Evelyn Reynolds

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    LGBTQ+ people protest in Florida over Republican conversion therapy bill

    Hundreds of LGBTQ+ people gathered on the steps of the Florida state house on Wednesday to protest against a first-in-the-nation bill that critics say would raise health insurance costs for all state residents.The Republican-backed proposal, house bill 1639, mandates that insurance carriers cover conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice whose practitioners falsely claim to be able to change the sexual orientation or identity of LGBTQ+ people.“We hope that legislators wouldn’t vote for a health insurance mandate that would increase everyone’s costs as a way to just demonize LGBT people,” said Quinn Diaz, public policy associate for Equality Florida. “But we really don’t have any faith in this state government, at this point.”Diaz said the proposed legislation would also force trans people to “out themselves” on state-issued identification cards, requiring Florida residents to list the sex they were assigned at birth on their driver’s licenses.The bill comes amid a mounting assault by Florida Republicans on LGBTQ+ rights, a legislative project that has cost Florida taxpayers millions in legal fees. Last year, the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the so-called “don’t say gay” law banning classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. Earlier this year, the Florida legislature introduced and advanced 11 bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights, including a proposed ban on Pride flags in public buildings, schools, and universities across the state.Now, Florida leaders have opted to focus on driver’s licenses and healthcare. Just last month, a leaked internal memo from the Florida department of highway safety and motor vehicles revealed that the state would no longer allow trans residents to change the gender marker on their driver’s license.“Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record,” said the memo, written by the deputy executive director of the Florida department of highway safety and motor vehicles, Robert Kynoch.Kynoch warned that “misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license” amounts to fraud and “subjects an offender to criminal and civil penalties”.LGBTQ+ advocates say the quiet rule change has sown fear and confusion among trans and non-binary people across Florida.“Folks were afraid to just drive their car and go pick up their kids from school, because if they get a traffic infraction and are pulled over, ‘would I be automatically arrested for fraud by the police officer who checks my license?’” said Diaz.Though there is no legal way to retroactively prosecute a trans driver for the gender marker on their license, Diaz said, “the point of that memo was to make people scared.”Protesters at Wednesday’s rally also expressed outrage that the bill will probably raise health insurance costs.The Florida legislature passed a statute last year that requires lawmakers to commission an economic impact study any time a bill proposes the creation of a health insurance mandate. According to the 2023 law championed by Florida Republicans, any proposed “mandate that certain health benefits be provided by insurers” needs to first be assessed by the Florida agency for healthcare administration, so that the state can understand how the bill will “contribute to the increasing cost of health insurance premiums”.But House Republicans have not commissioned an economic impact study to understand how mandating conversion therapy might raise monthly insurance premiums, according to Equality Florida.Despite widespread criticism, the bill’s lead sponsor, the state representative Doug Bankson, said during a house committee hearing earlier this month that his proposal did not target transgender people.“It doesn’t mean we’re standing here and saying that the people in this room don’t have the right to seek their wholeness,” Bankson said. “This bill is about making sure that everyone has the right to seek that wholeness.”He described gender as a “subjective issue that is going on socially”, arguing instead that a driver’s license should display a person’s sex, “something concrete medically”.Florida Democrats remain unconvinced by Bankson’s characterization of the proposed legislation as the “compassion and clarity” bill.“What’s going on in the Florida capitol? We should be moving forward as a state, not going backwards,” said the state representative Anna Eskamani, speaking at Wednesday’s rally.Testifying against the bill earlier this week, Eskamani said Bankson’s proposal was a poorly disguised way to score political points with other Florida conservatives.“When we get in between people and their doctors and start to decide what coverage is appropriate versus not, it’s not about safety, now it’s just about political parties, it’s about the latest Fox News headline,” she said. “Nobody is asking for this.”As protesters marched through the streets of Tallahassee on Wednesday, the memory of Nex Benedict – a non-binary teenager who died last week following a fight in their public high school bathroom – loomed overhead.Angelique Godwin, a trans activist and drag artist who helped organize Wednesday’s rally, thought of Benedict’s early death as she looked up at protest signs with the words “Let Us Live” emblazoned on the blues and pinks of the transgender Pride flag.“The tragedy of Nex’s death is something that I think has lit a fire in all of us,” said Angelique Godwin. “We want justice for Nex, and we are also aware that their death is a warning of what could happen here in Florida if they continue to push the anti-trans narrative in legislation.” More

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    Mitch McConnell’s time in the Senate will be remembered as sad and cynical | Moira Donegan

    For a moment, it looked like his face was going to fall off. At a press conference at the Capitol last July, Mitch McConnell, a senator for Kentucky since 1985 and the Senate Republican leader since 2007, abruptly stopped speaking, mid-sentence. He curled his lower lip inward, like a small child about to cry, and his eyes drifted to the side. He gripped the podium tightly and seemed to sway, as if uneasy on his feet. A few seconds later, he recovered, and began answering press questions again, without acknowledging the episode.A few months prior, McConnell, now 82, had suffered a fall, and had been concussed as a result. He’d been away from the Capitol for six weeks. Once, in 2020, he’d appeared with dramatic purple blisters on his hands and around his mouth, which were never explained. There had been rumors of other falls, but that’s all they were – rumors. Maybe, the thinking went, the episode at the press conference was just the after-effects of McConnell’s recent concussion. But then again, maybe not.That was the first time. The second time, McConnell was at another press conference, this one in Kentucky. On 30 August 2023, a reporter asked McConnell for his thoughts on running for re-election; if he were to run again and win an eighth term in 2026, he would be 90 by the end of that term. McConnell at first seemed not to hear the question. When the reporter repeated it, he chuckled, then went quiet. He gaze again veered to the side; his lips curled in.Aides rushed to McConnell and stood closely around him at the lectern, partially obscuring the view of the news cameras. His office later said that he had felt dizzy, and simply paused. A vaguely worded report from a doctor indicated that he was safe to continue working. But neurologists from Yale and UCLA each independently told Slate that they believed that in both incidents McConnell had been having seizures; another, from NYU, also diagnosed seizures in the New York Times.When McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will step down, the move was momentous, historic, a mile marker in the transformation of the Republican party that has played out before our eyes. But no one was probably surprised. It does not seem to have surprised Kentucky Republicans, either: faced with a Democratic governor in Andy Beshear, Republicans in the Kentucky statehouse worked last year to weaken the governor’s customary authority to fill Senate vacancies. It is a move that McConnell would likely have approved of.In one of his first political jobs, when he worked in Gerald Ford’s justice department in the 1970s, McConnell was known as a moderate. He supported abortion rights and labor unions; he had a reputation for a certain compromising pragmatism. As time went on, his pragmatism became less compromising – more hard-nosed and Machiavellian.His party moved steadily rightward, and so did he. By the time he became Senate Republican leader in the 2000s, he was presiding over an upper chamber that was losing its aura of deliberative dignity and becoming rowdier, more partisan, and more acrimonious, like the House. McConnell’s leadership accelerated that trend.He was willing to break legislative norms, alter Senate rules and undermine the spirit of representative democracy in order to get what he wanted. He focused particularly on the federal judiciary: throughout the Obama administration, McConnell organized a blockade of federal judge confirmations. Later, after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, he delayed filling the open supreme court seat for months, making a nakedly pretextual claim that Scalia’s death occurred too close to an election.When Donald Trump came into office, McConnell eliminated all remaining filibuster requirements for judicial confirmations in order to cram through Trump’s archconservative judicial nominees, rapidly filling the backlog of vacancies that he had deliberately created during the Obama years. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before the 2020 election, he ensured that Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, brakes-screechingly-fast, in the final days before voters went to the polls to expel Trump.Before McConnell, judges nominated by Democratic presidents could conceivably be confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate. After McConnell, Senate Republicans no longer acknowledged presidential appointment power, at least not in the instances when the president in question was a Democrat. The result has been a warped and extremist federal judiciary, one stuffed with rightwing partisans and scandal-courting careerists. It is a federal bench that we will have to live with for decades, and it is one crafted in McConnell’s image.For those of us who have watched people we love be robbed of their dignity by the ravages of old age, the visible sight of McConnell’s decline could give us, even in spite of ourselves, pangs of pity for the man. For those of us who grieve what McConnell has made our country into, his succumbing to mortality even from the heights of malignant power can feel like a certain kind of ironic justice, an Ozymandias-like contrast between how much he was able to hurt people and how weak he has been made.To me, there was something in McConnell’s visible decline that recalls the final years of his fellow conservative stalwarts Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who in their old age both reportedly descended into dementia so acute that they could no longer remember having been the leaders of their respective countries.What are we to do with these contrasts – between the contemptible evil of McConnell’s career, and the pitiable frailty of his age? Mostly, I think, we can direct our attention to those victimized by the impact of McConnell’s leadership – who do not have the comfort or the money to receive the quality of healthcare he did, or the opportunity to indulge their vanity by staying in power long after it was time to go.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Senate Democrats to force vote on protecting IVF access across the US

    Senate Democrats are moving to push through a bill that would protect Americans’ access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, after an Alabama supreme court ruling that frozen embryos are children led to the closure of a number of infertility clinics in the state.The Democratic Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth said she would try to force a vote on the legislation on Wednesday which would establish a federal right to IVF and other fertility treatments that are at risk in the post-Roe era. Duckworth’s two children were conceived through IVF.“I’m headed to the Senate floor to call on my colleagues to pass via unanimous consent my Access to Family Building Act, which would ensure that every American’s right to become a parent via treatments like IVF is fully protected, regardless of what state they live in – guaranteeing that no hopeful parent or doctor is punished,” Duckworth said at a news conference on Tuesday.Duckworth’s move comes as Democrats vow to make IVF a campaign issue as they look to squeeze Republicans and highlight the continuing fallout of the overturning of Roe v Wade.“I warned that red states would come for IVF. Now they have. But they aren’t going to stop in Alabama. Mark my words: if we don’t act now, it will only get worse,” Duckworth added.The bill would require unanimous consent in order for it to pass, meaning that any one senator can block its passage. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said it was unlikely to receive unanimous consent from the chamber to rush the bill through.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile many Republican lawmakers registered disappointment over the Alabama ruling, at least one conservative senator was expected to object.Blumenthal said Democrats would not be deterred. He would not say what the next legislative steps would be, but he said Democrats, who control the Senate, would look for other ways to protect IVF and reproductive healthcare.“The IVF dilemma for Republicans is they are down a path that is not only unpopular, it’s untenable as a matter of constitutional law and basic moral imperative, and we’re going to pursue it vigorously,” Blumenthal said.“Today’s vote, the effort to seek a unanimous consent, we know is unlikely to be successful. Failing today is only the prelude to a fight ahead on women’s reproductive care centered on IVF and other steps that have to be taken to protect basic rights.” More

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    Marianne Williamson ‘un-suspends’ campaign after Michigan primary

    The self-help author Marianne Williamson “un-suspended” her quixotic, all-but-certainly doomed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, saying she did so because Joe Biden could not defeat Donald Trump, who she called a “fascist” and a “juggernaut of dark, dark vision”.“I am un-suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States,” Williamson said, in a social media video the morning after a Michigan primary in which despite having suspended her campaign she finished third, way behind Biden and “uncommitted” but slightly ahead of the Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips, another rank outsider.“I had suspended it because I was losing the horse race,” Williamson said, though she is still clearly losing the horse race. “But something so much more important than the horse race is at stake here. And we must respond.“Right now we have a fascist standing at the door. Everybody’s all upset about it. Well, we should be upset about it. But we’re not going to defeat the fascist by, well, by what? What is President Biden offering? He says, ‘Let’s finish the job.’ Well, I hope you realise we’re talking about millions of voters [who] can’t even survive unless they work two or three jobs.”Williamson, who also ran in 2020, had suspended her campaign on 7 February, after failing to make an impact in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.“I hope future candidates will take what works for them, drinking from the well of information we prepared,” she said. “My team and I brought to the table some great ideas, and I will take pleasure when I see them live on in campaigns and candidates yet to be created.”She changed her mind after Michigan. Citing economic difficulties faced by many Americans including medical debt and an insufficient minimum wage, she also quoted a bygone Republican president Abraham Lincoln.“We the people basically don’t own this country right now. Abraham Lincoln said that people who died in the civil war for the union had died so that a government of the people, by the people and for the people would not perish from the earth. It’s perishing now on our watch.”Promising to end “government of the corporations by the corporations”, and to achieve an “economic U-turn”, Williamson said America needed a response to Trump’s “dark vision” better than that offered by Biden.“We need to say to the American people, ‘We see your pain.’ And we need to say to Donald Trump, ‘We see your BS.’ Let’s do this. Thanks so much. Spread the word.”The campaign now moves on to 5 March, Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory will vote. The territory, American Samoa, may offer Williamson hope, given that in 2020 it was the sole prize claimed by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor whose campaign also went nowhere fast.Still, in national polling averages, Williamson lags about 70 points behind Biden. More

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    If we the Black voters ‘get loud’, neither the Tories nor Donald Trump will survive | Al Sharpton

    Donald Trump’s racist mentality has long been an open secret. In the 1970s, a federal lawsuit was brought against him for alleged racial discrimination on one of his housing developments in New York. He led the campaign calling for the death penalty against the Central Park Five, who were accused of a brutal rape but later vindicated. Even after that exoneration, he continued to suggest they were guilty.So are Black Americans flocking to support Trump? Reports are mixed. Trump himself would tell you he has a unique affinity with the Black community, but personally, I don’t buy it. Polling in 2020 estimated Trump would take 20% of the black vote. The real number was closer to 8%.After all, let’s remember what he says about us. Just this weekend, he said that Black Americans identified with him because he had faced criminal charges and we embraced his criminal mugshot. That was outright racist and insulting. For him to say that during Black History Month in the US is the epitome of an insult.And the irony is that he is the one being prosecuted – and by Black professionals at that. The New York state attorney general, Letitia James, brought the financially ruinous civil financial fraud case against Trump. Fani Willis, Fulton county district attorney, was responsible for challenging Trump’s alleged election interference in Georgia.I spend a lot of time speaking with Black voters. I host a US radio show six days a week – and from what I hear, I’m not alone in thinking that claims that he has growing support among our community are grossly exaggerated. But I do think it is fair to say that Black citizens are asking questions of the Democrats.Joe Biden has simply not done a good enough job on messaging. He needs to be more aggressive in speaking to Black voters – laying out his record, such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (which Trump opposed) and his support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which almost every Republican voted down). Biden should not assume people know what they haven’t been reminded of.US liberals must understand that if you take the high road and are not making noise about it, no one knows that you’re taking any road. They have to be more vocal, they have to challenge more, and not run away from the issue of race.That goes for the left in the UK, too. Arriving yesterday, I was disgusted to hear racist, Islamophobic language being used by members of the Conservative party. The Tories seem to be alarmingly Trump-like in their language. And that should be a mobilising cry to millions of Black British voters to register to vote.It shocks me that the wider British public doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of the threat to Black voting in the UK. The UK’s new photo ID legislation disproportionately disadvantages Black and minority voters. We know – similar legislation was used against us in the US. But Black people mobilised against it, and in 2021 helped to elect Raphael Warnock as Georgia’s first Black US senator. It shows the importance of fighting back.That’s why I came here: to tell leaders to use our playbook to challenge laws that suppress the Black vote – and to impress on Black communities the importance of turning out. It is imperative to democracy that we awaken the black vote in the UK and bring it alive. And we must do it simultaneously in the US.Biden has an opportunity to expose Trump’s lies and get disenfranchised communities back on side. To do that, he must be candid: he must openly call out Trump’s blatant racism for what it is. He must tell Black voters how Trump stacked the courts in a way that is detrimental to them, and that he will aggressively fight that. The Democrats still have time to recapture those whom they think they are losing. If they do that, Trump will have no recourse. He can’t undo things he has already said and done.You have to turn people on before you can turn them out. And if you turn them on to what is being done to us – what has already been said about us – you can turn people out. Liberal movements in the US and the UK have been blindly hoping that people will turn out on their own. But leaders must understand they won’t mobilise without a reason. It’s not enough to be proud in silence – we need to get loud again.
    The Rev Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader, activist and founder and president of National Action Network (Nan). As told to Lucy Pasha-Robinson.

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    If Biden loses in November, don’t blame voters who are angry over Gaza | Arwa Mahdawi

    Here we go again, eh? For a short but wonderful period, it looked like Donald Trump’s political career was over. An indicted former president running again? It had never happened before. Trump’s legal problems looked insurmountable.And yet, like a phoenix with a toupee, Trump has risen from the ashes. It now seems inevitable that 2024 will be a repeat of 2020: a Joe Biden vs Trump rematch.What’s very far from inevitable however, is that Biden is going to win again. I don’t need to tell you that his polling figures are dire. I don’t need to tell you that there are serious concerns about his age and mental competence. As November creeps closer, there is increasing panic in Democratic circles about Biden’s ability to win.Amid that panic, there’s also a lot of finger-pointing and recrimination. Anyone who raises concerns about Biden is immediately accused of helping Trump. Anyone isn’t jumping at the bit to vote for a man many of us now think of as “Genocide Joe” is being told that we’re useful idiots who are going to hand the election to the former guy.I’ll put my cards on the table: I’m a permanent resident of the US which means I’m not allowed to vote. (I’m not sure what happened to the whole no taxation without representation idea.) But if I could vote and the election were tomorrow I would not be able to bring myself to support Biden. And I’d feel betrayed by my American wife if she voted for Biden. As someone of Palestinian heritage I have watched aghast as Biden has given Israel a green light to do whatever it wants in Gaza, international law and civilian deaths be damned. I have watched in horror as the entire population of Gaza starves and the US vetoes ceasefire resolution after resolution. And I have watched in disbelief as Biden has cast doubts on the number of Palestinians who have died, repeated inflammatory misinformation and ignored the suffering of Palestinians in official statements on the conflict.I’m sorry but I simply could not bring myself to cast a vote for a man who doesn’t seem to believe that people like me are fully human. I cannot support a man who seems to think that it’s OK that babies in Gaza are needlessly starving to death. A vote for Biden is not just a vote against Trump, it is a vote endorsing his clear disdain for Palestinians, his dehumanization of Arabs, and his complicity in what many experts have termed a plausible genocide.But, Arwa, Trump would have been even worse on Gaza! I know that. But, let me tell you something, that argument loses a lot of its potency when Gaza looks like hell on earth as its. There is not a single university left. The health system has basically collapsed. 1.9 million people have been forcibly displaced. The UN has said 100,000 people in Gaza have been killed, injured, or are missing. And Biden seems to think so little of the devastation that he seems to think it is appropriate to weigh in on a ceasefire while eating an ice-cream cone. It’s honestly very difficult to think about how things could possibly be worse.I am obviously not alone in my anger with Biden. Muslims, Arab-Americans, and many progressives feel conflicted about supporting a man who refuses to listen to our anguish about the horrific humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. It doesn’t seem to matter that 76% of Democratic voters want a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza. It doesn’t seem to matter what we do—how many protests we go on, how many petitions we sign, how many letters to our state representatives we write—every protest is met with some variation of ‘you idealistic morons had better just hold your nose and vote for Biden or Trump is going to win and he’ll be even worse!’See, for example, the response from many high-profile Democrats to the Listen to Michigan campaign, which urged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in Tuesday’s primary in order to send Biden a warning that his policy on Gaza is alienating voters in the heavily Arab-American swing state. There was never any doubt that Biden would win the primary—the “uncommitted” campaign hurt him in no way whatsoever, it was just another desperate attempt to be heard.Yet, once again, the Democrats didn’t listen. In an interview with CNN on Sunday Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, warned voters that that protest votes in the primary would help Trump. “It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” Whitmer said. “A second Trump term would be devastating. Not just on fundamental rights, not just on our democracy here at home, but also when it comes to foreign policy. This was a man who promoted a Muslim ban.”We all know who Trump is; we all know how devastating a second Trump term would be. It is important not to understate this. But it’s also important not to understate the damage that Biden is doing to democracy and foreign policy right now by funding a plausible genocide. People aren’t asking Biden to suddenly become pro-Palestinian: we’re asking him to do the bare minimum. We’re asking him to respect international law and do what (famed liberals) Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush did: put some conditions on US aid to Israel.To be very clear: I am not saying that people shouldn’t vote for Biden. I’m saying that it would behoove the Democrats to realize that bullying people into voting for the not-so-bad option is not a winning strategy. If they want to safeguard democracy they should start practicing it: and that means paying attention to why so many of their young and progressive voters are angry. I don’t know what’s going to happen in November but I do know this: if Biden loses, it’s not going to be the fault of progressives. It will be Biden’s fault and his alone.
    Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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    ‘Uncommitted’ vote in Michigan a warning shot over Biden’s support of Israel

    Standing before shimmering gold curtains on Tuesday evening, the mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah Hammoud, spoke with pride about his city.“We had the audacity to choose people over political party,” he said. “We had the damn audacity to put people over president.”For many gathered at this sprawling banquet hall in the heart of America’s most concentrated Muslim population, the outcome of last night’s Democratic primary in Michigan was beyond even the boldest of predictions.Although Joe Biden took the state, it was the hastily organized but committed grassroots campaign against the president’s support for the Israeli government’s war with Gaza that took the night. Organizers with Listen to Michigan, a group that urged voters to withdraw support for Biden and instead vote uncommitted, had hoped for a showing of 10,000 votes. They returned more than 100,000 – a clear demonstration of the growing fractures among the diverse coalition that brought Biden to power in 2020.It is a warning shot to the Democratic party, and shows more signs of expanding than diminishing as the primary season wears on.In just four weeks, the uncommitted campaign mobilized a cohort of progressives concentrated in the suburbs of Detroit, a region that saw a significant rise in Democratic turnout four years ago.“This is a humanitarian vote,” said the campaign’s manager, Layla Elabed, a 34-year-old lifelong Democrat, as she sipped coffee at a Yemeni cafe on a frigid Sunday morning, two days before the vote. “Right now, Joe Biden sits in a place of power where he can actually change course and save lives.”Elabed, the sister of the US representative Rashida Tlaib – the first Palestinian American to serve in Congress – met Biden last year at the White House during Eid celebrations. The president has heard personal stories of their grandmother’s struggles living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she said. “But it feels a lot like it’s falling on deaf ears.”Her next stop was a rally in the city of Hamtramck, where those assembled underlined not only the movement’s diverse collective of ages and race, but also the divergent outlooks on how the campaign could or should affect the general election in November.“I’m very focused on the moment,” said Dima Hassan, a Palestinian American who would be voting in her first presidential election in 2024. “What is happening right now is an active genocide so thinking about November honestly feels silly.”Yet Tuesday’s result should send alarm bells ringing for that vote, given the thin margin of Trump’s victory in 2016, which saw him swing the state red by just more than 10,000 votes. Organizers say the group is also representative of the large Democratic disapproval ratings of Biden’s handling of the war, the death toll in which is likely to surpass 30,000 in Gaza by this week.Although hastily convened, Listen to Michigan is well organized, with an effective phone banking operation making more than 500,000 calls in just a matter of weeks, according to the campaign. But with no official headquarters, meetings are held in cafes and living rooms. Elabed’s car is laden with boxes of flyers that she hauls alone, darting between locations.Although Biden sent campaign representatives to meet with members of the Arab-American community here earlier this month and on Monday expressed hope of a ceasefire, recent comments from the state’s Democratic governor that equated an uncommitted vote to effective support for Donald Trump were met with scorn.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMuslim communities in Dearborn and elsewhere endured rising rates of hate crimes during the Trump presidency, following a campaign laced with Islamophobia. Trump implemented a travel ban for several Muslim majority countries, which he has pledged to reinstate if he wins in 2024.With just a few hours left to vote on Tuesday afternoon, polling stations in Dearborn were still welcoming a steady flow of primary voters. At an intersection by the McDonald elementary school, Linda Sarsour, the New York-based organizer, was handing out flyers to those who trickled through. Most had already decided to cast their ballot uncommitted.Sarsour, who co-chaired the Women’s March in 2017 and became a prominent activist during the Trump era, expressed contempt at those within the party making the Trump equation.“Shame on them for gaslighting this community,” she said. “This is a presidential primary, this is democracy and people should be able to vote for whoever they want. Donald Trump is not part of the Democratic primary.”She continued: “But also the ball is in Joe Biden’s court. Why start pointing fingers at the voters when they should be pointing fingers at Joe Biden. They should be demanding that Joe Biden do better in order to keep these voters within the Democratic party.”Sarsour was one of a handful of volunteers from outside Michigan who had come to support the campaign on Tuesday. Others had arrived from Florida, Illinois and Washington, as the grassroots effort looks to expand beyond Michigan.Efforts are already under way for an uncommitted vote in Minnesota and also in Washington, while other states that do not offer an uncommitted ballot option may see new write-in campaigns.“This is becoming an opportunity to translate protest in the street to protest at the ballot,” Sarsour said. More

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    Biden wins Michigan primary but sheds support over Gaza

    Joe Biden has won the Democratic primary in Michigan – but a concerted effort by anti-war activists to vote “uncommitted” in the race could overshadow his win.The US president faced no real primary challenger in the contest. But a campaign that formed just weeks before the primary to vote “uncommitted” in protest of his continued support for Israel’s war in Gaza signaled the fury and betrayal some Arab American and younger voters in the state feel for Biden.The group pushing for voters to choose “uncommitted” – called Listen to Michigan – set the goal of 10,000 uncommitted votes in the primary. With more than half of the votes tallied Tuesday night, “uncommitted” had received 74,000 votes out of a total of more than 580,000 – almost 13% of the vote.For context, when the then president, Barack Obama, ran uncontested in the 2012 race, about 21,000 voted “uncommitted” against him in Michigan’s primary, with about 194,000 voting in total – just over 9% of voters.Trump narrowly won the state by just 11,000 votes in 2016 and organisers of the “uncommitted” effort wanted to show that they have at least the number of votes that were Trump’s margin of victory in 2016, to demonstrate how influential the bloc can be.View image in fullscreenAs results came in after polls closed at 8pm, members of the Listen to Michigan campaign gathered at a banquet hall in Dearborn and declared the results a victory for their campaign.. Attendees embraced and celebrated, many wearing the black and white keffiyeh.Before handing the microphone off to a series of speakers for the campaign, Abbas Alawieh, a Listen to Michigan spokesperson, held a moment’s silence “for every human life that has been taken from us too soon using US taxpayer funds and bombs”.“Thank you to our local and national progressive organizations and our voters of conscience, who used our democratic process to vote against war, genocide and the destruction of a people and a land,” said Layla Elabed, who launched the campaign in early February.The former congressman Andy Levin, an early and prominent local supporter of the push to vote “uncommitted”, called the movement “a child of necessity” and said the turnout so far was “a huge victory”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There is no hope for security and peace for the Jewish people without security and peace and freedom and justice for the Palestinian people,” said Levin, to cheers.The Listen to Michigan campaign was intended as a warning for Biden to revise his so far unwavering support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, ahead of the general election. The campaign is especially significant in Michigan given the state’s large Arab American population, a group that supported Biden strongly in 2020.But it isn’t clear what share of “uncommitted” voters are prepared to abandon Biden in the general election this November, when he will most likely face Donald Trump – who is campaigning on a pledge to reinstate and expand his Muslim travel ban.A day before the primary, Biden announced a ceasefire could come as soon as Monday – but both Hamas and Israeli officials denied that negotiations had progressed substantially.In a statement on Tuesday night, Biden did not address the Listen to Michigan campaign or the growing tally of voters who cast their ballots as “uncommitted”, instead touting his record on labor and warning that Trump is “threatening to drag us even further into the past as he pursues revenge and retribution”. More