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      January 6 rioter shot in face by police sentenced to nearly two years in prison

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      A Capitol rioter from Alabama who was shot in the face by police but still invaded Congress with a knife on his hip and rummaged through Ted Cruz’s desk while the Texas senator hid in a closet, was sentenced on Tuesday to nearly two years in prison.On 6 January 2021, outside the Capitol in Washington, a police officer shot Joshua Matthew Black in his left cheek with a crowd-control munition. The resulting bloody hole in his face did not stop Black from occupying the Senate with other rioters after lawmakers ran.“Black was a notorious offender during the attack on the Capitol,” prosecutors said in a court filing.“The nation was shocked and appalled at the events of January 6, and perhaps no other incident sparked as much outrage and distress as Black and other rioters’ occupation of the Senate chamber.”Prosecutors recommended a five-year prison sentence for Black, 47 and from Leeds, a suburb of Birmingham.A US district judge, Amy Berman Jackson, sentenced Black to 22 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release.Black did not testify before being convicted in January of five charges, including three felonies, after trial testimony was given without a jury. Jackson acquitted Black of one count, obstructing a congressional proceeding.Black joined the mob that disrupted the joint session of Congress for certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. But the judge concluded that prosecutors did not prove Black knowingly intended to obstruct or impede proceedings.A defense attorney, Clark Fleckinger, said Black was an evangelical Christian who believed God directed him to go to Washington so he could “plead the blood of Jesus” on the Senate floor “to foster congressional atonement for what he perceived to be the transgressions of [a] corrupt Democratic party and Republican party”.More than 1,000 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related crimes. Roughly 500 have been sentenced to imprisonment ranging from seven days to more than 14 years. Nineteen have received sentences of five years or longer.Black, who runs a lawn-mowing business, traveled alone to Washington to attend Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal rally. He then joined the crowd walking to the Capitol. Armed with a concealed knife, he was the first rioter to breach a barricade at the Capitol’s lower west terrace.“This brazen act no doubt encouraged other rioters, who soon after overran the entire Lower West Terrace,” prosecutors wrote.Black joined the mob on the west plaza, where police shot him with a “less-than-lethal” munition.“Rioters near Black became enraged that he was shot, and they harassed and assaulted officers,” prosecutors wrote.After entering the Capitol through the east rotunda, Black breached the Senate chamber and remained inside for more than 20 minutes.Black rummaged through a desk assigned to Cruz – who has described how he and other senators took refuge in a supply closet – and posed for photos on the Senate dais.Before leaving, Black joined other rioters in a “raucous demonstration styled as a prayer” and led by Jacob Chansley, the self-styled “QAnon Shaman”, prosecutors said.Black later told the FBI he had a hunting knife in a sheath beneath his coat while in the Senate chamber. Agents found the knife at Black’s home when they arrested him on 14 January 2021.He was jailed in Washington and remained detained until a judge ordered his release on 24 April. He will get credit for jail time served. More

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      ‘America is broken’: FBI criticized for mass-shooting survival video

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      A newly resurfaced FBI video purportedly training Americans to give themselves their best chance of surviving a deadly mass shooting is drawing scorn across the US and abroad.In the video, released in 2020 by the US’s top law enforcement agency, actors portraying everyday Americans explain to viewers ways in which they could at least survive – or, preferably, even stop – a mass shooting once the bullets start flying.“If European countries want to deter brain drain to the US they should just play this FBI video to their soon-to-be graduates,” the European tech investor Michael Jackson said on his LinkedIn profile, which has more than 134,000 followers.Jackson, who shared a link to the video, added that the well-documented gun problem in the US – where rates of mass gun violence are much higher than they are in Europe and in many other parts of the world – was hurting its standing with tourists and its companies’ prospects of hiring talented employees from overseas.Another typical reaction to the video was on Twitter from an Oklahoma scholarship foundation leader who wrote: “America is broken. Instead of addressing the cause of the carnage, we’re talking about how to survive a massacre like it’s a damn tornado.”The video begins with a scene of a bustling bar filled with people. A fight breaks out and then the sudden eruption of gunshots sends the crowd into a panic, with people rushing to find an exit or a hiding spot.A waitress spots a neon red exit sign and proceeds to explain to viewers techniques to avoid getting shot.“Running makes you harder to hit and improves your chances of survival,” she says as she runs down a stairway with a group of people.When she makes it downstairs and out the door, she is confronted by police pointing a gun at her. Still out of breath and distressed, the waitress reminds the camera to always keep “empty hands up” and “follow their instructions” when faced with law enforcement.Another woman hiding under a table then says to find another room and barricade the door if it’s not possible to escape. She ushers every person around her into a nearby closet and reminds viewers to turn their phones off.She then says to find anything that could be wielded as if it were a weapon – a fire extinguisher or a flower vase would do – and prepare to attack if the shooter breaks down the door.“Lock and barricade the door,” she instructs viewers as the gunshots can be heard firing in the background.It doesn’t address what to do if the attacker has a high-powered rifle and can fire through the door and walls enclosing the room.Someone is later shown not having a tourniquet but still properly applying pressure to a woman with a bleeding gunshot wound.Toward the end of the video, a man is shown trapped behind the bar with all exits blocked. He tells his audience: “I gotta stay hidden. But I’m no victim. I’m ready for this.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe lays out an elaborate plan that ends with him seizing the shooter’s gun, which occasionally happens but can cost people their lives if attempted unsuccessfully.The video ends with a narrator offering a word of encouragement – “you can survive a mass shooting if you’re prepared” – and directs viewers to the website fbi.gov/survive.The video resurfaced recently as the US is on pace this year to set the record for the highest number of mass killings in recent memory, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.The online reference site’s data recently showed the country in 2023 was likely to see 60 mass killings, which involve four or more victims who are slain.There were 31 mass killings in 2019, 21 in 2020, 28 in 2021 and 36 in 2022.As of Monday morning, there had been at least 224 mass shootings in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are injured or killed.Congress has been unable to meaningfully restrict access to guns despite the accelerated pace of mass shootings in the US this year.Actually stopping a mass shooter as a civilian is exceptionally rare, according to Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center. Less than 3% of more than 430 active attacks in the US ended with a civilian firing back from 2000 to 2021.A bystander who confronted and disarmed an attacker during a mass shooting that left five people dead and 17 others wounded at a Colorado LGBTQ+ club last year was a US army veteran who had previously gone to war. Richard Fierro had served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. More

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      Seven dead in Texas after car drives into crowd outside migrant center

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      Seven people have been killed and 10 others were injured after a car plowed into a crowd outside a shelter serving migrants and homeless people in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday, and investigators believe it may have been intentional, according to authorities.The car careened into the crowd of people who were sitting on the curb at a bus stop near the Ozanam Center at about 8.30am, the police department in Brownsville, which is near Texas’s border with Mexico, said. That came four days before the scheduled expiration of Title 42, the Covid-19 era policy that allows border patrol agents to swiftly expel migrants at the US’s southern border.Shelter director Victor Maldonado told the Associated Press that upon reviewing the shelter’s surveillance footage, he saw an SUV run a light and plow into the crowd of people who were at the bus stop. The majority of those who were injured or killed were Venezuelan men.“What we see in the video is that this SUV, a Range Rover, just ran the light that was about a hundred feet away and just went through the people who were sitting there in the bus stop,” Maldonado said.Police lieutenant Martin Sandoval told the news outlet Valley Central that seven victims died at the scene, and several others were rushed to nearby hospitals.Video footage posted online showed crowds of people at the scene while clothes and other personal items were strewn all over the road. Several people appeared to be tending to an individual who was lying on a grassy area.Sandoval said the driver was arrested and booked on a count of reckless driving. More charges are likely to be filed in what officers suspect may have been an intentional act, Sandoval added.“It can be three factors,” Sandoval told the Associated Press. “It could be intoxication; it could be an accident; or it could be intentional. In order for us to find out exactly what happened, we have to eliminate the other two.”He added that the driver was transported to a nearby hospital for injuries he sustained after the car rolled over and that no passengers were with him.“He’s being very uncooperative at the hospital, but he will be transported to our city jail as soon as he gets released,” said Sandoval, adding that the detained driver had given officers several different names. “Then we’ll fingerprint him and [take a] mug shot, and then we can find his true identity.”Police have also obtained a blood sample from the driver and have submitted it to be tested for possible intoxicants.The Ozanam Center is the only overnight shelter in Brownsville and manages the release of thousands of migrants from federal custody, and it offers free transportation for migrants.“In the last two months, we’ve been getting 250 to 380 a day,” Maldonado told the Associated Press, adding that even though the shelter can hold up to 250 migrants, many who arrive also leave on the same day.“Some of them were on the way to the bus station, because they were on their way to their destination,” he said.Two days earlier, the US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said that immigration authorities faced “extremely challenging” circumstances along the border with Mexico days before the end of asylum restrictions implemented through Title 42 during the Covid-19 pandemic.A surge of Venezuelan migrants through south Texas, particularly in and around the border community of Brownsville, has occurred over the last two weeks for reasons that Mayorkas said were unclear.On Thursday, 4,000 of about 6,000 migrants in border patrol custody in Texas’s Rio Grande valley were Venezuelan. More

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      Kentucky man gets record-setting 14 year sentence for role in Capitol attack

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      A Kentucky man with a long criminal record has been sentenced to a record-setting 14 years in prison for attacking police officers with pepper spray and a chair as he stormed the US Capitol with his wife.Peter Schwartz’s prison sentence is the longest so far among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The judge who sentenced Schwartz on Friday also handed down the previous longest sentence – 10 years – to a retired New York police department officer who assaulted a police officer outside the Capitol on 6 January.Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 24 years and 6 months for Schwartz, a welder.US district Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Schwartz to 14 years and two months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.Mehta said Schwartz was a “soldier against democracy” who participated in “the kind of mayhem, chaos that had never been seen in the country’s history.”“You are not a political prisoner,” the judge told hm. “You’re not somebody who is standing up against injustice or fighting against an autocratic regime.”Schwartz briefly addressed the judge before learning his sentence, saying, “I do sincerely regret the damage that January 6 has caused to so many people and their lives.”The judge said he didn’t believe Schwartz’s statement, noting his lack of remorse. “You took it upon yourself to try and injure multiple police officers that day,” Mehta said.Schwartz was armed with a wooden tire knocker when he and his then-wife, Shelly Stallings, joined other rioters in overwhelming a line of police officers on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace, where he threw a folding chair at officers.“By throwing that chair, Schwartz directly contributed to the fall of the police line that enabled rioters to flood forward and take over the entire terrace,” prosecutor Jocelyn Bond wrote in a court filing.Schwartz, 49, also armed himself with a police-issued “super soaker” canister of pepper spray and sprayed it at retreating officers. Advancing to a tunnel entrance, Schwartz coordinated with two other rioters, Markus Maly and Jeffrey Brown, to spray an orange liquid toward officers clashing with the mob.“While the stream of liquid did not directly hit any officer, its effect was to heighten the danger to the officers in that tunnel,” Bond wrote.Before leaving, Schwartz joined a “heave ho” push against police in the tunnel.Stallings pleaded guilty last year to riot-related charges and was sentenced last month to two years of incarceration.Schwartz was tried with co-defendants Maly and Brown. In December, a jury convicted all three of assault charges and other felony offenses.Schwartz’s attorneys requested a prison sentence of four years and six months, saying his actions were motivated by a “misunderstanding” about the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump and his allies spread baseless conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the election from the Republican incumbent.“There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being among the most prominent. Mr Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong,” his defense lawyers wrote.Prosecutors said Schwartz has bragged about his participation in the riot, shown no remorse and claimed that his prosecution was politically motivated. He referred to the Capitol attack as the “opening of a war” in a Facebook post a day after the riot.Schwartz has raised more than $71,000 from an online campaign titled Patriot Pete Political Prisoner in DC. Prosecutors asked Mehta to order Schwartz to pay a fine equaling the amount raised by his campaign, arguing that he shouldn’t profit from participating in the riot.Schwartz was on probation when he joined the riot and his criminal record includes a “jaw-dropping” 38 prior convictions since 1991, “several of which involved assaulting or threatening officers or other authority figures”, Bond wrote.More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to January 6. Nearly 500 of them have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment. More

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      Texas governor decried for ‘disgusting’ rhetoric in wake of mass shooting

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      As he announced a reward for the capture of a 38-year-old Texas man accused of fatally shooting five people after some of them complained about his firing a rifle in his yard, the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, went out of his way to describe Francisco Oropeza and those he allegedly murdered as “illegal immigrants”.The Republican’s words drew ire from immigration advocates, state and federal lawmakers and other politicians as Abbott’s words hewed closely with his track record of using anti-immigrant rhetoric in the wake of mass shootings.They decried Abbott’s rhetoric as dehumanizing and indicative of an attempt to deflect attention from the role Republican lawmakers played in shaping Texas’s lax gun laws that Democrats say have created an unsafe environment for residents.As of Monday, law enforcement authorities had not confirmed the immigration status of the five people killed. The victims, which included a young boy and two women who were shielding children from gunfire, were all from Honduras. Oropeza, who remained at large on Monday morning as federal and local enforcement frantically searched for him, was a Mexican national who had reportedly been previously deported from the US.Political discussions of those facts prompted the local sheriff, Greg Capers of San Jacinto, to say they were irrelevant to investigators.“My heart is with this … boy,” Capers told reporters. “He was in my county, five people died in my county, and that is where my heart is – in my county, protecting my people to the best of our ability.”In his statements, Abbott also noted that he would tell state officials to “alert Operation Lone Star soldiers and troopers to be on the lookout for the criminal and any attempts to flee the country after taking the lives of five people”. The operation, which started in 2021, enabled Abbott to declare a security crisis at Texas’s border with Mexico – where crossings have risen in recent years – and deploy the state’s national guard there.Critics have decried how the operation has cost Texas taxpayers millions of dollars weekly while its participants make arrests that are physically distant from the border, not related to crimes there, and involve law enforcement agencies not directly part of Operation Lone Star, according to reporting from the Texas Tribune, ProPublica and the Marshall Project.Julián Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio who served as secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development before he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, criticized Abbott for using anti-immigrant rhetoric when “five human beings lost their lives”.State senator Roland Gutierrez – a Democratic lawmaker whose district includes Uvalde, where 19 elementary school students and two of their teachers were shot to death by an intruder last year – went on Twitter to call Abbott’s statement a “new low”.Abbott, Gutierrez maintained, continued to “do nothing to keep #Texas safe from #GunViolence”.Gutierrez, who is likely to run against the Republican Ted Cruz for his US Senate seat, told MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez on Sunday that the state’s GOP members were responsible for loosening gun laws, noting that there were more than 20 pieces of gun control legislation that have not moved.“They don’t get to have an immigration narrative today,” Guiterrez said. “They need to own the narrative that they have made this state more dangerous … An undocumented person was able to buy an AR-15 illegally somewhere because of their lax gun laws.”State Republicans have routinely rejected more gun restrictions, including in the wake of a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 23 and at the Uvalde school. Instead, they have loosened them, despite initially signaling they were open to some restrictions.In 2021, two years after the El Paso shooting, Abbott signed a so-called “constitutional carry” law that allows Texas residents to carry handguns without a license or training.Texas joins more than half the US in allowing the permitless carrying of firearms. In April, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law making his state the latest to allow the carrying of concealed firearms without a license or training, less than seven years after a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.Despite calls from the families of Uvalde victims for tougher gun laws, Republican Texas lawmakers have refused to act, and the state’s gun laws have gotten looser. Last August, a federal judge struck down a Texas law that raised the legal age for people to carry handguns from 18 to 21.Those acts came even as a poll commissioned by Fox News, whose viewers are largely Republican, found that American voters favor gun control measures and worry that firearms violence will victimize them.Police recovered an AR-15-style rifle that they say Oropeza used in Friday’s shooting. It is unclear how he obtained it.The Immigration Legal Resource Center tweeted that Abbott’s rhetoric amplified a “specific narrative” rather than focusing on the people involved.The Congressional Hispanic Caucus tweeted that Abbott, by centering the victims’ unconfirmed immigration status, decided to “dehumanize” and “delegitimize” their lives. Congressperson Chuy García of Illinois, one of the caucus’s members, added that Abbott would “take every chance he gets to dehumanize migrants. Even if they were murdered in a mass shooting.”Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso in Congress, called Abbott’s rhetoric a “disgusting lack of compassion and humanity”. More

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      Closing arguments begin in trial of Proud Boys for January 6 Capitol attack

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      Ready for “all-out war”, leaders of the far-right Proud Boys viewed themselves as foot soldiers for Donald Trump as he clung to power after the 2020 election, a prosecutor said on Monday at the close of a historic trial over the January 6 Capitol attack.After more than three months of testimony, jurors began hearing closing arguments in the seditious conspiracy case accusing the former Proud Boys national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, and four lieutenants of plotting to forcibly stop the transfer of power.The Proud Boys were “lined up behind Donald Trump and willing to commit violence on his behalf”, prosecutor Conor Mulroe said. “These defendants saw themselves as Donald Trump’s army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it.”The justice department has worked to link the violence of 6 January 2021 to Trump. Prosecutors have repeatedly shown a video clip of Trump telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first debate with Joe Biden.Tarrio is one of the top targets of the Capitol attack investigation. He wasn’t in Washington but is accused of orchestrating it from afar. Defense attorneys say there is no evidence of a conspiracy or a plan to attack the Capitol.Nicholas Smith, an attorney for the former Proud Boys chapter leader Ethan Nordean, said prosecutors built their case on “misdirection and innuendo”, accusing them of repeatedly playing the clip of Trump to manipulate jurors.“Does that prove some conspiracy by the men here?” Smith asked. “We all know it doesn’t.”Mulroe said a conspiracy can be an unspoken and implicit “mutual understanding, reached with a wink and a nod”.Seditious conspiracy, a civil war-era charge that can be difficult to prove, carries a sentence of up to 20 years. The Proud Boys face other charges too.The justice department has secured seditious conspiracy convictions against the founder and members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers. But this is the first major trial involving the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group that remains a force in Republican politics.The government’s case is founded on messages leaders and members exchanged in encrypted chats and posted on social media before, during and after the January 6 attack. The messages show Proud Boys celebrating when Trump told them to “stand back and stand by”. After the election, they raged online about baseless claims of a stolen election and what would happen when Biden took office.“If Biden steals this election, [the Proud Boys] will be political prisoners,” Tarrio posted. “We won’t go quietly … I promise.”Jurors also saw gleeful messages posted during the Capitol riot when a group marched to the Capitol and some of them entered the building after the mob overwhelmed police.“Make no mistake,” Tarrio wrote. “We did this.”Prosecutors showed videos during closing statements, including one that appeared to show defendant Zachary Rehl spraying police with pepper spray. Confronted with the images earlier in the trial, Rehl said he didn’t remember it and couldn’t tell if it was him. Mulroe said the images show “he did it and he lied under oath about it”.Tarrio, a Miami resident, Nordean and Rehl are on trial with Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola. Nordean, of Auburn, Washington, was a chapter president. Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described organizer. Rehl was president of a chapter in Philadelphia. Pezzola was a member from Rochester, New York.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTarrio was arrested in Washington two days before the January 6 attack on charges that he burned a church’s Black Lives Matter banner. He followed a judge’s order to leave town.Defense attorneys called several current and former Proud Boys, trying to portray the group as a drinking club that only engaged in violence for self-defense.“If you don’t like what some of them say, that doesn’t make them guilty,” Rehl’s attorney, Carmen Hernandez, told jurors.Rehl said the group had “no objective” on 6 January. Pezzola testified that he got “caught up in the craziness” and acted alone when he used a riot shield to smash a Capitol window.The prosecutor told jurors the Proud Boys leaders wanted to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory “by any means necessary, including force”.“You want to call this a drinking club? You want to call this a men’s fraternal organization? Ladies and gentlemen, let’s call this what it is … a violent gang that came together to use force against its enemies,” Mulroe said.Key witnesses included two former Proud Boys who pleaded guilty to riot-related charges and are cooperating with the government in hope of lighter sentences.The first, Matthew Greene, testified that group members were expecting a “civil war”. The second, Jeremy Bertino, testified that he viewed the Proud Boys as leaders of the conservative movement and “the tip of the spear”.The Proud Boys’ defense mirrored arguments made by lawyers for members of the Oath Keepers: that there was no evidence of a plan to attack the Capitol.Prosecutors secured seditious conspiracy convictions against six Oath Keepers, while three were acquitted. Those three, however, were convicted of obstructing certification of Biden’s victory. More

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      A Fever in the Heartland review: chilling tale of the Klan and a dangerous leader

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      Hubris can be difficult to resist, no matter how well one appreciates the danger. Foremost, in his new book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them”, Timothy Egan indicates just how self-destructive hubris can be.It led to the downfall of David C Stephenson, a sadistic, grifting, backstabbing, vengeful, womanizing grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the center of Egan’s story of extremism and white rage, a tale with many parallels to our own time. Similar overconfidence might yet bring down Donald J Trump. For sure, reading Egan’s gripping book, my own hubris nearly waylaid me.At first, it seemed no writer could possibly offer anything different from what had already been compellingly presented on TV. In 1989, I was among rapt multitudes introduced by the miniseries Cross of Fire to this lurid tale from the second rise of the Klan.The KKK was born at the close of the civil war, in resentment of burgeoning African American independence. By the 1890s it was fading, with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, but the first world war “birthed” a more virulent second coming. Determined to keep Black people in their place, klansmen were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Native American, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-abortion and anti-communist.Cross of Fire, made 70 years later, concerned a rape and murder. Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old educator, unmarried and living with her parents. Stephenson, her assailant, led the Indiana branch of the Klan. Armed with a private force, 30,000-strong, wielding graft and bribes, he reigned supreme, the governor and many other officials firmly under his thumb. When he was brought to trial, he was in no doubt he would get off.Cross of Fire was shown in two segments, two hours each, and reached about 20 million viewers. Back then, I think, a certain optimism was still alive in America. With most social struggles behind us, it was broadly imagined, we were well on the way to rectifying our worst problems. In that context, a televised account of the Klan’s insidious rise across 1920s America seemed almost hard to believe.But the truth is chilling. At one point, the Klan reached millions of white Americans. Feeling threatened by newly enfranchised women, growing numbers of immigrants and African Americans made restive by commendable war service, many such white men felt certain they had been robbed of the position their fathers and grandfathers knew. Stevenson was a crusading would-be strong man. If not plain-spoken, he was at least an ignorant man’s idea of a wise one. Seemingly amiable, seemingly much like those who followed him, to some he felt like an answered prayer.If this is starting to sound familiar, back in 1989 it seemed outrageously implausible. Weren’t the 1920s the Roaring Twenties, the rebellious, modernizing Jazz Age? Was it not an era of prosperity and wellbeing? The problem is a matter of nuance. Setbacks or backlash attendant to progress are seldom acknowledged with the same emphasis as advancement. That’s why it is imperative to teach all American history, good or bad.The idea of making America great again is an old one, rooted in a nativist embrace of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy. A hundred years ago, many were throughly taken in by nationalist rhetoric and circus-like spectacle.Stephenson had no education beyond high school. He was an ardent fan of Mussolini. He claimed he had studied psychology and knew how to play on people’s emotions. Klan rallies whipped up followers, as frenzied as any at Nuremberg, into ecstatic orgies of cheering. Some called beseechingly for Stephenson to become president. In the flickering light of flaming crosses, large banners insisted: “America is for Americans.” It all planted a seed in a man convinced that everything – and anyone – could be bought.In his book, Egan explains how, much as with African Americans and the Black church, to many whites, Klan membership “gave meaning, shape and purpose to the days”.From neo-Confederates to hardline Brexiters, how perplexing is the malfeasance, the villainy, the rank hypocrisy of those who preach law and order and freedom and justice the loudest? It all brings to mind Churchill’s observation about Stalin and Russia after the pact with Hitler in 1939: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”Undaunted, Egan examines and sorts out the complexities and contradictions of the rise of Stephenson and the Klan. In doing so, unlike a writer for TV, he has no need for dramatic license.In Cross of Fire, Oberholtzer marries Stephenson – or so she thinks. It turns out the officiant is a henchman. This detail is important. It sets into motion a supposed honeymoon, a joyride on a private railway car to Chicago, a wedding trip that facilitates Stephenson’s crime.Dealing in fact, Egan reveals that not even a pretend wedding took place. Oberholtzer believed Stephenson could keep her state job from being cut but she never trusted him to the extent of getting married. She was drugged and taken by force.On her deathbed, she summoned the will to give an account of her ordeal. A transcript was presented in court. So was a doctor’s testimony. As much as the poison Oberholtzer ingested, the doctor said, sepsis, from deep bites on her face, breasts, tongue and elsewhere, resulted in Oberholtzer’s death. With timely attention, her life might have been saved.Another fact absent from Cross of Fire but featured in Egan’s account is yet more disturbing. Stephenson was found guilty of Oberholtzer’s murder and sentenced to life, but he was never chastened. He broke parole and was re-imprisoned but he ultimately died a natural death, in 1966, aged 74. He tricked, cheated, married and sexually assaulted many times more. It is this learning of the limits of the wages of sin that distinguishes A Fever in the Heartland as an honest look at what really happened.
      A Fever in the Heartland is published in the US by Viking More

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      Trump’s indictment and the return of his biggest concern: ‘the women’

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      In August 2015, at Trump Tower in New York, Donald Trump met with Michael Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, and David Pecker, then chief executive of American Media, owner of the National Enquirer. According to the indictment of the former president unsealed in New York this week, Pecker agreed to help with Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination, “looking out for negative stories” about Trump and then alerting Cohen.It was a “catch and kill” deal, a common tabloid practice in which Pecker would buy potentially damaging stories but not put them in print.Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories” about Trump’s competitors. The media this week seized on that passage in the indictment, noting how the Enquirer baselessly linked the father of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Trump’s closest rival for the nomination, to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F Kennedy.Last year, however, a New York Times reporter got to the heart of the matter. In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman says that around the same time as the meeting with Pecker and Cohen, Sam Nunberg, a political adviser, asked Trump for his “biggest concern” about running.“Trump had a simple reply: ‘The women.’”Trump now faces 34 counts, all felonies, of falsifying business records with intent to conceal another crime: breaches of campaign finance laws. All the charges relate to the $130,000 Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, the adult film star and director who claims an affair Trump denies, and how Cohen was repaid $420,000 including $50,000 for “another expense” Cohen has said was for rigged polls, another $180,000 to cover taxes and a $60,000 bonus.But the New York indictment is not the only form of legal jeopardy Trump now faces. As well as state and federal investigations of his election subversion, a federal investigation of his retention of classified records and a civil lawsuit over his business practices, he faces a civil defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape.Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. One of them, the writer E Jean Carroll, says Trump raped her in a department store changing room in New York in the mid-1990s.Trump denies the allegation. Carroll has sued him twice: for defamation and for defamation and battery, the latter suit under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law which gave alleged victims of crimes beyond the statute of limitations a year to bring civil claims. In the defamation case, trial has been delayed. The case under the Adult Survivors Act is due to go to trial on 25 April.To the New York writer Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, there is a some sense of poetic justice in Trump finally facing a legal reckoning in cases arising from his treatment of women.But, Jong-Fast says: “The thing I’m sort of struck by is, like, how much women continually are dismissed, even in this situation.“There’s so much talk about the Stormy Daniels case, there was so little talk about actually what happened, right? There was almost nothing about how he was married to his third wife [Melania Trump], and she had just had a child [Barron Trump], and he had this affair. He denies the affair but the affair is pretty much documented.“That’s as close to truth in Trumpworld as possible. But we’re discussing the nuances of who paid the hush money and whether or not that’s a campaign contribution, and whether that rises to a federal crime.“That can be argued, but I was surprised at how little focus women had in it. How nobody was talking about like, this is a serial philanderer who has the kind of problems that serial philanderers have.“The filing talked about how he had paid off this doorman, about the illegitimate child. I guess that may have been not true … but like, you don’t pay off somebody unless you have a sense that this could actually be true.”As Jong-Fast indicates, the New York indictment detailed two other “catch and kill” deals which prosecutors said also showed “illegal conduct” admitted by Pecker and Cohen but directed by Trump himself.In late 2015, American Media paid $30,000 to a former Trump World Tower doorman who was trying to sell a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock.In September 2016, Cohen taped Trump talking about a payment to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims an affair Trump also denies.“So what do we got to pay for this?” Trump asked. “One fifty?”American Media paid McDougal $150,000 to stay silent.After Trump won the presidency, the indictment says, American Media “released both the doorman and [McDougal] from their non-disclosure agreements”.That speaks to the central contention made by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in his charges over the Daniels payment: that Trump concealed it because he feared it could derail his campaign.According to Bragg’s indictment, in the McDougal case Trump “was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy”. In the case of the doorman, Cohen instructed Pecker “not to release [him] until after the presidential election”. Regarding Daniels, Trump is said to have directed Cohen “to delay making a payment … as long as possible … [because] if they could delay payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”.In short, prosecutors contend that Trump did not make and conceal hush-money deals because he wanted to avoid embarrassment or hurting his wife – the argument successfully pursued by John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate who made hush-money payments in 2008 but avoided conviction four years later. The case against Trump is built on the contention he broke state and federal campaign finance laws.Observers argue over whether Bragg has built a case he can win. Some expect Trump to wriggle off the hook. Others think the first prosecutor to indict a president has a good chance of securing a conviction. In either case, the indictment has brought Trump’s treatment of women back to the national spotlight.So has Trump himself. As Jong-Fast points out, as the former president this week attacked the judge in New York, who subsequently became subject to threats to his safety, so too Trump went after the judge’s wife and daughter.“If you see interviews with Stormy Daniels, she has had terrible experiences as a result of her brush with Trump. Even the judge in that case, the judge’s daughter, Trump went after them. You go after Trump, you get it. He’s like a mob boss. That’s just how he does it.” More