No, but some of you are
There is a scene I’ve long misremembered from Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Mrs. Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich) is having drinks with Chief Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy).
Mrs. Bertholt : You see, I have a mission with the Americans, as Mr. Perkins can tell you.
Judge Dan Haywood : Oh, what is that?
Mrs. Bertholt : To convince you that we’re not all monsters.
“No,” Haywood replies sadly, “but some of you are.”
That last line is neither in the script nor in the film. It must come from my inner monologue when I first saw the scene. For that is how I remembered it for decades until I rewatched a DVD of Judgment. I recalled it again last night.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Tuesday sentenced Kyle Young, an Iowa HVAC technician and Donald Trump fan, to 86 months in prison for his violent assault against former Washington, DC, police officer Michael Fanone and other officers during the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Young brought his 16-year-old son to the riot following Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally.
Young pleaded guilty in May to felony assault for his part in attacking police in the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace tunnel that day. Young helped drag Fanone into the crowd where he was beaten and shocked with a taser Young handed another rioter. Fanone lost consciousness and suffered a heart attack (CNN):
“On January 6, the violence was you,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson told Young before handing down the sentence, adding that he was a “one man wrecking ball” that day who attacked Fanone “under the whirling banner of a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ flag.”
“You were not prosecuted for being a Trump supporter. You were not arrested or charged and you will not be sentenced for exercising your first amendment rights,” she said to Young. “You are not a political prisoner … You were trying to stop the singular thing that makes America America, the peaceful transfer of power. That’s what ‘Stop the Steal’ meant.”
Fanone was in the courtroom for the sentencing (Washington Post):
Fanone resigned from the D.C. police late last year, saying fellow officers turned on him for speaking so publicly about the Capitol attack and former president Donald Trump’s role in it. In court Tuesday, Fanone directly confronted his attacker, telling Young, “I hope you suffer.”
“The assault on me by Mr. Young cost me my career,” Fanone said. “It cost me my faith in law enforcement and many of the institutions I dedicated two decades of my life to serving.”
[…]
Young has a long criminal history. While in prison for producing meth, he faced repeated sanctions for violence. His attorney said that after a difficult childhood, Young had straightened out his life, gotten married, raised four children and started working in HVAC installation. Until Jan. 6, he hadn’t been arrested in a dozen years, his attorney said.
Berman noted that while perhaps Young has since become a good husband and father, she sees a continued potential for more violence, the Post reports. Trump and his allies, Berman added, are “cagily predicting or even outright calling for violence in the streets” should he face criminal charges in multiple criminal investigations.
“If I could take it back, I would,” Young said. “Whatever you give me as a punishment I accept, and I probably deserve it,” he told Berman.
Fanone described the moments following the sentencing to CNN.
“And when I was walking back from the podium delivering my victim impact statement, an individual who was seated with other relatives of Mr. Young stood up and called me a piece of shit,” Fanone recounted.
U.S. Marshals escorted the man from the courthouse.
Fanon continued, “A lot of the family members and a lot of the defendants in these cases that are expressing a degree of remorse in order to hopefully gain some leniency from the judge, as was in this case, Mr. Young expressed some degree of remorse. His mother stood up and tried to apologize to me in the courtroom. And then later on as I was leaving the courthouse, his mother and several other individuals who were seated with her in the courtroom again called me a piece of shit.”
“In reality, there’s no remorse there.”
Trump fans are not all monsters.
UPDATE:
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