Documentary films

Subterms

    Latest story

    188 Shares139 Views

    ‘His ego will not accept defeat’: the story behind Trump’s attempt to steal an election

    by

    By now, 6 January 2021 has so thoroughly saturated the American political consciousness – a single date conjuring up images of the once unthinkable, mentioned every day in news about criminal court cases, the future of democracy and Donald Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign – that you could argue we are used to it. Election denialism has become a feature, not a bug, of a major political party for nearly four years. The fact that Trump, when given the opportunity by ABC moderators to distance himself from efforts to discredit the 2020 election during this month’s presidential debate, still refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimate victory is no longer surprising, though we are also inured to shock.But a new HBO documentary argues, through forensic chronological detail and, perhaps ironically, the testimony of Republican election officials and former members of Trump’s administration, for remembering just how beyond the pale attempts to subvert the 2020 election were. As recounted in Stopping the Steal, a new film from the Leaving Neverland director, Dan Reed, the period between election night 2020 and 6 January 2021 was a series of genuinely shocking, potentially devastating opportunities for democratic disaster that often came down to clashes between obscure, local Republican officials and the president of the United States. January 6, in fact, “isn’t the scary bit”, Reed said. “The really scary bit is all the machinations that happened before. Because had they succeeded, the knock-on effect would have been to just gum up the system.“Step by step, you can see that enough uncertainty was being injected into the system, and enough small gains were being made, to result in potentially a cataclysmic outcome.”Though Trump may deny any responsibility for January 6, his efforts to undermine the American electoral process and discredit the result in 2020 began the night of the election, before any network had even called it for Biden. At 2.30am, after news networks projected a Biden win in the crucial swing state of Arizona, Trump held an impromptu press conference in which he falsely claimed: “Frankly, we did win this election.” What happened next is a matter of real-time journalistic record, playing out over several weeks and relived in Stopping the Steal by the people who were there: administration pressure on election officials in Arizona and Georgia to support evidence-free claims of fraud or, in one infamous Trump phone call, to find him “11,780 votes”; activation of misinformation channels and true believers, who latched on to claims of fraud, harassed election officials and showed up outside county offices armed with AR-15s; a media campaign by Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and others bringing fringe legal “theories” into the mainstream; and finally the legitimization of crackpot legal theories to hijack the arcane electoral college, culminating in Trump’s January 6 rally.Stopping the Steal synthesizes these many episodes, through the perspectives of the officials – the then attorney general, Bill Barr; the Maricopa county supervisor, Clint Hickman; the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger; the Georgia election operations manager, Gabriel Sterling – who worked to prevent the steal by simply doing their jobs. The framing offers “a story told by people who love Trump, but who love democracy more, who love the institution more”, said Reed – mostly, Republicans who “held the line and who came under extraordinary pressure”.By their own admission in Stopping the Steal, these officials would have entertained evidence of voter fraud, even celebrated it, had there been any. “I had every motivation,” says Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s former speaker of the house, in the film. But there wasn’t – and Trump knew it. “He knows he lost,” says Stephanie Grisham, a Trump campaign and White House official for six years. “But he’s a narcissist and his ego will not accept defeat. And when you have people who will so willingly come around you and tell you you didn’t lose and the things you want to hear … that enables him to double down and triple down.”So he tripled down, with the help of (seemingly) true believers, some of whom also appear in the film – Jacob Chansley, also known as the QAnon Shaman, and Marko Trickovic, who spread numerous conspiracy theories about votes being stolen or discounted. “The guys on the grassroots level, I think they really believe,” said Reed. “I don’t think they have any doubt that the election was stolen, because they inhabit a universe in which that is a given.”Reed, who also recently performed a similar forensic analysis on January 6 called Four Hours at the Capitol, maintains that including the perspective of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement does not platform its beliefs; if anything, it puts the alternate universe of the “stolen” 2020 election in starker relief to the facts. “Whether you think they’re sincere or insincere, they’re protagonists in this drama,” he said. “It’s always good and fair to hear from them, and give them a chance to express what they have to say in a coherent way.View image in fullscreen“I presume my audience is intelligent,” he added. “I presume that they’re smart enough to know the difference between someone who’s indulging wish fulfillment or embracing a fantasy, and other people who are doing it for more cynical reasons.”Stopping the Steal ends with January 6, and makes no presumptions about what will happen in November if Trump wins or, perhaps just as distressingly, if he refuses to lose again, which some Republicans are already preparing for. “I’m not a political pundit,” said Reed. “I made the film because I want it to be a timeless film, because it marks a turning point in the way that we do elections. Now we have an option of: the Republicans won, the Democrats won, or someone stole it. We never had that option. That narrative didn’t exist before.“The blueprint is there, the playbook is there – why would it be different this time, if Kamala Harris wins?”The day-by-day recounting of how the votes in 2020 were counted, and then protected – in nondescript county buildings, secretary of state offices, board meetings and eventually the US Congress – only underscores that a democracy is only as strong as its most obscure, smallest offices, whose character can make the difference between business as usual and a steal. “The functioning of democracy depends on people who buy into the idea that it should be fair,” said Reed. “If the system isn’t populated with people who embrace the basic idea of it, that it should be fair and everyone gets their fair shot, then the system no longer works.”Stopping the Steal, in revisiting the timeline largely through Republicans’ first-person narratives – it was not Democratic officials that Trump personally called – acts as a “non-partisan” review of the facts, “the look back that we can all share”, said Reed. The election in November will come down to how many people vote, where they vote, and for whom. But it will also be determined by “the remote gearboxes and the little bits of democracy you can’t see”, he said. “And that’s what we need to look out for. That’s what we need to shine a light on this time.”

    Stopping the Steal is now available on Max in the US. In the UK, Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose is on Channel 4 on 17 September and 18 September at 9pm. More

    More stories

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Do you have contempt for my views?’ How a leftwing film-maker and a Republican came together

      by

      “Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show but there is no real strength there.”It was no surprise to hear such rhetoric cheered to the rafters at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the words were not spoken by a Democrat. They came from the mouth of a stranger in a strange land: the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger.It was the latest example of how the Trump era has created strange bedfellows. The former first lady Michelle Obama hugging ex-president George W Bush. Liberal audiences in Washington DC standing to applaud the arch conservative Liz Cheney. Even Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has earned grudging praise for defying his boss when it mattered most.But there are few odder couples than Kinzinger and Steve Pink, a leftwing Hollywood film director who aligns himself with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. They came together to make The Last Republican, a debut documentary by Pink that follows Kinzinger’s year of living dangerously as a Never Trumper on Capitol Hill. It premiered at the Toronto film festival last week.The film opens with Kinzinger expressing his and his wife’s doubts about the project and telling Pink: “I recognise that you have contempt for what I believe, like, in terms of my political viewpoints. I think in any other situation you probably would be protesting my office. You’re just so far left.”Pink objects that is kind of mean. Kinzinger asks: “Do you have contempt for my views, Steve?”We do not hear Pink’s reply. But in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles, the 58-year-old elaborates: “When it comes to strictly politics, I wouldn’t say I hold them in contempt although, when I’m feeling belligerent, I do hold them in contempt because I have very deeply opposing views.“It was kind of extraordinary he took a risk with me as a film-maker because he says in the film I could make him look stupid and I could just do a hit piece. I was surprised by that and I was like, OK, I realise that, but who we are to each other despite our opposing political views is maybe more important than our political views themselves.”So why did Kinzinger agree to the project? The answer is as simple as it is unexpected. His favourite film, the 2010 sci-fi comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, was directed by Pink. They also both hail from Illinois.Pink adds: “I’m like, if you think I have contempt for your views, why did you choose me as a film-maker? He’s like, Hot Tub Time Machine is what sold me, and I was like, well, that’s good logic. I don’t know if I would have done that if I were you but we had common ground. Having a shared sense of humour is a great foundation to have more difficult conversations down the road, for sure.”Kinzinger grew up with cultural touchstones such as Ronald Reagan, Rocky and Red Dawn. The former air force pilot, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was first elected to Congress in 2010. At first he was a loyal Republican; later Kevin McCarthy, destined to be speaker of the House of Representatives, offered to officiate Kinzinger’s wedding.View image in fullscreenBut Kinzinger broke from McCarthy, and the party, after the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. He and Cheney were then the only two Republicans who joined the House committee to investigate the January 6 attack.Both paid a price for refusing to submit to the cult of Trump and Maga (Make America great again). Kinzinger lost friends, was turned into a pariah by his own party and targeted by extremists and trolls with death threats. He did not seek re-election and formed a political organisation, Country First, to back anti-Trump candidates.Pink, whose documentary follows Kinzinger during his final year in office, comments: “That was my initial reason for wanting to make the film: here’s a guy whose political views I oppose who stood up against his party and Donald Trump in the wake of January 6 to take a principled stand in defence of our democracy in the defence of our constitution.“I thought that was a very brave thing to do. He sacrificed a lot. He had a pregnant wife at the time. He himself will tell you that he was shocked that he lost all of his friends and his family and the fact that he got thrown out of his own political party.”He adds: “He felt like part of your job description as a legislator, as a congressperson in our country is to uphold and defend the constitution. That’s the oath you take and so when he saw everyone around him being absolutely comfortable with violating that oath, it was absolutely shocking to him and kind of devastating and he was very isolated very quickly.”Perhaps the truly shocking thing is not that Kinzinger and a handful of others have dared to make a stand, but that so many members of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan have sold their political souls and capitulated? When the chronicles of the Trump era are written there will be a special place in infamy for enablers such as Pence, McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, Elise Stefanik, Sean Spicer and many others.Pink observes: “It is more shocking and it’s more infuriating and Adam talks about that as well. He’s actually more furious with the people who remain silent and have just gone along with this thing. He finds that deeply shocking and deeply troubling. There’s no question about it.”The film-maker himself was taken aback by the high stakes when Kinzinger sat with his congressional staff mapping out his final 14 months in office. He could have pursued all kinds of legislation but said instead his priority was the preservation of democracy – and that the history books would look kindly on that.“I found that to be a very shocking thing to say. Wait, so your legislative agenda is democracy preservation? I didn’t think that was on the table. I thought it was about safer streets, less government regulation, something legislative? But his focus was going to be democracy preservation. That was a terrifying moment for me that it was even a question in a staff meeting.”Pink gained access to the January 6 committee hearings on Capitol Hill and chronicles how they faced much scepticism at first. The headline of a David Brooks column in the New York Times declared: “The Jan 6 Committee Has Already Blown It,” before the first gavel had been wielded. In fact the sessions made riveting theatre for those in the room and compelling television for those at home.Kinzinger offers an inside track on how it all came together, what he thought of his colleagues on the panel and how a text message from his wife informed his public remarks, bringing him close to tears. Pink says: “It was quite a moment for Adam and all the committee members to have worked as hard as they did and to be able to successfully get the message out, which clearly helped speed up the justice department’s investigation into the matter.”But there was backlash. The Last Republican plays some of the chilling and ugly voicemails that Kinzinger received because of the stand he made. One says: “You little cocksucker. Are you Liz Cheney’s fag-hag? You two cock-sucking little bitches. We’re gonna get ya. Coming to your house, son. Ha ha ha ha!” Others describe Kinzinger as “a piece of shit” and a “traitor”.A company provides 24-hour security at Kinzinger’s family home. He explains to Pink with a rueful laugh: “People wanna kill me so, you know, it sucks, right?It is a stark reminder of the incentive structure that Trump has built inside the Republican party: kiss the ring and you will be rewarded with endorsements and Maga stardom; cross him and you will be ostracised, challenged in a party primary and subjected to vile abuse and death threats.View image in fullscreenPink says: “At first when I talked to him about it, it hadn’t left the confines of the congressional office. When the death threats were coming in, weirdly they became commonplace. They had an increased Capitol police and even FBI interest in what was happening. Obviously, there’s a lot of protection around you in that context.“Whereas when the death threats started expanding to his family, to his wife, at his home, it was very stressful and it took a toll on him. There was almost a level of disbelief that there was so much hatred and that people took the time to actually express their hatred. It was shocking to him and it was very hard on Sofia and Adam for sure.”During the film Kinzinger also talks movingly about an incident in his past that seems unrelated but actually explains much about his political decision-making. One night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2006 he encountered a young woman holding her throat, which was bleeding profusely, and her boyfriend intent on killing her with a knife.Kinzinger recalls: “If somebody would have whispered ‘run’ to me I would have run. But there are two immediate thoughts that went through my head. The first one was like, if I act, I’m gonna die. The second one was, if I watch this lady die and I did nothing, I can’t live with myself the rest of my life.”The assailant was bigger and Kinzinger can still remember feeling the knife hand trying to stab him. But he wrestled the man to the ground and held him there until police arrived. The 46-year-old says that moment in Milwaukee utterly changed his life.Pink comments: “Here again was an example where he stepped into a situation without thinking of the consequences, purely on the basis that he thought it was the right thing to do. I was interested in the kind of person who actually does that. To me the film became less a story about a guy who sacrifices for his country and more about what he wouldn’t sacrifice.“Despite the apparent danger, he didn’t want to give up his willingness to serve and lose that desire to do that and fall prey to cynicism. It’s one thing to say that you’re courageous to sacrifice. It’s a different kind of courage to say what I don’t want to lose are these things that are important to me. Despite everything against me, I don’t want to lose these things that I believe in because those are the things that keep me going.”The anti-Trump coalition has been described as the biggest political force in America today. It has scrambled old alliances and thrown together progressives, independents and groups such as the Lincoln Project, conceived largely by old-school Bush and McCain Republicans – often middle-aged white men – who now find themselves rooting for a liberal woman of colour from California to win the presidency.Pink is still ready for an argument about policy but acknowledges that, for now, there is a higher priority. “I remain deeply conflicted in terms of my political views but we are in a crisis moment in our country and there’s no way to avoid the fact that the more important value right now is the thing that we agree on: that everyone should have a vote and that vote should count and we need to ensure, in order to preserve our democracy, a peaceful transfer of power. Those two things are fundamental.”He says of Republicans: “It’s not whether they’re heroes. I even say to him in the movie a courageous Republican is still a Republican. You don’t have to be a Republican to believe in the peaceful transfer of power and believe that everyone’s vote should count.“It is shocking that one of our two major political parties don’t hold those as essential values. It’s terrifying and we’re going to need to do the work to lessen the influence and power of people who don’t believe in those two fundamental values.”Kinzinger received a warm reception on the final night of the Democratic convention, not long before Kamala Harris took the stage to accept the party nomination. Her speech, and a subsequent CNN interview, indicate that she is tilting towards the centre on climate, healthcare and immigration. But when the alternative is Trump, even an old lefty like Pink believes the choice is clear.“Because I’m a political junkie, you see how politicians move to different spaces as part of a campaign and then their political philosophy is revealed when they are in power. I don’t take that much stock in if someone says to me, oh, Kamala’s position on X or Y is this, it should be that.“Do we believe in her political philosophy broadly speaking? I do. She would make a great leader of our country. The kind of president she will be remains to be seen and I look forward to seeing the kind of president she will be. I’m not troubled by any particular political position she holds in this time when she’s campaigning for president.”Harris would be the first woman and first woman of colour to serve as president, dealing perhaps the final symbolic blow to Maga: the result would show that it was Trump, not Barack Obama, who was the historic aberration.Pink describes himself as “bullish” about her chances. “The hypocrisy and narcissism and bullying and madness of Donald Trump have been exposed over and over and over and over and over again and yet he’s somehow managed to survive, being a formidable person in American politics. One of these days he’s not going to be and I hope that moment is upon us.”

      The Last Republican is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We’re in a constitutional crisis’: Adam Kinzinger warns of chaos at documentary premiere

      by

      Adam Kinzinger reiterated his support for Kamala Harris in the US presidential election at the Toronto film festival on Saturday, but warned that there may be more eruptions of violence should she win.The former Republican congressman, whose party turned against him when he voted to impeach former president Donald Trump after the January 6 insurrection, was speaking to an audience following the world premiere of The Last Republican.The crowd-pleasing documentary, with healthy doses of comic relief in its coverage of outrageous and tragic political events, follows Kinzinger for over a year as he endures the fallout from his efforts to hold Trump accountable for inciting the riot as part of the United States House select committee on the attack. The film is a portrait focusing on the costly personal sacrifice to do what both Kinzinger and the director Steve Pink repeatedly remind is simply the right thing.After the screening, Kinzinger said history could repeat itself at a time when his party has “lost its mind” but doesn’t believe the violence will play out in exactly the same way. The battlegrounds won’t be Capitol Hill, according to the politician who recently spoke during a prime slot at the Democratic national convention, but individual states.“Look at Arizona for instance,” Kinzinger said. “Assume Arizona goes for Kamala. But it’s a Republican legislature. The legislature has to be the one to certify Kamala as the winner. I can see a pressure campaign where these people simply will not vote to certify her the winner. And what happens then? We’re in a constitutional crisis. According to the constitution, if the state legislature decides it’s just going to certify Trump, even if its [voters] went the other way, we have to accept that in the federal government … That’s a real concern I have. You can see violence at these statehouses that don’t have the security we have. Our security got overrun that day for God’s sakes and we have 500 times the security that statehouses do.”The Last Republican is directed by Steve Pink, a self-described leftie who Kinzinger suspects has contempt for his politics. The film opens with Pink sharing his admiration for Kinzinger’s resolute stand – he was one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment, and the only one next to Liz Cheney to sit on the January 6 committee. Kinzinger reciprocates, explaining that he’s agreeing to ignore the ideological gap and take part in the film because Pink directed Hot Tub Time Machine, which he loves.View image in fullscreenPink’s first foray into documentary is a handshake between liberal Hollywood and a Republican that occasionally leans into odd couple comedy. The director and his subject rib each other throughout for opposing political beliefs that the film shies away from interrogating. At one point Kinzinger admits his pro-life stance, but his voice wavers a bit, hinting at the slightest opening that he could be swayed. During the same interview, Pink declares: “If this documentary helps you win the presidency and you enact horrible conservative policies, I swear to fucking God!”His profile on the extremely charming Kinzinger certainly makes the case that the kid who once dressed up as the Illinois governor Jim Edgar for Halloween and grew up practically indoctrinated into Republican politics would have made a decent presidential candidate. The film revisits a heroic act, when Kinzinger, in his 20s, rescued a bleeding woman from an attacker with a knife. The act of self-sacrifice, the film gently suggests, foreshadowed his recent actions.The Last Republican doesn’t reveal anything particularly new about January 6 and Kinzinger’s work as part of the committee, but forensically revisits the damning moments before and after the attack. Kinzinger reflects on the Republican conference call, when the former House speaker Kevin McCarthy says he would be voting against certifying Joe Biden’s election win. Kinzinger says he warned McCarthy on the call that such an action could lead to violence. McCarthy’s response, which can be heard in the doc, was a dismissive “OK Adam” before he called for the “next question”.As The Last Republican cycles through testimony, Kinzinger offers personal reflections and feelings about how things happened, describing January 6 as a bad bender that the Republican party should have woken up from and sipped water to cleanse its system and recover. Instead, they backed Donald Trump. “You could always fix a hangover by starting to drink again,” says McCarthy, tying up the analogy.Kinzinger expresses that he was angrier at his old friend Kevin McCarthy than Trump. “He’s just nuts,” Kinzinger says of the latter.He admits he wanted nothing to do with the January 6 committee. “Please dear Jesus not me,” he would say before Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be seeking his participation without calling him first.Following the screening, Kinzinger tells the audience that almost every Republican congressman knows the 2020 election “wasn’t stolen” and “most of them would tell you that they think Donald Trump is crazy”. He adds that before impeachment, he believed there was going to be 25 votes in favor, instead of just the 10 who did, because many were too scared to take that stand. “I would have people come up to me all the time and say, ‘Thanks for doing it because I’ll lose in my district if I do it, but thank you.’” He’s exasperated by the gall of it.Kinzinger not only lost his district but was bombarded with hate while ostracized not just from his party but his own extended family. In one scene, his mother Betty Jo Kinzinger recalls a phone call from an old community friend who tells her she doesn’t like Adam any more. “You don’t have to like Adam,” she says, “but you don’t have to tell his mother that.”View image in fullscreenIn the film, Kinzinger’s staff can be heard sorting through the relentless phone calls to his office, ranging from angry voters to terrifying threats, deciding which calls should be referred to Capitol police. The vitriol is so much that they keep a cabinet near their desk filled top to bottom with what you would think is an apocalyptic supply of Kleenex boxes. The reveal elicited a hearty laugh from the audience. But the trauma behind it is all too real.“Over time it takes a toll that you don’t recognize on you,” Kinzinger told the audience. He said that the threats we hear in the film aren’t just a tiny sample, reciting one caller who wishes Kinzinger’s son, who was six months old at the time, would wander into traffic and die.“The people that call the death threats are probably not the ones that are going to come,” Kinzinger continued, who says he was swatted just a week before, a common occurrence when he speaks out. “The ones that are going to come are not going to let you know ahead of time that they’re going to be there.“I would always conceal and carry,” Kinzinger continued, “not because I’m just some crazy gun guy. But that was my way to defend myself in security … You’re living with security [with] your work. You always make sure to lock the doors and arm the system at night. But after a while I realized that I’m keeping distance from people. And I don’t want to be that way.”When pressed about why it’s so hard for his fellow Republicans to question the party line and Trump, Kinzinger said that many were just clinging to what they feel is their identity.“When you see yourself as a member of Congress,” he said, “and you walk into any room, except the White House, and you’re the most powerful person there, and you have everybody’s attention, it’s really hard to walk away from that … I’ve learned that courage is rare … you have to walk away from your identity. And unfortunately, so many in the Republican party were unwilling and are unwilling to do that.“Since we filmed this, there have been more people elected into the Republican party that actually are batshit crazy and truly believe some of this. So that’s a scary thing.”

      The Last Republican is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date More

    • 200 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘January 6 was just the warm-up’: the film that tracks three Maga extremists storming the Capitol

      by

      Homegrown is a documentary about three American patriots who love their country, revere Donald Trump and balk at the result of the 2020 presidential election. Director Michael Premo spent months trailing his subjects – Chris, Thad and Randy – in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol building of 6 January 2021, and his illuminating, gripping film looks back at a dark period of recent US history. Implicitly, though, it also warns of further unrest.“I think January 6th was just the warm-up,” Premo says. “This November, we’re going to see an even more frantic and desperate attempt to attack every level of the electoral system.” He is not optimistic about the US’s current direction of travel. The country, he argues, is effectively on the brink of civil war.Homegrown premieres in the International Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. It is one of a number of campaigning political pictures that could put the event at loggerheads with Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing Italian government. Joining it on the programme is Separated, Errol Morris’s documentary about family separation on the US’s southern border; Dani Rosenberg’s harrowing Gaza-themed drama Of Dogs and Men; and Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which is billed as an audiovisual diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Another highlight, says festival boss Alberto Barbera, will be the epic M: Son of the Century, Joe Wright’s eight-part TV biopic charting the life and times of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose government established the Venice film festival back in 1932. “And I must add,” Barbera told Variety magazine, “the time it describes has some pretty striking similarities with the present day.”View image in fullscreenLinks with the past are certainly clear in Homegrown, which spotlights a right-wing insurrectionist movement that had flourished on the fringes for decades before finding a new energy and focus under the Maga banner of Trump. Premo, a New York-based film-maker, began researching the documentary in 2018, eventually homing in on his three main protesters. One, Chris Quaglin, is a New Jersey electrician who divides his time between preparing a nursery for his soon-to-be-born son and stocking his “man-cave” with firearms in readiness for war. He says: “An AR-15 and enough people is enough to take our country back.”This, Premo argues, remains a distinct possibility. “Most prominent thinkers still dismiss the idea of civil war, because their reference is an event that occurred in 1860 under a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s discounting the way that modern political violence manifests itself, and particularly the way that sectarian violence plays out around the world. If this was happening in another country, say in Africa or Asia, I think American journalists would already be referring to the situation as a cold civil war. That’s how it feels to me.”Homegrown climaxes with powerful, ground-level footage of the January 6 attack. We see Quaglin in the thick of the action, resplendent in his stars-and-stripes Maga jumpsuit. He is swept up in the moment, storming the DC police by the metal barricades. “Almost a victory, I would say,” he brags afterwards, although this moment of near triumph proves short-lived. Quaglin was later found guilty of assaulting police and obstructing Congress and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.Premo has spent his career filming direct action protests. January 6 felt different, he says. “This was one of the most well-documented crimes in history. It was planned in public: a collaborative conspiracy involving numerous actors and institutions. Everyone knew it was coming.”View image in fullscreenThe director says he anticipated a massive police presence which would prevent protesters from gaining access to the Capitol. In the event, he was shocked by the lack of security; he says it almost felt deliberate. “I have to imagine that there are many law enforcement people who are part of these same conservative Facebook groups. They’re watching Fox News, watching Alex Jones and all the other pundits bang the drum about storming the Capitol. They had the same information I did and chose to do nothing about it.”What Homegrown highlights, however, is how broad-based and diverse America’s right-wing populist movement has become. Premo, who is black, claims that its main organising principle is not race hatred so much as despair and disillusion, characterised by a widespread loss of faith in American democracy’s ability to safeguard public interests. Significantly, the film chooses to cross-cut Quaglin’s journey with that of his fellow rebel Thad Cisneros, a charismatic Latino activist from Texas. Cisneros explains that he was first radicalised by watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He now dreams of forming an alliance with Black Lives Matter organisers.Cisneros, it transpires, is now also serving time and thus unavailable for comment. But he represents an increasingly fractured and muddied political landscape, one in which the old left-and-right stereotypes no longer apply. “We need to have a more nuanced understanding of the people driving this movement,” Premo says. “We need to know who these people are, what they look like, where they come from. Only then can we understand what we need to do to support the principle of a pluralistic democracy that stands any chance of surviving beyond this current era of us-versus-them politics.” More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘It’s not a theoretical proposition’: the ‘war game’ imagining a coup in the US

      by

      On 6 January 2025, US democracy stands at a crossroads. Congress must certify the results of an election that the loser refuses to concede. The Capitol is besieged by a wave of protesters who believe the election was stolen. Some of them are armed and determined to seize power for their leader. Similar groups have amassed at state capitols around the country. And a portion of the DC National Guardsmen – as well as a portion of the US military, including a handful of high-ranking officials – are on their side.This is a fictional scenario, played out in a “war game” simulation with real government and military officials in a mock situation room. But according to a new documentary capturing the role-playing exercise, such a crisis of authority – and the fracturing of the military along partisan lines – is a very real possibility in the politically polarized US, one that we should prepare for. “It’s not a theoretical proposition,” said Jesse Moss (Boys State, Girls State), a co-director of War Game, now playing in US theaters. “Even a very small sliver of the US active duty military that chooses to side with, say, a defeated candidate in a national election, could destabilize our country and put our democracy in jeopardy.”War Game, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, observes the six-hour event held at a Washington DC hotel room in January 2023. The simulation, developed by the Vet Voice Foundation, is one of several role-playing exercises developed in response to the events of January 6, to help military and government officials prepare for another worst-case scenario. How will the US government react if it happens again? And what if the president can’t count on the support of the military? Nearly one in five January defendants had a military background. In May 2021, 124 retired general and admirals signed an open letter propagating the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. As Benjamin Radd, a game producer who viscerally recalls living through the breakdown of institutional authority in 1979 Iran, puts it: “Think about the unthinkable.”While other exercises, such as those recently led by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Democracy Futures Project, focus specifically on role-playing responses to a second Trump presidency, War Game mostly doesn’t name the elephant in the room, examining instead the forces and potentials of political extremism in the US. The distance – using footage of January 6, but not naming the names – allowed for some renewed urgency and clarity. “Sometimes it’s impossible to see something that’s right in front of you,” said Tony Gerber, the film’s other co-director. “And you have to find new ways to show people that thing, because there’s this sort of intentional blindness to see that thing that’s right there.”The exercise participants, a bipartisan group of military and cabinet officials from the last five presidential administrations, must respond to what is essentially a more organized version of January 6. The so-called “red cell”, developed by military veterans Kristofer Goldsmith and Chris Jones, present a multi-faceted and mutating threat on the ground and online, where the situation room – comprised of mock president-elect Hotham (former Montana governor Steve Bullock) and his team of advisers – must also fight an information game. Jones and Goldsmith, both experts on domestic extremist movements who understand veterans’ disillusionment with the government’s status quo, based their mock insurgency group, the Order of Columbus, on Trump’s Maga movement, the conspiracy quasi-religion known as QAnon and far-right paramilitary groups involved in the Capitol attack, such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.Participants – including former senator Heidi Heitkamp, retired major general of the Maryland national guard Linda Singh, Lt Gen (Ret) Jeffrey Buchanan, former senator Doug Jones and Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump – must decide how to combat a metastasizing threat, complete with mock news coverage, speeches and social media posts egging insurgents to follow their “real” leader. They must contend with a video from a high-ranking general, based on the former Trump official and Stop the Steal rally speaker Michael Flynn, calling on the military to disobey the commander in chief. With the DC Guardsmen compromised, should they mobilize other national guards? Should the federal government get involved in coup attempts at state capitols? How much force is too much? And when, if ever, should the president invoke the Insurrection Act, considered the game’s nuclear option, which allows the executive to deploy the US military on its own citizens? (Though the film-makers had total editorial control, they ran potential security issues by Vet Voice: “We didn’t want to give any insurrectionists a handbook to stage a coup,” said Moss.)That last decision is particularly resonant, given the law’s potential for great destruction in the wrong hands. The film’s one mention of Donald Trump by name comes in footage from the Congressional January 6 hearings, in which Jason van Tatenhove, a former member of the Oath Keepers, confirmed that the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, urged then president Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, promising that veterans would support him. “Regardless of the outcome of this election, that act is a power the president has, and it’s a power that’s worth thinking about,” said Moss.View image in fullscreen“This film doesn’t lose its meaning and its relevance with this election,” Gerber added. “A problem like this doesn’t metastasize overnight. This has been cooking and growing and coming to fruition for years. And we as a nation have to ask ourselves, how did we get here?”To that end, the film attempts to “understand, with empathy, how a young man or a young woman coming home after serving overseas could be radicalized”, said Gerber. In cutaways from the real-time exercise, Goldsmith, Jones and game designer Janessa Goldbeck movingly discuss the real threat of extremism in the military, particularly for veterans struggling to reintegrate into society after service, in wars based on government lies or obfuscation, in a country where fewer and fewer civilians have personal ties to the armed forces. They’ve witnessed it, in themselves or in loved ones. “I do understand the insurgents,” says Goldsmith in the film. “I understand what led them down that path. Because I was there after I got home from Iraq.”For participants in the game, the exercise offered a rattling six hours of both anxiety and the empowerment of preparation. The simulation had “real intentional utility”, said Moss, in that it produced a report shared with policymakers, but also as way to excise fear, anger and shock over what happened four years ago this January, over what is still dividing the country. “These divisions, these fears, this extremism – it’s not over there. It’s right here. It’s within our country. It’s within our family,” said Moss. The film provides “a kind of catharsis to deal with the traumas that we carry, and to think about, in hopefully a constructive way, where we might be going”.

      War Game is out now in New York and will expand to other cities on 9 August, with a UK date to be announced More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Publisher of debunked voter-fraud film apologizes to falsely accused man

      by

      The publisher of 2000 Mules issued a statement Friday apologizing to a Georgia man who was shown in the film and falsely accused of ballot fraud during the 2020 election.The widely debunked film includes surveillance video showing Mark Andrews, his face blurred, putting five ballots in a drop box in Lawrenceville, an Atlanta suburb, as a voiceover by the conservative pundit and film-maker Dinesh D’Souza says: “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”Salem Media Group said in the statement that it had “removed the film from Salem’s platforms, and there will be no future distribution of the film or the book by Salem”.“It was never our intent that the publication of the 2000 Mules film and book would harm Mr Andrews. We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr Andrews’ image in the movie, book, and promotional materials have caused Mr Andrews and his family,” the statement said.A state investigation found that Andrews was dropping off ballots for himself, his wife and their three adult children, who all lived at the same address. That is legal in Georgia, and an investigator said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Andrews.The film uses research from True the Vote, a Texas-based non-profit, and suggests that ballot “mules” aligned with Democrats were paid to illegally collect and deliver ballots in Georgia and four other closely watched states. An Associated Press analysis found that it is based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data.Salem said it “relied on representations by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote, Inc (‘TTV’) that the individuals depicted in the videos provided to us by TTV, including Mr Andrews, illegally deposited ballots”.Lawyers for D’Souza and True the Vote did not immediately respond to emails Friday afternoon seeking comment on Salem’s statement.Andrews filed a federal lawsuit in October 2022 against D’Souza, True the Vote and Salem. The case continues, and representatives for Salem and for Andrews’ legal team did not immediately respond to emails asking whether the statement came as a result of the lawsuit. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Demolishing democracy’: how much danger does Christian nationalism pose?

      by

      Bad Faith, a new documentary on the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, opens with an obvious, ominous scene – the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 – though trained on details drowned out by the deluge of horror and easily recognizable images of chaos. That Paula White, Donald Trump’s faith adviser, led the Save America rally in a prayer to overturn the results for “a free and fair election”. That mixed among Trump flags, American flags and militia symbols were numerous banners with Christian crosses; on the steps of the Capitol, a “JESUS SAVES” sign blares mere feet from “Lock Them UP!”The movement to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump was, as the documentary underscores, inextricable from a certain strain of belief in America as a fundamentally Christian nation, separation of church and state be damned. In fact, as Bad Faith argues, Christian nationalism – a political movement to shape the United States according a certain interpretation of evangelical Christianity, by vote or, more recently, by coercion – was the “galvanizing force” behind the attempted hijacking of the democratic process three years ago.Bad Faith traces the origins of the movement as a savvy, disproportionately powerful political force, from churches to Republican political operatives to donors, either from conviction or convenience. “I think a lot of Americans have a very difficult time accepting and understanding the fact that such treason, such anti-democratic activity, could be carried out by people who basically look like Sunday school teachers,” Stephen Ujlaki, the film’s director, told the Guardian. By looking back on the half-century of Christian nationalist belief, organizing and action, the events of January 6 no longer seemed shocking, but the logical endpoint of anti-democratic ideals. “It was unmistakable, once you looked in the right place and you listened to what people were saying, and you understood how to decode what they were saying,” said Ujlaki. “Little would you know that when they talk about recreating the kingdom of God on earth, they weren’t talking about something spiritual. They were talking about demolishing democracy so that God, ie themselves, could rule. And for that reason, I call it a conspiracy carried out in broad daylight.”Though Christian nationalists are quick to invoke the founding fathers, whom they claim were directed by a Christian God, the conspiracy has its modern origins in the 1970s, when the Republican political organizer Paul Weyrich began uniting evangelical parishioners and televangelist preachers like Jerry Falwell with Republican party politics opposing desegregation, via a political action group called the Moral Majority. It’s not that evangelical Christians weren’t political – as the film, narrated by Peter Coyote, points out, the idea of America as a white Christian nation undergirded the Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak in 1924 claimed 8 million members, the vast majority of whom were white evangelicals, including 40,000 ministers.Accordingly, the crucial tie between white evangelicals and the Republican party came not from the 1972 ruling in Roe v Wade, as is often misattributed, but from opposition to a different ruling preventing racially segregated institutions – including schools and churches – from claiming charitable, tax-exempt status. The ruling brought segregated church leaders such as Falwell in alignment with Republican operatives like Weyrich, who cannily realized that emotional arguments against abortion would drive more grassroots support than openly racist talk against desegregation.Bad Faith highlights Christian nationalism’s “origins in the racism, and the segregation mentality, and you can draw a straight line from that to gerrymandering and voter suppression,” said Anne Nelson, a film participant and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Christian nationalist supporters, she added, were “very skillful at … framing and branding and messaging, that makes something like voter suppression look like electoral integrity. And they do this time after time, on every front”.The film juxtaposes the decades-long roots of the movement with its evolving principles: that America was founded as a Christian nation, for and by Christians; that maintaining such a state is a divinely sanctioned, righteous fight; that anti-democratic or violent tactics should be employed in the name of God. And in recent years, that Donald Trump – a thrice-married, profligate cheater with too many character scandals to name – is, if not a true “Christian”, a divinely sanctioned “King Cyrus” figure sent to disrupt the secular order. “The divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that we’re seeing today was part of a plan,” said Ujlaki. “It was a result of an actual plan, successfully executed to get to this point. And once the institutions are weakened and people have lost faith in elections, there’s room for the strongman to come in.”View image in fullscreenIn addition to political experts contextualizing the growth and funding of Christian nationalism, Ujlaki also enlisted several prominent, faithful Christians to dispute another of the movement’s prominent myths: that it’s a true distillation of Christian teachings. “It is absolutely not Christian. It is anti-Christian,” said Ujlaki. He quoted the theologian Russell Moore, who calls the movement “heresy” in the film, as well as the Rev William Barber II, whose faith leads him to advocate for wealth redistribution, racial equality and social justice: “They may have their Trump, but they don’t have their Jesus.”“They don’t care about the actual Jesus,” said Ujlaki. That’s underscored by the money trail, followed by Nelson and others, which leads to several non-evangelical donors – the Koch brothers and more – who nevertheless benefit from the movement’s weakening of institutions and drive to the far right, as with the Tea Party movement in 2010. “They’re in bed together, based on economic principles, not theology,” said Nelson.And yet theology continues to drive an anti-democratic movement, for which January 6 was not a disaster but a starting point. Bad Faith ends with a note about Project 2025, announced in December 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. The 900-page document builds on Weyrich’s Conservative Manifesto and recommends, among other things: placing all independent government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Justice, under direct presidential control; purging government employees considered “disloyal” to the president; and deploying the military against American citizens under the Insurrection Act.Some of the recommendations sound far-fetched and extreme, but if Bad Faith has one point, it is to take Christian nationalism as a serious threat to democracy. “These people are not stupid,” said Nelson. “They’re incredibly strategic. They’re extremely good at organization, and they have a very, very long attention span. If they set out an objective, they will give it 40 years to play out, they will build organizations, they will go into electoral districts not a month before the election, but two years before the election, organizing voters.”In Nelson’s view, major media organizations misunderstood this in the run-up to January 6. “They look at these events as independent grassroots eruptions, like the Tea Party,” she said. “And they’re actually fully integrated as a strategy with massive coordinated funding and implementation. If you don’t see that, you miss the story.”
      Bad Faith is now available to rent digitally in the US with a UK date to be announced More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘My soul is so tired’: Stormy Daniels stands up to Maga hate in new film

      by

      Stormy Daniels, the adult movie star who received hush-money payments at the center of one of Donald Trump’s pending criminal cases, says she is “so tired” as she confronts the prospect of testifying against the former president, whose supporters have flooded her social media accounts with threats.“I’m desensitized to some of it … but I’m also tired,” Daniels says in a new documentary premiering on Monday on Peacock, according to Slate, which reported viewing the film in advance. “Like, my soul is so tired. And I don’t know if I’m so much a warrior now as out of fucks, man. I’m out of fucks.”Daniels’ remarks in the documentary, titled Stormy, are meant to illustrate how overwhelmed, exhausted and – at times – hopeless she has felt since she accepted a $130,000 payment before Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory to keep quiet about an extramarital sexual encounter she says she had with him a decade earlier.Authorities allege that they later learned the payment to Daniels – whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford – was falsely recorded as a legal expenses reimbursement from Trump to the attorney who made the transaction and later pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law, Michael Cohen.Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records that were filed against him by New York state prosecutors, and is facing a trial date tentatively set for April at the earliest.Caught in the middle of the slowly unwinding legalities is Daniels, who in Stormy vividly describes Trump having “cornered” her in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite on the night she maintains they had sex.“I don’t remember how I got on the bed,” Daniels says in the film about the purported tryst in 2006, the year after the former president married Melania Trump, according to Business Insider. “And then the next thing I knew, he was humping away and telling me how great I was.“It was awful. But I didn’t say no.”Daniels is shown in the film telling a journalist that one of the reasons she accepted Trump’s hush money was to establish a “money trail” that linked her to him – “so he could not have me killed”, as she put it.After all, Daniels recalls in the film, a friend had admonished her that the Republican party under Trump’s command likes “to make [its] problems go away”, Slate noted. The film also reportedly shows a horse belonging to Daniels with a wound in its flank – she explains how she fears it may have been inflicted by someone who fired a rubber bullet at the animal in hopes of drawing its owner out into the open.Daniels also details how much mental anguish she suffers from the invective aimed at her online by Trump supporters reacting to coverage of the criminal charges against him. Some of the comments are insulting and misogynistic – “liar”, “slut” and “gold digger” – but stop short of violence.Others that she cites are overtly violent. “It is … ‘I’m going to come to your house and slit your throat.’ ‘Your daughter should be euthanized,’” Daniels says in the documentary, according to Slate. “They’re not even using bot accounts. They’re using real accounts.”It was enough to prompt Daniels to record a last will and testament outlining how she wanted her affairs handled in the event of her untimely death. While many people take such a step as a standard part of their life’s long-term planning, Daniels did so under circumstances few ever have to confront, a journalist who captured video footage seen in the documentary suggested.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When I met Stormy, she was convinced she was living in the last weeks or months of her life,” that journalist, Denver Nicks, says in the documentary, according to Slate.Daniels says she has acquired a measure of “legal knowledge” that has left her better positioned to navigate her role in the case against Trump than when the hush-money payment first became public in 2018. But at times it has also forced her to be away from family – whether for safety reasons or to exert whatever control that she can over her public narrative.One such instance was in April 2023, when she was on a media tour in the UK shortly after Trump was indicted in connection with her case and learned that her 11-year-old daughter had finished her school year with a straight A report card over a text message rather than in person.“Instead of being there with her, I’m here talking about an ex-president’s penis,” Daniels reportedly tells the documentary film-makers, a remark that possibly contained an allusion to her 2018 book which compared Trump’s reproductive organ to a toadstool.Besides the Daniels case, Trump is also facing dozens of criminal charges for subverting the outcome of his failed 2020 re-election bid as well as retention of classified documents. A separate civil jury verdict has also found him liable for the sexual abuse of writer E Jean Carroll, and he has also been adjudicated a business fraudster in a lawsuit over his entrepreneurial practices.Trump nonetheless has clinched the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden for a second presidential term in November. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The footage is very honest’: uncovering the real Lady Bird Johnson

      by

      Lady Bird, as Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson was better known, is a nickname that conjures the frivolous and fanciful, but the fiftysomething woman from east Texas who emerges in Dawn Porter’s elegant documentary The Lady Bird Diaries was a paragon of substance. She was also a documentarian in her own right, chronicling her time in the White House over 123 hours of audio recordings that were released after her death in 2007.Apart from the footage of wildflowers that Porter shot on the Johnson family ranch in Texas, the film entirely relies on archival audio and video recordings from the time of Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, from the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy to 1969. Building on an ABC News podcast, Porter’s work is a visually mesmerizing collage of mid-century America and one of its most fascinating characters.“[Being a first lady] is traditionally a feminine thing. It’s usually about children and reading and food gardens,” Porter said. “And those things are worthy.” Johnson, though, occupied herself with more than rose gardens. She was a shadow politician, serving as the president’s adviser as well as his tutor, even giving her husband grades on his speeches as we hear in one recording. “I don’t think there were a lot of A-pluses,” Porter said. “I think there was always room for improvement.”The Johnsons’ high expectations for each other mirrored the intensity of their devotion. “In a lot of ways, it’s a love story,” Porter said. “I think some of the best marriages are where each person thinks the other person is the smartest and most capable person. Her daughters confirmed that when I met them. They said, ‘Daddy thought Mother was the smartest person he’d ever met.’”Finding archival footage featuring her film’s subject was a bit of a treasure hunt, as scant material was catalogued with her name. “When we started and put in the words ‘Lady Bird Johnson’, very little came back,” the director said. Porter had better luck when she searched by the date and the names of other people who had been on the scenes of Johnson’s recounting. “She’s not noted in the description of the footage, and yet she’s right there in the middle of all of these events,” Porter said. “And I think that’s the story for a lot of women.”Johnson’s recordings brim with intimacy, and include material on her anxieties about her husband’s mental and physical wellbeing as well as her own apprehensions about living in the public eye. She also chronicled her work life, from campaigning for her husband’s second term to her environmental and anti-poverty efforts. She was the first president’s wife to hire her own staff, which was presided over by Liz Carpenter, a fellow Texan. (Carpenter’s teenage son, who liked to record himself singing, owned the tape recorder that Johnson used.)Porter’s film paints Johnson’s work on the “beautification” of Washington DC as more than an act of aesthetic improvement. “She was going into some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, which are primarily Black neighborhoods, and she was making the connection that kids need outdoor space, they need playgrounds, they need calm, beautiful places. She wasn’t just planting flowers.” The film touches on a few controversies, including the time when the singer Eartha Kitt publicly chastised Johnson at a luncheon, sounding off on the Johnson administration’s handling of the Vietnam war. But the point of view is unwaveringly Johnson’s. “This is not a tell-all movie,” Porter said. “What I wanted to do is add her perspective to what was happening.“She really was documenting this history in her tapes, and she was so accurate,” Porter said. “I’ve done a lot of films where people will tell me a story, and then we’ll go back and look at the archive and it’s similar, but memory is imperfect.” Lady Bird’s version of events, however, shared an uncanny precision backed up by the trove of film.Porter’s next two projects are about a reporter who embedded with the New York police department and ended up proving the innocence of a handful of wrongfully convicted inmates, as well as a film on the musician Luther Vandross, who died in 2005. While some documentarians like the immediacy of shadowing living subjects, Porter said that working with pre-existing footage guarantees an added layer of authenticity. “They’re not being interviewed for your movie so they’re not performing for you in any way,” she said. “The footage is very honest.”The choice not to interview anybody for Lady Bird came naturally, and it’s unlikely viewers will mind the absence of talking heads. “I wanted it to be her story. And also make the point that she’s there, she’s everywhere,” Porter said. “You just have to look for her, and then you’ll find her.”
      The Lady Bird Diaries is now available on Hulu in the US More