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      Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson: I was asked to run for US president by multiple political parties

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      Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has revealed that multiple political parties approached him last year to see if he would run for US president, after a poll revealed 46% of Americans would support his campaign.Appearing as the first guest on Trevor Noah’s new Spotify podcast What Now?, the actor and former WWE wrestler said a 2021 poll of 30,000 American adults led to “the parties” contacting him to ask if he was interested in running at the end of 2022.“That was an interesting poll that happened and I was really moved by that,” Johnson said. “I was really blown away and I was really honoured. I’ll share this little bit with you: at the end of the year in 2022, I got a visit from the parties asking me if I was going to run, and if I could run.“It was a big deal, and it came out of the blue,” he added. “It was one after the other, and they brought up that poll, and they also brought up their own deep-dive research that would prove that should I ever go down that road [I’d be a real contender]. It was all very surreal because that’s never been my goal. My goal has never been to be in politics. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot about politics that I hate.”However, Johnson, who has described himself as a “centrist” and “political independent” and publicly endorsed US president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, has openly shared his interest in running in the past. In 2016 he told GQ: “I can’t deny that the thought of being governor, the thought of being president, is alluring.” A year later he told Variety the 2024 presidential campaign was a “realistic consideration”.His sitcom Young Rock even hinges around him running for US president in 2032, with Johnson playing his future self as he gives interviews about moments in his early life that structure every episode.Responding to the aforementioned poll in 2021, Johnson wrote on Instagram: “I don’t think our Founding Fathers EVER envisioned a six-four, bald, tattooed, half-Black, half-Samoan, tequila drinking, pick up truck driving, fanny pack wearing guy joining their club – but if it ever happens it’d be my honour to serve you, the people.”But last year he seemed to have changed his mind, telling CBS Mornings it was “off the table” because of his duties as a parent of three daughters, who are now aged 22, seven and five.“The most important thing to me is being a daddy, number one, especially during this time, this critical time in my daughters’ lives,” he said.On Noah’s podcast, Johnson said his job as a wrestler often took him away from his eldest daughter, Simone, “and I don’t want that for my little ones now”.“That was one of my primary discussions with the parties, who were ultimately like, ‘Yeah, but the other ones have done it like this’,” he added.Johnson didn’t rule out running in the future, telling Noah: “If that’s ultimately what the people would want, then of course I would consider it.” More

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      Renegade review: Adam Kinzinger on why he left Republican ranks

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      Adam Kinzinger represented a reliably Republican district in the US House for six terms. He voted to impeach Donald Trump over the insurrection and with Liz Cheney was one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee. Like the former Wyoming congresswoman, he earned the ire of Trump and the GOP base.A lieutenant colonel and air force pilot, Kinzinger read the terrain and declined to run again. In his memoir, he looks back at his life, family and time in the US military. He also examines the transformation of the Republican party into a Trumpian vessel. With the assistance of Michael D’Antonio, biographer of Mike Pence, he delivers a steady and well-crafted read.Kinzinger finds the Republicans sliding toward authoritarianism, alienating him from a world he once knew. On 8 January 2021, two days after the Trump-inspired coup attempt, he received a letter signed by 11 members of his family, excoriating him for calling for the president to be removed.“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!’ the letter began. “We were once proud of your accomplishments! Instead, you go against your Christian principles and join ‘the Devil’s army’ (Democrats and the fake news media).”The word “disappointment was underlined three times”, Kinzinger counts. “God once.”Elected in 2010 with the backing of the Tea Party, once in office, Kinzinger distanced himself from the Republican fringe. The movement felt frenzied. Hyper-caffeinated. He cast his lot with Eric Cantor, House majority leader and congressman from Virginia. “Overtly ambitious”, in Kinzinger’s view, Cantor also presented himself as “serious, sober and cerebral”. Eventually, Cantor found himself out of step with the enraged core of the party. In 2014, he was defeated in a primary.Cantor was too swampy for modern Republican tastes. Out of office, he is a senior executive at an investment bank.Simply opposing Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act wasn’t enough. With America’s first Black president in the White House, performative politics and conspiracy theories took over.Kevin McCarthy, deposed as speaker last month, earns Kinzinger’s scorn – and rightly.“I was not surprised he was ousted,” Kinzinger told NPR. “And frankly, I think it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”On the page, Kinzinger paints McCarthy as weak, limitlessly self-abasing and a bully. He put himself at the mercy of Matt Gaetz, the Florida extremist, prostrated himself before Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia extremist, and endured 15 rounds of balloting on the House floor to be allowed the speaker’s gavel – an illusion of a win.McCarthy behaved like “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”, Kinzinger writes. The California congressman even tried, if feebly, to physically intimidate his fellow Republican.“Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber,” Kinzinger remembers. “As [McCarthy] passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.”Apparently, McCarthy forgot Kinzinger did stints in war zones.Kinzinger also takes McCarthy to task for his shabby treatment of Cheney, at the time the No 3 House Republican. On 1 January 2021, on a caucus call, she warned that 6 January would be a “dark day” if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.McCarthy was having none of it. “I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference,” he said. “She speaks for herself.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.These days, McCarthy faces the prospect of a Trump-fueled primary challenge. But he is not alone in evoking Kinzinger’s anger. Kinzinger also has tart words for Mitch McConnell and his performance post-January 6. The Senate minority leader was more intent on retaining power than dealing with the havoc wrought by Trump and his minions, despite repeatedly sniping at him.When crunch time came, McConnell followed the pack. Kinzinger bemoans McConnell’s vote to acquit in the impeachment trial, ostensibly because Trump had left office, and then his decision to castigate Trump on the Senate floor when it no longer mattered.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger bristles, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.”Kinzinger devotes considerable space to his own faith. An evangelical Protestant, he is highly critical of Christian nationalism as theology and as a driving force in the Republican party. He draws a direct line between religion and January 6. Proximity between the cross, a makeshift gallows and calls for Mike Pence to be hanged was not happenstance.“Had there not been some of these errant prophecies, this idea that God has ordained it to be Trump, I’m not sure January 6 would have happened like it did,” Kinzinger said last year. “You have people today that, literally, I think in their heart – they may not say it – but they equate Donald Trump with the person of Jesus Christ.”In his book, Kinzinger echoes Russell Moore, former head of public policy of the Southern Baptist Convention: “Moore’s view of Christianity was consistent with traditional theology, which does not have a place for religious nationalism. Nothing in the Bible said the world would be won over by American Christianity.”Looking at 2024, Kinzinger casts the election as “a simple question of democracy or no democracy … if it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don’t think there’s any question I would vote for Joe Biden”.
      Renegade is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      What’s Left Unsaid review: Andrew Cuomo and the case for his defense

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      Andrew Cuomo resigned as governor of New York in August 2021, amid a blizzard of sexual harassment allegations. None were prosecuted. Against this backdrop, he smolders. Once a giant figure in the Democratic ranks, he is out of a job. He “died as he lived”, Lis Smith, a former adviser, wrote in Any Given Tuesday, her memoir published last year. Cuomo had “zero regard for the people around him and the impact his actions would have on them”.Enter Melissa DeRosa with What’s Left Unsaid, a full-throated defense of her own former boss. On the page and while promoting her book, Cuomo’s chief adviser and most senior aide generally wields a sledgehammer. Except when she doesn’t.“I don’t want to comment on Lis’s book,” De Rosa said, when asked by Vanity Fair. “We all lived through this in our own ways. We all had to cope with the fallout of it.”Subtitled My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis, DeRosa’s memoir is pocked with scenes of a marriage gone south, of trying to cope with Covid-19 and of general governmental strife. She punches hard. Her anger is white hot. Her book is deliberate and focused.She slams Cuomo’s accusers. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Kathy Hochul, Cuomo’s successor as governor, get it in the neck. Aides to James had sexual harassment-related problems of their own, DeRosa charges. She also calls out CNN and the New York Times for their own alleged deficits on that score.DeRosa has connections. She interned in Hillary Clinton’s office, when Clinton was a New York senator. She thanks Clinton for helping put steel in her spine. She gives a shoutout to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s close aide. DeRosa led New York operations for Barack Obama’s political action committee. She rose through the ranks of state government and Cuomo’s office. She charges Hochul with administrative and political ineptitude, echoing criticism, leveled by Nancy Pelosi, that Hochul cost the Democrats control of the US House by screwing up the New York redistricting process, handing Republicans seats.“The governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was,” Pelosi told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. But here, DeRosa can be myopic. According to Bill de Blasio, the former New York mayor, Cuomo was also at fault in the process that most observers say facilitated Republican gains. If a mere 89 more New Yorkers had been counted, the size of the state’s congressional delegation would have suffered no loss in size.“For God’s sake, if the state had invested in the census, could you have found 89 more people to count? Sure, easily,” De Blasio has said. “This was a lost opportunity by the state government to get the count right.”DeRosa acknowledges tensions between mayor and governor but takes De Blasio to task for his embrace of leftwing politics.“That meant staking out a position that actively opposed police presence,” she writes, blaming De Blasio for problems related to crime. She also calls him out for sidling up to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star in Congress, and mocks his presidential run to nowhere.DeRosa also deals with the fractious relationship between Cuomo and the White House of Donald Trump, for so long a New York fixture and a former client of the Cuomo family law firm, Blutrich, Falcone & Miller.In 2020, under Covid, New York lockdown policy put it at odds with the administration.“We’ve done polling, and you guys are in the wrong place on this,” a “smug” Jared Kushner is quoted as telling DeRosa, saying New York was out of sync with Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Florida.“We were in the middle of a pandemic, one that had already killed tens of thousands of people, and I was talking with President Trump’s top adviser … about polling in swing states,” DeRosa writes.In fall 2021, Ron DeSantis actively discouraged vaccination. The grim reaper had a field day on the governor’s front lawn. Florida came to surpass New York in fatalities, in absolute and relative numbers. According to the Lancet, Florida’s unadjusted death rate (per 100,000) was 416, for New York 384.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeRosa also attacks Trump for reneging on federal assistance to infrastructure projects. Why? Cuomo publicly criticized Trump. To quote DeRosa, “the president of the United States had lost his mind over four sentences in a convention speech.”Yet Cuomo has more in common with Trump than DeRosa acknowledges. It went beyond being “two tough guys from Queens, raised by larger-than-life fathers”, as the author puts it. Confronted with pushback over his decision in 2014 to disband an anti-corruption commission which he himself appointed, Cuomo bellowed: “It’s my commission. I can appoint it, I can disband it. I appoint you, I can un-appoint.”L’état, c’est moi.DeRosa pays tribute to family. In summer 2021, as Cuomo was brought crashing down, she repaired to her sister’s in-law’s place on Cape Cod, away from prying eyes.She also deals with friends – some of them now former. Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican congresswoman who become a top Trump toady, was a buddy and classmate. DeRosa “knew her as ‘Little Elise’”. Stefanik landed at Harvard, DeRosa at Cornell. DeRosa reports a heated discussion over same-sex marriage that left Stefanik shaken. DeRosa compared her to a segregationist.The fact that Stefanik called for Cuomo and his senior staff to resign probably triggered this trip down memory lane. Left unmentioned: Stefanik was one of 39 Republicans, and the sole member of House GOP leadership, to vote in favor of federal protection for same-sex and interracial marriage.Promoting her book, DeRosa was asked by Vanity Fair about Cuomo, karma and payback. She said: “I don’t like to think that we live in a world where the answer is, ‘Well, you got it because you deserved it.’”Vanity Fair’s headline? “Melissa DeRosa Isn’t Done Defending Andrew Cuomo”. She and her boss are not about to disappear.
      What’s Left Unsaid is published in the US by Sterling Publishing More

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      Bannon used Confederate code words to describe Trump speech, book says

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      The far-right Donald Trump ally and adviser Steve Bannon used Confederate code words linked to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to describe a speech by the former US president before his historic first criminal indictment, a new book says.On 6 March this year, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Trump took aim at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney then widely expected to bring charges over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, thereby making Trump the first former president ever criminally indicted.Trump told his audience: “I am your warrior; I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”In a forthcoming book, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, writes: “When I spoke with Bannon a few days later, he wouldn’t stop touting Trump’s performance, referring to it as his ‘Come Retribution’ speech.“What I didn’t realise was that ‘Come Retribution’, according to some civil war historians, served as the code words for the Confederate Secret Service’s plot to take hostage – and eventually assassinate – President Abraham Lincoln.”Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor. The president died the following day.Karl is the author of two bestsellers – Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal – about Trump’s rise to the presidency, time in the White House and defeat by Joe Biden.In his third Trump book, excerpted in the Atlantic on Thursday, Karl quotes from a 1988 book, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and Assassination of Lincoln.“The use of the key phrase ‘Come Retribution’ suggests that the Confederate government had made a bitter decision to repay some of the misery that had been inflicted on the south,” the authors write. “Bitterness may well have been directed toward persons held to be particularly responsible for that misery, and Abraham Lincoln certainly headed the list.”Bannon, Karl writes, “actually recommended that I read that book, erasing any doubt that he was intentionally using the Confederate code words to describe Trump’s speech.“Trump’s speech was not an overt call for the assassination of his political opponents, but it did advocate their destruction by other means. Success ‘is within our reach, but only if we have the courage to complete the job, gut the deep state, reclaim our democracy, and banish the tyrants and Marxists into political exile forever,’ Trump said. ‘This is the turning point.’”In Karl’s estimation, the “Come Retribution” speech “was a turning point for Trump’s campaign” for re-election.Trump began his 2024 campaign sluggishly but then surged to huge leads over his Republican party rivals in national and key-state polling, despite a charge sheet now totaling 91 criminal counts and two civil trials, one over his business practices and one concerning a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKarl writes: “The [federal] trial date for the charge of interfering in the 2020 election has been set for 4 March [2024]; for the hush-money case, it’s 25 March; for the classified-documents case, it’s 20 May.“As election day approaches and [Trump] faces down these many days in court, he will be waging a campaign of vengeance and martyrdom. He will continue to talk about what is at stake in the election in apocalyptic terms – ‘the final battle’ – knowing how high the stakes are for him personally. He can win and retake the White House. Or he can lose and go to prison.”Bannon is quoted as saying: “Trump’s on offense and talking about real things. The ‘Come Retribution’ speech had 10 or 12 major policies.”But, Karl writes, “Bannon knew that the speech wasn’t about policies in a traditional sense. Trump spoke about whom he would target once he returned to power.“‘We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers,’ Trump said. ‘We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House.“‘And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all.’” More

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      Liz Cheney calls new House speaker ‘dangerous’ for January 6 role

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      The new Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, is “dangerous” due to his role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former Wyoming Republican congresswoman and January 6 committee vice-chair Liz Cheney said.“He was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong,” Cheney told Politics Is Everything, a podcast from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “And I think that the country unfortunately will come to see the measure of his character.”She added: “One of the reasons why somebody like Mike Johnson is dangerous is because … you have elected Republicans who know better, elected Republicans who know the truth but yet will go along with the efforts to undermine our republic: the efforts, frankly, that Donald Trump undertook to overturn the election.”Johnson voiced conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s victory in 2020; authored a supreme court amicus brief as Texas sought to have results in key states thrown out, attracting 125 Republican signatures; and was one of 147 Republicans who voted to object to results in key states even after Trump supporters attacked the Capitol.The events of 6 January 2021 are now linked to nine deaths, thousands of arrests and hundreds of convictions, some for seditious conspiracy. Trump faces state and federal charges related to his attempted election subversion (contributing to a total 91 criminal counts) yet still dominates Republican presidential primary polling.Cheney was one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the House January 6 committee, which staged prime-time hearings and produced a report last year. In Wyoming, she lost her seat to a pro-Trump challenger. The other January 6 Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, chose to quit his seat.Like Kinzinger, Cheney has now written a memoir, in her case titled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. She has also declined to close down speculation that she might run for president as a representative of the Republican establishment – her father is Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary and vice-president – attempting to stop Trump seizing the White House again.Johnson ascended to the speakership last month, elected unanimously after three candidates failed to gain sufficient support to succeed Kevin McCarthy, who was ejected by the far-right, pro-Trump wing of his party.The new speaker’s hard-right, Christianity-inflected statements and positions have been subjected to widespread scrutiny.Cheney told Larry Sabato, her podcast host and fellow UVA professor: “Mike is somebody that I knew well.”“We were elected together [in 2016]. Our offices were next to each other, and Mike is somebody who says that he’s committed to defending the constitution. But that’s not what he did when we were all tested in the aftermath of the 2020 election.“In my experience, and I was very, deeply involved and engaged as the conference chair, when Mike was doing things like convincing members of the conference to sign on to the amicus brief … in my view, he was willing to set aside what he knew to be the rulings of the courts, the requirements of the constitution, in order to placate Donald Trump, in order to gain praise from Donald Trump, for political expedience.“So it’s a concerning moment to have him be elected speaker of the House.” More

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      Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover review – the billionaire is laughably grandiose at times

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      It is hard to take anyone very seriously when they use the phrase “the woke mind virus” with a straight face. But, increasingly, when it comes to Elon Musk, there is no other option. Is he a visionary? A hypocrite? The last defender of the first amendment? Or simply a bullied kid who got his own back by buying the global playground and trashing it? Opinions of Musk are as volatile and wide-ranging as the man himself.“When things are calm he seeks out storms,” says his biographer, Walter Isaacson. As this exhaustive documentary shows, when Musk acquired ownership and control of Twitter (subsequently rebranded X) in 2022, he certainly found one. The film works on several fascinating levels. It is a character study, a potted history of the last decade of American politics and also a detailed and disturbing exploration of how social media became a dysfunctional forum for the world’s grievances.The pandemic and the Trump presidency were the strongest accelerants in this process. For years, Twitter had attempted to negotiate a balance between allowing free expression and refusing to tolerate hate speech and overt disinformation. But what is a company to do when the president starts spreading verifiable falsehoods on its platform, at a time when those falsehoods have the potential to cost lives? Twitter’s response was to suspend Trump. Musk was, at the time, annoyed about the compulsory closure of his Tesla factories. So, in opposition to lockdown, an uneasy alliance was born.Who decides to suspend a president? In this case, people such as Yoel Roth, working in Twitter’s Trust and Safety department and about to become a lightning rod for Trumpite wrath. Interviewed at length, he is jittery, nervous and looks extremely young. He is also, in his measured way, defiant. Who are you, Roth is asked, to make this decision? “I’m no one,” he responds. “It shouldn’t be any one person’s decision” And there’s the nub of it. These people didn’t seek this power. They are essentially nerdy kids (although Roth did once call Trump “a racist tangerine” on Twitter, which probably didn’t help). He is right though. It shouldn’t be up to him alone. And it surely follows that it also shouldn’t be up to Jack Dorsey, or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.Musk, meanwhile, was spiralling. He was becoming a high-profile example of the way in which a person’s buy-in to a conspiracy theory often wedges the door open for others. In one tweet (“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”) he managed to insult transgender people, Covid victims and the integrity of medical science in the space of five words.Here, things get unnerving. Musk’s opinionated carelessness is, in the context of his status, extremely dangerous. The list of people harassed and threatened after being the target of his tweets grows as the film proceeds. This amounts to its own form of censorship: the scariest censorship of all – self-censorship. If you suspect that a billionaire with more than 160 million followers (many of them aggressively protective of him) will disapprove of a course of action, you might decide not to take that action. This principle has subsequently applied to everyone who might oppose Musk’s worldview – from politicians to journalists. By the time Musk’s acolytes were using The Twitter Files (a leak of information claimed to show collusion between government and social media companies) as a pretext for excoriating Joe Biden’s presidency, one thing had become clear: social media had warped our discourse by ostensibly liberating it.In its quiet, diligent way, the film is a noble response to this phenomenon. Stylistically and aesthetically, PBS documentaries typically resemble elongated news reports – no frills or fripperies, just reporting. In the context of our partial, bad-faith current news environment (nurtured, ironically, by Twitter), this feels admirably spartan and bracing – old investigative techniques, such as examining multiple perspectives and asking difficult questions of people on both sides of the argument, prove refreshing. Old-fashioned broadcasting might be one antidote to social media’s poisonous hysteria.But what of Musk himself? He is hilariously grandiose at times, but also seems easily bored – which might be our salvation. Early in the film, there is a clip following him at the launch of one of his spacecraft. If you can ignore the wild extravagance of these endeavours, it is oddly charming. He looks like a little boy bubbling with excitement about having a chance to play with the biggest and best toys ever made. While the regulation of social media will be a headache for years to come, dare we hope that, one day, Elon Musk might decide to return to his rockets?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion
      Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover aired on PBS America, which is available for catchup on Freeview Play and Amazon Fire TV. More

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      American Gun review: riveting and horrifying history of the AR-15

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      How long can we go between news cycles featuring assault rifles? According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 the answer is barely more than 12 hours. This year there have been 565 mass shootings in the US, including the latest horror in Maine – an average of nearly two a day. Those statistics make American Gun, a brilliant new biography of the AR-15, a particularly powerful and important book.Written by two fine Wall Street Journal reporters, Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the book is packed with characters and plot turns, from Eugene Stoner, the publicity-shy inventor who designed the first AR-15 in the 1950s, to the embrace of the gun by Robert McNamara and John F Kennedy, which led to its disastrous adoption as the chief weapon for army infantrymen in Vietnam.The design was shaped by a simple military adage: “Whoever shoots the most lead wins.” Every detail of how the weapon went from a “counter-insurgency” tool in south-east Asia in the 1960s to the most popular way to kill American schoolchildren in the 21st century is included in this harrowing narrative.Stoner worked with aluminum in one of the booming aerospace factories in California and became obsessed with how he could use new materials like plastic to make a lighter, more effective rifle. He also achieved the “holy grail that gun designers had pursued for generations: how to use the energy released from the exploding gunpowder … to reload the weapon”. Soon he had a patent for a “gas operated bolt and carrier system” with fewer parts than a conventional rifle, that would make his “smoother to operate and last longer”.The first third of American Gun is devoted to how Stoner teamed up with an entrepreneur, George Sullivan, who brought his invention to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, which set up a new division, ArmaLite, to produce the weapon. The main challenge they faced in selling the gun to the government was a centuries-old tradition of the army designing its own weapons. In 1957, the army announced it had chosen its own M-14 to replace the M-1, the workhorse of the second world war.But the inventors used the ancient rivalry between the services to get their foot in the door. They socialized with an air force general, Curtis LeMay, and got him to fire an AR-15 at a July 4 celebration in 1960. (Famously, LeMay was a model for the psychotic character played by George C Scott in Dr Strangelove.) LeMay was so impressed by the impact the gun had on watermelons 50 and 150 yards away, he decided the air force should buy 8,500 of them for its security teams.The new rifle took off inside the government with the arrival of John Kennedy in the White House and former Ford president Robert McNamara at the defense department, with a legion of whiz kids who wanted to invent new forms of warfare. McNamara was eager to prove he was smarter than the generals he inherited, so he overrode them and convinced Kennedy the army should adopt Stoner’s rifle instead of the M-14.One thing which especially impressed the earliest AR-15 users, including South Vietnamese troops, was the way its bullets became unstable inside a human body, tearing through “like a tornado, spiraling and tipping … obliterat[ing] organs, blood vessels and bones”. This of course was the same quality that would make the weapon the ultimate scourge of American schoolchildren five decades later.To mollify the generals, McNamara allowed the Pentagon’s technical coordinating committee to modify the gun before it went into mass production. Among other things, the committee changed the kind of ammunition used – with disastrous consequences. In Vietnam, the gun jammed repeatedly in combat. Vivid descriptions of how that jeopardized the lives of American soldiers are some of the most terrifying sections of American Gun.Dick Backus, a grunt who saw half of his 10-member squad mowed down, summarized the problem: “Our government sent young men to war with a rifle that didn’t shoot.” A Washington Post editorial reached a similar conclusion: “If the New Left were to set out to compose an insider’s indictment of the ‘military-industrial complex’, it could hardly match the report which a congressional committee has submitted” about the new rifle. Eventually, the army redesigned the weapon, and by 1975 it was working well again.The second half of American Gun highlights the role of Wall Street hedge fund owners in consolidating the gun industry and making the AR-15 the weapon of choice for insecure American males. Some of the most disgusting details are about an ad campaign proposed for readers of Maxim. The first ad was a picture of a gun pointed at the reader, with the caption “MINE IS SO DEFINITELY BIGGER THAN YOURS”. A website for the Bushmaster rifle read: “The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded.”Even more disgusting was the strategy of private equity owners who bought up large portions of the gun industry in the early 2000s. They made sure video games included their brand of rifle because it would “help create brand preference among the next generation who experiences these games, allowing [us] to win our fair share of these young customers”.There is so much more in this book, including the collapse of political will to reform gun laws. The authors also detail how fake the 10-year ban on assault rifles really was, because the bill authored by then California senator Dianne Feinstein contained so many loopholes, gun manufacturers just made tiny tweaks and kept producing weapons.And because Congress had made the AR-15 forbidden fruit, sales actually exploded. In 1995, Americans owned about 400,000 of them. “By the end of 2021,” McWhirter and Elinson write, “that number jumped to more than 20 million.”
      American Gun is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More