US Politics

We were theatre people gathered from the UK, the US, Palestine, South Africa, Syria, Taiwan, Eritrea, Italy and France. Our idea was for Amal, a 12ft puppet of a Syrian child, to travel along one of the routes across Turkey and Europe that refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and many other countries follow as they flee war, violence and persecution. We imagined Amal as one of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and her journey as, simply, a search for her mother.In 70 towns and cities along her 5,000-mile route – Gaziantep to Manchester – we invited artists and arts organisations to welcome her. “A refugee child will arrive. She’ll be tired, hungry, frightened. How will you welcome her? With a dance? With a meal typical of your region? With an orchestral concert?”And we invited figures of “power” to welcome her – in a Turkish mountain village the mayor, in Rome the pope, in London the speaker of the House of Commons …Between July and November 2021, Amal travelled along the south Turkish coast, crossed to the island of Chios in Greece, walked through Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, sailed from Dunkirk to Dover all the while leading perhaps the biggest community art project ever staged, a rolling festival of art and hope. In Arabic Amal means “hope”.Through the genius of her creators, Handspring Puppet Company, the skill of her puppeteers and social media, she quickly became a global symbol of human rights. She met something like a million people on the street, tens of millions more online. Her education pack was downloaded from walkwithamal.org all over the world. In the welcoming crowds, we’d hear kids explain to their parents: “She was born in Aleppo, we learned about her in school …”Almost as soon as she set out, she received invitations to places – Stockholm, Adelaide, Seoul – not within the logic of her route but, once her first journey was complete, she was free. She could go anywhere. In 2022 at the invitation of the mayor of Lviv she visited Ukraine as well as shelters set up across the border in Poland to receive refugees from the war zone. She toured the UK, visiting Stonehenge and appearing alongside Elbow at Glastonbury. She led a group of mayors from many major cities through the streets of Amsterdam to the Anne Frank House.In New York she was welcomed by the Metropolitan Opera on her arrival at JFK airport and by artists and audiences at 50 sites across all five boroughs. Thousands of children holding bird puppets streamed behind her across Brooklyn Bridge. We saw all this, and visits early this year to Toronto and Trondheim, as preparation for her second very long journey.On 7 September she arrived in Boston harbour in a clipper. Later that day she was serenaded by students in Harvard Yard and at night was played to sleep among other homeless people by Yo Yo Ma. On 10 September members of the Nipmuc nation canoed across Lake Ashfield to sing to her in welcome. The mayor of Hartford, Connecticut was the first of many mayors to declare the day of her visit “Little Amal Day”. In Washington a brass band played as she strode down Pennsylvania Avenue to be welcomed to the Capitol by congressmen and women, then she paraded down Black Lives Matter Plaza.She went north to the “rustbelt” – Detroit, Dearborn, Flint. She gazed at the rush of cars thrusting down into the tunnel under the Detroit River that emerges in Canada, the first of three river borders on her 12-week, 60-city US/Mexico journey. In Memphis, Tennessee, she stood outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. In Birmingham, Alabama, she marched from the 16th Street Baptist Church hand in hand with a veteran of the 1960s civil rights “foot soldiers”, the crowd singing “Ain’t nobody gonna turn me around, turn me around …” On a glittering New Orleans night, accompanied by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, she made her way through the revellers on Bourbon Street.From El Paso, Texas she crossed briefly into Mexico. Beneath the massive blood-red X-shaped tower that expresses Ciudad Juárez as a crossing point and a meeting place, she was cheered by young people in Mexican national dress and a Mariachi band. Later, standing on the south bank of the Rio Grande (the second river border of her journey), she came across a group of families with young children from Venezuela who, having waded through the chest-high water, were on US soil but blocked from going further by the barbed-wire crested 20-foot wall …Back in the US, she was welcomed by some of the hundreds, maybe thousands, young and old, who run organisations in villages and towns along the border to support migrants and refugees who have made it across. Tiffany runs a shelter where new arrivals can make a phone call, eat, shower and rest while a bus is summoned to ferry them to Tucson where they’ll hand themselves over to the authorities and apply to stay. Father Mike offers his church hall to new arrivals to pause and take stock of the new world they’re in. Outside on the street a youngster from Honduras is interviewed by a local journalist.“What does Amal mean to you?”“She gives me hope …”One late October day, west of Nogales, Arizona, the elderly chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation guided Amal to the fence between his hereditary territory and Mexico. Overnight, perhaps 2,000 people had crossed and were gathered in a hard mud clearing under the blazing sun awaiting the arrival of police to “process” them. “We will never allow a wall to be built on this land which we cherish,” said the Chairman gazing up at Amal. “If they try, we will fight them, won’t we, my girl.”In the Inglewood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, she had a starring role in a vibrant Vegas-style dance of welcome choreographed by Debbie Allen, performed by hundreds of students. On the jam-packed Jerry Moss Plaza of the downtown Music Center bands played, soap bubbles glimmered in the night air as a jubilant crowd serenaded Amal.From San Diego, she crossed into Mexico through the turnstile on foot and was greeted by the governor of the state of Baja California and the mayor of Tijuana, both making speeches about how deeply they as mothers felt their responsibilities for the wellbeing of migrant children. On Tijuana Playa the metal border wall juts into the sea. As Amal strolled along the beach accompanied by well-wishers and a mariachi band, I thought: “But the wall doesn’t jut out that far, why don’t people swim round it?” The currents are too strong.Will the strong flow of migrants ever cease? No one sets out on these perilous journeys unless there’s no other way to escape war, organised crime, extreme poverty. In Mexico, as in Turkey, it seemed to us that, at the official level but also on the streets, there’s an understanding that “the problem” is not refugees and asylum seekers. The people are innocent. The problem is the situation. Deal with the political, social and economic crises or people will keep coming.In the Centro Comunitario San Bernabé in Monterrey she played soccer with teams of boisterous kids. In the Tonalá neighbourhood of Guadalajara something like 40,000 people crowded the streets. “Amal, Amal, Amal!” In Zapopan perhaps 20,000 yelled as she entered the Basilica of Our Lady, was sung to by priests and then escorted back out into the blazing sunshine by yet another mariachi band.In Mexico City she was formally welcomed by the presidents of the Senate and of the Congress. In Los Pinos Park the minister of culture brandished her cowboy hat and sang to her. “You are warriors,” she told us, “warriors for peace.” On the central square, the Zócalo, she was welcomed by the mayor and by a dance choreographed for her by Raúl Tamez. Tens of thousands marched behind her through the working-class district Iztapalapa brandishing signs “We love Amal, Ser Migrante es un acto de Valor”.Outside the church at Xochimilco, near the vast canal system built by the Aztecs on which Amal went for a twilight cruise, Unicef and UNHCR officials asked if she would keep heading south into Guatemala, San Salvador and Honduras: “This work you do is very important to us. You draw attention to the level of the crisis, to the needs of the children. No doubt about it, she should keep going.”At Mexico’s southernmost tip, Ciudad Hidalgo, the river border with Guatemala is a gently sloping bank strengthened by sandbags leading down to a row of wooden rafts. Armed police stand about but seem unengaged by the constant, apparently casual, flow of people punting to and fro in both directions. The Guatemalan quetzal is stronger than the Mexican peso so Guatemalans hop aboard the rafts and float across to do their shopping. But Amal has no need to shop. She climbs aboard a raft, lays her head on her hands, stretches out and floats gently along, at rest at last.As she travelled, Amal raised just shy of $1,000,000 (£800,000) which will be distributed to organisations that support refugees by our charity partner Choose Love. There are two further, briefer, Amal journeys planned for 2024.
David Lan was artistic director of the Young Vic from 2000 to 2018. With Tracey Seaward he is producer of The Walk.
This article was amended on 12 December. Philadelphia Avenue has been corrected to Pennsylvania Avenue; and the spelling of choreographer Raúl Tamez’s name has been corrected. More

Special counsel prosecutors indicated on Monday they will call three expert witnesses at Donald Trump’s trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election who could potentially show how January 6 rioters moved on the Capitol in response to the former president’s tweets.The witnesses, according to a three-page filing, involve two experts on geolocation data to show the crowd’s movement during and after Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, and an expert on cellular phone data to testify about when and how Trump’s phone was being used, including over the same time period.Expert 3 will testify that they extracted data from official government phones belonging to Trump and one unnamed individual, how the phones were used in the post 2020 election period, including the websites visited, and when Trump’s phone accessed Twitter during January 6.The fact that the special counsel, Jack Smith, had obtained warrants for Trump’s phone and Trump’s Twitter/X account was disclosed in unsealed court filings. But the description of the anticipated testimony suggested they gathered more granular information than previously known.The notice of expert testimony in Trump’s federal 2020 election interference case – he is also facing a 2020 interference case in Fulton county, Georgia – also reveals how prosecutors intend to deploy the evidence they amassed during the criminal investigation at trial.In recent weeks, prosecutors have made it increasingly clear that they want to make the case that Trump sought to obstruct the January 6 congressional certification of the election results with the rioters by tying him to Capitol attack, as well as through political means.The notice about the subject of the expert witness testimony suggests prosecutors also intend to make the case that Trump – through his action and inaction – simultaneously advanced the physical obstruction of Congress as the Capitol attack progressed.Testimony from the first two geolocation experts will help to “aid the jury in understanding the movements of individuals toward the Capitol area during and after the defendant’s speech at the Ellipse”, the filing said.Still, the filing stopped short of claiming that the experts could definitely say who used the phones at any given moment, likely because Trump often used other people’s phones and had aide Dan Scavino compose tweets for him – something Trump’s defense lawyers are almost certain to focus on.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProsecutors previously said in the 45-page indictment that they had evidence Trump knew of the significance of impeding the vote certification when he pressured his vice-president, Mike Pence, to interfere, saying he otherwise could not remain president.Trump took steps to obstruct the certification through political means by imploring Pence to accept fake slates of Trump electors to delay proceedings or reject the Biden slates, and asked senators to keep delaying the certification after it was interrupted by the riot. More

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik celebrated the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania in a storm over campus antisemitism, but faced criticism regarding her support for Donald Trump, who associates with antisemites himself.Referring to Liz Magill, who quit after a stormy congressional hearing last week, and the presidents of Harvard and MIT, who by Monday had not stepped down, Stefanik – the House Republican caucus chairperson – tweeted: “One down. Two to go.”In response, the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin asked on MSNBC: “Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?“She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” said Raskin, who is Jewish, about a controversial event at the former US president’s Mar-a-Lago property last November.“Nick Fuentes, who doubts whether 7 October [the Hamas attacks which killed about 1,200 people in Israel] even took place because he thinks it was some kind of suspicious propaganda move by the Israelis.“The Republican party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that and yet somehow [Stefanik] gets on [her] high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT.”The hearing concerned official responses to claims of rising campus antisemitism, surrounding protests against Israeli tactics in response to 7 October and student calls for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war. During the war, more than 18,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed by airstrikes in Gaza.Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, and Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, were also grilled. MIT expressed support for Kornbluth. Gay apologised for her testimony, saying: “Words matter”, as nearly 600 professors backed her in a public petition.Magill resigned as president of Penn on Saturday. Stefanik, who led Republicans’ questioning, then tweeted: “One down. Two to go.“This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America. This forced resignation of the president of Penn is the bare minimum of what is required.”Promising a “robust and comprehensive congressional investigation of all facets of their institutions[’] negligent perpetration of antisemitism including administrative, faculty, funding, and overall leadership and governance”, Stefanik called on Harvard and MIT to “do the right thing”.Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, began her congressional career widely seen as a moderate New York Republican. But she adopted increasingly extreme Trumpist rhetoric as she rose to become House Republican caucus chair.Raskin is a prominent Democrat who led impeachment efforts against Trump over the January 6 attacks, then sat on the committee that investigated the attack his supporters aimed at Congress. He told MSNBC he was “thinking about” the issue of campus antisemitism “as a father, as a parent”, concerned for students’ safety.Raskin said: “I want to know that if somebody is actually calling for the genocide of the Jews or anybody else on campus, that we’ve got a college president who will say: ‘Quickly get campus police over there, that person could be a danger to other people around them.’“Especially in the age of the AR-15 [assault rifle], when we’ve had, you know, genocidal-style language being used but also massacres taking place like at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh [in 2018], or at the Buffalo supermarket [in 2022].skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Those are rightwing antisemites who talk about the great replacement theory. We [also] had a guy at Cornell who was making death threats towards Jews, and we had three Palestinian college kids who were shot in Burlington, Vermont, of all places.”The great replacement theory holds that Democrats encourage immigration and multiculturalism in order to bolster their political chances.Last year, after a white gunman killed 10 people in an attack on a supermarket in a predominantly Black area of Buffalo, New York, Stefanik came under scrutiny for campaign ads which, in the words of the New York Times, “play[ed] on themes of the white supremacist ‘great replacement’ theory”.Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman turned anti-Trump Republican, said then that Stefanik and other Republicans had “enabled white nationalism, white supremacy and antisemitism”.Last week, after the campus antisemitism hearing, the Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin praised Stefanik’s questioning of the college presidents – but also noted her use of great replacement theory.Stefanik’s “ability … to sustain a rational argument about antisemitism at elite universities makes her [Make America great again] rhetoric that much worse”, Rubin wrote.“She knows better.” More

Special counsel prosecutors on Monday asked the US supreme court to make an expedited decision on whether Donald Trump can be criminally prosecuted on federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.The move amounts to an attempt by prosecutors to bypass Trump’s recent appeal to the DC circuit after the federal judge overseeing his case rejected the notion that he had immunity for acts he committed during his presidency.The petition to the supreme court shows prosecutors were concerned that going through the appeals process – submitting briefs, scheduling oral arguments and waiting for a decision while the case remained frozen – could delay the March 2024 trial date.Trump has made no secret of the fact that delaying the trial as long as he can remains his overarching legal strategy. If it was postponed until after next year’s presidential election and Trump won, he could direct his attorney general to drop the charges.“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted,” the petition said.The request that the supreme court grant what is known as certiorari before the appeals court issues judgment is unusual. It is typically used in cases of national crises, like when Richard Nixon refused to hand over White House tapes to a special prosecutor.By citing US v Nixon and asking for expedited treatment in their petition, prosecutors essentially contended to the supreme court that they consider the Trump case of equal magnitude and constitutional consequence.“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” the filing said. “This is an extraordinary case.”The supreme court has previously ruled that presidents have expansive immunity in civil lawsuits but has never explicitly ruled whether presidents can face criminal charges for crimes they are alleged to have committed while in office.Whether the court will take up the case remains uncertain, but it has increasingly granted certiorari before an appeals court judgement in recent years, and especially for presidential power cases, according to research by supreme court experts Steve Vladeck and David Merlinsky.The prosecutors on the filing included the special counsel Jack Smith himself, two of his deputies JP Cooley and James Pearce, as well as veteran supreme court litigator Michael Dreeben, who was also formerly a top appellate litigator for special counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation.Having the case go to trial in Washington after the election would also mean voters would not know the full extent of the evidence of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 defeat before deciding whether to give him a second term in the White House.“It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” the petition said. “Only this court can definitively resolve them.”Last week, the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump’s claims that he enjoyed absolute immunity through a sweeping interpretation of executive power, arguing the former president could not be held accountable for actions undertaken in office.“Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” Chutkan wrote in her 48-page opinion.Trump swiftly challenged the denial of his motion to dismiss to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit. Notably, the ex-president also asked Chutkan to freeze all aspects of the 2020 election subversion case until the question was resolved.The motions to dismiss submitted by Trump’s lawyers contended that all of his attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the indictment were in his capacity as president and therefore protected. Those actions ranged from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification to organizing fake slates of electors.At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that Trump both was entitled to absolute presidential immunity and that the immunity applied whether or not Trump intended to engage in the conduct described in the indictment. More

A little over a month before the Iowa caucus kicks off the Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump has expanded his “commanding” lead in the first-to-vote state, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News poll found.The 77-year-old former president faces 91 criminal charges including 17 for attempting to overturn his 2020 election defeat, and civil suits including a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”. Warnings of the authoritarian threat he poses have been rising in volume.Nonetheless, he received 51% support in the Iowa poll.His closest challenger, the hard-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis, took 19%. The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley took 16%, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy 5%, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie 4% and Asa Hutchinson, formerly governor of Arkansas, 1%.That meant Trump’s lead was the largest ever recorded in the influential poll so close to a competitive caucus day.J Ann Selzer, the highly regarded Iowa pollster who conducted the survey, told NBC: “The field may have shrunk, but it may have made Donald Trump even stronger. I would call his lead commanding at this point.”Selzer also pointed out that caucus winners have come from behind, notably including Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, in 2012.Santorum was backed by white evangelicals, a powerful bloc in any Iowa vote. Last month, it was revealed that in 2016, Trump called evangelicals who backed a rival “so-called Christians” and “real pieces of shit”.Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa evangelical leader, endorsed DeSantis and attacked Trump. Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor, also endorsed DeSantis.But despite such moves, and a general perception that Haley has performed well in debates Trump has skipped, the former president has only strengthened his position in Iowa.On Monday, the fivethirtyeight.com average for Iowa put Trump at 45.9%, ahead of DeSantis on 19.7% and Haley on 17.5%.Steve Kornacki, NBC’s national political correspondent, pointed to Trump’s momentum in the NBC/Register poll.“We last polled Iowa in October,” Kornacki said, “and look at this: Trump is up eight points since that last poll, DeSantis only three.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You think about the month DeSantis has had in Iowa. He got the governor’s endorsement. He got a key evangelical endorsement and he was in the debate, he had the debate with Gavin Newsom [the governor of California, on Fox News], and it has not turned into measurable momentum.”Haley, Kornacki said, scored better with political independents and anti-Trump Republicans but that was nowhere near enough to significantly close the gap.Kornacki also pointed to what happened when voters were asked if their minds were made up.“Seven out of 10 Trump supporters say their mind’s made up, they’re locked in. [For DeSantis and Haley], their locked-in vote is not even half of what Trump’s is. Huge enthusiasm gap.”Despite his attempt to overturn the last election, including inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Trump also performs strongly in national and key-state polling when placed against the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden.Also on Monday, a CNN/SSRS poll put Trump ahead in two battleground states: 10 points clear in Michigan and five points up in Georgia. More

A man from Dover, New Hampshire, faces a federal criminal charge after threatening the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and attendees at a campaign event.The US attorney’s office for New Hampshire said Tyler Anderson, 30, “received a text message from the victim’s campaign notifying him of a political event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.“Anderson responded to the text message on 8 December 2023, stating: ‘Great, another opportunity for me to blow his brains out!’ and ‘I’m going to kill everyone who attends and then fuck their corpses.’”The federal release did not name the candidate or say when the event was but charging documents identified a breakfast meeting on Monday, a time when only Ramaswamy was scheduled to stage such an event in the state.A spokesperson for the biotech entrepreneur told NBC Boston: “Unfortunately it is true. We are grateful to law enforcement for their swiftness and professionalism in handling this matter and pray for the safety of all Americans.”Anderson is charged with transmitting in interstate commerce a threat to injure the person of another, an offense that can lead to a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000.He was due in court in Concord, New Hampshire, on Monday afternoon.As cited by NBC, charging documents said federal agents searched Anderson’s residence on Saturday, finding guns as well as the phone used to send the texts regarding Ramaswamy.Agents also found threats to another candidate, NBC said, including a promise to “blow that bastard’s head off” and the message: “Thanks, I’ll see you there. Hope you have the stamina for a mass shooting!”Anderson reportedly admitted sending messages to “multiple” campaigns.New Hampshire will hold the second event of the Republican presidential primary, with voting on Tuesday 23 January.The website fivethirtyeight.com gives the former president Donald Trump a comfortable New Hampshire lead over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, 44.7% to 18.9%.Ramaswamy shone early in the primary campaign but has fallen back, amid a series of abrasive debate performances. According to fivethirtyeight.com, he now sits fifth in New Hampshire, on 6.7% support, with only the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson below him. More

Last week in Congress, Representative Elise Stefanik proved how well she can throw a dead cat.Let me explain. During an hours-long hearing on 5 December, members of Congress grilled university presidents from Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, some of the country’s most elite institutions of higher learning, about antisemitism on their campuses. But it was Stefanik’s questioning that grabbed the spotlight. She repeatedly asked the presidents essentially the same question: does calling for the genocide of Jews on your campus constitute harassment, yes or no?The question is a trap, of course, and for several reasons. The first and most important reason is that there’s no evidence anyone since 7 October, or even in recent history, has called for the genocide of Jews on any American campus, public or private. Stefanik’s question implies that such calls are commonplace, but she offered no proof.The second reason this is a trap is that the question can’t be answered with just “yes” or “no”. Public universities, as state actors, are bound by the first amendment, as are private universities which receive federal funding. And the vast majority of private universities guarantee freedom of speech and academic freedom as part of their core mission. The American university is, by tradition and design, precisely where abhorrent ideas can be uttered. So, if someone had called for the genocide of Jews, which they haven’t, that would be extremely disturbing but still protected speech.The utterance alone does not constitute harassment. In fact, the utterance should be an opportunity to debate and debunk – and not silence – the worst ideas of our day. To rise to harassment, such conduct must be targeted at an individual and, as a 2019 supreme court case decided, be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit”. Context makes the difference, or as this 2011 article, published by the American Bar Association, says: “It is the context that matters, and the context helps to make the determination about whether conduct is actionable under school policy or protected by the First Amendment.”The third reason the question is trap is that the situation is complicated by the overarching codes of conduct many universities have adopted, codes that I believe do often (wrongly) cross over into limiting speech. But here, too, Stefanik seems confused. Writing in the Wall Street Journal after the hearing, Stefanik ridiculed Harvard for requiring incoming undergraduates to take an online training session to help them identify language and behavior that could be considered hateful to others. But, while mocking Harvard’s approach, Stefanik – a rising Maga Republican – is at the same time demanding to be included in it. So, which is it?To recap: all three presidents were asked how they would hypothetically punish hypothetical students for uttering hypothetical thoughts. They answered, albeit with lawyerly detachment. Yet their responses were deemed by many, from the White House on down, as callous and insufficiently protective of Jewish students. Following the hearing, all the presidents attempted damage control, but the University of Pennsylvania president has since resigned.Meanwhile, not a word was spoken about the threats that Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim students and faculty (and their supporters) are facing. Billboard trucks drive around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City and Washington, broadcasting the names and faces of Palestinian supporters and libelously labeling them “antisemites”. University leaders suspend campus groups such Students for Justice in Palestine in moves the ACLU has said “harken back to America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era, and in the months and years after 9/11”. Three Palestinian college students, speaking a mixture of Arabic and English, were shot in Vermont over Thanksgiving break in what was “absolutely was a hateful act”, the Burlington police chief told CNN. On 29 November, dozens of students and some faculty members at Trinity College, where one of the students is enrolled, walked out of a vigil for the injured student because they say the campus administration is downplaying their insecurity on campus.But there is something even more ominous in Stefanik’s questions. “You understand that the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for … the genocide of Jews,” she asked the Harvard president, Claudine Gay. I’m not aware if Stefanik is an Arabic speaker, but I suspect she’s not since she’s wrong again. The term “intifada” literally means “shaking off”. It’s often translated as “uprising”, and there have been non-violent and violent periods of Palestinian uprisings against a brutal Israeli occupation. At no point, however, has the word ever stood as a call for the genocide of Jews. What a gross misrepresentation.But Stefanik’s questions are aimed at backhandedly discrediting words like “intifada” and patrolling the language we use to describe the Palestinian struggle. (We see the same thing with the phrase “from the river to the sea”, a version of which incidentally forms part of the founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.) Needless to say, demonizing the Arabic language works to demonize Palestinians, Arabs and the world’s Muslims. And handing over the definitions of our political terms to partisan politicians would spell the death of free inquiry in this country.Which brings us back to Stefanik’s dead cat. In politics, a “dead cat strategy” is used to divert attention away from one issue and on to another by metaphorically throwing a dead cat onto a dining room table in the middle of a dinner party. “People will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted,” is how Boris Johnson once described the strategy. “That is true, but irrelevant,” he continued. “The key point … is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”What Congress is not talking about is that the Israeli assault on Gaza has killed at least 17,000 people, over 7,000 of them children, and injured over 49,000. Israel has cut off regular supplies of food, water, fuel, electricity and medical supplies. Around 1.8 million Palestinians of Gaza’s 2.2 million have been displaced. More than 60% of the housing has been destroyed. Half the population is officially starving. Hospitals, historic mosques, essential libraries and the entire foundation of a society have been bombed into rubble. Meanwhile, the US was again the sole UN security council veto for a ceasefire, and the state department invoked an emergency measure to expedite weaponry to Israel that will almost certainly kill civilians. On 9 December, a group of esteemed scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies warned in a public letter “of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza”.Elise Stefanik would have us believe that that we should be more worried about non-existent calls for genocide on American college campuses than with what many experts are warning is an actual genocide in Gaza, funded and supported by US bombs and political cover. So, all credit where credit is due. She really knows how to throw a dead cat.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

I want to talk about an uncomfortable topic that needs much more open discussion than it’s receiving: the United States’ extraordinarily high level of anxiety.A panel of medical experts has recommended that doctors screen all patients under 65, including children and teenagers, for what the panel calls anxiety disorders.Lori Pbert, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan medical school, who serves on the panel, calls mental health disorders “a crisis in this country”.A recent New York Times article discussed what’s called “persistent depressive disorder”, or PDD, which an estimated 2% of adults in the United States have experienced in the past year.Nearly 50,000 people in the US lost their lives to suicide last year, according to a new provisional tally from the National Center for Health Statistics. (The agency said the final count would likely be higher.)The suicide rate, now 14.3 deaths per 100,000 Americans, has reached its highest level since 1941, when the US entered the second world war.Men aged 75 and older had the highest suicide rate last year, at nearly 44 per 100,000 people, double the rate of people aged 15-24. While women have been found to have suicidal thoughts more commonly, men are four times as likely to die by suicide.Suicide rates for Native Americans are almost double the rates for other Americans.(Some good news: suicide rates for children aged 10 to 14 have declined by 18%, and for those between 15 and 24 by 9%, bringing suicide rates in those groups back to pre-pandemic levels.)What’s going on?Maybe the widespread anxiety and depression, along with the near record rate of suicide, should not be seen as personal disorders.Maybe they should be seen – in many cases – as rational responses to a society that’s becoming ever more disordered.After all, who’s not concerned by the rising costs of housing and the growing insecurity of jobs and incomes?Who (apart from Trump supporters) isn’t terrified by Trump’s attacks on democracy, and the possibility of another Trump presidency?Who doesn’t worry about mass shootings at their children’s or grandchildren’s schools?Who isn’t affected by the climate crisis?Add increasingly brutal racism. Mounting misogyny. Anti-abortion laws. Homophobia and transphobia. Attacks on Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jews, Arab Americans and other minority groups. And the growing coarseness and ugliness of what we see and read in social media.Consider all this and it would almost be stranger if you weren’t anxious, stressed and often depressed.Studies show that women have nearly double the risk of depression as men. Black people also have higher stress levels – from 2014 to 2019, the suicide rate among Black Americans increased by 30%.Are women and Black people suffering from a “disorder”? Or are they responding to reality? Or both?White men without college degrees are particularly vulnerable to deaths from suicide, overdoses and alcoholic liver diseases, with contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity.Are they suffering from a “disorder”, or are they responding to a fundamental change in American society? Or both?In their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue that “the deaths of despair among whites would not have happened, or would not have been so severe, without the destruction of the white working class … .”Part of the problem, they say, is that the less educated are often underpaid and disrespected, and feel that the system is rigged against them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven if we had far more mental health professionals, what would they do against these formidable foes? Prescribe more pills? If anything, Americans are probably already overmedicated.Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing against better access to mental health care. In fact, quite the opposite. Increased staffing and improved access to mental health care are very much needed.Mental health care is harder to find now than before the pandemic. About half of people in the US live in an area without a mental health professional, federal data shows, and some 8,500 more such professionals would be needed to fill the gap. Most people rely on family doctors for mental health care.Officials are trying to widen familiarity with a national suicide and crisis lifeline that last year received a nationwide number, 988.But in addition to providing more and better access to mental health care, and a suicide and crisis hotline, shouldn’t we try to make our society healthier?Americans experience the least economic security of the inhabitants of any advanced nation. A healthy society needs more job security and stronger safety nets.The distribution of income and wealth in the United States is the most unequal of any other advanced nation. A healthy society ensures that no one working full-time is poor, and levies high taxes on the wealthy to help pay for what society needs.Guns and assault weapons are easier to buy in the United States than in any other advanced nation. A healthy society bans assault weapons and makes it difficult to buy guns.A lower percentage of Americans has access to affordable medical care than in any other advanced nation. A healthy society keeps its people healthy.The United States puts more carbon dioxide into the air per capita than almost any other advanced nation. A healthy society better protects the environment.Big money plays a larger role in American politics than it does in almost any other advanced nation. A healthy society does not allow big money to buy politicians.Some American politicians – like Donald Trump – gain power by stirring up racism, xenophobia and homophobia. A healthy society does not elect these sorts of people.The list could be much longer, but you get the point. The anxiety disorders suffered by Americans are real, and they apparently are growing. But instead of regarding them solely as personal disorders, maybe we need to understand them at least partly as social disorders – and get to work remedying them as a society.Granted, it would be difficult to achieve any of these criteria for a healthy society.But without seeking to achieve them, no number of mental health professionals, and no amount of medications or hotlines, will be enough to substantially reduce the stress, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts that so many Americans are now experiencing.In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More