JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel is holding over 1,200 detainees — nearly all of them Palestinians — without charge or trial, the highest number in over three decades, an Israeli human rights group said Tuesday.
The detainees, 99% of whom are Palestinians, are held under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention,” without trial and under allegations that Israeli authorities keep secret.
The detentions can range from a few months to years — and authorities often extend them for unknown reasons, according to Jessica Montell, the executive director of Hamoked, the rights group that published the figures.
Hamoked said this makes it nearly impossible for detainees or their lawyers to mount a proper defense.
“The overall figure is outrageous,” Montell said. “This is a patently illegal practice. These people should be given a fair trial or released.”
Israeli authorities can renew administrative detentions indefinitely. While detention orders are usually set for periods of three or six months, Montell said administrative detainees in Israel spend a year in detention on average.
Israel says the controversial tactic is necessary to contain dangerous militants and avoid divulging incriminating material for security reasons. But Palestinians and rights groups say the system denies due process and is widely abused.
The number of administrative detainees has more than doubled since early last year, when Israel began staging near-nightly arrest raids into Palestinian cities and towns following a series of Palestinian attacks. A quarter of all Palestinians under Israeli custody are now administrative detainees, according to Hamoked.
Administrative detention is very rarely used against Jews or Israelis, but that figure has been rising, too — 14 Israelis were held in administrative detention as of March, Montell said. Most of them are Palestinian citizens of Israel. But several are Jews suspected of violence against Palestinians during rampages in the West Bank.
Neither Israel’s Shin Bet security service nor the army immediately commented on the latest administrative detention figures.
Israel says its activities in the occupied territories are meant to stamp out militancy and thwart future attacks. The past year and a half has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades. More than 160 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting this year, according to a tally by The Associated Press.
Israel says most of the dead are militants. But many were stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions or people uninvolved in violence. At least five of them were age 14 or younger.
Israel’s hard-line National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a West Bank settler himself, has pushed for tough measures against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
On Monday, the Palestinian Prisoners Club and other advocacy groups reported that Ben-Gvir had done away with a policy allowing the early release for Palestinian prisoners held on national security charges.
For years, all detainees sentenced to less than four years had been eligible for early release to relieve severe overcrowding in the country’s prisons. Israel’s prison service confirmed that it was abiding by Ben-Gvir’s waiver of early releases as of Tuesday.
The West Bank has been under Israeli military rule since Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want it to form the main part of their future state.
The territory’s nearly 3 million Palestinian residents are subject to Israel’s military justice system, while the nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers living alongside them have Israeli citizenship and are subject to civilian courts.
Such disparities have fueled allegations by human rights groups that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians amount to apartheid.
NEW YORK — Michael Cohen, the onetime lawyer and fixer for former President Donald Trump, came face to face with his former boss in a New York courtroom on Tuesday.
Cohen is at the New York County Supreme Court to testify in a civil trial alleging the former president inflated the value of his assets to land better business deals and tax benefits.
During his testimony, Cohen said that Trump had asked him to "increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected."
His responsibility, along with that of former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, "was to reverse engineer the very different asset classes, increase those assets in order to achieve the numbers" Trump had asked for.
Another of Trump’s lawyers has pleaded guilty to charges as part of a cooperation agreement with the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office. This morning, Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings as part of the plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. She is the fourth of the 19 people charged in the Georgia racketeering case to plead guilty.
In late September, bail bondsman Scott Hall, who helped to breach voting equipment and data in Coffee County, Georgia, pleaded guilty; lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty last week.
Ellis opposed Trump’s 2016 nomination but supported him after his election in frequent television appearances as a “constitutional law attorney” although she had not worked on election law. After Trump saw her on the Fox News Channel, Ellis became a “senior legal advisor” to Trump’s reelection campaign.
After he lost, she was a very visible television spokesperson for the Big Lie that the election was stolen. On November 19, 2020, she joined Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to insist that Democrats had rigged the voting in majority-Black cities and that communist forces in Venezuela had tampered with U.S. voting machines. She also peppered her social media feed with MAGA statements, mixing it up with anti-Trump figures, making her a more public figure than the other lawyers.
Nonetheless, Trump declined to cover her legal fees after her indictment as a co-defendant in the Georgia racketeering case, possibly because she had supported Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. While Ellis said she had stopped supporting the former president because of his “narcissistic” tendencies, she continued to echo Trump’s rhetoric. In September she raised more than $216,000 for her legal defense fund from crowdfunding, claiming she was fighting “a weaponized government and the criminalization of the practice of law.”
Today, in a court of law rather than in front of the television cameras, she sounded quite different.
“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” a tearful Ellis told the court. “I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” (Ellis worked closely with older Trump lawyer Giuliani; she will be 39 on November 1.)
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said in court. “I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, your honor, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”
Ellis’s plea agreement spelled out the statements she made that were lies. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, this means the court has identified the specific lies that made up the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that Ellis will testify that they are lies. Those claims include the lie that there were 96,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots, that 2,506 felons voted illegally, that 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote, that 2,423 unregistered people voted, that more than 10,000 dead people voted, that Fulton County election workers counted ballots with no oversight.
In the civil case in New York in which Trump, his older sons, two employees, and the Trump Organization are on trial for fraud, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified today that he and the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, would reverse engineer Trump’s financial statements to meet whatever number Trump wanted.
His testimony suggested that the alleged massive fortune on which Trump based his identity, as well as his presidential bid, was an illusion.
In a series of motions filed overnight, Trump’s defense team appears to be throwing anything it can at the wall to challenge the election conspiracy case in Washington, D.C.
But as Trump’s legal peril escalates, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to reject any House speaker who does not embrace Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today said, “We need a speaker of the House that reflects the values and the views of Republican voters across the country, and they support President Trump and they support his agenda.” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) suggested nominating Trump himself for the job.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has had enough. “I'm covering life and death issues, serious tragedies, serious momentous occurrences here in Israel and of course in Gaza,” he said today. But, he said, “We have to interrupt this for one moment to cover the complete and utter clown car that is the House Republicans' Speaker's race.”
House Republicans today selected Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN) as their choice for the post, only to have him drop out of the race after Trump, apparently angry that Emmer had dodged a question about whether he supported Trump’s nomination for president, turned on him.
Trump went on social media to call Emmer, whose work in Congress has earned him a 79% lifetime approval rating from the right-wing Heritage Action for America, a “Globalist RINO,” meaning “Republican In Name Only.” Trump warned that Emmer “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA…. I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win?”
Trump ally Ohio Representative Jim Jordan’s failure to win the speakership even after threatening his colleagues showed that Trump cannot put his chosen candidate into the chair, but Emmer’s failure to win the speakership suggests Trump’s opposition can keep a candidate out of it.
Just hours after Emmer dropped out, the House Republican conference threw up a fourth candidate for speaker: Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson is a self-described Christian and staunch Trump ally. He defended the former president during both of his impeachment trials and fought for Texas v. Pennsylvania, the key lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election (the Supreme Court decided that Texas did not have standing to sue). He voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Johnson won the conference’s nomination with 128 votes to 29 votes for Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who only entered Congress in 2021. In an interesting sign that Republicans might be reconsidering their rejection of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) three weeks ago, 43 Republicans voted for him even though he was not standing for the position. Johnson told reporters he expects a floor vote at noon tomorrow.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has offered a bipartisan deal in which Democrats would help Republicans elect a speaker. In exchange for their help, Democrats have said they want a candidate who is not an election denier and who agrees to hold up-or-down votes for bills that have broad support across the parties. Such a deal would mean some security for future elections. It would also mean that a measure funding Ukraine, which is popular across Congress but which the extremists oppose, would get a hearing.
So would funding the government.
Quote:Another of Trump’s lawyers has pleaded guilty to charges as part of a cooperation agreement with the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office. This morning, Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings as part of the plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. She is the fourth of the 19 people charged in the Georgia racketeering case to plead guilty.
In late September, bail bondsman Scott Hall, who helped to breach voting equipment and data in Coffee County, Georgia, pleaded guilty; lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty last week.
Ellis opposed Trump’s 2016 nomination but supported him after his election in frequent television appearances as a “constitutional law attorney” although she had not worked on election law. After Trump saw her on the Fox News Channel, Ellis became a “senior legal advisor” to Trump’s reelection campaign.
After he lost, she was a very visible television spokesperson for the Big Lie that the election was stolen. On November 19, 2020, she joined Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to insist that Democrats had rigged the voting in majority-Black cities and that communist forces in Venezuela had tampered with U.S. voting machines. She also peppered her social media feed with MAGA statements, mixing it up with anti-Trump figures, making her a more public figure than the other lawyers.
Nonetheless, Trump declined to cover her legal fees after her indictment as a co-defendant in the Georgia racketeering case, possibly because she had supported Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. While Ellis said she had stopped supporting the former president because of his “narcissistic” tendencies, she continued to echo Trump’s rhetoric. In September she raised more than $216,000 for her legal defense fund from crowdfunding, claiming she was fighting “a weaponized government and the criminalization of the practice of law.”
Today, in a court of law rather than in front of the television cameras, she sounded quite different.
“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” a tearful Ellis told the court. “I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” (Ellis worked closely with older Trump lawyer Giuliani; she will be 39 on November 1.)
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said in court. “I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, your honor, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”
Ellis’s plea agreement spelled out the statements she made that were lies. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, this means the court has identified the specific lies that made up the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that Ellis will testify that they are lies. Those claims include the lie that there were 96,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots, that 2,506 felons voted illegally, that 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote, that 2,423 unregistered people voted, that more than 10,000 dead people voted, that Fulton County election workers counted ballots with no oversight.
In the civil case in New York in which Trump, his older sons, two employees, and the Trump Organization are on trial for fraud, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified today that he and the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, would reverse engineer Trump’s financial statements to meet whatever number Trump wanted.
His testimony suggested that the alleged massive fortune on which Trump based his identity, as well as his presidential bid, was an illusion.
In a series of motions filed overnight, Trump’s defense team appears to be throwing anything it can at the wall to challenge the election conspiracy case in Washington, D.C.
But as Trump’s legal peril escalates, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to reject any House speaker who does not embrace Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today said, “We need a speaker of the House that reflects the values and the views of Republican voters across the country, and they support President Trump and they support his agenda.” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) suggested nominating Trump himself for the job.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has had enough. “I'm covering life and death issues, serious tragedies, serious momentous occurrences here in Israel and of course in Gaza,” he said today. But, he said, “We have to interrupt this for one moment to cover the complete and utter clown car that is the House Republicans' Speaker's race.”
House Republicans today selected Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN) as their choice for the post, only to have him drop out of the race after Trump, apparently angry that Emmer had dodged a question about whether he supported Trump’s nomination for president, turned on him.
Trump went on social media to call Emmer, whose work in Congress has earned him a 79% lifetime approval rating from the right-wing Heritage Action for America, a “Globalist RINO,” meaning “Republican In Name Only.” Trump warned that Emmer “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA…. I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win?”
Trump ally Ohio Representative Jim Jordan’s failure to win the speakership even after threatening his colleagues showed that Trump cannot put his chosen candidate into the chair, but Emmer’s failure to win the speakership suggests Trump’s opposition can keep a candidate out of it.
Just hours after Emmer dropped out, the House Republican conference threw up a fourth candidate for speaker: Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson is a self-described Christian and staunch Trump ally. He defended the former president during both of his impeachment trials and fought for Texas v. Pennsylvania, the key lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election (the Supreme Court decided that Texas did not have standing to sue). He voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Johnson won the conference’s nomination with 128 votes to 29 votes for Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who only entered Congress in 2021. In an interesting sign that Republicans might be reconsidering their rejection of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) three weeks ago, 43 Republicans voted for him even though he was not standing for the position. Johnson told reporters he expects a floor vote at noon tomorrow.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has offered a bipartisan deal in which Democrats would help Republicans elect a speaker. In exchange for their help, Democrats have said they want a candidate who is not an election denier and who agrees to hold up-or-down votes for bills that have broad support across the parties. Such a deal would mean some security for future elections. It would also mean that a measure funding Ukraine, which is popular across Congress but which the extremists oppose, would get a hearing.
So would funding the government.
hcr
What a horrible mess that party is right now.
Quote:What a horrible mess that party is right now.
Twenty House members have made a mess of our whole country. As long as the GOP keeps listening to Trump the country is in real danger. I was actually hoping that Emmer got elected Speaker – he actually had some values and cared about governing. These idiots are playing with fire.
As Israel and Hamas descend into all-out war, Russia has been more of a bit player than a lead actor. There is no evidence that Moscow directly aided or abetted Hamas’s vicious attack against Israel on Oct. 7, despite some early suggestions. Diplomatically, too, the Kremlin has been of negligible significance, unable to defuse the metastasizing tensions.
Last week made plain its peripheral status. While President Biden traveled to Israel as part of intensive U.S. shuttle diplomacy across the Middle East, President Vladimir Putin of Russia — having waited nearly 10 days to dignify Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel with a phone call — headed instead to Beijing. At the United Nations, Russian officials lamented the war’s civilian casualties and pressed for a humanitarian cease-fire. But it was little more than showmanship. Lacking leverage over the parties in conflict, Moscow cannot arrange the release of Hamas’s hostages or secure humanitarian corridors, let alone stop the fighting.
Yet despite its limited sway, Russia is emerging as a major beneficiary of the war. With minimal effort, Moscow is reaping the benefits from the regional chaos that threatens Israelis and Palestinians with devastation and desolation. In three key areas — its military campaign against Ukraine, its designs on the Middle East and its global war of narratives with Western states — Russia stands to gain from a protracted conflict. Without doing much, Mr. Putin is getting what he wants.
First and foremost, events in Gaza are distracting Western policymakers and publics from the war in Ukraine. Fighting a grinding counteroffensive while enduring relentless Russian bombardment, Ukraine must now share the airwaves with Israel and the Palestinians. Fears that Western societies have begun to suffer from “Ukraine fatigue,” real enough before Oct. 7, will continue to grow. For Russia, that could bring some welcome respite from the constant scrutiny of its crimes against Ukraine. With all eyes on Gaza last week, a deadly Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia went under the radar.
If media attention is in short supply, so too are munitions. Mr. Biden has vowed that the United States can support both Israel’s and Ukraine’s security needs, and is asking Congress for $105 billion in emergency funding to cover them. But Israel may eventually need weapons that are now running short in Ukraine, including armed drones and artillery rounds. Trapped in a war of attrition of its own making, Russia must be relishing the appearance of a new and demanding conflict for the United States, draining the strength of its adversaries.
What’s more, the war in Gaza threatens to postpone — if not derail — the Biden administration’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Even before this month, Washington had the herculean task of reconciling the parties’ disparate demands related to U.S. security guarantees, a Saudi civilian nuclear program and the fate of the Palestinians. The new cycle of violence now threatens the initiative altogether.
That would please officials in Moscow, who have always viewed the Abraham Accords, a set of deals between Israel and several Arab states struck in 2020 that paved the way for the Saudi normalization process, as an American project that sidelines Russia. Its faltering offers Russia more than just the sheer pleasure of seeing America struggle. Moscow has its own designs for nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia and also hopes to thwart the maturing of an Arab-Israeli defense partnership against Iran, an increasingly close Russian partner.
But Russia’s biggest gain may come in the court of global opinion. Moscow’s messaging on the conflict — the Kremlin has refused to call the attack on Oct. 7 “terrorism” and blamed the escalation on Western policy mistakes — aligns Russia with public sentiment across much of the Middle East. Silhouetted behind platitudes about peace, calls for the protection of all civilians and acknowledgments of Israel’s right to self-defense are hints of a pro-Palestinian position. In Russian media coverage, the display of Palestinian suffering in Gaza has taken center stage and Russian officials have spotlighted humanitarian concerns while avoiding any direct censure of Hamas. Moscow’s affinity for the Palestinian cause is not new, but the Kremlin has become more explicit about it.
Yet Russian aspirations go beyond the Middle East. Styling itself as David to the Western Goliath, Russia has framed its war against Ukraine as an “anticolonial” fight to end the West’s global dominance — tapping into powerful grievances held across the developing world about Western arrogance and hypocrisy. The Kremlin’s response to the war in Gaza, putting distance between itself and Washington’s unequivocal pro-Israel stance, is designed to exploit those feelings further. For Russia, increasing disillusion with the West and even winning over new sympathizers for its challenge to the global order would be advances worth the risk of upsetting Israel. That such a position plays into tensions in Europe is a pleasing byproduct.
Russia’s cynicism in all of this is self-evident. At the U.N., Moscow called for an emergency session over the attack on a hospital in Gaza — never mind that it has spent 20 months bombing residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Yet in countries roiled by anger and anguish over Israel’s military actions in Gaza, Russia’s criticism plays well into preconceived notions about Israel and its Western backers. Amid a tribalization of pain, the fissures between the developing world and the West are widening. Russia will not waste the chance to deepen the rift further.
Supporting Ukraine over the past 600 days, and now standing with Israel in the wake of its darkest hour, Western officials have tried to convince the rest of the world that the global order is on the line and that democratic values are under threat. But as Israel and Hamas tumble into a whirlwind of violence, the West is far from winning the battle of narratives. The Ukraine war has receded into the background; U.S.-led diplomacy in the Middle East is in disarray; and the West and the rest face each other over an abyss of mutual incomprehension.
From this state of affairs, Russia will do its best to pocket the gains.
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Prison censorship normalizes the idea that reading can be dangerous. Robert Greene, a self-help author whose books are banned in 20 state prison systems, told PEN America that prison censorship is “something that spills out beyond the prison system. And it’s a form of control. It’s the ultimate form of power of manipulation. So the hypocrisy of saying, This is a book that’s dangerous for you—whereas they’re the ones that are completely controlling the dynamic and giving you access to only certain amounts of information—is very frightening. That’s how totalitarian systems operate.”
... ... ...
A Moms for Liberty chair who previously fought a library for having an adaption of Anne Frank’s diary recently promoted her organization on an antisemitic network that warns viewers about “seditious Jews,” “Jewish tyrants,” and how Jewish people “have forsaken God.” She clearly had a positive effect on network leader Rick Wiles, who told her that he wants to “do everything I can to help you” and said that Moms for Liberty is doing “great work.”
Jen Pippin is the chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Indian River County, Florida. Pippin was recently awarded the group’s “Abigail Adams Award for Public Policy” and the group wrote that she “stepped up to launch one of the first two Moms for Liberty chapters in the country." The post celebrating Pippin’s award said she “has not only had an enormous impact on her community, she has served at the state level on committees to shape policies and guidelines for school libraries and teachers.”
Pippin made national news after she forced a high school to remove Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation from its library because it allegedly had “sexually explicit” content and was “not a true adaptation of the Holocaust.”
Media Matters has documented Moms for Liberty’s extremism as the group has gained influence among Republican politicians and in the right-wing media. Moms for Liberty also promoted rhetoric from Adolf Hitler to argue for its mission.
Pippin appeared on TruNews on September 12 to promote Moms for Liberty and its mission. Evidence about the nature of the network is ample and readily available.
TruNews is led by Rick Wiles, a virulent antisemite who has said of Jewish people: “That’s the way the Jews work. They are deceivers, they plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda. … You have been taken over by a Jewish cabal.” He has also claimed that “the American people are being oppressed by Jewish tyrants” and the impeachment of Donald Trump was a “Jew coup.”
Today, data from the Commerce Department showed that the U.S. economy grew at an astonishing rate of 4.9% in the third quarter, and we learned that in Lewiston, Maine, a single shooter killed at least 18 people—more people than died by gun homicide in Maine in the whole of 2021—and injured at least 13 others.
These two things are the results of two dramatically different worldviews.
President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and the administration’s other economic advisors have resurrected the idea that the government can promote economic growth by regulating businesses, protecting workers, and investing in ordinary Americans.
That theory reaches back to the liberal consensus of the years from 1933 to 1981, when members of both parties believed that the intricacies of the modern economy required the federal government to keep the playing field level so that a few people could not monopolize resources and power, cutting others out. In those years, Americans used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. The system created what economists call the “great compression.” Wealth and income distribution became much more even, and economic inequality fell dramatically. The economy boomed.
The modern-day Republican Party grew out of a rejection of that idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, a faction insisted that such government action was a form of socialism that stopped the economy from responding efficiently to market forces. Individual entrepreneurs should invest their money without government interference, they argued, and their investments would dramatically expand the economy. Putting money at the “supply side” rather than the “demand side” would allow everyone to prosper together, they promised: a rising tide would lift all boats. They vowed to cut taxes and regulations and to restore American individualism.
Those same people championed the image of the American cowboy as the symbol of the country: a man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work hard and prosper, and who protected himself and his family—if he had one—with a gun.
That image was always a myth, but it was an attractive one to white voters who had come to resent the government’s protection of civil rights, those voters who listened to politicians who assured them that the government’s actions were simply a way to direct tax dollars into the pockets of undeserving minorities.
The political image of cowboy individualism played into the hands of the National Rifle Association, which had organized in 1871 in New York in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with quite hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments.
By 1920, rifle shooting was a popular American sport, and the NRA worked hard to keep it respectable. In the 1930s the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill, and children; require all dealers to be licensed, and require background checks before delivery. The NRA backed the 1934 National Firearms Act and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.
But in the 1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” The NRA formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and in 1980, for the first time, it endorsed a presidential candidate: Republican Ronald Reagan. When Reagan was elected, the NRA became a player in national politics and was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers.
By 2000 the NRA was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. In 2004 the federal assault weapons ban expired, and gun companies began to sell AR-15–style semiautomatic rifles (the AR stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” which was the name of the military weapon on which the mass-market AR-15 is based). Gun sales had been flat for years, but gun and ammunition sales took off during the administration of Democratic president Barack Obama as advocates told customers that he would confiscate their guns.
Firearms companies played on the politics of the era, advertising their products as tools for heroic figures taking on dangerous threats in society. The firearms industry estimates that about 20 million AR-15s have been sold in the U.S., and mass shootings took off as individual rights trumped the rights of the community.
The NRA spent more than $204 million on the 2008 election. In 2016, NRA spending surged to more than $419 million, with more than $30 million going to support Trump. Since 2020, lawsuits and a dramatic dropoff in funding have dramatically weakened the NRA, but the image of the gun-toting individualist has become so central to the Republican Party that congress members have taken to sending holiday cards showing their families brandishing assault rifles and to wearing AR-15 lapel pins on the floor of Congress.
But now, as the nation reels from another mass shooting, there is yet more proof that Republican economic individualism from which the gun obsession developed doesn’t work as well as the idea of using the government to support the American people. Growth under the Trump administration before the Covid-19 pandemic hit was 2.5%. Trump promised he would get it to 3%, which he claimed was an astonishing rate.
Despite the dire warnings that the economic policies of the Biden administration would cause a terrible recession, Biden and Harris rejected supply-side policies and stood firm on the traditional idea that trying to hold the economic playing field level and investing in workers and infrastructure would nurture the economy. The economy has responded exactly as they predicted, giving the U.S. strong growth for the past five quarters.
Manufacturing has taken off, and the rate of job growth is historic. At the same time, new bargaining power has helped workers make dramatic gains: yesterday the United Auto Workers union and Ford reached a tentative agreement that includes a 25% wage increase over the next 4.5 years, along with cost-of-living adjustments that will bring the increases up to 33%. The union still has to ratify the agreement, but the UAW has called off the strike at Ford plants, suggesting it has faith the union will agree.
A worldview that requires the government to work for the people, rather than handing power to individuals to impose their will on the majority, supports the idea of gun safety laws. Such laws are very popular: in April 2023 a Fox News poll showed that at least 80% of Americans want criminal background checks on gun buyers, better enforcement of existing gun laws, a 21-year age requirement for gun purchases, and mental health checks on gun buyers. Seventy-seven percent wanted a 30-day waiting period to buy a gun; 61% wanted to ban assault rifles and semiautomatic weapons.
Those eager to dismantle the government have stood in the way of such measures, but the heartbreaking news out of Maine has changed at least one lawmaker’s stand. Representative Jared Golden (D-ME), who represents Maine’s conservative second district, which includes Lewiston, today apologized for his previous opposition to gun safety laws.
“The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles like the one used by this sick perpetrator of this mass killing," Golden said. "To the families who lost loved ones and to those who have been harmed, I ask forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings.”
Maine governor Janet Mills has personal ties to Lewiston, where she worked, met her late husband, and sent their daughters to school. “Lewiston is a special place,” she wrote today. “It is a closeknit community with a long history of hard work, of persistence, of faith, of opening its big heart to people everywhere.
“I love this place, just as I love our whole state with my entire heart. I am so deeply saddened. This city did not deserve this terrible assault on its citizens, on its peace of mind, on its sense of security. No city does. No state. No people.”
Those eager to dismantle the government have stood in the way of such measures, but the heartbreaking news out of Maine has changed at least one lawmaker’s stand. Representative Jared Golden (D-ME), who represents Maine’s conservative second district, which includes Lewiston, today apologized for his previous opposition to gun safety laws.
“The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure, which is why I now call on the United States Congress to ban assault rifles like the one used by this sick perpetrator of this mass killing," Golden said. "To the families who lost loved ones and to those who have been harmed, I ask forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings.”
