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      The Age of Insurrection review: how the far right rose – and found Trump

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      Rightwing extremism has always been a feature of American life, from the diehard supporters of slavery in the 19th century to the 20,000 fascists who filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 and the violent opponents of integration who beat and killed civil rights workers and leaders throughout the 1960s.Today, this ugly tradition of hatred is perpetuated by dozens of vile groups, from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to the Family Research Council and a slew of Christian nationalist organizations.But as the investigative reporter David Neiwert argues in his terrifying new book, there is one terrible difference: the relentless mainstreaming of such disgusting ideas. The white nationalist ideology which inspired Payton Gendron to travel 200 miles to massacre 10 people in a Black Buffalo neighborhood is becoming as American as cherry pie.Neiwert shows such extremism has been “widely adopted” from “the highest reaches of the Republican party” to broadcasts by Tucker Carlson, “the most popular cable talk show host” until Fox News fired him.The surge in rightwing extremism inspired by the election of the US’s first Black president was reflected in an explosion in militia groups during Barack Obama’s first year in office. Then came Donald Trump, the first modern president to celebrate white supremacists. He praised “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia, where in August 2017 neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters, and he embraced the Proud Boys in 2020, telling them to “stand back and stand by”.The collaboration between such a president and the high-speed locomotive of social media has had disastrous consequences. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have brought American wackos together faster than any previous medium.Neiwert is a former senior writer for Daily Kos, the admirable progressive website founded by Markos Moulitsas 21 years ago. But Neiwert’s work goes back further. When he started out, he saw rightwing extremism as “an excellent bet” to propel a career in journalism, “an endless wellspring of human misery, social disruption and frightening violence – the kind of behavior that always makes news”.When Timothy McVeigh killed 168 by blowing up a truck outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, it became clear to Neiwert that the far right was “an existential threat not just to innocent people in its vicinity, but to democracy itself … What was striking … was how frequently their rhetoric waded into open sedition.” What Neiwert has learned over decades is one of the essentials lessons of his book: “They never ever give up … They are relentless in finding new ways to insinuate their toxic beliefs within the mainstream of American politics.”Neiwert offers some of the most detailed descriptions I have read of the movement’s biggest moments, including Charlottesville and the January 6 Capitol attack. His rigorous reporting produces many details new to me, including the fact that when a Swat team evacuated congressmen from a balcony on January 6, the officers drew guns on insurgents “outside the balcony doors” and forced them to “lie prone” as the legislators escaped.After Charlottesville, as a correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Neiwert covered events that advanced the right’s strategy for “simultaneously intimidating the general public while generating a phony narrative blaming leftists … for the brutality they themselves inflicted”. Now, he documents how so many far-right conspiracies have made their way into the mainstream, especially the great replacement theory, which says progressives want to flood the country with immigrants, to undermine white citizens.How successful has this effort been? In 2020, the Republican party refused to withdraw support from of any of the “64 GOP candidates … with QAnon connections”. In 2022, a poll found that nearly 70% of Republicans believed in the great replacement theory. Last week, the Washington Post reported the adoption of the great replacement theory as far away as Tunisia, where President Kais Saied sparked “evictions, firings, arrests and brutal assaults” of Black Africans, causing a surge in their efforts to escape to Europe.When Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, said that any opponent of the Florida governor’s “don’t say gay bill” was “probably a groomer or a least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children”, she used language “directly inspired by the hysterical QAnon conspiracy cult … in no time at all, Pushaw’s tweets made ‘grooming’ a mainstream rightwing talking point”.Neiwert’s book is full of reminders of how social media promote rightwing lies. When a veteran of the Tea Party movement teamed up with two ex-writers for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News to start a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group in November 2020, it got 300,000 followers in 24 hours. Facebook took the page down but Bannon started his own page the same day, then changed its name to “Own Your Vote”. The associated groups “amassed 2.5 million followers. YouTube, another giant purveyor of hatred and lies, hosted Stop the Steal videos which attracted 21m views and 863,151 likes.”No one has been more important to the mainstreaming of extreme rightwing views than Trump. Neiwert says the 45th president has “perfected a three-step tango with the radical right – a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat.”The book ends with a horrifying description of how the the movement has metastasized since the January 6 attack. By fall 2021, Proud Boys and “patriots” were everywhere, harassing “LGBTQ+-friendly teens at libraries, mask-promoting school board members and mall shops that required masks”. In Trump-loving rural areas, daily life “had become filled with foreboding, intimidation, threats and ugliness, all emanating from authoritarian rightwingers directing their aggression at anyone who failed to follow their dictates”.America’s only hope lies in the power of important books like this one to inspire decent citizens to redouble their efforts to defeat these vile scourges of freedom and democracy.
      The Age of Insurrection is published in the US by Melville House More

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      The Big Break: Ben Terris on his portrait of Washington after Trump

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      If you were a pollster, would you ever bet on elections? How about your clients’ elections? How about betting your clients would lose? For Sean McElwee, the wunderkind behind the liberal polling group Data for Progress, the answer was all the above.McElwee had clients including the 2022 Senate campaign of John Fetterman, in Pennsylvania. McElwee placed multiple bets on the midterms, including that Fetterman would lose. Fetterman’s organization became displeased. Following its victory, it severed ties with McElwee. It was just the beginning of a dramatic downfall heightened by the pollster’s connections to the pandemic-prevention advocate Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose billionaire brother Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire collapsed in scandal around election day.The rise and fall of Sean McElwee is one of many storylines in a new book The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses its Mind. For the author, the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, the individuals he profiles tell a collective story about DC processing the fallout from the Trump years.“Nobody knew what the world was going to be like post-Trump,” Terris says, adding: “If there is a post-Trump.”To explore that world, he turned to Democratic and Republican circles: Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress turned funder of progressive causes, whose conservative grandfather HL Hunt was reportedly the world’s wealthiest man; Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, a Republican power couple whose fortunes crested after Matt decided to stick with Trump in 2016; Ian Walters, Matt’s protege until political and personal differences ruptured the friendship; Robert Stryk, a cowboy-hatted lobbyist who parlayed Trump connections into a lucrative career representing sometimes questionable clients; and Jamarcus Purley, a Black staffer for the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein who lamented the impact of George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic on Black Americans including his own father, who died. Disenchanted with his boss, Purley lost his job in disputed circumstances and launched an unconventional protest in Feinstein’s Capitol office, after hours.Terris is a reporter for the Post’s Style section, which he characterizes as strong on features and profiles. He can turn a phrase, likening Fetterman to “a Tolkien character in Carhartt”, and has an ear for the telling quote. Once, while Terris was covering the Democratic senator Jon Tester, from Montana, in, of all places, an organic pea field, nature called. A staffer asked: “Can the senator’s penis please be off the record?” Terris quips that he’s saving this for a title if he ever writes a memoir.His current book is “sort of a travelog, not a memoir”, Terris says. “I tried to keep myself out of the book as much as I could. I wanted the reader to feel like they knew Washington, knew the weirdos, the odd scenes … the backrooms, poker games, parties.”Hunt-Hendrix’s Christmas party is among the opening scenes. Attendees include her aunt Swanee Hunt, a former ambassador to Austria. Hunt-Hendrix aimed to make her own mark, through her organization Way to Win.“She’s very progressive,” Terris says, “trying to unwind a lot of projects, in a way, that her grandfather was all about. To me, it was fascinating, the family dynamics at play.”Just as fascinating was her “figuring out how to push the [Democratic] party in the direction she believed it should go in – a more progressive direction than some Democrats pushed for. It told the story of Democratic party tensions – money and politics, the idea of being idealistic and also super-wealthy … All of these things made for a very heady brew.”On the Republican side, Stryk went from running a vineyard to savoring fine wine in a foreign embassy, thanks to his connection to Trump. Stryk joined the campaign in 2016. When Trump won, Stryk celebrated on a patio of the Four Seasons hotel in DC. A dog sniffed his crotch. When its owner apologized, Stryk found she worked for the New Zealand embassy, which was having difficulty reaching Trump. It was Stryk’s lucky break.“He was in a position to connect New Zealand to Trump,” Terris says. “He got a phone number and was off to the races, a sideshow guy making major deals … $5m with the Saudis, that kind of thing.”When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, Stryk was in Belarus, exploring a potential relationship with that country’s government. He had to make his way home via the Baltics.“One of the themes of the book is that the Donald Trump era allowed a bunch of sideshow characters to get out on the main stage,” Terris says. “Stryk is a great example of that.”Others distanced themselves – eventually. Terris sees the rupture between Matt Schlapp and Ian Walters as illustrative. As head of the American Conservative Union, Schlapp presided over CPAC, the annual conservative conference, with Walters his communications director. As Schlapp welcomed fringe elements to CPAC – from Trump to Matt Gaetz to Marjorie Taylor Greene – Walters felt increasingly repelled.“It’s an interesting tale of a broken friendship,” Terris says. “It also helps the reader understand how did the Republican party get to where it is now – where are the fault lines, why one way over another.”The 2020 election was the point of no return. Schlapp stayed all-in on Trump, supporting his claim of a stolen election even in a graveside speech at the funeral of Walters’s father, the legendary conservative journalist Ralph Hallow.“We have to take confidence that he would want us, more than anything else, to get beyond this period of mourning and to fight,” Schlapp is quoted as saying. Walters and his wife, Carin, resigned from the ACU. Ian remained a Republican but marveled at the bravery of the whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson in the January 6 hearings.As for Schlapp, he faced scandal late last year. Assisting with the Senate campaign of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, when Schlapp arrived in Georgia, he allegedly groped a male campaign staffer.“I had to go back into my reporting and ask, were there signs of this?” recalls Terris. “Could I run through all of this [with] the alleged victim over the phone? I did. I ran a bunch of questions by Matt – he never answered.”There was another last-minute controversy. McElwee’s polls proved inaccurate. Another red flag was his ties to Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose brother was arrested in December. Reports of McElwee’s gambling made clients wonder where their money was going. Senior staff threatened to resign. McElwee stepped down.“All of a sudden, it was national news in a way I was not prepared for,” Terris says.Can anyone be prepared for what comes next in Washington?“Donald Trump proved you can win by acting like Donald Trump,” Terris says. “There are a lot of people that learned from him – mostly in the Republican party, but [also] the Democratic party – how to comport yourself in Washington, what you can get away with. People’s confidence is broken, politics is broken, relationships.”Can it all be restored?“Nobody knows yet how to do it. It’s not the same thing as normal. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe normal led to Donald Trump.”
      The Big Break is published in the US by Twelve More

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      Decades of Decadence review: Marco Rubio joins publishing’s motley Republican crew

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      Marco Rubio should have picked a better title. With his new book, the three-term senator echoes a 1991 double-platinum album by none other than Mötley Crüe: Decade of Decadence. The vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee gives no credit to the bad boys of rock.Rubio is no Tommy Lee. As a presidential candidate, in 2016, the Florida senator preened … with an invisible kick-me sign pinned to his back.Donald Trump gleefully mocked the senator, his finances and personal tics. Rubio’s relationship with credit cards, Trump called a “disaster”. He also laced into his rival for sweating and gulping down water when rebutting Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in 2013.“I need water. Help me. I need water,” Trump sneered.It didn’t matter if Lil’ Marco had larger hands than him.In New Hampshire, Chris Christie fatally blistered Rubio for a robotic debate performance. “Memorized 25-second speech” – the words will forever haunt him. In that moment, Rubio’s grand ambitions went up in smoke.Also in 2015, McKay Coppins of the Atlantic caught Rubio pinching himself over his own good fortune, exclaiming to a friend: “It’s amazing … I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of $40,000 in cash.”So much for the yucks to be derived from Rubio’s title. As a text, Decades of Decadence delivers little. It lacks even the (skewed) intellectual curiosity of recent books by Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, hard-right senators of a generation just after Rubio. Instead, Rubio’s broadside reads like a laundry list of Republican orthodoxies delivered by a legislator scared Trump will upend his career still further. Less than two years ago, remember, the prospect of a primary challenge from Ivanka Trump had Rubio terrified.“I like Ivanka, and we worked very well together on issues, and she’s a US …” Rubio babbled. In the end, she punted. He was spared.But Rubio won’t (or can’t) leave well enough alone. In his new book, he compares himself to Donald Trump.“Watching the Trump campaign in action, I was reminded of my own first campaign for the US Senate in 2010,” he reminisces. “I did have an outsider spirit that allowed me to connect with voters who felt that the government wasn’t working for them.”Not in 2016, he didn’t. In his own state, Rubio lost the presidential primary to Trump by nearly 20 points.Elsewhere, Rubio compares himself to Roger Goodell.“I think of my role as a policymaker as very similar to the role of the commissioner of the National Football League,” he writes.OK. For what it’s worth, Rubio’s wife was once a Miami Dolphins cheerleader. His time as a college football player is a source of personal nostalgia.Dutifully, Rubio bashes the Bushes. He attacks the late George HW Bush and James Baker, his secretary of state, for being soft on China. He castigates Bush, who was ambassador to the United Nations and liaison to China, for referring to a Chinese leader as an “old friend”. He zings Baker as a “career public servant”.Bush served in the second world war. Baker was Bush’s “Velvet Hammer”. On their watch, the Berlin Wall fell and Kuwait was liberated. Rubio never wore a uniform and has spent most of his adult existence on the taxpayers’ dime. He is a career politician.Predictably, Rubio omits any mention of Trump prostrating himself before Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. The normally loquacious senator also stayed mum over Trump congratulating Kim on his country’s election to the board of the World Health Organization.On the page, Rubio also takes aim at the over-extension of the US military, financialism and woke corporations. He evidently suffers from amnesia. In a March 2015 interview with Fox News, Rubio rejected the contention the Iraq war was a mistake.“I don’t believe it was,” he said, adding: “The world is a better place because Saddam Hussein doesn’t run Iraq.”Weeks later, he reversed his position.In the same spirit of expediency, Rubio now voices disgust for Wall Street and financialism, upbraids Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase for supporting Black Lives Matter, and zings Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Capital for boosting investment in China.In 2016, such forces drove Rubio’s presidential campaign. Politico blared: “Koch donors give Rubio early nod.” Other major donors included Paul Singer of Elliott Management and Ken Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund mogul and Harvard donor.“I’m really excited to be supporting Marco Rubio,” Griffin said. “He will be the next president.”Not quite. Seven years on, Griffin’s Citadel Securities is increasing its exposure in China. To Rubio, apparently, the role of business is to cough up campaign dollars – then shut up.“The best way to ensure our political system is less reliant on money is not to pass laws which infringe on fundamental rights, but rather to elect leaders who value policy and principles over politics and special interests,” the senator intones.In the race for the Republican nomination, he has not yet endorsed. That has not stopped him bemoaning Trump’s fate at the hands of the law. Last week, moments after news of the former president’s latest indictment, over his retention of classified records, Rubio delivered the following tweet:“There is no limit to what these people will do to protect their power and destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart and shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.”His disdain for Joe Biden is unvarnished. Trump? Less so – in public, at least.
      Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      Dictatorship? How Hitler, Stalin and Trump show it’s easier than you think

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      Three zombies lurching your way is scary enough. Now imagine they’re Lenin, Stalin and Putin. This scene isn’t from a Kremlin-themed horror film, but rather a new graphic novel, Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa.Through their day job, as co-hosts of the Gaslit Nation podcast, the authors have long warned about the dangers of authoritarianism, whether discussing January 6 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now they are releasing a book, illustrated by the Polish artist Kasia Babic.It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at dictatorship, a how-to manual with lessons from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Putin, Kim Jong-un and many others whose stories offer time-tested tips on how to seize and consolidate power.“We wanted to do a book on the dictator playbook to show people how unoriginal dictators are,” Chalupa says, “so they can better predict the next moves of an aspiring authoritarian.”Some such moves, such as stigmatizing minority groups or employing propaganda, are well-known from history class. Others may seem counterintuitive. According to Chalupa and Kendzior, dictators are fond of both elections and constitutions. It helps, of course, if they win the popular vote by an overwhelming margin and if constitutional rights are guaranteed on paper but not in real life.On the page, these tips and more are shared by an omniscient narrator who Chalupa says has Cary Grant’s looks and verve, Stephen Colbert’s snark and the devil’s ability to tempt.One relatively new development for dictators is the increasing usefulness of technology when it comes to keeping civilians under surveillance. Chalupa notes that when her Ukrainian grandfather was in one of Stalin’s prison camps, inmates were allowed to speak to each other relatively freely. Today, China uses technology to keep a constant eye on Uyghurs in its own camps. Chalupa and Kendzior fault companies like Apple, Facebook and Google for doing business with China.“When you have innovations in AI driven by companies in the west, it’s going to be used for authoritarian control,” Chalupa says.“It’s only a matter of time before it starts spreading everywhere. You think you live in a democracy? Every single democracy is vulnerable. Nobody is immune to the authoritarian virus. If all the surveillance technology tools go unregulated, if there’s no vocal outcry against them from the public or elected officials in the EU, North America and elsewhere, if there’s no pushback against them, it’s going to be game over.”When Chalupa and Kendzior conceived their book, they outlined it as if it were an infomercial, wondering what a Trump University course on dictatorship would look like, and proceeded accordingly. They also thought about Oscars-style awards for despots.In one sequence, the narrator becomes an Academy Awards host. He dons a tuxedo, strolls the red carpet and presents the Oscar for Best Purge to Kim Il-sung, founder of the dynasty that rules North Korea. According to the book, nowadays Kim Jong-un not only continues the tradition of purges, he has extended it to canine pets of the ruling class.As Chalupa points out, dictators can’t achieve power on their own. They require the help of “useful idiots”.“In terms of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, all the sort of people we highlight throughout the project, the larger theme of the book is useful idiots. People helped Hitler have power. Why? What did they get out of it, or think they were getting out of it?”The book looks at a Weimar Republic media baron, Alfred Hugenberg, who thought he could control Hitler and limit his danger to Germany: a fateful miscalculation. Meanwhile, Stalin’s brutality was whitewashed in the west thanks to figures including the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw and the New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, whose fawning coverage won a Pulitzer prize. One of Duranty’s contemporaries, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who sought to expose Stalin’s atrocities, was the subject of Chalupa’s 2019 feature film, Mr Jones. Another voice of conscience spotlighted in Chalupa and Kendzior’s book is George Orwell, for his courageous opposition to Stalin and to authoritarianism in general.“I think Orwell wasn’t alone,” Chalupa says. “He had a community working with him side-by-side” including “his wife Eileen, a remarkable poet in her own right”.The rogues’ gallery wouldn’t be complete without Donald Trump. Recently indicted a second time, the 45th president plays a prominent role in the book. One aspect the authors emphasize is Trump’s dictatorial skill when it comes to inflaming supporters.They highlight his tweets on the campaign trail in 2016: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”Another sequence depicts Trump supporters drinking conspiracist Kool-Aid on January 6. A man wearing a red Maga cap downs a shot which makes his muscles expand and brain shrink. “Stop the steal!” he exclaims. Others, similarly addled, start threatening Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Egged on by Trump, the mob attacks the Capitol. With the seat of government burning, Trump feigns innocence.The book also examines US support for dictatorships abroad. In the 1970s, such support often came about through the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Whether it was the coup against Salvador Allende that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile or coziness toward dirty war dictators in Argentina, Kissinger was key to the embrace of despots worldwide.“He was like a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ during our research,” Chalupa recalls, noting “all the times he kept popping up – ‘there’s Kissinger again.’”With so much material to work with, the authors had to make decisions about what to include. Their treatment of Hitler spotlights Mein Kampf and his brief alliance with Stalin, but there is not much mention of his antisemitism and the Holocaust.“We sort of focused on the dictators themselves versus their atrocities,” says Chalupa, whose next project is a Holocaust-themed work about the American second world war reporter Dorothy Thompson. “It’s sort of like the Hitchcock method.”She adds that “the focus is so much on useful idiots. It’s really the theme of the book. We’re not trying to minimize any atrocities” or “eclipse the victims”.Chalupa noted that the book is geared toward younger readers, aiming to encourage them to learn more. Sadly, with things the way they are, it seems there will be no shortage of material should a sequel ever be planned. But Chalupa maintains a sense of hope.“We’ve got to keep fighting,” she says. “We have no choice. Every single one of us, wherever [we are], should not check out, should not say, ‘OK, it’s out of my hands.’ It’s not up to you alone to fix it, but what we have the power to do, the bandwidth to do, is incredibly powerful.”
      Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! is published in the US by First Second More

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      The Shadow Docket review: how the US supreme court keeps sunlight out

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      Only a quarter of Americans have confidence in the supreme court. As the country strives to navigate a post-Roe v Wade world, the right to abortion removed, regard for the right wing of the court is scarcer still. Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito have negative ratings with the public. Kavanaugh and Thomas are underwater by double-digits.Being perceived as a predator – Kavanaugh – engenders disdain or worse. Taking undisclosed gifts from a Republican mega-donor and being married to an election-denier who trades on her spouse’s judgeship – Thomas – triggers demands for renewed oversight.When Ginni Thomas visited the White House “you knew your day was wrecked”, said a senior Trump aide, according to the Daily Beast. This week came news that Clarence Thomas and Alito have not yet filed their financial disclosures and have received extensions. The circus rumbles on.Against such a backdrop, Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas law school and CNN commentator, delivers The Shadow Docket.Under the subtitle “How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic”, Vladeck offers a well-researched indictment of how the supreme court has grown to rely on using procedural orders rather than rulings to make new law, escaping scrutiny while delivering major victories to the political right.The term “shadow docket” was coined in 2015, by William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. In Vladeck’s words, it was “a catch-all for a body of the supreme court’s work that was, to that point, receiving virtually no academic or public attention”.Strictly speaking, the shadow docket is a vehicle for addressing issues that demand urgent attention, usually injunctions and orders to preserve the status quo. But it has morphed into a fraught topic. The court has adjudicated cases involving abortion, voting rights and Covid policy by means of the shadow docket. The docket also became the prime location for the elevation and reordering of religious rights, under the free exercise clause of the first amendment.Almost by definition, docket rulings are sparse. They are often unaccompanied by reasoning, Vladeck writes. “Invariably”, they lack “identification of how (or how many of) the justices voted and can be handed down at all times of day or, as has increasingly become the norm, in the middle of the night.”Vladeck knows his subject. In September 2021, he testified to the Senate judiciary committee about “Texas’s Unconstitutional Abortion Ban and the Role of the Shadow Docket”.He has also said: “What’s remarkable is that the court repeatedly acquiesced and acquiesced [to the right] … and almost always without any explanation.”On the page, he observes that few such Trumpian wins have resulted in actual binding precedents. Rather, shadow docket triumphs mainly satisfy political needs. Vladeck credits Noel Francisco, the solicitor general under Trump, and his deputy, for hatching the legal strategy that for example salvaged the Muslim travel ban and efforts to “build the wall” on the southern border without express congressional appropriation.SB-8, the Texas six-week abortion ban, provides a stark illustration of how the process continues to work. In September 2021, the supreme court did not formally opine on the constitutionality of the draconian Texas law. Instead, in an unsigned shadow docket order, a bare majority allowed the statute to slide into effect. It read:
      The application for injunctive relief or, in the alternative, to vacate stays of the district court proceedings presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the court is denied.”
      The text made no mention of Roe, the 1973 ruling then in place, safeguarding federal abortion rights. But everyone could see what was coming.John Roberts, the chief justice, a George W Bush appointee, would have stopped the Texas law from going into effect, pending a decision on the merits. The statutory rubric was “unusual” and “unprecedented”, he wrote. “The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large.”Months later, Roberts voted with the three liberals to save Roe. No matter. The court struck it down.Not everyone welcomes the attention Vladeck and others have brought to the use of the shadow docket. Alito publicly twitted the media for portraying it as something “sinister”, and depicting the court as “having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways”.On the other hand, Thomas’s friendship with the mega-donor Harlan Crowe should surely give any observer clear reason to pause.Elsewhere, Coney Barrett has denied that the court engages in results-oriented decision-making, urging an audience at the Reagan Library in April 2022 to “read the opinion” instead.Vladeck is unswayed: “It’s essential context to point out that, just two days later, she joined a 5-4 shadow docket ruling with no opinion for the public to read. It’s all part of the story – or, at least, it should be.”“The rise of the shadow docket … has negative effects on public perception of the court – and of the perceived legitimacy of the justices’ work,” Vladeck writes.The legitimacy of the court erodes.The Shadow Docket is comprehensive and sensitive to nuance, written for concerned audiences. Members of Congress, the bar, the press and engaged non-lawyers come to mind. Vladeck covers more than two centuries of legal history, together with the transformation of the court into a visibly co-equal branch of government.On Thursday night, news broke of 37 federal criminal counts against Donald Trump. The next election is 17 months away. The legitimacy and resilience of all US institutions stands to be tested like never before.
      The Shadow Docket is published in the US by Hachette More

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      The Supermajority review: How the supreme court trumped America

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      Michael Waldman ran the speechwriting department in Bill Clinton’s White House. His new book about the conservative supermajority which dominates the supreme court is written with the verve of great campaign oratory.Waldman is also a learned lawyer, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and a talented popular historian. His new book focuses on three horrendous decisions the court rendered at the end of its term one year ago, but it includes a brisk history the court of the last 200 years, from the disastrous lows of Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) and Plessy v Ferguson (1896) to the highs of Brown v Board of Education (1954) and Obergefell v Hodges (2015).But the longest analysis is devoted to those three days in June 2022 when the court “crammed decades of social change into three days”.Waldman writes: “It overturned Roe v Wade [on abortion] … putting at risk all other privacy rights. It radically loosened curbs on guns, amid an epidemic of mass shootings. And it hobbled the ability of government agencies to protect public health and safety and stop climate change.”These decisions were the work “of a little group of willful men and women, ripping up long-settled aspects of American life for no reason beyond the fact that they can”.Waldman describes how earlier extreme decisions of the court provoked gigantic national backlashes.The civil war started just four years after the court held in Dred Scott that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States.In May 1935, the “Black Monday decisions” obliterated key parts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including striking down the National Recovery Administration. Those rulings led to Roosevelt’s unsuccessful plan to expand the size of the court, which in turn led the court to reverse its position on the New Deal, suddenly upholding Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. Referring to the number of justices on the court, one newspaper humorist called it “the switch in time that saved nine”.Waldman describes the current make-up of the court as the ultimate outcome of the longest backlash of all – the one to the court led by Earl Warren, who crafted the unanimous opinion in Brown, outlawing segregation in public schools.Equally important were decisions requiring legislative districts to have equal populations. Before Reynolds v Sims in 1964, nearly 40% of the population of California lived in Los Angeles but the state constitution awarded that county just one of 40 state senators. Proclaiming the revolutionary doctrine of “one person, one vote”, the court said: “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.” By 1968, 93 of 99 state legislatures had redrawn their districts to comply.But these vital building blocks of modern American democracy coincided with the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, including the fight for racial equality and the explosion of sexual freedom.“The backlash to the 1960s lasted much longer than the 1960s did,” Waldman observes. “Most of us have spent most of our lives living in it.”Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign was the first to capitalize on this backlash. A young campaign aide, Kevin Phillips, explained the plan to the journalist Garry Wills: “The whole secret of politics” was “knowing who hates who”, a theory that reached its apotheosis 50 years later with the ascendance of Donald Trump.The problem for America was that most of the energy on the left dissipated after the election of Nixon. At the same time, the right began a decades-long battle to turn back the clock. For 50 years, the right has had overwhelming organizational energy: it built a huge infrastructure of think tanks and political action committees that culminated with the election of Trump and his appointment of the three justices who cemented the rightwing supermajority.Recent reports have highlighted the enormous amounts of money that have directly benefitted justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas (never mind Thomas’s own gifts from Harlan Crow) through payments to their wives. Waldman reminds us how long this has been going on. Way back in 2012, Common Cause charged that Thomas failed to disclose nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation to his wife, forcing him amend 20 years of filings.Waldman is particularly good at explaining how earlier rulings have accelerated the infusion of gigantic sums that have corrupted American politics. Most important of course was Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, in 2010, when five justices including Roberts “undid a century of campaign finance law”.Citizens United made it possible for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums in federal elections as long as they plausibly pretended they were independent of the candidates they backed. As Waldman writes, quickly “that proved illusory, as presidential contenders … raised hundreds of millions of dollars for their campaigns, all of it supposedly independent”.This was the beginning of the Roberts majority’s use of the first amendment guarantee of free speech “to undermine democracy, a constitutional contradiction”. Two years after Citizens United, the court eliminated “a long-standing cap on the amount” individuals could give to federal candidates.These rulings “remade American politics”, Waldman writes. “In the new Gilded Age of fantastically concentrated wealth, billionaires again dominated the electoral system.”The shift was dramatic “and largely unremarked”. In 2010, billionaires spent about $31m in federal races. A decade later they spent $2.2bn. Last year, Peter Thiel provided nearly $30m in “independent funds” to support JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona.Waldman concludes that the court has become a serious threat to American democracy. He suggests our only hope is that Democratic successes in last year’s midterms – many based on fury over the fall of Roe v Wade – mark the beginning of a backlash against the rightwing revolution the court now shamelessly promotes.
      The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      ‘It looked like Chauvin would get away with it’: Minnesota’s top attorney on how he won justice for George Floyd’s family

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      When he recalls seeing Derek Chauvin in court for the first time, Keith Ellison references “the banality of evil”, a phrase coined by writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.“The point of the whole book is that Nazis were not these big, scary people that your imagination conjures,” Ellison, Minnesota’s top law enforcement official, says in a phone interview. “They’re ordinary, they’re plain, they’re very regular and they’re a lot less than you assume they would be and that’s how I felt about Derek Chauvin. He looked like a relatively small man – I bet he didn’t weigh 140lb. Here’s this guy who acted so monstrously: it’s just a man, not a very big one.”Chauvin, a white former police officer, was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man in Minneapolis, after kneeling on his neck for nine minutes. He was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison and has appealed his conviction.The prosecution was directed by Ellison, who led every meeting, assigned duties to the team and sat in court every day scribbling observations in old notebooks from his 12-year spell in the House of Representatives (he was the first Muslim elected to Congress). When those were full, a friend at a law firm gave him more.The notes were invaluable to prosecutors as the trial unfolded and served as raw material for Ellison’s recently published book, Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence, which offers a blow-by-blow account of the case and spotlights a culture in which the training manual often receives lip service and complaints about “bad cops” are too easily ignored. It asks what role prosecutors, defendants, heads of police unions, judges, activists, legislators, politicians and media figures can play in reforming a criminal justice system that fails people of color.The book begins on the day three years ago last week when Ellison, attorney general of Minnesota, was woken by his phone at 4.45am by an urgent message. He watched a mobile phone video that showed Floyd, trapped under Chauvin’s knee, shouting “Mamma! Mamma! I’m through!” and, repeatedly, “I can’t breathe!” Ellison could not believe how long the torment continued.The 59-year-old recalls: “Even though I have been working on police accountability and brutality issues for years, I was still shocked. I was still blown away by the inhumanity of what I saw.”The side of every police car in Minneapolis displays the words: “To protect with courage, to serve with compassion.” The first statement from the city police department about Floyd was entitled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” and made no mention of officers restraining him on the ground with a knee on his neck.The state attorney general comments: “I did not expect to see basically a whitewashing of what happened to George Floyd. It said he died of a medical emergency – sounds like a heart attack or a stroke. It does not sound like positional asphyxia with a knee on the neck and so I found that dumbfounding as well.”With America already traumatised by the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s divisive presidency in the summer of 2020, the killing ignited protests against police brutality and racial injustice. Ellison had expected the conscience of Minneapolis to be shocked but was not prepared for the demonstrations that took hold everywhere from Bogotá to Lisbon.“In cities all over the world you saw an outrage. When I thought about it, I understood it because nowhere in the world do people tolerate arbitrary government force. They always protest it no matter what.”America began a racial reckoning but, Ellison notes, around the world the issue transcended race. “In America everything is racialised but it’s not racialised in every country in which people were shot. There were protests in Lagos – everybody is Black in Lagos. People still recognised government abuse of power and state-sponsored violence and they protested it.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, tapped Ellison, who had spent 16 years as a criminal defence lawyer but served less than two as attorney general, to lead the prosecution when the Chauvin case came to trial. Ellison accepted but, even with video evidence and witnesses, did not take the outcome for granted.A murder conviction of a police officer for an on-duty death is uncommon. The officers accused of beating Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 were acquitted, while Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s cases never made it past the grand jury. “History was on Derek Chauvin’s side,” Ellison says. “It looked a lot more like Chauvin would get away with it than not.”The makeup of the jury was a key concern. “We grow up on TV shows like Dragnet or Hill Street Blues or Law and Order. We all are raised on a certain amount of media that reinforces this idea that you should trust the police.“And yet here on this video we see officers who don’t deserve to be trusted, don’t deserve to be believed, and so part of the job that we had assigned to us is to help people believe their eyes, trust their instincts, listen to their neighbors. The people who stopped on that street corner were as inclined to believe the police story as anyone but they couldn’t deny it because it was unfolding right in front of them. As we picked the jury, we wanted the jury to identify with that randomly selected group of people who assembled to object to the treatment that George Floyd was receiving.”Ellison succeeded in impaneling the most gender and racially diverse jury of his career. Fellow officers and even a police chief took the witness stand to testify against Chauvin, who did not testify on his own behalf.In April 2021, on the day of the verdict, several hundred people gathered outside the courthouse and 23 million people watched on live television. The jury found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Ellison felt a rush of relief but took no joy at the sight of a man whose life had changed forever.On the faces of the Floyd family he saw “validation” and “vindication”, he recalls. “More than anything else, their brother was treated like human trash and the verdict said, no, he’s a human being worthy of respect like anyone. To them, it was extremely emotional – tears – and then they were surprisingly calm. They’re a very dignified family, very dignified people. They were clearly relieved: they didn’t know what the jury was going to decide.”In November that year, however, Ellison suffered a defeat. The residents of Minneapolis voted on a ballot proposal that would in effect replace the police department with a public safety department putting an emphasis on public health. The attorney general endorsed the measure but more than 56% of people voted against it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEllison explains: “Sadly, after the death of George Floyd, we experienced what you might describe as de-policing and a lot of officers quit and a lot of officers said we’re not going to engage criminal conduct.“Some of the folks who are inclined to commit crimes felt they had a freer hand and we saw crime statistics go up. Because of that, a lot of people were more concerned about their personal safety than they were about police accountability and that is one reason why the measure failed.”A second cause of rising crime, he argues, was a breakdown in trust between police and community. “People who commit crimes know this. They’re like, ‘Look, I know in this neighborhood people don’t call the police, therefore I’m freer to sell dope, carry guns, harm others, extort people.’ It is very important for the sake of public safety to hold police accountable on a consistent ongoing basis because, if you don’t, it will allow crime to thrive and grow, which is nobody’s benefit.”Centrist Democrats took the ballot result as a sign that the phrase “defund the police” had turned politically radioactive and become a gift to Republicans eager to portray them as soft on crime. Former president Barack Obama warned young progressives that it would turn off many voters.But Ellison, a former deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, believes that “defund the police” has been unfairly weaponised by a Republican party that, given its unwillingness to address gun violence, has no credibility on public safety.He points out that police misconduct lawsuits in Minneapolis and elsewhere in recent years have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars – money that could have been spent on hospitals, parks, public transport or schools. “It’s going to compensate victims of police misconduct. What if we just stop the misconduct?”The failure of the ballot measure in Minnesota hinted at a broader loss of momentum after that seemingly revolutionary summer. The Black Lives Matter signs that adorned many front gardens gradually gave way to Ukrainian flags as new causes took hold. Congress failed to reach a bipartisan agreement on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Police shot and killed at least 1,096 people – a record – last year, according to a count by the Washington Post.But Ellison sees a mixed picture. “What I can tell you is that on the local level a lot of good things have happened. You’ve seen legislation passed in the state of Minnesota. The city of Minneapolis has taken a number of measures to try to improve things. We’ve hired some police leaders who are reform-minded. But quite honestly, it has been an uneven progress. The federal government hasn’t really done anything, which is really disappointing.”The ambivalence was highlighted earlier this year when Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, died after a traffic stop escalated into a beating by a group of Memphis police officers. The horrific killing reopened old wounds but Memphis police and county officials earned praise for a swift, unequivocal response. Five officers were fired and charged with second-degree murder. They pleaded not guilty.Ellison was impressed. “Quite honestly, I think that if George Floyd had not occurred, maybe we would still be stuck in this very ham-handed, fumbling-along approach, but the way that they did it signaled to the population that this was going to be handled in a proper way and it was going to be meaningful accountability.”Indeed, despite all he has seen of the worst in human nature, Ellison remains optimistic about the future. He reflects: “Look, it’s sad but it’s true: the people who killed George Floyd were a multiracial group. There was one Black officer, one Hmong officer and two white officers. But the people who stood up for George Floyd were a multiracial group too. There was a young white woman who was a firefighter, two young white teenagers, a 61-year-old African American man, a 17-year-old Black girl.“It was a mixed group and, if you look at the protests, they were multiracial. I’m not pessimistic. We can move forward but we’ve got to try to take stock of the lessons that are available to be learned and that’s why I wrote the book, because I want folks to really think about solving this problem.”
      Break the Wheel is published in the US by Twelve More

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      The Movement Made Us: true story of family and the civil rights struggle

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      In the crowded field of books about social activism, truth is the element that distinguishes good from great. In his first book, David Dennis Jr has mastered the process.The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and a Legacy of a Freedom Ride is written with his father, David Dennis Sr, a hero of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The book opens with raw truth and maintains that standard, never using ambiguity as a shield against accountability.Dennis Sr never intended to be involved in the movement. In fact, the life he dreamed of when he went to Dillard University in New Orleans had nothing to do with activism at all. He wanted to be an engineer.When he started attending meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality (Core, which he would direct in Mississippi), he did so not out of bravery, nor driven by a desire to fight for a better world for Black people. Nor was he driven by a refusal to stand idle against white nationalism. At first, he was driven by motives familiar to any freshman who finds himself the first in his family to attend college. He wanted to meet attractive girls, keep his head down, finish school and get a job.Whether you consider that selfish, or self-preservation, it is unmistakably human. The Movement Made Us never shies away from the humanity of our civil rights heroes and heroines and the truth about a country that forced even the least prepared “soldiers” to fight a war that still hasn’t ended.In a chapter entitled God and Fear, Dennis Sr and Jr invite readers to experience the tension in the room as figures including John Lewis, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Andrew Young, CT Vivian, Wyatt Tee Walker and the director of Core, James Farmer, discuss whether a freedom ride – an organized incursion into the south, by public transport and in support of voting rights – should be cancelled because of extreme threats and the promise of jail on arrival.King objects. Questions arise about whether he is too important to the movement to ride. “He ain’t special,” one attendee shouts. King’s commitment was never in question but something far worse was being projected to other leaders: his assumed “superiority”. Dennis Sr and Jr draw readers into such tensions, allowing them to sit with the fear, anger and authenticity of the moment.Describing pivotal historic moments, the authors use truth as their compass, unafraid of where it may lead. No subject is above examination. The truth of our country is far more brutal than many Americans want to believe.Americans often see their history through rose-colored glasses. The Movement Made Us holds history to the sun, willing to let the rays burn. In a chapter entitled A Weekend in Jackson, the young activist Joan Johnson is questioned by the police who want to know about the “leaders” of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.“Lil’ [n-word] you in the NAACP,” the cop spat.“Yes,” she declared.Her words met with a beating. She fell to the floor, tried to protect her head. The police kicked her and demanded to know “who runs the NAACP?”“The people.”Each time she was asked the same question, Johnson gave the same answer. She was beaten unconscious, left in a pool of her own blood. The authors reveal that she was 16 years old at the time. The rawness of the image leaves no room to pretend that such domestic terrorism precluded the torture of women and children.America and the police force it protects and serves are not alone in being held to the light. The authentic life of David Dennis Sr, college student turned civil rights veteran, is examined closely too.After his close friend Medgar Evers was shot dead on his own front lawn, Dennis Sr nearly succumbed to survivor’s guilt and grief. The trauma and turmoil he describes will pose questions in the mind of the reader. Questions like, “What becomes of those who survive when their fellow soldiers are murdered with impunity? Where do their bodies and minds store the pain from the emotional and physical violence inflicted? What happens to marriages and families when one spouse promises for ever but can barely imagine a world beyond tomorrow?”This book addresses these questions with truth. Father and son wrestle with their answers. There are no clear winners. Noting how the family became an unwilling casualty in the war, Dennis Jr shares what it was like to be the son of a civil rights legend who barely escaped his own share of assassination attempts:
      The white men who fired shots at your back may have missed you but they hit our lineage. They left bullet holes in the foundation upon which your future families are built.”
      The Movement Made Us is not for those unprepared for veracity. Readers will experience a father sometimes reluctant to revisit the past and a son navigating his identity as a griot, recording history while protecting the father he loves.At its core, The Movement Made Us is about legacy, leadership, healing and accountability. It is more than a story about a father and his son. It is more than a story about the civil rights movement. It is a master class on allowing truth to anchor you and finding the balance between accountability and honoring. This is a lesson that should be replicated in America as a whole.Dennis Jr states: “This is the part where we break and tear the things that have been fixed in place.” His words are directed towards his father, but for a country in need of real healing, it is an evergreen declaration.
      The Movement Made Us is published in the US by Harper More