US Politics

‘We need action’: how an Iranian soccer player is using his fame to fight the regimeMahmood Ebrahimzadeh is one of a network of former athletes living in exile and urging global support for the uprising rocking Iran Can soccer change the world? Mahmood Ebrahimzadeh, an Iranian international who played for his country in the Fifa World Cup, believes it can.Ebrahimzadeh is one of a network of retired Iranian soccer players now living in exile and urging global support for the uprising currently rocking the country’s theocratic regime. The group is preparing a joint letter to Joe Biden calling for the president and the US to help the Iranian people just as they are helping the people of Ukraine.“A lot of actors, a lot of singers, a lot of soccer players in the world are supporting the movement in Iran right now,” said the 69-year-old, who lives in Woodbine, Maryland. “The only people that need to come to the same line are the governments, European and American.”Spontaneous protests have erupted in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained by the country’s morality police for allegedly wearing a hijab headscarf in an “improper” way. Scores of people have been killed and hundreds arrested over three weeks.The upheaval vibrates within Ebrahimzadeh, whose political activism disrupted his soccer career in Iran in the 1970s. He played as a striker for the national team – “I think it was 15 times,” he says – including World Cup and Olympic qualifying matches. But after the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought chaos and oppression, he felt his dissident views froze him out of the national team.Finally, in 1982, when the team’s coach invited Ebrahimzadeh back to play in the Asian Cup, the regime saw an opportunity to seize him along with two other players. “They captured those two,” he recalled. “They put them in the jail and then they killed one of them.“I had the chance to run away in the night-time and go and meet my wife and my son Maboud, who was nine months old. We left through Kurdistan and we left the country. It was hard, 10 days and nights walking through the mountains in snow, 20 degrees minus, and we were not familiar with the roads. No passport or nothing.”The family crossed the border into Turkey, then went on to Germany, which – despite a language barrier – Ebrahimzadeh recalls as “heaven” compared to the freezing Zagros Mountains. He said Germans’ learning he was a soccer pro “was the key to open all the doors” for him.He went on to play for renowned German club VfL Wolfsburg and proved a prolific goalscorer. He moved to the US in 1986 and joined a Chicago indoor team but a broken leg forced him into premature retirement. He ran a US-based soccer school for AC Milan before becoming a travelling representative for the Italian club, then directed Olympic development programmes in Maryland.Ebrahimzadeh is still in touch with at least 20 Iranian former soccer players living in America and Europe who, like other prominent figures, are showing solidarity with the protesters in Iran.Ali Karimi, an ex-Iranian captain and Bayern Munich player now based in Dubai, was charged in absentia by Iran over social media posts supporting the protests, including on Instagram, where he has nearly 12m followers. Ebrahimzadeh reflected: “They’re supporting the young generation in the streets. They’re supporting human rights. They’re supporting the movement right now.”The political potency of soccer was evident last year when England’s players took the knee during the European championships to express support for racial justice after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in the US.Ebrahimzadeh noted that some current members of the Iranian national team have also spoken out at great personal risk. “On social media they said this is not way to treat the people, this is their right, this is their choice. The government has to respect them and killing is not the solution. You have to open up democracy further.”But the government crackdown under hardline president Ebrahim Raisi has been draconian. Ebrahimzadeh continued: “Anybody that speaks out against the government and supports the woman’s movement right now, they capture them, they put them in the jail.“Of course non-soccer players, regular people, they can kill easier. They can hardly kill soccer players or singers or actors but they put them in a jail and that’s happened to a couple of the national team players.”Ebrahimzadeh said reports of a 16-year-old soccer player being jailed were enough to bring him to tears.The Iranian government seeks to restrict TV coverage of European soccer leagues in Iran but the big clubs still have a following. Ebrahimzadeh called on Fifa, the sport’s world governing body, to play its part by barring Iran from the World Cup finals in Qatar. The team’s campaign is to begin against England on 21 November.He likened the move to sporting organizations suspending Russia from competition after the country’s invasion of Ukraine.“Fifa knows that the federation of Iran and all the clubs [there] are controlled by military generals,’” he said. “A bunch of terrorists is running a federation that is part of Fifa.”Leaderless, protean and durable, the protests go on, largely fuelled by the middle and upper classes. They pose the biggest threat to the authoritarian government since the 2009 green movement brought millions to the streets.Ebrahimzadeh, who last visited his homeland five years ago, said he dreams of an Iran free from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime.In order to realise that dream, he wants America to focus on human rights in Iran rather than negotiations to restore a nuclear deal struck under President Barack Obama which, he fears, would release tens of millions of dollars to Tehran.“Don’t pay them,” Ebrahimzadeh said. “The money that they release from here is going to be weapons, bullets and killing our young kids over there.”Instead he wants to see the US rally the international community and “support the people” by pressuring Iran’s regime through boycotts.“We need action,” Ebrahimzadeh said. “We need them to stand up for us.”TopicsIranActivismUS politicsReuse this content More

‘We must defeat them’: new evidence details Oath Keepers’ ‘civil war’ timelineTestimony from government’s first witness showed militia group’s leader had planned resistance well before election results were out It was just two days after the presidential election that his preferred candidate Donald Trump lost, and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes fired off a text to members of his extremist group.“We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” the text read.Now, Rhodes and four others charged with seditious conspiracy stemming from the deadly 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol staged by Trump supporters are coming off the first week of their trial in federal court in Washington DC.Capitol attack: Proud Boys leader pleads guilty to seditious conspiracyRead moreSeven other Oath Keepers pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges before the trial, which saw the prosecution reveal troubling new information about how long ago Rhodes’ group had resolved to keep Trump in the Oval Office at any cost.Testimony on Tuesday from the government’s first witness – FBI agent Michael Palian – established that Rhodes had been encouraging resistance to a potential Joe Biden electoral college victory in the early hours of 4 November 2020, days before the major news networks had called the race in his favor.“The left, including the Democratic party … seek our destruction,” Rhodes said through text messages. “We must defeat them … Even if one of them occupies the White House.”By 7 November, the day news stations projected Biden had defeated Trump, Rhodes sent a group chat through the encrypted private messenger app, Signal, “What’s the plan? We need to roll,” the Washington Post reported.He added: “I’m on my way to [D.C.] now, with my Oath Keepers tactical leaders for a possible DC op to do a leaders recon and make plans. I’m available to meet face to face.”The group chat, Friends of Stone, included Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and former Trump adviser Roger Stone, though the latter has denied any prior knowledge of the Capitol attack which a bipartisan Senate report linked to at least seven deaths and has not been charged with any crime connected to the insurrection.In arguably the most consequential reveal of the trial thus far, an Oath Keepers insider who testified Thursday claimed the group had begun plotting what he understood to be a coup during a virtual meeting with more than 100 members on 9 November, which took two hours.The Oath Keepers West Virginia chapter leader Abdullah Rashid, a heavy equipment mechanic and US marine corps veteran, started recording the session because it sounded to him like the extremist group planned to go to war with the US government, the loosely affiliated antifascist movement known as “Antifa” for short, and the racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.NOW: We are moving onto the next witness for the prosecution. His name is Abdullah Rashid. We learn now he was responsible for recording the Nov 9 GoTo Meeting.He recorded it because it sounded like Oath Keepers were planning to “go to war with the US govt”— Brandi Buchman (@Brandi_Buchman) October 6, 2022
As Brandi Buchman of the Daily Kos noted, Rashid testified that – after he recorded the meeting – he reached out to Washington DC’s attorney general, Karl Racine, and the US Capitol police. In a November 2020 email to the Capitol police force, he called Rhodes a “wacko,” and on Thursday he told prosecutors that he thought what Rhodes was proposing was “crazy.”Responding to questions about what he suspected were Rhodes’ aims for the January 6 attack, Rashid said, “It sounded like we were going to overthrow the US government and start shooting everybody, and beating up Antifa and beating up [Black Lives Matter]. That’s what I understood it to be.”Rashid also provided a tip to the FBI, which he even resubmitted in March 2021, CNN reported. No one followed up his tip until after the Capitol attack, raising questions about whether authorities had blown a chance to prevent the uprising from happening.In the recording, which was played in court on Tuesday, Rhodes repeatedly discussed putting pressure on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a federal law that allows the president to deploy military forces domestically to perform the duties of civilian law enforcement. CNN reported that Rhodes also declared his willingness to die in a fight against Antifa protesters in order to facilitate Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, CNN reported.“I’m not going to micromanage you,” Rhodes said during the call, the Daily Kos reports. “The official position is if we’re going to go in complying with DC bullshit gun laws, we are not vulnerable to being charged with felonies.”One of Rhodes’ co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, was heard on the call mentioning weapons that could skirt Washington DC’s stringent gun laws.“Pepper spray is legal. Tasers are legal. And stun guns are legal,” Meggs said, adding it doesn’t hurt to have lead pipes.The defense has argued that Rashid’s video recording doesn’t explicitly mention January 6, CNN reported, but rather refers to members attending the Million Maga March on 14 November in Washington DC. The prosecution countered that the Million Maga March – which refers to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan – hadn’t been scheduled by 9 November, the Daily Kos reported.Attorneys for Oath Keepers members have argued their clients were simply developing a “quick reaction force” in response to fears about being met with violence by Antifa.Palian testified that the FBI has not come across a person who unequivocally admitted they were planning to attack the Capitol on January 6.A former leader of the Oath Keepers’ North Carolina chapter, army veteran John Zimmerman, testified Thursday that group members did form a quick reaction force for the Million Maga March at Arlington Cemetery, the New York Times reports, hiding in a van with at least a dozen assault-style rifles, sawed-off pool cues, and handguns. The group deployed quick reaction force teams to lie in wait at another December rally and again – from hotels in northern Virginia – on January 6.Zimmerman’s testimony shed light on Rhodes’ fixation with Antifa, which allegedly drove his push to create private security details for his group at rallies before and during the Capitol attack. Zimmerman said he became alarmed over this fixation when Rhodes suggested dressing members up as elderly people or parents with children to see if Antifa would attack them without provocation after the Million Maga March, the New York Times reportedPalian also testified that another defendant, Thomas Caldwell, had talked with Rhodes about getting a boat, sitting in it during the Capitol attack, and serving with the group’s “quick reaction force,” the Daily Kos reported.The prosecution produced photos and a receipt of a $670 double-barrel pistol made to look like a cellphone that Caldwell had. Palian also testified that Caldwell had planned to use his Berryville, Virginia, home as a basecamp for out-of-town Oath Keepers descending on Washington DC for the Capitol attack, even complaining to Rhodes that he’d have to get portable toilets.Caldwell was not at the Capitol for January 6. His attorney has attempted to argue his role in the insurrection was insignificant and that he never paid dues as an official Oath Keepers member.Meanwhile, prosecutors unsuccessfully asked Thursday for permission to introduce evidence about a “death list” written by Caldwell that named Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Freeman and her daughter Moss were subjects of a baseless voter fraud conspiracy circulated among Trump supporters.The trial was expected to last several weeks more.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Texas Fort Hood to be renamed for US army’s first Latino four-star generalThe facility, named for the late retired general Richard Cavazos, will become the first to honor a Latino service member The US army’s first Latino four-star general is set to become the namesake of the country’s largest active-duty armored military base, replacing the Confederate leader after whom the facility was originally named.In a recent memo to top military brass at the Pentagon, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin said officials had until 1 January 2024 to implement a recommendation to change the name of Texas’s Fort Hood to Fort Cavazos, honoring the late retired general Richard Cavazos.West Point’s Ku Klux Klan plaque should be removed, commission saysRead moreThe base long named after John Bell Hood – who served the Confederacy – is just one of multiple military installations and facilities that the US defense department has been asked to rename by the Naming Commission, created by Congress to remove symbols commemorating Confederate figures.Eight other military bases whose names were inspired by Confederates who betrayed the United States while waging and losing the US civil war will be renamed as well.There has been a broad push to remove public symbols of the Confederacy after the 2017 killing of a counter protester during a white supremacist rally opposing the removal of a Confederate Gen Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. The killings of nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 also helped spark the push.Austin’s memo said the bases’ names should “fully reflect the history and the values of the United States and commemorate the best of the republic that we are all sworn to protect”.The fort destined to be renamed after Cavazos houses about 40,000 soldiers and sits in Bell county, Texas, where Latino residents make up more than a quarter of the population.Since its permanent establishment in 1950, the fort commemorated the commander of the Confederate army’s Texas brigade during the civil war. But it will now be named after a Mexican American native of Texas who served the US army in the Korean and Vietnam wars.In Korea, as a first lieutenant, he earned the Distinguished Service Cross – the American military’s second highest citation for valor – for repeatedly returning to a battlefield to personally evacuate soldiers that were wounded while fighting along his side, according to the Naming Commission.He earned another Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam, where he had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, for leading soldiers through an ambush, organizing a counterattack that repulsed their enemies and exposing himself to hostile fire numerous times in the process.Later, Cavazos – who also taught military science as part of the reserve officers training corps at Texas Tech – became the US army’s first Latino brigadier general in 1973. Among his roles was commanding soldiers based out of the fort slated to be renamed after him.He became the Army’s first Latino four-star general in 1982 and was put in charge of sustaining, training and deploying all the forces that the Army could deploy at the time.Cavazos retired in 1984 after a 33-year career in the army, which also saw him accumulate two Legions of Merit, a Silver Star, five Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, among other medals for service in war and peacetime. He spent his retirement in Texas before his death in 2017 in San Antonio.“Richard Cavazos’s service demonstrates excellence at every level,” the Naming Commission wrote in a summary of the late four-star general’s career. “His 20th-century service will inspire soldiers as they continue those traditions of excellence into the 21st.”US House representative Joaquin Castro – a Democrat from San Antonio – pushed for Fort Hood to be renamed after Cavazos and received support from the congressional Hispanic Caucus. When that push began, no US military bases had been named in honor of a Latino service member.Other name change recommendations include renaming Georgia’s Fort Gordon to Fort Eisenhower after Dwight Eisenhower, who led the army during the second world war and later became president; North Carolina’s Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty; and Virginia’s Fort AP Hill to Fort Walker after Dr Mary Edwards Walker, the surgeon, prisoner of war and women’s voting rights advocate.TopicsUS militaryTexasRaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Woman tells New York Times that Herschel Walker urged her to have second abortionThe Republican candidate for a Georgia US Senate seat has insisted that he does not know the woman’s identity Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for a Georgia US Senate seat, has maintained he does not know the identity of a woman who claims that in 2009 she terminated a pregnancy that was the result of her and Walker’s relationship.But on Friday, the woman at the center of a political storm that threatens to undo the former Dallas Cowboys running back’s campaign told the New York Times that Walker urged her to terminate a second pregnancy two years later and that their relationship ended when she declined.Republicans throw support behind Herschel Walker after abortion denialRead moreThe woman, a former girlfriend whom Walker has referred to as “some alleged woman”, said the Senate hopeful backed by former president Donald Trump had scarcely been involved in their son’s life other than child support and gifts.But she offered a perspective on a candidate who has appealed to the state’s social conservatives as an opponent of abortion – even in cases of rape and incest.“As a father, he’s done nothing,” she told the Times, insisting on anonymity to protect her son. “He does exactly what the courts say, and that’s it.“He has to be held responsible, just like the rest of us. And if you’re going to run for office, you need to own your life.”She provided the paper with a $575 receipt from an Atlanta women’s clinic where the 2009 procedure was performed, as well as a check deposit slip showing a copy of a $700 check she claims Walker gave her as reimbursement.But Walker said Thursday on conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt’s show: “I know this is untrue. I know it’s untrue. I know nothing about any woman having an abortion.”Walker’s wife, Julie Blanchard, disclosed to the Daily Beast on Friday that she had been in touch with the woman who had told her it was “cruel” that Walker “continues to claim he doesn’t know me or the abortion he paid for”.“He brought all of this on himself when he decided to get on a platform and denounce abortion and make a mockery of his children who have done NOTHING to deserve this,” the anonymous woman reportedly also said.Blanchard said that “this makes me incredibly sad”, adding that she “witnessed everyday Herschel pray for you and [your son] & everyone in our family”.She told the outlet that Walker calls and texts the 10-year-old child “regularly” and feels “sadness” when he gets no response – to which the woman replied, “Are you kidding me?”The woman has said that Walker has never missed any of his $3,500 monthly child-support payments, but the complex drama has nonetheless focused attention on the Republican candidate that his campaign did not want.Besides his opposition to abortion, he has four children with four different women after openly criticizing absentee dads in the Black community.Walker has disputed that he does not acknowledge his children. “I just chose not to use them as props to win a political campaign,” he said in June. “What parent would want their child involved in garbage, gutter politics like this?”But some criticism has come from close to home. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” Walker’s adult son and conservative social-media influencer Christian Walker said on Twitter.Herschel Walker responded with his own tweet: “I LOVE my son no matter what.”But the revelations have challenged Walker’s conservative political positions as he faces off with Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock for the US senate seat that could determine control of the evenly divided legislative body.A Fox News poll conducted after reports emerged last week that Walker had paid for the former girlfriend to have an abortion showed Warnock at 47% and Walker at 44%.Warnock’s campaign recently reported having $13.7m in cash on hand.Walker’s campaign said it has more than $7m. Walker campaign manager Scott Paradise said the candidate had his best fundraising days immediately after the abortion revelation, contained in a Daily Beast article on 3 October.Nonetheless, there’s apparently been an atmosphere of chaos in the Walker campaign since the bombshell Daily Beast report. Two days after the report, the campaign cut ties with its political director, Taylor Crowe, CNN reported, citing multiple sources.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaAbortionUS SenateUS politicsReuse this content More

Don’t be fooled: policymakers are quietly invoking austerity by other namesClara MatteiFraming monetary policy as a war effort has been part of the playbook for instituting austerity policies for over a century Austerity, like trickle-down economics, has been relegated to the list of things economists don’t talk about anymore. Austerity’s core policies – hikes in interest rates, downward pressure of fiscal spending and wages – had their last stand with the European sovereign-debt crisis a decade ago, and the resulting public outcry made the “a-word” unmentionable, even in times of economic crisis. So, on 21 September, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced his fifth interest-rate hike of the last nine months, this dirtiest word in economic policy was conspicuously absent from his remarks. Instead, Powell described the process of resetting the economy – through the introduction of increased unemployment and possible recession –as a necessary form of “economic pain.” Powell’s comments echoed those of his British counterpart, former chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, in a letter to Boris Johnson: “[the public] need to know that whilst there is a path to a better future, it is not an easy one.” This framing of monetary policy as some sort of war effort – hard work and individual sacrifice for the greater good –has been part of the playbook for instituting austerity policies for more than a century. In 1920, at the first international financial conference in Brussels, British civil servant Robert H Brand evangelized economic narratives focused on this “hard truth”: in order for the economy to get back on its feet after World War I, “the answer is a very painful one and yet a very simple one. We must all work hard, live hard, and save hard.” As Powell, Sunak and Brand demonstrate, the road to austerity is paved with vague euphemisms.For a policy so reviled that officials can’t even speak its name, austerity continues to enjoy a remarkable century-long run as the go-to policy prescription for national economies in strife. This is even more remarkable when one considers that, as the work of political economist Mark Blyth and others have shown, austerity policies don’t actually work – at least not in their stated ends of boosting economic growth and reducing debt. If we know that austerity doesn’t fix what needs fixed, then why is it suddenly making a comeback? Keynesian critics dismiss this paradox as a simple matter of bad policy informed by bad economic theory. But how does this response square with a world that is increasingly stewarded by Keynesian economists – a world in which the Keynesians are the ones courting austerity?A more satisfying explanation emerges when we recognize that austerity is more than just a tool for managing an economy. Rather, austerity is a political project that is crucial to upholding the smooth functioning of our economic system.In order for a capitalist system to work in delivering economic growth, the social relation of capital – people selling their labor power for a wage – must be stable across a society. Where prices or wages go up or go haywire, the system fails, and economic disaster quickly follows.‘Starve and shiver with Sunak’ is the reality for millions. The chancellor can – and must – stop it | Gordon BrownRead moreIn this way, a country’s commitment to economic growth presupposes a certain sociopolitical order, or capital order. Every capitalist society needs accumulation at the top and laboring at the bottom in order to keep expanding its pie. This organization is neither fixed nor a given; it has to be constantly protected through economic policies. That’s exactly the function austerity serves: it preserves the basic class relations at the core of our economy, especially in times of social changes. In the US, that social changeis the rapid reconfiguring of the labor market since the onset of the pandemic. It is no longer the case that the lowest-paying jobs are eagerly taken up by a labor class; instead, many people have seemingly reexamined the merits of participating in a labor market rife with unappealing conditions. And as inflation makes wage work even less sustainable than it was before the pandemic, the problem is compounded. The fiscal, monetary, and industrial measures that make up austerity are not, as they’re typically described, an economic war effort for the greater good. They are simply the crude tools for reestablishing the quiet disciplinary mechanisms that organize modern societies. For some, the short-term cost of a temporary economic recession is worth its structural gain; austerity restabilizes class relations and thus refurbishes the conditions for profits. As we enter a period of “economic pain,” it is worth considering whether this endgame justifies it.
Clara E Mattei is assistant professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She is author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, which will publish in November from the University of Chicago Press
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Why oh why don’t kids these days look hot, laments Fox News host, 58Arwa MahdawiGreg Gutfeld’s creepy rant is just the latest example of the US right’s obsession with sex Sign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter​ on feminism and sexism sent every SaturdayFox, 58, host complains college kids not hot any moreKids these days, eh? They’re all “deliberately ugly-fying themselves”. That’s according to Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, anyway. The 58-year-old recently went on a weird tirade about how college students aren’t adhering to his beauty standards. “You see them on TikTok, they’re out of shape, asexual,” Gutfeld said on Thursday, during a conversation about college loans. “They’re rejecting the truth in beauty, they all look like rejects from a loony bin.”The world is done with Wife Guys. Thank goodness for that | Arwa MahdawiRead moreThere’s nothing particularly surprising about a Fox anchor going on a creepy rant about the physical appearance of people three decades younger than him. Ninety per cent of the “news” on Fox, after all, seems to be bizarre commentary on how women look. (Remember when they speculated about whether anyone would listen to congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she “was fat and in her 60s”?) However, Gutfeld’s little outburst is worth noting because it underscores just how sex-obsessed rightwingers are. The party of supposedly small government is constantly inserting itself into other people’s pants. They want to ban sex education in schools; they want to restrict contraception; they want to force women to give birth; they want to ban women from wearing revealing clothes; they want to complain that college students aren’t wearing revealing enough clothes. Republicans don’t have any meaningful or coherent policies, they just have a fixation on controlling women.While rightwingers are busy sexualizing college students young enough to be their own kids they’re also, of course, simultaneously shouting about how liberals are “groomers” who are trying to “recruit” children. The moral panic over “grooming”, it must be said, is starting to look a lot like projection. Let’s not forget, after all, that Matt Gaetz, a sitting Republican congressman is still under investigation for underage sex trafficking. Meanwhile Matt Walsh, a prominent rightwing commentator, has suggested that we should be pushing for more teenage girls to marry and get pregnant because it is “technically when they’re at their most fertile”. The party of family values, ladies and gentlemen!Gutfeld’s spiel on “asexual” college students, doesn’t just exemplify the right’s sex-obsession – it’s also an example of the Republican’s fixation with attacking higher education. While anti-intellectualism has been a key part of the Republican party for a long time (Ronald Reagan wanted to eliminate the Department of Education), it has ramped up recently. At the beginning of the 2010s, 58% of Republicans believed higher education had a positive impact on the course of the country, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2015 that number started dipping dramatically and by 2019 only 33% agreed colleges and universities were shaping the US for the better. Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, have been vying for more control over state universities and trying to regulate what can be taught about race and identity.You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand why universities terrify Republicans: they teach critical thinking skills. And the very last thing Republicans seem to want is for people to think for themselves.Elon Musk blames communism for the fact his teenage daughter doesn’t want to talk to himAccording to the Financial Times, Elon Musk has “blamed the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists”. (Sticking with the theme of rightwingers hating higher education.) Musk told the FT that “It’s full-on communism …  and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil.” Blaming “neo-Marxists” for your daughter severing ties with you is certainly an interesting argument!Employers in the US are cutting back on parental leave, survey showsA new survey has found that the number of organizations offering paid maternity leave dropped from 53% in 2020 to 35% in 2022. The number offering paid paternity leave dropped from 44% to 27%. And people wonder why nobody is having kids any more!South Korean president tries to scrap gender equality ministry to ‘protect’ women“Abolishing the gender ministry is about strengthening the protection of women, families, children and the socially weak,” South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk-yeol, said. How does that work then?French author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel prize for literatureErnaux’s first book, Cleaned Out, is an autobiographical novel about getting an abortion when it was still illegal in France. She wrote it in secret, telling the New York Times that her husband had made fun of her after her first manuscript. When the book was picked up her husband was annoyed. Ernaux said: “He told me: If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, then you’re capable of cheating on me.” Reader, she divorced him. Outcry in Spain over male students chanting abuse at female studentsFootage of the incident shows one student calling women “whores” and “fucking nymphomaniacs” and telling them to come “out of your dens like rabbits”. Spain’s equality minister said the episode was “the clearest proof” of the need for education on sexual consent. Young women are trending liberal, young men are notForty-four per cent of young women described themselves as liberal in 2021, compared with 25% of young men.The week in pawtriarchyPerhaps you’ve heard there is cost of living crisis and the economy is pretty dire? That news seems to have bypassed San Francisco which is home to a new fine-dining restaurant exclusively for dogs. Dogue serves a $75 three-course tasting menu for pampered pooches; sample dishes include green-lipped mussels with fermented carrots and wheatgrass. I love dogs but this is just an obscene example of how out of control inequality is. It’s also completely pointless: anyone who has ever met a dog knows that they happily eat their own vomit. Serving them $75 wheatgrass is just barking mad.TopicsFox NewsOpinionUS universitiesUS politicscommentReuse this content More

Marjorie Taylor Greene: can Democrats unseat the far-right extremist?Georgia in focus: A Democratic challenger who raised $10.8m is facing an uphill battle against the Maga congresswoman In cowboy hat and square-toed boots, Marcus Flowers steps on to another porch, knocks on another front door and introduces himself as the Democrat trying to unseat congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Chip Freeman will take some persuading. He usually votes Republican and admires Greene’s “backbone”.“She puts her foot down and stands on a situation,” says Freeman, 51, a self-employed delivery man and handyman in suburban Rome, Georgia. “Not backbone because she’s accomplished anything but backbone because she’ll stand up face to face with people.”Flowers understands but is not ready to give up. “I’m not one that pulls punches either,” he says. “I’ll talk about what’s important. I’m standing on principle as well. The principle that we are a community and we’re better than the vision of those who have us be divided. There’s no us, and them, there’s only we here.”Freeman takes the candidate’s campaign leaflet and promises to read it. It is a micro victory for Flowers, a 47-year-old African American who, door by door, vote by vote, is attempting to turn back a tide that swept Georgia’s 14th congressional district two years ago.There is no better example of the rise of far-right conspiracy theory politics in the U.S. than Greene, a provocateur who has made racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic statements, signalled support for political violence – including the execution of Democrats – and promoted bizarre claims. One of them is that a Jewish-controlled space laser started a California wildfire.Despite it all, Greene, 48, looks set to retain her northwestern Georgia seat in the House of Representatives against Flowers next month. Her ascent here illustrates the Republican party’s drift to the right, the tendency of primary elections to reward the loudest, wealthiest and Trumpiest candidate and what happens when good men and women do nothing.What are the US midterm elections and who’s running?Read moreThe 14th district sprawls across 11 counties and is mostly blue collar. Three in four people are white and three in four voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Trump signs and Confederate flags can be spotted in rural areas. Despite a wild start to her career in the House of Representatives that saw her ejected from committees for spreading ugly conspiracy theories, many Republicans here intend to stick with Greene.Cookie Wozniak, 77, said: “She’s a fighter. I believe in her, I have a lot of respect for her. She’s a real bulldog and a true patriot. I worry about our country being so divisive and they’re using the race card on everything. People want to destroy our history.”Carla McFarland, 65, an air force veteran and retired nurse practitioner, added: “I have always been impressed from the first that I heard she was running. Nothing has changed my core belief in not only Marjorie Taylor Greene but the Maga [Make America great again] America First thought process.”The district’s biggest city, Rome (population 36,000), was founded in 1834 in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains and named after the Italian capital because it was also built on seven hills. The city played its part for the slave-owning south in the civil war; last year a statue of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was removed to a local museum that still uses the outdated term “war between the states”.Rome has a pretty main street with Italian, Mexican, sushi and Thai restaurants, baby clothing boutiques, wine bars and a cinema built in 1929 to show the talkies. It is reminiscent of main streets all over small-town America – an ominous sign that what happened here can happen anywhere.The street also features a Republican campaign office in a former furniture shop. A sign in the window says: “Flood the polls! Marjorie Taylor Greene. Save America, stop communism!”But Rome did not produce Greene. She grew up near Atlanta and planned to run for election in the 6th congressional district in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, where her chances would have been slim. When Republican congressman Tom Graves suddenly announced his retirement, however, she switched to the ruby red 14th district in what critics saw as carpetbagging.For local party officials and voters, there should have warning signs flashing red. In 2017, Greene had posted a video praising the QAnon conspiracy movement, which baselessly asserts that Democrats are a cabal of Satan worshippers who traffic children for sex (last year she expressed regret and sought to distance herself from QAnon).A year later, in another video, she asserted that President Barack Obama was Muslim, suggested that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were a hoax and sought to blame Hillary Clinton for the death of John F Kennedy Jr in a 1999 plane crash.Yet in a crowded Republican primary in which she was the only woman, Greene stood out and gained the most votes. She brought “all the authority, anger and everything of a metro Atlanta soccer mom”, recalled one local political observer, who did not wish to be named.Having become wealthy from a construction business and CrossFit gym, she was also able to outspend her rivals. Flowers, her Democratic challenger this time, recalled: “She ran against a field of guys who hadn’t really raised any money and couldn’t do the same things she was doing: just blanket the airwaves, put out a lot of mail. So I look at it as she bought the primary.”There was one more chance for Republicans to stop her. Greene faced a runoff against John Cowan, a neurosurgeon. While a handful of party leaders and conservative groups intervened to endorse Cowan, many remained neutral. Greene earned national support from members of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus, including congressman Jim Jordan, the group’s founder.Wendy Davis, 57, a political consultant and two-term city commissioner, said: “The runoff was basically who loves Trump more? Although the media and some people had dug into this QAnon mess that she was a part of, none of the other Republicans made that an issue in their primary. Nobody had said, ‘She’s a little out there’. Nobody had said, ‘What do you mean September 11 was a fake inside job?’.“Nobody challenged her on that and so she was able to win. If you’ve got eight people saying the same thing, who are you going to pick? You’re going to pick the person who says what you feel like is most authentically. She was very believable. Like I sleep with my dog, I think she sleeps with her gun. She gives you this feeling that gun is very important to her.”Greene won the runoff then beat her Democratic opponent, IT specialist Kevin Van Ausdal, who stopped campaigning early for “personal and family reasons”, by nearly 50 percentage points in the general election. In short, Davis contends, Greene represents the 14th district because of arbitrary circumstance rather than an abrupt outbreak of mass delusion among the electorate.“How we get here wasn’t because everybody around here went QAnon cuckoo. We got here because she loved Trump, she loved guns, she hated socialism, she hated abortion and that won that primary and it’s a Republican district.”Local Republican officials here are said to be privately dismayed by Greene’s antics since she took her seat in Congress, which have included calling for Joe Biden’s impeachment and prison visits to rioters arrested after the January 6 insurrection. Mirroring their national counterparts’ deference to Trump, however, they mostly remain silent in public.As for the people, some turn a blind eye or take little interest in politics. Others are appalled by Greene’s conduct and want to be rid of her.Julie Svardh, 49, an insurance agent, said: “I’m embarrassed to be from her district. She’s a national laughing stock. The things that she says, she doesn’t know basic words. She couples off with the worst people in Washington and is very annoying. She’s not bright and she’s a bully. She’s definitely not somebody you want representing where you live.”How did Greene get elected in the first place? Svardh replied: “People blindly supported Trump in this area and so anyone who supported that person just got lumped in. People didn’t read a lot or really look at the details and see what people stand for.”Like many districts all over the country, a significant chunk of voters here consume a diet of Fox News, the conservative cable network, and social media where conspiracy theories such as QAnon thrive. The daily Rome News-Tribune newspaper, which covers Floyd County, a market of about 100,000 people, now has about 7,000 print and 2,000 digital subscribers – a steep decline from its heyday.John Bailey, 49, its executive editor, shares Davis’s view that the district did not become a hotbed of extremism overnight. “Do you have that? Yes. Is that the minority? I think so. Do you have reasonable people who don’t consume good information? A lot. I’m not saying these are dumb people, I’m just saying their information consumption is habitually bad.“I have friends who are intelligent people but their information consumption habits have been bad for a long time. They don’t intelligently consume media. Top that on decades of ‘those politicians don’t care about us’, top that on ‘the media is looking for an angle’.”Like Trump, Greene taps into white grievance, anger among the “left behind” and desire for an outsider to “drain the swamp” of Washington. Her lack of polish and frequent gaffes – in February she referred to “gazpacho police” when she meant “Gestapo” – merely add to supporters’ perception that she is “one of them” rather than a manufactured politician.Bailey added: “They’re very forgiving of gaffes and other things that they may not like because this person kind of speaks for them. The problem that you’re dealing with is rooted in apathy and rooted in this feeling of not being connected or not being important or not being represented.”Like Trump, Greene exploits a social media ecosystem in which outrageous behaviour aimed at “owning the libs” is rewarded, and breaking taboos offers her followers a vicarious thrill of transgression. This has enabled her to build a national profile and raise money way beyond what a freshman member of Congress could have managed in the pre-digital era. In a recent campaign ad, she is seen flying in a helicopter and shooting a wild hog in Texas while comparing the animals’ destruction of farmers’ crops to Democrats’ destructive policies.Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the non-profit group Right Wing Watch, said via email: “In the social media age, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene can become a folk hero to, and raise money from, extremists from around the country. So she has a national constituency, not just a local one.”Greene remains a prominent Republican figure on Capitol Hill. When Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, last month unveiled a “Commitment to America” policy agenda at an event near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she could be seen sitting beyond his shoulder in the audience.It was a clue that Greene, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Paul Gosar of Arizona, all of whom would have been extreme fringe figures in the old Republican party, now find its centre of gravity moving towards them and could wield huge influence over McCarthy if he becomes House speaker. In a sense, they are all Trump’s children.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “It’s clear that there is a large contingent of voters in places like Georgia who feel who have felt ignored for a long time, who may have had political views that were not considered mainstream, that were now given a voice because of the extremist and unconventional viewpoints of Donald Trump.“He’s emboldened the underbelly of American politics. We cannot underestimate what the QAnon election-denying, rightwing extremist, white Christian nationalist wing of the Republican party has become and how many people subscribe to this. We should be very alarmed because what they stand for is antithetical to our constitutional and democratic norms and institutions.”Back on the campaign trail last week, Flowers, an army veteran and defence contractor who decided to run for office after the January 6 insurrection, was beating the streets of suburban Rome. Running against Greene has ensured a fundraising windfall of $10.8m from Democratic donors across the country who are disturbed by her rise. Even then, he remains a very long shot.He still has faith in the people of the 14th district: “I get why people think, ‘They voted her in office and that’s got to be who they are’. Why wouldn’t people think that? We did send her to Congress. That ain’t who we are. People were misled, misinformed.“The way she ran that campaign and didn’t have any pushback because no one else could afford to do the same things she did led some people to vote for her. A lot of those people come to me now and say, ‘I voted for her last time but she’s embarrassed us. I’m not voting for her again.’”Trump expected to launch dozens of TV ads boosting Republicans in key racesRead moreFlowers’ last house call of the day was to Jose Herran, 67, whose dogs barked loudly in a scrappy front garden and whose first question was sharp: “Do you believe in killing unborn babies?” But Flowers listened to him patiently and emphasized his career of service and religious faith while describing Greene as an absent voice who has left her own constituents in the lurch.By the end of the lengthy and meandering conversation, which Flowers described as a job interview, Herran had been won over. He told the candidate: “I’d give you the job. If you’re going to take care of veterans, that’s it for me.” Herran added: “You’ve got my vote. You talked me into it.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More