Max McCoy, Kansas Reflector

I hated high school.

So I ditched as much class as I could and spent my time racing muscle cars on Route 66 outside of my hometown of Baxter Springs and pursuing other misadventures. I was always reading, though, and in between repairing blown head gaskets and thrown timing chains I had my nose in books, trash and treasure alike, from “The Monkey Wrench Gang” to Hemingway and Harper Lee. My high school guidance counselor told me I should give up my dreams of being a writer and join the Navy instead. I managed to graduate from high school by the intervention of a school superintendent who reckoned I was smarter than I looked and allowed me to test out of some required classes. I still have my graduation photo around someplace, me at 17 in a cap and gown and leaning against the hood of an old GTO.

Later I went to college and washed out after a semester or two and then gave it another try after a couple of years and did better. I eventually graduated from a four-year public university in Kansas and then got an advanced degree and spent some years as an investigative reporter at daily newspapers and published a couple of dozen books with New York houses. I sometimes thought about calling my old high school guidance counselor to gauge her reaction but always thought better of it because, after all, it wasn’t bad advice, considering.

But high school today? It makes my blood run cold.

I wouldn’t last 10 minutes.

Sartre was wrong. Hell used to be other people. Now it’s high school.

I’m convinced of this because I’ve been following the news coverage of Lawrence High School. Just imagine you’re a student at Lawrence High (go Chesty the Lion!) and every homework assignment, email, photo, and chat on your school-supplied device is being monitored by artificial intelligence for indicators of drug and alcohol use, anti-social behavior, and suicidal inclinations.

That’s been the reality since last November, when the district began a $162,000 contract with Gaggle, a Dallas-based student safety technology company to provide around-the-clock surveillance. If a word or an image triggers an alert in the AI software, the result could range from the student being sent to an administrator to being referred to online counseling to getting a visit from local police.

The district says Gaggle is a tool to increase the safety and welfare of its students and staff. That’s an admirable goal, because suicide is the second leading cause of death for youths 15-19, according to the National Institute for Mental Health. In Kansas, the suicide rate among young people has outpaced the national average, according to the Kansas Health Institute.

“With Gaggle, our district is better equipped to proactively identify students who are at risk for potential unsafe behaviors, provide support where needed, and foster a safer school environment,” according to the USD 497 website.

Gaggle claims that it has saved an “estimated” 5,790 student lives between 2018 and 2023. It did this, according to its website, by analyzing 28 billion student items and flagging 162 million of those for review.

AI surveillance flags “concerning content” on school-issued devices and software accounts for review and blocks potentially harmful content, according to its website. Expert human review, it says, helps district officials to take action before students harm themselves or others, and in severe situations it alerts “district-appointed” contacts, even after hours or on weekends. If no district representative is available, the police might be summoned.

What Gaggle is selling is an antidote for fear — for administrators, for parents, for students — in exchange for civil liberties. It’s difficult to argue with 5,790 lives saved, if you take it at face value, but I have my doubts about that number.

At what point is the safety you think you’re buying for students actually doing harm in unintended ways? Won’t teachers avoid assignments that challenge students to consider real-world problems like violence, depression and suicide? Won’t students learn just to keep their emotions to themselves, instead of confiding in a teacher or another trusted adult? What about the chilling effect on student creativity and expression?

Gaggle is the thought police for K-12 campuses.

Lawrence school board president Kelly Jones confers with principal Quentin Rials during an April 19, 2024, meeting with student journalists about their concerns with the district’s use of spyware. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

It would be easy to describe what’s happening to students at Lawrence High School as Orwellian, but that would be an easy and not exactly fitting metaphor. It does resemble in general the dystopian novels we used to be assigned to read in high school — “1984” and “Brave New World” — but a more accurate comparison is to a science fiction novella you may have never heard of.

In Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” published in 1956 and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2002, a predictive policing system is used to arrest people before they have the chance to commit the crime they are expected to. Dick’s story — like the use of Gaggle — pits authoritarianism and conformity against creativity and individual liberty.

Just consider what happened to photography students at Lawrence High School shortly after Gaggle was introduced. Nearly an entire class, reported the student newspaper, was called in to explain to administrators the contents of their art portfolios.

“To have administrators reach out to a student,” editor-in-chief Maya Smith wrote in February, “a file in their Google account must be in what Gaggle calls ‘red zone,’ whether it be a photo, document or video. For photography students, photos for various projects were flagged for what was deemed ‘nudity.’ ”

But, Smith reported, none of the students said there was nudity in their work. It was difficult to discuss the images with administrators because the files had been removed from the student accounts, so even the creators couldn’t see them.

Much of what we know about Gaggle at Lawrence High has come from the student newspaper, the Budget. Its enterprising staff of student journalists questioned whether the district’s use of Gaggle was proper under the First Amendment, the Kansas Shield Law and the Kansas Student Publications Act. Newsgathering is a constitutionally protected activity and those in authority shouldn’t have access to a journalist’s notes, photos and other unpublished work.

“People in authority can violate your rights while believing they are protecting you,” the Budget staff wrote in explaining their coverage. “It’s up to you to protect your work process and product. Adults didn’t tell us to fight the good fight. We did it ourselves.”

The staff also reported that when Gaggle flags an email, it stops delivery, which could delay students seeking help. This concern was echoed by their journalism adviser, Barbara Tholen, when earlier this month the district voted to renew Gaggle’s contract, at $53,000. Tholen said a student had shared her thoughts in an email to a trusted teacher, only to have the email rerouted to an administrator.

“Imagine the person that student trusted most with news of their struggles never knowing to reach back out to them with words of comfort,” Tholen told the Lawrence school board, as reported by the Lawrence Times. “We need students to share concerns openly with us — that saves lives.”

The district reached an agreement in April with Budget staff to remove Gaggle from the devices of student journalists. But with the renewal of the contract, the rest of the student body has no such reprieve. A school board member made it clear that students and staff had no expectation of privacy when using district-issued devices. As Reflector intern Grace Hills reported, “Gaggled” has become a new verb in the Lawrence school district.

The question of student surveillance is made more difficult by a lack of clear data on whether it works and if so, whether the collateral damage to privacy is justified. School officials across the country defend the use of such surveillance by arguing that if it saves just one life, it’s worth it. But is it worth it if it turns schools into virtual prisons?

“Through a careful review of the existing evidence, and through interviews with dozens of school staff, parents and others,” wrote a group of Rand researchers in February, “we found that AI based monitoring, far from being a solution to the persistent and growing problem of youth suicide, might well give rise to more problems than it seeks to solve.”

Surveillance software, which became prevalent during the pandemic, may disproportionately target minority students, according to a 2021 piece in the Conversation. According to reported Fast Company magazine, Gaggle previously flagged the words “gay” and “lesbian” in assignments and chat messages.

And about those estimated 5,790 student lives that Gaggle claims to have saved? I asked the company to share its methodology with me. It seemed a suspiciously exact number for an estimate. It also seemed out of proportion, considering there are fewer than 10,000 suicide deaths of those ages 10-24 each year, as of 2018, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Each of our Possible Student Situations (PSSs), which are the highest priority alerts our safety team receives, are reviewed by the head of our Safety Team against a number of different criteria that include nature of the alert, context around the alert, and if the alert resulting [sic] in school or district leaders providing intervention or support that prevented a student death,” Shelby McIntosh Goldman, Gaggle’s vice president of marketing and research, told me. “If the incident meets all criteria, it is counted as a life saved (and yes, counts are exact and tracked annually.) The classification also goes through a secondary audit to create as much inter-rater reliability as possible.”

That’s a lot of “Minority Report” verbiage that says it’s a guess.

And what about Gaggle’s failures? Does it count lives lost?

“By ‘live lost’ I’m assuming you’re asking about situations where the Gaggle Safety Team received an alert but intervention or support did not prevent a student death,” McIntosh Goldman said. “We haven’t received any feedback indicating that occurred in the five plus years that we’ve been tracking lives saved, but due to student privacy issues there is no way for us to confirm that.”

That last sentence represents a positively Orwellian decline in the use of the English language. Tortured prose aside, wouldn’t keeping track of tragedies on their watch be just as important to Gaggle, and more accurate, than guessing at number of lives saved? But then, I’m not trying to sell districts on around-the-clock student surveillance.

The erosion of student privacy by Gaggle and other educational spyware firms, such as Bark and Gnosis IQ, should be of concern to anybody who takes their Bill of Rights seriously. Spyware represents a grave threat to the student press and free speech on campus. It also conditions students to expect government surveillance and may create an assumption that nothing a student does at school — or at home — should be beyond the authority of administrators.

When I was in high school, challenging authority meant cutting class and doing burnouts in front of school. About the only surveillance I was subject to was the speed gun of the local cops.

There were a few teachers I knew I could trust, and that was enough.

But who do you trust in a red zone?

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.

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.”

How neatly Ogle summed up a cynical — and dangerous — campaign strategy. What recently would have been beyond the pale is now embraced, after Donald Trump’s May 30 convictions in the New York hush money trial, as street cred for politicians. The bar just keeps getting lower in American politics. If it gets much lower, we’ll all be in the gravel pit with Cricket.

Ogle is among five GOP hopefuls vying to fill the 2nd District seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, who is not seeking reelection. The district represents most of eastern Kansas, with the exception of portions of the Kansas City metro area and Lawrence. There are also two Democrats running, including Nancy Boyda, who held the seat for one term, until 2009.

Ogle pleaded guilty to aggravated domestic battery for choking a family member and interference with a law enforcement officer after a drunken Christmas morning domestic dispute in 2019 at his Topeka home, according to court records. Police had been summoned by a family member who said Ogle was inside with children, had access to a handgun, and was making threats. Police subdued Ogle with rubber bullets and in the course of the arrest, according to reports, fatally shot one of his dogs because it was deemed a threat to officers.

An Army veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom and a member of the Kansas Army National Guard who retired at the rank of major, Ogle is the service officer of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1650 in Topeka, according to the organization’s website. In the KSNT interview, he blamed the drunken Christmas morning domestic dispute on his inability to adjust to civilian life following his overseas deployment.

Ogle did not respond to requests to talk with me about the incident.

But on a recent social media post, he disputed KSNT’s reporting.

“Yesterday KSNT news reported that I had choked my wife,” Ogle said in a video posted to Facebook on June 5. “I did not say that. What I said was the physical evidence did not match up with me choking anybody on Christmas morning of 2019 given the fact that I am, or was, a United States Army combative instructor.”

Does that mean if he meant to choke someone, they’d be dead? Or at least signs of major trauma? In the video, he doesn’t elaborate, but that’s sure what it sounds like. And where’s the remorse? He says he pleaded guilty only in order to settle the criminal case and be allowed to see his children.

“That is a choice I had to make during COVID and the suspension of the Constitution of the United States and the suspension of the Constitution of the State of Kansas,” Ogle said in the video. “These are realities when we depart, people have to make horrible decisions when our government departs from the Constitution.”

In the post, Ogle asserted “the courts are not just corrupt in New York, the courts are corrupt everywhere.”

While he stopped short of declaring his own case was corrupt, he didn’t have to. The implication is clear. He pleaded guilty but, you know, he wasn’t really guilty, because he just couldn’t fight the system and he took the hit for his kids’ sake.

Court records indicate Ogle spent 55 days in jail and, after entering the guilty plea, was given a two-year suspended sentence. He was advised of the prohibition against carrying a firearm. He was discharged from probation a year early. He told KSNT he hopes for an expungement of his record.

Those convicted of state or federal felonies are barred from voting in Kansas, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, unless their civil rights have been restored upon completion of their sentence. Felons are not prohibited from running for federal office, however, because the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of a disqualification for criminal history. Article 1 says representatives must be at least 25 years old, have been a citizen for seven years and live in the state they seek to represent.

Ogle has run for office before. In 2013, he won 32% of the vote as a Libertarian candidate for Topeka mayor. Although Ogle lost, the Libertarian Party of Kansas considered his numbers a win.

“Mike, with the guidance of his campaign manager Bob Cooper, ran a highly professional, spirited and organized campaign,” state party chairman Al Terwelp said. “The Ogle campaign did the LPKS proud. Mike ran on a great platform of issues that expressed the positive solutions Libertarians can bring to local government.”

I’ll bet the Libertarians are glad Ogle switched parties.

There is no hint of professionalism or a platform built on issues in Ogle’s nascent GOP run. Instead, he has latched onto the politics of grievance and hitched his star to the fall of democracy.

There are some courts and judges that are, without a doubt, corrupt, even in Kansas. Bill W. Lyerla, a magistrate judge in Galena, pleaded guilty in 2016 to embezzlement. But to say American courts are corrupt everywhere defames the institution that, while flawed, represents the best hope for justice we’re likely to find while still walking the earth. Such an accusation, from a candidate for Congress, also panders to the Trump cult, is intellectually lazy, and flirts with the kind of political chaos that plagues much of the world.

Nobody likes losing. Whether it’s an election or a court case, losing has consequences that range from the irritating to the catastrophic. It can be a growth experience, if you let it. But if we don’t agree to a shared set of rules — if our candidates declare that courts and elections are rigged, that the only fair contest is one in which they win, then they are undermining democracy itself. Democracy is in the details — the shared rules that we agree to follow in order to be self-governing.

“Stay tuned,” Ogle tells us in another Facebook post. “The powers that be want me destroyed and are grasping at straws.”

Who does that sound like?

There is a good chance Ogle will be defeated in the Aug. 6 primary, perhaps by former Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Trump toady and the best-known of the GOP 2nd District candidates. But the damage has already been done because self-pitying felons have become emboldened to run for federal office, even in boring Kansas. And there is the terrifying possibility, however unlikely it seems now, that Ogle could win the primary and then the seat.

You could vote for two felons, if you want.

I should make a distinction here between violent felons, those like Ogle, and the many individuals who have been convicted of felony charges based on nonviolent crimes with no victim, such as possession of marijuana, in the Sunflower State. Bring that Rocky Mountain high back with you from Colorado and you’re likely to lose your voting rights, too, if convicted.

There is also the matter of historical figures who were imprisoned for nothing more than stating their beliefs, and there is no better (or I should say worse) example of this than Eugene V. Debs.

Debs was a Socialist, a pacifist, a labor activist and a co-founder of the Wobblies. He was also a candidate for president five times. On his third try, in 1908, he gave a speech in Girard, Kansas, that became one of his best-known.

“When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other’s throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other,” Deb said, “we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends.

Debs gave that speech in Girard because it was the home of the Appeal to Reason, a Socialist newspaper that had, in 1910, more than half a million subscribers. The Appeal’s writers included Debs, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Mother Jones and Helen Keller, among others. Its readership declined after the first world war, but it’s difficult to overestimate its influence on early 20th Century political thought in America.

He was also called a “traitor” by President Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to America’s involvement in World War I.

In 1916, Debs made a speech at Canton, Ohio, in which he urged resistance to the draft.

“They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and slaughter yourselves at their command,” Debs said. “You have never had a voice in the war. The working class who make the sacrifices, who shed the blood, have never yet had a voice in declaring war.”

Debs was charged with sedition and found guilty.

At his sentencing hearing, Debs delivered a moving plea.

“Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity,” he said. “I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time, they will come into their own.”

Years before, Debs said, he had recognized his kinship with all living things and realized he was no better than the meanest among us.

“While there is a lower class, I am in it,” he said, “and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison and disenfranchised from voting for life. He ran again for president, from his jail cell at the federal pen at Atlanta, and garnered about a million votes. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence to time served — and received Debs at the White House.

Debs died of heart failure in 1926, at the age of 70.

No matter what you think of Socialism — and in the early 1900s many Americans were talking Socialism, including here in Kansas — consider the power of his public statements while being prosecuted for speaking his conscience. He asks for no immunity, seeks no special favor and uses the opportunity only to plead his philosophy.

Contrast that with the whining, self-serving, grievance-filled utterances of Trump. The trial was rigged, the election was stolen. “I’m a very innocent man,” he sputters, as if there are degrees of innocence. His wailing is that of a political Grendel seeking to undo us with chaos, misdirected anger and vengeance. Horrible decisions must be made, the Trump chorus murmurs, ignoring the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. All is corrupt.

“Felons, Donald Trump should be an inspiration,” Ogle posted Thursday on Facebook. “Sometimes you have to stand tall and assert your self-worth no matter who would disparage.”

An inspiration?

Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham Jail is an inspiration. So are Aleksei Navalny’s final letters from a Russian prison. Nothing Trump has said or done comes close to being moving, profound, or exhibiting a hint of original thought. His Tweets are an embarrassment, his speeches incoherent, and his actions abhorrent.

We must free ourselves from the monsters that have come creeping from the political shadows. To drive them out, we must embrace the disinfecting sunlight of fact. The 2020 election was not stolen and Trump’s trial was not rigged. As for Ogle — well, I hope he finds some peace from whatever demons he brought back from his deployment. But nobody who has pleaded guilty to the felony of aggravated battery for choking his wife deserves a place in Congress.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Grice had turned 31 a few days earlier, so maybe he was thinking about his place in this world — and perhaps the next. We don’t know exactly what was on his mind when he walked into the historic red brick courthouse at the center of town to deliver his bundle of papers, but the story told by the 35-page document is of a world vastly different from the one the rest of us inhabit.

Grice’s world was based not on reality but instead spun from poisonous conspiracy theories, half-baked legal hypotheses and religious delusion. I’m assuming he must have walked into the Cimarron County Courthouse at Boise (pronounced “Boyce”) City because he lived with his wife and three kids only 16 miles to the northeast, at Keyes, a town of just a few hundred people. There’s no indication in the documents of whether he delivered them in person, or mailed them, but I imagine he would have visited in person.

We know Grice sent copies of the “renunciation” document to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken by certified mail. The return receipt is in the filing.

“I am a creation of nature and natures God,” he declared in the courthouse document, in the curious spelling and punctuation that has become the legal patois of the sovereign citizen movement. “A people, a man, found alive and living, commonly known by my family, friends and neighbors as Paul Grice and so here I (w)ill stand.”

He had dominion over all things, he asserted. His three children were his “God-given property” and subject to none other. He lived not in Oklahoma, but in the “Oklahomat Republic,” and the United States had been under martial law since the Civil War. The 14th Amendment, which most of us understand as granting citizenship to formerly enslaved persons and guaranteeing due process and equal protection under the law, had actually made slaves of us all. The Federal Reserve was illegitimate, the U.S. had become a corporation that sold its citizens as debt to foreign powers, and 1930s Pennsylvania congressman Louis T. McFadden was right when he said there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

He also claimed state and federal authorities, in cooperation with judges and attorneys, were engaged in child kidnapping and trafficking.

All of it is nonsense, but it’s the kind of nonsense associated with anti-government rhetoric from the “sovereign citizen” movement, topped with QAnon conspiracy theories.

“Sovereign citizens believe they are not under the jurisdiction of the federal government and consider themselves exempt from U.S. law,” Travis McAdam, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. “And that is all based on a variety of conspiracy theories and falsehoods they use to justify their beliefs and activities.”

The sovereign movement has been around for decades and has typically been linked to militias, McAdam said, but recently it has gained strength from QAnon. Although the movement has usually been seen as irksome by public officials, because of the copious court filings that are a favorite tactic of sovereigns to avoid paying taxes or confound the legal system, sovereign resistance has sometimes taken violent forms. The FBI classifies the movement as a domestic terrorism threat.

Terry Nichols, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber, was part of the movement. In 1992, Nichols — like Grice — attempted to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

“I am no longer a citizen of the corrupt political corporate state of Michigan and the United States of America,” he wrote in a letter to officials.

Such attempts aren’t legally recognized. You can only renounce your citizenship, according to the State Department website, from outside the U.S., and only by following established procedure.

“We’ve seen more and more sovereign groups trying to recruit people who are involved (in disputes) with child protective services,” McAdam said. “They really try to use the idea of this is an illegitimate government, this is an illegitimate court system trying to take your kids away, and maybe we can help.”

On April 24, Grice became the fifth Misfit to be arrested.

He faces the same charges as his former prayer partners, Tifany Adams, Tad Cullum, and Cole and Cora Twombly. Adams was in a bitter custody dispute with the mother of her grandchildren and, according to court documents in the criminal case, the five were involved in a conspiracy to kidnap and kill. The plan was to ambush the children’s mother, Veronica Butler, and a court-approved supervisor when they came to pick up the children for a birthday party March 30, the day before Easter, the documents say. Both women were from Hugoton, just across the state line in Kansas.

Their car was found abandoned along a dirt lane in Texas County, Oklahoma. Smashed windows, a broken hammer, a purse with a pistol magazine and blood at the scene indicated something violent had taken place. The women were the object of an intense search for two weeks after their disappearance.

The bodies of Butler, 27, and Jilian Kelley, 39, the supervisor, were located following the initial arrests. They had been mothers and church members in their hometown of Hugoton. Their remains were found in a freshly dug hole covered by dirt and hay at a rural property rented by Cullum for grazing cattle. Tifany Adams, according to an affidavit filed by prosecutors, had confessed to participating in the murder of the women.

Affidavits in the case also named Grice as being involved, including helping to block the highway and divert Butler and Kelley’s car. Authorities have not said where Grice was before he was arrested. He was arraigned Wednesday at Texas County District Court at Guymon, Oklahoma. Like his co-defendants, he was denied bond.

“On April 23, 2024, Grice was interviewed and admitted that he was part of the planning and killing of both Butler and Kelley,” an affidavit supporting probable cause for his arrest said. “Grice admitted to (an Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent) that he participated in the killing of Butler and Kelley and their subsequent burial.”

In his manifesto-like filing at Boise City last year, Grice cited a litany of perceived governmental abuses that are common among sovereign citizens and Christian Identity adherents. Grice recalled the April 19, 1993, siege at Waco, Texas, as the “murder ” of 86 men, women and children by agents of the federal government. Part of Timothy McVeigh’s motivation in bombing the Alfred P. Murrah federal building on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City — which killed 168 people and was the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history — was the Waco siege.

“I am not anti-government, anti-military, or anti-America,” Grice claimed in the document. The eccentric capitalization that follows is his: “Quite the contrary. For Generations, My family served the united States of America in both active and inactive service all over the world.”

The sovereign citizen movement began with William Potter Gale, a World War II veteran who formed an anti-tax resistance movement called the California Rangers in the 1960s. Gale also was a key figure in Christian Identity and white supremacy and a founder of the Christian Patriots of the 1980s. At one point, he broadcast his message to radio listeners from a studio in Dodge City. He was convicted of tax crimes, sentenced to prison and died awaiting appeal in 1988.

In the document filed July in Cimarron County, Grice rails against government oversight and regulation, the genetic manipulation of food, vaccines and the United Nations. He does get two things right: The Tuskegee Experiment, in which hundreds of Black men were left untreated for syphilis so the course of the disease could be studied, and Project MK-Ultra, a CIA project in which unsuspecting individuals were given experimental drugs in an attempt at mind control.

Near the end, he references the Book of Revelation.

“I must now also leave Babylon the Great and not partake of her sins any longer lest I receive her plagues,” he writes, “for her sins have reaching unto Heaven, and God will remember her iniquities. May God have mercy on the people of the United States/UNITED STATES!”

“They spell their name and others in all caps or they use weird punctuation,” McAdam said. “They think the Treasury Department has set up these accounts when any child is born, and that somehow there is this corporate account, that exists differently (but represents) the actual child. And so you’ll see in these court filings where they’ll think that OK, if I just get the punctuation right, if I get the capitalization right, I’m going to be able to reclaim my sovereign status.”

It’s as if the sovereigns believe there is a kind of magic code to legal documents, that if only they get the weird spelling and capitalization right, all of their problems will be solved. But there doesn’t appear to be a Sovereign Citizens Stylebook, and every document looks a bit different.

Some sovereign citizens also believe that the only legitimate governmental entity is the state, but they tend to view each state as a republic. McAdam said, however, he did not know why Grice spelled Oklahoma as “Oklahomat Republic.”

Reading Grice’s manifesto left me wondering how many others out there believe what he does, or at least what he professed to. McAdam said the SPLC had not heard of God’s Misfits until news broke about the arrests. He also said the center doesn’t have a way to track actual members in a movement, but that it was pretty clear the sovereign citizens were growing.

McAdam, who works for the SPLC from his home in Montana, compared the movement to a prairie twister.

“Many of these movements are like a funnel cloud or tornado, where way up in the clouds at the big end of the funnel, you have people who get pulled in for all kinds of reasons,” McAdam said. “They kind of spin out and back in again. But then there are people who really start to go down into the funnel. And as they do that, they become steeped in these conspiracy theories and worldviews. And if you go all the way through down to the ground and pop out, well those are people like Timothy McVeigh.”

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Butler’s Saturday visitations with her children were court-ordered to be supervised, according to court documents, and on that day Jilian Kelley was the approved supervisor. Butler was 27 and Kelley, 39. The women knew each other, but it’s unclear from the official accounts if they were friends. The plan was to meet Adams at 10 a.m. at Four Corners, pick up the kids, and then go on to a birthday party.

The women never made it to Four Corners.

When the women didn’t show up at the birthday party, Butler’s family began a search, and shortly after noon they found the women’s car down a dirt path just off Oklahoma Highway 95 and Road L, south of Elkhart, Kansas — but still in Texas County, Oklahoma. It was a spot Butler would likely have known well. Just down the road is the Yarbrough School, where in 2015 according to school officials Butler was the only graduating senior.

What was found at the scene was alarming.

“An examination of the vehicle and area surrounding the vehicle found evidence of a severe injury,” according to an affidavit sworn by a special agent with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. “Blood was found on the roadway and edge of the roadway. Butler’s glasses were also found in the roadway south of the vehicle, near a broken hammer. A pistol magazine was found inside Kelley’s purse at the scene, but no pistol was found.”

Adams, according to the investigator, told investigators she had called Butler at 9 that morning to confirm plans, but that Butler said something had come up, so the pickup was off. The children had spent the night before with a couple named Barrett and Lacy Cook. Believing that Butler had canceled the visitation, Adams said, she allowed the children to remain that morning with the Cooks.

The Cooks are identified in court documents as belonging to “God’s Misfits” and as having had religious services in their home. They are not described as suspects. Another individual identified as a “misfit” in court documents is Paul Grice. It is unclear whether authorities considered Grice a suspect.

Hunter McKee, an OSBI public information officer, referred my questions about the case and what authorities had learned about “God’s Misfits” to court records in Texas County District Court at Guymon.

Two weeks after the women went missing, a heavily armed contingent of law enforcement made four arrests in Oklahoma’s Cimarron and Texas counties. Those taken into custody were Tifany Adams, 54, the paternal grandmother of the children in the custody dispute; her boyfriend, Tad Bert Cullum, 43; Cole Earl Twombly, 50; and Cora Gayle Twombly, 44. The Twomblys own a cattle company at Boise City, Oklahoma. All were members of “God’s Misfits,” according to probable cause affidavits filed in Texas County District Court at Guymon.

On April 3, according to court record, agents with the OSBI interviewed the 16-year-old daughter of Cora Twombly.

“CW stated she had overhead group conversations related to Butler not protecting her children from (alleged sexual abuse),” the affidavit said. “CW advised that she was told by Cora that Adams, Cullum, Cora, Cole, and Paul Grice were involved in the deaths” of the women. “She described (them) as being part of an anti-government group that had a religious affiliation. Through OSBI investigation it was learned that they call their group God’s Misfits. Regular meetings are held weekly at Twombly’s and the home of Barrett and Lacy Cook.”

CW said she asked Cora what happened and was told “things did not go as planned,” according to the affidavit, “but that they would not have to worry about (Butler) again. CW was told that Cora and Cole blocked the road to stop Butler and Kelley and divert them to where Adams, Cullum and Grice were. CW asked about Kelley and why she had to die and was told by Cora that she wasn’t innocent either, as she had supported Butler.”

A previous attempt had been made to kill Butler, the girl said, in February, but the five misfits — Adams, Cullum, Cole, Cora and Grice — could not get Butler to leave her home. One plan, CW said, was to drop an anvil through her windshield while she was driving, making it look like an accident “because anvils regularly fall off work vehicles.”

The children’s father, Wrangler Rickman, was in a rehabilitation facility at the end of March, according to court documents. A court hearing on the custody case was scheduled for April 17, and Butler was expected to receive unsupervised visitation.

While an OSBI agent interviewed CW and her brother at Kerrick, Texas, the Twomblys arrived and attempted to intervene, according to the affidavits.

“Cora was verbally aggressive and was very upset with your affiant” and said she had not granted access to her children. “Cole exited the vehicle armed with a handgun in a holster on his belt.”

The OSBI investigation revealed that Adams had bought five stun guns at a store in Guymon on March 23. In addition, the affidavits said, she had previously bought “burner” phones for the group to use.

Investigators tracked signals from the phones on the morning after the disappearance to a property owned by Jamie Beasley, 8.5 miles away. There they discovered a hole that had been freshly dug and then filled with dirt and hay. Beasley, according to the affidavit, told investigators that Cullum had cleared some concrete and done other dirt work March 29 with a skid steer, a “Bobcat” type of small front loader. Cullum also rented the pasture for grazing cattle and had around-the-clock access.

Two bodies were recovered in rural Texas County on April 14, according to the OSBI, but the location was not released. Two days later, the Office of the Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner said the remains had been positively identified as Butler and Kelley.

On Wednesday, an Oklahoma judge denied bail for the four defendants, entered not guilty pleas on their behalf, and ordered them to be represented by public defenders. Prosecutors also alleged in a motion to deny bond that Adams had confessed to the killings.

All face two counts of murder in the first degree; two counts of kidnapping; and conspiracy to commit murder. The murder counts are punishable by death or life in prison without parole, according to the criminal complaints.

It is, of course, important to remember the defendants are innocent until proven guilty. But looking over the court filings, there is a prodigious amount of evidence against these individuals, who seem bound together by their hatred of the government and their twisted interpretation of faith.

Cole Twombly seemed to be the most outspoken, at least on social media, and his posts went right up to April 12, when he described celebrating his 50th birthday. In addition to ranch life, he posted or reposted on Facebook about Cliven Bundy and his bloody standoff with federal agents over grazing rights; passed along an Ayn Rand quote about it being impossible for innocent men to live without breaking government’s laws; and an odd and chilling post about a toy made to resemble the armored “Killdozer” that Marvin Heemeyer used to level city hall and other structures in 2004 at Granby, Colorado. There’s also a lot of hateful stuff that is anti-vax, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-liberal.

“Everyone seems to be talking about the weaponization of the FBI from the raid at Mar A Lago to the pro life activist being swatted in Pennsylvania in front of his screaming children,” Cole Twombly says in one post. “The FBI doesn’t even possess a congressional charter to exist. So why do governors have to allow them in their states.”

On Oct. 5, he thanked “the Keyes community and the Misfits” for a prayer meeting that night at a park. “Keyes is claimed for the almighty God through Jesus name !!!,” he posted. “NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING !!!”

It appears “God’s Misfits” have beliefs similar to the sovereign citizen movement, mixed with QAnon conspiracies, although I couldn’t find a coherent ideology on Cole Twombly’s page. So-called sovereign citizens believe a number of wacko things, including that they can ignore laws and court orders because they have freed themselves from an illegitimate and oppressive government.

But that didn’t stop the “Misfits” from accepting government farm subsidies. The EWG Farm Subsidy Database indicates Tifany Adams took at least $134,000 in subsidies since 2013. She took $2,828 in crop rotation payments in October 2023, according to the USDA. Last year, she even was elected chair of the Cimarron County GOP, according to state officials.

So, what to make of “God’s Misfits?”

They have been engaged in the kind of political hate-mongering and misinformation that has driven our country to the edge of political catastrophe, if Cole Twombly’s Facebook page is any indication. This does not mean that everyone who subscribes to right-wing conspiracy theory or is QAnon curious is prone to violence, but violence — especially armed resistance to authority — is fundamental to this kind of political extremism.

Whether the Misfits are guilty of murder or not, they seem to have embraced some of the Seven Deadly Sins, including Pride and Wrath, and broken more than a few commandments. This, while publicly extolling the virtues of American rural life and proclaiming their faith in God.

We should not be afraid of what the Misfits believe, but we should be concerned about their delusions and their fascination with guns and resistance. People are free to think whatever they want, but one can’t help but ponder to what extent the Misfit’s radical beliefs may have fostered violence. Did the unfounded QAnon claims about a vast pedophile ring of Satanists short-circuit their ability to reason?

I am revolted by what the Misfits are accused of having done. More than revolted, actually. The broken hammer, the abandoned car, the pools of blood. There’s not a word for what I’m feeling. It’s not hate, but it’s not far from it. All that “love your enemies” fails me here.

But not everyone.

Kelley was the wife of Heath Kelley, pastor of the Hugoton First Christian Church. On the morning the women’s bodies were found, a service was held at the Hugoton church in which the congregation was asked to pray for the Kelley and Butler families and their children.

The service was streamed on YouTube.

“This is pretty wide reaching,” said Dave Mason, who delivered a sermon on Ecclesiastes. “Obviously our community is hurting and our church is hurting.”

He said Heath Kelley had told him the day before that “one of his great concerns is that the people who have done this crime and taken his wife from him, he’s asking us to remember them in prayer. … So pray for those people. It may be hard. That’s the desire of your pastor.”

The world is watching, he said, to see how the church will react. Father, he said, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.

It will now be up to a court to decide if the Misfits did or not.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

The number of legal guardrails authorities blew through Aug. 11 in their quest to seize computers and terrorize, intentionally or not, the publishers and staff of the Record should be of concern to anyone who cares about democracy. New reporting by KSHB-TV makes it clear that it wasn’t just local authorities who kicked federal and state protections in considering the execution of a search warrant on a newspaper, but that the state’s highest investigative agency, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, knew about the impending raid — and did nothing to stop it.

KSHB obtained texts from former Police Chief Gideon Cody to County Attorney Joel Ensey. In those texts, Cody said he had been in contact with the KBI before the raid and later claimed the KBI was “100 percent” behind him. Other emails obtained previously by KSHB showed a KBI agent was texting Marion police asking if the search warrant on the newspaper had been executed.

Ensey folded like a cheap umbrella in the media storm that followed and revoked the search warrants. Two days after the raid, KBI director Tony Mattivi released a statement in which he said he supported freedom of the press, but that nobody was above the law, including members of the news media.

The KBI has declined to answer questions about how much the agency knew about the raid before it happened, but it seems apparent now they were up to their badges in it. It appears now, however, that the KBI has handed off the investigation to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Recently, the Marion County Record reported CBI agents were in town interviewing those who were associated with the raid, including newspaper staffers and Kari Newell.

In case you’ve forgotten the grubby details that led to the raid, Newell was the restaurant owner seeking a liquor license from the Marion City Council and who had been driving for the past 15 years or so without a license after being busted for drunk driving. It’s understandable that Newell might think her career as a vehicular scofflaw might influence the council’s vote. She was tipped off by her close friend, Cody, the town’s relatively new chief of police, that those busybodies at the newspaper had been checking into her driving record using the Kansas Department of Revenue website, an act that Cody concluded amounted to identity theft and computer crime. That was the basis for the search warrants, signed by magistrate judge Laura Viar, for the newspaper office and the homes of the newspaper publishers and that of a city councilwoman

During the execution of the warrants, the newspaper staff was placed under arrest and made to stand on the sidewalk in the heat outside while the cops rummaged through files and eventually decided to take away computers and other equipment. Meanwhile, at the home of publisher Eric Meyer, police rifled through papers and equipment while his 98-year-old mother, Joan, blistered the walls with a tirade worthy of a teamster.

Joan would die the next day of a heart attack.

During the raid, Cody kept Newell updated on the execution of the warrants. He also left his body cam on during a phone conversation with Newell, at one point calling her “honey.” He also left the camera on while he made a pit stop at the restroom of a local convenience store. Classy.

The Record published its next regular Wednesday edition as scheduled, on Aug. 16, in defiance of the police raid and despite having its equipment seized a few days before. The paper had help from the Kansas Press Association, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations.

Cody had left his role as a captain with the Kansas City, Missouri, police department under a cloud of scrutiny in April and took the job at Marion, a town of fewer than 2,000 in east central Kansas. In early October, after being suspended by the city council, Cody resigned as Marion police chief.

Viar, the magistrate judge, was the target of a disciplinary complaint from a Topeka resident who was outraged Viar would sign off on the warrant. On Dec. 6, the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct said in a letter it had dismissed the complaint, saying there wasn’t evidence of “incompetence.”

That, thus far, is the condensed story of the raid.

Because of the clear threat to press freedom, intense international interest, and reporters interviewing scores of witnesses and filing mounds of open record requests, the raid has become one of the best-documented local police actions in the history of the state. You could spend hours doom scrolling news accounts or binging videos from the day of the raid. The Marion County Record has become, at least for a time, the biggest little newspaper in the world.

It’s obvious that people here and abroad are deeply concerned about press freedom, and properly so. Journalism has been subjected to economic and political stress that we haven’t seen in this country in half a century. But in all this frenzy of journalists covering other journalists, we may have forgotten that the great newspaper raid has implications not just for the media, but for average citizens as well.

Consider for a moment the way local offiicals abused their authority and generally disgraced their offices in the performance of their official duties, both at the time of the raid and since. It’s a sordid tale of local revenge politics, the strutting and bragging of small-town cops, the willingness of a prosecutor and a magistrate to go along, and the failure of state officials who damn well knew better to intervene.

Now imagine that this comedy of terrors is unleashed not on the local newspaper, which is the best equipped of all local institutions to fight back, but is directed instead at a friend or neighbor. Imagine these tactics are used against you or your family while you were exercising your normal law-abiding actions guaranteed by the First Amendment. Imagine being raided for expressing your opinion in a letter to the editor, or for going to church (or for not going to church), or for peaceably assembling at a town hall meeting.

We are fortunate that the majority of officials take their responsibilities and their oaths seriously. Every police officer in Kansas swears or affirms to uphold the Constitution, as does every public official and state employee. It is the first, and the most important, promise any public servant will ever make.

The abuses by the tinpot dictators in Marion have been laid bare by a media spotlight fueled by public outrage. But what also worries me are the abuses perpetrated on ordinary citizens across the country who don’t have barrels of ink or digital platforms with unlimited bandwidth. The public outrage over the illegal raid on the Marion County Record was a justifiable response to a jaw-dropping abuse of power.

But most instances of official misconduct don’t take place in broad daylight on a Friday across the street from the county courthouse in a sleepy little Flint Hills town. No, it happens during traffic stops on hostile highways to frightened individuals who don’t have powerful friends to call for help. It happens in filthy alleys and crowded backrooms, in well-kept homes and cozy apartments, in jails and prisons and anywhere else officials use their power to victimize others.

The remarkable thing about the Marion raid is that local authorities were brazen enough to leverage all of the influence they could muster against an entity regarded as irksome. If this is how a local newspaper, an institution working on behalf of the public interest, is now dealt with, then what hope for justice is there for individuals?

What happened in Marion back in August wasn’t just about freedom of the press. It was about freedom for us all.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.