an opportunity to ignite hate. Hate toward our governor, hate toward government, and also hate toward Black and brown people. These conditions are creating a perfect storm.”The 30 April protest had been organised by a few men on Facebook calling themselves the American Patriot Council. Two and a half weeks later, they held a second demonstration, in Grand Rapids, at a plaza known as Rosa Parks Circle. This time, there were no Confederate flags. On the periphery, dozens of armed white men in tactical apparel surveilled the plaza. A few held flags with the Roman numeral III – a reference to the dubious contention that only 3% of colonists fought the British, and a generic emblem signifying readiness to do the same against the US government. (Americans who displayed the symbol and embraced the mentality that it represented often identified as “Three Percenters”.) Some were Home Guard. Others belonged to the Michigan Liberty Militia, including the heavyset man with the mohawk whose picture Dayna Polehanki had tweeted from the senate floor. He wore a sleeveless shirt and a black vest laden with ammunition. A laminated badge read Security. His habit of pressing a small gadget embedded in his ear with his index and middle fingers felt like an imitation of something he had seen onscreen. He appeared to be having an excellent time.A general atmosphere of cheerful make-believe was accentuated by the presence and intense engagement of actual children. One of them, materialising suddenly, interrupted my conversation with a Home Guardsman: “Excuse me, what kinds of guns are those?”We looked down to find a 10-year-old boy with a businesslike expression.“This is an AK-47,” the Home Guardsman told him.“With a flashlight or a suppressor?”“That’s a suppressor. This is a flashlight with a green dot.”“What pistol is that?”“That is a Glock. A 9mm.”The boy seemed underwhelmed.“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” he said.“Before you ever pick up a gun, you have to have your 100 hours of safety classes, right?” admonished the Home Guardsman, bristling a little.“I already have them.”The keynote speaker was Dar Leaf, a sheriff from nearby Barry County who had refused to enforce Governor Whitmer’s executive orders. Diminutive, plump and bespectacled, with a startling falsetto and an unruly mop of bright yellow hair, Leaf cut an unlikely figure in his uniform, the baggy brown trousers of which bunched around his ankles. Nevertheless, he promptly captivated his audience by inviting it to imagine an alternate version of the past – one in which Alabama officers, upholding the constitution, had not arrested Rosa Parks. To facilitate the thought experiment, Leaf channelled a hypothetical deputy boarding the bus on which Parks – in the real world – was detained. “Hey, Ms Parks,” said the sheriff, playing the part. “I’m gonna make sure nobody bothers you, and you can sit wherever you want.” The crowd cheered. “Thank you!” a white man cried out.In Alabama, during the 60s, sheriffs and deputies were often more ruthless than their municipal counterparts toward Black citizens. The sheriff Jim Clark led a horseback assault against peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and habitually terrorised African Americans with a cattle prod that he wore on his belt. Dar Leaf, though, saw himself as heir to a different legacy. According to him, the weaponisation of law enforcement to suppress Black activism arose from the same infidelity to American principles of individual freedom that in our time defined the political left. “I got news for you,” Leaf said. “Rosa Parks was a rebel.”And then, for those minds not yet wrapped around what he was telling them: “Owosso has their little version of Rosa Parks, don’t they? Karl Manke!” The equivalence was all the more incredible given that Leaf belonged to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA. The notion of the “constitutional sheriff” had been first promulgated by William Potter Gale, a Christian Identity minister from California. Christian Identity theology held that Europeans were the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; that Jews were the diabolic progeny of Eve and the serpent; and that all non-whites were subhuman “mud people”. In the 70s, Gale developed a movement of rural resistance to federal authority that expanded the model of white vigilantism in the south to a national scale, adding to the fear of Black integration the spectre of governmental infiltration by communists and Jews. He called his organisation Posse Comitatus, which is Latin for “power of the county”, and it recognised elected sheriffs as “the only legal law enforcement” in America. Posse Comitatus groups across the country were instructed to convene “Christian common-law grand juries”, indict public officials who violated the constitution, and “hang them by the neck”.Gale’s guidance on what offences merited such punishment was straightforward: any enforcement of federal tax regulations or of the Civil Rights Act. The CSPOA argued that county sheriffs retained supreme authority within their jurisdictions to interpret the law, and that their primary responsibility was to defend their constituents from state and federal overreach. In Grand Rapids, Sheriff Dar Leaf told the anti-lockdowners, “We’re looking at common-law grand juries. I’d like to see some indictments come out of that.” At the end of his speech, he called the Michigan Liberty Militia on to the stage. “This is our last home defence right here,” he said. Glancing at the heavyset man with the mohawk, Leaf added: “These guys have better equipment than I do. I’m lucky they got my back.”Later, while reviewing my videos from Rosa Parks Circle, I noticed a woman with a toothbrush moustache painted on her upper lip. Looking closer, I saw that she also wore a wig. It was brunette and wavy, intended to resemble Governor Whitmer’s hair. The woman wasn’t doing Hitler, in other words: she was doing Whitmer doing Hitler. She would probably have said that she was doing “Whitler”. While comparing pandemic measures to the atrocities of the Third Reich might have constituted its own kind of antisemitism, it also suggested how desperate many anti-lockdowners understood the situation to be. Nazis were a frequent topic of conversation in the barbershop – which, for Karl Manke’s supporters, represented a bulwark against the kind of creeping authoritarianism that had gradually engulfed Germany in the 1930s.Manke himself had a lot to say on the subject. His great-grandfather had immigrated from Germany, and Manke had grown up attending a Lutheran church with services in German. He often cited the victims of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale. “They would trade their liberty for security,” he told a customer one afternoon. “Because the Nazis said to them: ‘Get in these cattle cars, and we’re gonna take you to a nice, safe place. Just get in.’” “I would rather die than have the government tell me what to do,” the man in the chair responded. In mid-May, when Attorney General Nessel suspended his business licence, Manke exclaimed: “It’s tyrannical! I’m not getting in the cattle car!” But the longer I stayed in Michigan, the clearer it became that many anti-lockdowners sincerely placed mask mandates and concentration camps on the same continuum. “This has nothing to do with the virus,” a 68-year-old retiree told me outside the barbershop. “They want to take power away from the people, and they want to control us. We’re never gonna get our freedoms back from this if we don’t stop it now.” Given the stakes, violence was inevitable. “We’re a trigger pull away,” he said. “You’re gonna see it. We’re getting to the point where people have had enough.” We had to raise our voices to hear each other over a Christian family loudly singing hymns. But I had the sense that the retiree would have been yelling anyway. “You got storm troopers coming in here!” he shouted, referencing the officers who’d served Manke with a cease-and-desist order. “They weren’t cops, they were storm troopers! They deserve to wear the Nazi emblem on their sleeves.”When I went back inside, the phone was ringing. An anonymous caller wanted Manke to know that the national guard was on its way. “We need more people,” a customer in a pressed shirt announced. I’d met him earlier. A self-described “citizen scientist”, he’d given me a flier explaining that masks prevented the body from detoxifying and therefore did more harm than good. “If we get more people, we can stand them off,” he told Manke. “I would hope it’s a rumour,” Manke said. “Whatever it is, we could use more people.” “Well, if they come with a tank…”“Like Tiananmen Square!” the citizen scientist agreed. He lapsed into pensive silence, as if calculating how many people it would take to stand off a tank. Finally, a solution occurred to him: “The sheriff can stop them. The sheriff has the power to stop the National Guard, the federal government, everybody.”Someone looked up the number. Reaching a voice mail, the citizen scientist left a message: “Attention, sheriff. We need you over here at the barbershop. Please come here immediately to attend to a situation. We need your help here to defend our constitutional rights. Please hurry up.”After a while, it became apparent that neither the sheriff nor the national guard was coming. I went back outside. The family had stopped singing and was now reciting scripture. Psalm 2: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” The patriarch was joined by his son, daughter, and one-year-old grandson. “If there’s children, they won’t shoot tear gas,” he said. “That’s my hope, anyway – if we’re here, they back off.” “Who backs off?” I asked. “The Nazis.”TopicsUS Capitol attackThe ObserverUS politicsMichiganThe far rightPolitics booksextractsReuse this content More

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      Broken News review: fired Fox News editor has broadsides for both sides

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      Broken News review: fired Fox News editor has broadsides for both sidesChris Stirewalt helped call Arizona early and right, enraging Donald Trump. He has harsh words for the US media in general Late on 3 November 2020, Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden. In that moment, Rupert Murdoch’s US flagship upended Donald Trump’s re-election bid. Chris Stirewalt, a decade-long Fox News editor, was part of the team that put the state in the Democrat’s column. One insurrection and two months later, the network fired him.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreFox called it a “restructuring”. Others, including Stirewalt, shared a different view: he and more than a dozen others had been sacrificed to mollify Trump, Republicans and Fox’s fanbase.“I got canned after very vocal and very online viewers – including the then-president of the United States – became furious,” Stirewalt writes.According to Stirewalt, viewer anger had bled on to Fox’s bottom line: “The high ratings born of a presidential coup attempt in the midst of a global pandemic were never going to be sustainable, but the decline was sharper than industry experts expected.”The suits in the Fox C-Suite and elected Republicans demanded scalps. But Stirewalt would have the last word.This past June, he appeared before the January 6 committee. Under oath, he testified that Biden won and Trump lost. He also accused the ex-president and his minions of seeking to “exploit” a systemic “anomaly”.Specifically, during the 2020 election, in states like Arizona where same-day votes were counted before mail-in ballots, Republicans appeared to lead early on election night.Generally, Democrats tended to vote by mail or before election day while Republicans appeared at the polls on election day itself. On the night, as the hours pass, an apparent Republican advantage may evaporate, leaving little but a red mirage – and enraged viewers.Stirewalt’s book is both a critique of the media and a rebuke of his former employer and Trump. He spares no one. The Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough all fare poorly too.Substantively, he contends that much of the news business is about the pursuit of ratings. In part, the media inflames passions to monetize all that passes through its domain. No story is insignificant if it can double as clickbait.Stirewalt says Fox News failed to prepare Trump followers for the possibility that he would lose to Biden, a failure far beyond negligence. Fox News, he writes, stoked “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred”, in order to entice viewers to buy a $65 “Patriot” streaming service. These days, Fox is facing rather higher costs, battling defamation lawsuits arising from repeatedly airing Trump’s “big lie”.As for the Times, Stirewalt attacks the paper of record for using its 1619 Project, which casts American history in light of racism and slavery, as a vehicle to “upsell super-users from subscriptions to $35 books”. He also characterizes the 1619 Project as a “frontal assault on the idea of America’s founding as a new birth of freedom that it very plainly, if imperfectly was”.Stirewalt’s devotion to journalism spills on to the page. He places a premium on individual freedom and the classic liberal tradition. He is sympathetic to the intellectual underpinnings of liberalism and conservatism but casts a wary eye toward progressivism and nationalism. He takes both to task for fetishizing the collective will and distorting history.“Progressivism seeks to ameliorate the problems of humankind,” he writes “… but not necessarily within the framework of the American system or the humanistic concept of human rights.”By contrast, “nationalists believe that the appropriate aim of the federal government should always be the improvement of life for the greatest number of Americans, even when that comes at a cost to individual rights greater than a strict reading of the constitution would allow”.Steve Bannon, Sohrab Amari and JD Vance might disagree. Or not.Stirewalt also tackles the issue of the media and politicians being cowed by their bases. As Stirewalt sees it, the threat of the mob – real and virtual – leads people to avert their gaze from our national train wreck.He knocks “liberals who believe in free speech” but “look at their shoes when people are shouted down or fired for their beliefs”. Likewise, he takes to task those “seemingly normal members of Congress” who went “along with Trump’s efforts to steal a second term”.Not surprisingly, Stirewalt has little patience for performative politicians. He lumps together Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and pairs Marjorie Taylor Greene with Rashida Tlaib. He suggests such figures excel at triggering partisan outrage but lack Trump’s entertainment chops.Breaking History review: Jared Kushner’s dispiriting Trump bookRead more“They’re Showtime after 10pm,” Stirewalt cracks. “Trump was hardcore.”Stirewalt is unsparing in his takedown of Cruz. Broken News recalls the Texas senator’s groveling for Tucker Carlson, for referring to the January 6 insurrection as a “violent terrorist attack on the Capitol”. Cruz was a “quavery mass of regret and humiliation” on Carlson’s show, Stirewalt writes.Turning to Carlson, Stirewalt lets us know the Swanson frozen-food heir is loaded, yet at the same time rails against the “big, legacy media outlets”. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance in prime time. For good measure, Stirewalt reminds the reader that Carlson’s employer is a “multinational corporation led by an Australian billionaire who owns arguably the single most powerful news outlet in America”.Stirewalt offers no easy way out. He “urges us to question our own assumptions when consuming news” but does not assure us that doing so will actually lower the volume and temperature. He hopes we can see the other side of the political divide, but sounds uncertain. He provides plenty of food for thought.
      Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back is published in the US by Hachette
      TopicsBooksFox NewsUS television industryUS press and publishingTV newsUS politicsRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump is reading my memoir, Kushner claims of famously book-shy boss

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      Trump is reading my memoir, Kushner claims of famously book-shy bossSon-in-law and former adviser says ex-president has ‘given me some compliments on’ critically panned 500-page tome Donald Trump was notoriously averse to reading his briefing papers as president but according to Jared Kushner he has started reading Breaking History, his son-in-law and former adviser’s 500-page White House memoir.Breaking History review: Jared Kushner’s dispiriting Trump bookRead moreSpeaking to the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Wednesday, Kushner said: “When I gave it to him, he said, ‘Look, this is a very important book. I’m glad somebody wrote a book that’s really going to talk about what actually happened in the room.’ And he says, ‘I’m going to read it.’“So he started reading and he’s given me some compliments on it so far. And again, I hope he’s proud of it. I don’t know if he’ll like anything [in it].”Critics have not liked much in Kushner’s book. For the Guardian, Lloyd Green called it “a mixture of news and cringe” which “selectively parcels out dirt”. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner called the book “earnest and soulless”, saying “Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one”.“Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye-goo,” Garner wrote.Kushner has said he “read that review and … thought it was hysterical” and wanted “to hang it on my wall”. He also said sales had increased since the Times piece. The book does not appear on the Times bestseller list.Married to Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka, Kushner was a senior adviser through a presidency that ended in a deadly attack on Congress as Trump attempted to stay in power.Kushner said: “Sometimes he listened. Sometimes he didn’t but we had a lot of fun.”Whether Trump will finish Kushner’s book remains to be seen. The former president has never been known to be much of a reader – although his first wife, Ivana Trump, did say he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.At the time, Trump told Vanity Fair: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”TopicsBooksJared KushnerDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansTrump administrationPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book says

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      ‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysFormer New York mayor’s ex-wife describes breakdown Trump helped hide, years before mutual White House drama Depressed and drinking to excess after the failure of his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Rudy Giuliani secretly recovered at the Florida home of a close friend and ally – Donald Trump.Trump stash retrieved from Mar-a-Lago runs to hundreds of classified filesRead more“We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Giuliani’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, says in a new book.Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, by Andrew Kirtzman, will be published in September. The Guardian obtained a copy.In 2018, Giuliani told the New York Times he “spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing” after the primary a decade before. He has not otherwise discussed the period.Giuliani initially polled well in 2008 but won just one delegate and dropped out after placing fourth in Florida.The former mayor, Kirtzman writes, had “dreamed of becoming president from a young age, [but] blew his big moment when it arrived”.Judith Giuliani tells Kirtzman her husband fell into “what, I knew as a nurse, was a clinical depression”.“She said he started to drink more heavily,” Kirtzman writes. “While Giuliani was always fond of drinking scotch with his cigars while holding court at the Grand Havana or Club Mac, his friends never considered him a problem drinker. Judith felt he was drinking to dull the pain.”Giuliani has repeatedly denied having a drinking problem. But reports of his drinking while fulfilling his late-career role as Trump’s personal attorney are legion, whether regarding his behavior around reporters or in his presence at the White House on election night in 2020, when he exhorted Trump to declare victory before all results were counted.In testimony to the House January 6 committee, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, said Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” that night.Kirtzman’s reporting of Giuliani’s little-known 2008 stay at Mar-a-Lago – a period when in Giuliani’s ex-wife’s words he was both speaking to therapists and “always falling shitfaced somewhere” – also prefigures Giuliani’s current role in American public life, as a chaotic, picaresque Trump booster seemingly impervious to personal or political embarrassment.Trump is a lifelong teetotaler but also a longtime Giuliani ally. In 2008, Kirtzman says, as Giuliani was struggling even to get out of bed, Trump came to his rescue.The former mayor and his wife, Kirtzman writes, moved into a bungalow across the street from Mar-a-Lago but connected by a tunnel underneath South Ocean Boulevard, one of many little known passages and rooms beneath the expansive resort. The secret route allowed the couple to come and go from Trump’s home without the media knowing.As Kirtzman’s book nears publication, underground rooms at Mar-a-Lago are in the news, after the FBI searched some for classified material taken from the White House at the end of Trump’s four years as president.Giuliani eventually emerged from seclusion to appear on Saturday Night Live. He made “self-deprecating jokes about the failure of his campaign”, Kirtzman writes, but “his makeup barely hid a large scar above his right eyebrow”. According to Judith Giuliani, the scar was the result of a fall when getting out of a car.Kirtzman writes that Giuliani’s third wife “was known to exaggerate, and the depth of his depression [during his secret spell at Mar-a-Lago] is something that only she and Giuliani knew for certain”. But the author also quotes friends, among them the 2013 Republican New York mayoral candidate Joe Lhota, as saying the Giulianis were out of touch at the time in question.Kirtzman recounts Giuliani’s career from his days as a hard-charging New York prosecutor to two terms as a controversial mayor, the 9/11 attacks and Giuliani’s widely praised leadership in the immediate aftermath.The author also covers Giuliani’s business deals after leaving office and his failed Senate run against Hillary Clinton in 2000.04:35In Giuliani’s meltdown after the primary in 2008, Kirtzman finds the seeds of a relationship which ultimately saw Giuliani contribute to Trump’s first impeachment, over approaches to Ukraine for political dirt, and to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts resulted in Trump’s second impeachment, over the Capitol riot, and extensive professional and legal jeopardy for Giuliani.Rudy Giuliani informed he is target of criminal investigation in GeorgiaRead moreAs reported by the New York Times, Kirtzman ultimately describes a Giuliani associate’s failed request that Trump pardon his ally in the aftermath of the Capitol attack – and give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he was at it.Giuliani and Trump had “a compelling kinship”, Kirtzman writes. “The former mayor and the famous developer were two New York colossuses, dinosaurs from another time and place.” Judith Giuliani tells Kirtzman Trump and his own third wife, Melania Trump, “kept a protective eye” on their friends.Judith, Kirtzman writes, “contends that, eight years before Washington began talking about Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump in the same breath, the future president took the failed candidate under his protective wing at a vulnerable moment.“What’s clear is the two men’s friendship survived when a hundred other Trump relationships died away like so many marriages of convenience. Giuliani would never turn his back on Trump, much to his detriment.”TopicsBooksRudy GiulianiUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansPolitics booksBiography booksnewsReuse this content More

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      The Storm is Upon Us review: indispensable QAnon history, updated

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      The Storm is Upon Us review: indispensable QAnon history, updated Donald Trump welcomed the conspiracy at the White House. Its followers stormed Congress. Big Tech still seems not to care. Mike Rothschild’s book should sound the alarm for us allWhat is it that has hypnotized so many addled souls who devote themselves to decoding the Delphic clues of the QAnon conspiracy?QAnon’s ‘Q’ re-emerges on far-right message board after two years of silenceRead moreWhat they think they’re getting is “secret knowledge”, from “Q” and a bunch of other military insiders working for Donald Trump, about “the storm … a ringside seat to the final match” in a “secret war between good and evil” that will end with the slaughter of all “enemies of freedom”.In short, an irresistible mix of “biblical retribution and participatory justice”.The bad guys are “Democrats, Hollywood elites, business tycoons, wealthy liberals, the medical establishment, celebrities and the mass media … They’re controlled by Barack Obama” – a Muslim sleeper agent – and Hillary Clinton, “a blood-drinking ghoul who murders everyone in her way … and they’re funded by George Soros and the Rothschild banking family (no relation to the author)”.This updated edition of Mike Rothschild’s exhaustive history of the Q movement is more important than ever. Why? Partly because of the crucial role played by so many QAnon devotees in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 but mostly because Rothschild documents how much of this insanity has penetrated to the heart of the new Republican party, propelled by many of America’s most loathsome individuals, from Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr to Alex Jones, Michael Flynn and Roseanne Barr.As Rothschild writes of Trump’s first national security adviser, “Flynn’s family even filmed themselves taking the ‘digital soldier oath’… part of what would become a total enmeshment between members of the Flynn family and QAnon.”In the two years before the 2020 presidential election, “nearly 100 Republican candidates declared themselves to be Q Believers” while Trump “retweeted hundreds of Q followers, putting their violent fantasies and bizarre memes into tens of millions of feeds”.Asked about a movement which has repackaged most of the oldest and harshest racist and antisemitic conspiracies for a new age, Trump gave his usual coy endorsement of the behavior of America’s most damaged internet addicts.“I don’t know much about the movement,” he mumbled, “other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”In winter 2021, as the Omicron variant sent Covid cases skyrocketing, “QAnon promoters were among the most visible anti-vaccine advocates pushing out lies and conspiracy theories” to “dissuade people from getting vaccinated”.As with so many of QAnon adherents’ positions, the message was “both clear and completely contradicted by the available evidence: they believed the pandemic was over and any mandates related to vaccines or masks were totalitarian control mechanisms that were actually killing people”.More than anything else, this is the latest horrific confirmation of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently described as “the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached”.Like so many other ghastly conspiracies of recent decades, especially the blood libel that the Sandy Hook massacre was a staged event in which no one was actually killed, QAnon was propelled at warp speed by a combination of the incompetence and greed of all the big-tech big shots: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.Rothschild describes the usual futile internet game of Whac-A-Mole.Reddit “abruptly banned the 70,000-member r/Great Awakening board because members had started harassing other users” and had released the personal information “of at least one person they incorrectly claimed to be a mass shooter”.No matter: Q followers just migrated to Twitter and “closed Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members … Just in 2018, Q believers shared Q YouTube videos over 1.4m times, and drove hundreds of thousands of shares to Fox News, Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit”.By 2019, “Trump was routinely retweeting QAnon-promoting accounts.” By the 2020 election, “Trump had retweeted hundreds … and was regularly sharing memes created by the movement”.When Twitter and Facebook finally started “cracking down on Q iconography in the summer of 2020”, much of the movement just moved on to Instagram. Amazon and Etsy joined in the fun with books and merchandise and there were even “Q apps on the Google Play Store”.‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theoristsRead moreQ’s legacy includes what now looks like the permanent deformation of the Republican party. A December 2020 poll by NPR/Ipsos found about a third of Americans believed in a shadowy “deep state” and a robust 23% of Republicans “believed in a pedophilic ring of Satan-worshiping elites”.Rothschild ends by asking behavioral experts if there is anything the rest of us can do to help those who have gone far down this wretched rabbit hole. They say the only effective solution is a complete “unplugging” from the internet.Every time I read another book like this one, I’m increasingly inclined to the idea that this could be the only road back to sanity for all of us.
      The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is published in paperback in the US by Melville House
      TopicsBooksQAnonThe far rightPolitics booksUS politicsSocial mediaInternetreviewsReuse this content More

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      Biden bounces back: Inside 19 August Guardian Weekly

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      Biden bounces back: Inside 19 August Guardian Weekly Joe Biden rides high. Plus, 75 years since the Partition of India
      Get the Guardian Weekly delivered to your home address Joe Biden’s political capital is riding high after a key plank of his legislative programme came to fruition. But the US president has greeted this “hot streak” in his usual quiet fashion. For his predecessor, it was a decidedly rough week after his home was raided by the FBI, looking for official documents that Donald Trump had held on to after his presidential term had ended. The reaction was a typical explosion of rage and accusation. David Smith, our Washington bureau chief, follows this compare-and-contrast theme to see which of the two men, who at this juncture still look likely to face each other again in the 2024 presidential election, came out on top.We report on two anniversaries in one region this week as Monday marked 75 years since the Partition of India, as well as a year since Afghanistan returned to Taliban rule. Our world affairs editor, Julian Borger, examines the extent to which Pakistan and India are still scarred by a final, brutal colonial flourish that divided communities, while Stefanie Glinski’s photo essay from Kabul focuses on how women’s rights have been eroded in the past year.The shocking news of the stabbing of Salman Rushdie reminded the world of the importance of free speech and how the efforts of ideological fanatics to curb it must be resisted. As Margaret Atwood writes on our Opinion pages, attacks on writers are a cheap populist distraction, while on the news pages we look at how Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses triggered hatred against him.Leading our features section this week is a story about a reversal in reputation. Peru-based writer Dan Collyns explains how Bolivian tin baron Moritz Hochschild, had been viewed as an exploitative oligarch until the discovery of a cache of papers revealed his role in saving thousands of Jews from Nazi Germany and how he used his power to overcome antisemitism in the ruling elites. And then we take a full and frank look at the growing popularity of naturism in Britain. The photographs are necessarily coy, with artfully placed props, but writer Sally Howard takes the pastime as seriously as its practitioners. We hope you enjoy this week’s issue.Get the magazine delivered to you at homeTopicsUS politicsInside Guardian WeeklyDonald TrumpJoe BidenSalman RushdieFreedom of speechIndiaAfghanistanReuse this content More

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      Breaking History review: Jared Kushner’s dispiriting Trump book

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      Breaking History review: Jared Kushner’s dispiriting Trump book The former president’s son-in-law has written a predictably self-serving and selective memoir of his time in the White HouseThe House January 6 committee hearings depict Donald Trump as eager to storm the Capitol. He knew the rally held in his name included armed individuals. When rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, Jared Kushner’s father-in-law remarked: “He deserves it.”The Big Lie review: Jonathan Lemire laments what Trump hath wroughtRead moreIn response to a plea from Kevin McCarthy, the 45th president questioned the House Republican leader’s devotion. The mob invaded Congress. Trump sat back and watched.Kushner has not fared well either. In testimony to the panel, he has derided Pat Cipollone as a “whiner” and described deigning to exit the shower to take a call from a panicked McCarthy. On the screen, Kushner drips hauteur, empathy nonexistent. It’s not a good look.Then comes Breaking History, Kushner’s White House memoir. Its sits at the intersection of spin, absolution and self-aggrandizement.“What is clear to me is that no one at the White House expected violence that day,” Kushner writes of January 6. Cassidy Hutchinson says otherwise.Kushner adds: “I’m confident that if my colleagues or the president had anticipated violence, they would have prevented it from happening.” DC police tell a different story.Kushner rebuffed early entreaties from Marc Short, the vice-president’s chief of staff, to end Trump’s attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden’s win.“You know, I’m really focused on the Middle East right now,” Kushner replied. “I haven’t really been involved in the election stuff since Rudy Giuliani came in.”In the aftermath of January 6, White House morale was at a nadir, according to Kushner. A second impeachment loomed. Kushner told staff to stay the course.“You took an oath to the country,” he recalls. “This is a moment when we have to do what’s right, not what’s popular. If the country is better off with you here, then stay. If it doesn’t matter, then do what you want.”That sales pitch sounds canned. Those who had served in the military found the spiel stale and grating.In Kushner, Inc, the author Vicky Ward described Kushner’s earlier efforts to persuade Mark Corallo to join the White House staff. Corallo was once in the army and did a stint at the Department of Justice too.After he said no, Kushner asked: “Don’t you want to serve your country?”Corallo replied: “Young man, my three years at the butt end of an M-16 checked that box.”Trump dodged the draft for Vietnam. When his brother, Fred Jr, accepted a commission in the air national guard, he met with his family’s scorn. In contrast, Mike Pence’s son, the Biden boys, Steve Bannon: all wore a uniform.In Breaking History, Kushner selectively parcels out dirt. He seeks to absolve his father for recruiting a sex worker to film her tryst with William Schulder, Charlie Kushner’s brother-in-law. At the time, Schulder, his wife, Esther, (Charlie’s sister), and Charlie were locked in battle over control of the family real estate business.Kushner explains: “Billy’s infidelity was an open secret around the office, and to show his sister Esther what kind of man she had married, my father hired a prostitute who seduced Billy.”Schulder and Esther were also talking to the feds.The names of two Trump paramours, Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, and Karen McDougal, the Playboy model, do not appear in Kushner’s book. Then again, as Trump once said, “When you’re a star … you can do anything.” For Trump and Kushner, rules are meant for others.Breaking History comes with conflicting creation stories. In June, the New York Times reported that Kushner took an online MasterClass from the thriller writer James Patterson, then “batted out” 40,000 words of his own.The Guardian reported that Kushner received assistance from Ken Kurson, a former editor of the New York Observer who was pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges but then pleaded guilty after being charged with spying on his wife. Avi Berkowitz, a Kushner deputy who worked on the Abraham Accords, and Cassidy Luna, an aide married to Nick Luna, Trump’s White House “body man”, were also on board.Breaking History says nothing about Patterson but gives shout-outs to Kurson, Luna and Berkowitz: “From the inception of this endeavor, Ken’s brutally honest feedback and inventive suggestions have made this a better book.”Kushner rightly takes pride in the Abraham Accords, normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. In the process, he provides backstory for Trump’s frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu.Israel’s then-prime minister’s earned a “fuck him” after he hesitatingly embraced Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, seeking to extract maximum concession without grace or reciprocity. What Netanyahu craved but never received was American approval of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Here, Breaking History adds color to Trump’s Peace by Barak Ravid.According to Ravid, David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, was close to Netanyahu. He sat in on Israeli government meetings until he was tossed out by cabinet members. Ravid also calls Friedman “flesh of the settlers’ flesh”.Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policyRead moreEnter Kushner. “Friedman had assured Bibi that he would get the White House to support annexation more immediately,” he says. “He had not conveyed this to me or anyone on my team.”Things grew heated. “You haven’t spoken to a single person from a country outside of Israel,” Kushner said. “You don’t have to deal with the Brits, you don’t have to deal with the Moroccans, and you don’t have to deal with the Saudis or the Emiratis, who are all trusting my word and putting out statements. I have to deal with the fallout of this. You don’t.”One Trump veteran described Breaking History to the Guardian as “just 493 pages of pure boredom”. Not exactly. Kushner delivers a mixture of news and cringe. He does not extract Trump from his present morass. On Wednesday, Kushner’s father-in-law invoked the fifth amendment. Only Charlie Kushner got the pardon. A devoted child takes care of dad.
      Breaking History: A White House Memoir is published in the US by HarperCollins
      TopicsBooksJared KushnerTrump administrationDonald TrumpUS politicsPolitics booksRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Truth, courage, resilience’: Biden hails Salman Rushdie after attack

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      ‘Truth, courage, resilience’: Biden hails Salman Rushdie after attackPresident says author stands for ‘essential, universal ideals’ and ‘the ability to share ideas without fear’ A day after Salman Rushdie’s stabbing in western New York, Joe Biden on Saturday issued a statement hailing the author as standing “for essential, universal ideals”.“Truth. Courage. Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear,” the president’s statement added about Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after a former leader of Iran put out a call for the writer’s death over one of his novels. “These are the building blocks of any free and open society. And today, we reaffirm our commitment to those deeply American values in solidarity with Rushdie and all those who stand for freedom of expression.”Biden also said he and Jill Biden offered prayers to Rushdie, and he thanked those who came to the writer’s aid after the stabbing, which left Biden “shocked and saddened”.Rushdie, 75, was at a literary festival hosted by the Chautauqua Institution to speak about how important it was for the US to give asylum to exiled writers when he was stabbed.Authorities allege Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, rushed on stage and knifed Rushdie repeatedly before being tackled by spectators, institution staffers and police providing security.Rushdie suffered three stabs wounds to the right front of his neck, another four to his stomach, one each to his right eye and chest, and a cut to his right thigh, the local district attorney, Jason Schmidt, said Saturday.A helicopter crew flew Rushdie to a hospital in nearby Erie, Pennsylvania. He remained hospitalized on Saturday, with his liver damaged, nerves in his arm severed and at the risk of losing an eye, according to his literary agent.New York officials have charged Matar with attempted murder as well as assault on a man who was sharing the stage with Rushdie and suffered a relatively small facial wound during the stabbing. Matar has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.Investigators haven’t said why they believe Matar may have wanted to kill Rushdie. But at a preliminary court hearing on Saturday, the local district attorney alluded to the fatwa – or decree – calling for his life that late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put out in 1989.The fatwa – well before Matar was born – was in retribution for Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Many Muslims interpreted the Indian-born author’s book as blasphemous because it included a character they found insulting to the prophet Muhammad, the founder of their faith.Iran’s government has since tried to distance itself from the fatwa, but with the help of religious extremists, an accompanying bounty was increased in recent years to more than $3m.Matar’s social media activity reportedly reflects an admiration of Iran’s government as well as Islamic extremism.Rushdie lived in hiding and under police protection for years after the fatwa. But more recently he had been living openly in New York, which Biden’s statement hailed as “a refusal to be intimidated or silenced”.Biden – whose administration is trying to re-enter a nuclear deal with Iran – also said Rushdie had demonstrated “insight into humanity with his unmatched sense for story”.TopicsUS newsSalman RushdieJoe BidenUS politicsIranReuse this content More