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      Moms for Liberty is part of a long history of rightwing mothers’ activism in the US | Michael Feola

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      The activist group Moms for Liberty has become the new face of the culture wars around education. The group was founded in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, and rose to prominence through outspoken opposition to school mask mandates. The group has now spread across the United States, its membership fueled by the Republican-led moral panic over a “woke ideology” that is supposedly sweeping public schools and “indoctrinating” children. At present, the group counts 285 chapters in 45 states.As the group has grown, so too have its political ambitions. Moms for Liberty places particular emphasis on capturing local school boards in order to secure greater control over school policy. More broadly, the group endorses legislation that would limit the topics that can be discussed in the classroom (for instance, Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation), and they promote policies that allow parents to target books for removal from school libraries and classrooms.The materials challenged by Moms for Liberty reflect the “war on wokeness” announced by conservative figures such as Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis. Group members regularly disrupt school board meetings to rail against books that address the nation’s history of racial violence (maligned under the fuzzy category of “critical race theory”). Likewise, the group condemns materials that explore gender identity or advocate for LGBTQ+ acceptance – particularly those that explore transgender identity. Librarians, teachers and parents who defend these materials have been repeatedly harassed by group members as “groomers” or “pedophile sympathizers”.The caustic tone of the group’s activism has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify it as an extremist organization. As a movement, Moms for Liberty draws from the long history of rightwing women’s activism in the US – particularly in such activists’ identity as mothers. Where mothers’ movements are often associated with projects of social welfare, a counter-tradition of women’s activism has politicized motherhood to pursue staunchly conservative aims.As the historian Michelle Nickerson demonstrates, the period surrounding the cold war is a useful lens for understanding how mothers’ movements became a pillar of American conservatism. Like Moms for Liberty, these groups responded to cultural change by condemning the spread of progressive ideologies through public school systems. Fueled by anti-communist panic, they fought for the removal of textbooks, teachers and administrators they judged to be tainted by progressive ideals. A defining feature of these groups was how they leveraged cultural beliefs surrounding motherhood for political ends. They invoked motherhood to argue that they were uniquely connected to the domestic sphere and childrearing and therefore uniquely able to speak for the moral interests of parents, families and children.Moms for Liberty pulls deeply from this established playbook of “housewife populism”. Behind their challenges to school policies rests a repeated assertion: as mothers, they possess a right to speak for the welfare of children, as opposed to government bureaucrats, educational elites or teachers’ unions (who they deride as the “K-12 mafia”). This insistence rests at the heart of the slogan that defines the group: “We don’t co-parent with the government”. In the Moms for Liberty worldview, parents hold an “innate” or “natural” right to decide what their children should be learning, the health protocols they should observe, or the ideas they are exposed to. And parents must wield this right in an uncompromising, militant sense to protect their children against elite campaigns of “woke indoctrination”.The specific aims pushed by Moms for Liberty reflect a more troubling thread from the history of rightwing mothers’ activism. Scholars such as Elizabeth Gillespie McRae have detailed how white mothers’ organizations were some of the most committed players in the mid-century project of “massive resistance” fought to preserve the Jim Crow order. This segregationist battle was particularly concerned with legal mandates for school desegregation. And one of its battlegrounds remains central to the mission of Moms for Liberty: textbooks and school curricula. In the south and beyond, mothers’ organizations fought to eliminate books and teachings that highlighted white violence or white supremacy. Furthermore, they routinely attempted to remove books from the curriculum that highlighted Black contributions to the nation, its history, or its culture.The challenges posed by Moms for Liberty, then, exceed its disruptive brand of activism, its ties to far-right organizations, or the campaigns of harassment its members have allegedly waged against school boards or rival parent groups. More broadly, the group’s mission resonates with an established history of rightwing mothers’ movements that focused on schools in order to block movements for social equality and to preserve structures of white supremacy.Moms for Liberty channels this troubled racial legacy while broadening its exclusionary mission to sexuality and gender identity. Group chapters persistently invoke motherhood and parental rights as cudgels to shape public schools toward their particular vision of history, race, sexuality and faith. Narratives that complicate conservative visions of gender identity are demonized as efforts to corrupt children and are targeted for removal. In this way, Moms for Liberty weaponizes family rights to undercut equal access to schools for other families with other values. This project becomes more ominous yet through the group’s cozy relationship with Republican officials who have pushed for policies to limit support and visibility for already vulnerable LGBTQ+ students.The culture wars have long fastened upon schools as institutions that shape the future of the nation. The threats posed by Moms for Liberty exceed business as usual in the culture wars. Instead, group chapters routinely exploit the moral authority of the family to erase other ways of experiencing race, gender, or sexuality – while reshaping schools and curricula around their own fears, interests, and beliefs.In doing so, Moms for Liberty continues one of the most troubling aims pursued by historical rightwing mothers’ groups: to hijack public institutions to stall the tides of cultural change.
      Michael Feola is a professor of government at Lafayette College, a contributor to publications including Slate and The Washington Post, and the author of a forthcoming book on the far right, Rage of Replacement More

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      Boris Johnson claims he ‘reminded’ Trump about key role in Ukraine aid

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      On his recent visit to the US, Boris Johnson “reminded” Donald Trump he “actually played an important role” in supporting and arming Ukraine against its Russian invaders, the former British prime minister said, adding that British aid to Kyiv was “enabled” by Trump’s example.Johnson made the claim about the notoriously pro-Russian former president – and brushed off mention of Trump’s impeachment for blocking military aid to Ukraine – in an interview on One Decision, a podcast hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former chief of the British intelligence service MI6, and the journalist Julia Macfarlane. The episode was released on Thursday.Johnson resigned as Conservative leader and prime minister in July last year, amid scandals including Partygate, over lockdown breaches in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic. Last month, found to have misled parliament, he resigned as an MP. He has since become a columnist for the Daily Mail, a move found to have breached parliamentary rules.Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, a defeat he refuses to accept, advancing the lie that it was the result of electoral fraud.Having survived a second impeachment, for inciting the deadly January 6 assault on Congress, and despite facing 71 criminal charges and the prospect of more, Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination next year.The two oft-disgraced ex-leaders met at an undisclosed US location in May. Johnson’s attempt to persuade Trump to back Ukraine was widely reported then.Speaking to One Decision, Johnson said: “One of my reasons for going to the United States [was] because clearly, American politics is getting into that pre-election period of ferment and I’m very concerned just to get over the message that whatever you people may be hearing, what other people may be thinking, the war in Ukraine is immensely important, and Ukrainian victory is essential, and it’s the only way out.”Republican presidential hopefuls including Trump’s nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, have stoked controversy by appearing to question US support for Ukraine.During his own time in power, Trump was widely held to be too close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Since leaving the White House, Trump has refused to commit to continuing US support for Kyiv in its efforts to expel Russian invaders, should he return to office.At a CNN town hall in May, Trump said: “Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”On One Decision, Johnson said: “I just think it’s very important if you have a chance to talk to people like Donald Trump, just to get … over [that] I know in my heart that Ukrainians are going to win. I know they deserve to win.“And I know that America has played a crucial role in making sure that is the right outcome. I think it’s important to remind somebody like Donald Trump, you know, he actually played an important role.”Asked by Dearlove if Trump was a threat to Ukrainian chances of winning the war, Johnson said: “Don’t forget who sent the first Javelins [missiles] out. It was Donald Trump.”The US approved the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Kyiv in 2018. It was later revealed that Trump blocked further military aid as part of a scheme to seek dirt on his enemies, including Biden, that resulted in his first impeachment.Macfarlane said: “It was also Donald Trump who withheld military aid to Ukraine.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohnson said Trump’s military aid “actually enabl[ed] us in the UK in a way” to send arms to Kyiv.His recent meeting with Trump, Johnson said, produced “a very free-flowing energetic conversation, as you’d expect. And what I find, actually, with the Republican party in in the United States, is that, of course, they’re anxious about the expense, and that’s the role of Congress. [But] they strongly support the Ukrainians.”Saying his hosts should question Trump themselves, Johnson added: “My view is that whatever happens in the race for the White House I think America will be steadfast. And I think that the big geopolitical reasons for continued American support for Ukraine will be overwhelming for whoever’s there.”Asked about DeSantis’s controversial characterisation of the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute”, a statement the Florida governor was forced to swiftly walk back, Johnson said there was an “isolationist” element in Republican ranks but it was “ever thus”.As prime minister and after leaving office, Johnson has enjoyed warm welcomes in Ukraine. On the One Decision podcast, he was also asked about his claim that Putin threatened an attack on the UK.Putin was “creepily playful”, Johnson said, adding that the Russian president was really trying to “reframe what he’s done, which was a barbaric invasion of an innocent neighbor, as a confrontation between a nuclear-armed Nato and Russia”.Calling Biden’s stewardship of aid to Kyiv “outstanding” and “amazing”, the former prime minister also said allies of Ukraine “all need to speed up” nonetheless. More

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      Wisconsin governor slashes tax cuts and boosts school funding – for centuries

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      Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, signed off on a two-year spending plan on Wednesday after gutting a Republican tax cut and using his broad veto powers to increase school funding for centuries.Evers angered Republicans with both moves, with some saying the Democratic governor was going back on deals he had made with them.Wisconsin governors have broad partial veto power and Evers got creative with his use of it in this budget, which is the third passed by a Republican legislature that he’s signed.He reduced the GOP income tax cut from $3.5bn to $175m, and did away entirely with lower rates for the two highest-earning brackets. He also edited the plan to increase how much revenue K-12 public schools can raise per student, by $325 a year until 2425.Evers, a former state education secretary and teacher, had proposed allowing revenue limits to increase with inflation. Under his veto, unless it’s undone by a future legislature and governor, Evers said schools will have “predictable long-term spending authority”.“There are lots of wins here,” Evers said of the budget at a signing ceremony surrounded by Democratic lawmakers, local leaders, members of his cabinet and others.Republicans blasted the vetoes.The Republican assembly speaker, Robin Vos, said allowing the school revenue limit to increase effectively forever would result in “massive property tax increases” because schools will have the authority to raise those taxes if state aid isn’t enough to meet the per-pupil cost. He also said scaling back the tax cut put Wisconsin at an economic disadvantage to neighboring states that have lower rates.Vos did not say if Republicans would attempt veto overrides, an effort that is almost certain to fail because they would need Democratic votes in the assembly to get the two-thirds majority required by state law.Republicans proposed tapping nearly half of the state’s projected $7bn budget surplus to cut income taxes across the board and reduce the number of tax brackets from four to three.Evers kept all four brackets. The remaining $175m in tax cuts over the next two years is directed to the lowest two tax rates, paid by households earning less than $36,840 a year or individuals who make less than $27,630. Wealthier payers will also benefit from the cuts but must continue to pay higher rates on income that exceeds those limits.Evers was unable to undo the $32m cut to the University of Wisconsin, which was funding that Republicans said would have gone toward diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – programming and staff. The budget Evers signed does allow for the university to get the funding later if it can show it would go toward workforce development and not DEI.Evers previously threatened to veto the entire budget over the UW cut. But on Wednesday, he used his partial veto to protect 188 DEI positions in the university system that were slated for elimination under the Republican plan.Another of Evers’ vetoes removed a measure that would have prohibited Medicaid payments for gender-affirming care. The governor accused Republicans of “perpetuating hateful, discriminatory, and anti-LGBTQ policies and rhetoric” with the proposal.No Democratic lawmaker voted for the budget, but most stopped short of calling for a total veto.Evers ignored a call from 15 liberal advocacy and government watchdog groups that had urged him to “fight like hell for our collective future” and veto the entire budget, which they argued would further racial and economic inequality.Evers said vetoing the entire budget would have left schools in the lurch and meant rejecting $125m in funding to combat water pollution caused by so-called “forever chemicals”, also known as PFAS, along with turning down $525m for affordable housing and pay raises for state workers.No governor has vetoed the budget in its entirety since 1930. This marks the third time that Evers has signed a budget into law that was passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2019, he issued 78 partial vetoes and in 2021 he made 50. That year, Evers took credit for the income tax cut written by Republicans and used it as a key part of his successful 2022 re-election campaign.This year he made 51 partial vetoes.The budget also increases pay for all state employees by 6% over the next two years, with higher increases for guards at the state’s understaffed state prisons. More

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      White House calls on Republicans to act on gun control after Fourth of July weekend killings – as it happened

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      From 2h agoWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Republicans to support tighter gun restrictions after the Independence Day holiday weekend was marred by mass shootings across the United States.“As we have seen over the last few days, there’s a lot more … work to do to address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing up our communities,” Jean-Pierre said, pointing to Joe Biden’s support for legislation approved by Democrats and some Republicans in Congress last year that included modest steps to prevent mass shootings.“He also knows that that is not enough. Which is why, on the heels of the tragedies we saw unfold across the last few days, the president continues to call on Republican lawmakers in Congress to come to the table and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers, immunity from liability and to enact universal background checks.”Jean-Pierre continued:
      Lives are at stake here, folks, lives are at stake … these are meaningful, common-sense reforms that the American people support, the majority of the American people support these reforms. And we need Congress to do something, we need Republicans in Congress to do something to protect our communities.
      Once again, America is dealing with the aftermath of mass shootings, both those that occurred over the just-concluded Independence Day holiday weekend, and others less recent. A man accused of killing five people in Philadelphia has been arraigned on charges that include murder, one of more than a dozen mass shootings that happened as Americans gathered to celebrate the country’s independence. But there were few festivities in Highland Park, Illinois, where a ceremony was held to memorialize the deaths of seven people and wounding of dozens more by a shooter last year. And in Texas, a gunman who killed 19 people at a Walmart in El Paso is expected to receive multiple life sentences today after pleading guilty to federal charges.Here’s a rundown of what happened today:
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the violent weekend is proof Republicans must support tighter restrictions on firearms.
      A gun violence researcher told the Guardian’s US politics live blog that widespread gun violence represents a “new normal” for the annual Independence Day celebrations.
      That was indeed cocaine discovered at the White House, testing confirms. The powder was reportedly found in an area where visitors lock up their cellphones, and the Secret Service is investigating.
      More details of the government’s reasoning for searching Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort could become public, after a judge ruled that portions of the search warrant affidavit should be unsealed.
      Global average temperatures on Monday and Tuesday broke records, data indicates.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also responded to a federal court ruling from Tuesday that curbed the ability of Biden administration officials to meet with social media firms over the content they allowed on their platforms.Here’s what Jean-Pierre had to say:The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington spoke to a top disinformation expert, who warned the ruling could undermine efforts to fight lies spread over social media ahead of next year’s presidential elections:
      Nina Jankowicz, a specialist in disinformation campaigns, told the Guardian that an injunction imposed by a federal judge on Tuesday against key federal agencies and officials blocking their communication with tech platforms could unleash false information in critical areas of public life. She said that election denialism and anti-vaccine propaganda could be the beneficiaries.
      “This is a weaponisation of the court system. It is an intentional and purposeful move to disrupt the work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election, and it’s really chilling,” she said.
      In Tuesday’s ruling, a federal judge from a US district in Louisiana imposed tough restrictions on federal agencies and officials liaising with social media companies over online content. The injunction comes amid mounting pressure from Republican leaders and rightwing groups claiming collusion between the Biden administration and social media platforms to censor conservative speech.
      The judge, Terry Doughty, sided with Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri who sued the Biden administration, claiming it violated the first amendment right to free speech. He ruled that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits in showing that the government “has used its power to silence the opposition”.
      He added that the Biden administration’s handling of social media content during the Covid pandemic resembled the “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’”.
      If the allegations raised by the Republican officials were true, Doughty wrote, they would involve “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn’t have much to say about the cocaine found in the White House over the weekend.The Secret Service is investigating, she said, and noted that the substance was found in a “heavily traveled area”:Joe Biden, who was not at the White House this weekend, did not respond to a question from a reporter about the cocaine during his meeting with Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson.The wave of mass shootings that occurred over the Fourth of July weekend was fueled by factors including the easy access to firearms in America and higher temperatures, and shows no sign of stopping, a gun violence researcher warns.“Unfortunately, I think this is our new normal when you factor in numbers of guns on the street, a holiday weekend and soaring temperatures. Given the way the country is right now with our lax gun policies and rising rates of shootings, I believe this is the way things are and tragically not an aberration from the norm,” the Vanderbilt University sociology professor Jonathan Metzl told the Guardian’s US politics live blog.When it comes to stopping these tragedies, Metzl, who is also research director at The Safe Tennessee Project focused injuries from firearms, says local police and law enforcement agencies can only do so much.“I believe they are as prepared as they can possibly be given the frequency of these tragedies. However, it’s not simply a matter of training or preparedness, and there are quite simply many more guns and many more shootings than any safety department can manage by themselves. The key is prevention,” he said.“We need to rebuild community infrastructure and trust in communal governance – but that this is a much broader issue than a single gun policy or even a series of gun policies can address by themselves. Mass shootings are a symptom of much larger issues.”White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called on Republicans to support tighter gun restrictions after the Independence Day holiday weekend was marred by mass shootings across the United States.“As we have seen over the last few days, there’s a lot more … work to do to address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing up our communities,” Jean-Pierre said, pointing to Joe Biden’s support for legislation approved by Democrats and some Republicans in Congress last year that included modest steps to prevent mass shootings.“He also knows that that is not enough. Which is why, on the heels of the tragedies we saw unfold across the last few days, the president continues to call on Republican lawmakers in Congress to come to the table and ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers, immunity from liability and to enact universal background checks.”Jean-Pierre continued:
      Lives are at stake here, folks, lives are at stake … these are meaningful, common-sense reforms that the American people support, the majority of the American people support these reforms. And we need Congress to do something, we need Republicans in Congress to do something to protect our communities.
      The Philadelphia shooting is the 29th mass killing in the US of 2023. It means the country has witnessed the highest number on record of mass killings and deaths to this point in a single year.Here are some of the other mass killings that occurred this year, from the Associated Press, which maintains a database of these tragedies together with USA Today and Northeastern University:
      Here’s what happened in each US mass killing this year.
      KELLOGG, IDAHO: 18 June
      A 31-year-old man is accused of fatally shooting four members of a neighboring family in their apartment on Father’s Day. The man was upset that the neighbor’s 18-year-old son had reportedly exposed himself to the man’s children, a police document alleges.
      SEQUATCHIE, TENNESSEE: 15 June
      A 48-year-old man is thought to be responsible for killing himself and five others – including three children and his estranged wife – in a home where police responded to a shooting and arrived to find the residence ablaze, authorities said. A seventh person suffered gunshot wounds and was found alive at the home after firefighters extinguished the flames.
      MESA, ARIZONA: 26 May
      A 20-year-old man shot four men to death and wounded a woman in a 12-hour crime spree in metro Phoenix, authorities said. He told police that he met the victims at random that day at a range of places, including a park and a convenience store, and became angry when the subject of drugs came up.
      NASH, TEXAS: 23 May
      Authorities jailed an 18-year-old man in connection with the shootings of his parents, sister and brother inside a home. A victim’s co-worker who went to the home after one of the victims failed to show up for work told police that the man said “he had killed his family because they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him.”
      Away from the gun violence of the weekend, my colleague Ed Pilkington has spoken to a leading disinformation expert after a judge limited the Biden administration’s ability to work with social media companies on moderating content.Nina Jankowicz, who used to lead a government unit aimed at combatting online conspiracy theories, said the decision represented a “weaponisation of the court system” aimed at disrupting efforts to minimise disinformation ahead of the 2024 US elections.Jankowicz was initially named as a defendant in the Missouri case but removed from the suit on grounds that she no longer has a governmental role. In April 2022, she was appointed to lead a new Department of Homeland Security unit devoted to combating online conspiracy theories and false information.The board was shut down days later, after it came under a massive storm of rightwing criticism accusing it of censoring conservative speech.Speaking to the Guardian, Jankowicz said Tuesday’s injunction was the culmination of an ultra-rightwing campaign to crush efforts to constrain disinformation that started with the attack on her board.“They got a win in shutting us down, so why would they stop there? This is why the lawsuit continues – because they’ve won – and nobody knows how to deal with it.”“It’s a weaponisation of the court system that is purposeful in disrupting work that needs to be done ahead of the 2024 election,” she said.Once again, America is dealing with the aftermath of mass shootings, both those that occurred over the just-concluded Independence Day holiday weekend, and others less recent. A man accused of killing five people in Philadelphia has been arraigned on charges that include murder, one of more than a dozen mass shootings that happened as Americans gathered to celebrate the country’s independence. But there were few festivities in Highland Park, Illinois, where a ceremony was held to memorialize the deaths of seven people and wounding of dozens more by a shooter last year. And in Texas, a gunman who killed 19 people at a Walmart in El Paso is expected to receive multiple life sentences today after pleading guilty to federal charges.Here’s a rundown of the day’s events thus far:
      That was indeed cocaine discovered at the White House, testing confirms. The powder was reportedly found in an area where visitors lock up their cellphones.
      More details of the government’s reasoning for searching Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort could become public, after a judge ruled that portions of the search warrant affidavit should be unsealed.
      Global average temperatures on Monday and Tuesday broke records, data indicates.
      The Washington Post reports that the cocaine discovered at the White House was found on the ground floor in an area where visitors leave their cellphones.White House employees can give tours of the building, usually on evenings and weekends, and part of the security protocol involves having visitors leave their cellphones in a locked box. As the for the cocaine, the Post adds that “Authorities are trying to find the person who left it at the White House.”There’s a correlation between heat and homicides, and the Guardian’s Damien Gayle reports that across the world, average temperature records indicate Tuesday was the hottest day ever:World temperature records have been broken for a second day in a row, data suggests, as experts issued a warning that this year’s warmest days are still to come – and with them the warmest days ever recorded.The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday.Until the start of this week, the hottest day on record was in 2016, during the last El Niño global weather event, when the global average temperature reached 16.92C.On Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization, the UN’s weather body, confirmed El Niño had returned. Experts predicted that, combined with the increased heat from anthropogenic global heating, it would lead to more record-breaking temperatures.The suspect in a mass shooting in Philadelphia on Monday evening that killed five people and wounded four has been arraigned, the Associated Press reports.Kimbrady Carriker, 40, will face charges of murder, among many others. Here’s more on the killings, which took place seemingly at random in a Philadelphia neighborhood, from the AP:
      A 40-year-old accused of killing a man in a house and then gunning down four others on the streets of a southwest Philadelphia neighborhood before surrendering to police officers has been arraigned on murder and other charges.
      Kimbrady Carriker was arraigned Wednesday on five counts of murder as well as charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault and weapons counts of possession without a license and carrying firearms in public, prosecutors said.
      A 2-year-old boy and a 13-year-old youth were also wounded by gunfire and another 2-year-old boy and a woman were hit by shattered glass in the Monday night rampage that made the working-class area of Kingsessing the site of the nation’s worst violence around the July Fourth holiday.
      Police called to the scene found gunshot victims and started to help them before hearing more shots. Some officers rushed victims to hospitals while others ran toward the gunfire and chased the firing suspect.
      Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom, the homicide unit commander, said witness interviews and video indicated that the suspect went to several locations in a ski mask and body armor, carrying an AR-15-style rifle.
      “The suspect then began shooting aimlessly at occupied vehicles and individuals on the street as they walked,” he said. The vehicles included a mother driving her 2-year-old twins home — one of whom was wounded in the legs and the other who was hit in the eyes by shattered glass.
      Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said the “armed and armored individual” was firing “seemingly at random.”
      Cornered in an alley, the suspect surrendered and was found to have not only the rifle but also a pistol, extra magazines, a police scanner and a bulletproof vest, police said.
      Another community is today continuing to grapple with the aftermath of a mass shooting that occurred almost four years ago.Patrick Crusius killed 23 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in a 2019 attack targeting Hispanic shoppers, and will be sentenced today after pleading guilty to federal charges. He is expected to receive multiple life sentences, but has also been charged with murder in state court, and could face the death penalty.Here’s more on his case, from the Associated Press:
      A white Texas gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart in 2019 returns to court Wednesday for sentencing in a mass shooting that targeted Hispanic shoppers in the border city of El Paso.
      Patrick Crusius, 24, is set to receive multiple life sentences after pleading guilty to federal hate crime and weapons charges in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Although the federal government did not seek the death penalty, Texas prosecutors have not taken lethal injection off the table under a separate case in state court.
      Investigators say the shooting was preceded by Crusius posting a racist screed online.
      The sentencing phase could last several days. It is the first time that relatives of the victims, who included citizens of Mexico, will have an opportunity to address Crusius face-to-face in court.
      The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that a federal magistrate judge has ordered additional portions of the affidavit used to justify the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last year be made public:The former president was indicted last month over the government secrets federal agents found during their search of the south Florida property. Media organizations last year argued successfully to unseal portions of the affidavit submitted by investigators to justify the search, but parts of it remained secret.NBC News confirms that the white substance discovered at the White House on Monday was indeed cocaine:Now for the question of who brought it in there, and how did they get it past the building’s strict security. There are no firm answers to that yet, but since the area where it was found is accessible to tour groups, one can assume that the list of suspects is long. Here’s more from the Guardian’s Edward Helmore on the initial discovery:
      A preliminary field test on a white substance found in the White House has reportedly come up positive for cocaine, law enforcement authorities said, and the US Secret Service was investigating on Tuesday how it came to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
      The presence of the substance – which has been sent out for further testing – came to light late on Monday when a firefighter with the Washington DC fire department’s hazardous materials team radioed: “We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride,” the Washington Post first reported.
      A Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, told the Post that the discovery led to an elevated security alert and a brief evacuation of the executive mansion after it was found during a routine inspection.
      On 4 July last year, a gunman opened fire at the annual Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, killing seven people and wounding more than 30. One year later, the Chicago suburb commemorated the massacre with a ceremony, as well as some Fourth of July celebration events free of fireworks, the New York Times reports:
      There were no marching bands this year. No floats. No church groups tossing snacks to spectators. No American flags lining the sidewalks.
      Instead, there were prayers. There were tears. And there was a somber stroll down Central Avenue, a collective effort to take back a parade route that was stolen in a storm of bullets.
      Over generations in Highland Park, Ill., a quaint parade through downtown became synonymous with the Fourth of July.
      But in less than a minute last Independence Day, a gunman firing from a rooftop killed seven people, wounded dozens and sent families scrambling for cover, leaving water bottles and red-white-and-blue lawn chairs scattered on the ground.
      As the first anniversary of the massacre approached, city leaders faced a seemingly impossible set of demands: Honor the people who died. Reclaim the parade’s path through downtown. Give people space to celebrate the country’s birthday. And support residents of the Chicago suburb still carrying devastating wounds, mental and physical, from last year.
      “When there are mass shootings in this country, a day or two later, people move on,” Mayor Nancy Rotering said. “But those communities that are directly impacted are carrying this pain and this trauma forevermore.”
      That this past Independence Day weekend was a violent one is not a surprise. As the Guardian reporter who is also writing this blog reports, the Fourth of July is the most mass-shooting prone day over the last four years, research indicates, with the day after it coming in as a close second: Gun violence is a daily reality across the US, but an emerging body of research indicates the most risky day for mass shootings in the nation is the Fourth of July, when Americans celebrate their independence from Britain.Using data from the Gun Violence Archive, James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, found that there have been 52 mass shootings on the Fourth of July over the past decade, averaging just over five a year, and more than on any other given day.His analysis, which he implemented for USA Today, underscores how, in a country where Republicans in many states have acted to loosen gun laws, it is routine that the barbecues, block parties and parades held to commemorate the US’s birthday become scenes of bloodshed.The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington crunched the numbers from the long Independence Day holiday weekend to report just how bad the period was for gun violence across the United States:From the nation’s capital to Fort Worth, Texas, from Florin, California, in the west to the Bronx, New York, in the east, the Fourth of July long weekend in the US was overshadowed by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and 94 injured.The Gun Violence Archive, an authoritative database on gun violence in America, calculated the grim tally using its definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people excluding the shooter are killed or injured by firearms.The tragic bloodletting was recorded from 5pm on Friday until 5am on Wednesday across 13 states as well as Washington DC. Texas and Maryland both entered the register twice.Good morning, US politics blog readers. Yesterday was the Independence Day public holiday in the United States, and Americans gathered for their customary barbecues and fireworks displays – several of which were marred by gunfire. In Washington DC, nine people were shot and wounded on the evening of 4 July, two of which were minors, while in Tampa, Florida, a seven-year-old was shot and killed. Those shootings came a day after a gunman, firing seemingly at random, killed five people and wounded two in Philadelphia, while another shooting left three people dead and eight wounded in a parking lot in Fort Worth, Texas. The tragedies put Joe Biden in the familiar role of once again decrying gun violence across the United States, a phenomenon he has little control over.Here’s what else we are watching today:
      Biden will host Sweden’s prime minister Ulf Kristersson at the White House at 2pm eastern time.
      Senators and members of Congress are dispersed across the United States, because both the Senate and House of Representatives are still on recess.
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will take questions from reporters at 2.15 pm.
      Was cocaine discovered at the White House? The secret service investigation continues.
      The White House is digesting a federal court ruling prohibiting some Biden administration from asking social media companies to moderate their content. More

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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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      God Only Knows why: when a Reagan aide took aim at the Beach Boys

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      Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, decided to take a stand for “wholesomeness”, against undesirable elements. The Beach Boys, he announced, would be banned from the 1983 Independence Day celebrations on the National Mall.Watt, who died in May at 85, was a lightning rod of a cabinet secretary who compared environmentalists to Nazis and divided fellow citizens into ‘‘liberals and Americans”. According to him, “hard rock” bands like the Beach Boys attracted the “wrong element” – drug-using, boozing youngsters.The decision was so out-of-step with American society – the Beach Boys were not the Dead Kennedys, after all – that he ran afoul of Beach Boys fans in the corridors of power, among them Reagan, his wife Nancy Reagan and the vice-president, George HW Bush.It would be hard to think of a more quintessential American pop band than the Beach Boys, whose hits include Good Vibrations, Surfin’ USA, Fun, Fun, Fun and Wouldn’t It Be Nice.“They are what America is,” Elton John has said. “A very wonderful place.”The backdrop to this contrived culture war episode was the appearance, over the previous three years, of the Beach Boys (1980 and 1981) and the Grass Roots (1982) in front of hundreds of thousands at July 4 celebrations in Washington DC.Watt was head of the interior department, with jurisdiction over the National Park Service, which organized such events. As a Pentecostal fundamentalist who didn’t smoke or drink, he announced that he was banning rock music from Independence Day festivities. Citing “repulsive” reports in the first two years of the Reagan administration of “high drug use, high alcoholism, broken bottles, some injured people, some fights”, Watt lined up instead “patriotic, family-based entertainment” from figures including Wayne Newton, a friend and supporter of Reagan.“We’re trying to have an impact for wholesomeness,” Watt said, adding: “July 4 will be a traditional ceremony for the family and for solid, clean American lives. We’re not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in the past years.“… The reason for the arrests and other trouble, we concluded, was that we had the rock bands attracting the wrong element, and you couldn’t bring your family, your children, down to the Mall for a Fourth of July picnic in the great traditional sense because you’d be mugged by … the wrong element, whatever is the nice way to say it.”But as the Washington Post reported, “a ban on apple pie couldn’t have brought a stronger reaction”.A Washington talk show host linked the controversy to a major issue of the day: “I haven’t seen the phones ring over here as steadily or heard more strong comments since the Iranian hostage takeover. Our audience regards the Beach Boys as much a part of Americana as Wayne Newton.”The New York Times also referred to Iran, likening Watt to the Ayatollah Khomenei, who among his “first acts on seizing power after the Iranian revolution … ban[ned] western music because it made listeners’ brains ‘inactive and frivolous’”.In their own statement, the band said it was “unbelievable that James Watt feels that the Beach Boys attract ‘the wrong element’ … over their 20-year career, the group has participated in many events geared specifically to the very families Watt claims they turn away”.Slightly bizarrely, they added: “The Soviet Union had enough confidence in the Beach Boys to invite them to perform in Leningrad [on] July 4 1978. Obviously the Soviet Union, a much more controlled society than our own, did not feel the group attracted the wrong element.”On Capitol Hill, scorn was bipartisan.“‘Help me, Ronald, don’t let him run wild,” said George Miller, a Democratic congressman from California, spoofing the Beach Boys song Help Me, Rhonda.“The Beach Boys are not hazardous to your health,” said Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican senator.Nor was Watt backed by his bosses.“They’re my friends and I like their music,” Bush, the vice-president, said of the Beach Boys, who played a concert for him during his 1980 presidential run.Michael Deaver, the White House deputy chief of staff, said:“I think for a lot of people the Beach Boys are an American institution. Anyone who thinks they are hard rock would think Mantovani plays jazz.”A White House spokesman told reporters the Beach Boys would “be welcome on the Mall”.Reagan had a little fun at Watt’s expense. Saying he had ordered his special ambassador to the Middle East “to settle the Jim Watt-Beach Boy controversy”, the president also presented Watt with a plaster foot with a bullet hole.Watt retreated. Standing on the White House lawn, holding his plaster foot, Watt said: “Obviously, I didn’t know anything to start with. The president is a friend of the Beach Boys. He likes them, and I’m sure when I get to meet them, I’ll like them.”Watt also said Nancy Reagan had told him “the Beach Boys are fans of hers, and her children have grown up with them and they’re fine, outstanding people and that there should be no intention to indicate that they cause problems, which I would agree with”.Watt said the Beach Boys would appear. But it was too late: they played Atlantic City instead.That fall, Watt resigned. The Beach Boys returned to the Mall the next July 4, attracting more than half-a-million, then played again in 1985. That year, the lead singer, Mike Love, defended Watt: “He said rock music attracts the wrong element, and that’s true. Rock groups do sing pornographic lyrics, satanic lyrics, but we’re certainly not one of those groups. We’re no more satanic than Pat Boone.”In his autobiography, Watt tried to shrug off the blame. The controversy was the work of the “liberal press”, he said.
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of several books, including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      Why was Trump hoarding classified government documents? | Moira Donegan

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      There are many surreal revelations in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Donald Trump. There are the texts between various Trump underlings and Walt Nauta, the Trump body man who has also been indicted, showing the president directing his employees to move the boxes containing classified information back and forth to various locations around his properties in Palm Beach and Bedminster, New Jersey. There is the annoyed missive from Trump’s wife Melania, trying to make sure the boxes don’t crowd out room for her luggage on a private plane. There is the claim from Trump’s former attorney, compelled to testify against him in an unusual arrangement, that the former president suggested, with a Grinch-like pinching gesture, that the lawyer destroy confidential documents to prevent them from being produced in a subpoena. There is a text message Nauta sent to another Trump underling, showing a box having fallen over in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, secret documents spilling on to the floor – whoops.What there is not, conspicuously, is a motive. Over the course of more than a year following his departure from office, it appears that Trump spent considerable effort and resources in transporting the documents with him and keeping them near at hand – and that later, as the federal government began to demand the boxes back, that he then went out of his way to keep and conceal them, going to great length, sparing no expense, and ultimately breaking the law so much that he incurred himself a series of felony charges. Anyone can tell you how this behavior is typical of Trump: how it reflects his pettiness, his contempt for the law, his willingness to sacrifice and endanger others. What no one can tell you is why he did it.It would be more convenient – legally, for Jack Smith and his prosecutors, and politically, for Joe Biden, for the Democrats, and for the growing number of Republicans who are looking to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican primary – if we could say precisely why Trump wanted to keep the documents so badly, exactly what he wanted them for. It would be very easy to make a case to a skeptical jury – or to a divided American people – that Trump was a danger and could not be trusted with national secrets again if it could be said that he wanted to keep the documents for any of the straightforwardly dangerous and nefarious reasons that have been speculated: if he was seeking to sell national security secrets to the Saudis, say, or to Israel; if he was hoping, as some have suggested, that he one day might be able to blackmail someone powerful, like the president of France.It’s very possible that Trump had concocted such a plan. There is much that we do not know about the investigations into Trump, including about the special counsel’s query into his illegal document retention. But we do know that in the past, we know that he has gone further, and risked more, in the pursuit of even more harebrained schemes.But what seems the most likely explanation is the simplest, stupidest, and most aggravating one: that Trump had no plan for the documents, except perhaps for use as souvenirs, trophies to be shown off, maybe as evidence for petty score-settling. That the documents that Trump smuggled out of the White House and squirreled away around Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were not instruments in a coherent, well-formed plan, but instead mere ornaments to Trump’s ego. In transcripts of Trump’s statements about the documents that were included in the indictment, and in audio of Trump showing some of the secret papers off to a writer that was recently released by CNN, Trump uses the documents to contradict a former national security official he was then in a spat with in the press; he tells one interlocutor not to get too close to one of the secret papers, seeming to want to create a hush of reverence for the documents in place of respecting their confidentiality in the first place. At these moments, Trump does not sound as if he has a plan. He sounds as if he wants to impress the people in the room with him, and like he can think no further ahead than to how good it will feel to get their praise.Why did Trump want the secret documents? Why did he refuse to return them? The answer may be the one truest to Trump’s piddling, puerile character: because they looked cool; because they reminded him of his own importance; because the government had asked for them back, and Trump has never missed an opportunity to throw a petulant little tantrum.It is this smallness of Trump’s character, and the possible triviality of his motives, that poses a peculiar risk to both of the cases being made against Trump – the one being pursued in a Miami courthouse, and the one being pursued in public. Because there has always been an uncanny mismatch with Trump, an incongruence: between the awesome and vast powers he had in office, the historical forces he unleashed on America, and the horrible ways his presidency warped millions of lives, on the one hand; and on the other, his pettiness, his vanity, his short-sightedness, his piddling personal grievances and constant need to be flattered and reassured.The gap between the seriousness of Trump’s role in history and his unseriousness as a person is the strange place where the documents case – and, now, much of American political thought – risks getting stuck. The very silliness of Trump’s use of the documents undercuts the grave risks posed by his hoarding of them. How can such a powerful country have been made so vulnerable by someone so stupid?
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Chris Christie calls Trump-DeSantis nomination feud ‘a teenage food fight’

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      An escalating feud between the two main rivals for the Republican presidential nomination is akin to a “teenage food fight”, another challenger, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, said on Sunday.He made the comment after the campaign of Ron DeSantis, the rightwing Florida governor who has slipped in the polls to Donald Trump, released a “homophobic” video attacking the former president for his previous support of the LGBTQ+ community.It shows DeSantis, whose barrage of attacks on minorities in his own state has drawn praise from his extremist base and condemnation from trans and gay rights advocates, celebrating his signing of “the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history” and a “draconian anti-trans bathroom bill”.The video, and Trump’s attacks on DeSantis using “juvenile” nicknames such as Ron Sanctimonious and Meatball Ron, failed to impress Christie, who told CNN’s State of the Union he would prefer the candidates to focus on “real issues” rather than each other.“I’m not comfortable with it. And I’m not comfortable with the way both Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump are moving our debate in this country,” he said.“We have nine and a half million children in this country every night who go to bed hungry, we have 21% of our students in 10th grade saying they’re using hard illegal drugs. And this is the kind of stuff that we’re talking about?“It’s a teenage food fight between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump and I don’t think that’s what leaders should be doing. It doesn’t make me feel inspired as an American, on the Fourth of July weekend, to have this back-and-forth going on.“It’s narrowing our country and making it smaller. I want a country that’s going to be bigger, and going after the big issues that will make every American feel better about themselves, their families and their country.”Christie wasn’t the only politician with thoughts about DeSantis’s video on Sunday.In his own appearance on State of the Union, Democrat Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, who is openly gay, referenced some of the imagery featured in it, specifically masked, shirtless men, including a clip of actor Brad Pitt from the movie Troy.“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled up shirtless bodybuilders, and get to the bigger issue, which is who are you trying to help?” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Who are you trying to make better off, and what public policy problems can you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?”Meanwhile Caitlyn Jenner, a prominent trans activist and Trump supporter, said DeSantis had reached “a new low” with the video.“He’s so desperate he’ll do anything to get ahead. That’s been the theme of his campaign. You can’t win a general [election], let alone 2028 by going after people that are integral parts of the conservative movement!” she tweeted.Christina Pushaw, the registered “foreign agent” who is DeSantis’s director of rapid response, denied the campaign was being anti-gay for, among other things, opposing Pride month.“We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either … It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering,” she wrote, also on Twitter. More