Evelyn Reynolds

A federal judge denied a request from former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to transfer his Georgia 2020 election interference case from state to federal court on the basis that some of the charged conduct was within the scope of his official duties.The ruling from US district judge Steve Jones on Friday means the prosecution of Meadows brought by the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis stays in superior court in Atlanta, unless Meadows appeals and the decision is reversed by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.“The Court finds insufficient evidence to establish that the gravamen, or a heavy majority of overt acts alleged against Meadows relate to his role as White House Chief of Staff,” the judge wrote in an unusually detailed and extensive 49-page decision.“Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role,” the judge wrote, “he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the indictment are related to any of his official acts.”Last month, the Atlanta-area grand jury handed up a sprawling 41-count indictment against Donald Trump and 18 others, including Meadows, alleging that they violated Georgia’s state Rico statute in their efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.Meadows had sought to remove the case to federal court arguing that the sprawling racketeering charges related to his normal work undertaken as a White House chief of staff, which gave him immunity from prosecution and prevented him from being prosecuted at the state level.But the judge rejected his arguments in a detailed 49-page decision, determining that Meadows did not meet his burden to show that he was acting within his job description when he undertook efforts to benefit Trump as a political candidate rather than Trump as president.“The color of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff did not include working with or working for the Trump campaign,” the judge wrote, “except for simply coordinating the President’s schedule, traveling with the President to his campaign events, and redirecting communications to the campaign.The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.Trump has weighed for weeks whether to file a similar removal motion, and the Guardian has previously reported that the Trump legal team was watching to see how Meadows fared before deciding whether to make a request before their statutory deadline at the end of September.Meadows’s defeat compounds his legal difficulties in Fulton county because his value as a cooperating witness has now diminished, legal experts said. The ruling is also ominous for Trump, who is seen as having a weaker case for removal compared to his former chief of staff.A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBroadly speaking, Jones determined that Meadows could not have undertaken any political actions as part of his official duties because the US constitution does not provide any basis for the executive branch to involve itself in state election and post-election procedures.To determine Meadows’s scope, the judge used the Hatch Act, which plainly prohibits executive branch officials like Meadows from using their official authority to influence or interfere with the results of an election through partisan political activity.The indictment described Meadows as having participated in several so-called overt acts in furtherance of the racket and Meadows had argued that even if one of those acts fell under the scope of his chief of staff role, the case should be transferred to federal court.But the judge interpreted the removal statute differently and he decided that Meadows having a single overt act come under his duties was not enough for the federal court to assume jurisdiction.The more important question was what activities were at the “heart” of Meadows’s participation in the racket and whether those activities as a whole related to the scope of his federal office, the judge wrote, before concluding that they were not.And even if the remaining overt acts were characterized as everyday chief of staff duties like making phone calls or preparing meetings for the purpose of advising the president, the underlying substance of the actions were political in nature and therefore outside his official duties, the judge wrote. More

Former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that she will be seeking re-election in 2024. The 83-year-old Democrat representing California’s 11th district announced the news on Wednesday among volunteers and labor allies in San Francisco.Pelosi went on to tweet about her plans, saying: “Now more than ever our city needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our recovery. Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there, with liberty and justice for ALL. That is why I am running for reelection – and respectfully ask for your vote.”Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco since 1987, served as House speaker twice. Her first tenure as House speaker was from 2007 to 2011, during which she made history by becoming the first female speaker. Pelosi went on to lead the House of Representatives again from 2019 to the beginning of this year.Last November, Pelosi announced that she was stepping down as the leader of the Democratic party after Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives with a narrow 222-212 majority with one vacancy.Her announcement on Wednesday comes amid several politically delicate moments on Capitol Hill, particularly as Democrats prepare to take back control of the House of Representatives. Moreover, it comes as House Republicans entertain the idea of an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden amid a federal investigation into the business dealings of his son Hunter.It also comes as growing questions surround the mental competency of older Capitol Hill leaders including the 80-year-old president, 81-year-old Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and 90-year-old California senator Dianne Feinstein.According to a source close to Pelosi who is familiar with her re-election decision, Pelosi believes that democracy hangs in the balance in the upcoming election as she prepares to help re-elect Biden and appoint House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries as the next House speaker, the Associated Press reported.Throughout Pelosi’s leadership, she helped lead the Democratic party through a series of legislative victories including the passage of the Affordable Care Act under then-president Barack Obama in 2010, as well as legislation surrounding gun violence prevention measures, minimum wage increases.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPelosi has also played a key role in international politics, including becoming the first highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years, as well as securing the votes needed to defeat Republicans’ efforts to disapprove of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. More

The tragedy of Joe Biden is that people see his age, his frailty and his ailing poll numbers and they miss the bigger story. Which is that his has been a truly consequential presidency, even a transformational one. In less than three years, he has built a record that should unify US progressives, including those on the radical left, and devised an economic model to inspire social democratic parties the world over, including here in Britain.Sadly for Biden, politics and government are different things: it takes more than a record of good governance to get reelected. For one thing, voters cast their ballots less as a verdict on the past than as an instruction (or hope) for the future. And the fear, shared by 76% of Americans, according to a poll this week, is that Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, is simply too old to lead them there. Put aside the fact that his near certain opponent in November 2024, Donald Trump, is only three years younger. Trump has a presence and vigour, an ability to project himself, that Biden does not. And that simple fact affects – distorts – the entire way the Biden administration is seen. As one observer puts it, “the vibes are off”.The challenge for Democrats is to use the 14 months between now and election day to get past that, to point out the malignancy of Trump and the danger a second Trump presidency would represent to the republic and the world – and also to make the positive case for what we might call Bidenism. Luckily, that is not a hard case to make.That’s because, though elected to be no more than a calm hand on the tiller, a stopgap, interim leader who might allow the country to steady itself after four years of Storm Donald, Biden has confounded that expectation. He has none of the stage presence of his old boss, Barack Obama – who never had any trouble with vibes – but he can already claim to have achieved much more.Top of the list is, characteristically, something that sounds boring but is of enormous significance: the Inflation Reduction Act, passed last year. That seemingly technocratic piece of legislation actually achieves two epochal goals. First, it hastens the day the US makes the break from fossil fuels – by making clean energy not only the morally superior option for both industry and consumers, but the financially superior one too.It does that through a massive raft of tax breaks, subsidies and incentives all designed to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, ever improving battery technology, geothermal plants and the like, along with tax credits aimed at making electric cars irresistible even to those middle-American consumers more concerned about their wallets than the burning planet.The estimated cost of $386bn is huge, but that’s not a limit on how much Biden has committed to spend. On the contrary, if the demand is there for solar panels or electric vans, Biden’s law obliges the US government to keep spending. A calculation by Credit Suisse reckoned the figure could rise to $800bn, which will in turn unleash $1.7tn in private-sector spending on green technology. Small wonder that everyone from environmental activists to Goldman Sachs hailed the act as a “gamechanger” in the fight to tackle the climate emergency.But the second goal of the legislation is almost as significant. Biden insisted that this surge in green manufacturing would happen inside the US, thereby reviving industrial towns and cities in decline since the 1980s. It is US factories that are getting the subsidies to build all this clean tech – alongside an earlier, huge package of infrastructure spending – restoring jobs to workers who had long been written off.The Inflation Reduction Act is the centrepiece of Bidenomics, an approach that resurrects Democratic principles discarded in the Bill Clinton years, seemingly for ever: old-school industrial policy centred on an activist state making serious public investment in manufacturing; muscular regulation of corporations; and warm encouragement of unionised labour. (“When unions win, Americans across the board win,” says Biden.) Which is one reason why the AFL-CIO trade union, echoing Goldman Sachs, also hailed the act as a “gamechanger” for working people.The passage of the legislation – all the more remarkable given a Senate then split 50-50 between the parties – and its impact are set out in an outstanding new book on the Biden presidency, The Last Politician by Franklin Foer. He describes how Biden, whose hands were already full with the Covid pandemic and the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, was not content simply to be a caretaker manager, troubleshooting crises. Instead, “he set out to transform the country through some of the biggest spending bills that have ever been proposed”, Foer told me when we spoke this week.The result is that Biden has “redirected the paradigm” of US economic life in a way that will affect Americans “for a generation”. While Obama and Clinton were “deferential to markets”, says Foer, Biden has reversed “the neoliberal consensus” in place since the Ronald Reagan era. He doesn’t leave corporations alone; he gets stuck in, taking on de-facto monopolies, reviving “anti-trust” policies that had long been abandoned. (“Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism,” insists Biden. “It’s exploitation.”) “Like Reagan, Biden is resetting the economic trajectory of the nation,” adds Foer. “In fact, as a matter of substance, he is the most transformational president since Reagan.”Internationally, the change is not as dramatic, but Biden is credited with bringing stability after the chaos and dictator-coddling of the Trump years and, especially, for building and maintaining a western alliance in support of Ukraine as it defends itself against Russian imperialism. Others admire his handling of China: robust, without crossing the line where a cold war turns hot.There’s more to the Biden record than this, of course. Inflation is not at European levels, but Americans are feeling the cost of higher prices. And plenty had their confidence in the president shaken two summers ago, when they saw images of a scrambled, chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, to say nothing of the climate activists who cannot forgive his approval of an oil-drilling project in Alaska. His poll numbers point to a grim truth about politics: that it can be a cruel business. No matter how strong his record, Biden looks older and shakier than Trump and he is less entertaining. And those may be reasons enough for him to lose.For now, the Biden presidency is a reminder of why politics matters, why political skills matter, including the dark, sometimes ugly arts of getting legislation passed, often through painful compromise. It also suggests a possible, unexpected formula for success, one Labour might study closely: campaign in reassuring prose, but govern in radical poetry. Biden was no one’s idea of a fire-breathing leftist: that’s one reason why he was able to win. But once you’re in, you can dare to be bold. Once you have power, be sure to use it.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. He will host a Guardian Live event with Gordon Brown on Tuesday 26 September at 7pm BST. The event will be live in London and livestreamed – book tickets here More

Republicans attacking Joe Biden for being too old to serve a second term are “one-trick ponies”, the US president’s campaign co-chair said.“Republicans are a one-trick pony talking about the president’s age, that’s all they talk about,” Cedric Richmond told CNN.Biden, 80, is the oldest president ever. He will turn 82 after the election next year. If he completed a second four-year term, he would be 86 on leaving office. His likely opponent – Republican former US president Donald Trump – is 77.Polling shows that more than two-thirds of the American public think Biden is too old to serve an effective second term, with smaller proportions thinking the same of the 91-times indicted Trump.Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman, told CNN: “It’s now time to go into campaign mode and talk about the president’s accomplishments because they are great accomplishments.“Beating the NRA [to pass gun control reform]. Passing [an] infrastructure [spending package] which no other president could do, although they promised it.”Democrats lost the US House last year but only narrowly. They kept the Senate, after a campaign focused on warning of extremism in Trump’s Republican party.Richmond said: “We have to be solely focused on what not only this president and vice-president but what this Congress has done, the Democratic Senate and the Democratic House when we had it.“And I think that that’s going to prove to be a winning formula once again for all Democrats and for President Biden and Vice-President [Kamala] Harris.”Earlier, a CNN poll showed Biden and Trump in a dead heat in a general election. The poll also returned a low approval rating for Biden and showed about 70% of Democrats want someone else as their candidate next year.The poll also showed the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley as the only Republican candidate clearly beating Biden. Haley, 51, has called for mental competency tests for politicians over 75 and claimed a vote for Biden was really a vote for Harris, given the chances of Biden not completing a second term.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRichmond said he was “glad” to be asked about Haley, because of “her position on abortion, because I’ll tell you that if you look at the vote in Ohio, just a month ago, a swing state, they soundly rejected the extreme positions on abortion. And that’s Nikki Haley.“Now about the president’s age. Voters will see his vigour. Voters will see his accomplishments … he’s traveling around the world over the next four and a half days [to the G20 in India] to continue to show American leadership.“So when they compare President Biden’s miles traveled to that of Republicans, even Republicans that are running for president, he’s traveling almost 30% more.”Polling also shows widespread belief that Biden’s policies have been bad for the US economy, despite most observers saying it is performing strongly.Richmond said: “This is about American families. And I think American families are going to look at the issues they have faced, and they’re going to look at who’s addressing those issues, who’s talking about those issues, and who’s doing something about it, and that’s going to be President Biden.” More

One reality of Florida politics is that a bad hurricane for the state traditionally blows good fortune for its governor. It was true for Rick Scott, elected a senator in November 2018, one month after guiding Florida through category 5 Hurricane Michael; and again for Ron DeSantis, whose landslide re-election last year followed his much-praised handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.This year, however, DeSantis is struggling to shake the dark clouds of Hurricane Idalia, as his return to the national stage to try to rescue his flailing presidential campaign after an 11-day break has been further scarred by his “petty and small” snub of Joe Biden’s visit to Florida last weekend to survey the storm’s damage.Opponents seized on it as a partisan politicization of a climate disaster, contrasting the Republican Florida governor’s approach to a year ago after Ian, when DeSantis and Biden put their differences aside to praise each other and tour the worst-affected areas with their respective first ladies.“Your job as governor is to be the tour guide for the president, to make sure the president sees your people, sees the damage, sees the suffering, what’s going on and what needs to be done to rebuild it,” Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade.“You’re doing your job. And unfortunately, he put politics ahead of his job,” added Christie, who was applauded by Democrats and savaged by Republicans for working closely with Barack Obama after Superstorm Sandy mauled his state in 2012.It was left to Scott, now Florida’s Republican junior senator, to graciously welcome the president to the state, and the bitter political rivals spoke warmly of each other as they surveyed the storm damage together.DeSantis’s office insisted there was nothing political in the decision to skip a meeting with Biden, which aides said would have disrupted essential recovery work. “In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts,” Jeremy Redfern, the governor’s press secretary said.But gaining political capital from the hurricane was clearly uppermost in the minds of his campaign advisers. Talking points about how to spin DeSantis’s handling of the storm were contained in a memo entitled “strong leadership in a time of crisis”, authored by communications director Andrew Romeo, obtained by Politico.And analysts say DeSantis would have been keen to avoid the potential pitfall of being seen to be too cozy with Biden. In last month’s first Republican presidential primary debate, he looked on as Vivek Ramaswamy tore into Christie, effectively accusing the then-governor’s post-Sandy metaphorical hug of Obama for the president’s re-election one week later.“Christie had taken heat about embracing Obama, and that was not a good look for Republicans who are going to be voting in the primary,” said Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida.“I’m sure that, without it being said, the DeSantis campaign was mindful of the impacts of such an embrace [with Biden] during a presidential race.”MacManus also believes DeSantis was probably trying to ensure voters’ lasting memory of him countrywide from Hurricane Idalia was positive.“Any time a hurricane heads for Florida it gains massive national attention. There’s hardly a voter that hasn’t been to Florida, wants to come to Florida, or has relatives who live here or lived here,” she said.“The net gain for him was to be off the trail. It gave him time to regroup, and it gave him time to reach audiences or opportunities to reach audiences that he would not have reached. A lot of people don’t know much about him, in spite of the fact that people who follow politics every single day are well aware of him.”Unsurprisingly, political opponents see it as another messy contribution to a series of missteps on DeSantis’s increasingly unlikely path to the White House, as he continues to sink in the polls, and major donors desert him.“It is a really unfortunate time for Ron DeSantis to choose to be small and petty. This is a moment where people are hurting, they want to see their leaders, they want to hear from them. It’s a moment to put partisanship aside,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former White House press secretary, told CNN.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party, was even more blunt. “Ron keeps showing us what divisive leadership looks like. In times of crisis, the American people expect our leaders to put aside their differences and find strength in unity,” she said in a statement.“By refusing to meet with President Biden, he’s proving again what we’ve known for years: Ron will always put politics over people. I hope his fundraisers in Iowa are worth it.”By Thursday, DeSantis was back on more familiar ground, railing against the “medical authoritarianism” of Covid-19 mandates at a press conference in Jacksonville, and pledging to keep Florida mask-free as a resurgence of the virus threatens to sweep the nation this fall.The notoriously prickly governor also found time for a public shouting match with a Black voter who questioned his policies in the wake of racist killings in the city.DeSantis returns to the presidential trail weaker, in popularity terms at least, and attempting a “reset” with a new campaign manager. A CNN/SSRS poll this week showed him continuing his decline among Republican or Republican-leaning primary voters, down four points to 18% (Donald Trump leads a large field at 52%, with everybody else in single digits).And he has suffered setbacks in Florida itself, such as a federal judge striking down his “unconstitutional” dismantling of majority-Black voting districts (DeSantis is appealing); his lingering feud with Disney over LGBTQ+ rights that continues to turn off voters; and progress of a constitutional amendment measure that could enshrine abortion rights regardless of the state supreme court’s imminent ruling on the legality of its current 15-week ban.MacManus sees abortion, rather than Disney, voting districts or even the hurricane, as more of a “trouble spot” for DeSantis, both in Florida and nationally.“It’s an issue we know is resonating with a lot of people on both sides, and there’s the possibility of an amendment before the public in the November election. To me, that’s going to be a more consequential issue for him,” she said. More

The Florida supreme court on Friday will hear arguments in a case that could drastically limit abortion access in the south-eastern United States.Abortion providers in Florida filed a lawsuit to block the state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.If the state’s high court upholds the 15-week ban, a separate, stricter law would take effect prohibiting abortion after six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant.“It would be devastating for providers to have to turn even more folks away under a six-week ban,” said Whitney White, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “They’re already having to turn away patients under the current 15-week ban.”Friday’s hearing is the culmination of Republican efforts to end Florida’s legacy as a safe haven for abortion seekers in neighboring states. Five of the seven justices on the current state supreme court were selected by the conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, fueling the concerns of Floridians who support abortion access.After signing the six-week trigger ban into effect in April, Governor DeSantis said in a brief statement that he was “proud to support life and family in the state of Florida”. The Florida governor has been hesitant to discuss abortion on the campaign trial.A whopping 62% of American adults believe abortions should be legal in “all or most cases”, according to a 2022 report published by Pew Research Center. A 2020 Ipsos/Reuters poll found that 56% of likely voters in Florida believe abortion should be legal in most cases. And abortion rights supporters in Florida say the bans violate the explicit privacy protections found in the state constitution.Despite DeSantis’s conservative overhaul of the state’s high court, White remained confident about the case in the run-up to Friday’s hearing.“No justice of the Florida supreme court has ever written a decision questioning the conclusion that abortion rights are protected by the privacy clause,” White said.Florida Republicans passed the 15-week ban on abortion in April 2022, months before the US supreme court ended the federal right to abortion. That same month, a judge revived a 2015 state law that mandated patients wait 24 hours between getting an initial consultation for an abortion and undergoing the procedure.“It’s been one restriction after another,” said Dr Kanthi Dhaduvai, a Jacksonville abortion provider with Physicians for Reproductive Health.Dhaduvai felt “nervous and frustrated” about the hearing, fearing a court ruling that would make it impossible for her patients to receive “what is often life-saving care”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRoughly half of Dhaduvai’s patients come to Florida from states like Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama – even Texas.“I think a lot of people are not aware as to how dangerous this could be, not just for Florida, but the entire region,” she said. “Florida has been a huge access point for people, we already have people traveling these great distances to get care.”In the months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Florida saw the greatest increase in the number of legal abortions performed per month, according to a report released this April from the Society of Family Planning.“I’m still providing care and I’m going to continue providing care, within legal limits, even after the decision,” Dhaduvai said. More

In December 2021, President Joe Biden hosted an event billed as a “Summit for Democracy”. Biden opened his address to the summit by describing his motivation for holding it: “in the face of sustained and alarming challenges … democracy needs champions”.Since that time Biden has embraced, as allies, autocrats and would-be autocrats all over the world, including the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who US intelligence has said was responsible for the brutal murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. More recently, Biden invited Benjamin Netanyahu, who is presiding over the destruction of Israel’s democracy by targeting its judicial system, for an official visit to the United States.Biden is right that there is an ever-larger club of backsliding democracies, with the US among them. And the American president is not the only openly hypocritical leader in this club. In fact, he is not even close to the worst offender.This September, India is hosting G20 leaders under the banner of “One Earth, One Family, One Future”. As a part of the transition to India’s assumption of this position, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has leaned heavily on these themes in promoting India as an inclusive, emerging global power.Yet behind these lofty ideals lies a very different, and dangerous, reality.Those in Modi’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), are hardline Hindu nationalists. Their ideology holds that India was originally a pure Hindu state, with minorities, such as India’s large Muslim population, the supposed result of colonization by outside forces.The hallmarks of fascism are everywhere. School textbooks are being rewritten to reinforce the fake history behind BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda. Topics like the theory of evolution and the periodic table have been replaced with traditional Hindu theories, and academics have been silenced for calling out the BJP’s election malpractices. The government has weaponized education in the manner typical of fascist regimes such as Russia. There are other clear indications of India’s slide towards fascism. On press freedom, India ranks 161st out of 180 countries, sandwiched between Venezuela (at 159) and Russia (at 164).Modi and the BJP have proven themselves to be fluent hypocrites on the world stage. Under the banner of anticolonialism, the party is replicating Britain’s colonial practices.In 2005 Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, was denied entry to the US because of his role in ethnic violence that left over 1,000 people dead, the vast majority of them Muslims. According to a recently declassified report from the British Foreign Office, the Hindu mobs’ “systematic campaign of violence has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and “Narendra Modi is directly responsible.”He’s much more powerful now, but the playbook remains the same. India’s minorities face lynchings and the bulldozing of their homes, among other abuses. Ten percent of the world’s Muslims live in India, over 200 million in all; as Gregory Stanton, the founder and director of Genocide Watch, has warned in a US congressional briefing, we are seeing in India the beginning of what would be by far the largest genocide in history.And it’s not just Muslims who are at risk. In Manipur, over 150 people have been killed since May 2023 in a vicious ethnic conflict pitting Hindus against Christians. More broadly, since Modi took over in 2014, hate crimes against minorities have increased by 300%.History tells us that this is how it works. Fascism grants the dominant majority special status, targeting national minorities by threatening their equal citizenship. In 2019, India passed a Citizenship Amendment Act that granted a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslims who lack documentation as citizens. The National Registry Act, already implemented in the Indian state of Assam, is a seemingly contradictory effort to expel illegal immigrants. It demands that residents provide proof of their citizenship in India, essentially a birth certificate, or face expulsion. Yet 38% of Indian children under five lack a birth certificate.This tangle of laws exemplifies the blatant hypocrisy of India’s ruling party, leaving India poised to disenfranchise much of its Muslim population.Nor is the problem only domestic. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has become one of the world’s largest importers of Russian oil – essentially propping up Russia’s occupation and genocide of its peaceful neighbor. Genocidal regimes support one another, in an alliance of evil, and the rest of the world must stand against them.So, has the US been listening? The answer is clearly no. In June, Biden gave Modi’s visit a red-carpet treatment. Jack Kirby, a US national security official, has made light of objections to Modi, declaring that “India is a vibrant democracy. Anybody that, you know, happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves.” With America’s help, the G20 platforms BJP’s transparently hypocritical embrace of humanitarian and liberal ideals.The US public and their leaders are paying attention, at least somewhat, to Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. But the collective shrug at a potentially vast genocide in India (as well as the ongoing genocide in Sudan) raises an obvious concern: is the US public’s standard for this crime much higher when black and brown people face the threat?
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and the author, most recently, of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them More

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