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      ‘Coal jobs were out, opiates were in’: how shame and pride explain Trump’s rural popularity

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      Arlie Russell Hochschild has spent decades studying the relationships between work, identity and emotion. The sociologist has a knack for coining terms that gain social currency – including “emotional labor”, in 1983, to describe the need for certain professionals, like flight attendants and bill collectors, to manage their emotions, and “the second shift”, in 1989, to describe women’s household labor.Her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, explores what Hochschild calls the “pride paradox”: because conservative Americans value personal responsibility, they feel proud when they do well, and blame themselves when they don’t. Yet, her thinking continues, conservative regions often have worse economies and fewer opportunities than so-called blue states, so people feel ashamed of circumstances that aren’t really their fault.Stolen Pride hits shelves just weeks before a monumental presidential election that will hinge in part on competing visions of identity. The book is an attempt to understand how that pride paradox finds political expression, drawing on several years of field research in mountainous eastern Kentucky, a Donald Trump stronghold.Hochschild believes progressives need to learn to better hear “the powerful messages that are being communicated from a charismatic leader to a followership, and potentially intercept and understand them and speak to an alienated sector of the population”, she tells me on a recent evening, speaking by Zoom from a book-filled office in Berkeley, and peering at the screen through thin, red-framed eyeglasses.View image in fullscreenIn recent years, Hochschild’s work has investigated how cultural identity influences politics. Her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right studied conservative Tea Party supporters in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a region where the petrochemical industry is linked to serious environmental and health problems. Hochschild was interested in why the people she met were hostile to government regulation even when they might personally benefit from state intervention. The book, embraced by progressives anxious to understand Donald Trump’s appeal, became a bestseller.Hochschild began researching Stolen Pride in 2017. The book applies a similar ethnographic method to an equally conservative, but in other ways very different, region: Appalachia. It focuses on Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, which is the United States’ whitest and second poorest voting district, with high unemployment, poor health metrics and many people, especially men, who are subject to the so-called diseases of despair – drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide. While Hochschild’s interest in the American white working class is hardly new, her book offers some interesting new theories and angles of understanding.One of the book’s central events is a march that white supremacists held in Pikeville, Kentucky, in April 2017 – a test run for their more famous and deadly march in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few months later. These neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other extremists saw Pikeville as an ideal place to preach; in addition to being overwhelmingly white, eastern Kentucky had suffered a “perfect storm”, Hochschild says: “Coal jobs were out, opiates were in. It was a distressed area, and the white supremacists were coming to speak to that distress, to say, Hey, we’ve got answers for you,” in the form of violent fascism and white separatism.Hochschild discovered that Pikeville rejected the white supremacists’ pitch. “And I compared it to another kind of appeal, which was that of Donald Trump. One appeal didn’t work, and one did.” Her book, based on interviews with a number of local residents as well as white supremacists, wrestles with the complicated question of why.Hochschild argues that a “pride economy” coexists with the material economy and is almost as important. It also helps to explain Trump’s popularity in many rural and blue-collar areas.For more than a century, eastern Kentucky was one of the centers of the American coal industry. Though back-breaking and sometimes deadly for its workers, the sector employed thousands of people, lifted many out of poverty, and brought railways and other infrastructure into the region. Men took pride in their work, which required courage and knowhow, and the people of the region were proud that their coal fueled America.“[People could] proudly say, ‘We kept the lights on in this country; we won world war one, world war two by digging coal,’ and the coalminer was kind of like a decorated soldier – he faced danger. Many died young, of black lung. But it was like a trade passed down from generation to generation for men, and then suddenly it was cut off.”Many Appalachians blame Barack Obama’s environmental regulations for the loss of coal jobs, though that decline was decades in the making and had more to do with the rise of natural gas and automation that made the coal industry less reliant on human labor. The job losses contributed to people leaving, exacerbating a depopulation already endemic in rural America. Men who remained were humiliated, Hochschild notes, and forced to accept “‘girly jobs’ – waiting tables or scooping ice-cream, jobs that young teenagers took that couldn’t support a family”.Add to this OxyContin, which Purdue falsely marketed as a non-addictive painkiller for people recovering from work injuries. Some liberal states required three copies of every prescription, with one going to a government-controlled substances monitor; in conservative, regulation-averse states such as Kentucky, which required only two, OxyContin distribution was 50% higher.“So many people succumbed to drug addiction,” Hochschild says, “and that became [another] kind of shame, because once you did that, you lost your family, custody of your kids, you might be stealing from Grandma’s purse, or you’re on the dole, and great shame in this area was attached to accepting government services, although many people did.”Like many blue-collar, formerly Democratic areas of the US, eastern Kentucky has a history of leftwing populism. Pikeville is only 35 miles from Matewan, West Virginia, where striking miners memorably battled union-busting private detectives in 1920. The phrase “redneck” – today a term of derision, including in Kentucky, where some of Hochschild’s subjects stressed that they were “hillbillies” but not rednecks – was once a badge of honor that distinguished union miners, who wore red scarves, from scabs.The white supremacists’ belief that Pikeville would be sympathetic ground turned out to be wrong. “I spotted only three locals who marched with the white nationalists,” someone tells Hochschild in her book, “and one of them is mentally challenged.” Residents, conscious of stereotypes about Appalachia, resented the marchers’ assumption that just because their area was rural and economically deprived it would also be bigoted. The local government went to lengths to prevent violence and protect a local mosque, and residents treated the march with indifference or hostility.In contrast, Trump is more popular than ever in eastern Kentucky, which Hochschild thinks is because voters regard him as a “good bully” willing to be obnoxious on behalf of white working-class people, even if that means flouting norms of political correctness and civility.Trump shrewdly understands the power of shame and pride, Hochschild argues, and his antagonism of the liberal establishment follows a predictable pattern: Trump makes a provocative public pronouncement; the media shames Trump for what he said; Trump frames himself as a victim of censorious bullies; then he “roars back”, shifting blame back on to his persecutors and away from himself and, by extension, his supporters. Struggling Appalachians, who feel that big-city Americans look down on them, identify with Trump’s pugnacity.Shame is “almost like coal”, Hochschild says – “a resource to exploit by a charismatic leader”.Places like eastern Kentucky used to have strong labor unions that protected workers and connected blue-collar Americans to the Democratic party. The decline of unions, which now represent fewer than 7% of American private-sector workers, has been accompanied by the kind of alienation to which a strongman figure like Trump is adept at speaking.“If we look at whites without [bachelor’s degrees] who fit this pattern of loss and decline, they’re all turning Republican,” Hochschild says. “And we’re not speaking to them.” (By “we”, she seems to be referring to progressives, coastal elites, the establishment.) Despite what she calls a mutual loss of political empathy, Hochschild still believes there is “an opportunity for us to become bicultural” – and that, with an acrimonious and consequential election looming, doing so is more important than ever. More

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      Donald Trump makes a theatrical return to Butler, scene of assassination attempt

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      Donald Trump has returned to the site where he narrowly escaped assassination in July, pushing the emotional buttons of his supporters and suggesting that his political opponents “maybe even tried to kill me” to stop him regaining the White House.The Republican presidential nominee – and perennial showman – mounted an unabashedly sentimental spectacle in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. He was joined by billionaire Elon Musk, who made the baseless claim that if Trump’s supporters fail to turn out, “this will be the last election”.Their joint appearance before an enthusiastic crowd of thousands capped hours of programming seemingly intended to mythologise the 13 July shooting for the Trump base exactly one month before the presidential election.The rally was held, with heightened security, at the same grounds where Trump was grazed in the right ear and one rallygoer – firefighter Corey Comperatore – was killed when a gunman opened fire. The would-be assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.View image in fullscreenA photo of Trump standing with blood streaked across his face as he raised his fist and shouted “Fight!” became the indelible image of his campaign. Yet Joe Biden’s decision just a week later to step aside and endorse his vice-president, Kamala Harris, stole Trump’s thunder and altered the trajectory of the race.On Saturday Trump became the first former president to return to the scene of his attempted assassination and weaponise it for political gain. His campaign sought to recapture the aura of their candidate as hero and martyr.As he walked out on stage, a video juxtaposed an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River with the photo of Trump with fist raised. A voice boomed: “This man cannot be stopped. This man cannot be defeated.”“As I was saying …” Trump said as he appeared on stage, gesturing towards an immigration chart that he was looking at when the gunfire began 12 weeks earlier. The crowd, which was overwhelmingly white, roared enthusiastically, holding aloft signs that read “Fight! Fight! Fight!”Standing behind protective glass that now encases the stage at his outdoor rallies, Trump recalled: “On this very ground a cold-blooded assassin aimed to silence me and silence the greatest movement – Maga – in the history of our country … But by the hand of providence and the grace of God that villain did not succeed in his goal. He did not stop our movement.”Trump even seemed to be trying to emulate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettsyburg address as he described the field as a “monument to the valour” of our first responders and prophesied: “Forever afterward, all who have visited this hallowed place will remember what happened here and they will know of the character and courage that so many incredible American patriots have showed.”But Trump also hinted darkly, without evidence, about facing “an enemy from within” more dangerous than any foreign adversary. “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and who knows, maybe even tried to kill me,” he said. “But I’ve never stopped fighting for you and I never will.”Trump saluted volunteer firefighter Comperatore, who was shot and killed by the gunman, and two other supporters who were wounded. A memorial was set up in the bleachers, his firefighter’s jacket surrounded by flowers. Giant screens said “In loving memory of Corey Comperatore”, accompanied by his picture. Comperatore’s family were present.At 6.11pm, the exact time when gunfire erupted on 13 July, Trump called for a moment of silence. A bell then tolled four times, once for each of the four victims, including Trump. Then opera singer Christopher Macchio belted out Ave Maria.Trump then veered into more familiar territory of falsehoods about immigration and other topics. Later he called up on stage Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and owner of social media platform X, who has swerved politically right. Wearing a black cap and black “Occupy Mars” shirt and coat, Musk jumped around with his arms held high and was greeted with cheers.He said: “The true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire. We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs and another who was fist-pumping after getting shot! Fight, fight, fight!”Despite Trump’s attempt to stage a coup and cling on to power on 6 January 2021, Musk argued: “President Trump must win to preserve the constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. This is a must-win situation. Get everyone you know, drag them to register to vote. If they don’t, this will be the last election. That is my prediction.”View image in fullscreenThe Butler shooting led to widespread criticism of the Secret Service and the resignation of its director. Critics raised concerns about how Crooks was able to access a nearby rooftop with a direct line of sight to where Trump was speaking. In September the former president survived another attempt on his life when a gunman hid undetected for nearly 12 hours at a golf course in one of his Florida clubs.On Saturday there was an intensified security presence with Secret Service and other law enforcement officers in camouflage uniforms stationed on roofs. The building from which Crooks fired was completely obscured by tractor trailers and a fence.The rally had an upbeat atmosphere like a giant picnic. People sat on the grass or foldout chairs and walkers in blazing sunshine. They gazed up into a brilliant blue sky to see four special forces skydivers – one holding a giant Stars and Stripes – jumping from a Cessna 206 plane from more than 5,000 feet, then a flypast of “Trump Force One” accompanied by the theme music from the film Top Gun.One tent displayed paintings of the now famous image of a bloodied Trump with fist raised – reproductions were on sale for up to $200. That photograph was also visible on numerous T-shirts worn by Trump supporters with slogans such as “Fight … fight … fight!”, “American badass”, “Never surrender” and “Fight. Trump 2024. Legends never die”. The commercialisation of the former president’s near death experience was on vivid display.Attendees spoke of their ardent support for Trump, their suspicion that Democrats were behind an assassination plot and that his life had been spared by divine intervention.Patricia King, 82, using a walker, was at the rally in Butler in July with her 63-year-old daughter, Diana, and both felt it was important to return. “I remember the long wait and how hot it was and people being loyal enough to stand there and some of them fainted,” said King, a retired nurse. “I remember the shots going off – pop, pop, pop, pop – and I turned and looked where he was and everybody started running.”King praised Trump’s instinctively combative response that day. “That’s great with me. That’s like: I’m not quitting and that’s what America is about. We don’t quit. Kamala Harris is too weak. I think she’d be asking Putin to have a cup of tea with her, which is not strength to me.”Debbie Hasan, 61, a landlord wearing a Trump 2024 cap, described Saturday’s rally as “history in the making” and recalled the events of 13 July. “I was watching TV and my husband was in the other room. I start screaming: ‘They shot Trump! They shot Trump!’ Then I called my brother and I’m screaming. And then seeing him get up and the fist pump was an awesome sight. He’s a great man.”Hasan outlined a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats orchestrated the shooting. “I hate to say it, I think they were behind all this. They can’t beat him any other way. They tried putting him in court on all kinds of trumped up charges. They’re at their limit. They don’t know what else to do. They promote hate and prejudice. How they talk about him, some wacko’s going to say, he needs to be keyholed.”View image in fullscreenMany rallygoers echoed Trump’s claim that God saved him in order to save the country. Rodney Moreland, 66, retired from various jobs including welding, truck driving and security, said: “I don’t know if you believe in God but there was an angel around him that day, absolutely. After that happened his demeanour, everything changed about him. Now he’s calm, cool and collected and he’s known what words to say.”But Moreland warned of a possible backlash to the election result. “If it goes the opposite direction, there’s going to be a war. The last election was rigged. They said, we cannot have him stay in office again.”Kristi Masemer, 52, a Walmart worker, wearing a T-shirt that said “I’m still a Trump girl. I make no apologies”, criticised people who said they wished the would-be assassin had killed the former president.“The amount of people who were like, ‘I’m sorry that he missed’. People actually said that about another human being. That’s the Democrat party. Are you kidding me? That’s not humanity. Who would think that?”Masemer praised the restraint of Trump supporters after the assassination attempt. “The best part of all that was the people in the Maga movement after that didn’t riot. We didn’t lash back at these people because we’re not haters. We just want our country back and that’s it.”Butler county, on the western edge of a coveted presidential swing state, is a rural-suburban community and a Trump stronghold. He won the county with about 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. About 57% of Butler county’s 139,000 registered voters are Republicans, compared with about 29% who are Democrats and 14% other parties.Jana Anderson, 62, who works at an animal shelter, said: “I don’t think a woman should be president, only because it’s always been men. I’m a woman but I think men should lead the country, not a woman. Women, in my opinion, are wishy washy. I mean, she says a lot of things, she promises a lot of things, but I don’t know if she’s capable of doing those things.” More

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      Trump to attend rally at site of July assassination attempt in Pennsylvania

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      Donald Trump plans to return on Saturday to the site where a gunman tried to assassinate him in July, as the former president sets aside what are now near-constant worries for his physical safety in order to fulfill a promise – “really an obligation”, he said recently – to the people of Butler, Pennsylvania.“I’ll probably start off by saying, ‘As I was saying … ’,” the Republican presidential nominee has joked, in a bit of black humor about a speech cut short when a bullet struck Trump’s ear and he was whisked off stage – fist aloft – with blood dripping across his face.Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, also will be on hand at the Butler Farm Show grounds, as will billionaire Elon Musk, as the campaign elevates the headline-generating potential of his return with just 30 days to go in their the campaign against the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.The campaign is predicting tens of thousands of people will attend what is being pitched as a “tribute to the American spirit”. Local hotels, motels and inns are reportedly full and some eager rallygoers were already arriving on Friday, according to a local Facebook page.Hundreds of people were lined up as the sun rose on Saturday. A memorial for firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died as he shielded family members from gunfire, was set up in the bleachers, featuring his firefighter’s jacket surrounded by flowers.“President Trump looks forward to returning to Butler, Pennsylvania, to honor the victims from that tragic day,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “The willingness of Pennsylvanians to join President Trump in his return to Butler represents the strength and resiliency of the American people.”Trump will use the 5pm ET event to remember Comperatore and to recognize the two other rallygoers injured during the assassination attempt, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. They and Trump were struck when the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire from an unsecured rooftop nearby before he was fatally shot by sharpshooters.How Crooks managed to outmaneuver law enforcement that day and scramble on top of a building within easy shooting distance of the ex-president is among myriad questions that remain unanswered about the worst Secret Service security failure in decades. Another is his motive, which has never been determined.The Butler county district attorney, Rich Goldinger, told WPXI-TV this week that “everyone is doubling down on their efforts to make sure this is done safely and correctly”.Mike Slupe, the county sheriff, told the station he estimates the Secret Service – which has undergone a painful reckoning over its handling of two attempts on Trump’s life – is deploying ”quadruple the assets” it did in July.Butler county, on the western edge of a coveted presidential swing state, is a Trump stronghold. He won the county – where turnout hovers around an impressive 80% – with about 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. About 57% of Butler county’s 139,000 registered voters are Republicans, compared with about 29% who are Democrats.Three months after the shooting, townspeople are divided over the value of Trump’s return. Heidi Priest, a Butler resident who started a Facebook group supporting Harris, said Trump’s last visit fanned political tensions in the city.“Whenever you see people supporting him and getting excited about him being here, it scares the people who don’t want to see him re-elected,” she said.But Trump needs to drive up voter turnout in conservative strongholds such as Butler county, an overwhelmingly white, rural-suburban community, if he wants to win Pennsylvania in November. Harris, too, has targeted her campaign efforts at Pennsylvania, rallying there repeatedly as part of her aggressive outreach in critical swing states. More

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      Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in polls with early voting under way

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      More than 1.4 million people have now voted in the presidential election, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump continue to crisscross the country in the final stretch of a neck-and-neck campaign.Their vice-presidential picks, JD Vance and Tim Walz, also faced off this week in the only vice-presidential debate of this cycle. But initial polls suggested voters saw the debate as a draw, without clear impact on the race.Harris earned her highest national polling average since July, though the presidential race remains extremely close in battleground states, according to the Guardian’s poll tracker. Harris is leading in five of seven swing states, according to the Guardian’s average of high-quality state polls aggregated by the polling analysis platform 538 over the last 10 days. But overall, both candidates continue to have about even odds of winning.The Guardian’s tracker shows Harris with 49.3% of the vote nationally, compared with 46% for Trump. Early voting is already under way and more than 1.4 million Americans had voted as of midday Friday, according to data collected by the Election Lab at the University of Florida.Harris retains a slight lead, similar to the Guardian’s analysis last week. But the numbers have yet to reflect the vice-presidential debate.The simplest path to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency continues to be winning the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While Harris leads Trump in the 10-day average of polls in all three, according to the Guardian’s analysis (Pennsylvania by 1.2 points, Michigan by 0.1 point, and Wisconsin by 2.2 points), those advantages aren’t significant enough to say who will win, analysts say.The race is similarly close in the four other battleground states, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.“No candidate enjoys a significant lead in states worth the 270 electoral votes needed to win,” Nate Cohn, the polling analyst for the New York Times, wrote in his weekly newsletter. “This might be the clearest read we’ve had of the race so far. It was arguably the first ‘quiet’ week since Vice-President Harris’s entry into the race.”One slight exception may be in Pennsylvania, Cohn wrote. Polls showed Harris leading in the state by about 2 points after the 10 September debate, but now the race there was essentially tied, he wrote.The Guardian’s tracker is based on an average of high quality polls over the last 10 days compiled by 538. As of Friday, the forecasting site said the race was essentially a toss-up, with Harris having a 55% chance of winning and Trump having a 45% chance.Some of Trump’s best polling has been in Arizona – he leads Harris there 48.8% to 48%, according to the Guardian’s state poll tracker. Some of that advantage may have to do with his support among Hispanic voters, Cohn wrote.When Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020, he carried Latino voters by nearly 25 points. Four high-quality polls released this week showed Harris leading among Hispanic voters by no more than 12 points, Cohn noted. A national poll from NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC found Harris leading among Hispanic voters 54%-40%. Biden won 59% of the Hispanic vote in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Mr Trump’s strength among Hispanic voters this cycle might seem surprising, but four years ago he made big gains among them across the country,” Cohn wrote. “And in 2016, he fared no worse than Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among them, even though his anti-immigration rhetoric created the expectation of a significant backlash. In retrospect, his resilience among Hispanic voters in 2016 looks like a harbinger of what was to come.”Hispanic voters are not a monolith and Trump and Biden may be targeting different parts of the demographic. A Pew analysis found Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters 69% to 30% in 2020. But among non-college educated Hispanics, he won a much narrower 55% to 41%.Recent polling from the non-partisan Cook Political Report also found that the race was essentially tied. But its analysis did show some good signs for Harris.A plurality of voters now think Harris will win the election, with 46% saying so compared to 39% for Trump.“That represents an 11-point swing in Harris’s favor since August, and suggests that Harris has been successful in presenting herself as a serious candidate, while Trump’s attempts to portray her as unable to do the job have not been effective,” Amy Walter and Jessica Taylor, two of the site’s editors, wrote in an analysis.There were also some encouraging signs for Harris on the economy, the Cook Political Report found. While Trump continues to lead among voters who believe he is better equipped to handle the economy, voters are evenly split on who would be better to get inflation under control. In August, Trump had a 48%-42% advantage on the issue.The shift might reflect that Harris’s messaging on the economy is breaking through to voters, Walter and Taylor wrote. It could also suggest that Trump hasn’t been successful in linking Harris to the rising cost of living, they said. More

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      If Trump wins the election, US protest movements could face serious crackdowns

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      The Knox county commission was questioning a property developer one evening in April three years ago when protesters quietly filed in to their auditorium and raised their fists in the air.A week earlier, police had shot and killed 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr in a bathroom at his high school after they found him with a gun. Protests erupted in Knoxville, the county seat and largest city in eastern Tennessee, and one the loudest voices speaking out was Constance Every, who had organized demonstrations in the city during the national outrage that followed George Floyd’s death less than a year earlier. Now, she was in the county commission chamber with about two dozen others, intending to press them for the release of police body-camera footage that captured Thompson’s death.As the protesters lined up near the meeting room’s back wall, Every, who was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, retrieved from her backpack a white T-shirt Thompson’s aunt gave her, which read: “Who do you call when the murderer wears a badge?” Then, she pulled out an electronic bullhorn, and sounded the siren.“Knox county, county commission, your meeting is over,” Every said through the bullhorn, as the protesters clustered around her. “’Cause what we’re not going to tolerate is that we got a kid who was murdered at Knox county schools, and y’all going to carry on like these children don’t deserve to have their rights and other factors. It is not OK, what you all are doing, whatsoever.”View image in fullscreenWithin seconds of the siren going off, sheriff’s deputies, both in uniform and in plainclothes, converged on Every, grabbing her and some of her group, and marching them outside. While many kept silent as they left, Every did not. “I have not broke any laws! I am exercising my right to peacefully assemble and use my freedom of speech, you fucking murderers!” she shouted.The disruption lasted just over 70 seconds. But for Every and the six others arrested in the commission chambers, it marked the beginning of a three-year legal saga, after the county prosecutor charged them with disrupting a lawful meeting – a misdemeanor for which Tennessee’s Republican leaders had just months earlier doubled the punishment.Since Floyd’s death in May 2020, Republican-led states have enacted laws expanding the definition of rioting to encompass protesters who stayed peaceful when others did not, protecting drivers who run over demonstrators that block roads and enhancing penalties against protesters who target oil and gas infrastructure and deface monuments. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which tracks the legislation, has found that hundreds of proposals have been made by state and federal lawmakers nationwide, and more than two dozen signed into law.The push comes as the GOP’s standard bearer, Donald Trump, campaigns for the presidency on a platform that includes suppressing protests. He has vowed to deploy the national guard “where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order”, while simultaneously promising pardons for people convicted over the January 6 insurrection. As president, Trump reportedly encouraged the military to shoot protesters, and, this year, allies such as the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, have said the national guard should be used against college students demonstrating over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.If he returned to the White House, Trump could direct a militarized response to protests and pressure congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would impose nationwide penalties like those already in effect in Tennessee.Tennessee is a thoroughly red state where the GOP holds a supermajority in its general assembly. Last year lawmakers temporarily expelled two Black Democratic representatives who staged a noisy protest calling for gun control legislation in the state house chamber. In August 2020, Republicans passed a bill that increased penalties for blocking a street or sidewalk and created a new felony offense for protest encampments on state property, in addition to making disrupting a meeting a more severe category of misdemeanor.The Republican governor, Bill Lee, justified the legislation as necessary to prevent “lawlessness”, and in the years since, he has signed two more anti-protest bills, one of which made blocking roads a felony, and the other of which expanded the definition of aggravated rioting and created a mandatory minimum sentence for people convicted.View image in fullscreen“These laws that we are seeing in Tennessee are really representative of the kinds of tactics that we’re seeing nationwide in response to particular protest movements,” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at ICNL’s US program.To Amelia Parker, a Black Lives Matter activist who now serves on the Knoxville city council, it is not surprising that Every wound up being perhaps the first person to run afoul of such laws.“She’s one that authorities would want to make an example out of. They definitely would not want another Constance,” Parker said.An African American army veteran who is disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder from two tours in Afghanistan, Every became politically active after struggling to find services during a period of homelessness in Knoxville, the home town she returned to after leaving the military.“I’m not a sugar-coater, I’m not a person that’s going to come in and say, ‘with all due respect’. I’m not that,” Every said in an interview from her apartment, where a framed photograph of her speaking to protesters in a police station parking lot in the days after Floyd’s death hangs over the couch.“I’m going to come in and tell you straight to your face the failures, the problems, and more importantly, you holding this role as a political, elected body or member, that you should hold a lot of accountability for what’s happening.”Her leadership of the 2020 protests, which in Knoxville were generally peaceful, put her on the radar of local authorities, she believes. Tensions in the city escalated again following Thompson’s shooting on 12 April of the following year at Austin-East, a predominantly Black high school where, in the few months since the new year, four students had already died in shootings in its neighborhood.Officers went to the school that afternoon to find Thompson after his ex-girlfriend reported him for assaulting her earlier in the day and warned he was known to carry a gun, an investigation by Knoxville’s police department would find. In a lawsuit filed against the city and the four officers involved in his death, attorneys for Thompson’s mother and his best friend would write that he carried a pistol because his ex-girlfriend’s family had threatened him, and because the streets around the school were unsafe.The fours officers looking for Thompson found him in a bathroom stall with a gun. A struggle ensued, and after Thompson’s pistol went off and hit a garbage can, one of the officers fired twice, fatally wounding the teenager and injuring a school resource officer.Days later, the Knox county district attorney general, Charme Allen, said she would not prosecute the officers who encountered Thompson. The lawsuit filed by his mother and friend was dismissed by a federal judge, who found the officers had qualified immunity – the controversial doctrine that limits law enforcement officials’ liability for some lawsuits. Their attorney has appealed the decision.Every and other activists in Knoxville remember an atmosphere of distrust in the days after Thompson’s death, which was worsened by authorities’ decision to initially describe him as an “active shooter” and lead the public to believe the teenager was responsible for wounding the school resource officer, when he was in fact shot by one of their colleagues. They decided to hold protests to demand more details of what really happened, including the release of footage from the cameras the police were wearing on their uniforms.“We knew we had to double down and, as activists, that we had to really rally around each other and dig in on having fortitude to ensure we put a spotlight to this,” said Calvin Skinner, a Baptist minister who has collaborated on social justice work with Every, and was arrested at the county commission meeting.Days after Thompson’s death, Every, Skinner and others disrupted a school board meeting without issue. But when they went to the county commission meeting a week after the teen’s fatal wounding, they knew something was off. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies were waiting for them, and signs had been posted warning of the state’s law.In the past, disruptions had not been uncommon at the Knox county commission. Like many local governments, the body had just weathered a tense period as they dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic, during which protesters opposed to mask mandates would sometimes start shouting at them during meetings, recalled the former county commissioner Dasha Lundy. The same thing would happen when people grew upset over zoning decisions, she said, but, to her knowledge, nobody from either group was arrested.“I keep going back to the people who were not supportive of [mask mandates] and how they were interrupting our meetings, but they just so happened to be white folks,” said Lundy, who was the sole Black commissioner during her four years in office.“They just tell them, be quiet, do this, whatever. They interrupted the meeting too, but we don’t want to talk about that.”After Every began talking, the commission’s then chair, Larsen Jay, a Republican, gaveled the meeting into a 10-minute recess. When it resumed, he called the disruption “clearly a staged set-up for one purpose: to draw attention, to draw in police reaction, and to make this commission put in a very bad position”. He then added that anyone who wanted to speak could sign up for their public forum.The seven protesters who were removed from the commission chambers were jailed for a few hours, then released and charged with disrupting a meeting. That was one of the offenses that the Tennessee general assembly had raised penalties for in their bill passed after Floyd’s death, upgrading it from a class B misdemeanor to class A, the most serious category that carries a maximum jail sentence of just under 12 months.View image in fullscreenThough the protesters were a multiracial group, Every believes their cause made them a target. “If we were talking about anything else than Black Lives Matter, [there] probably would have been a whole different approach,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Knox county sheriff, Tom Spangler, said he was unavailable to comment. A spokesman for Allen, the district attorney general, said she declined to comment, because the case was still “pending”.The arrest came as a surprise to Mary Winter, a white Ihop manager who had traveled from a Tennessee city nearly two hours west to attend the protest. She didn’t think she was in danger of breaking the law and had walked into the chamber holding Every’s phone, which was streaming the protest on Facebook. That video, as well as another recorded by the Knoxville News Sentinel, shows that Winter stayed silent until she was detained, but in an affidavit, the deputy who arrested her accused her of disrupting the meeting by “yelling and encouraging others to do the same”.“This sworn statement of this officer in my arrest affidavit, that was the basis for my being arrested. And it flat-out did not happen,” Winter said.Shortly before the trial started on 8 April, Winter opted to plead guilty in exchange for six months of unsupervised probation and paying court costs. She was already on probation for felony attempted murder after shooting her husband, with whom she said she was in an abusive relationship, and feared a conviction that would send her to jail. Two other protesters, Carrie Hopper and Kevin Andrews, also took plea deals.At the trial, attorneys for Every, Skinner and two co-defendants, Gavin Guinn and Aaron Valentine, attempted to convince the jury that prosecutors had failed to prove that they had “substantially” disrupted the meeting, as the statute demanded. Every testified that they never intended to halt the commission’s meeting, because that would defeat the purpose – rather, they wanted the lawmakers to use their power over the district attorney general’s budget to have the body-camera footage released. The video was made public two days after the protesters’ arrest.View image in fullscreenThe trial also answered the question of how the sheriff’s department was aware of Every’s plans: they had been monitoring her Facebook account.“We’ll check various activist groups, activist individuals, individuals who somebody calls to us about and says they have concerns. And one of those individuals was Ms Every,” testified John Sharp, a sergeant in the Knox county sheriff’s office’s narcotics division, one of the plainclothes officers that removed Skinner from the commission chambers.Both sides questioned Jay about why the mask mandate protesters were not arrested when they were disruptive. The commission chair replied: “I’m not aware that they got arrested” but “several of them were escorted out of the room after being disruptive. I don’t know what the result of their actions were afterwards.”“And you say [these two parties] disrupted your meeting in similar ways?” asked Mike Whalen, Skinner’s attorney.“Yes, basically shouting out and disrupting it from an auditory perspective,” the commissioner replied.The prosecution, led by the deputy district attorney, Sean McDermott, put Every’s use of the bullhorn, and the protesters gathering around her, at the center of their case.“Did any of the mask people pull a siren and announce that your meeting was over?” McDermott asked Jay. “No,” he replied.In his closing argument, McDermott said: “The group was acting as one. They were protecting the one with the bullhorn, surrounding her, making it more difficult, slowing law enforcement down, stopping the meeting.”After about six hours of deliberations, the jury found Every guilty, but acquitted the three other defendants. She was sentenced to nearly a year of probation. Her attorney, Andrew Beamer, has appealed the verdict.Even with the heightened penalties, it was unlikely that Every would have been sentenced to jail, Beamer said. But he believes the new law serves as a “shot across the bow of everybody, that they weren’t going to let you protest in this way.“I think that the state saying, ‘hey, we care about these protest laws, let’s charge people.’ I don’t think that was lost on the county here.” More

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      Man charged with threatening judge in Florida district that heard Trump case

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      A man from Illinois has been charged with making violent threats against a federal judge in the Florida district that has handled Donald Trump’s classified documents case, according to an indictment made public on Thursday.Eric James Rennert, 65, is facing five federal charges in the indictment which accuses him of communicating interstate threats and threatening to assault, kidnap and murder a federal judge.The communications also included threats to injure or kidnap members of the judge’s family, prosecutors allege.Court documents do not name the judge who received the threats but indicate they occurred in St Lucie county, Florida. US district judge Aileen Cannon, who presided over the criminal case accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents, is based in that county along with another federal magistrate judge.Representatives for the US attorney’s office in Miami, which brought the indictment, and the federal court in the southern district of Florida did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The threats, which were made on three occasions in May and July, were intended to retaliate against the judge “on account of the performance of official duties”, according to the indictment.Rennert has been arrested and will be transported to Florida for his next court appearance, according to court records. He has not yet entered a plea.Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump during his presidency, and her approach to the classified documents case drew intense scrutiny. She dismissed all charges in July based on a finding that lead prosecutor and special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed to the role.Prosecutors are appealing Cannon’s ruling with the hopes of reviving the case. If they were to succeed, any trial would not take place until well after the 5 November presidential election, in which the Republican Trump faces Vice-President Kamala Harris.Cannon was also recently assigned to preside over the case of a man accused of attempting to assassinate Trump last month at his Florida golf course. A woman in Texas was sentenced to more than three years in prison in February after admitting to threatening Cannon, court records show.Federal judges have faced a rise in threats as part of an overall surge in violent rhetoric directed toward public officials in the United States. More

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      Elon Musk says he will attend Trump rally at Pennsylvania shooting site

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      Elon Musk plans to attend Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the former president narrowly avoided assassination in July.“I will be there to support!” the tech billionaire replied to a post by Trump on Musk’s social media platform, X, saying he was returning to the Butler Farm show grounds.Trump’s decision to hold the rally in the same open-air venue came after a series of harsh reports into Secret Service security failures that allowed a gunman to open fire from a rooftop on the outskirts of the fairgrounds.Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, injured the former president, killed rally attender Corey Comperatore and severely wounded two others as he got off clear shots with an assault rifle before he was killed by federal snipers.Trump and his campaign have indicated they will turn the rally into a triumphant return for the former president, as well as a way to honor those who were killed or injured.Comperatore’s family will attend, along with those injured in the gunfire, Trump and his campaign have said.“What you’re going to see in Butler … tomorrow is the kind of strength and leadership that we are desperate for back in that White House. I think it’s going to be an emotional rally,” Lara Trump told Fox News.The Pittsburgh Gazette said crowd estimates for Saturday’s planned event ranged from 15,000 to as high as 100,000. The Secret Service is expecting as many as 60,000 people.“There is a pilgrimage sense at all the rallies, but this is going to be the one,” said Jen Golbeck, a University of Maryland professor, told the newspaper. “There are definitely people who feel like – and say to me – the hand of God has touched Trump.”Trump said, “I had God on my side” in surviving the shooting and the “providential” moment, which also produced one of the 2024 presidential campaign’s – and any election in US history – most potent images, with Trump rising from a Secret Service huddle, blood streaked across his face, raising his fist and shouting “Fight!”Religious interpretations aside, the assassination attempt was the first of two Trump has now faced. Last month, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly aspired to shoot the former president on Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.Trump has also faced ongoing death threats from Iran, which is also blamed for hacking into his campaign.Trump has accused the Biden administration of intentionally denying security resources to help Kamala Harris, the US vice-president and his Democratic opponent in the November election, by preventing him from addressing large crowds, a signature of his political life.“They couldn’t give me any help. And I’m so angry about it because what they’re doing is interfering in the election,” he said in a Fox News interview.Changes have been made to what he can do on the campaign trail and Trump staffers are on edge, the Associated Press reported. There have been death threats directed at his aides, and his team isn’t as able to quickly organize the mass rallies he prefers.View image in fullscreenArmed security officers stand guard at the campaign’s Florida headquarters, and staff have been told to remain vigilant and alert.Events have been canceled and moved around because the Secret Service lacked the resources to safely secure them. Even with the use of glass barricades to protect Trump on stage, there are concerns about holding additional rallies outdoors due to fears about drones.Trump also now travels with a larger security footprint, with new traffic restrictions outside his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, and a line of dump trucks and big guns on display outside Trump Tower in New York when he is staying there.The Secret Service spokesperson, Anthony Guglielmi, said that Trump “is receiving heightened levels of US Secret Service protection” and that “our top priority is mitigating risks to ensure his continued safety at all times.”Leslie Osche, Butler county commissioners chair, told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 that officials were “confident” about security at Saturday’s event.Musk has endorsedTrump for another term in the White House. On Friday, the tech billionaire also retweeted a post calling Saturday’s event “HISTORIC!” More

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      Stephen Colbert on report on Trump’s attempts to steal election: ‘Smells like consequences’

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      Late-night hosts talk Jack Smith’s new report on how Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election and Republican hypocrisy over Joe Biden’s age.Stephen ColbertBack in July, the supreme court released a 6-3 decision declaring that Trump had immunity from prosecution on acts committed as president, “all but guaranteeing that the case would be delayed past the election, and no one would be talking about or learning any more about it”, said Stephen Colbert on Thursday’s Late Show.“Well, surprise!” he added, holding a 165-page report by special counsel Jack Smith on Trump’s efforts to steal the election. “Mhmmm, that’s beefy. Smells like consequences.”The report details efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election, and “how they are not covered by that ridiculous immunity ruling”, said Colbert.“We knew stuff in this report already, but it’s still gratifying to read the novelization of the horror movie we all lived through,” he added. According to the report, Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, knowingly pushed false claims of voter fraud and in his bid to hold on to power, “resorted to crimes”.“Pretty damning language, but kinda weird word choice to say Trump ‘resorted’ to crimes,” said Colbert. “That’s like saying ‘With nowhere else to turn, the bear resorted to pooping in the woods.’”“Just to note, ‘resorted to crimes’ should not be confused with ‘crime resort’ – another name for Mar-a-Lago.”Seth MeyersAccording to Republicans, January 6 is ancient history, “which is why a new filing from special counsel Jack Smith in the election subversion case is so damning”, said Seth Meyers on Late Night. “It reminds everyone of what Trump and his allies tried to do, and how brazen they were about it.”According to Smith’s report, Trump was overheard saying to his daughter Ivanka: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”“This is the most damning thing: in private, Trump knew he lost, despite what he was telling his supporters in public,” said Meyers.The report also details how Rudy Giuliani accidentally butt-dialed an NBC reporter, who overheard him discussing his need for cash and trashing the Biden family. “As a favor to Rudy, stop giving this man your phone number,” Meyers laughed. “The only two numbers he should have in his phone are his doctor and a liquor store that delivers.”“Rudy is the first criminal in history who has managed to rat on himself,” he continued. “The FBI doesn’t need to bug him or monitor his calls. They just have to sit around and wait until he accidentally sits on his phone and calls them.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel marveled at how Trump is now trying to get out of election fraud charges by claiming that the investigators rigged the election. “The old ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ defense,” said Kimmel.As Trump said in a recent far-right news interview: “The election was rigged. I didn’t rig it. They did.”“He’s actually right about some of that – he didn’t rig the election,” said Kimmel. “He tried to rig the election, and failed to rig the election. He’s rig-noramus, is what he is.”Meanwhile, Trump was “ranting and raving” in Michigan this week on the campaign trail. “If you watch any of his speeches from the last election, from 2020, you’ll see he’s slower,” said Kimmel. “He slurs his words, he repeats the same stories over and over and over again. He’s repeatedly promised to release his medical records and has not.”Which is notable, because Republicans “were very worked up about Joe Biden and how old he was, his energy levels and ability to lead, but even though Trump is only three years younger than Biden, they don’t seem too worried about that anymore”, said Kimmel before a montage of all the GOP Biden criticisms easily applied to Trump’s ravings on the campaign trail. More