US Politics

Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.There was jubilation when he was elected.“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.Lawson’s loss was nearly entirely attributable to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor went out of his way to redraw the boundaries of Lawson’s district to ensure that a Republican could win it. It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.“Governor DeSantis has really targeted Black folks in his efforts to strip, restrict and suppress our vote in the state of Florida. That has been his number one mission,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, the founder of Equal Ground, a nonprofit that works to register voters.As DeSantis prepares to launch a run for president, his war on voting rights is a dangerous omen for what he could do in the White House. Several states have already passed similar voting restrictions and implemented their own units dedicated to prosecuting election fraud, which is extremely rare. DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.“At the end of the day, this is all about his blind political ambition,” said Angie Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker who led a sit-in on the floor of the state legislature in protest of DeSantis’s attack on voting rights. “I fear for what’s to come.”A new Republican voting mapLawson’s election was a big deal in Gadsden county, the only majority-Black county in Florida. Near the stately old courthouse in Quincy, the county seat, Brenda Holt, a county commissioner, can quickly point out the tree that was used to lynch Black people.“We needed a Black congressman. We needed one simply because he would come to all these little places and help us with things. He understood about raising hogs and he understood about being out there in the tobacco fields,” said Holt, who has also served as the chair of the county Democratic party. “When he walked in the room, you didn’t have to say nothing. We didn’t have to explain ourselves so much to him. Because he lived it.”Lawson’s election was no accident. In 2015, the Florida supreme court ordered the state to draw a district that stretched across northern Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Such a district was legally required, the court said, to preserve the ability of Black voters in that part of the state to elect the candidate of their choosing.When it came time to redraw Florida’s congressional districts last year, the Republican-controlled legislature offered up a plan that kept Lawson’s district intact for at least another decade.Then DeSantis stepped in.On Martin Luther King weekend last year, the governor submitted his own proposal for Florida’s 28 congressional districts. His plan chopped Lawson’s district into four different ones, all of which favored Republicans. DeSantis took issue specifically with the idea that the state was required to draw an irregularly shaped district to benefit Black voters. Such an approach, he said, was unconstitutional.The legislature did not back down. It passed a map that kept Lawson’s district in place. But it also passed a backup map which broke up the majority of Lawson’s district, but kept Jacksonville contained in one congressional district. It was a compromise.DeSantis rejected that plan too, saying it was dead on arrival.Eventually, the legislature caved and invited DeSantis to draw a congressional map.“I served in the legislature for 17 years and never in the history of the legislative body have we turned over the redistricting to the governor. Never heard of that – never,” said Tony Hill, a former Lawson staffer who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year.Lawson was blindsided. Some top Republicans in the state, he said, including Senator Rick Scott and Ted Yoho, privately told him they were surprised by what DeSantis was doing.DeSantis, who had already been working with top Republican mapmakers, proposed a plan that sliced up Lawson’s district and heavily favored Republicans in 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats, a bump up from the 16 GOP seats that the legislature proposed. DeSantis’s map also cut the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.The legislature passed his map. Last November, white Republicans won all four seats in northern Florida.“This is a lynching,” Holt said. “You’re treating us like a dog. They treat dogs better than us. We’re pissed off.”It’s now harder for Jacksonville residents to access federal resources to address issues like housing affordability, food deserts and crime. Several residents said they have not yet seen any town halls or events from Aaron Bean, the new GOP congressman who represents the area. A Bean spokesperson did not say whether he had held any events in Jacksonville. “Congressman Bean has been enthusiastic about seeing all corners of this newly drawn congressional district. From town halls to chamber of commerce events, from groups of thousands to groups of one, he has made it his mission to engage with as many residents of north-east Florida as possible,” she said.Ben Frazier, an activist who leads a nonprofit called the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, emphasized the need for federal assistance as he drove around the city’s 33209 zip code – one of the most dangerous in the city – pointing out boarded-up businesses and houses.“It is unfortunate that [DeSantis] has chosen to operate like that because he’s not only a danger to Black people and people of color,” he said. “He’s a danger to democracy.”“It’s people of color that all of this redistricting is concerned about,” said Lee Harris, the senior pastor at Mt Olive Primitive Baptist church in Jacksonville. “If you notice, as long as they think they have control and the majority, they will push whatever law is beneficial to them.”DeSantis’s attack on Black representation appears to have aims far outside Lawson’s district.The governor has waged a legal battle over a 2010 constitutional amendment, overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, making it illegal to draw districts that reduce political access for racial minorities. Getting rid of Lawson’s district would seem to violate that provision.“It was a performing, crossover district where Black voters had long successfully elected their candidate of choice. And in dismantling it, it raises all kinds of indicia of discriminatory intent,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.If DeSantis succeeds in dismantling districts like Lawson’s, it could ultimately provide legal cover for other states to do the same, Li said. In the federal courts, DeSantis’s approach joins a long line of conservative cases that have been pushing to raise the bar for when race can be considered in redistricting.“It’s basically trying to divorce any consideration of race or racial impacts in a redistricting map from the actual drawing and construction of a redistricting map,” said Chris Shenton, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is challenging the Florida maps.“That’s a distinction that only makes sense on paper and only makes sense if what you’re trying to do is prevent the Voting Rights Act from working.”‘Fear’ and confusionBeyond redistricting, one of the key elements of DeSantis’s crackdown on voting has been his use of a law enforcement unit to pursue charges of voter fraud.One morning last August, Ronald Lee Miller, a Miami man in his late 50s, heard a knock on his door and answered, still in his underwear. When he opened the door, he saw that police had surrounded his home, some with their guns drawn and pointed at him. They put him in handcuffs and told him he was under arrest.A few hours later, DeSantis appeared at a press conference in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers, and announced Miller was among 19 people with prior criminal convictions being arrested for voter fraud and would “pay the price”. They were charged with multiple counts of third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The arrests were the first made under the office of election crimes and security, a new $1.2m office DeSantis had created a few months earlier.Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to keep Black people from voting (14 of those arrested were Black). And records showed that many of those charged believed they were eligible to vote. Even though they all had prior convictions that resulted in a lifetime voting ban in Florida, none of them had been warned they couldn’t vote. All of them, including Miller, had received voter registration cards before casting a ballot.Ahead of the arrests, DeSantis and Florida Republicans had also made the rules for voting with a felony conviction in Florida extremely confusing.In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved one of the largest expansions of the right to vote in the modern era. They approved a constitutional amendment that allowed people with most felony convictions to vote. Those convicted of murder and sex-related offenses – as the 19 people in the arrests had been – were excluded.DeSantis and the GOP legislature followed up by passing a law that required people with felony convictions to pay off outstanding fines and fees before casting a ballot. But Florida has no central mechanism for people to check how much they owe and state officials quickly became backlogged.“They want to put fear, the same type of spirit, fear into people so that you won’t vote,” said Rosemary McCoy, a Jacksonville activist who had her voting rights restored in 2019.Miller and his lawyer, Robert Farrar, eventually got his case dismissed on procedural grounds, successfully arguing that the statewide prosecutor didn’t have the authority to bring the case.But DeSantis did not let it go. In February, the legislature passed a law that expanded the power of the statewide prosecutor, bolstering their authority to go after cases like Miller’s. DeSantis has also requested increasing the office of election crimes and security’s budget to $3.15m and nearly doubling the number of personnel.Now the governor and the legislature could cause more confusion. An election bill unveiled last week would make it so that all voters receive a warning that they may not be eligible to vote when they receive their official voter registration card.“This has all become nothing more than political theater. It’s a waste of time, waste of money, waste of judicial assets,” Farrar said.The office of election crimes and security also targets groups that register voters.In Florida, Black and Hispanic voters are five times more likely than white voters in Florida to register through a third-party group. But in its first year, the office of election crimes and security levied $41,600 in fines against these voter registration groups. Those fines came after DeSantis and the legislature passed sweeping new voting restrictions and raised the maximum fine that could be levied from $1,000 to $50,000.Burney-Clark said her nonprofit Equal Ground registered 10,000 voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But since then, it has scaled back and only registered a handful of voters – the group can’t afford the risk of high fines.‘We’re going to silence you’Cecile Scoon, president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, sees a clear through-line in all of DeSantis’s efforts to attack voting rights.“It’s all connected to ‘we don’t care what you vote,’” she said. “‘We don’t care what you say. We know better and we’re going to silence you.’“We are not in the land of the free any more in the state of Florida.” More

The Biden administration will propose strict new automobile pollution limits requiring that all-electric vehicles account for as many as two of every three new vehicles sold in the US by 2032 in a plan that would transform the US auto industry.Under the proposed regulation, expected to be released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday, greenhouse gas emissions for the 2027 through 2032 model years for passenger vehicles would be limited to even stricter levels than the auto industry agreed to in 2021.“This is a massive undertaking,” said John Bozzella, the president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told the New York Times, which first reported on the proposed limits. “It is nothing short of a complete transformation of the automotive industrial base and the automotive market.”The auto industry is expected to push back against the plan, which comes nearly two years after carmakers pledged to make electric vehicles comprise half of US new car sales by 2030 as part of a history-making transition from gasoline-powered engines to battery-powered vehicles. Environmental groups have applauded the ambitious limits proposed by the Biden administration.The proposal would require at least 54% of new vehicles sold in the US to be electric by 2030, four percentage points higher than the 2021 goal that the industry previously agreed to, and up to 67% of new vehicles by 2032. The 2021 agreement came after strong pressure from President Biden, who signed an executive order setting a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emissions vehicles.The president also wants automakers to raise gas mileage and cut tailpipe pollution between now and model year 2026, which would be a significant step toward his pledge to cut US planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.Electric vehicles accounted for only 7.2% of US vehicle sales in the first quarter of the year, but the share of EV sales is on the rise – last year it was 5.8% of new vehicle sales.The EPA declined to offer details ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, but confirmed in a statement that, as directed by Biden’s order, it is “developing new standards that will … accelerate the transition to a zero-emissions transportation future, protecting people and the planet”.The proposed regulation isn’t expected to become final until next year. More

Well, it looks like Melaniawatch is officially over. The former first lady has a habit of periodically disappearing, sparking fanciful theories that she has left her philandering husband and is crashing at the Obamas’ mansion to write a tell-all. Her latest vanishing act came, understandably, after Trump was arrested last week for hush money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. Melania was conspicuously absent from Trump’s arraignment and he failed to mention her in a speech where he thanked his entire family, and – bizarrely – praised his son Barron for being very tall. Like Jesus, however, Melania made a public reappearance on Easter Sunday.As soon as the where-is-Melania speculation was laid to rest, the what’s-Tiffany-up-to conjecture started. Eyebrows were raised when Trump thanked Tiffany, his youngest daughter, in his post-arraignment speech, because Trump famously has a habit of forgetting that Tiffany exists. Her siblings reportedly aren’t much kinder. According to Michael Cohen’s memoir about his time as Trump’s lapdog, Donald Jr, Eric and Ivanka (Trump’s children with his first wife, Ivana Trump) referred to Tiffany, who Trump fathered with his second wife, Marla Maples, as the “red-haired stepchild”. Cohen also claims the former president and Ivanka were rude about Tiffany’s looks.While Tiffany has always been on the sidelines in the Trump family, she has recently started to edge closer to the spotlight. Now that Trump’s eldest, Ivanka, is strategically keeping a distance from her disgraced dad, it looks like Tiffany is finally getting a little bit of her father’s attention. Publicly supporting him in his hour of need “could be her way to get closer to her father”, a source speculated to the New York Post in a recent piece titled “Is Tiffany Trump taking Ivanka’s place as Donald’s ‘First Daughter’?” Heartwarming stuff, eh? Sometimes it just takes being charged with 34 felony counts to bring a family together. More

FDA authorization for a key abortion drug could be nullified after Friday, unless an appeals court acts on a Biden administration request to block last week’s ruling suspending approval of the drug.The drug, mifepristone, is used in more than half of all the abortions in the US. The ruling, issued by a federal judge in Texas, applies across the country.Writing that the ruling would “inflict grave harm on women, the medical system, and the public” if it went into effect, the Department of Justice on Monday requested the fifth US circuit court of appeals temporarily block Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling while the appeals process plays out.The issue may ultimately fall into the hands of the US supreme court and its conservative supermajority, which eradicated abortion rights last year by overturning Roe v Wade.Kacsmaryk stayed his decision for seven days to allow the Biden administration time to appeal. Shortly after the ruling from Texas, Obama-appointed Washington district judge Thomas Rice issued a contradictory ruling that directs the FDA to keep the drug available in 17 states.The dueling opinions set the stage for the supreme court to possibly intervene.“On one hand, you have a ruling that says to defer to the expertise of the FDA and keep the status quo while another says to second-guess the FDA with junk science,” says David S Cohen, law professor at Drexel University, who focuses on reproductive rights.“When you have different rulings from different federal courts it is more likely for the US supreme court to get involved.”The New Orleans-based appellate court is one of the most conservative in the US. Republican appointees comprise three-quarters of its bench, with six judges nominated by former President Donald Trump. The court has routinely ruled against the Biden administration and on behalf of Texas’s abortion laws.If the appeals court declines to put a hold on Kacsmaryk’s ruling, then the Biden administration would likely appeal to the high court.“It’s possible that the mifepristone issue makes its way to the [Supreme] Court this week, either because the Fifth Circuit refuses to even temporarily pause Kacsmaryk’s ruling, or because it takes too long to do anything,” writes Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at The University of Texas.In his ruling, Kacsmaryk echoed the arguments of the anti-abortion groups that brought the case, writing that the FDA disregarded science that the drug causes harm, despite repeated studies finding it extremely safe. Legal experts say that the decision – the first time the judiciary has intervened to overturn FDA approval of a drug – could create a precedent that throws the entire drug approvals system into disarray.More than 250 pharmaceutical and biomedical companies who strongly denounced Kacsmaryk’s ruling in an open letter and warned that it could upend the FDA approval process as well as the entire US healthcare system.“Judicial activism will not stop here,” they cautioned. “If courts can overturn drug approvals without regard for science and evidence, or for the complexity required to fully vet the safety and efficacy of new drugs, any medicine is at risk for the same outcome as mifepristone.”Mifepristone is used for abortion, miscarriage management and other medical care. If access to the drug is upended, abortion providers have said they will continue to prescribe the second of the two-drug protocol for abortions. However, that drug, misoprostol, has been found to be somewhat less effective and associated with more painful side effects than the combination of pills.With the mifepristone in doubt, the Biden administration asked Rice, the district judge in Washington, for clarification on how to proceed if the Texas ruling goes into effect, given that his decision orders the government to take no action that would hinder its availability.Legal experts have argued that the FDA does not need to enforce Kacsmaryk’s ruling, even if it goes into effect.The ruling does not formally compel the FDA to seize the pills and take them off the market, Cohen says, and leaves the door open for the Biden administration to apply what’s called “enforcement discretion”, which would entail issuing guidance protecting the distribution of mifepristone. In the past, the FDA has granted drug manufacturers this type of safe harbor even in the absence of agency authorization, including for infant formula.“The ruling does not force the FDA to do anything,” says Cohen. “It’s up to the FDA to determine what to do next. They can use enforcement discretion to protect access to mifepristone. We shouldn’t read into Kacsmaryk’s ruling as having more power than it does – it is limited – and there’s a huge amount of authority the FDA can retain.” More

When Tennessee lawmakers expelled two Black legislators from the state’s Republican-dominated house of representatives, pundits described the decision as “stunning” and “historic”. Joe Biden called it “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”. The New York Times characterized it as “an extraordinary act of political retribution”.Sorry, have you met America?This tragic comedy always has the same theme: Black voter suppression vs white power. In the comparatively short arc of this country’s political history, this display of unapologetic whiteness is as unusual as water being wet and fire being hot. It is the most preposterous narrative to say the partisanship that defines this political climate is new or even remarkable.In 1869, the Georgia supreme court ousted Chatham county’s Black superior court clerk Richard W White from office. The three-judge panel noted that White “received a majority of the votes” and was “eligible, and qualified by law for said office”. Nevertheless, White was removed. Theconstitution didn’t matter. Votes didn’t matter. All that mattered was whiteness. So, instead of naming their decision White v Clements, the Georgia supreme court rejected the usual naming conventions and opted instead for the more candid title Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia?On 10 January 1966, Georgia’s house of representatives refused to seat the civil rights activist-turned-legislator Julian Bond after he signed a statement opposing US involvement in the Vietnam war. Bonds’ majority district went without representation until the US supreme courtunanimouslydecided that the first amendment protected Bond’s right to speak out on public issues.The fact that Justin Jones has been reinstated by a vote of Nashville’s council and Justin Pearson probably will be by a similar vote doesn’t mean the opposition party will stop using tricks from which democracy, common decency and even the rule of law offer no shelter.The decision to subvert the will of the voters and evict state representatives is not unprecedented – it is a great American tradition. And when placed in the context of white history, the theme that emerges has more to do with America’s racial binary than it does two-party politics.All politics is about power and there can be no real conversation about American politics that ignores the single, most common characteristic of the people who wield it. The weaponization of white power is a poltergeist that has haunted every significant political decision ever made, from the drafting of the constitution to the picking of presidents. It defined American citizenship, catapulted a toddler country into an economic superpower and created the bloodiest war in the history of this continent. In fact, racism might be the most bipartisan part of politics.Republicans whose historical knowledge is limited to eighth-grade social studies books love to tout that they’re the party of abolition and Reconstruction. They therefore blame the totality of the post-civil war racial terrorism on “the Democrats”.Even though it would be more accurate to attribute this political and social violence to southern conservatives still wistful about the lost cause of the Confederacy, these history buffs conveniently forget how the success of Black Republican candidates outraged the party’s white members, sparking the “Lily White Republican movement” that lasted for half a century, until the 1930s. This anti-Black GOP movement began in Texas, but soon Republican committees in North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and nearly every southern state banned Black candidates from running for office. Lily White Republicans were willing to sacrifice their party’s political power to preserve the racial hierarchy.While Julian Bond, Black Republicans and the Tennessee Three may have lost their elected positions, there is a far longer list of Black officials who were murdered in order to remove their authority.Returning to 1868, Georgia’s Black voters had already registered to vote in droves. Buoyed by a turnout rate (74.8%) twice that of their white counterparts (38.4%), the newly freed electorate sent 30 Black state representatives and three African American state senators to the Georgia legislature in that year’s election.By 1869, every one of the duly elected Black lawmakers known as the “Original 33” had already been ousted from the state assembly and a quarter of them had already been killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. Hundreds of African Americans had been massacred by terrorist groups. By the time the state’s highest judicial body determined, in the Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia? case, that state law “does not confer upon the colored citizens of this State the right to hold office”, white conservatives had already gained control of state politics and reasserted the government-sanctioned system of white supremacy.This story repeats and repeats.In 1898, a lynch mob unseated Lake City, South Carolina’s new postmaster, Frazier B Baker, by shooting Baker and his two-year-old daughter Julia dead. White vigilantes shot the South Carolina state representative Simon Coker in the head as he prayed – he was one of at least two dozen Black Republicans murdered in his state on that day. The civil rights attorney Robbie Robertson won his seat on the Savannah, Georgia, city council with 80% of the vote and lost it to a 1989 mail bomb.Murder of Black representatives is the purest form of voter suppression. It exposes the myth that there is a conservative “pro-life” movement that doesn’t believe in “cancel culture”.And to be clear, the historical effort to suppress Black political power has nothing to do with ensuring the supremacy of the white race. If the powerful white people in the Tennessee legislature were truly concerned about the collective wellbeing of white people, they would have protected white children by helping the legislators they ousted to pass gun control laws. If they truly wanted white kids to succeed, they wouldn’t condemn their constituents to perpetual ignorance with a whitewashed version of history.More than 160 years ago, the Tennessee state senator William H Barksdale, speaking from the same building Pearson and Jones were removed from, exposed the entirety of this strategy. “Our slaves are true and faithful, we fear not them,” he said, defending a bill “for the expulsion of Negroes from this state” in 1860, “but this free, combustible material, this fire brand, let us prepare for the future and hurl it out of the camp.”They do not care about white people; they care about white power, and anti-Blackness will continue to be the most reliable tool for maintaining their authority and control. More

As TikTok, the world’s most popular app, comes under increasing scrutiny in response to data privacy and security concerns, lawmakers in the west may soon set their sights on other Chinese platforms that have gone global.TikTok was built by ByteDance as a foreign version of its popular domestic video-sharing platform, Douyin. But it is far from being ByteDance’s only overseas moneymaker. The Chinese company owns dozens of apps that are available overseas, many of them English-language versions of Chinese offerings.CapCut is a video-editing app that is used by TikTok creators, while Lark is a workplace collaboration platform. Other apps, particularly e-commerce platforms such as Shein, have become hugely popular in the US and the UK.The US Congress is now considering the introduction of the Restrict Act, which would give the commerce department the power to ban TikTok and other apps that pose national security risks. Because the main concern about Chinese apps is that they are subject to interference from the Chinese Communist party, many household names could soon be in the line of fire.CapCutCapCut is the Chinese version of ByteDance’s JianYing. It was the fourth-most downloaded app globally in 2022, behind TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to Statista, which analyses market and consumer data.Despite the security concerns over TikTok, governments have said little about CapCut. India’s government is an outlier, banning the app in 2020 along with a host of others made by Chinese companies.First released in April 2020, CapCut has been downloaded more than 500m times on the Google Play store globally. On Apple devices, it was downloaded 25m times just last month, according to data analysts Sensor Tower. At times in 2021, CapCut was the most downloaded free app in the US.LarkLark, a workplace collaboration platform, launched in 2019. Its Chinese version is called Feishu, but the two platforms operate and store data separately, with Lark being managed from Singapore.It has already launched in the US, south-east Asia and Japan, and has plans to expand into Europe. Its target audience is multinational companies that work with China, or Chinese companies working overseas.Lark combines elements of Slack, Dropbox, Google Docs and Skype. It is a minnow compared with ByteDance’s other products, but is part of a strategy to diversify the company’s offering.Now, however, Lark’s future looks uncertain. It explicitly deals with the kind of proprietary data that western lawmakers and companies would want to keep secure. Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst who previously worked for tech firm Alibaba, said that, for years, Chinese apps pursued a strategy of developing “under the radar” before being discovered more widely. But, Yang said, “that trajectory has to shift because the American government doesn’t allow them to do that any more”.WeChatTencent’s WeChat – which has more than 1.1 billion users – is overwhelmingly used in China, where the all-encompassing app is essential for communications, bookings, finances, and even health monitoring during the pandemic.But it is popular in other countries, too, particularly for diaspora communities wanting to keep in touch with friends and family back in China. Disinformation is particularly rife on WeChat, in part because news spreads in private chat groups rather than on public feeds, so is harder to monitor.In 2022, it was downloaded more than 66m times in China, about 2.1m times in both the US and Indonesia, and more than 1m times in Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan.In September 2020, the then US president, Donald Trump, sought to ban WeChat and TikTok outright. This led to lawsuits and court-ordered stays on the ban, and in 2021 his successor, Joe Biden, withdrew Trump’s executive orders. Biden’s administration also launched national security reviews of apps created by companies with links to adversarial foreign governments such as China.WeChat is a Chinese-made app also used in the west, unlike TikTok, CapCut and others, which are western versions of Chinese apps. In 2021, WeChat said it had separated processes for its domestic Chinese users and those who log in with a foreign phone number.But in September last year, overseas users received pop-up messages warning them that “personal data [including] likes, comments, browsing and search history, content uploads, etc” would be stored on Chinese servers.SheinShein, pronounced “shee-in”, is the world’s largest fashion retailer. Founded in 2008 in Nanjing, last year it was the most-downloaded fashion and beauty app in the US, with more than 27m downloads, according to Statista.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConsumers are turning to Shein because it is cheap. But, said Yang, it is also “a lot more fun”. Chinese e-commerce apps are “a lot more engaging”, with pop-ups offering discounts and deals to gamify the shopping experience.Despite the cheap prices, its revenues are huge. In 2022, it raked in $22.7bn (£18.2bn), putting it in the same league as established behemoths such as H&M and Zara. Rui Ma, a China tech analyst and investor, said that Shein’s core advantage was its supply chain. Unlike other fashion companies, Shein works directly with the material suppliers and factories, so it has a detailed understanding of its own pipeline. Ma said Shein’s inventory waste “is one-10th that of the industry average”, which allowed it to keep prices down.TemuTemu only launched in the US in September 2022, but by January this year it was the most popular app in the country. The e-commerce platform sells everything from wireless earphones for $5.09 to a cat’s toothbrush for $0.44.Its inventory is a core part of its business model: it prioritises lightweight products to reduce cargo costs, and ships to consumers directly from factories in China. This allows it to offer rock-bottom prices. It also requires vendors to offer products that are not available on other platforms.It is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings Inc, a Chinese company that also owns the Chinese internet retailer Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo is the dark horse of the Chinese e-commerce market. Despite being much younger than Alibaba and JD.com, which dominate the industry, Pinduoduo has about 15% of the market share. Ma said PDD had “a team that is really good at execution, and they’re taking a lot of the Chinese advantages, and their knowhow, into expanding abroad”.Yang also notes that with US consumers being increasingly cash-strapped, they are willing to wait longer – Temu’s delivery times can be one to two weeks – for cheaper products. That is a challenge for US giants such as Amazon, which have prioritised speed of delivery above all else.AliExpressLast year AliExpress, the online marketplace of the tech giant Alibaba, was the third-most popular marketplace app in the UK, with 1m downloads, behind Amazon and eBay. Rather than working directly with factories, it connects small businesses in China with consumers around the world to sell cheap products, often in bulk.However, despite being backed by China’s leading e-commerce platform, AliExpress has failed to catch on in the west as successfully as newer rivals such as Temu and Shein. Yang said part of the reason for this was that it didn’t have the “laser focus” of its competitors. Yang said that AliExpress “was never really under pressure to thrive” in the west because Alibaba already had so many arms to its business, including Taobao, for shopping, and Alipay, a mobile payments system that is ubiquitous in China.What’s next for Chinese apps?In theory, many of the accusations that have been levelled against TikTok – such as that it is bad for children’s mental health or engages in censorship of political topics – should be less applicable to other Chinese apps that are popular in the west. Fast fashion and cheap cosmetics are less controversial than algorithmically delivered content that is seen as shaping young minds. And shopping apps like Temu and Shein are dependent on physical supply chains, so they are less able to change or mask their Chinese links.But US lawmakers have warned that any Chinese-owned apps could be vulnerable to data privacy breaches or interference from the Chinese Communist party.Some analysts have pointed out that the US does not have comprehensive data privacy laws, meaning that users of any apps have little control over how their data is used.Ma said: “It doesn’t make much sense to me that a shopping app is going to be put on the same level [of scrutiny] as a media app. But my view is that it’s not going to stop anyone from trying.” More

Harvard University will rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire hedge fund executive and Republican megadonor Kenneth Griffin, the institution announced on Tuesday, after a new $300m contribution brought Griffin’s total support of his alma mater to more than half a billion dollars.Griffin, 54, is the founder and chief executive of Citadel, a $59bn hedge fund, and Citadel Securities, which trades securities. He is the 35th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $34.9bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.Griffin will be just the fourth individual to have a school at Harvard named after him in exchange for a donation, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. His name will carry controversy thanks to Griffin’s stature as a major political donor to rightwing politicians and his company’s investments in firearm and ammunition manufacturers.Griffin’s companies held investments in gun and ammunition manufacturers worth more than $139m as of March 2022, according to Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ. These included shares in US gun manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger, as well as US ammunition makers Olin Corp, Vista Outdoor, and Ammo Inc.The investments became a matter of public debate in 2022 when Griffin poured millions into a Republican candidate for the governorship of Illinois. Griffin accused sitting Democrat governor JB Pritzker of failing to combat crime in Chicago, where Griffin’s companies were based. He subsequently moved his companies’ headquarters to Miami.A WBEZ analysis of firearms recovered by Chicago police from violent crime incidents over five years found that nearly one in four were produced by companies in which Citadel invests.At the time, Citadel disputed the importance of the investments, telling WBEZ that they made up “less than .01% of our portfolio” and arguing that a connection to gun violence was “quite a stretch”.Griffin rejected a call by the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper for his companies to divest from gun and ammunition makers, writing in a letter to the editor that “40% of American households own a gun” and that “the violence destroying our city is not the result of … legal gun purchases, but rather a failure to prosecute criminals, a lack of support for police, and progressive left legislation that prioritizes criminals ahead of law-abiding citizens”.He added: “I will not embrace today’s cancel culture nor engage in amateurish virtue-signaling based on blind ideology.”Griffin is also a major political donor and one of the most prominent backers of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom he has urged to run for president in 2024. A one-time fundraiser for Barack Obama, Griffin gave nearly $60m to Republican candidates for federal positions in 2022, according to Politico.Griffin’s close association with DeSantis is another potential reputational issue for Harvard. The Florida governor has staked out extreme positions on education and LGBTQ rights, including by signing the so-called “don’t say gay” bill that restricts Florida teachers from discussing topics related to sexuality and gender identity and banning the state’s public high schools from teaching a new advanced placement course in African American studies.This year, DeSantis unveiled a legislative proposal to remake Florida’s public colleges and universities that included banning critical race theory – an academic theory developed by Black scholars at Harvard Law School – and diversity and inclusion programs and drastically reducing the protections afforded by academic tenure.Asked to comment about Griffin’s association with DeSantis and his policies, a spokesperson for Citadel said: “Ken respects and employs people of all backgrounds.”Griffin’s gift to Harvard was unrestricted, the school said, and will go to the faculty of arts and sciences, which includes the undergraduate college and PhD programs. In 2014, Griffin made a $150m donation to the elite private university, primarily to fund financial aid. At the time, it was the largest single donation in the institution’s history.“Ken’s exceptional generosity and steadfast devotion enable excellence and opportunity at Harvard,” said Harvard president Larry Bacow in a statement. “I am deeply and personally appreciative of the confidence he has placed in us – and in our mission – to do good in the world.”Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Got a tip on this story? Email [email protected] More

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