Pet zebra captured more than a week after it escaped home in Tennessee
A pet zebra has finally been captured after he escaped - sparking a week-long manhunt across Tennessee.
Dramatic video footage captured the moment Ed the Zebra was airlifted by a helicopter while wrapped in a net rocking side to side.
'Ed was airlifted and flown by helicopter back to a waiting animal trailer,' the sheriff's office said in a statement.
The zebra's owner first reported him missing on May 31, just one day after Ed arrived at his new home in Christiana on May 30.
Ed was spotted galloping along the busy Interstate 24 in shocking video footage.
Officials were forced to completely shut down the road as they attempted to capture Ed.
The animal became an internet sensation during his eight-day adventure through central Tennessee with viral memes circulating the web.
'Rutherford County Sheriff's deputies observed a missing zebra through a drone camera Friday morning in a field near Christiana,' the original post read.
Deputies tracked the zebra with a drone as Sheriff's Cpl. White asked people to avoid the area.
'The zebra's owner reported the presence of people and cameras scaring the zebra and potentially harming the efforts to secure the zebra,' the post continued.
'Please avoid the area to allow the safe recovery of the zebra.'
He was eventually found on Sunday when aviation crews tracked down the animal in a pasture near the Christiana community, according to the Rutherford County Sheriff's Office.
'We don't want to scare the zebra,' White said. 'We need time to get him to calm down.'
'The Sheriff's Office requested help from a veterinarian to respond to rescue the zebra.'
It's unclear why officials had to resort to the airlift method to rescue the lost zebra.
This comes just one month after a runway kangaroo shut down a section of Alabama interstate.
The runaway kangaroo named Sheila shut down a stretch of interstate in Alabama before state troopers and the animal's owner wrangled the wayward marsupial.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said the kangaroo was spotted hopping along the side of Interstate 85 in Macon County, which is between Montgomery and Auburn.
The sight snarled traffic, and state troopers shut down both sides of the interstate for the safety of motorists.
The animal's owner and troopers were able to capture it, Capt. Jeremy J. Burkett of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said.
'When somebody said there was a kangaroo of course I didn't believe it, and nobody believed it. But I'm looking at him,' Macon County Sheriff Andre Brunson said in a Facebook live video as the animal was captured.
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37 minutes ago
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Man loses 40% of his skin when he risks his life to save his beloved dog from house fire
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The Guardian
an hour ago
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‘There is no option of surrender': can Zohran Mamdani cause the greatest progressive upset in New York politics?
Zohran Kwame Mamdani is huddling with advisers surrounded by agitated protesters, New York police department (NYPD) officers and lines of metal barriers penning us in. An hour ago Brad Lander, the elected comptroller of New York who is running against Mamdani in the race to become the city's next mayor, was arrested by masked agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as he accompanied an individual out of immigration court. Video shows the agents shoving Lander against a wall, handcuffing him, and scuffling him away. The incident has clearly rattled Mamdani. He looks tense, and when greeted by supporters his trademark beaming smile is replaced by a tight grin. Days earlier Mamdani cross-endorsed with fellow progressive Lander ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary, which makes this personal. 'This is horrifying,' he says. Behind us looms the brutalist tower of the Federal Building, its tombstone-grey granite and glass exterior wrapped in fine mist. It is a setting out of a dystopian Gotham City. 'No peace, no justice,' the protesters chant. 'Ice out of the court, Ice out of the city.' 'This is an authoritarian regime that has dispatched masked men in unmarked cars to detain and disappear as many immigrants as they can find, and anyone standing in their way,' Mamdani says. 'Ice agents attempted to rough up Comptroller Lander and make an example of him – if that's what they are willing to do to an elected official, what will they do to an unknown immigrant?' There is a potent family link too. 'That's the very court I took my father to a few months ago for his citizenship interview,' he explains. 'I hugged him tightly, not knowing if I would see him at the end or if he too would be detained, as so many immigrants have been. I waited in a coffee shop for four and a half hours hoping he would come downstairs, and he did.' It is not impossible, given the state of the race, that in three days' time Mamdani, until recently a virtual unknown, will prevail in the primary ballot and take a giant leap towards becoming the next occupant of Gracie Mansion. Should he go on to win the general election in November, he would be propelled onto the front lines of the battle to protect New Yorkers from Donald Trump's mass deportations and other legally-dubious incursions. Could he handle it? 'I do believe that I could. I will unabashedly stand up for our sanctuary city policies which have kept New Yorkers safe, and use every tool at the city's disposal to protect our immigrants.' And then he adds: 'There is no option of surrender.' That Mamdani should be a serious contender for the leadership of America's largest city is both a sign of the times and of his individual capabilities. Polls show him within striking distance of the frontrunner Andrew Cuomo in what is now essentially a two-horse race, with Lander trailing a distant third. Mamdani came to the US aged seven from Uganda where he was born to parents of Indian descent. His father is a political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, is the Oscar-nominated director of Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding. He is a democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has been outspoken on the Gaza war, which he views as a genocide, and is unrestrained in his criticism of Trump, whom he calls an authoritarian. He denounced Lander's arrest as 'fascism'. He is equally scathing about the establishment of the Democratic party, which he tells me has 'betrayed' the people of New York. And yet here he is, an unashamed progressive Muslim immigrant, snapping at the heels of the ultimate Democratic machine politician, the thrice-elected former governor of New York, Cuomo. The outcome of the ranked-choice vote could illuminate so much more than the future of New York, important though that is. There's age. Mamdani, if elected, would become at 33 the youngest mayor in a century; Cuomo, 67, would be its oldest in a first term. Could this election deliver a blow to what Ocasio-Cortez has called the 'gerontocracy' of American politics? There's Trump. Lander's arrest could be just the start – only a day before the comptroller was apprehended, the president announced he was prioritizing deportations from New York and other Democratic-run cities, putting whoever wins the mayoral race in the line of fire. And there's the Democratic party itself. Mamdani calls the election a referendum on the future of the party – and given the parlous state in which it currently finds itself, trapped in the headlights of a president who appears hell-bent on destroying American democracy as we know it, he may not be wrong. This is gearing up to be a seismic clash at a turning point for the country. No wonder Mamdani looks tense. Our interview was not meant to be like this. The plan was for us to meet in Mamdani's campaign office near Madison Square Park, but the shock of the Lander arrest sends him scrambling down to Federal Plaza, the Guardian in hot pursuit. It's a bit like a game of cat and mouse. We follow the candidate as he moves away from Federal Building, and takes off with his posse of campaign managers to find a quiet place to talk. He says we'll regroup at a sandwich bar nearby then abruptly changes the location, but amid the confusion he's always impeccably polite. 'Thank you for your understanding,' he says to me. We finally get to sit down in a Le Pain Quotidien around the corner from where Lander is being detained. Mamdani asks if I mind that he eats while we talk – it's mid-afternoon by now and it's his first meal of the day. When I express sympathy, he gives a maudlin smile and says: 'I chose this.' We begin by discussing his explosive rise, from a barely known member of the state assembly representing Queens into a political phenomenon. The previous Saturday, at a rally at Terminal 5, a music venue in Hell's Kitchen, Mamdani was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez, who likened how he has burst onto the scene to her own unlikely eruption as Bronx bartender turned congresswoman in 2018. Did Mamdani expect to be where he is now when he launched his run last October? From the start he believed in the possibility of his campaign, he says, but did not expect his numbers to surge until the end. 'Instead we've been firmly in second place for the last few months, and we've narrowed a 40-point gap with Cuomo down to single digits despite Republican billionaires spending close to $20m in attack ads against me.' That Mamdani has caught the imagination of young New Yorkers is self-evident at the Saturday night rally. The venue is packed with over 3,000 supporters, most in their 20s and 30s, waving placards saying 'A City We Can Afford'. Comedian the Kid Mero hosts, a marching band performs Empire State of Mind, and the DJ plays hope and change-themed tracks (the rally closes with Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'). It all has the razzmatazz of a premature victory party. Mamdani commands the stage, displaying an ease with TikTokable soundbites and a beguiling charisma which are essential qualifications for high office these days. He echoes the lyrical rhetoric of Barack Obama: when he wins on 24 June, he orates, 'it will feel like the dawn of a new day, and when the sun finally climbs above the horizon that light will seem brighter than ever'. A key to his success among young voters – and in turn, the amassing of a vast army of 46,000 volunteers who have knocked on more than a million doors – has been his savvy use of social media. He has posted a stream of viral videos, shot on gritty New York streets, infused with the humor and pace that he first honed during his younger years when he was an aspiring rapper going by the name of Mr Cardamom. To publicise his plan to freeze the rents of all rent-stabilised apartments, Mamdani posted a TikTok video in which he dives fully clothed into the frigid waters off Coney Island. It was titled: 'I'm freezing … your rent.' When Cuomo entered the mayoral race, Mamdani filmed in front of Trump Tower to visually connect the two men as bullies accused of sexual misconduct – Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, Cuomo was forced to resign as governor in 2021 following reports that he sexually harassed female staff, which he denies. Such grabby stuff has spawned a whole cluster of fan-based Instagram groups. Among them: Hot Girls for Zohran and, not to be outdone, Hot Boys for Zohran. Fun this may be. But it's also serious politics. It's earned him the adoration of countless young voters at a time when social media is increasingly critical to winning elections – just ask Trump who, with his 106 million X followers and his Truth Social platform, literally owns political social media, leaving most Democratic leaders languishing in the wilderness. 'New Yorkers of all ages are engaging with the world around them through their phones,' Mamdani says. 'One reason we've been able to get so many to engage with us is that they've heard about our politics in places they typically would not.' He calls his social media strategy the 'politics of no translation'. What is that? 'It's when you speak directly to the crises that people are facing, with no intermediaries in between. We need a politics that is direct, that speaks to people's own lives. If I tell you that I'm going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I mean.' Mamdani puts his spectacular popularity with young New Yorkers down to a hunger for a 'new kind of politics, one that puts working people at the heart of it and showcases a new generation of leadership'. There's maybe something else also at play: he has a magnetism that just seems to draw people towards him. The young waiter who takes his order of grilled chicken salad appears starstruck, and after we finish talking the waiter comes back to the table and engages Mamdani in intense conversation. The candidate obliges, despite his frantic schedule that will see him dashing between boroughs late into the night. I get flashes of that magnetism as we sit at our table. Like any politician, Mamdani has his talking points, but he drops his guard when I ask him what he remembers about arriving in New York as a kid. He leans towards me, and his face opens, and he seems transported. 'I remember going to Tower Records around 66th Street or so, and browsing all the different CDS, then stepping outside and buying my first bootleg copy of Eiffel 65, the euro pop group with the song Blue (Da Ba Dee). I remember playing soccer in Riverside Park, I remember falling in love with chess.' Reverie over, Mamdani the mayoral candidate is back, shoveling down food in between espousing political strategy. And this is when we get down to it, and the real challenge he faces. Because his appeal to young New Yorkers is not enough to win. To defeat Cuomo on Tuesday he has to reach beyond young voters. He has to get to the older African Americans and Hispanics in the outer boroughs who dependably turn out to vote, and thus often decide the outcome of New York Democratic primaries. Polls suggest that such voters are still favouring Cuomo as a safe pair of hands, though there has been a recent uptick among older Latinos. Mamdani is candid about how hard this has been. 'It was very difficult for us to get into these spaces to make our case,' he admits. 'Especially as we began with 1% name recognition. But things are shifting, now we're finding that we are double-booked for churches on a Sunday morning.' Paradoxically, the outer borough communities that he has to convert are home to the very same voters with whom Trump made astonishing inroads last November. It's the guilty secret of New York, which is so proud of its status as a liberal bastion: Trump enjoyed his biggest swing of any state in the country here – about 11.5% – and increased his vote by double digits in both the Bronx and Queens. 'It wasn't just the scale of the swing,' Mamdani says. 'It was that it took place far from the caricature of Trump voters, and into the heart of immigrant New York.' After Trump's victory, Mamdani had to turn the political impulse of lecturing into listening went on a listening tour to the outer boroughs. 'I went to Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, and asked these New Yorkers, most of whom are Democrats, who they voted for and why. I learned that many did not vote, and many voted for Trump, and they did so because they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago.' The plea he heard over and over again was for an economic agenda that would make people's tough lives easier. 'And that is how we have run this race,' he says. That's where his affordability ticket kicks in. Rents will be frozen in rent-stabilised apartments that house 2 million New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom are people of colour. Childcare will be provided at no cost, the minimum wage will be raised, city-run groceries will be opened offering cheaper healthy food, buses will be made fast and free. To pay for all that, taxes will be raised for corporations and for the top 1% of earners with incomes above $1m. When I ask him to imagine how he imagines New York would look after he had been in Gracie Mansion for two terms, he replies: 'It is a city that is more affordable, that works better, and where we have restored public excellence into public service.' Mamdani's affordability manifesto is a conscious blueprint for reconnecting working-class Americans, of all races, back to the Democratic party in the fight against Trump. It's also a damning indictment of where he believes the Democratic leadership has gone wrong. He goes so far as to use that word 'betrayal'. 'New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city,' he says. As evidence he points to Trump's deportations. We're still sitting in Le Pain Quotidien, Mamdani's salad now half-eaten and his tie off, and we are both painfully, though unspokenly, aware that Lander remains in custody as we speak (he was released a few hours later without charge). Up to 400,000 New Yorkers are at risk of Trump's deportations, he says, yet under the current Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, whose corruption charges were dropped by Trump in what was widely seen as a quid pro quo, the city has assisted fewer than 200 people facing imminent removal. Mamdani pledges that under his leadership, the city would provide legal representation for all immigrants in detention proceedings. That would boost their chances of going home to their families some elevenfold. His critique of the Democratic party doesn't end there. For him, Cuomo is the epitome of where the established party has gone off the rails. 'I believe we lost the presidential election because we had left the working class behind a long time ago. They were told time and time again that their leaders would fight for them, and those leaders, like Andrew Cuomo, sold them out.' He's in his flow now, his arms flapping in grand gestures of the sort that his staff have worked hard to get him to tone down. There's animation in his portrayal of Cuomo, containing a hefty dose of venom, and even disgust. 'We are considering electing a former governor who resigned in disgrace, one who cut Medicaid, stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA [which runs the subway], hounded the more than a dozen women who credibly accused him of sexual harassment even suing them for their gynecological records. It begs the question: what high ground do we have in the Democratic party when we critique Donald Trump?' Towards the end of his Terminal 5 rally speech, Mamdani warned his supporters to expect a barrage of negative attack ads from Cuomo and his billionaire backers in the closing stage of the race. But it's not just the barrage of TV ads that are attacking Zohran. The most withering criticism has come from the New York Times editorial board, which went so far as to opine that he didn't deserve a spot on the ballot. Mamdani swats that one away with the curt remark: 'These are the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers. They're entitled to them.' The paper described his proposals as unrealistic. That's paradoxical, he says. Working-class Americans are losing faith in the Democratic party, yet anyone who comes up with policies that address their daily struggles is castigated for being pie in the sky. 'If you want to fight for working people priced out of their own city, then you are told you are out of touch.' The Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Museum, and several Jewish leaders have also blast out to scorch him in the final stretch. Shortly after we meet, a podcast is posted by the Bulwark in which Mamdani was asked whether he felt uncomfortable about the use by some pro-Palestinians of the phrase 'globalize the intifada', which has been condemned by some Jews as a call to violence. He would not denounce the expression, saying it spoke to 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights'. The comment led to rapid backlash from some Jewish groups. That was just the latest in a pattern in which, stepping outside a campaign tightly focused on affordability, he has been prepared to speak out about the highly contentious issue of the Middle East. He has decried the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and championed the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University who was released on Friday after more than three months detention on the orders of a federal judge. Given the nature of his economically-focused campaign, wouldn't it have been expedient to skirt around the issue of Gaza? . 'I have always been honest,' he says. 'I am honest because I believe it is incumbent upon us to have a new kind of politics, consistent with international law, and I believe there are far more New Yorkers looking for that consistency than one would imagine.' Mamdani has clearly been riled by the attacks made on him, which he calls Islamophobic. 'I have been smeared and slandered in clear racist language,' he says, pointing to mailers from a Cuomo-supporting super PAC which altered his face to be darker and his beard to be thicker (the super PAC denied any intentional manipulation). In the days after our interview, the NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force announced they are investigating threats made against Mamdani, by an unidentified man who said he was a 'terrorist' who is 'not welcome in America'. None of this is new for him. He's had to deal with Islamophobia since 9/11, when he was nine and had been living in the city for just two years. He was spared the worst of the anti-Muslim fallout of the attacks, he says, partly thanks to a kind teacher who pulled him aside and told him to let her know if he was ever bullied. But 9/11 left its mark. 'Living in the shadows of that moment, it politicized my identity. It forced a nine-year-old boy to see himself the way the world was seeing him.' That young boy is now three days away from a vote in which he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. As he finishes up his salad and downs a cup of hot water with honey and lemon, before rushing off to his next engagement, he looks a strange mix of bone tired and fired-up for the battle ahead.
The Guardian
an hour ago
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The Minnesota shootings illuminate the character of the Trump era
In the early morning of 14 June, according to authorities, Vance Luther Boelter, disguised as a police officer and wearing body armor and a face mask, drove his black Ford Explorer SUV, equipped with flashing lights, to the home of the Minnesota state senator John Hoffman. There, he shot Hoffman nine times, critically wounding him, and shot his wife eight times as, relatives say, she threw her body over her daughter to shield her. He next drove to the home of the former house speaker Melissa Hortman, forced his way in, and killed her and her husband, officials say. The police arrived and Boelter fled, abandoning his car. In it they allegedly discovered a 'kill list' of dozens of federal and state Democratic officials, mostly from Minnesota but also prominent Democrats in other midwestern states, and the sites of women's healthcare centers and Planned Parenthood donors. He left behind notebooks with detailed descriptions of his target locations. On the lam, Boelter sent a text message to his family: 'Dad went to war last night.' As soon as the earliest reports of the murders were published, with the sketchy information that Boelter had been appointed by Minnesota's governor, Tim Walz, to one of many state boards, on which there are currently more than 342 vacancies, the rightwing swarm began spreading the falsehood that he was Walz's hitman. Mike Cernovich, a notorious conspiracy-monger with a large following on X, tweeted: 'Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?' Elon Musk jumped in, writing on X: 'The far left is murderously violent.' The far-right activist Laura Loomer, who occasionally surfaces as an intimate of Donald Trump, tweeted that Boelter and Walz were 'friends' and that Walz should be 'detained' by the FBI. Within hours, Mike Lee, a Republican senator for Utah, used the platform of his office to push the disinformation. Over eerie night-time photos of Boelter in his mask and police outfit standing at Hortman's door seconds before he opened fire, Lee tweeted, first at 9.50am on 15 June: 'This is what happens. When Marxists don't get their way.' At 10.15am, he tweeted, 'Nightmare on Waltz Street,' misspelling Walz's name. Lee expressed no sympathy or shock over the assassinations. He assumed the distance of the online tormentor gave him license. Like the mask-wearer, both were disinhibited by their contrived personas. Anything goes. Lee was doing more than blaming Walz for carrying out a bloody vendetta that conspiracy theorists had conjured. Lee created a cartoon. The killer was enlisted by the evil liberal governor to rub out someone who was in reality one of his closest allies. Like Boelter, Lee felt a compulsion to push himself in. The clamor of the far right pre-empted the emergence of the facts for Lee and served as his incitement. But, of course, Lee is a learned man who knew that what he was doing was malicious. The facts were always irrelevant. He trivialized a tragedy in order to implicate Walz as the villain commissioning the hit. Lee's tone was one of mocking derision to belittle and distort. The killer, Walz and the victims were all tiny, dehumanized figures he arranged to illustrate his tweets. His manipulation was more than a maneuver. It was a revelation of Lee's own mentality and political imagination he believed would be embraced to his advantage. His depraved humor was designed to cement fellow feeling between the jokester and his intended audience. He was playing to the gallery that he knew how to own the libs. He would gain approval and acceptance. In the hothouse in which he operates, he thought his mindless cruelty passed as wit. Soon enough it was reported that Boelter was not a Marxist or for that matter a hitman hired by Marxists. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Walz 'did not know him' and Walz was on his 'kill list'. Boelter was reportedly an abortion opponent, an evangelical Christian and a registered Republican who attended Trump rallies. Mike Lee is also a man in a mask. He altered his identity, discarding the veneer of a statesman for the Maga mask. Both Boelter and Lee profess to be men of faith, draping themselves in the authority of the law as one allegedly committed murder and the other hooted at it. They have both posed as heroic avengers and truth-tellers as they target victims. While speaking of God, the law and a higher calling, they worship at the shrine of Trump. The alleged assassin and the character assassin embody parallel lives that have intersected at the tragedy under the influence of Trump. One grew up in a traditional middle-class family; the other is a privileged son. Each of their fathers were prominent in their communities – one a high school coach, the other solicitor general of the United States. One graduated from St Cloud State University, the other from Brigham Young and its law school. One appeared susceptible to the latest conspiracy theories; the other knows these are lies but amplifies them anyway for personal aggrandizement to win the approval of the mob and its boss. One is a true believer; the other is a cynical opportunist. One is a 'loser' in the Trump parlance. The other is a winner in the Trump galaxy. Both put their enemies in their crosshairs. One has been booked for homicide; the other is disgraced as a moral reprobate. One is indicted for his alleged crimes; the other has indicted himself. Both spiraled under Trump and both became lost souls, though Boelter would believe that he was found at last. Vance Luther Boelter grew up in the town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, one of five siblings, living in a large house, the captain of the high school basketball team, voted 'most courteous' and 'most friendly', according to the Washington Post, and his father acclaimed in the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. But when he was 17, the mainstream Lutheran young man became a born-again Christian, living in a tent in the local park and shouting sermons to passersby. After he received a degree from a state university, he wound up at the Christ for the Nations Institute, a Texas Bible school that emerged in 1970 from a faith healing group founded by Gordon Lindsay. On the lobby wall of the school is a Lindsay saying: 'Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.' Lindsay was also an organizer for the Anglo-Saxon World Federation, an antisemitic organization in the 1930s and 1940s that spread the doctrine of what was called British Israelism, that Anglo-Saxons, not the Jews, were the chosen people of God. The group distributed Henry Ford's antisemitic tract, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, as well as Nazi propaganda, and preached that God would punish Franklin D Roosevelt. Lindsay was a close associate of Gerald Winrod, a pro-Nazi demagogue, who ran a group called Defenders of the Faith and was indicted for seditious conspiracy in 1944. After the war, British Israelism was rebranded as Christian Identity, a theocratic doctrine based in part on racist distinctions between superior and inferior races. Lindsay preached 'spiritual war' against the satanic demons of secular culture. Boelter graduated in 1990 from the Christ for the Nations Institute with a degree in practical theology. He wandered as a missionary spreading his gospel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In one sermon, he said: 'There's people, especially in America, they don't know what sex they are. They don't know their sexual orientation. They're confused. The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.' Boelter claimed he was the CEO of the Red Lion security group. He continued his soul-saving. 'In the Middle East, I went to the West Bank, the Gaza strip, southern Lebanon, and I would give pamphlets to everybody I could,' he said in one sermon. He created a website for a religious group he called Revoformation. He managed a 7-Eleven store, a gas station, and after taking courses in mortuary science worked transporting bodies to a funeral home. He listened to Alex Jones's stream of conspiracy-mongering, Infowars. Boelter created a website for a security firm called Praetorian Guard for which his wife was listed as the CEO and he was the head of security. He bought two cars that he fitted out to look like police cars, stockpiled weapons and uniforms, but had no known business. On 14 June, with his 'kill list' in hand, he sent a message to a longtime friend: 'I made some choices, and you guys don't know anything about this, but I'm going to be gone for a while. May be dead shortly …' Boelter's apparent disguise as a law enforcement officer was an expedient that tricked his victims into opening their doors. Pretending to be a police officer, he traduced the law to impose his idea of order. Christ for the Nations Institute issued a statement renouncing Boelter: 'Christ For The Nations does not believe in, defend or support violence against human beings in any form.' It added that the school 'continues Gordon Lindsay's slogan of encouraging our students to incorporate passion in their prayers as they contend for what God has for them and push back against evil spiritual forces in our world'. Mike Lee took the news of the assassinations as the signal for him to tweet. Lee was born to Mormon royalty in Utah. His father, Rex Lee, was Ronald Reagan's solicitor general, a principled conservative with an independent streak. He resisted pressure to argue cases on behalf of the administration against separation of church and state that would endorse government-sponsored prayer and religious symbols. He resigned in 1985, stating: 'There has been a notion that my job is to press the Administration's policies at every turn and announce true conservative principles through the pages of my briefs. It is not. I'm the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general.' Rex Lee became the president of Brigham Young University and dean of its law school, both of which his son attended. Lee was elected to the Senate in great part on the strength of the family name. In 2016, Lee endorsed Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination for president. When Trump wrapped up the nomination, Lee refused to endorse him. 'I mean we can get into the fact that he accused my best friend's father of conspiring to kill JFK,' Lee said. 'We can go through the fact that he has made some statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant.' Lee demanded: 'I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the US constitution. That he is not going to be an autocrat. That he is not going to be an authoritarian.' Lee remained a holdout at the convention until the very end. By 2020, Lee touted Trump as a virtuous figure, comparing him to the self-sacrificing leader in the Book of Mormon. 'To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,' a hero in the Book of Mormon, Lee told a rally, with Trump standing beside him. 'He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.' After Trump lost the 2024 election to Joe Biden, Lee sent John Eastman, a law professor with a scheme to have the vice-president throw out the votes of the electoral college on January 6, to the Trump White House. While Trump focused on the insurrection, Lee strategized with the chief of staff, Mark Meadows – 'trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend', Lee texted Meadows. Lee diligently worked to realize the coup plan using fraudulent electors. 'I've been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow,' Lee wrote Meadows. The journalist Tim Alberta, writing in the Atlantic, described a conversation Lee recounted with one of his staffers about Trump that went far to explain his motive for switching from a critic of Trump's authoritarianism to a defender. 'Donald Trump walks up to the bar,' said the staffer, 'and he's got a beer bottle in his hand, and he breaks the beer bottle in half over the counter and brandishes it.' Lee said he replied: 'Immediately, a bunch of people in the room get behind him. Because he's being assertive. And odds are lower, as they perceive it, that they'll be hurt if they get behind him.' As Vance Boelter's life unraveled, perhaps he imagined himself risen into a spirit warrior. Mike Lee knows better. To know better, but not to be better, is his peculiar disgrace. He lacks introspection into the source of his hateful behavior, except to offer the excuse that he won't 'be hurt' by Trump. Not to feel any ordinary emotion for the victims of a terrible and unprovoked crime and instead to engage in taunts betrays his father's legacy and the shining figure of Captain Moroni, whom Lee has upheld. His fall from grace is one of the incidents that illuminates not only his but also the true character of the Trump era. Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast
