Max McCoy, Kansas Reflector

Call it trickle-down politics.

On Monday, just hours before the filing deadline, a Topeka man with a violent criminal history submitted the paperwork necessary to run for Congress.

“The majority of Kansas is probably going to vote for a felon for president,” said the newly minted candidate, Michael Allen Ogle, as quoted by KSNT. “So I figured why not take my shot, and you can vote for two if you want.” ...

By the Sunday before Memorial Day, my father would already have the flowers set out on the family graves. He would have called the flowers “decorations,” because being an original Ozarker he knew the holiday by its old name. The relatives whose remains were held safe by these grassy plots had been gone for years, or in some cases decades, but they lived still in his memory.

As a kid, as an unwilling accomplice, during these annual rituals there wasn’t much for me to do except find the shade of a nearby tree and listen with the bored disinterest of a designated witness to his recitation of the names on the stones. I had known perhaps only one or two of them — my grandmothers, for example — but the rest were as distant to me as the sun overhead.

My father was not a devout man or much given to ceremony, but Memorial Day was the holiday he observed with a rigor that resembled a civil religion. For Carl McCoy, the year began not with the lengthening days after the winter solstice but with Memorial Day. The solemn remembrance of the dead typically concluded with a family meal (although seldom a picnic) and then the doors to summer were flung open, with its long days and baitcaster fishing and homegrown tomatoes by the Fourth of July....

On the afternoon of July 6 last year, Paul Grice went to the county clerk’s office at the Cimarron County Courthouse at Boise City, Oklahoma, and paid $104 to file a peculiar document in an attempt, among other things, to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

You may have heard of Grice, a member of an anti-government group in the Oklahoma panhandle called “God’s Misfits,” because he was recently the fifth member of the group to be charged with the murder of a pair of Kansas women in connection with a custody battle.

But the custody dispute is only part of the story. It appears the Misfits may have embraced reckless and vengeful violence as an extension of their apocalyptic religious beliefs that children are property and that no government or other human institution can interfere in parental authority. ...

What should we make of “God’s Misfits?”

That’s the name Oklahoma authorities say a small antigovernment group who held worship services in their homes called themselves. Four of these “misfits” have been charged with the kidnapping and murder of a pair of southwest Kansas women missing since March 30.

To recap a sad story, the women — Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley, both of Hugoton — were on their way to pick up Butler’s kids at a place called Four Corners in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The spot is little more than an intersection of two highways, about 50 miles southwest of Hugoton. The Saturday morning trip was part of a complicated, and what investigators would later call “problematic,” custody dispute Butler was having with the children’s paternal grandmother, Tifany Adams. ...

It’s been four months since the police raid on the Marion County Record, but new revelations are deepening our understanding of what may come to be regarded as a signal moment in the history of American journalism. The more we know about the newspaper raid, the more alarmed we should be, because the stench just keeps growing.

The story is about freedom of the press, of course.

But it’s also much more. ...