https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/623832/forget-the-alamo-by-bryan-burrough-chris-tomlinson-and-jason-stanford/

I got a ton out of this one. It’s basically a history of the history of the Alamo, plus myth, its dissemination, and its repercussions. Forget the Alamo is heavily sourced, with a ton of notes, and an accessible narrative style. To me, it couldn’t be more timely, especially in the midst of the uproar over Critical Race Theory. It’s not afraid to go after all kinds of sacred cows, and I learned a lot about how important those cows were and still are to many.

Bottom line: The Heroic Anglo Narrative is BS, and we were taught it in school. Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and Houston were far from being “heroes,” and their crusade wasn’t for “liberty and freedom” against a tyrannical Mexico. It was to preserve their slave colonies and then to break free to make them permanent. The authors start with that foundation and then tell the story of how the myths were created, and by whom. Disney, John Wayne, and several Texas politicians loom large, but surprising names surface, too, like Phil Collins and David Bowie.

Well worth reading, IMO. An excerpt:

The story of Texas’s first fifteen years as an Anglo colony is the success story of a band of misfits and dreamers who came to forge sprawling cotton plantations. In just a scant few years, Texas cotton was being made into clothing as far away as England. The “Texians,” as they called themselves, revolted because they believed a new Mexican government threatened this economic model.

What was it they feared losing? In the pamphlets and newspaper articles that swirled through the revolt, it was always called “property.” The inarguable fact is that there was only one kind of property the Mexican government ever tried to take from its American colonists, and it tried to do so repeatedly. In the ten years before the Alamo, this single disagreement brought Texians and Mexican troops to the brink of warfare multiple times.

So, what did the Mexicans want to take? It wasn’t the cotton. Or the land it was grown on. It was the third leg of the Texas economic stool, the “property” in which Texas farmers had invested more money, more working capital, than any other asset.

The slaves.

* * *

As hard as it may be to accept, Texas as we know it exists only because of slave labor. Southerners-and most Texians came from the South-wouldn’t immigrate to Texas without it. Thousands didn’t, in fact, worried that the Mexican government’s ingrained opposition to slavery put their “property” at risk. For Mexicans, newly freed from Spanish oppression, abolishing slavery was a moral issue. For the American colonists, it was an issue of wealth creation. In the early years, as we’ll see, each new Mexican effort to ban slaves got Texians packing to head back to America. In later years, many put away their suitcases and took out their guns.

For more than a century, historians tiptoed around the importance of slavery to the state’s early development. Not until the 1980s did serious academic study of the subject really get under way, led by professors like Randolph B. Campbell at the University of North Texas and Paul D. Lack at Stevenson University. And not until recent years have historians taken the next step, arguing that the need to protect slavery was a driving force behind the Texas Revolt. The most notable book to support this hypothesis, Andrew J. Torget’s groundbreaking 2015 Seeds of Empire, proved enormously influential to our thinking. In these opening chapters, we draw heavily on its conclusions and research.

The top 11 edge-rushers in the 2021 draft class

* https://touchdownwire.usatoday.com/lists/2021-nfl-draft-edge-rushers-jaelan-phillips-azeez-ojulari-kwity-paye/

A story I relate often comes to us from the 2013 NFL draft, and is the perfect way to begin this article. Early on night one the Miami Dolphins traded up with the then-Oakland Raiders to select Dion Jordan, the pass rusher from Oregon. When the pick was made Mike Mayock, now the general manager for the Raiders, stated that the move told us something about the state of professional football. Paraphrasing here, Mayock stated that the most important place on the field was the pocket. Teams need players that can throw from that spot, that can protect that spot, and that can attack that spot.

That remains true today. Think about how this draft is expected to unfold, with potentially four quarterbacks off the board with the first four picks, and then two offensive linemen shortly thereafter.

But what about the players who can attack that spot?

This is an intriguing EDGE class, if an incomplete one. It lacks the surefire prospect at the top, the complete player that you know can step in and produce without reservation. If you are looking for a Chase Young or Jadeveon Clowney or a Bosa Brother at the top of the board, you might be out of luck.

That does not mean, however, this class lacks talent. Far from it, in fact. The only issue is that you might need to sacrifice a trait or take a gamble on development. If you get the evaluation and the fit right, you might just find that player to attack the spot.

Here are the top 11 EDGE prospects in the 2021 draft class.

1. Jaelan Phillips, Miami

Height: 6’5″ (92nd) Weight: 260 (51st)
40-Yard Dash: 4.56 seconds (93rd)
Bench Press: 21 reps (39th)
Vertical Jump: 36 inches (81st)
Broad Jump: 125 inches (90th)
3-Cone Drill: 7.01 seconds (80th)
20-Yard Shuttle: 4.13 seconds (96th)

Bio: Once upon a time Jaelan Phillips was the top recruit in all of high school football. Graded as a five-star prospect out of Redlands East Valley High School in Redlands, California by 247sports, Phillips had no shortage of interested programs knocking down his door. He was considered the top player at his position, and the top overall prospect by 247sports.com. Phillips committed to play at UCLA, and unfortunately his career with the Bruins did not match his potential. He played in seven games as a true freshman in 2017, and the following season he appeared in just four before a concussion ended his sophomore campaign.

And his time at UCLA.

In December of 2018, following three concussions, Phillips retired from football. Coming from a musical family (his grandfather Jon Robinson is a critically acclaimed pianist and conductor, his mother plays the cello and his father plays the trumpet) Phillips enrolled at Miami and entered the Frost School of Music. But the passion for the game was still there, so he returned to the field for the Hurricanes and this past season looked like the former top-rated recruit. He notched 45 total tackles (15.5 for a loss) and eight sacks in one season, and now stands as perhaps the top prospect at his position yet again.

Stat to Know: Pro Football Focus charted Phillips with 36 total pressures over his final seven college games.

Strengths: Between the lines, Phillips is a rather easy evaluation. It should be no surprise that a former five-star recruit (and once the top prospect in the country) is good at football. Phillips is solid against the run, with good awareness and vision on the edge and the ability to use his hands and upper-body strength to lock out blockers while he identifies the run design and seeks out the ball carrier. He shows good awareness and feel against traps, pulls and zone designs when the slice block from the backside is coming his way. Phillips also displays good discipline on jet sweeps and end arounds, fighting to keep contain.

But if you are drafting an EDGE you want a pass rusher, and Phillips certainly delivers in that regard. He has a great compliment of moves off the edge, including cross-chops, swims and spins, as well as the ability to counter the tackle late in the play. He is explosive off the line, particularly when given the green light to slant or stunt to the inside. His film is replete with examples of him cutting inside and beating tackles and even guards to the spot. He even shows the ability to dip and bend, an essential trait for pass rushers.

Phillips also has the size and quickness to kick inside on passing downs or in sub packages. There are a number of examples from 2020 of this trait, particularly early against Duke where his quick, violent swim move led to immediate pressure on a number of downs. He also kicked inside to NT on a few snaps (PFF charted him with four snaps in the A-Gap this past season) and you can envision some defensive coordinators using him as the single lineman in some 1-5-5 or 1-4-6 sub packages. Patrick Graham might love to get his hands on Phillips.

Weaknesses: As mentioned above, the football part is the easy piece to the evaluation. His main weaknesses stem from the off-the-field portion, which is something that a chucklehead like me cannot answer with any certainty. There is a medical history with Phillips that is hard to ignore. In addition to the three concussions — which led to his medical retirement — there is also a broken wrist suffered during a scooter accident during his time at UCLA. Teams are going to want to drill down on the medical side before making him a first-round pick.

There is one small, nitpicky thing with him that shows up on film, mostly when he is in a two-point stance. Phillips will sometimes false step, picking up his lead foot at the snap and dropping it right back down. That costs him a split-second off the line of scrimmage. It did not hurt him at Miami — and he is much more explosive in a three-point stance — but every split-second counts on Sundays.

Conclusion: If teams are satisfied from a medical perspective, this is an easy selection. The talent and potential is there for Phillips to be a dominant player off the edge at the NFL level, and he also offers discipline and awareness against the run, making him a complete package. His ability to dominate on the inside with his quickness and array of pass-rushing moves makes him an asset on every down in the league.

Comparison: Mike Renner of PFF went with Frank Clark as a comparison, which seems applicable to Phillips and what he offers at the next level.

Resources: For more on what Phillips offers off the edge you can check out this piece on Phillips and the “pass rushing plan.”

2. Azeez Ojulari, Georgia

Height: 6’2″ (17th) Weight: 249 (26th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.60 seconds (88th)
Bench Press: N/A
Vertical Jump: N/A
Broad Jump: 124 inches (94th)
3-Cone Drill: N/A
20-Yard Shuttle: N/A

Bio: ESPN graded Azeez Ojulari as a four-star recruit from Marietta High School in Marietta, Georgia, and Ojulari was coveted by a number of SEC schools including Alabama, Forida and Auburn. He chose Georgia, staying in-state to play his college ball. But due to an ACL tear suffered during his final season at Marietta, Ojulari played in just two games in 2018 as a freshman and ultimately redshirted. He returned to the field for 2019 and appeared in all of Georgia’s games, notching 33 tackles and 5.5 sacks.

This past season his production exploded, as in just ten games Ojulari recorded 31 total tackles (including 12.5 for a loss, a career-high) and another career-best mark with 9.5 sacks.

Stat to Know: Ojulari is a true “EDGE,” as Pro Football Focus charted him with just one snap in the A- or B-Gaps over his three-year career.

Strengths: Speed is the name of Ojulari’s game. While some other prospects in this class have more power few — if any — can match what Ojulari offers around the corner. Ojulari has tremendous explosiveness and quickness off the edge, with an impressive first step and the ability to turn the corner and flatten to the quarterback. His hands are very impressive, has he can chop/rip/swat against most tackles and there are some reps where he just leaves the tackle in his wake.

He is still filling out his plan as a rusher, and there are moments where you would love to see him come up with a better counter or Plan B, but you can find some good examples of him figuring this out if you look. On one play against Missouri he initially punches with his left hand to attempt a long-arm move, but when the tackle handles that he immediately dips to the inside and is able to put a big hit on the QB. Another example is from his game against Mississippi State where the left tackle does not bite on his Euro step move, so Ojulari immediately tries to counter with a long-arm move.

But as he figures out how to effectively counter, his ability to win with speed and quickness will serve him well. That explosive first step gives him an advantage around the outside against most tackles, and also helps him when freed up to slant or stunt to the inside. His athleticism and ability to corner make him a solid prospect at the position. Another solid trait of his is his length. At Georgia’s pro day Ojulari measured in with 34.38 inch arms, placing him in the 84th percentile among EDGE prospects. That shows up when he turns to the long-arm move.

Finally, that Mississippi State game is a fascinating study. The Bulldogs used a number of three-man fronts to try and slow down MSU’s Air Raid offense, which led to Ojulari facing a lot of double-teams.

Weaknesses: Given his reliance on speed, power is a part of his game that needs to be filled out. His initial plan of attack on almost every play is to try and win with quickness, and while that often worked on Saturdays he’ll need a more complete package to win consistently on Sundays. There are moments when tackles got their hands on him, and the play was over before it began.

Ojulari is also a pure EDGE right now, and is not someone you can see kicking inside on sub packages or on passing downs. He was also part of a deep rotation at Georgia at the position, and as PFF noted he never played more than 52 snaps in a game. That led to a number of plays where he had fresh legs, relatively speaking. It also led to the tremendous finish to his college career against Cincinnati in the Peach Bowl, where he put together a number of sacks in the final half of play including a safety on his final collegiate snap. There could also be questions about whether he is better suited for an off-ball, OLB role rather than as a player with his hand in the dirt.

Conclusion: There is always room for a player who can corner, bend and get to the quarterback. Ojulari’s quickness gives him a true trump card that will work at the next level. He might not have the full array of moves under his belt, but you can see him starting to piece it all together. His length will also serve him well on Sundays in the league. He might be a pure outside-only player but his quickness and explosiveness is worth an early pick.

Comparison: Ojulari’s size, frame and athleticism remind me a bit of Marcus Davenport, who had a stunning first-round rise and was ultimately drafted by the New Orleans Saints who traded up to do so. Ojulari is seeing a similar rise, building off his Peach Bowl performance.

3. Kwity Paye, Michigan

Height: 6’2″ (18th) Weight: 261 (54th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.52 seconds (97th)
Bench Press: 36 reps (99th)
Vertical Jump: 35.5 inches (76th)
Broad Jump: 118 inches (61st)
3-Cone Drill: N/A
20-Yard Shuttle: N/A

Bio: Kwity Pay was born in a refugee camp following the First Liberian Civil War. He was named after his father, who died in the conflict, and his mother brought him and Kwity’s brother Komotay to Rhode Island when Kwity was just six months old. He developed a passion for football and played both running back and defensive end in high school, and was named Rhode Island’s Gatorade Player of the Year as a senior in 2016. Considered a three-star recruit he turned down offers from northeast schools such as Boston College, Rutgers and Syracuse to play for the Michigan Wolverines.

Paye was an immediate contributor for Michigan as a true freshman, playing in nine game and recording a sack. His breakout season was as a junior in 2019, where he notched a career-high 6.5 sacks. In the COVID-shortened 2020 season Paye still managed to record a pair of sacks.

Stat to Know: Paye made Bruce Feldman’s “Freaks” list prior to this past season, and with 36 bench reps (99th percentile) and a 4.52 40-yard dash (97th percentile) you can see why.

Strengths: For the most part, that freakish athleticism translates to film. He is powerful off the edge or even in the interior, with hands and upper-body strength to rock defenders off the snap and control them if necessary. He can also convert speed-to-power off the edge, and has a bull rush move that can drive even the best blockers back into the pocket.

On film Paye did some of his best work against the run, with the ability to stack/shed blockers and identify the target in the backfield. That is where those 36 reps on the bench show up, as he can lock out and control blockers while finding the ball-carrier behind them. He also shows good discipline against traps and can scrape off blockers well to get the to running back. He also works on the outside to set the edge against the run, and knows where his help is coming from in those situations.

I also love what he did against zone read teams, as he remained assignment sound and if the play went away from him, you cannot question his effort. His film is filled with effort plays both against the run and when rushing the passer.

He is building out his toolkit as a pass rusher, but you can see a variety of moves being developed. His bull rush is perhaps his best move — due to his power — but you can find examples of him using a push/pull, a rip/dip, a long-arm or even the occasional swim move.

Weaknesses: There are moments when his hands are a bit slow off the line, which enabled some tackles to get into him and control him through the play. Some have questioned his ability to put together a plan, or to come up with counters, but there are some examples. Against Michigan State this past season he flashed a long-arm at the start of one play before immediately changing into a rip/dip move based on how the tackle set against him. There is another example of him flashing a cross-chop and again turning to the rip/dip move as a counter attack. Still, there is room for growth here.

Despite his strength and ability to kick inside, there were moments when he got swallowed up by interior offensive lines. Keeping him on the edge might be a better course of action at the next level.

Conclusion: Ultimately, Paye might offer a better floor than the two prospects above him, and teams might find that enticing at the next level. He does not have the medical concerns that you find with Jaelan Phillips, and he is already built for the NFL game unlike Azeez Ojulari who still needs to add some strength and power to his arsenal. He has played on the interior so he offers some versatility, and while I do think he is better off the edge teams are going to value that from him.

Comparison: Jordan Reid of The Draft Network sees some Brandon Graham in Paye’s game and profile, and that does make sense. Paye, however, goes with a different comparison and tries to model his game after Yannick Ngakoue.

4. Joseph Ossai, Texas

Height: 6’3 5/8″ (58th) Weight: 256 (44th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.65 seconds (80th)
Bench Press: 19 reps (21st)
Vertical Jump: 41.5 inches (99th)
Broad Jump: 131.5 inches (99th)
3-Cone Drill: N/A
20-Yard Shuttle: N/A

Bio: Joseph Ossai was born in Nigeria, and moved to Texas with his family when he was ten years old. He was graded as a four-star recruit by 247sports.com, choosing to play for the University of Texas over schools like Notre Dame, Oregon and Texas A&M. He was a contributor immediately on campus, playing in every game as a true freshman and recording a sack and a forced fumble. As a sophomore in 2019 he played in 13 games, tallying 90 total tackles (13.5 for a loss) and five sacks. He also added a pair of interceptions. He was named the MVP of the 2019 Alamo Bowl after his three-sack performance. In the nine games of his junior season he added another 5.5 sacks, including three in a win over Oklahoma State.

Stat to Know: Pro Football Focus charted him with three-plus pressures in seven of Texas’ nine games this season.

Strengths: At the outset you should understand that I might be higher on Ossai than consensus. PFF graded him as a third-round prospect, and Jon Ledyard — whose opinion I value particularly when it comes to EDGE players — has him as the sixth-best EDGE in the class. This is part of what he wrote: “Ossai might be the ultimate boom-or-bust edge prospect in this class, so like a true coward I’ve planted my flag right between the polarizing grades on him.”

I am going to plant that flag, and here is why. I think Ossai is just scratching the surface of what he can be at the next level, and you cannot match his athleticism and his effort. He is explosive off the line — and can improve in this area as we will discuss — and is adept at cornering of the edge. He is building out a complete set of pass rushing moves, but you can see examples of rip/dips, push/pulls, swim moves and even a bull rush or two. His first step is impressive, particularly when he can cut inside off the snap.

You also will not outwork him. His motor runs hot on every play from snap to whistle, and whether double- or even triple-teamed, he is going to fight to the football. Against the run he will stack and shed and use his hands to keep fighting while getting his eyes on the football.

Ossai started in more of an off-ball role before transitioning to a defensive end this past season, but Texas still found times to drop him into coverage in both zone and man coverage schemes. That versatility is going to be a plus for him as teams could use him in a few different roles

Weaknesses: Ossai is still learning it seems, given the position switch this past season, and that has led to some snap hesitation on plays. This is something that Benjamin Solak has explored, and I have done work on as well. Here is what Solak put together:

If he cleans this up, you are talking about a potential home run pick. The problem? The phenomenon of “coach-it-up-itis,” which is a term I’ve come up with to outline the belief that everything can get fixed with coaching. Is it possible? Sure. Is it a safe bet? Maybe not.

In addition to the above, Ossai could use his hands better, particularly when facing cut block attempts. I would love to see him flare out the hands and drive would-be blockers to the turf to keep his legs and ankles clear.

Conclusion: Ultimately, Ossai is one of my favorite prospects in the draft because you can see the potential. Maybe the allure of what he can be, and the phenomenon of “coach-it-up-itis,” is clouding my judgement. But I look at what he is now, where he is athletically, and think with just a bit of refinement to his approach you are talking about a double-digit sack player in the NFL. Can it happen? Maybe, maybe not. But sometimes in the draft you have to roll the dice and this is a bet I’m willing to make.

Comparison: In a recent mock draft I had the Baltimore Ravens drafting him as a potential Matthew Judon replacement, and there is a reason…

Resources: After Ossai’s incredible pro day I put together this piece on him, that dives into that snap hesitation and his upside.

5. Jayson Oweh, Penn State

Height: 6’5 7/8″ (78th) Weight: 257 (46th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.39 seconds (100th)
Bench Press: 21 reps (39th)
Vertical Jump: 40 inches (96th)
Broad Jump: 134 inches (100th)
3-Cone Drill: 6.84 seconds (96th)
20-Yard Shuttle: 4.15 seconds (95th)

Bio: Jayson Oweh played his high school football at Blair Academy in Blairstown, New Jersey. Considered a four-star recruit by ESPN, who also graded him as the second-best player in the state and 94th overall, Oweh had offers from a number of Big Ten schools including Ohio State and Michigan. He went to Penn State and was a rotational player as a true freshman, notching a pair of sacks. That continued in 2019, where he made one start and added five sacks to his resume.

The production was not there in 2020, as Oweh was held without a sack for the first time in his career. As we will see, that does not tell the whole story…

Stat to Know: While Joseph Ossai was the clubhouse leader for “best pro day from an EDGE prospect” Oweh took that — unofficial — title from him after his performance a few weeks ago. Both his broad jump and 40-yard dash placed him in the 100th percentile among players at his position. He was named to Bruce Feldman’s “freaks” list two seasons in a row for a good reason.

Strengths: Athleticism is the trait that simply jumps off the film. Some might not know this about me but for a few seasons I covered the Minnesota Golden Gophers for the Rivals network. Part of my job was to write about the upcoming opponent in a “Scouting Notebook” series, where I would study the upcoming offense and defense and break down each player the Golden Gophers would face.

Here is what I wrote about Oweh two years ago when discussing their pass rush: “The only one who really stands out is Oweh. He had a very good pass rush rep late in the game against Michigan State with impressive speed off the edge. He runs the arc and then rips to the inside to get a sack/fumble.”

That remains true to this day. His athleticism and speed off the edge is great, almost elite. But he also has some power to his game, and can pack a punch with his hands. On one play against Ohio State this past season he drove the guard back in to the lap of the quarterback, so he is not just a finesse/speed player. Against the run he shows good vision and does a good job of stacking and shedding blockers. He is also disciplined against zone read designs.

He can be a weapon on stunts to the inside. When Penn State tasked him with slicing inside he was often able to get immediate pressure on the opposing passer. Oweh can also chase down plays from behind due to his impressive speed and the effort he puts into each snap.

Weaknesses: The first question is the production element. How could a player with these tools and traits not record a single sack? Some if it was scheme, as he did see his share of double-teams and chips from tight ends. But there were also moments when the pressure did not result in a sack, due to elusive quarterbacks. For those who believe pressure is production, however, you can make the case that despite the lack of sacks Oweh’s 2020 season was still production.

Oweh also relies on his athleticism more as a pass rusher, rather than technique. I did not see a lot of evidence that he can string together moves, counter blocks and pass sets, and win in the technical game.

Conclusion: With athleticism like this, however, who cares about the technical side? Of course that is a rather glib statement but when you see Oweh and what he can do athletically, you can talk yourself into draft him early and molding him into a more complete player. You can refine pass rushing technique over time, you cannot teach his athleticism and explosiveness off the edge.

Comparison: PFF’s Mike Renner went with Montez Sweat, which might be a perfect comp.

6. Quincy Roche, Miami

Height: 6’3″ (33rd) Weight: 243 (13th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.68 seconds (72nd)
Bench Press: 23 reps (56th)
Vertical Jump: 32.5 inches (41st)
Broad Jump: N/A
3-Cone Drill: N/A
20-Yard Shuttle: N/A

Bio: Hailing from Owings Mills, Maryland, Quincy Roche was a standout defensive end and tight end at New Town High School. A three-star recruit according to 247sports.com, he entertained offers from smaller schools such as Appalachian State and Toledo before enrolling at Temple. Roche was an impact player for the Owls from the day he set foot on campus, notching seven sacks as a true freshman. His best season by far was back in 2019, when he tallied 13 sacks and was named the American Athletic Conference Defensive Player of the Year as well as a First-Team All-AAC player. He transferred to Miami for his final year of eligibility as a graduate, and he added another 45 tackles and 4.5 sacks to his resume, this time as an ACC player.

Stat to Know: According to Pro Football Focus Roche’s 104 pressures the past two seasons made him the most productive pass rusher in all of college football.

Strengths: Roche is a technically-advanced pass rusher that wins with effort, technique and experience. Given the number of games he has played and the different players he has seen, Roche is able to read and react to almost anything a tackle can throw at him. He can put together a variety of pass rushing moves, including cross-chops, swims, rips, and spins, and he can counter most pass blockers with an efficient plan of attack. Early against Duke this past season you saw that on a play where he initially tried to rip and dip around the edge, but hit the tackle with a counter/spin late in the down for a sack. His hands in that game against Duke were extremely impressive, particularly on cross-chop moves where he was leaving the Duke tackles in his wake.

He is also adept at exploiting over-sets and mistakes by tackles. Against Pittsburgh this past season the tackle set too far to the outside exposing the inside gap, and Roche immediately identified that and attacked inside to generate pressure on the QB. In that game he also showed a bit of a Euro step on one snap, threatening the outside shoulder of the tackle and then cutting inside to force the QB off the spot. The Clemson game also provided some examples of Roche ironing out a long-arm move, adding one more element to his arsenal.

Weaknesses: Roche is more technique than power or athleticism, and more experienced tackles might be better suited to handle what he attacks with off the edge. You even saw some of that this season in games against Virginia Tech and Clemson, when he was working against experienced and/or talented tackles who could handle his array of moves or simply beat him with power and/or athleticism. Speaking of which, athletically Roche does not compare well to some of the other prospects in this class, and he might be more of a finished product than players like Jayson Oweh or Joseph Ossai.

Conclusion: Still, it is hard to argue with the production. Dating back to high school — Roche set a school record his senior year with 19 sacks — Roche has found ways to get to the quarterback. He might not duplicate those kinds of numbers in the NFL, but players with a knack for getting to the QB are still a valued part of a roster. He might not have the ceiling of other players on the draft, but the floor is rather solid.

Comparison: I see a little of Trey Flowers in his game, a player who might rely on technique and need a bit of scheme help to produce at the next level.

7. Rashad Weaver, Pittsburgh

Height: 6’4″ (68th) Weight: 259 (49th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.83 seconds (33rd)
Bench Press: 20 reps (31st)
Vertical Jump: 33 inches (41st)
Broad Jump: 114 inches (36th)
3-Cone Drill: 6.98 seconds (84th)
20-Yard Shuttle: 4.30 seconds (74th)

Bio: 247sports.com graded Rashad Weaver as just a two-star prospect coming out of Cooper City High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Weaver played both basketball and football at Cooper City, and was a tight end and defensive end in the fall and a center on the hardwood. He originally committed to Michigan, but when he was informed that he would have to be a preferred walk-on, he switched his commitment to Pittsburgh. Weaver tallied three sacks as a redshirt freshman in 2017, and then 6.5 sacks as a sophomore in 2018. He was set for a breakout year as a junior in 2019 but tore his ACL prior to the season, missing the entire year. He came back for the 2020 campaign and tallied a career-high 7.5 sacks in just nine games.

Stat to Know: The Panthers used him as a pure EDGE, as he saw just 14 snaps over the tackle — and nothing on the inside — this past season according to Pro Football Focus.

Strengths: Weaver has length and he knows how to use it. He has great technique and hand usage, and his length makes his reliance on a long-arm move a natural fit. But he offers more than just that one move, as you can find examples of him winning with a swim move, a cross-chop, a rip/dip, and he can also bend around the arc to get to the quarterback. When it comes to countering tackles, his preferred method of attack is to counter-spin late in the down and he is effective when turning to that move.

I enjoyed seeing Weaver work against the run, as he shows power at the point of attack and great hand technique. Tackles and other blocker who try and cut him are often found on the business ends of his hands, as he drives them face-down into the turf and evades the attempt. He has great awareness overall — against the run and the pass — and knows how to relate down when he sees the tackle down block, and he can initiate contact against traps and slice blocks.

Recognition and awareness might be two of his strengths, as he can diagnose plays well and will sink under screens or designed throws to the flat. He also uses his length to disrupt passing lanes and force the QB to either reset or adjust his arm angle.

Weaknesses: Weaver is another “floor” prospect, as there might not be a ton of room for growth. He wins with power, length and technique, and does that part of the job well. But the athletic profile does not offer a ton of hope for his upside. He tested well at his pro day, which might offer some potential, but his career arc might best be summed up in one play against Syracuse, where he uses fantastic technique to beat the tackler, but misses on the sack because he cannot change direction quickly enough. There was also an example of that against Clemson and Trevor Lawrence where he won with technique, but ended up falling on his back trying to chase the QB as he spun away from him. Maybe this is a case where the good testing numbers on his agility drills (4.30 short shuttle, 6.98 three-cone) overshadow moments like that on the field.

Conclusion: NFL decision makers love safe floors, and that is what Weaver offers. That coupled with his awareness, recognition, work against the run and his discipline make him a safe option. His age and lack of burst might not provide an enticing ceiling, but you can see a path to him unlocking some effort sacks at the next level.

Comparison: I can see a little bit of Deatrich Wise Jr. to Weaver’s game.

8. Payton Turner, Houston

Height: N/A Weight: N/A
40-Yard Dash: N/A
Bench Press: N/A
Vertical Jump: N/A
Broad Jump: N/A
3-Cone Drill: N/A
20-Yard Shuttle: N/A

(Pro day scheduled for April 9).

Bio: 247sports.com graded Payton Turner as a two-star prospect, and the 359-ranked player in the state of Texas alone. Coming out of Westside High School in Houston, Texas he entertained interest from Kansas, Purdue, Texas and Michigan but his only offer came from the Cougars, so Turner enrolled at Houston. Part of this might have been due to a knee injury his senior year which caused him to miss the bulk of his final prep season.

Turner played immediately for the Cougars as a true freshman, tallying 14 tackles and an interception. He started the first 11 games of his sophomore year and while his season ended early due to a foot injury, he recorded 42 total tackles, including 3.5 for a loss. His final two years on campus saw him truly start to produce off the edge, as he recorded 3.5 sacks as a junior and five as a senior, in just five games due to the COVID-shortened year. Turner earned an invitation to this year’s Senior Bowl for his efforts.

Stat to Know: Turner’s productivity increased every season. In addition to the big jump in sacks Turner notched a whopping 10.5 tackles for a loss in 2020, again in just five games. That beat his previous mark of 7.5 set in 2019 over a 12-game season.

Strengths: There are often prospects that you come to late in the process, and wish you had spent time on earlier in the cycle. Payton Turner is one such player for me. But I am glad I took the time to study his tape. It is hard to find a more contrasting set of game than watching a pass rusher against BYU and then Navy, but watching those two contests gives you a flavor of what he can be against the run and when rushing the passer. Turner is powerful and violent off the snap, and shows power at the point of attack when working against the run. He does not quit until the whistle, and his game against Navy flashed a number of effort plays where he was chasing down runs from behind. He also displayed impressive change-of-direction skills on one counter option, when he spun back to mirror the QB and dragged him down for a tackle behind the line.

Rushing the passer is what moves the needle for EDGE defenders, and Turner checks that box as well. He has a bevy of moves at his disposal, including rip/dip moves, an impressive cross-chop that he will pair with either a rip or a swim after if necessary, a push/pull move and he will even just rely on a bull rush if necessary. On one play against BYU’s right tackle he used that bull rush to just walk him back into Zach Wilson’s lap, influencing the QB’s arm angle.

Turner also has quick hands, and when combined with his experience and array of moves he is a pass rusher with a clear plan. It is rare to see him use the same move on two consecutive snaps, and he is ready to counter the tackle should his initial move be stymied. He will use a spin or a late rip as a preferred method of countering, but really you can see him turn to a different Plan B from snap-to-snap. There are even some flashes of bend and cornering ability from him, which is also quite intriguing. Finally, given his experience if a tackle makes a mistake, he will make you pay.

Turner is not the most athletic or bursty defender, but the size, frame and length when coupled with his experience and technique makes for a nice package.

Weaknesses: Turner plays extremely high with his pads, and will need to either adjust his pad level or accept the fact that he will lose some reps when tackles get into his exposed chest. He is not the most explosive player off the edge, and he wins with effort, technique and experience. He also took advantage of the competition around him, and has just the two (or one-and-a-half) years of good production. He had success against BYU’s right tackle and at times against Brady Christensen, their left tackle who is going to get drafted this cycle, but the level of competition is an open question. His Senior Bowl week, however, should alleviate some of those fears.

Then there is an injury history, both with the high school injury and the lower body injury that ended his sophomore season early.

Conclusion: Still, his tool-kit as a rusher coupled with his ability to kick inside makes him an extremely enticing option, even early on Day Two of the draft. I love what he offers from a technical standpoint, and also what he demonstrates in terms of a plan of attack. My only regret is that I did not start watching him sooner.

Comparison: I am getting an Adalius Thomas vibe from him, a player who when left to pressure the quarterback thrived, but when asked to do more in terms of coverage and playing in space struggled.

9. Joe Tryon, Washington

Height: 6’5″ (87th) Weight: 259 (49th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.64 seconds (81st)
Bench Press: 22 reps (47th)
Vertical Jump: 35 inches (72nd)
Broad Jump: 118 inches (61st)
3-Cone Drill: 7.18 seconds (55th)
20-Yard Shuttle: 4.36 seconds (60th)

Bio: Joe Tryon was graded as a three-star recruit by ESPN’s scouting services, after playing at Hazen High School in Renton, Washington. He received a handful of offers from schools in the Pacific Northwest including Washington State, Oregon and Eastern Washington, and originally chose Washington State, but decided to flip his commitment and play for the in-state Huskies. He redshirted his freshman year but in 2018 he appeared in 12 games, notching 20 tackles and a sack. Tryon enjoyed a bit of a breakout in 2019, as he tallied eight sacks and was named a Second-Team All-Pac-12 player. That would be the end of his college career, as he opted-out for 2020 due to COVID-19.

Stat to Know: Pro Football Focus charted him with 29 pressures in his final seven games during the 2019 season, which is a heck of a way to end your career.

Strengths: There is a phrase in life: “Do one thing and do it well.” That could apply to Tryon and his mode of attack as a pass rusher, as he wins primarily with a speed-to-power bull rush off the edge. Forget evading you, he wants to run through you. It works on occasion, but what gives me more hope about his NFL career is what you are seeing him use to complement that move. You are seeing examples of him using cross-chops and even the occasional rip/dip move to add to the weapons in his bag.

Tryon is another defender who is acutely aware of what could be coming his way, in terms of traps or slice blocks. He takes those on with violence, driving into the blocker and turning running plays back to the inside. He does not take a single snap off, and finishes every play to the whistle.

Something I noticed with him, particularly in his game against Oregon in 2019, is how well he handled playing in space. He showed good awareness and feel for handling underneath zone coverages, passing off receivers, and making tackles in the open field. Could there be an unlocked OLB type waiting to be discovered at the next level? The idea intrigues me…

Weaknesses: One of the biggest questions facing Tryon is the production angle. With some of the other players in this class with thin resumes, such as Gregory Rousseau, you have one year of elite production or execution to hang your hat on. Here, you have a year with eight sacks, many of which came as effort plays rather than due to his technique. Still, he is explosive on the outside and might have the versatility to play both on the inside and in space as just discussed. Again, you cannot teach size and frame, and Tryon checks those boxes. A creative defensive coordinator could find ways to involve him all over the defensive front and just unleash him on the opposing offensive line from a variety of alignments and angles. That works too in the NFL, last I checked.

Conclusion: Teams will talk themselves into what Tryon could be, and if they do that in conjunction with the potential versatility he offers, that might be a smart bet. I think there is schematic versatility in that Tryon could be an off-ball OLB in a 3-4 base scheme with the potential to drop down as a defensive end in even fronts. You could also kick him to the inside on some sub packages. There are things to play with here, and that will be enticing on the second day of the draft.

Comparison: Tryon could be a “boom/bust” type of player, and you can see a variety of outcomes for him. On the high end of that range you could be getting T.J. Watt-lite, a player who thrives in a role as an outside linebacker in a 3-4 base scheme who can primarily rush the passer but also handle coverage responsibilities. But how often are “high ends” realized? On the low end of the range you might get Daeshon Hall. Somewhere in the middle? Perhaps Dawuane Smoot, who has carved out a solid little role with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

10. Gregory Rousseau, Miami

Height: 6’7″ (98th) Weight: 266 (67th)
40-Yard Dash: 4.69 seconds (71st)
Bench Press: 21 reps (39th)
Vertical Jump: 30 inches (14th)
Broad Jump: 115 inches (42nd)
3-Cone Drill: 7.50 seconds (16th)
20-Yard Shuttle: 4.45 seconds (36th)

Bio: Gregory Rousseau did it all for Champagnat Catholic School in Hialeah, Florida. He was a defensive end, safety and wide receiver for his high school football team, and helped Champagnat Catholic to its second state title in school history. As a senior he tallied 80 tackles and ten sacks, including three sacks in the state championship game. He also earned Second-Team All-State honors as a wide receiver, catching nine touchdowns in 2016. He enrolled at Miami and after playing in a few games as a true freshman, an ankle injury ended is season and he took a medical redshirt. He came back as a redshirt freshman in 2019 and exploded on the national stage with 15.5 sacks, earning ACC Defensive Rookie of the Year honors. He was also named a First-Team All-ACC player as well as a Second-Team All-American.

Rousseau opted out of the 2020 season due to COVID-19.

Stat to Know: Rousseau has just 546 career college snaps. That…requires a lot of projection.

Strengths: Rousseau immediately checks the size, length and frame boxes. His length pops on film against the run and as a pass rusher, as he has developed a great long-arm move that shows up off the edge. He also has the ability to lock out blockers against the run, and loves to set the edge against run plays. Rousseau has long strides off the edge, which gets him into most tackles quickly in the down despite a lack of pure explosiveness. For a player of his size he has impressive footwork, and that shows up when tackles try to cut him, as he can quickly step back with ease and rely on his feet, rather than his hands, to evade cuts.

Even with his frame, Rousseau has the ability to dip and bend around the arc with ease. He is disciplined against option plays and rarely bites on fakes. His power shows up on film, particularly when he uses that long-arm technique but also when he tries to overpower tackles with a bull rush attempt.

Miami also kicked him inside — he saw 74 A-Gap snaps according to PFF charting — and he stood out in those opportunities. He seemed to generate immediate pressure on those occasions and perhaps even showed a bit more burst and explosiveness than he did on the outside.

Weaknesses: I mentioned the 546 snaps, right? Because that is not an extensive body of work and there is a lot of projection that goes into what he could be at the next level. Beyond that, Rousseau is relatively new to being a pass rusher, having spent a lot of his prep days playing in the secondary and as a receiver. You can see a lot of false steps from him off the line, mostly when in a two-point stance, and you would like to see more from him in terms of a pass rushing plan and counter moves. If you are looking for a technically-sound option in this class, Rousseau might not be your top choice. He also relies mightily on a Euro-step move to the inside and he either wins with that…or doesn’t. Basham also has an upright playing style and high pad level, which allows some tackles to get into his frame and win the rep. Finally there are now questions about his athleticism, given his pro day performance.

Conclusion: Still, for a team looking for a situational pass rusher with the chops to kick inside while they hope to fill in the rest of the blanks, Rousseau could be an enticing option. He might need a lot of development and coaching, but you cannot teach his size and frame. I know I know, the words of the wise Emory Hunt ring in my mind: “Size is not a skill.” Sometimes, however, it is enchanting…

Comparison: Coming up with a comparison for Rousseau is tough, as most raw prospects rely more on athleticism than frame. This writeup of him uses Arik Armstead as a comparison which is the best I’ve found.

11. Carlos Basham Jr., Wake Forest

Height: 6’3″ (46th) Weight: 274 (81st)
40-Yard Dash: 4.64 seconds (81st)
Bench Press: 20 reps (30th)
Vertical Jump: 34 inches (61st)
Broad Jump: 122 inches (82nd)
3-Cone Drill: 7.13 seconds (60th)
20-Yard Shuttle: 4.25 seconds (84th)

Bio: A standout on the gridiron and the hardwood for Northside High School in Roanoke, Virginia, Carlos “Boogie” Basham Jr. turned down offers from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to enroll at Wake Forest. Basham redshirted his first year on campus but was a contributor the rest of his career for the Demon Deacons. He was named a First-Team All-ACC player as a junior in 2019 when he recorded 57 total tackles (18 for a loss) and ten sacks. He returned for one final season and appeared in six games, notching five sacks. Basham earned an invitation to the Senior Bowl and was one of the better performers down in Mobile.

Stat to Know: Pro Football Focus charted Basham with just 35 B-Gap snaps this past season but operating inside could be critical to his future success.

Strengths: Basham favors winning to the inside, which has its benefits and its curses. Smarter tackles who did their homework were patient on his initial attempt to threaten the outside and simply would ride down on him when he eventually tried to slice inside. But Wake Forest catered to that, using him on a lot of stunts and twists to free him up to the inside, and you would see his motor and his ability to swim to the inside. That might be his best move as a pass rusher, a swim move, which he uses often and is even more effective at implementing when kicked to the inside. Against Clemson this season he saw a few snaps as a three-technique and you saw that inside swim move work to pressure Trevor Lawrence.

Basham is also an experience defender with great awareness, particularly against the run when he stays disciplined against zone read designs and has great feel for trap blocks and slice blocks on inside zone plays. He can either long-arm those blockers and keep his eyes on the play or initiate contact with them. He will fight to set the edge on runs to his side, and if you run away from him the motor never stops. Basham is more than able to chase plays down from the backside. I do not think you can question his competitive toughness. When you see him fighting against and through double-teams down 31-3 to Clemson, you check that box of the scouting report and move on.

Weaknesses: I did not see a full array of pass-rushing moves, which is somewhat concerning given his experience. He flashed a few cross-chops and a spin move at times, but by far he wants to win to the inside either by design or with a swim move. He also seems to lack a plan off the edge, mostly in terms of how to counter what he sees from the tackle or when the tackle handles his initial move. It seems his favored approach is to simply outwork the opponent or try and fight to the inside.

Conclusion: I believe Basham’s key to contributing immediately in the NFL is as a situational pass rusher on the interior. That is, at least to me, when he seemed to be at his best. Working against guards and centers with that swim move that he loves so much. He can offer interior pressure via that means while filling out the rest of his toolkit as a pass rusher off the edge.

Comparison: Jon Ledyard compared him in a sense to Curtis Weaver, the Boise State product who was trying to figure things out last season from an execution and technical standpoint, and that comparison carries some weight.

Javon Kinlaw believes he can be better than Aaron Donald

Javon Kinlaw believes he can be better than Aaron Donald
by Christian Alamodin
January 22, 2020

With the offseason edging closer than ever, teams are now fixated on the NFL Draft. Players who declared for the draft are doing everything they can to attract the attention of scouts, and one of those players is defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw.

While he’s shown enough quality that he will be considered a top NFL Draft prospect, he didn’t stop there. The junior compared himself to one of the league’s best defensive linemen in Aaron Donald.

Luke Easterling of The Draft Wire was among the press when the young lineman was asked about his potential to carve out a career in the NFL. He was extremely confident, as he said that he believed that he can be better than the Rams superstar.

South Carolina’s Javon Kinlaw on whether he can be the kind of player Aaron Donald is:

“I think I can be better.” #SeniorBowl pic.twitter.com/doOWON7UXY

— Luke Easterling (@LukeEasterling) January 21, 2020

It’s always great for NFL Draft prospects to show confidence in their games. In a league where results and performance matter a lot, this approach will get him on different teams’ boards. They will look at his stats and see if he does have the walk to go with the talk.

So far, it seems like he is a great prospect to get. Through three years with the Gamecocks, he notched 42 tackles, 17 TFLs, 10.0 sacks, eight pass deflections, four fumble recoveries, and four forced fumbles. He will be a great addition to teams that need a boost on their defensive line.

However, putting his name in the same breath as Donald may be a bit too soon. The Los Angeles Rams defensive line counts on him, and his 12.5 sacks — despite being a very good number in the NFL — is actually a downgrade from his performance last season.

If Kinlaw does believe that he can be greater than Arnold, he will have to do a lot of work to do so.

Nonetheless, the NFL Draft is approaching at the speed of light.

Slavery and the Myth of the Alamo

James W. Russell

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/146405

Two and a half million people visit the Alamo each year where, according to its website, “men made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom,” making it “hallowed ground and the Shrine of Texas Liberty.”

There can be no doubt that the symbolism of the Alamo is at the center of the creation myth of Texas: that the state was forged out of a heroic struggle for freedom against a cruel Mexican dictator, Santa Ana. It represents to the Southwest what the Statue of Liberty represents to the Northeast: a satisfying confirmation of what we are supposedly about as a people.

But if Northeasterners can be excused for embracing a somewhat fuzzy notion of abstract liberty, the symbolism of the Alamo has always been built upon historical myth.

As the defenders of the Alamo were about to sacrifice their lives, other Texans were making clear the goals of the sacrifice at a constitutional convention for the new republic they hoped to create. In Section 9 of the General Provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, it is stated how the new republic would resolve their greatest problem under Mexican rule: “All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude … Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall congress have power to emancipate slaves.”

Mexico had in fact abolished slavery in 1829, causing panic among the Texas slaveholders, overwhelmingly immigrants from the south of the United States. They in turn sent Stephen Austin to Mexico City to complain. Austin was able to wrest from the Mexican authorities an exemption for the department — Texas was technically a department of the state of Coahuila y Tejas — that would allow the vile institution to continue. But it was an exemption reluctantly given, mainly because the authorities wanted to avoid rebellion in Texas when they already had problems in Yucatán and Guatemala. All of the leaders of Mexico, in itself only an independent country since 1821, were personally opposed to slavery, in part because of the influence of emissaries from the freed slave republic of Haiti. The exemption was, in their minds, a temporary measure and Texas slaveholders knew that.

The legality of slavery had thus been at best tenuous and uncertain at a time when demand for cotton — the main slave-produced export — was accelerating on the international market. A central goal of independence would be to remove that uncertainty.

The Mexican armies that entered the department to put down the rebellion had explicit orders to free any slaves that they encountered, and so they did. The only person spared in the retaking of the Alamo was Joe, the personal slave of William Travis.

Once the rebels succeeded in breaking Texas away from Mexico and establishing an independent republic, slavery took off as an institution. Between 1836 and 1840, the slave population doubled; it doubled again by 1845; and it doubled still again by 1850 after annexation by the United States. On the eve of the Civil War, which Texas would enter as a part of the Confederacy, there were 182,566 slaves, nearly one-third of the state’s population.

As more slaves came into the Republic of Texas, more escaped to Mexico. Matamoros in the 1840s had a large and flourishing colony of ex-slaves from Texas and the United States. Though exact numbers do not exist, as many slaves may have escaped to Mexico as escaped through the more famous underground railway to Canada. The Mexican government, for its part, encouraged the slave runaways, often with offers of land as well as freedom.

The defenders of the Alamo, as brave as they may have been, were martyrs to the cause of the freedom of slaveholders, with the Texas War of Independence having been the first of their nineteenth-century revolts, with the American Civil War the second.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died
A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.

On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call.

I called, and he told me that he had discovered a site like the one I’d imagined in my novel, which contained, among other things, direct victims of the catastrophe. At first, I was skeptical. DePalma was a scientific nobody, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, and he said that he had found the site with no institutional backing and no collaborators. I thought that he was likely exaggerating, or that he might even be crazy. (Paleontology has more than its share of unusual people.) But I was intrigued enough to get on a plane to North Dakota to see for myself.

DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.

Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills.

The Hell Creek Formation spanned the Cretaceous and the Paleogene periods, and paleontologists had known for at least half a century that an extinction had occurred then, because dinosaurs were found below, but never above, the KT layer. This was true not only in Hell Creek but all over the world. For many years, scientists believed that the KT extinction was no great mystery: over millions of years, volcanism, climate change, and other events gradually killed off many forms of life. But, in the late nineteen-seventies, a young geologist named Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis Alvarez, a nuclear physicist, discovered that the KT layer was laced with unusually high amounts of the rare metal iridium, which, they hypothesized, was from the dusty remains of an asteroid impact. In an article in Science, published in 1980, they proposed that this impact was so large that it triggered the mass extinction, and that the KT layer was the debris from that event. Most paleontologists rejected the idea that a sudden, random encounter with space junk had drastically altered the evolution of life on Earth. But as the years passed the evidence mounted, until, in a 1991 paper, the smoking gun was announced: the discovery of an impact crater buried under thousands of feet of sediment in the Yucatán peninsula, of exactly the right age, and of the right size and geochemistry, to have caused a worldwide cataclysm. The crater and the asteroid were named Chicxulub, after a small Mayan town near the epicenter.

One of the authors of the 1991 paper, David Kring, was so frightened by what he learned of the impact’s destructive nature that he became a leading voice in calling for a system to identify and neutralize threatening asteroids. “There’s no uncertainty to this statement: the Earth will be hit by a Chicxulub-size asteroid again, unless we deflect it,” he told me. “Even a three-hundred-metre rock would end world agriculture.”

In 2010, forty-one researchers in many scientific disciplines announced, in a landmark Science article, that the issue should be considered settled: a huge asteroid impact caused the extinction. But opposition to the idea remains passionate. The main competing hypothesis is that the colossal “Deccan” volcanic eruptions, in what would become India, spewed enough sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause a climatic shift. The eruptions, which began before the KT impact and continued after it, were among the biggest in Earth’s history, lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and burying half a million square miles of the Earth’s surface a mile deep in lava. The three-­metre gap below the KT layer, proponents argued, was evidence that the mass extinction was well under way by the time of the asteroid strike.

In 2004, DePalma, at the time a twenty-­two-year-old paleontology undergraduate, began excavating a small site in the Hell Creek Formation. The site had once been a pond, and the deposit consisted of very thin layers of sediment. Normally, one geological layer might represent thousands or millions of years. But DePalma was able to show that each layer in the deposit had been laid down in a single big rainstorm. “We could see when there were buds on the trees,” he told me. “We could see when the cypresses were dropping their needles in the fall. We could experience this in real time.” Peering at the layers was like flipping through a paleo-history book that chronicled decades of ecology in its silty pages. DePalma’s adviser, the late Larry Martin, urged him to find a similar site, but one that had layers closer to the KT boundary.

Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. In 2012, while looking for a new pond deposit, he heard that a private collector had stumbled upon an unusual site on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July, 2012, the collector showed DePalma the site and told him that he was welcome to it.

“I was immediately very disappointed,” DePalma told me. He was hoping for a site like the one he’d excavated earlier: an ancient pond with fine-grained, fossil-bearing layers that spanned many seasons and years. Instead, everything had been deposited in a single flood. But as DePalma poked around he saw potential. The flood had entombed everything immediately, so specimens were exquisitely preserved. He found many complete fish, which are rare in the Hell Creek Formation, and he figured that he could remove them intact if he worked with painstaking care. He agreed to pay the rancher a certain amount for each season that he worked there. (The specifics of the arrangement, as is standard practice in paleontology, are a closely guarded secret. The site is now under exclusive long-term lease.)

The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro­tektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain micro­tektites by the million.

As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.

DePalma grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and as a child he was fascinated by bones and the stories they contained. His father, Robert, Sr., practices endodontic surgery in nearby Delray Beach; his great-uncle Anthony, who died in 2005, at the age of a hundred, was a renowned orthopedic surgeon who wrote several standard textbooks on the subject. (Anthony’s son, Robert’s cousin, is the film director Brian De Palma.)

“Between the ages of three and four, I made a visual connection with the gracefulness of individual bones and how they fit together as a system,” DePalma told me. “That really struck me. I went after whatever on the dinner table had bones in it.” His family ­buried their dead pets in one spot and put the burial markers in another, so that he wouldn’t dig up the corpses; he found them anyway. He froze dead lizards in ice-cube trays, which his mother would discover when she had friends over for iced tea. “I was never into sports,” he said. “They tried to get me to do that so I would get along with the other kids. But I was digging up the baseball field looking for bones.”

DePalma’s great-uncle Anthony, who lived in Pompano Beach, took him under his wing. “I used to visit him every other weekend and show him my latest finds,” DePalma said. When he was four, someone at a museum in Texas gave him a fragment of dinosaur bone, which he took to his great-uncle. “He taught me that all those little knobs and rough patches and protrusions on a bone had names, and that the bone also had a name,” DePalma said. “I was captivated.” At six or seven, on trips to Central Florida with his family, he started finding his own fossilized bones from mammals dating back to the Ice Age. He found his first dinosaur bone when he was nine, in Colorado.

In high school, during the summer and on weekends, DePalma collected fossils, made dinosaur models, and mounted skeletons for the Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History, in Dania Beach. He loaned the museum his childhood fossil collection for display, but in 2004 the museum went bankrupt and many of the specimens were carted off to a community college. DePalma had no paperwork to prove his ownership, and a court refused to return his fossils, which numbered in the hundreds. They were mostly locked away in storage, unavailable for public display and enjoyment.

Dismayed by what he called the “wasteful mismanagement” of his collection, DePalma adopted some unusual collecting practices. Typically, paleontologists cede the curation and the care of their specimens to the institutions that hold them. But DePalma insists on contractual clauses that give him oversight of the management of his specimens. He never digs on public land, because of what he considers excessive government red tape. But, without federal support for his work, he must cover almost all the costs himself. His out-of-pocket expenses for working the Hell Creek site amount to tens of thousands of dollars. He helps defray the expenses by mounting fossils, doing reconstructions, and casting and selling replicas for museums, private collectors, and other clients. At times, his parents have chipped in. “I squeak by,” he said. “If it’s a ­tossup between getting more PaleoBond”—an expensive liquid glue used to hold fossils together—“or changing the air-conditioning filter, I’m getting the PaleoBond.” He is single, and shares a three-bedroom apartment with casts of various dinosaurs, including one of a Nanotyrannus. “It’s hard to have a life outside of my work,” he said.

DePalma’s control of his research collection is controversial. Fossils are a big business; wealthy collectors pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, for a rare specimen. (In 1997, a T. rex nicknamed Sue was sold at a Sotheby’s auction, to the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, for more than $8.3 million.) The American market is awash in fossils illegally smuggled out of China and Mongolia. But in the U.S. fossil collecting on private property is legal, as is the buying, selling, and exporting of fossils. Many scientists view this trade as a threat to paleontology and argue that important fossils belong in museums. “I’m not allowed to have a private collection of anything I’m studying,” one prominent curator told me. DePalma insists that he maintains “the best of both worlds” for his fossils. He has deposited portions of his collection at several nonprofit institutions, including the University of Kansas, the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, and Florida Atlantic University; some specimens are temporarily housed in various analytical labs that are conducting tests on them—all overseen by him.

In 2013, DePalma briefly made news with a paper he published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Four years earlier, in Hell Creek, he and a field assistant, Robert Feeney, found an odd, lumpy growth of fossilized bone that turned out to be two fused vertebrae from the tail of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the Cretaceous period. DePalma thought that the bone might have grown around a foreign object and encased it. He took it to Lawrence Memorial Hospital, in Kansas, where a CT technician scanned it for free in the middle of the night, when the machine was idle. Inside the nodule was a broken tyrannosaur tooth; the hadrosaur had been bitten by a tyrannosaur and escaped.

The discovery helped refute an old hypothesis, revived by the formidable paleontologist Jack Horner, that T. rex was solely a scavenger. Horner argued that T. rex was too slow and lumbering, its arms too puny and its eyesight too poor, to prey on other creatures. When DePalma’s find was picked up by the national media, Horner dismissed it as “speculation” and merely “one data point.” He suggested an alternative scenario: the T. rex might have accidentally bitten the tail of a sleeping hadrosaur, thinking that it was dead, and then “backed away” when it realized its mistake. “I thought that was absolutely preposterous,” DePalma told me. At the time, he told the Los Angeles Times, “A scavenger doesn’t come across a food source and realize all of a sudden that it’s alive.” Horner eventually conceded that T. rex may have hunted live prey. But, when I asked Horner about DePalma recently, he said at first that he didn’t remember him: “In the community, we don’t get to know students very well.”

Without his Ph.D., DePalma remains mostly invisible, awaiting the stamp of approval that signals the beginning of a serious research career. Several paleontologists I talked to had not heard of him. Another, who asked not to be named, said, “Finding that kind of fossil was pretty cool, but not life-­changing. People sometimes think I’m dumb because I often say I don’t have the answers—we weren’t there when a fossil was formed. There are other people out there who say they do know, and he’s one of those people. I think he can overinterpret.”

After receiving DePalma’s e-mail, I made arrangements to visit the Hell Creek site; three weeks later I was in Bowman. DePalma pulled up to my hotel in a Toyota 4Runner, its stereo blasting the theme to “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He wore a coarse cotton work shirt, cargo pants with canvas ­suspenders, and a suède cowboy hat with the left brim snapped up. His face was tanned from long days in the sun and he had a five-day-old beard.

I got in, and we drove for an hour or so, turning through a ranch gate and following a maze of bone-rattling roads that eventually petered out in a grassy basin. The scattered badlands of Hell Creek form an otherworldly landscape. This is far-flung ranching and farming country; prairies and sunflower fields stretch to the horizon, domed by the great blue skies of the American West. Roads connect small towns—truck stop, church, motel, houses and trailers—and lonely expanses roll by in between. Here and there in the countryside, abandoned farmhouses lean into the ground. Over millions of years, the Hell Creek layer has been heavily eroded, leaving only remnants, which jut from the prairie like so many rotten teeth. These lifeless buttes and pinnacles are striped in beige, chocolate, yellow, maroon, russet, gray, and white. Fossils, worked loose by wind and rain, spill down the sides.

When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay open in front of us: a desolate hump of gray, cracked earth, about the size of two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece of the moon had dropped there. One side of the deposit was cut through by a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the other ended in a low escarpment. The dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. A couple of two-by-fours, along with various digging tools and some metal pipe for taking core samples, leaned against the far side of the hole. As we strolled around the site, I noticed on DePalma’s belt a long fixed-blade knife and a sheathed bayonet—a Second World War relic that his uncle gave him when he was twelve, he said.

He recalled the moment of discovery. The first fossil he removed, earlier that summer, was a five-foot-long freshwater paddlefish. Paddlefish still live today; they have a long bony snout, with which they probe murky water in search of food. When DePalma took out the fossil, he found underneath it a tooth from a mosasaur, a giant carnivorous marine reptile. He wondered how a freshwater fish and a marine reptile could have ended up in the same place, on a riverbank at least several miles inland from the nearest sea. (At the time, a shallow body of water, called the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the proto-­Gulf of Mexico up through part of North America.) The next day, he found a two-foot-wide tail from another marine fish; it looked as if it had been violently ripped from the fish’s body. “If the fish is dead for any length of time, those tails decay and fall apart,” DePalma said. But this one was perfectly intact, “so I knew that it was transported at the time of death or around then.” Like the mosasaur tooth, it had somehow ended up miles inland from the sea of its origin. “When I found that, I thought, There’s no way, this can’t be right,” DePalma said. The discoveries hinted at an extraordinary conclusion that he wasn’t quite ready to accept. “I was ninety-eight per cent con­vinced at that point,” he said.

The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-­section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another. Glass turns to clay over millions of years, and these tektites were now clay, but some still had glassy cores. The microtektites he had found earlier might have been carried there by water, but these had been trapped where they fell—on what, DePalma believed, must have been the very day of the disaster.

“When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t just any flood deposit,” DePalma said. “We weren’t just near the KT boundary—this whole site is the KT boundary!” From surveying and mapping the layers, DePalma hypothesized that a massive inland surge of water flooded a river valley and filled the low-lying area where we now stood, perhaps as a result of the KT-impact tsunami, which had roared across the proto-Gulf and up the Western Interior Seaway. As the water slowed and became slack, it deposited everything that had been caught up in its travels—the heaviest material first, up to whatever was floating on the surface. All of it was quickly entombed and preserved in the muck: dying and dead creatures, both marine and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks, roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs; tektites, shocked minerals, tiny diamonds, iridium-laden dust, ash, charcoal, and amber-smeared wood. As the sediments settled, blobs of glass rained into the mud, the largest first, then finer and finer bits, until grains sifted down like snow.

“We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments,” DePalma said. “With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died.” No paleontological site remotely like it had ever been found, and, if DePalma’s hypothesis proves correct, the scientific value of the site will be immense. When Walter Alvarez visited the dig last summer, he was astounded. “It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.”

When DePalma finished showing me the dig, he introduced me to a field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, the director of the Palm Beach Museum. Pascucci, a muscular man in his fifties, was sunburned and unshaven, and wore a sleeveless T-shirt, snakeproof camouflage boots, and a dusty Tilley hat. The two men gathered their tools, got down on the floor of the hole, and began probing the three-foot-high walls of the deposit.

For rough digging, DePalma likes to use his bayonet and a handheld Marsh pick, popularized by the nineteenth-­century Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, who pioneered dinosaur-hunting in the American West and dis­covered eighty new species. The pick was given to him by David Burnham, his thesis adviser at Kansas, when he completed his master’s degree. For fine work, DePalma uses X-Acto knives and brushes—the typical tools of a paleontologist—as well as dental instruments given to him by his father.

The deposit consisted of dozens of thin layers of mud and sand. Lower down, it graded into a more turbulent band of sand and gravel, which contained the heavier fish fossils, bones, and bigger tektites. Below that layer was a hard surface of sandstone, the original Cretaceous bedrock of the site, much of which had been scoured smooth by the flood.

Paleontology is maddening work, its progress typically measured in millimetres. As I watched, DePalma and Pascucci lay on their stomachs under the beating sun, their eyes inches from the dirt wall, and picked away. DePalma poked the tip of an X-Acto into the thin laminations of sediment and loosened one dime-size flake at a time; he’d examine it closely, and, if he saw nothing, flick it away. When the chips accumulated, he gathered them into small piles with a paintbrush; when those piles accumulated, Pascucci swept them into larger piles with a broom and then shovelled them into a heap at the far end of the dig.

Occasionally, DePalma came across small plant fossils—flower petals, leaves, seeds, pine needles, and bits of bark. Many of these were mere impressions in the mud, which would crack and peel as soon as they were exposed to the air. He quickly squirted them with PaleoBond, which soaked into the fossils and held them together. Or, us­ing another technique, he mixed a batch of plaster and poured it on the spec­imen before it fell apart. This would preserve, in plaster, a reverse image of the fossil; the original was too short-lived to be saved.

When the mosquitoes got bad, DePalma took out a briar pipe and packed it with Royal Cherry Cavendish tobacco. He put a lighter to it and vigorously puffed, wreathing himself in sickly-­sweet smoke, then went back to work. “I’m like a shopaholic in a shoe store,” he said. “I want everything!”

He showed me the impression of a round object about two inches wide. “This is either a flower or an echinoderm,” he said, referring to a group of marine life-forms that includes sea urchins and starfish. “I’ll figure it out in the lab.” He swiftly entombed it in Paleo­Bond and plaster. Next, he found a perfect leaf, and near that a seed from a pinecone. “Cretaceous mulch,” he said, dismissively; he already had many similar examples. He found three more small craters with tektites in them, which he sectioned and photographed. Then his X-Acto blade turned up a tiny brown bone—a jaw, less than a quarter inch in length. He held it up between his fingers and peered at it with a lens.

“A mammal,” he said. “This one was already dead when it was buried.” Weeks later, in the lab, he identified the jaw as probably belonging to a mam­mal distantly related to primates—including us.

Half an hour later, DePalma discovered a large feather. “Every day is Christmas out here,” he said. He exposed the feather with precise movements. It was a crisp impression in the layer of mud, perhaps thirteen inches long. “This is my ninth feather,” he said. “The first fossil feathers ever found at Hell Creek. I’m convinced these are dinosaur feathers. I don’t know for sure. But these are primitive feathers, and most are a foot long. There are zero birds that big from Hell Creek with feathers this primitive. It’s more parsimonious to suggest it was a known dinosaur, most likely a theropod, possibly a raptor.” He kept digging. “Maybe we’ll find the raptor that these feathers came from, but I doubt it. These feathers could have floated from a long way off.”

His X-Acto knife unearthed the edge of a fossilized fin. Another paddlefish came to light; it later proved to be nearly six feet long. DePalma probed the sediment around it, to gauge its position and how best to extract it. As more of it was exposed, we could clearly see that the fish’s two-foot-long snout had broken when it was forced—probably by the flood’s surge—against the branches of a submerged araucaria tree. He noted that every fish he’d found in the site had died with its mouth open, which may indicate that the fish had been gasping as they suffocated in the sediment-laden water.

“Most died in a vertical position in the sediment, didn’t even tip over on their sides,” he said. “And they weren’t scavenged, because whatever would have dug them up afterward was probably gone.” He chipped away around the paddlefish, exposing a fin bone, then a half-dollar-size patch of fossilized skin with the scales perfectly visible. He treated these by saturating them with his own special blend of hardener. Because of the extreme fragility of the fossils, he would take them back to his lab, in Florida, totally encased in sediment, or “matrix.” In the lab, he would free each fossil under a magnifying glass, in precisely controlled conditions, away from the damaging effects of sun, wind, and aridity.

As DePalma worked around the paddlefish, more of the araucaria branch came to light, including its short, spiky needles. “This tree was alive when it was buried,” he said. Then he noticed a golden blob of amber stuck to the branch. Amber is preserved tree resin and often contains traces of whatever was in the air at the time, trapping the atmospheric chemistry and even, sometimes, insects and small reptiles. “This is Cretaceous flypaper,” he said. “I can’t wait to get this back to the lab.”

An hour later, he had chiselled all the way around the fish, leaving it encased in matrix, supported by a four-inch-tall pedestal of rock. “I’m pretty sure this is a species new to science,” he said. Because the soft tissue had also fossilized, he said, even the animal’s stomach contents might still be present.

He straightened up. “Time to plaster,” he said. He took off his shirt and began mixing a five-gallon bucket of plaster with his hands, while Pascucci tore strips of burlap. DePalma took a two-by-four and sawed off two foot-long pieces and placed them like splints on either side of the sediment-encased fossil. One by one, he dipped the burlap strips in the plaster and draped them across the top and the sides of the specimen. He added rope handles and plastered them in. An hour later, when the plaster had cured, he chiselled through the rock pedestal beneath the fossil and flipped the specimen over, leaving the underside exposed. Back in the lab, he would go through this surface to access the fossil, with the plaster jacket acting as a cradle below. Using the rope handles, DePalma and Pascucci lugged the specimen, which weighed perhaps two hundred pounds, to the truck and loaded it into the back. Later, DePalma would store it behind a friend’s ranch house, where all his jacketed fossils from the season were laid out in rows, covered with tarps.

DePalma resumed digging. Gusts of wind stirred up clouds of dust, and rain fell; when the weather cleared, the late-afternoon sun spilled across the prairie. DePalma was lost in another day, in another time. “Here’s a piece of wood with bark-beetle traces,” he said. Plant fossils from the first several million years after the impact show almost no signs of such damage; the insects were mostly gone. The asteroid had likely struck in the fall, DePalma speculated. He had reached this conclusion by comparing the juvenile paddlefish and sturgeon he’d found with the species’ known growth rates and hatching seasons; he’d also found the seeds of conifers, figs, and certain flowers. “When we analyze the pollen and diatomaceous particles, that will narrow it down,” he said.

In the week that followed, fresh riches emerged: more feathers, leaves, seeds, and amber, along with several other fish, three to five feet long, and a dozen more craters with tektites. I have visited many paleontological sites, but I had never seen so many specimens found so quickly. Most digs are boring; days or weeks may pass with little found. DePalma seemed to make a noteworthy discovery about every half hour.

When DePalma first visited the site, he noted, partially embedded on the surface, the hip bone of a dinosaur in the ceratopsian family, of which triceratops is the best-known member. A commercial collector had tried to remove it years earlier; it had been abandoned in place and was crumbling from years of exposure. DePalma initially dismissed it as “trash” and decried the irresponsibility of the collector. Later, though, he wondered how the bone, which was heavy, had arrived there, very close to the high-water mark of the flood. It must have floated, he said, and to have done so it must have been encased in desiccated tissue—suggesting that at least one dinosaur species was alive at the time of the impact. He later found a suitcase-size piece of fossilized skin from a ceratopsian attached to the hip bone.

At one point, DePalma set off to photograph the layers of the deposit which had been cut through and exposed by the sandy wash. He scraped smooth a vertical section and misted it with water from a spray bottle to bring out the color. The bottom layer was jumbled; the first rush of water had ripped up layers of mud, gravel, and rocks and tumbled them about with pieces of burned (and burning) wood.

Then DePalma came to a faint jug-shaped outline in the wall of the wash. He examined it closely. It started as a tunnel at the top of the KT layer, went down, and then widened into a round cavity, filled with soil of a different color, which stopped at the hard sandstone of the undisturbed bedrock layer below. It looked as though a small animal had dug through the mud to create a hideout. “Is that a burrow?” I asked.

DePalma scraped the area smooth with his bayonet, then sprayed it. “You’re darn right it is,” he said. “And this isn’t the burrow of a small dinosaur. It’s a mammal burrow.” (Burrows have characteristic shapes, depending on the species that inhabit them.) He peered at it, his eyes inches from the rock, probing it with the tip of the bayonet. “Gosh, I think it’s still in there!”

He planned to remove the entire burrow intact, in a block, and run it through a CT scanner back home, to see what it contained. “Any Cretaceous mammal burrow is incredibly rare,” he said. “But this one is impossible—it’s dug right through the KT boundary.” Perhaps, he said, the mammal survived the impact and the flood, burrowed into the mud to escape the freezing darkness, then died. “It may have been born in the Cretaceous and died in the Paleocene,” he said. “And to think—sixty-­six million years later, a stinky monkey is digging it up, trying to figure out what happened.” He added, “If it’s a new species, I’ll name it after you.”

When I left Hell Creek, DePalma pressed me on the need for secrecy: I was to tell no one, not even close friends, about what he’d found. The history of paleontology is full of tales of bribery, backstabbing, and double-­dealing. In the nineteenth century, ­Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, the nation’s two leading paleontologists, engaged in a bitter competition to collect dinosaur fossils in the American West. They raided each other’s quarries, bribed each other’s crews, and vilified each other in print and at scientific meetings. In 1890, the New York Herald began a series of sensational articles about the controversy with the headline “scientists wage bitter warfare.” The rivalry has since become known as the Bone Wars. The days of skulduggery in paleontology have not passed; DePalma was deeply concerned that the site would be expropriated by a major museum.

DePalma knew that a screwup with this site would probably end his career, and that his status in the field was so uncertain that he needed to fortify the find against potential criticism. He had already experienced harsh judgment when, in 2015, he published a paper on a new species of dinosaur called a Dakotaraptor, and mistakenly inserted a fossil turtle bone in the reconstruction. Although rebuilding a skeleton from thousands of bone fragments that have commingled with those of other species is not easy, DePalma was mor­tified by the attacks. “I never want to go through that again,” he told me.

For five years, DePalma continued excavations at the site. He quietly shared his findings with a half-dozen luminaries in the field of KT studies, including Walter Alvarez, and enlisted their help. During the winter months, when not in the field, DePalma prepared and analyzed his specimens, a few at a time, in a colleague’s lab at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton. The lab was a windowless, wedge­like room in the geology building, lined with bubbling aquarium tanks and shelves heaped with books, scientific journals, pieces of coral, mastodon teeth, seashells, and a stack of .50-­calibre machine-gun rounds, dating from the Second World War, that the lab’s owner had recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. DePalma had carved out a space for himself in a corner, just large enough for him to work on one or two jacketed fossils at a time.

When I first visited the lab, in April, 2014, a block of stone three feet long by eighteen inches wide lay on a table under bright lights and a large magnifying lens. The block, DePalma said, contained a sturgeon and a paddlefish, along with dozens of smaller fossils and a single small, perfect crater with a tektite in it. The lower parts of the block consisted of debris, fragments of bone, and loose tektites that had been dislodged and caught up in the turbulence. The block told the story of the impact in microcosm. “It was a very bad day,” DePalma said. “Look at these two fish.” He showed me where the sturgeon’s scutes—the sharp, bony plates on its back—had been forced into the body of the paddlefish. One fish was impaled on the other. The mouth of the paddlefish was agape, and jammed into its gill rakers were microtektites—sucked in by the fish as it tried to breathe. DePalma said, “This fish was likely alive for some time after being caught in the wave, long enough to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in a vain attempt to survive.”

Gradually, DePalma was piecing together a potential picture of the disaster. By the time the site flooded, the surrounding forest was already on fire, given the abundance of charcoal, charred wood, and amber he’d found at the site. The water arrived not as a curling wave but as a powerful, roiling rise, packed with disoriented fish and plant and animal debris, which, DePalma hypothesized, were laid down as the water slowed and receded.

In the lab, DePalma showed me magnified cross-sections of the sediment. Most of its layers were horizontal, but a few formed curlicues or flamelike patterns called truncated flame structures, which were caused by a combination of weight from above and mini-surges in the incoming water. DePalma found five sets of these patterns. He turned back to the block on his table and held a magnifying lens up to the tektite. Parallel, streaming lines were visible on its surface—Schlieren lines, formed by two types of molten glass swirling together as the blobs arced through the atmosphere. Peering through the lens, DePalma picked away at the block with a dental probe. He soon exposed a section of pink, pearlescent shell, which had been pushed up against the sturgeon. “Ammonite,” he said. Ammonites were marine mollusks that somewhat resemble the present-day nautilus, although they were more closely related to squid and octopi. As DePalma uncovered more of the shell, I watched its vibrant color fade. “Live ammonite, ripped apart by the tsunami—they don’t travel well,” he said. “Genus Sphenodiscus, I would think.” The shell, which hadn’t previously been documented in the Hell Creek Formation, was another marine victim tossed inland.

He stood up. “Now I’m going to show you something special,” he said, opening a wooden crate and removing an object that was covered in aluminum foil. He unwrapped a sixteen-inch fossil feather, and held it in his palms like a piece of Lalique glass. “When I found the first feather, I had about twenty seconds of disbelief,” he said. DePalma had studied under Larry Martin, a world authority on the Cretaceous predecessors of birds, and had been “exposed to a lot of fossil feathers. When I encountered this damn thing, I immediately understood the importance of it. And now look at this.”

From the lab table, he grabbed a fossil forearm belonging to Dakotaraptor, the dinosaur species he’d discovered in Hell Creek. He pointed to a series of regular bumps on the bone. “These are probably quill knobs,” he said. “This dinosaur had feathers on its forearms. Now watch.” With precision calipers, he measured the diameter of the quill knobs, then the diameter of the quill of the fossil feather; both were 3.5 millimetres. “This matches,” he said. “This says a feather of this size would be associated with a limb of this size.”

There was more, including a piece of a partly burned tree trunk with am­ber stuck to it. He showed me a photo of the amber seen through a micro­scope. Trapped inside were two impact particles—another landmark discovery, because the amber would have preserved their chemical composition. (All other tektites found from the impact, exposed to the elements for millions of years, have chemically changed.) He’d also found scores of beautiful examples of lonsdaleite, a hexagonal form of diamond that is associated with impacts; it forms when carbon in an asteroid is compressed so violently that it crystallizes into trillions of microscopic grains, which are blasted into the air and drift down.

Finally, he showed me a photograph of a fossil jawbone; it belonged to the mammal he’d found in the burrow. “This is the jaw of Dougie,” he said. The bone was big for a Cretaceous mammal—three inches long—and almost complete, with a tooth. After my visit to Hell Creek, DePalma had removed the animal’s burrow intact, still encased in the block of sediment, and, with the help of some women who worked as cashiers at the Travel Center, in Bowman, hoisted it into the back of his truck. He believes that the jaw belonged to a marsupial that looked like a weasel. Using the tooth, he could conduct a stable-isotope study to find out what the animal ate—“what the menu was after the disaster,” he said. The rest of the mammal remains in the burrow, to be researched later.

DePalma listed some of the other discoveries he’s made at the site: several flooded ant nests, with drowned ants still inside and some chambers packed with microtektites; a possible wasp burrow; another mammal ­burrow, with multiple tunnels and galleries; shark teeth; the thigh bone of a large sea turtle; at least three new fish species; a gigantic ginkgo leaf and a plant that was a relative of the banana; more than a dozen new species of animals and plants; and several other burrow types.

At the bottom of the deposit, in a mixture of heavy gravel and tektites, DePalma identified the broken teeth and bones, including hatchling remains, of almost every dinosaur group known from Hell Creek, as well as pterosaur remains, which had previously been found only in layers far below the KT boundary. He found, intact, an unhatched egg containing an embryo—a fossil of immense research value. The egg and the other remains suggested that dinosaurs and major reptiles were probably not staggering into extinction on that fateful day. In one fell swoop, DePalma may have solved the three-metre problem and filled in the gap in the fossil record.

By the end of the 2013 field season, DePalma was convinced that the site had been created by an impact flood, but he lacked conclusive evidence that it was the KT impact. It was possible that it resulted from another giant asteroid strike that occurred at around the same time. “Extraordinary discoveries require extraordinary evidence,” he said. If his tektites shared the same geochemistry as tektites from the Chicxulub asteroid, he’d have a strong case. Deposits of Chicxulub tektites are rare; the best source, discovered in 1990, is a small outcrop in Haiti, on a cliff above a road cut. In late January, 2014, DePalma went there to gather tektites and sent them to an independent lab in Canada, along with tektites from his own site; the samples were analyzed at the same time, with the same equipment. The results indicated a near-perfect geochemical match.

In the first few years after DePalma’s discoveries, only a handful of scientists knew about them. One was David Burnham, DePalma’s thesis adviser at Kansas, who estimates that DePalma’s site will keep specialists busy for at least half a century. “Robert’s got so much stuff that’s unheard of,” Burnham told me. “Amber with tektites embedded in it—holy cow! The dinosaur feathers are crazy good, but the burrow makes your head reel.” In paleontology, the term Lagerstätte refers to a rare type of fossil site with a large variety of specimens that are nearly perfectly preserved, a sort of fossilized ecosystem. “It will be a famous site,” Burnham said. “It will be in the textbooks. It is the Lagerstätte of the KT extinction.”

Jan Smit, a paleontologist at Vrije University, in Amsterdam, and a world authority on the KT impact, has been helping DePalma analyze his results, and, like Burnham and Walter Alvarez, he is a co-author of a scientific paper that DePalma is publishing about the site. (There are eight other co-authors.) “This is really a major discovery,” Smit said. “It solves the question of whether dinosaurs went extinct at exactly that level or whether they declined before. And this is the first time we see direct victims.” I asked if the results would be controversial. “When I saw his data with the paddlefish, sturgeon, and ammonite, I think he’s right on the spot,” Smit said. “I am very sure he has a pot of gold.”

In September of 2016, DePalma gave a brief talk about the discovery at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Colorado. He mentioned only that he had found a deposit from a KT flood that had yielded glass droplets, shocked minerals, and fossils. He had christened the site Tanis, after the ancient city in Egypt, which was featured in the 1981 film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. In the real Tanis, archeologists found an inscription in three writing systems, which, like the Rosetta stone, was crucial in translating ancient Egyptian. DePalma hopes that his Tanis site will help decipher what happened on the first day after the impact.

The talk, limited though it was, caused a stir. Kirk Cochran, a professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at Stony Brook University, in New York, recalled that when DePalma presented his findings there were gasps of amazement in the audience. Some scientists were wary. Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told me that he knew the Hell Creek area well, having worked there since 1981. “My warning lights were flashing bright red,” he told me. “I was so skeptical after the talk I was convinced it was a fabrication.” Johnson, who had been mapping the KT layer in Hell Creek, said that his research indicated that Tanis was at least forty-five feet below the KT boundary and perhaps a hundred thousand years older. “If it’s what it’s said to be,” Johnson said, “it’s a fabulous discovery.” But he declared himself “uneasy” until he could see DePalma’s paper.

One prominent West Coast paleontologist who is an authority on the KT event told me, “I’m suspicious of the findings. They’ve been presented at meetings in various ways with various associated extraordinary claims. He could have stumbled on something amazing, but he has a reputation for making a lot out of a little.” As an example, he brought up DePalma’s paper on Dakotaraptor, which he described as “bones he basically collected, all in one area, some of which were part of a dinosaur, some of which were part of a turtle, and he put it all together as a skeleton of one animal.” He also objected to what he felt was excessive secrecy surrounding the Tanis site, which has made it hard for outside scientists to evaluate DePalma’s claims.

Johnson, too, finds the lack of transparency, and the dramatic aspects of DePalma’s personality, unnerving. “There’s an element of showmanship in his presentation style that does not add to his credibility,” he said. Other paleontologists told me that they were leery of going on the record with criticisms of DePalma and his co-authors. All expressed a desire to see the final paper, which will be published next week, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so that they could evaluate the data for themselves.

After the G.S.A. talk, DePalma realized that his theory of what had happened at Tanis had a fundamental problem. The KT tsunami, even moving at more than a hundred miles an hour, would have taken many hours to travel the two thousand miles to the site. The rainfall of glass blobs, however, would have hit the area and stopped within about an hour after the impact. And yet the tektites fell into an active flood. The timing was all wrong.

This was not a paleontological question; it was a problem of geophysics and sedimentology. Smit was a sedimentologist, and another researcher whom DePalma shared his data with, Mark Richards, now of the University of Washington, was a geophysicist. At dinner one evening in Nagpur, India, where they were attending a conference, Smit and Richards talked about the problem, looked up a few papers, and later jotted down some rough calculations. It was immediately apparent to them that the KT tsunami would have arrived too late to capture the falling tektites; the wave would also have been too diminished by its long journey to account for the thirty-­five-foot rise of water at Tanis. One of them proposed that the wave might have been created by a curious phenomenon known as a seiche. In large earthquakes, the shaking of the ground sometimes causes water in ponds, swimming pools, and bathtubs to slosh back and forth. Richards recalled that the 2011 Japanese earthquake produced bizarre, five-foot seiche waves in an absolutely calm Norwegian fjord thirty minutes after the quake, in a place unreachable by the tsunami.

Richards had previously estimated that the worldwide earthquake generated by the KT impact could have been a thousand times stronger than the biggest earthquake ever experienced in human history. Using that gauge, he calculated that potent seismic waves would have arrived at Tanis six minutes, ten minutes, and thirteen minutes after the impact. (Different types of seismic waves travel at different speeds.) The brutal shaking would have been enough to trigger a large seiche, and the first blobs of glass would have started to rain down seconds or minutes afterward. They would have continued to fall as the seiche waves rolled in and out, depositing layer upon layer of sediment and each time ­sealing the tektites in place. The Tanis site, in short, did not span the first day of the impact: it probably recorded the first hour or so. This fact, if true, renders the site even more fabulous than previously thought. It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history could still exist millions of years later—a sort of high-speed, high-­resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone. DePalma said, “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.” If Tanis had been closer to or farther from the impact point, this beautiful coincidence of timing could not have happened. “There’s nothing in the world that’s ever been seen like this,” Richards told me.

-=-=-=

One day sixty-six million years ago, life on Earth almost came to a shattering end. The world that emerged after the impact was a much simpler place. When sunlight finally broke through the haze, it illuminated a hellish landscape. The oceans were empty. The land was covered with drifting ash. The forests were charred stumps. The cold gave way to extreme heat as a greenhouse effect kicked in. Life mostly consisted of mats of algae and growths of fungus: for years after the impact, the Earth was covered with little other than ferns. Furtive, ratlike mammals lived in the gloomy understory.

But eventually life emerged and blossomed again, in new forms. The KT event continues to attract the interest of scientists in no small part because the ashen print it left on the planet is an existential reminder. “We wouldn’t be here talking on the phone if that meteorite hadn’t fallen,” Smit told me, with a laugh. DePalma agreed. For the first hundred million years of their existence, before the asteroid struck, mammals scurried about the feet of the dinosaurs, amounting to little. “But when the dinosaurs were gone it freed them,” DePalma said. In the next epoch, mammals underwent an explosion of adaptive radiation, evolving into a dazzling variety of forms, from tiny bats to gigantic titanotheres, from horses to whales, from fearsome creodonts to large-brained primates with hands that could grasp and minds that could see through time.

“We can trace our origins back to that event,” DePalma said. “To actually be there at this site, to see it, to be connected to that day, is a special thing. This is the last day of the Cretaceous. When you go one layer up—the very next day—that’s the Paleocene, that’s the age of mammals, that’s our age.” ♦

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525

At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news­gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”

To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-­October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. “He was the premier guy in the business,” says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. “He was our Michelangelo.”

In the fable Ailes tells about his own life, he made a clean break with his dirty political past long before 1996, when he joined forces with Murdoch to launch Fox News. “I quit politics,” he has claimed, “because I hated it.” But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W. Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing U.S. senators. Fox News turbocharged the Republican takeover of the House last fall, and even helped elect former Fox News host John Kasich as the union-busting governor of Ohio – with the help of $1.26 million in campaign contributions from News Corp. And by incubating a host of potential GOP contenders on the Fox News payroll– including Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – Ailes seems determined to add a fifth presidential notch to his belt in 2012. “Everything Roger wanted to do when he started out in politics, he’s now doing 24/7 with his network,” says a former News Corp. executive. “It’s come full circle.”

Take it from Rush Limbaugh, a “dear friend” of Ailes. “One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it,” Limbaugh once declared. “Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him.”

The 71-year-old Ailes presents the classic figure of a cinematic villain: bald and obese, with dainty hands, Hitchcockian jowls and a lumbering gait. Friends describe him as loyal, generous and “slap your mama funny.” But Ailes is also, by turns, a tyrant: “I only understand friendship or scorched earth,” he has said. One former deputy pegs him as a cross between Don Rickles and Don Corleone. “What’s fun for Roger is the destruction,” says Dan Cooper, a key member of the team that founded Fox News. “When the light bulb goes on and he’s got the trick to outmaneuver the enemy – that’s his passion.” Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

Ailes was born in 1940 in Warren, Ohio, a manufacturing outpost near Youngstown. His father worked at the Packard plant producing wiring for GM cars, and Roger grew up resenting the abuse his father had to take from the “college boys” who managed the line. Ailes has called his father a “Taft Republican,” and the description is instructive: Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio led a GOP uprising to block the expansion of the New Deal in the late 1930s, and spearheaded passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which beat back the power of labor unions.

Roger spent much of his youth in convalescence. A sickly child – hemophilia forced him to sit out recess at school – he had to learn to walk again after getting hit by a car at age eight. His mother worked out of the house, so he was raised in equal measure by his grandmother and TV. “Television and I grew up together,” he later wrote.

A teenage booze hound – “I was hammered all the time” – Ailes said he “went to state school because they told me I could drink.” There was another reason: His father kicked him out of the house when he graduated from high school. During his stint at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television, his parents divorced and left the house where he had spent so much of his childhood recovering from illness and injury. “I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone,” he recalled. “I never found my shit!” The shock seems to have left him with an almost pathological nostalgia for the trappings of small-town America.

In college, Ailes tried to join the Air Force ROTC but was rejected because of his health. So he became a drama geek, acting in a bevy of collegiate productions. The thespian streak never left Ailes: His first job out of college was as a gofer on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime variety show that featured aging stars like Jack Benny and Pearl Bailey in a world swooning for Elvis and the Beatles. In many ways, Ailes remains a creature of that earlier era. His 1950s manners, martini-dry ripostes and unreconstructed sexism give the feeling, says one intimate, “like you’re talking to someone who’s been under a rock for a couple of decades.”

Ailes found his calling in television. He proved to be a TV wunderkind, charting a meteoric rise from gofer to executive producer by the age of 25. Ailes had an uncanny feel for stagecraft and how to make conversational performances pop on live television. But it was behind the scenes at Mike Douglas in 1967 that Ailes met the man who would set him on his path as the greatest political operative of his generation: Richard Milhous Nixon. The former vice president – whose stilted and sweaty debate performance against John F. Kennedy had helped doom his presidential bid in 1960 – was on a media tour to rehabilitate his image. Waiting with Nixon in his office before the show, Ailes needled his powerful guest. “The camera doesn’t like you,” he said. Nixon wasn’t pleased. “It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected,” he grumbled. “Television is not a gimmick,” Ailes said. “And if you think it is, you’ll lose again.”

The exchange was a defining moment for both men. Nixon became convinced that he had met a boy genius who could market him to the American public. Ailes had fallen hard for his first candidate. He soon abandoned his high-powered job producing Westinghouse’s biggest hit and signed on as Nixon’s “executive producer for television.” For Ailes, the infatuation was personal – and it is telling that the man who got him into politics would prove to be one of he most paranoid and dirty campaigners in the history of American politics. “I don’t know anyone else around that I would have done it for,” Ailes has said, “other than Nixon.”

It was while working for Nixon that Ailes first experimented with blurring the distinction between journalism and politics, developing a knack for manipulating political imagery that would find its ultimate expression in Fox News. He knew his candidate was a disaster on TV. “You put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away,” Ailes told reporter Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President 1968. “He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight, and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’ ”But the real problem, as Ailes saw it, was a media establishment that he viewed as hostile to Republicans. The “only hope,” he recalled, “was to go around the press and go directly to the people” – letting the campaign itself shape the candidate’s image for the average voter, “without it being interpreted for him by a middleman.”

To bypass journalists, Ailes made Nixon the star of his own traveling roadshow – a series of contrived, newslike events that the campaign paid to broadcast in local markets across the country. Nixon would appear on camera in theaters packed with GOP partisans – “an applause machine,” Ailes said, “that’s all that they are.” Then he would field questions from six voters, hand-­selected by the campaign, who could be counted on to lob softball queries that played to Nixon’s talking points. At the time, Nixon was consciously stoking the anger of white voters aggrieved by the advances of the civil rights movement, and Ailes proved eager to play the race card. To balance an obligatory “Negro” on a panel in Philadelphia, Ailes dreamed of adding a “good, mean Wallacite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, ‘Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'”

Ailes had essentially replaced professional journalists with every­day voters he could manipulate at will. “The events were not staged, they were fixed,” says Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. “People were supposed to ask tough questions. But asking a tough question – let alone knowing how to follow up – is a skill. Taking that task out of the hands of reporters and putting it into the hands of inexperienced amateurs was brilliant in itself.”

As for actual journalists? “Fuck ’em,” Ailes said. “It’s not a press conference – it’s a television show. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set.” The young producer forced reporters to watch the events backstage on a TV monitor – just like the rest of America. “Ailes figured out a way to bring reporters to heel,” Perlstein says.

After Nixon was elected, Ailes was soon fired by the White House. He had brazenly insulted his boss in the McGinniss book while playing up his own talent as an image-maker, and Nixon, as always, took the snub personally. “In the television field, we have made the move that we should have made long ago,” the president sniffed to his chief of staff in a memo uncovered by Rolling Stone, adding that Ailes was not among “the first-rate men that we could have in this field.”

Out on his own, Ailes briefly returned to the passion for the theater he discovered during his college days. In perhaps the oddest chapter of his professional life, he formed a partnership with Kermit Bloomgarden – the famed producer of Death of a Salesman – and set out to conquer Broadway. Their first production: an environmental-themed musical called Mother Earth. When the show flopped, folding after just a dozen performances in 1972, it nearly bankrupted Ailes. The next year, though, he was back in the game, scoring an edgy off-Broadway hit with The Hot L Baltimore, which the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named Best American Play of 1973. He was later nominated for an Emmy for a documentary on Federico Fellini, and produced a TV special from the Fantasy Suite at Caesars Palace for Liberace, whom Ailes knew fondly as “Lee.”

But Ailes couldn’t stay away from the theater of politics. In 1974, his notoriety from the Nixon campaign won him a job at Television News Incorporated, a new right-wing TV network that had launched under a deliberately misleading motto that Ailes would one day adopt as his own: “fair and balanced.” TVN made no sense as a business. The project of archconservative brewing magnate Joseph Coors, the news service was designed to inject a far-right slant into local news broadcasts by providing news clips that stations could use without credit – and for a fraction of the true costs of production. Once the affiliates got hooked on the discounted clips, its president explained, TVN would “gradually, subtly, slowly” inject “our philosophy in the news.” The network was, in the words of a news director who quit in protest, a “propaganda machine.”

But TVN’s staff of professional journalists revolted over the ideo­logical pressure by top management. So the fledgling operation purged 16 staffers and brought in Ailes to command the newsroom. “He was involved in the creation of the effort,” recalled Paul Weyrich, a leading figure in the New Right who had close ties to Coors. “He was sort of the godfather behind the scenes.”

During the time he spent at TVN, Ailes began to plot the growth of a right-wing network that looked very much like the future Fox News. The network planned to invest millions in satellite distribution that would enable TVN to not just distribute news clips but provide a full newscast with its own anchors – a business model that was also employed by an upstart network called CNN. For Ailes, it was a way to extend the kind of fake news that he was regularly using as a political strategist. “I know certain techniques, such as a press release that looks like a newscast,” he told The Washington Post in 1972. “So you use it because you want your man to win.”

Under Ailes, TVN even signed an open-ended contract to produce propaganda for the federal government, providing news clips and scripts to the U.S. Information Agency – a hand-in-glove relationship with the Ford administration that Ailes insisted created no conflict of interest. But TVN collapsed in 1975, depriving Ailes of the chance to implement his vision for a right-wing news network. “They were losing money and they weren’t able to control their journalists,” says Kerwin Swint, author of the Ailes biography, Dark Genius. Ailes would have to wait two decades to launch another “fair and balanced” propaganda machine – and when he did, he would make sure that the journalists he employed were prepared to toe the party line.

Following the failure of TVN, Ailes re­dedicated himself to political consulting. Over the next decade, drawing on the tactics he honed working for Nixon, he helped elect two more conservative presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1984, after the 73-year-old Reagan stumbled badly in his first debate with Walter Mondale, the campaign tapped Ailes to prep the president for the next showdown. At the time, Reagan was beginning to exhibit what his son Ron now describes as early signs of Alzheimer’s, and his age and acuity were becoming a central issue in the campaign. Ailes – a veteran of Reagan’s media team in 1980 who was overseeing the creation of the legendary “Morning in America” campaign – knew that framing one good shot in a debate could make the difference come Election Day. “Roger had the presence to be a director,” says Ed Rollins, who managed the ’84 campaign. “And Reagan, who had always been around directors, would listen to Roger.”

Ailes – known on the Reagan team as “Dr. Feelgood” – told the Gipper to ditch the facts and figures. “You didn’t get elected on details,” he told the president. “You got elected on themes.” For Ailes, the advice reflected a core belief: People watch TV emotionally. He armed Reagan with a one-liner to beat back any question about his mental agility – and the president’s delivery was pitch-perfect. “I want you to understand that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan winked. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Four years later, Ailes was in such high demand that the entire GOP field, with the exception of Pat Robertson, paid court. After hearing all the pitches, Ailes agreed to work for Bush – an effete New Englander who even Richard Nixon said “comes through as a weak individual on television.” Worse still, Bush had baggage: He was neck-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal that had secretly sent arms to Tehran and used the profits to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. Ailes saw an opportunity to address both shortcomings in a single, familiar strategy – attack the media.

In January 1988, Ailes rigged an interview about the scandal with Dan Rather of CBS News by insisting on an odd caveat: that the interview be conducted live. That not only gave the confrontation the air of a prizefight – it enabled Ailes himself to sit just off-camera in Bush’s office, prompting his candidate with cue cards. As soon as Rather, who was in the CBS studio in New York, began his questioning, Bush came out swinging, claiming that he had been misled about the interview’s focus on Iran-­Contra. When the exchange got tricky for Bush, Ailes flashed a card: walked off the air. A few months earlier, Rather had stormed off camera upon learning his newscast had been pre-empted by a women’s tennis match. Clenching his fist, Ailes mouthed: Go! Go! Just kick his ass!

Bush proceeded to hit Rather below the belt. “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” he said. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?” It was the mother of all false equivalencies: the fleeting petulance of a news anchor pitted against the high crimes of a sitting vice president. But it worked as TV. “That bite of Bush telling Rather off played over and over and over again,” says Roger Stone, an infamous political operative who worked with Ailes on the Nixon campaign. “It was a perfect example of Roger understanding the news cycle, the dynamics of the situation and the power of television.”

Ailes became the go-to man on the Bush campaign, especially when it came to taking down the opposition. “On any campaign you have a small table of inside advisers,” says Mary Matalin, the GOP consultant. “Roger always had the clearest vision. The most robust, synthesized, advanced thinking on things political. When you came to a strategy impasse, he’d be the first among equals. I can’t remember a single incident where he lost a fight.” As usual, Ailes knew how to use television to skew public perception. His dirtiest move came during the general election – a TV ad centering on Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Massachusetts prison during a weekend furlough when Michael Dukakis was governor and later assaulted a couple, stabbing the man and raping the woman. “The only question,” Ailes bragged to a reporter, “is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand – or without it.”

Knowing that such an overt move could backfire on the campaign, Ailes instead opted to evoke Horton by showing a line of convicts entering and exiting a prison through a revolving door of prison bars. An early take of the ad used actual prisoners. “Roger and I looked at it, and we worried there were too many blacks in the prison scene,” campaign manager Lee Atwater later admitted. So Ailes reshot the ad to zero in on a single black prisoner – sporting an unmistakably Horton-esque Afro. The campaign also benefited from a supposedly “independent” ad that exuberantly paraded Horton’s mug shot. The ad was crafted by Larry McCarthy – a former senior vice president at Ailes Communications Inc.

After the ’88 campaign, ailes kept on playing the Willie Horton card against Democrats. Working for Rudy Giuliani in 1989, he even tried the tactic against David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, running ads that exploited the criminal record of a Dinkins staffer who had served time for kidnapping. But this time, the tactic backfired. Dinkins made Ailes himself the issue, labeling him “the master of mud.” Giuliani lost the race, and Ailes went into a deep political slump. In 1990, he tried to take out bow-tied Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois and whiffed. The following year, he blew a special election in Pennsylvania. One political observer at the time declared that Ailes was becoming “an albatross.”

A few months later, Ailes made a show of exiting the political arena. “I’ve been in politics for 25 years,” he told The New York Times in 1991. “It’s always been a detour. Now my business has taken a turn back to my entertainment and corporate clients.” But instead of giving up his work as a political consultant, Ailes simply went underground. Keenly aware that his post-Horton reputation would be a drag on President Bush, Ailes took no formal role with the re-election campaign. But he continued to loom so large behind the scenes that campaign allies referred to him as “our Deep Throat.”

He quietly prepped the president for his State of the Union address in 1992, and he served as an attack dog for the campaign, once more blasting what he saw as the media’s liberal bias. “Bill Clinton has 15,000 press secretaries,” Ailes blared. “At some point, even you guys will have to get embarrassed.” (Last November, Ailes deployed the same line against President Obama, reducing the number of press secretaries to only 3,000.)

Ailes also pushed Bush campaign manager James Baker to “get on the fucking offensive” and “go for the red meat.” From his office in Manhattan, Ailes advised the campaign to spin Clinton’s graduate-school train trip to Moscow into a tale of a Manchurian candidacy. “This guy’s hiding something,” Ailes barked over a speakerphone in Baker’s office. Clinton’s public fuzziness about the trip was proof enough, insisted Ailes: “Nobody’s that forgetful.” President Bush soon appeared on Larry King Live, following the redbaiting advice to the letter. “I don’t have the facts,” the president insinuated, “but to go to Moscow one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, and not remember who you saw – I think the answer is, level with the American people.”

In advance of the final debate of 1992, Bush called in his two closest confidants, Baker and Ailes, to help him prepare at Camp David. The advice Ailes offered could serve as a mission statement for Fox News. “Forget all the facts and figures,” he said, “and move to the offense as quickly as possible.”

After Bush lost to Clinton, Ailes kept right on claiming that he was through with politics. In 2001, as part of a House hearing into election night news coverage, Ailes submitted biographical materials to Congress under oath that made the break explicit: “In 1992, Ailes retired completely from political and corporate consulting to return full-time to television.”

That is a lie. At the time, Ailes was certainly becoming a force in tabloid TV. He had helped launch The Maury Povich Show in 1991, and – in his first brush with the News Corp. empire – he consulted on A Current Affair. But in 1993 – the year after he claimed he had retired from corporate consulting – Ailes inked a secret deal with tobacco giants Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds to go full-force after the Clinton administration on its central policy objective: health care reform. Hillarycare was to have been funded, in part, by a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes. To block the proposal, Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting “real people affected by taxes.”

According to internal memos, Ailes also explored how Philip Morris could create a phony front group called the “Coalition for Fair Funding of Health Care” to deploy the same kind of “independent” ads that produced Willie Horton. In a precursor to the modern Tea Party, Ailes conspired with the tobacco companies to unleash angry phone calls on Congress – cold-calling smokers and patching them through to the switchboards on Capitol Hill – and to gin up the appearance of a grassroots uprising, busing 17,000 tobacco employees to the White House for a mass demonstration.

But Ailes’ most important contribution to the covert campaign involved his new specialty: right-wing media. The tobacco giants hired Ailes, in part, because he had just brought Rush Limbaugh to the small screen, serving as executive producer of Rush’s syndicated, late-night TV show. Now they wanted Ailes to get Limbaugh onboard to crush health care reform. “RJR has trained 200 people to call in to shows,” a March 1993 memo revealed. “A packet has gone to Limbaugh. We need to brief Ailes.”

Ailes and Limbaugh were more than co-workers. The two jocular, balding right-wingers had met carousing in Manhattan a few years earlier and had become fast friends: Both were reviled for the virulence of their politics, and both saw themselves as victims of what Ailes would call “liberal bigots.” In a 2009 speech, Limbaugh credited Ailes for teaching him “how to take being hated as a measure of success.” Ailes, in fact, would become a father figure to the king of right-wing talk. “The things I’ve learned from him about being a man, about the country, about how to be a professional, nobody else taught me,” Limbaugh said. “When Roger Ailes is on your team, you do not lose.”

In August 1993, Ailes made his biggest foray into television since his days as a producer for Mike Douglas: He became the head of CNBC, America’s top business network. In his three years as boss, he more than quintupled profits and minted stars like Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo. He also helped launch a new cable network called America’s Talking, an odd mash-up of television and talk radio. “The lineup really comes out of my head,” Ailes said. Shows on the new network included Bugged! (about things that irritate people), Pork (a takedown of pork-barrel spending) and Am I Nuts? (a call-in psychiatry hour).

Then in his early fifties, Ailes had shed 40 pounds by curbing his Häagen-Dazs habit, and he had shaved off the salt-and-pepper goatee he sported during his days as a GOP operative. But what he refused to give up was politics. As head of CNBC, he continued to produce Limbaugh’s TV show on the side – and he remained on the take from Big Tobacco, pocketing a $5,000 monthly retainer from Philip Morris “to be available.” In 1994, when the tobacco giant tried to stave off harsher regulation by unveiling a voluntary initiative to curb youth smoking, it once again called on Roger to activate Rush: “Ask Ailes to try to prime Limbaugh to go after the antis for complaining.”

But despite his success at CNBC, Ailes wasn’t being given the power he craved to shape public opinion. In a move that took him by surprise, his bosses at NBC decided to shut down America’s Talking and hand its channel over to an all-news venture called MSNBC. Ailes felt that his creation had been hijacked. The man who imagined himself the king of political infighters had been cut off at the knees.

Ailes responded as he always did to setbacks: by throwing himself into another political battle. This time, though, he would do things on his own terms. Securing release from his NBC contract without a noncompete agreement, he immediately joined forces with a media giant who was equally unabashed in using his news operations as instruments of political power. As Jack Welch – then the CEO of NBC’s parent company GE – put it at the time, “We’ll rue the day we let Roger and Rupert team up.”

Rupert Murdoch had long been obsessed with gaining a foothold in the TV news business. He made a failed run at buying CNN, only to see Time Warner scoop up the prize. Even before he hired Ailes, Murdoch had several teams at work on a germinal version of Fox News that he intended to air through News Corp. affiliates. The false starts included a 60 Minutes-style program that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program. “The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving,” says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Like Joseph Coors before him at TVN, Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the “left-wing bias” of CNN. “There’s your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda,” says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. “That’s its original sin.”

Murdoch found Ailes captivating: powerful, politically connected, funny as hell. Both men had been married twice, and both shared an open contempt for the traditional rules of journalism. Murdoch also had a direct self-interest in targeting regulation-­minded liberals, whose policies threatened to interfere with his plans for expansion. “Rupert is driven by a twofold dynamic: power and money,” says a former deputy. “He had a lot of business reasons to shake up Washington, and he found in Roger the perfect guy to do it.”

But Ailes was determined not to repeat what he saw as the mistakes of TVN, the ideological forerunner of Fox News. Before signing on to run the new network, he demanded that Murdoch get “carriage” – distribution on cable systems nationwide. In the normal course of business, cable outfits like Time Warner pay content providers like CNN or MTV for the right to air their programs. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn’t just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25 million homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. “Murdoch’s offer shocked the industry,” writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. “He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice.” Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch’s “nerve,” adding, “This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great.”

Ailes was also determined not to let the professional ethics of journalism get in the way of his political agenda, as they had at TVN. To secure a pliable news staff, he led what he called a “jailbreak” from NBC, bringing dozens of top staffers with him to Fox News, including business anchor Neil Cavuto and morning host Steve Doocy – loyalists who owed their careers to Ailes. Rounding out his senior news team, Ailes tapped trusted Republicans like veteran ABC correspondent Brit Hume and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Tony Snow.

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn’t far enough to the right for his tastes, he’d spring an accusation: “Why are you a liberal?” If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. As recounted by journalist Scott Collins in Crazy Like a Fox, the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. “All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom,” says a former anchor. “But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color – and that your color was red.” Red state, that is.

Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes also housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and an endless cube farm along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit – known at Fox News as the “brain room” – that requires special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” says Cooper, who helped design its specs. “It’s where the evil resides.”

If that sounds paranoid, consider the man Ailes brought in to run the brain room: Scott Ehrlich, a top lieutenant from his political-­consulting firm. Ehrlich – referred to by some as “Baby Rush” – had taken over the lead on Big Tobacco’s campaign to crush health care reform when Ailes signed on with CNBC. According to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Ehrlich gravitated to the dark side: In a strategy labeled “Underground Attack,” he advised the tobacco giants to “hit hard” at key lawmakers “through their soft underbelly” by quietly influencing local media – a tactic that would help the firms “stay under the radar of the national news media.”

At Fox News, Ehrlich kept up a relentless drumbeat against the Clinton administration. A reporter who joined the network from ABC promptly left in horror after a producer approached him, rubbing her hands together and saying, “Let’s have something on Whitewater today.” Ailes mined the Monica Lewinsky scandal for ratings gold, bringing Matt Drudge aboard as a host, and heaped rumor on top of the smears. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard – the News Corp. property with the most direct crossover on Fox News – trafficked in gossip “that there’s a second intern who was sexually involved with the president. If there is, that will certainly be dynamite.”

But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn’t leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network’s “decision desk” on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush’s first cousin. As a columnist at The Boston Globe, Ellis had recused himself from covering the campaign. “There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush’s presidential campaign,” he told his readers, “because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you.”

In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset. “We at Fox News,” he would later tell a House hearing, “do not discriminate against people because of their family connections.” On Election Day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume announced Fox’s call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers.

“We’ll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not,” says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. “But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election.”

Dwell on this for a moment: A “news” network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives – including those that helped elect the candidate’s father – declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts. “Of everything that happened on election night, this was the most important in impact,” Rep. Henry Waxman said at the time. “It immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people’s minds that he was the man who won the election.”

After Bush took office, Ailes stayed in frequent touch with the new Republican president. “The senior-level editorial people believe that Roger was on the phone every day with Bush,” a source close to Fox News tells Rolling Stone. “He gave Bush the same kind of pointers he used to give George H.W. Bush – delivery, effectiveness, political coaching.” In the aftermath of 9/11, Ailes sent a back-channel memo to the president through Karl Rove, advising Bush to ramp up the War on Terror. As reported by Bob Woodward, Ailes advised Bush that “the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible.”

Fox News did its part to make sure that viewers lined up behind those harsh measures. The network plastered an American flag in the corner of the screen, dolled up one female anchor in a camouflaged silk blouse, and featured Geraldo Rivera threatening to hunt down Osama bin Laden with a pistol. The militarism even seemed to infect the culture of Fox News. “Roger Ailes is the general,” declared Bill O’Reilly. “And the general sets the tone of the army. Our army is very George Patton-esque. We charge. We roll.”

Ailes likes to boast that Fox News maintains a bright, clear line between its news shows, which he touts as balanced, and prime-time hosts like O’Reilly and Hannity, who are given free rein to voice their opinions. “We police those lines very carefully,” Ailes has said. But after Bush was elected, Ailes tasked John Moody, his top political lieutenant, to keep the newsroom in lockstep. Early each morning, Ailes summoned Moody into his office – often joined by Hume from the Washington bureau on speakerphone – and provided his spin on the day’s news. Moody then posted a daily memo to the staff with explicit instructions on how to slant the day’s news coverage according to the agenda of those on “the Second Floor,” as Ailes and his loyal cadre of vice presidents are known. “There’s a chain of command, and it’s followed,” says a former news anchor. “Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down.”

When the 9/11 Commission began investigating Bush’s negligence in the lead-up to the terrorist attacks, Moody issued a stark warning: “This is not ‘What did he know and when did he know it?’ stuff. Do not turn this into Watergate. Remember the fleeting sense of national unity that emerged from this tragedy. Let’s not desecrate that.” In a 2003 memo on Bush’s overtures for Middle East peace, Moody again ordered the staff to champion the president: “His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting throughout the day.” During the 2004 campaign, Moody highlighted John Kerry’s “flip-flop voting record” – a line that dovetailed with the attacks coming out of the White House. In fact, Fox News was working ­directly with the Bush administration to coordinate each day’s agenda – as Bush’s own press secretary, Scott McClellan, later conceded. “We at the White House,” McClellan said, “were getting them talking points.” (Ailes and Fox News declined repeated requests from Rolling Stone for an interview.)

When Bush was re-elected, Murdoch and Ailes toasted the victory together in the control room of Fox News, celebrating until three in the morning. The network’s relentless GOP boosterism had not only been good for ratings, it also appeared to have paid dividends for the network’s corporate parent. Acting nakedly in Murdoch’s interests, the FCC blocked satellite-TV provider EchoStar’s $27 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2002 as being anti-competitive. That cleared the way for News Corp. – which had originally been outbid – to buy control of DirecTV for a mere $6.6 billion.

But despite their commercial and political triumphs, the relationship between Murdoch and Ailes has grown rocky. The more profits soared at Fox News, the more Ailes expanded his power and independence. In 2005, he staged a brazen coup within the company, conspiring to depose Murdoch’s son Lachlan as the anointed heir of News Corp. Ailes not only took over Lachlan’s portfolio – becoming chair of Fox Television – he even claimed Lachlan’s office on the eighth floor. In 2009, Ailes earned a pay package of $24 million – a deal slightly larger than the one enjoyed by Murdoch himself. He brags privately that his contract also forbids Murdoch – infamous for micromanaging his newspapers – from interfering with editorial decisions at Fox News.

In recent years, Ailes has increasingly become a headache for News Corp. In 2004, to protect his pal Rudy Giuliani, Ailes apparently interceded in the case of Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who had been nominated on Giuliani’s recommendation to head the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik proved to be a train wreck: In the most offensive of his indiscretions, he had commandeered an apartment overlooking Ground Zero – intended for rescue and recovery workers – as a love shack for trysts with his book editor, News Corp.’s own Judith Regan. Acting more like a political consultant than a news executive, Ailes appears to have resorted to Watergate-style obstruction of justice. According to court documents, the Fox News chairman “told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign.” The records reveal that Ailes “advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.” The allegation featured prominently in a wrongful-termination lawsuit brought by Regan, which reportedly cost News Corp. more than $10 million to settle.

Many within Murdoch’s family have come to viscerally hate Ailes. Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi, has worked to soften her husband’s politics, and his son James has persuaded him to embrace the reality of global warming – even as Ailes has led the drumbeat of climate deniers at Fox News. Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law and a top PR executive in Britain, recently told reporters, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

“Rupert is surrounded by people who regularly, if not moment to moment, tell him how horrifying and dastardly Roger is,” says Wolff, the Murdoch biographer. “Wendi cannot stand Roger. Rupert’s children cannot stand Roger. So around Murdoch, Roger has no supporters, except for Roger himself.”

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a black nationalist and a 1960s radical. In early 2007, Ailes joked about the similarity of Obama’s name to a certain terrorist’s. “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said in a speech to news executives. “I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’” References to Obama’s middle name were soon being bandied about on Fox & Friends, the morning happy-talk show that Ailes uses as one of his primary vehicles to inject his venom into the media bloodstream. According to insiders, the morning show’s anchors, who appear to be chatting ad-lib, are actually working from daily, structured talking points that come straight from the top. “Prior to broadcast, Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson – that gang – they meet with Roger,” says a former Fox deputy. “And Roger gives them the spin.”

Fox & Friends is where the smear about Obama having attended a madrassa was first broadcast, with Doocy – an Ailes lackey from his days at America’s Talking – stating unequivocally that Obama was “raised as a Muslim.” And during the campaign, the show’s anchors flogged Obama’s reference to his own grandmother as a “typical white person” so relentlessly that it even gave Fox News host Chris Wallace pause. When Wallace appeared on the show that morning, he launched a rebuke that seemed targeted at Ailes as much as Doocy. “I have been watching the show since six o’clock this morning,” Wallace bristled. “I feel like two hours of Obama-bashing may be enough.”

The Obama era has spurred sharp changes in the character and tone of Fox News. “Obama’s election has driven Fox to be more of a political campaign than it ever was before,” says Burns, the network’s former media critic.“Things shifted,” agrees Jane Hall, who fled the network after a decade as a liberal commentator. “There seemed suddenly to be less of a need to have a range of opinion. I began to feel uncomfortable.” Sean Hannity was no longer flanked by Alan Colmes, long the network’s fig-leaf liberal. Bill Sammon, author of At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election, was brought in to replace Moody as the top political enforcer. And Brit Hume was replaced on the anchor desk by Bret Baier, one of the young guns Ailes hired more than a decade ago to inject right-wing fervor into Fox News.

Most striking, Ailes hired Glenn Beck away from CNN and set him loose on the White House. During his contract negotiations, Beck recounted, Ailes confided that Fox News was dedicating itself to impeding the Obama administration. “I see this as the Alamo,” Ailes declared. Leading the charge were the ragtag members of the Tea Party uprising, which Fox News propelled into a nationwide movement. In the buildup to the initial protests on April 15th, 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand the rallies as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” Veteran journalists were taken aback. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a news network throw its weight behind a protest like we are seeing in the past few weeks,” said Howard Kurtz, the then-media critic for The Washington Post. The following August, when the Tea Party launched its town-hall protests against health care reform, Fox & Friends urged viewers to confront their congressmen face to face. “Are you gonna call?” Gretchen Carlson demanded on-air, “or are you gonna go to one of these receptions where they’re actually there?” The onscreen Chyron instructed viewers: HOLD CONGRESS ACCOUNTABLE! NOW IS THE TIME TO SPEAK YOUR MIND.

Fox News also hyped Sarah Palin’s lies about “death panels” and took the smear a step further, airing a report claiming that the Department of Veterans Affairs was using a “death book” to encourage soldiers to “hurry up and die.” (Missing from the report was any indication that the end-of-life counseling materials in question had been promoted by the Bush administration.) At the height of the health care debate, more than two-thirds of Fox News viewers were convinced Obama­care would lead to a “government takeover,” provide health care to illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and let the government decide when to pull the plug on grandma. As always, the Chairman’s enforcer made sure that producers down in the Fox News basement were toeing the party line. In October 2009, as Congress weighed adding a public option to the health care law, Sammon let everyone know how Ailes expected them to cover the story. “Let’s not slip back into calling it the ‘public option,’” he warned in an e-mail. “Please use the term ‘government-run health insurance’ … when­ever possible.” Sammon neglected to mention that the phrase he was pushing had been carefully crafted by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s largest lobbying organization, which had determined that the wording was “the most negative language to use when describing a ‘public plan.’”

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”

During his days as an overt political consultant, Roger Ailes reshaped Republican politics for the era of network television. Now, as chairman of Fox News, he has reshaped a television network as a force for Republican politics. “It’s a political campaign – a 24/7 political campaign,” says a former Ailes deputy. “Nobody has been able to issue talking points to the American public morning after morning, day after day, night after night.” Perhaps the only media figure in history with a greater sway over the American electorate was Father Charles Coughlin, the redbaiting Catholic ideologue whose corrosive radio sermons – laced with anti-Semitism and economic populism – reached nearly a third of the country during the Great Depression.

“Ailes is actually much more sophisticated than Coughlin,” says Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and author of The Age of Reagan. “Coughlin was only on the air once a week, and it was clear that what he presented was his opinion. Fox News is totalized: It’s an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it’s broadcast as ‘the news.’ That’s why Ailes is a genius. He’s combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way – one that blurs the distinction between the two.”

The phenomenal political power and economic prowess of Fox News has inspired imitation. In recent years, MSNBC has tried to refashion itself as the anti-Fox, with a prime-time lineup stacked with liberal commentators. Such contortions, say media veterans, only strengthen Fox News, emboldening Ailes to tack even further to the right. “He can say, ‘I’m not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing – I’m just doing it on the other side of the fence,’ ” says Dan Rather.

But Ailes has not simply been content to shift the nature of journalism and direct the GOP’s message war. He has also turned Fox News into a political fundraising juggernaut. During her Senate race in Delaware, Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell bragged, “I’ve got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money.” Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate who tried to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, praised Fox for letting her say on-air, “I need $25 from a million people – go to SharronAngle.com and send money.” Completing the Fox-GOP axis, Karl Rove has used his pulpit as a Fox News commentator to promote American Crossroads, a shadowy political group he founded, promising that the money it raised would be put “to good use to defeat Democrats who have supported the president’s agenda.”

But the clearest demonstration of how Ailes has seamlessly merged both money and message lies in the election of John Kasich, a longtime Fox News contributor who eked out a two-point victory over Democrat Ted Strickland last November to become governor of Ohio. While technically a Republican, Kasich might better be understood as the first candidate of the Fox News Party. “The question is no longer whether Fox News is an arm of the GOP,” says Burns, the network’s former media critic, “but whether it’s becoming the torso instead.”

The host of a weekend show called Heartland, Kasich made 42 appearances as a contributor on Fox after he announced his interest in running, frequently guest-hosting on The O’Reilly Factor. He also appeared 16 times as an active candidate, using the network as a platform to make naked fundraising appeals. Most striking of all, News Corp. itself chipped in $1.26 million to the Republican Governors Association, making it one of the largest single contributors to the club Kasich was seeking to join. Murdoch made no bones about why he made such a generous donation to the GOP cause: It was driven, he said, by “my friendship with John Kasich.” Since becoming governor, Kasich has repealed collective-­bargaining rights for 350,000 state workers and killed a stimulus-­funded project to develop high-speed rail for the state.

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America’s most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypass­ing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as “matadors” who want to “tear down the social order” with their “elitist, horse-dung, social­ist thinking.” Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. “I’m not in politics,” Ailes recently boasted. “I’m in ratings. We’re winning.”

The only thing that remains to be seen is whether Ailes can have it both ways: reaching his goal of $1 billion in annual profits while simultaneously dethroning Obama with one of his candidate-­employees. Either way, he has put the Republican Party on his payroll and forced it to remake itself around his image. Ailes is the Chairman, and the conservative movement now reports to him. “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us,” said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. “Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.”

off the net from June Pulliam in Louisiana

I am proud that our governor is launching a probe into Alton Sterling’s death, but this fucking city, wow. Our police officers need to be held accountable for brutality, and they need more support and training to do a better job as well. This guy was just selling bootleg CDs outside of a convenience store, apparently with the permission of the owner. As a convicted felon who spent 5 years in jail for possession of marijuana, this was probably the only way he had to make a living for his family, as his chances of getting a more mainstream job were ruined by the felony conviction for a non-violent offense. And he was carrying a gun because he had been robbed recently; in this way, he is no different than the many citizens of our state who get conceal and carry licenses to protect themselves. According to what is known so far, the BRPD tried to arrest Sterling for selling the CDs outside of the store, although the store’s owner had no problem with him being there. Sterling resisted arrest and was tasered by the BRPD. When the tazer didn’t bring him down, the police shot Sterling multiple times in the chest and back. The officers’ body cameras had conveniently falled off of their chests, and so that evidence not surprisingly doesn’t show much of their actions. At least there is cell-phone footage shot by a witness to add some more information to this unfolding story.

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An open carry law didn’t stop police from killing Alton Sterling.

http://www.vox.com/2016/7/6/12105380/alton-sterling-police-shooting-baton-rouge-louisiana

Warning: Graphic footage of a police shooting:

In the video showing the police shooting of Alton Sterling, the police officers’ stated reason for opening fire is clear: Sterling apparently had a gun. Even as two Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers held Sterling down, they apparently saw the gun as a grave enough threat to their lives — and they opened fire.

But Louisiana is an open carry and concealed carry state, meaning residents are legally allowed to carry firearms. So why was Sterling’s alleged possession of a firearm reason enough to shoot him?

In his last few minutes of life, Alton Sterling seemed completely immobile. Two Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers had pinned him to the floor, flat on his back. But even as Sterling seemed completely unable to move, one of the police officers yelled, “He’s got a gun!” Within seconds, an officer shot Sterling, who was still pinned to the ground by the cops. Sterling died of multiple gunshot wounds, according to an autopsy.

After a bystander released video of the shooting, people quickly protested in the area and voiced their anger on social media. Several people went to the convenience store where Sterling was shot, holding up “black lives matter” and “hands up, don’t shoot” signs, Maya Lau and Bryn Stole reported for the Advocate.

Sterling’s death is the latest in a long string of police shootings to lead to outrage, particularly from the Black Lives Matter and racial justice movements against racial disparities in the criminal justice system. To many critics, it is just another example of an issue that quickly rose to the national spotlight after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

Two police officers shot Alton Sterling while he was seemingly pinned to the ground, unable to move

According to the Advocate, Baton Rouge police officers Blaine Salamoni and Howie Lake responded to a call at a convenience store around 12:35 am on Tuesday after receiving an anonymous tip that a man in a red shirt who was selling CDs had pointed a gun at someone. Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, matched part of the description: He sold CDs, and he was wearing a red shirt.

A short cellphone video captured by a bystander shows what happened next: Two police officers yelled at Sterling to get on the ground. The officers then pulled him to the ground, pinning Sterling on his back. An officer yelled, “He’s got a gun!” The video shows an officer holding down Sterling’s left arm, but Sterling’s right arm isn’t visible. One officer aimed his gun at Sterling’s chest — at what seems to be point-blank range. Within seconds, at least one officer opened fire. Sterling was pronounced dead shortly after.

Shop owner Abdullah Muflahi told the Advocate that the officers were “aggressive” from the start, and that Sterling was armed but was not holding his gun and didn’t have his hand near his pocket at the time of the shooting.

Both officers are on administrative leave, per Baton Rouge Police Department policy, and an investigation, led by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, is underway. Both officers were reportedly wearing body cameras, and the police car had a dashboard camera as well.

Sterling had a criminal record. He was a sex offender, convicted of one count of carnal knowledge of a juvenile in 2000. He also was accused of several crimes in the 1990s, including aggravated battery, simple criminal damage to property, unauthorized entry, domestic abuse battery, possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute, and illegally carrying a weapon with a controlled dangerous substance. It’s unlikely police knew about his record.

But his previous convictions aren’t what’s relevant to the shooting; it’s whether he was holding and trying to use a gun at the time he was shot. The legal standard for use of force requires officers to reasonably perceive a threat at the moment of use of force.

Since Sterling was seemingly immobile in the video of the shooting, critics argue that he was not in fact a threat and the shooting is another example of excessive use of force against a black man.

Black people are much more likely to be killed by police than their white peers

An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox’s Dara Lind shows that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: They accounted for 31 percent of police shooting victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete, since it’s based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.

Black teens were 21 times as likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012, according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica’s Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: “One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica’s analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one per week.”

BLACK TEENS WERE 21 TIMES AS LIKELY AS WHITE TEENS TO BE SHOT AND KILLED BY POLICE BETWEEN 2010 AND 2012

There have been several high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.

One possible explanation for the racial disparities: subconscious biases. Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. “In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” he said, “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.”

Part of the solution to this type of bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential subconscious prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive.

Police only have to reasonably perceive a threat to justify shooting

Legally, what most matters in these shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat.

In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.

Constitutionally, “police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,” David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, told Vox’s Dara Lind. The first circumstance is “to protect their life or the life of another innocent party” — what departments call the “defense-of-life” standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.

The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, “they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight.”

THE KEY TO BOTH OF THE LEGAL STANDARDS IS THAT IT DOESN’T MATTER WHETHER THERE IS AN ACTUAL THREAT WHEN FORCE IS USED

The key to both of the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer’s “objectively reasonable” belief that there is a threat.

That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor. This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who’d survived his encounter with police officers, but who’d been treated roughly, had his face shoved into the hood of a car, and broken his foot — all while he was suffering a diabetic attack. The court didn’t rule on whether the officers’ treatment of him had been justified, but it did say that the officers couldn’t justify their conduct just based on whether their intentions were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were “objectively reasonable,” given the circumstances and compared to what other police officers might do.

What’s “objectively reasonable” changes as the circumstances change. “One can’t just say, ‘Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly force again now,” Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, said.

In general, officers are given lot of legal latitude to use force without fear of punishment. The intention behind these legal standards is to give police officers leeway to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders. And although critics argue that these legal standards give law enforcement a license to kill innocent or unarmed people, police officers say they are essential to their safety.

For some critics, the question isn’t what’s legally justified but rather what’s preventable. “We have to get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are preventable,” Ronald Davis, a former police chief who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the Washington Post. Police “need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun,” he added. “When they do that, they have no choice but to shoot.”

Police are very rarely prosecuted for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest. Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.

“There is a tendency to believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility,” David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and Litigation, told Vox’s Amanda Taub. “And when an officer is on trial, reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction.”

If police are charged, they’re very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

The statistics suggest that it would be a truly rare situation if the officer who shot and killed Sterling were convicted of a crime. But the family does have the advantage of video footage, which persuaded prosecutors before to press charges for the police shootings of Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Laquan McDonald in Chicago.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/draft/2016/04/24/vernon-adams-nfl-draft-oregon-quarterbacks/83466794/Vernon

Adams: Draft me before every QB except Carson Wentz
Lindsay H. Jones, USA TODAY Sports 7:13 p.m. EDT April 24, 2016

Russ Lande breaks down his top QB picks in the 2016 draft. USA TODAY Sports
USP NCAA FOOTBALL: OREGON AT STANFORD S FBC USA CA

As Vernon Adams approaches the weekend that he hopes will change his life, he’s going to try to start it just like any regular weekend.

He’ll get his hair cut on Thursday, just like always, and he’ll spend all day Friday with his nearly-two-year-old son, Kash. But on then Saturday, the third day of the NFL draft, Adams will allow himself to turn on the television coverage of the draft at his grandparents’ home in Glendale, Calif., and just wait for the phone to ring.

Adams, a quarterback from the University of Oregon by way of Eastern Washington, is trying to temper his expectations. He’s spending these finals days of the pre-draft process preparing himself for the chance that the call from an NFL team won’t come, and that he’ll have to sign a contract as an undrafted rookie free agent.

But if Adams is honest with himself, he knows he should be drafted.

He’s seen other quarterbacks in this draft class up close, in Pac-12 games against Jared Goff of Cal, and Cody Kessler of USC and Kevin Hogan of Stanford – Adams’ Ducks won each of those games, he’ll point out – and watched more North Dakota State film of Carson Wentz than many draft analysts have thanks to years’ worth of studying common Big Sky Conference opponents.

“I feel like I’m as good as everybody else, or better than everybody else in this draft,” Adams told USA TODAY Sports.

If Adams were the one putting together quarterback rankings, he’d put himself second, behind only Wentz, because he believes the pro-style offense Wentz ran at North Dakota State makes Wentz the most pro-ready quarterback in this class.

But the rest of the bunch? Goff, who could be the No. 1 overall pick by the Los Angeles Rams, and Memphis’ Paxton Lynch or Michigan State’s Connor Cook or Mississippi State’s Dak Prescott? Adams is daring teams to take one of those guys instead of him.

“I’ve played Jared Goff. They always want to talk about my hands being too small, but my hands are bigger than his. I’ve played in snowy games. I’ve played in rainy games. I’ve played in negative-15 degree games. Look at my wins to losses, look at my touchdowns to interceptions. Look at my career yards,” Adams said. “I’m not a cocky dude, I just want everybody to know that everything that everyone else is doing, I can do it as well. It’s just so much on my height.”

And his height is the one thing Adams can’t change. He measured in at 5-foot-10 7/8 inches at the NFL scouting combine, the shortest of the quarterbacks there, and he’s lost count of how many times he’s been asked about his stature in the draft process. The questions came from scouts at the East-West Shrine game in January – where Adams was named offensive MVP – and at the combine, and even more puzzlingly, from strangers.

“I’ll meet a person on the plane, and we’re talking and they’ll be like ‘Oh you play quarterback, that’s cool. But aren’t you kind of short for a quarterback?’” Adams said, laughing. “I’ll just be like, ‘Yeah, I am, but watch me play.’’

That’s the same pitch Adams has tried to make to NFL teams when he’s gotten the chance. Between the Shrine game, the combine and his pro day in Eugene, Adams figures he’s spoken to someone from every NFL team. He’s hoping that when teams do look at his film, especially from his lone season at Oregon, they take into account the fact that he was academically cleared to join the team just three weeks before the season opener, leaving him little time to win the starting job and learn the offense, and that he suffered a broken finger on his throwing hand early in the year.

He’s hoping teams watch Oregon’s Pac-12 schedule, and the wins against Cal, USC and Stanford, and especially that they watch the first half of the Alamo Bowl against Texas Christian. He had completed 13 of 19 passes for 197 yards and a touchdown, and the Ducks had built a 28-0 nothing lead before he was knocked from the game with a concussion about 4 minutes before halftime. Without him playing in the second half, Oregon lost 47-41.

“Put on the film when I wasn’t playing, and put on the film when I was playing and see how much of a game-changer I was,” Adams said. “Honestly, those words aren’t just mine, it’s my teammates that have told me that. They’ll say, ’Man, forget your height, this is what you should tell the scouts.’ That’s what they say, and it really is the truth.”

Now he just has to endure the wait to see if any NFL team believes it. Adams admits the past several months have caused him to be anxious, and that anxiety won’t go away until his NFL future is set. Still, he’s determined to enjoy the time with his son and his immediate family, no matter the outcome.

“Whether I get drafted or not, I’m celebrating with my family, because I’ve gone the farthest. Nobody in my family got a degree, or two degrees. I’ve got a (bachelor’s) and I’m almost done with my masters,” Adams said. “I’m very blessed that I can do this and have the career that I had in college. I’m going to be happy. If I am a priority free agent, I’m going to go to whichever team, and they’re going to love me.”