US Politics

‘Too much fear, too much grief’: Biden visits Uvalde amid scrutiny of police response to shooting Kamala Harris calls for ban on assault weapons after attending last funeral of those killed in Buffalo attackJoe Biden lamented “too much violence, too much fear, too much grief” after the latest US mass shooting as he prepared to visit Uvalde, where police face intensifying scrutiny for waiting outside the classroom where a teenage gunman with an assault rifle killed 19 children and two teachers.The US president and first lady, Jill Biden, arrived in Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday morning, both dressed in black. They visited the informal memorial of flowers and notes that has accumulated outside Robb elementary school, where the carnage took place last Tuesday.Then they will meet families who lost loved ones, and those who survived the gunman’s rampage, followed by first responders, after a relatively long gap between the tragedy in Uvalde and the presidential visit.On Saturday, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, called for a ban on such military-style assault weapons for the general public, while she attended the last funeral of the 10 people killed just two weeks ago in a racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, carried out with a similar gun.Kamala Harris calls for assault weapons ban: ‘We are not sitting around waiting’Read moreThe center of Uvalde was busy but hushed on Saturday afternoon as a long line of people lined up quietly in heat approaching 100F, waiting to place flowers and other tributes at the hurriedly-created memorial of crosses set up for those killed five days ago at nearby Robb elementary school.An ambulance was standing by and a state trooper assisted members of the public who came to mourn.But as well as grief there was anger that has been simmering since Tuesday, when local police waited at least an hour, while young children trapped with the gunman repeatedly called 911 and parents outside pleaded with officers to go in, before federal agents arrived and shot the 18-year-old local man dead.The police department specifically assigned to oversee school security in the area, led by Pedro Arredondo, appeared not to have followed state protocols advising that an “officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker”.0The head of the Texas department of public safety, Steve McCraw, admitted on Friday afternoon that “of course it was the wrong decision” for local officers to wait to enter the classroom.And Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, said he felt “misled” and was livid after several days of conflicting accounts about the law enforcement response.Biden spoke about the tragedy in Uvalde during a commencement speech he gave on Saturday morning at the University of Delaware, his alma mater.“As I speak, those parents are literally preparing to bury their children. In the United States of America. Too much violence, too much fear, too much grief,” said Biden and called the Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings acts of “evil”.“In the face of such destructive forces, we have to stand stronger. We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of our people, and of our children,” he said.‘We have to act’: can Biden cut through the gridlock on gun control?Read moreThe US has received increasing criticism from the international community and gun safety advocates domestically over continual mass shootings and the failure of lawmakers to pass gun control laws that could mitigate them.Biden and fellow Democrats have been repeatedly out-maneuvered in the last decade by Senate Republicans, many of whom are backed by the powerful gun lobby.Harris called on the Congress to act, saying: “We are not sitting around, waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. We know what works on this. It includes – let’s have an assault weapons ban.”In Uvalde, Alfred Garza was among several parents who gathered outside the elementary school after reports that a shooting was under way and witnessed officers delaying a move to storm in. He tried not to get in the way. Other parents begged officers to take action.His daughter Amerie Jo, 10, was among those shot dead before federal agents arrived and killed the gunman, Salvador Ramos.“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it just took too long to get in there and, you know, had they gotten there sooner, and someone would have taken immediate action, we might have more of those children here today, including my daughter,” he told CNN.Warning signs about Ramos had been evident prior to his attack, with reports of threatening posts on social media and aggressive interactions with teenage peers.But he was able legally to arm himself with assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition shortly after he turned 18 this year.His mother, Adriana Martinez, gave a short television interview earlier in the week, saying in Spanish: “I have no words to say. I don’t know what he was thinking,” adding: “He had his reasons for doing what he did. Please don’t judge him. I only want the innocent children who died to forgive me.”TopicsTexas school shootingBuffalo shootingUS gun controlJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump’s ‘big lie’ hits cinemas: the film claiming to investigate voter fraud2000 Mules has been resoundingly debunked by factcheckers, but the film has earned praise from Trump and other Republicans The atrium of Cinemark Fairfax Corner could not be described as characterful. The yellow walls, arcade games and rows of snacks and popcorn might be any bland multiplex cinema anywhere. But the digital dashboard of films currently playing merits a second glance.Along with Bad Guys, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is the title 2000 Mules. Anyone hoping for a superhero blockbuster about an army of horse-donkey hybrids will be disappointed.Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpRead moreInstead, Donald Trump’s “big lie” has arrived at a cinema near you.2000 Mules claims to be an investigation of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. It purports to show that Democratic-aligned ballot “mules“ were paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, tipping swing states in favour of Joe Biden against Trump.The “documentary” has been resoundingly debunked by factcheckers who point out that its supposed smoking gun – $2m worth of anonymised mobile phone geolocation data that allegedly tracks the “mules” visiting drop boxes – is based on false assumptions about the accuracy of such technology.But that has not prevented 2000 Mules earning praise from Trump and other Republicans, gaining a limited cinema release and becoming something of a sacred text in the discredited “Stop the steal” conspiracy theory narrative.So it was that on a quiet Wednesday afternoon, a dozen people – most of them white and middle-aged or elderly – took their seats at Cinemark Fairfax Corner for a screening. Unusually and perhaps tellingly as the lights went down, there were no trailers for other movies.The main feature turned out to be more restrained than critics of the big lie might expect. Far-right film-maker and provocateur Dinesh D’Souza seeks to present himself as curious, innocent and reasonable – just asking questions – as he interviews commentators and “experts” about the conduct of the 2020 election.In fact, D’Souza is so determined to avoid the raucous tone of Trump’s rallies or Fox News’s opinion hosts that at times the 88-minute film is, surprisingly, just plain dull. But by the end he does emphatically conclude that the election was rigged and stolen by Democrats as an ominous, plaintive version of The Star-Spangled Banner swells.Among this group of cinemagoers, at least, D’Souza was preaching to the converted. All had gone in convinced that Biden is not legitimately elected president. The film, like a social media echo chamber, delivered a satisfying dose of confirmation bias.“I thought it was spectacular,” said Joe Hughes, 67, who is self-employed. “Trump never stood a chance in that election.”Joyce Gould, 69, an accounting administrator, agreed: “When Trump talked about stuff that was going to happen, I didn’t have any reason to doubt him. I figured there was a lot of cheating going on. But when you actually see the details in the film as far as the geo-technology and all that kind of stuff? Sure.“I’m just surprised at the evil that is out there in the world. You always know it’s there, but when you actually hear the details of it, it’s just very astounding to me.”A man who gave his name only as Bill, and his age as above 50, described the film as “nauseating and extremely compelling if you have an open mind”. He insisted: “I’m a very objective person. If my own children were charged with a crime, I’d be on the jury. That’s how objective I am.”But he added: “My frustration is with Trump. He knew it was going to happen. He did nothing to stop it. That’s also very nauseating to me.”Will this film actually change minds? Bill’s wife, Anna, 63, who works for an airline, commented: “It might wake up some people that aren’t woken but I don’t know who will come to watch it. I doubt some with a certain political affiliation are willing to because they don’t want to see it or hear it.”2000 Mules was produced by D’Souza and uses research from the Texas-based non-profit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws.A special screening at Trump’s luxury Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, was attended by prominent supporters of his assault on democracy: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell.Clips from the film have regularly featured at Trump’s campaign rallies and it was shown in full before he took the stage in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The former president has praised 2000 Mules for exposing “great election fraud”.There are signs that it could become a cultural touchstone for Republicans, granting a patina of gravitas and respectability to the big lie that does not come from rumors, speeches or internet chatrooms.Ronny Jackson, the White House’s former top physician who is now a member of Congress, tweeted: “If you don’t think there was MASSIVE voter fraud in the 2020 election after seeing 2000 Mules, then NOTHING can convince you. The amount of criminal fraud all caught ON CAMERA will SHOCK you! 2020 was NOT “free & fair” at ALL. GO SEE 2000 MULES!!”Kandiss Taylor, who ran for governor of Georgia in this week’s Republican primary election, bemoaned the lack of investigations into voter fraud: “There’s been none in Georgia outside 2000 Mules that just came out, outside of data teams all over the state that are private citizens.”However, factcheckers have eviscerated the movie, noting its flawed analysis of mobile phone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that someone deposited a ballot into a drop box as opposed to merely walking or driving nearby.Aaron Striegel, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, told the Associated Press: “You could use cellular evidence to say this person was in that area, but to say they were at the ballot box, you’re stretching it a lot. There’s always a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.”2000 Mules also contains drop-box surveillance footage that showed voters depositing multiple ballots into the boxes. But it is impossible to tell whether those voters were the same people as the ones whose mobile phones were anonymously tracked.Critics also point out that D’Souza has form. He has spent years promoting disinformation. In 2007 he wrote wrote that “the cultural left is responsible for causing 9/11”. In 2014 he was convicted of violating federal election law by making illegal donations to a US Senate campaign only to be pardoned by Trump in 2018.Yet 2000 Mules has been released in more than 270 cinemas across the US with most distribution provided by Cinemark, the third biggest chain in the country. The Popular Information website pointed out that Cinemark’s founder and board chairman, Lee Roy Mitchell, “is a major financial backer of Trump and rightwing misinformation platforms”.Given Trump’s obsession with ratings, it would not be a huge surprise if he now claims to have rescued the American box office. But the release of 2000 Mules is very modest compared to the typical Hollywood blockbuster.Dan Cassino, a government and politics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in Madison, New Jersey, said: “It’s not a widespread release. This is not Doctor Strange. This exists because there is a market for it.“It’s hard to believe that this sort of very blatant propaganda that doesn’t address the question it’s supposed to is going to convince anyone who didn’t already believe that this was real. This is a way of giving additional talking points to people who already believe that the election was stolen.”Purveyors of Trump’s false election claims took a hammering in this week’s Republican primary elections in Georgia. But some watchdogs warn that, about 18 months after the presidential election, the mere existence of 2000 Mules could yet breathe new life into the big lie.Gunner Ramer, political director of the Republican Accountability Project, said: “We get angry emails in our inbox all the time – we’re dumb, terrible RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] or whatever – and one thing I have noticed is that people do mention 2000 Mules.“Among the still-can’t-get-over-the-2020-election-loss crowd, they are watching this. It has made an impact with them and reinforced the big lie.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart, readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truthsKellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit. Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreConway strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.Conway labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.“You were a leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”He got the pardon anyway.Some who feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men, Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.“If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz Twitter, Truth Social.But Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the sycophant.In 2019, Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”In Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.Left unsaid is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention, drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced non-disclosure agreement in court.On a matter of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.Rebekah Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.Like many in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing acquaintance.Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum about the Mercers’ ownership.In 2016, the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That same year, the unseen hand of the company put it sticky fingers on the scales of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data breach.Here’s the Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she shares a desire to keep things “classy”.Some realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in 2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”The only thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse. Unsurprisingly, Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreHello, alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join. This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.As for Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a cost.Conway remains in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in 2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve Bannon. He could tell her some things.
Here’s the Deal is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
TopicsBooksKellyanne ConwayUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationRepublicansUS elections 2016reviewsReuse this content More

‘We have to act’: can Biden cut through the gridlock on gun control?The president has long fought for restrictions but deep divisions have often left him hamstrung Less than two hours after returning from a five-day trip to Asia, a visit meant to signal American strength, Joe Biden walked slowly into the Roosevelt Room of the White House, visibly shaken, to address one of the nation’s greatest weaknesses.Another bloody mass shooting in America. This time in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, making it the deadliest shooting at an elementary school since the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.It was just 10 days after a gunman had targeted Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 people. And just nine days after a gunman opened fire in a Taiwanese church in southern California, leaving one dead and several wounded.“Why?” Biden said, his voice rising in anger. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”Nearly a decade after watching Republicans defeat a gun control package he helped develop as vice-president in response to the shooting at Sandy Hook, Biden’s wrenching search for answers to this uniquely American tragedy continues.He entered the White House with a sweeping plan to address gun violence, but too-narrow margins in Congress to see them enacted. Once again, the president finds himself stuck between a desire to act and the limits of power to do so.Washington’s shame: how previous bids to tighten gun laws have failedRead more“I am sick and tired of it,” Biden said this week. “We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.”On Sunday, Biden will travel to Uvalde to honor the lives lost. He will grieve with the community as a father who knows the pain of burying a child. But as the president, it is unclear what he can deliver.Biden said on Wednesday that “the idea that an 18-year-old can walk into a store and buy weapons of war, designed and marketed to kill, is, I think, just wrong,” declaring: “The second amendment is not absolute.”Any hope he had of action from lawmakers on Capitol Hill was seemingly tempered by decades of false starts and failures. He called on Congress to pass “reasonable” gun safety laws and urged the Senate to take a “modest step” by confirming his nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).“We’re always looking to do more,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Thursday. “But right now we need the help of Congress.”Encouraged by the White House, Democrats have thrown themselves into the gun control debate anew. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, who was the congressman representing Sandy Hook at the time of the massacre, began talks this week. But they face long odds in drafting a bill that can garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Senate filibuster.Speaking at a gun safety rally on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Murphy acknowledged a feeling of “dejà vu” in the wake of these tragedies, when vows of “never again” are followed by gridlock and inaction. He asked supporters for help building the public case for action, urging a “popular uprising of citizens” to pressure Republicans.Democrats say the discussions will not be open-ended and have vowed to force Republicans to take votes on the issue if no compromise is reached in the coming weeks.“I’m not going to negotiate for ever,” Murphy told reporters after the rally.Hours later, Senate Republicans blocked legislation introduced by Democrats that would have strengthened the federal government’s response to domestic terrorism and white supremacy in response to the racist attack in Buffalo, a stark reminder of the deep divisions between the parties on how to address gun violence in America.The White House pointed to a flurry of executive orders Biden has signed as part of the administration’s “whole of government” response to the nation’s “epidemic of gun violence”. One would strengthen regulations on “ghost guns”, homemade firearms without serial numbers that are increasingly recovered at crime scenes. Another launched a team of strike forces to crack down on illegal firearms trafficking in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and DC.Additionally, they have launched efforts to prevent veteran suicides by firearm, increase community policing and tighten regulations on “stabilizing braces” that have been used in mass shootings.But the steps fall short of Biden’s campaign promises to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and his embrace of a federal gun buyback program to take more weapons off the streets.In the absence of congressional action, gun safety advocates believe Biden can do more with his bully pulpit and his pen.“We need the president to bring this issue to the national level consistently, even when there aren’t mass shooting tragedies rocking the nation,” said Po Murray, chair of Newtown Action Alliance, formed after the Sandy Hook massacre. “He needs to make this issue a daily priority until we start reducing gun deaths and injuries in this country.”Murray is among the advocates urging the White House to establish a federal office of gun violence prevention and issue a national emergency declaration to more forcefully confront the issue. Others have called on Biden to appoint a gun “tsar” or use his executive authority to expand background checks on firearm purchases and reform the ATF.Greg Abbott backs out of NRA appearance amid fury over eventRead moreJohn Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said Biden had been the “strongest gun-sense president in history”. But he is urging the White House to issue an executive order that would clarify the definition of gun sellers so that more would be required to conduct background checks on prospective buyers.During a press briefing this week, Jean-Pierre stressed that this had been a top priority for Biden for much of his political life. “Look, this is a president, as I’ve said already, who has been working on gun violence, comprehensive gun reform, since he was a senator.”But a reporter pushed back: “Isn’t that more of an indictment” that he has been working on this issue for so long and so little has changed?Jean-Pierre replied that Biden had done “more via executive actions than any president in their first year” to combat gun violence, but understands that we need to do more.”“We are angry as well,” she said.Biden’s frustration is borne of decades of experience working on the issue, one of the most divisive in American life. As a senator, he played a key role in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004 when Congress failed to renew it.Years later, when Biden was vice-president, Barack Obama tasked him with the mission of developing a fresh wave of gun control measures in response to Sandy Hook. The team proposed a slew of executive actions that Obama ultimately signed, but a parallel legislative effort failed in the Senate in 2013.Matt Bennett, a vice-president of the Democratic thinktank Third Way, who worked with Biden’s team on gun control legislation after Sandy Hook, said Biden knows his options are limited without Congress.“When he ran the taskforce in 2013, they did their damnedest to find every single thing Obama could do by executive order, but there’s just not that much,” he said. “Trust me, they’re looking under every rock.”Wading too deeply into the legislative debate as talks begin on Capitol Hill could upset the already-fragile negotiations, he added.“Biden understands that this can’t be the ‘Biden bill’ or else it has no hope,” Bennett said.In Uvalde, Biden will once again play the role of first responder to a nation reeling from tragedy. But in the days and weeks that follow, advocates hope the president will seize this moment to relentlessly pursue meaningful policy reform.“He can be savvy but he cannot be complacent,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, a gun violence protection group founded by the former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt that left six people dead, “because we cannot continue this cycle of mourning.”TopicsTexas school shootingJoe BidenUS politicsUS gun controlUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceMarc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster’s brilliant book considers the history of communications technology in a racist society Nearly all the books I have read about the internet have deepened my fears about the net effect of social media on the health of our body politic. For example, I thought three facts from the congressman Ro Khanna’s recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, were enough to scare anyone concerned about the future of democracy.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreKhanna reported that an internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”; he revealed that before 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles”; and he pointed to a United Nations report that Facebook played a “determining role” in events in Myanmar that led to the murder of at least 25,000 Rohingya Muslims and the displacement of 700,000 others.Seen and Unseen, a brilliant new book by Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor, and Todd Brewster, a white journalist, certainly doesn’t ignore those dangers. But the authors’ focus is overwhelmingly on the positive effects of Twitter and Black Twitter, which they argue have democratized access to information, and the power of the smartphone to provide the incontrovertible video evidence needed to prosecute the murderers of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.The book is a brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies, from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.It includes terrific mini-portraits of many of the heroes and several of the villains of the Black-and-white battle which has dominated so much of American history, including the great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who turns out to be the most photographed American of the 19th century, and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.There is a great section about the impact of The Birth of the Nation, which single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan and did more to rewrite the history of Reconstruction than any other book or movie. Its director, DW Griffith, was frank about wanting to give white southerners “a way of striking back”.“One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends – the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after – in the Yankee-written histories we read in school,” Griffith wrote. “From all this was born a burning determination to tell … our side of the story to the world.”As the authors note: “His movie did that spectacularly.”The book also reminds us that this was the first movie shown in the White House and the host, Woodrow Wilson, was a friend and Johns Hopkins classmate of Thomas Dixon Jr. Wilson, of course, was also the president who allowed the segregation of the federal government.But what makes this volume especially valuable is the authors’ capacity to see the good and the bad in almost everything.WEB Du Bois said The Birth of the Nation represented “the Negro” either “as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful but doddering idiot”. James Baldwin called it “an elaborate justification of mass murder”.And yet the film was so egregious it also had a tremendous positive effect – it “did more to advance the NAACP”, which had been founded six years earlier, “than anything else to that date. In essence it jump-started the movement for civil rights.” At that time, that term did not yet have any meaning.Du Bois and the NAACP hoped to hit back “in kind” with a movie called Lincoln’s Dream but were stymied by “the lack of enthusiasm” of white capital.In our own time, Hill and Brewster identify the unique power of the video of the murder of George Floyd, which “resonated with whites because the cruelty inflicted on him was so undeniable, so elemental … and so protracted (nine minutes 29 seconds) that it could be neither ignored nor dismissed”.For Black people of course it was much more personal: as they watched “the last breaths being squeezed from Floyd’s body, they could see themselves in his suffering; or an uncle, or a sister, or even a long-departed ancestor”.A beautiful mini-biography of James Baldwin includes many of his most pungent observations, including, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And, “To be a Negro in this country, and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”.A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hateRead moreIt turns out that “one of the most frequently cited BLM counterpublic voices is Baldwin’s”. He is “the movement’s literary touchstone, conscience, and pinup” as well as its “most tweeted literary authority”.That is the most positive contribution of Twitter – and particularly Black Twitter – I have ever heard of.The authors write that Baldwin “was impatient with America because he saw it as trapped in its own history”, and wanted America to admit “that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”.There was a time in my life when I considered that an exaggeration. But once you have acknowledged that ours is a nation that was literally founded on genocide and slavery, Baldwin’s judgment becomes an indisputable truth.
Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice is published in the US by Atria Books
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Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpThe ex-president suffered some humiliation when his candidates lost in the Georgia primaries – but the hard-right strain of Republican politics will survive In his campaign heyday, Donald Trump would declare it the greatest movement in the history of politics and promise: “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.”What never occurred to him was that the “Make America Great Again” movement – or Maga – might get sick and tired of him first.Tuesday’s Republican primaries did not go as Trump had hoped | Lloyd GreenRead moreThe former US president suffered some humiliation on Tuesday when four candidates he handpicked in Georgia lost Republican primary elections in a landslide. It was a stinging rebuke in what has become ground zero for his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.But it was no rebuke of Maga and all it stands for.The hard-right, nativist-populist strain of Republican politics predates Trump and will surely survive him. This year’s primary season winners in Georgia and elsewhere have been careful not to disavow the movement, or its patriarch, even when they lack his blessing.“Donald Trump has transformed the Republican party over the past five years and it is now a solid majority Trumpist party with everything that entails in policy and in tone,” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “On the other hand, Republicans, including very conservative ones, are clearly willing to entertain the possibility of Trumpism without Trump.”Trump is now 75 and could be living a quiet, golf-playing retirement like other past presidents. But against the counsel of some of his inner circle, he chose to make this year’s midterm elections about him and the primaries – votes in states and districts to decide which Republicans will take on Democrats in November – a referendum on his continued influence.Trump endorsed candidates in nearly 200 races, from governor to county commissioner, often in contests that are not particularly competitive and help bolster his list of wins. But others have been reckless, vengeful bets aimed at dislodging incumbents who defied his claims of election fraud. So far, the results have been a mixed bag.The month began well enough in Ohio, where venture capitalist and author JD Vance leaped from third to first place following Trump’s late-stage endorsement in the Senate primary.In North Carolina, Trump helped the 26-year-old former college football player Bo Hines win the nomination for a seat in the House of Representatives. In Pennsylvania, voters chose his preferred candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 win of the state.But other governor races, which often turn on specific local issues, have proved more elusive. Trump’s pick in Nebraska’s primary, Charles Herbster, lost after allegations surfaced that he had groped women. In Idaho a week later, Governor Brad Little comfortably beat a Trump-backed challenger.In North Carolina, meanwhile, voters rejected Trump’s plea to give a scandal-plagued congressman Madison Cawthorn a second chance. And in Pennsylvania, a Senate primary featuring Trump-endorsed TV doctor Mehmet Oz remains too close to call.This week Trump again notched some wins including Sarah Sanders, his former White House press secretary, in the primary for governor of Arkansas. But it was all overshadowed by Georgia, where he has pushed his personal vendetta hardest and so squandered political capital.It was not just that former senator David Perdue, whom Trump had lobbied to run, lost to Governor Brian Kemp, who had refused to overturn the results of the 2020 election in his state. It was also the crushing margin: Kemp beat Perdue by a staggering 52 percentage points.Rubbing salt into the wound, Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who defied Trump’s call to “find” the votes to change the outcome two years ago, also won his party’s nomination. Attorney general Chris Carr and insurance commissioner John King, both opposed by Trump, prevailed in their primaries too.Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, commented: “The results in Georgia were really stunning. Few, if any Republicans, have aroused Donald Trump’s ire so much as Governor Kemp and Brad Raffensperger and they both did substantially better than expected. Donald Trump went all out in Georgia and he ended up an egg on this face, which is significant.“It may be that the people who have been in the bull’s eye of Trump’s ‘big lie’ campaign have started resenting it and took their resentment out. More generally, I think an increasing number of people are asking themselves a question that they weren’t asking previously: would we be better off with a Trumpist candidate who’s not named Donald Trump?”Among those asking the question is Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who campaigned for Kemp in Georgia and told the Politico website: “Trump picked this fight.” Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have also felt at liberty to campaign for midterm candidates denied Trump’s imprimatur.Then there is Mike Pence, the former vice-president, who defied his old boss by rallying with Kemp on Monday and telling the crowd: “Elections are about the future.” Pence, himself a former governor of Indiana, has made a habit of speaking with pride about the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration while distancing himself from the “big lie”.Should he run for president in 2024, he may pay close attention to how Little, Kemp and others have studiously avoided criticising Trump while capturing swaths of his base by shifting right on abortion, gun rights and “culture wars” issues and signing legislation to prove it. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is another likely student of the formula.That means there is still little room for more old school Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, who lost the presidential election in 2012. Few are making an impact in the primaries. “A Republican who wants to pretend that 2016 through 2020 never happened and go back to the Romney-Ryan era is not going to do well in today’s Republican party,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington.But Trump does face a further challenge to his authority from the far right.Some on this wing effectively accuse him of not being Trumpy enough, as demonstrated last year when he was booed for urging supporters to get vaccinated against the coronavirus (he now barely mentions vaccines in his speeches).Kathy Barnette, a Senate candidate who mounted a late surge in Pennsylvania with ideas even more extreme than Oz, told the Reuters news agency: “Maga doesn’t belong to him. Trump coined the word. He does not own it.” Kandiss Taylor, a similarly far-right candidate for governor of Georgia, backs Trump’s false claims of voter fraud but is unsure whether she would vote for him again in 2024. She said in an interview with the Guardian: “It’s not about him. The people of America chose him and he’s the one that we elected. Will I vote for him in 2024? It all depends on what happens between now and then and who runs against him.”A further sign of fracturing came this week when Cawthorn, smarting from his defeat in North Carolina, swore revenge on “cowardly and weak” members of his own party and declared: “It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark Maga to truly take command.”The anti-democratic implication was that the end justifies the means in an existential struggle for America. Cawthorn named allies including the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Trump himself, suggesting that the former president has already turned to the dark side.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who belonged to the rightwing Tea Party movement, said: “Maga’s dark enough on its own … Trumpism has metastasised beyond Trump and it’ll go in a bunch of different dark, eerie places but it’s all the same thing. Trumpism now is the dominant strain in the party.”Maga’s identity crisis comes as Biden and other Democratic leaders seek to brand their opponents as “Ultra-Maga Republicans” in the hope that labelling the entire party as extremist will be more effective in the midterms than a singular focus on Trump (though he and his supporters have embraced “Ultra-Maga” in merchandise and fundraising emails).Yet while Trump’s status as a kingmaker has been diminished, and his “Stop the steal” obsession is wearing thin, it would be unwise to extrapolate too much from primaries where it was always going to be hard to oust popular, well-funded incumbents.Trump continues to raise vast sums of money and command loyalty from most Republicans in Congress as well as from the Republican National Committee. Polls suggest that he is more popular with the Republican base now than when he won the nomination for president in 2016. His “America first” mantra is now in the party’s DNA; even the candidates he does not endorse typically do endorse him.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 presidential primary and now hosts a podcast, added: “Nothing has changed. This is Trump’s party and everything that’s happened this primary season just continues to reflect that … Wake me up when an anti-Trump Republican wins a primary. That would be news.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS midterm elections 2022RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Kevin McCarthy refuses to comply with House Capitol attack panel subpoenaThe Republican minority leader sent an 11-page letter appearing to demand materials from the committee related to his questioning Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, indicated on Friday to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that he would not cooperate with a subpoena unless he could review deposition topics and the legal rationale justifying the request.The California congressman’s response adopts an adversarial position similar to other subpoenaed Republican Congress members, and it sets a conundrum for the panel over whether to entertain the requests that also challenge the January 6 inquiry’s legitimacy.McCarthy appeared to tell the select committee in an 11-page letter through his lawyer that he would not consider complying with the subpoena until House investigators turned over materials that would reveal what the panel intended to use in questioning ahead of a deposition.Rudy Giuliani stonewalls Capitol attack investigators during lengthy depositionRead moreThe House minority leader also asked the panel to give him internal analyses about the constitutional and legal rationales justifying the subpoena, and whether the panel would adhere to one-hour questioning between majority and minority counsel, according to the letter.McCarthy’s references to the minority counsel amounted to a thinly veiled attack at the investigation, which Republicans have called illegitimate because the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, refused last year to appoint some of McCarthy’s picks for the Republican minority.The accusations, however, are to some degree disingenuous: it was McCarthy who pulled all Republican participation, incensed at Pelosi’s refusals, rather than name different members. Pelosi later added Republican congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the panel.McCarthy’s requests also appeared phrased in a manner expecting the select committee to decline his requests, with the letter accusing the panel of issuing unprecedented subpoenas to five House Republicans in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.“The select committee is clearly not acting within the confines of any legislative purpose,” the letter said. “It is unclear how the select committee believes it is operating within the bounds of law or even within the confines of any legislative purpose.”The response from McCarthy largely mirrored the response from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan on Wednesday. In the letter, obtained by the Guardian, Jordan said he would consider complying only if the panel shared material that put him under scrutiny.Like with Jordan, it was not immediately clear how McCarthy might act if the select committee refused his requests. The investigation’s standard operating procedure to date has been not to share such materials with witnesses, according to a source familiar with the matter.The panel’s next move could have significant ramifications for both its inquiry and Congress. If the panel refused the request and the five subpoenaed House Republicans in turn declined to cooperate, it could leave large unanswered questions about the Capitol attack.But it could also set a problematic precedent for Republicans themselves, who might like the idea of subpoenaing Democrats in partisan investigations should the GOP take control of the House – as Capitol Hill widely expects – after the 2022 midterm elections.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment.The resistance from McCarthy came as he and Jordan denounced the investigation as a “kangaroo court” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For House Republican leaders to agree to participate in this political stunt would change the House forever,” they wrote.With McCarthy’s refusal to appear for a deposition without first receiving materials from the select committee, at least four of the five Republicans subpoenaed to testify about their roles in the events of 6 January have now declined to comply without some sort of negotiation.The current chairman of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, and its previous chairman, Andy Biggs, have both sent letters to the panel refusing to cooperate, CNN reported. It was not clear whether the fifth Republican, Mo Brooks, would comply.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

America, how long will you sacrifice your children on the altar of gun worship?Jonathan FreedlandThis devotion to the right to bear arms is horrifyingly outdated. It brought terror to Texas – and it will happen again and again America’s great appeal to the world was its promise of possibility. It presented itself as virgin territory, a tabula rasa where a society could form anew, free of the past, and where individuals might do the same, reinventing themselves, renewing themselves, starting over. It was a myth, of course: it took no account of those people who were already there, and whose lives and lands were taken, or of those who had been brought to America in shackles. But it was a powerful myth all the same, one whose grip on the global imagination lives on: witness the success of the stage show Hamilton in seducing yet another generation into the romance of a new world and its revolutionary creation.But now we see something else: a country uniquely burdened with the dead weight of its past, and therefore powerless either to deal with a danger in its present or to make a better future. The land of possibility stands paralysed, apparently unable to make even the smallest change that might save the lives of its young.The evidence came again this week in the Texan town of Uvalde, where an 18-year-old walked into an elementary school and killed 19 children, aged between eight and 10, and two of their teachers. It was the 27th school shooting in the US this year, and it’s not yet June.There are so many stats like that. In the US, 109 people die of gun violence every day. There have been more mass shootings in the US in 2022 than days of the year. There are more guns in America than there are people. It was Uvalde this week, but last week it was Buffalo, where another 18-year-old walked into a supermarket and killed 10: his animus was directed at black people rather than children, but his method was the same.Each time, the satirists at the Onion bring out the same headline: “‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens”. The joke gets at something critical and curiously un-American: a debilitating form of fatalism.After Uvalde, I spoke to several seasoned Washington hands, asking if the horror of this latest massacre might at last prompt action. No, was the reply. Of course, each side makes the same ritual moves. Democrats deliver stirring, even heartbreaking speeches. Republicans then accuse Democrats of “politicising” tragedy, preferring instead to offer “thoughts and prayers” to the victims, before suggesting every possible remedy except the obvious one: this week we had Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas demand an end to the menace of unlocked back doors in schools. Not one of them will so much as entertain the idea of, you know, making it a tiny bit harder for a disturbed teenager to get hold of a military grade assault weapon.The easy explanation for this refusal to act is money, specifically the cash put in the hands of pro-gun politicians by the National Rifle Association (whose annual convention, addressed by Donald Trump, is going ahead this weekend in Houston, Texas, with the massacre in Uvalde deemed no reason to reschedule). But that is too pat. The NRA has been weakened by a slew of recent scandals, yet Republican politicians still refuse to pass even the mildest gun safety measures. The glum truth is that it’s not a lobby organisation that has a hold on them so much as pro-gun voters, who have concluded that if a politician dares suggest, say, the massively popular move of requiring universal background checks – looking for a record of instability or past violence – before selling someone an AR-15, they have taken the first step towards government confiscation of citizens’ guns.That, of course, is seen as an unconscionable violation of the constitution’s second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Never mind that no Democrat is advocating anything like the action Britain or Australia took after mass shootings, all but banning guns, and never mind that it’s hard to believe that the framers of the constitution were intent on allowing unhinged teenagers access to weapons that could kill en masse and in seconds. That slippery slope argument, combined with the sacred status accorded to the second amendment and the constitution itself, has immobilised Republican politicians.Their opposition matters because they have far more say than the number of votes that they win might suggest. Under the US system, every state gets two senators, no matter how many or how few people live in that state. It means mainly white, mainly rural states with few voters – but strong views on guns – exercise an effective veto on more populous, more diverse, more urban states, whose tens of millions of voters are desperate for gun safety measures. That’s why even the modest proposals that followed the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012 died in the Senate. And that’s why so many feel fatalistic about the prospects of change, resigning themselves to another massacre and then another.Some try to keep the fatalism at bay, insisting that with the NRA weak, now is the time to strike. They propose a march on Washington of a million parents and their children. Or a consumer push to demand the Republicans’ corporate donors withhold their cash until the party acts on guns. Or maybe even international pressure, with foreign leaders raising gun violence with their US counterparts the way they’d raise human rights abuses when meeting representatives of China. The US Senate banned assault weapons back in 1994 (before allowing the ban to expire a decade later): if they did it once, they can do it again.But those defiant voices are in the minority. Most believe that the state of America’s politics has condemned the US to suffer a fate the rest of the democratic world has avoided. Beyond the mortal threat that represents to Americans, that despair, that sense that political effort is futile and that change is impossible, endangers US democracy and the country’s very sense of self.That it arises out of the constitution – its second amendment and its design of the Senate – is a bitter irony. The whole point of the American revolution enshrined in that document was to forge a society that could make the world anew, able to adapt to the present unbound by the strictures of the past. In the words of the great English-born revolutionary Thomas Paine, who argued that circumstances always changed from one generation to the next: “As government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.” Today’s America is sacrificing the living in the name of the dead of two centuries ago. It is betraying its founding ideal. It is offering up its young to placate ghosts from a time long gone.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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