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      Will the Republican convention be good for Milwaukee businesses?

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      For Ricky Ramirez, posting “stupid shit” on the Facebook page of his bar, the Mothership, is one way he draws in customers to taste the clever cocktails he crafts in Milwaukee’s trendy Bay View neighborhood.Yet a March post that Ramirez wrote in his typically profanity-laced, punctuation-free style declaring that the bar would close over the period of the Republican national convention, which begins in Wisconsin’s most populous city next week, brought him the sort of attention he never wanted.“Sup idiots we haven’t lost a lot of followers in a while so here we go … as everything gets amplified with like the RNC shitshow coming to town lmao I would like to formally state that we’re shutting bar down during the week of because fuck that noise,” Ramirez wrote.“I’m not trying to get involved with or actively take money or rent the space out to that tomfoolery.”The announcement of the temporary closure, which Ramirez wrote out of dissatisfaction with what both political parties have to offer ahead of the November election, attracted hundreds of likes and comments, and was written up by several major media outlets. But not long after, angry emails and messages began arriving, as well as outright threats, one of which was mailed from Florida, and which Ramirez said the police are investigating.“There’s a lot of things that happen that I don’t agree with and I don’t ever want to like, you know, ruin someone’s life over it,” Ramirez said in an interview. “But people are really into this.”Ramirez’s experience is the exception in a city where many businesses were hoping for a surge in bookings and reservations connected to the four-day convention, during which the GOP is expected to formally nominate Donald Trump as their presidential candidate.Yet he is not alone in finding the RNC to be a confounding experience, even before its Monday opening. While many restaurants, bars and venues have indeed seen a flood of business connected to the convention, others have seen a mere trickle, or nothing at all.“The whole big promise of what the RNC said it was going to be is not shaking out to be that way,” said Adam Siegel, the James Beard award-winning chef-owner of Lupi & Iris, a Mediterranean restaurant in downtown Milwaukee.He had expected that one of the many organizations or businesses that sets up shop on the sidelines of the convention would book out his whole restaurant, which lies outside the convention’s security perimeter, and is regarded as one of Milwaukee’s finest eateries.Instead, his only firm booking so far is a small dinner in one of his private rooms, and though he has received more inquiries lately, Siegel has put up signs reminding customers that they will remain accessible during the convention, in hopes of maintaining steady business.Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has studied the impact of political conventions on cities and their businesses, said conventions, with their crowds, security and road detours, can undercut other industries.Bookings at Broadway theaters were down 20% compared with a typical summer week when Republicans held their convention in New York City in 2004, his research found. And unlike an event that brings similar demands on a city’s downtown, such as a city hosting the Super Bowl, political conventions don’t do much for civic pride, at least not in the current era of hyper-partisanship.“These conventions are disruptive without any kind of glow associated with them,” Matheson said.Milwaukee was initially supposed to host the Democratic national convention in 2020 until the party dramatically downsized that event and held much of it virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now it will play host to Trump’s coronation, while the Democrats are expected to renominate Joe Biden later on in August, in Chicago.“If you go back to when the DNC was going to be here in 2020, I mean, we saw inquiries, bookings, conversations about catering, stuff like that,” said Dan Jacobs, co-owner of American-Chinese restaurant DanDan. “This definitely doesn’t have the same feel whatsoever.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe tourism bureau, Visit Milwaukee, estimates that 50,000 people will come to town for the convention, 16,000 hotel room nights will be booked and the total economic impact could rise to $200m. Venues as large as the American Family Field, where the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team plays, have reportedly been booked for parties connected to the convention.The RNC could also give heightened prominence to GOP candidates in a swing state that is crucial to Trump’s hopes of retaking the White House, and where the party hopes to oust the Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin, who is up for re-election in November.“It is a state that’s certainly in play politically. So if that drives people to come here to see our city, I just hope that the entire city views this as an opportunity to show off Milwaukee and Wisconsin in the best light possible,” said Paul Bartolotta, the chef and owner of the Bartolotta Restaurants, who said he had been “exceedingly pleased” with bookings for everything from buffet lunches to hors d’oeuvres receptions at his restaurants and catering venues.“It’s an incredibly charged political environment, and you just need to let that noise go away and focus on taking care of your employees and making sure that we’re taking care of our guests.”Gary Witt, president and CEO of the Pabst Theater Group, is bracing for a week in which he expects to lose about $100,000 since five of his six venues have no bookings connected to the convention, and many touring acts are avoiding the city. He wonders if things might have been different had Trump not staged a controversial takeover of the Republican National Committee earlier this year, or if the GOP had nominated a different candidate who would have attracted more donor support for the convention.“Once the candidate was announced, there were tremendous changes that were placed that impacted the RNC by the candidate, and that created a lot more confusion and disorganization within the RNC, and probably added to the delays of getting anything done,” Witt said.The former president did not help matters by reportedly calling Milwaukee a “horrible city” in a closed-door meeting with Republicans in Washington DC, though he tried to control the damage by declaring “I love Milwaukee” days later during a rally in nearby Racine. The predominantly Democratic city’s leaders are nonetheless rolling out the welcome mat, knowing that the convention could be a boon to its economy.“I welcome those types of comments from a guy who has extremely bad taste,” Milwaukee’s Democratic county executive, David Crowley, said in an interview on the sidelines of an event hosted by the Biden-Harris campaign in Milwaukee, two weeks before the convention was to start.“Our expectation is we’re going to have thousands of people descending on Milwaukee county, and it is our job to make sure that they have the greatest party that they have,” he said.“Even though I don’t agree with any of their policies or their nominee, for us, it’s about how do we make sure that we can showcase our community, so in the future, we can bring more conventions and conferences to Milwaukee.” More

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      The far right’s crusade against porn is a crusade against progress | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Project 2025’s porn problemThe lines between art and obscenity aren’t always clear; pornography can be hard to define. “I know it when I see it,” the late US supreme court judge Potter Stewart said in his famous non-definition of the term.The far-right knows it when they see it as well. And they see pornography everywhere. Experts have noted that worries about pornography among social conservatives seem to go up and down over time: right now we seem to be at a high-point of porn panic. The Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley, for example, has repeatedly claimed that feminism has driven young men to “pornography and video games”. And the Republican party has called porn a “public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions”.Porn also plays a big part in Project 2025: a Christian nationalist manifesto and list of desired policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation that has been described as “a wish list for a Trump presidency”. (Donald Trump has said he knows nothing about it.) The 900-page plan proposes policies like mass deportations, extreme abortion restrictions, and the dismantling of climate change protections. It also says that pornography should be outlawed.On the surface the conservative obsession with porn doesn’t seem overly problematic. There are, after all, plenty of serious issues with the porn industry. It’s often exploitative and it’s helped to normalize violent acts like strangling during sex. The problem, however, is the incredibly broad way in which Project 2025 Mandate talks about porn. No definition of porn is provided; rather, it’s talked about in the context of things like transgender rights and non-normative gender expression. Porn, we are told is “invading [children’s] school libraries”. The word has been weaponized as a useful way to attack LGBTQ+ rights. See, for example, this extract from the foreword of the Project 2025 Mandate:“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”What does this mean? Well it seems to mean that the far-right want to define a book that features a same-sex couple as illegal pornography and throw the author of the book and any distributors of the book in prison. It seems to mean that a book talking about sexual violence could be classified as porn and banned. It seems to mean that talking about the existence of trans people would be “porn” and criminalized. In short: anything that goes against normative gender roles and hierarchies, or interrogates those hierarchies, could be considered obscene and criminalized.Project 2025, it can’t be stressed enough, isn’t some sort of hypothetical dystopian possibility. The scariest part of all this is that it’s very much under way. Republicans are already classifying anything they don’t like as obscene pornography and finding ways to ban it. There’s been a surge in book bans in American schools, for example. From July to December 2023, PEN America found that more than 4,300 books were removed from schools across 23 states. Many of the targeted titles feature LGBTQ+ characters. Work that address rape and sexual assault are also increasingly being targeted. So don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s preoccupation with porn. The far-right aren’t interested in the exploitation of women, they’re interested in controlling exactly what it means to be a woman. This isn’t a crusade against porn, it’s a crusade against progress.Katy Perry is getting backlash for Woman’s World, her new ‘feminist’ anthemWoman’s World is Perry’s first solo single in three years and, the singer explained, the first thing she’s done “since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine”. Unfortunately, however, the single isn’t getting a divine reception. The Guardian’s Laura Snapes gave it a one-star review and described it as “Bic for Her of pop, the pink Yorkie for girls (get your lips around this!), a song that made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it”. Perry is also facing criticism for working with the controversial producer Dr Luke on the single. In 2014 pop star Kesha accused Dr Luke of sexual assault and he then sued her for defamation. In 2023 a legal settlement was reached in the defamation suit.Elon Musk denies volunteering his sperm to help start a colony on Mars“I have not … ‘volunteered my sperm’” wrote Musk in a post on X after the New York Times reported he had. Can you imagine a planet populated entirely by mini-Musks? It would be full of so much hot air it would be unbearable.The all-women patrol team protecting Sumatra’s rainforest“We have to remember that conservation is only necessary as a result of colonialism and the forced displacement of Indigenous people who have stewarded the land for thousands of years,” says an Indigenous female ranger in this beautiful Guardian photo essay.Canadian serial killer Jeremy Skibicki given life sentence for murders of Indigenous womenSkibicki appears to have been motivated by white supremacist beliefs and targeted vulnerable women in Winnipeg’s shelter system. The “jarring and numbing” murders helped draw attention to the broader crisisof missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAttempt to ease Poland’s strict abortion laws defeatedIn Poland anyone convicted of aiding a woman in getting an abortion faces up to three years in jail. On Friday a slim majority rejected legislation that would have decriminalized abortion assistance.Death at US women’s prison amid heatwave sparks cries for helpThere’s no air conditioning in the cells at the California’s largest women’s prison and there are worries there may be even more preventable heat deaths.Etsy sellers say imminent ban on sex toys is a betrayal“Bans like this one also further the idea that sexual health and pleasure is somehow taboo or something to be ashamed of,” one seller said. “It has broader impacts on society as a whole.”Israeli forces used US-made bombs to murder kids playing soccer in a Gaza playgroundJust another day in the graveyard that is Gaza! Meanwhile pundits in the Western media and politicians keep saying Joe Biden is a “good man”. Biden is facilitating one of the worst atrocities we’ve seen in modern times–if you think he is a “good man” then what you’re really saying is that you don’t think Palestinians are people.The week in pawtriarchyThe latest status symbol for the paranoid 1% isn’t a bunker with a safe room, it’s a Svallin. This is a “an undisclosed mix of Dutch shepherd, German shepherd, and Belgian Malinois”, bred to be “beasts that could rip out an attacker’s trachea yet also function as pets.” The top dogs cost $150,000 each and only 20 are sold a year after an in-depth vetting process. More

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      Republicans ramp up attacks on Kamala Harris amid swirl over Biden future

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      With the state of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign in turmoil, Donald Trump and his Republican allies are stepping up attacks on a familiar and, some say, possibly more threatening, political foe: his vice-president, Kamala Harris.In the weeks since Biden’s stumbling debate performance, Republicans have intensified what many call racist and misogynistic criticism. They have questioned Harris’s competency, mocked her demeanor, and accused her of concealing concerns about the president’s health. Trump unveiled a new, derisive nickname for the vice-president, “Laffin’ Kamala”, which he tested at a campaign rally in Florida this week.In the rambling, falsehood-filled speech, Trump dedicated several minutes to assailing Harris, whose shortcomings as vice-president, he said, were in effect an “insurance policy” for the embattled incumbent.“If Joe had picked someone even halfway competent, they would’ve bounced him from office years ago, but they can’t because she’s got to be their second choice,” he said.While the Trump team insists they are not intimidated by Harris, supporters say the pre-emptive strikes against the vice-president – the highest ranking woman in American politics and the first Black and Asian American vice-president – are a reflection of her strength at a moment when concerns about Biden’s fitness to serve have thrust her into the spotlight. In response, a group of Democratic strategists and donors are amplifying their defense of the vice-president, an effort they say is necessary to win in November.“We need to have a surround sound around Kamala that promotes the best of her strength – that she fights for our freedoms, that she works for a better life for all Americans, that she is ready to challenge Trump,” said Tory Gavito, the president and co-founder of Way to Win, a Democratic donor network.Though the group has not weighed in on whether Biden should remain the nominee, Gavito said Harris is a major asset to the party – whether as his running mate or his replacement. New battleground state polling released this week by her group found Harris running strong with the parts of the Democratic coalition Biden is struggling to energize: young people and Black and Latino voters.“She brings in factions of that coalition that, right now, are a little concerned,” Gavito said. “So it’s an important moment to lift up the full ticket.”For much of Biden’s presidency, Republicans have warned that a vote to re-elect the 81-year-old president was really a vote for Harris. Nikki Haley, in her unsuccessful run against Trump for the Republican nomination, once told voters that the possibility of a Harris presidency should “send a chill up every person’s spine”.In the presently unlikely scenario Harris becomes the Democratic nominee, Republicans say they have plenty of material ready to deploy against her from her years as a vice-president and her short-lived run for president against Biden in 2020. As the other half of the Biden-Harris administration, her record is tied to the president’s, Republicans argue, which means she is equally to blame for Americans’ frustration over the economy and the border.Republicans have sought to make Harris the face of the administration’s response to record migration at the US southern border, casting her as its absentee “border tsar”. But she was never charged with overseeing US border policy; rather, she was tasked, as was Biden during his vice-presidency, with a diplomatic mission to address the root causes of migration.In a preview of what Trump’s strategy against Harris might look like, his campaign released an online ad alleging a “Great Kamala Cover-Up”. The video overlays images of Biden looking lost and disorientated with comments from Harris defending his fitness for office. “Kamala lied to us for years about Biden,” it says. Trump’s campaign also referred to the vice-president as “Low IQ Kamala” this week.View image in fullscreen“No one has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years more than Cackling Co-pilot Kamala Harris,” Caroline Sunshine, deputy director of communications for the Trump campaign, said in a statement to the Guardian. She also assailed the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy and immigration, among Biden’s most vulnerable issues with voters.Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who was a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the attacks by Trump and his campaign were part of an old political “playbook” used to undermine women in positions of power.“It’s things like attacking her intelligence, attacking the tone of her voice, her laugh, the othering language,” Finney said. Those are pretty common tropes that we see used against women.”Several Democratically aligned women’s organizations, including UltraViolet and Emily’s List, have joined forces to combat what they described as the “racist and sexist disinformation campaigns” against the vice-president that are proliferating online and on the campaign trail, sometimes with the explicit endorsement of Republican officials.“There’s always legitimate reasons to critique any public figure, especially politicians,” said Jenna Sherman, campaign director at UltraViolet Action. But she said many of the rightwing attacks on Harris mix personal insults with myths and falsehoods about Democrats’ positions on issues such as abortion and immigration.“This is about misogyny,” she said. “This is about the society that we live in trying to normalize, essentially, the berating of women.”Since the presidential debate last month, some surveys have found Harris performing as well as or marginally than better than Biden in a hypothetical contest against Trump, which some suspect have prompted the new wave of attacks.“Vice-President Harris is proud to be President Biden’s running mate,” Brian Fallon, Harris’s campaign communications director said in a statement to the Guardian.“As a former district attorney and attorney general, she has stood up to fraudsters and felons like Donald Trump her entire career. Trump is lying about the vice-president because she has been prosecuting the case against him on the biggest issues in the race.”The former California attorney general, elected as a senator in 2017, had a rocky start to the vice-presidency, stumbling in media appearances and struggling to stand out as Republicans relentlessly attacked her performance. But since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Harris has become the administration’s lead messenger on reproductive rights, by far Democrats’ strongest issue.On the anniversary of Roe’s fall last month, Harris declared Trump “guilty” in the “case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America”. She has also been at the forefront of democracy protection efforts, rushing to Tennessee last year to stand beside Black lawmakers expelled from the state legislature for protesting against gun violence.“She is qualified to be president,” Biden said at his Nato press conference on Thursday night. “That’s why I picked her.”He praised Harris as a “hell of a prosecutor” and a “first-rate person”, casting her as fighter for reproductive rights and an agile lieutenant who has effectively managed a wide portfolio. But even as Biden promoted Harris, he mistakenly referred to her as “Vice-President Trump”, the exact type of verbal gaffe that has unnerved Democrats in recent weeks. Trump immediately seized on the misstep.“By the way: yes, I know the difference,” the president’s campaign replied later on X. “One’s a prosecutor, and the other’s a felon.”Earlier on Thursday, Harris rallied supporters in North Carolina, delivering the kind of fiery denunciations of Trump that many Democrats long for in their nominee. Ticking through the Biden administration’s legislative and foreign policy achievements, Harris warned that a second Trump term would hurt the country’s standing in the world and make Americans less safe.“As Trump bows down to dictators, he makes America weak,” Harris said, a reference to the former president’s flattery of Vladimir Putin. “And that is disqualifying for someone who wants to be commander-in-chief.”Sharing a clip from her campaign stop in North Carolina, Representative Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, said on X: “VP Harris is on fire. She’s vetted, tested, and has been Democrats’ strongest messenger throughout this campaign. She’s next up if we need her, and we might.”Biden’s insistence that he is the candidate best positioned to defeat Trump has not quelled dissent within his party. A growing number of elected Democrats have called on the president to step aside, while speculation mounts over whether Harris could realistically replace him atop the ticket.Amid the uncertainty, the New York Times reported that the Biden campaign has commissioned a survey to measure how Harris would fare in a head-to-head matchup against Trump. It comes amid a series of media reports that advisers close to the president have lost confidence in his ability to beat Trump in November, which the White House and the president’s campaign have denied.In a memo outlining the “path ahead”, Biden’s re-election campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said there was no indication that any other candidate would fare better than Biden against Trump. It noted that an alternative Democratic nominee would face an onslaught of negative media, which is already “baked in” to his candidacy.Yet a separate memo circulating among Democrats makes a counter-argument. Titled “The case for Kamala”, the document, written anonymously by Democratic strategists, argues that making Harris the party’s nominee is the “one realistic path out of this mess”.It argues that her weaknesses are “real but addressable” and that she enjoys structural advantages over other potential alternatives: she has already been vetted on the national stage, has the highest name recognition and would have immediate access to the re-election campaign’s war chest.With just little over a month left before Democrats meet in Chicago for their convention, Harris remains the most obvious and, for now, the most popular choice to replace Biden in the apparently unlikely event he ends his run for a second term.But regardless of what happens with the ticket, attention will remain fixed on Harris as the next-in-line to a president who has raised public concern about his ability to serve another four years. That is why Democrats such as Gavito of Way to Win say it is important to defend her aggressively across all media platforms.“The anti-Maga coalition is bigger than Maga,” she said, referring to Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. “We have proven that for the last three cycles. They have lost consistently. We can prove it again. But that requires a full-throated response on every platform available that shuts down people who are afraid of strong women.” More

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      ‘Rule of the lawless’: what does the authoritarian playbook look like?

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      Donald Trump has glibly remarked that he would be “a dictator on day one” if elected to a second term, and experts on authoritarianism say we should take him seriously.The supreme court’s ruling earlier this month giving presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution heightened the risk that Trump could follow through with that plan.“It is a democratic emergency,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor of Italian studies whose work has focused on fascism.In her most recent book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ben-Ghiat explores the conditions in which democracies, including vibrant and apparently healthy ones, can fall – and the “playbook” aspiring authoritarians use to take power. According to Ben-Ghiat, Trump’s habit of maligning immigrants, casting himself as a victim, and attempting to discredit the media all align with the playbook.The Guardian spoke to Ben-Ghiat about the contemporary threat of authoritarianism in the US.This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.You have written and spoken extensively about the “authoritarian playbook”. What does that look like?At its most basic, authoritarianism is when the executive branch of government domesticates or overwhelms or politicizes the judiciary, critiques and tries to silence the press, and when the leader has a party that he’s made into his personal tool, and in general, seeks to remove or neutralize any threats to his power.As I described them in my book, the tools of rule are one: propaganda, so that the leader can go against the press early on; two: corruption itself – buying people off and getting a compliant civil service; the use of violence, which ranges from intimidation and threats to physical harm and the elimination of critics; and machismo – it’s the leader who’s the man of the people, but he’s also the man above all other men, and he’s the savior of the nation.Trump just got a huge gift from the supreme court last week with the ruling that presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution, and I’m wondering what exactly we should be preparing for now that he’s been emboldened by the court.Trump is part of the category of authoritarians who run for office, or they run to get back into office, because they have charges against them, and they must get into power so they can make their legal problems go away. Regular politicians don’t want to run for office if they have indictments or charges, but the strongman must run for office because he must make himself feel safe from prosecution.Authoritarianism is about replacing the rule of law with rule by the lawless.It’s about taking away the rights of many such as voting rights or reproductive rights, and giving the leader and the elites more liberties to do what they want to do without fear of regulations or prosecution. So the fact that the supreme court agreed to hear the immunity case and then gave him immunity – even if he kills political opponents – is the autocrat’s fantasy.So I guess preparing for the most dire possible outcome is something that we should be considering at this point – like the possibility of Trump throwing political opponents in jail, or, you know, assassinating them.The United States is an outlier nation in having someone running for office who staged a violent coup to try and keep himself in power, illegally. In other places, where these are called “self-coups,” like in Guatemala, Indonesia, or Peru, the leader ended up in jail or had to go into exile in the United States.Trump is also uniquely dangerous because he has long indulged in fantasies of violence, and he made violence his brand. This is someone who started off his campaign saying he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any followers. And he has used his rallies for almost 10 years now to preach that violence should be seen in a positive light. He’d say in the old days, you could beat up people, and that violence is necessary, sometimes, to “save the nation”.This is someone who talks about executions. The reason he admires foreign leaders such as Xi and Putin is that they have the power to execute people and pay no consequence.Something we’ve been reporting on at the Guardian is Trump’s habit of taking accusations from his political opponents, and spinning it back at them. For example, promising to go after his enemies, but then simultaneously claiming that he’s the victim of a witch-hunt, or claiming that actually, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. What’s the function of this kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” rhetoric as a form of propaganda?So you mentioned two separate things, and both of them are classic authoritarian maneuvers. The first is depicting yourself as simultaneously the defender of the nation, the all powerful man who can protect people and at the same time, the victim.For Mussolini, the enemy of Italy – which was a poor nation – was the League of Nations. Today, Trump says the enemy is the deep state. Erdogan talks about witch hunts. Berlusconi talked about witch hunts by the press and prosecutors. It makes people get on board with any aggressive actions that this leader takes, because it becomes self defense. So for example with January 6, Trump said that he was a victim of a witch hunt and that the election had been stolen from him, and he summoned everybody to the rally, and he said, If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have any country any more.The other thing that goes with this is the prospect of some kind of existential threat – in fact, what does Trump say? He says: “They’re going after me, but I’m just standing in the way. They’re really going after you.”From Putin to Orbán, all these authoritarians say that democracy is the real tyranny, and they present their way – whether it’s fascism or Trumpism – as the way to free the people. And so this idea that Biden is a threat to democracy – this is part of it.View image in fullscreenAny aggression that Trump does is because he’s the defender of freedom, and the Democrat represents real tyranny.And this goes into Project 2025, with its fake populism, which says, we are going to liberate the American people and allow them to have “self government from the tyranny of the administrative state”.So it’s very seductive rhetoric, but it’s an inversion, so that democracy becomes the threat and tyranny and fascism, or whatever we’re calling Trumpism, becomes freedom, and that is how in history, we’ve gotten into situations where mass repression is hailed as something positive.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThink about the gates of Auschwitz: “Work makes free.” It’s a whole scary, horrible lineage. When you have this kind of inversion, I call this the upside-down world of authoritarianism.I think there’s this common idea that American institutions are so strong they couldn’t possibly be worn down to the point of where we are facing mass repression. Or that a second Trump term might look illiberal, but that we could never go down the path of full dictatorship. What do you say to people who have that kind of strong faith in American democracy to persevere?When I did the research for my book, I saw that around the world, people have always been unprepared, and thought that their institutions would hold. For example, Germany was one of the most sophisticated nations in the world in the late 20s and early 30s; it had one of the highest rates of literacy, it was known for science, technology, graphic design – it was so advanced, and people didn’t think in Germany that this ranting lunatic, Hitler, could possibly do the damage he did. And then he came in, and he did things very quickly.And then in Chile, a coup occurred – and that’s like instant martial law, repression. The conservative Christian Democrats, who were the leading party, actually thought that the junta and Pinochet would establish order in the country and then give back power to them.View image in fullscreenSo my point is that it can be very scary to think that you’re in a situation of true emergency, and people are reluctant to see what’s in front of them – sometimes, because that means they might have to get out of their comfort zone and do something and become political in ways they they’ve never been before.When Trump declared he was running for president, many major media, not the Guardian, but many major US media, they didn’t even mention January 6 in the announcement.I don’t like to blame the media, so I don’t want to overstate it, but there are many ways in which the American public has been encouraged to feel that it’s not an emergency, when in fact it is a democratic emergency.On the topic of the US media, I also wanted to ask how you see the media rising to the occasion in documenting the rise of the far right, and where do you see it failing to do so?One of the best ways to go after authoritarians, whether left- or right-wing, is to investigate their corruption, and that’s one of the most dangerous things to do. The big, powerful papers that have resources, like the New York Times and The Washington Post, have done really good investigations into Trump’s corruption. In that way, they’ve been superb.View image in fullscreenIn other ways, the problem is that we have a very unique situation. We are a bipartisan republic in which one party has exited democracy. Here all the GOP lawmakers, they go on talk shows, and none of them will commit to accepting the results. They have exited democracy. And they also support January 6. They don’t disavow January 6 at all. They support Trump, even though he’s a convicted felon.All of their behaviors are authoritarian, but the media has continued to have a coverage model that is suited for two parties that are in one political system.On a similar point, I also wanted to ask about the role that liberals have historically played in either resisting rising fascism or, on the other hand, enabling it. Where do you see the Democratic party, as the largest political organ representing an alternative to the rightwing, doing correctly here? And where has the Democratic party failed?There’s been a kind of timid stance in the Democratic party to be fully progressive. And if you look at what Biden and Harris have actually done, they have been one of the most progressive, socially-conscious administrations in history. Not only have they improved the economy and jobs, but they have stood up for America as a multiracial democracy, very, very strongly with their programs, with their legislation, they have helped working people.So one of the lessons from the history of authoritarianism is if you have a far-right authoritarian threat, you shouldn’t move to the center, or even become center right, thinking you can placate. You have to have a progressive alternative. And in the Netherlands, in Israel, in Italy, in Hungary, for example, the opposition failed because it did not make a really strong progressive stance when faced with a far-right authoritarian. I think that the Democrats have not gone far enough in this.At this point, what do we do to oppose this agenda?I think Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. I know that sounds exaggerated, but he managed working not in a closed state, like Mussolini or Putin, but in a full democracy, with a pluralistic media, he still managed to convince tens of millions of people that he won the election in 2020. That’s how skilled he is, and he continues to have this enormous, enormous impact. So there’s a crisis of disinformation.One of the best things we can do as regular people is to try and educate those around us as to the outcome. What is going to happen if Trump comes back in, how is it going to affect them? More

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      Don’t believe it – the Republicans aren’t ‘softening’ their stance on abortion | Judith Levine

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      The press has pointed to the near erasure of the word abortion from the new Republican platform as evidence that the mind and soul of the Republican party now reside in the body of Donald J Trump. The document omits the right’s top-priority goal of a federal abortion ban and replaces it with Trump’s preference to let the states do the dirty work. Missing too is the holy grail of the antiabortion movement: a “human life amendment,” which would extend to fetuses and embryos the constitutional protections that were seized from pregnant people when the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022.The consensus is that the changes from the 2016 platform, which was used in the 2020 elections, to the 2024 version subordinate the Republican party’s long-held principles and strategies – not just on abortion but also on trade, entitlement cuts, and same-sex marriage – to the transient political needs and desires of its leader.On abortion, news outlets from CNN to Fox to Roll Call have called the shift a “softening” of the party’s stance.Don’t be fooled. Apart from the fact that voters don’t read platforms and elected officials rarely abide by them, the “new” abortion position will make no practical or political difference.First – if this doesn’t go entirely without saying – Trump’s word is as good as the paper he flushes down his golden toilet. If a Republican Congress handed a President Trump a federal ban, does anyone think he’d veto it? Trump doesn’t really care about abortion anyhow. His stated opinions have swung every which way, from “I’m very pro-choice” in 1999 to “God made the decision” to overturn Roe in 2022, not a US supreme court packed with the far-right justices he appointed.Second, the court is already taking care of things. Yes, it rejected a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone – but did so only on the grounds that the plaintiffs, an ad hoc group of antiabortion medical professionals, did not have standing to sue. Public health and legal experts say that the ruling almost guarantees another challenge, this time with more carefully vetted plaintiffs. And state laws banning mifepristone are untouched.The supreme court also left in place two FDA regulations loosening the prescription and use of mifepristone, but only while the regulations are under appeal. And if the appeal reaches the high court? This session, the majority declared itself the boss of the federal agencies. Should the anti-abortion activists challenge the FDA’s authority again, there’s a good chance they will prevail.So far, neither judges no state lawmakers have succeeded in shutting down abortion access. In fact, the number of pregnancy terminations increased in 2023, after Roe’s undoing, thanks to telemedical providers prescribing and a global feminist underground sending pills into abortion deserts. Laws still protect these activities. Statutes in liberal states shield providers from prosecution by authorities in conservative states, and the fourth amendment protects first-class letters and packages from illegal search and seizure.However, federal postal inspectors can get a warrant to open the mail if they have probable cause to believe the contents violate federal law. The 1873 Comstock Act prohibits the mailing of anything that can be used to cause an abortion. It is still on the books. The executive branch holds authority over the US Postal Service. With the president’s nod, the Postal Service could train its dogs to sniff out the little white pills and direct its enforcers to tear open parcels in search of contraband. US Customs is authorized to check international mail for prohibited items – whether that’s gold, fresh fruit, animal fur, or illegal drugs.The 2024 Republican platform may be no more than a script for political theater. But, there’s another document – finally discovered by the media – that shows the party ain’t playing: Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for transition to an extreme-right America under an imperial presidency. All the positions Trump finessed or “softened” in the platform are laid out in flagrant detail in the 900-page tome.Trump has disavowed connection with it, while proudly owning the platform. “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican platform, had nothing to do with it,” he posted on Truth Social. But CNN found at least 140 people involved in Project 2025 who served in the Trump administration, including six cabinet members.While peeved that the Republican platform committee flouted their input, antiabortion leaders have dismissed it as a temporary setback. “The 2024 platform is a decent statement of campaign priorities,” said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, “but not necessarily the enduring principles of the party.”Whoever ends up in the White House, the antis will not rest until every baby that can be born is born and anybody who gets in the way is punished – slandered, delicensed, sued, fined, imprisoned, even executed for homicide, or, hardly least of all, forced to carry and bear a child they do not want.Republican-dominated state legislatures have indicated their eagerness to enact the most stringent limitations and the harshest penalties. And because the supreme court has immunized presidents from criminal prosecution (with the insane proviso that they commit the crime as an official act), a second-term President Trump would be free to follow his instincts and impose his will over the bodies of women. That’s what he has always done. But this time he will be accountable to nobody.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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      Bitter tensions as reporters feel misled by White House over Biden health

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      It was the moment when long-simmering media resentment at a seemingly opaque White House broke through the surface with startling intensity.With Joe Biden’s candidacy teetering in the wake of last month’s alarming debate showing, journalists who had covered his presidency full-time for years suddenly asserted that it lacked that most basic political element: credibility.The trigger was the revelation – disclosed in several news outlets – that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times in as many months. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was forced in a live televised briefing on to the defensive over a supposed lack of transparency.“My first [question] to you is on the credibility of this White House when it comes to talking about the president’s health,” the Associated Press correspondent, Zeke Miller, asked Jean-Pierre, who, taken aback, responded by calling for “a little respect”.The exchange quickly devolved into an angry back-and-forth over whether Jean-Pierre had given an accurate picture about the president’s health and her continuing refusal to confirm the name of the visiting specialist, despite it already being in the public domain. The White House ultimately clarified matters in a subsequent news release that confirmed the specialist as Kevin Cannard and explained that he had visited the White House in January to carry out the neurological part of Biden’s annual medical check-up.Yet the flare-up went beyond one narrow episode.Many journalists increasingly feel they have been bamboozled by a White House culture of denial and non-disclosure. People who pride themselves in holding power to account in the world’s leading democracy have been asking how they could have been so blinded to Biden’s diminishing state before it burst into the open so vividly on the debate stage in Atlanta.At least some have reached the conclusion they have been misled by a campaign of obfuscation by White House staff – some of whom themselves privately complain of feeling deprived of access to the president that their seniority would normally have assured.Wider staff access, the argument runs, could have given more people a clearer picture of whether Biden was in decline – which, in turn, would have created a higher chance of the true state of his functioning coming to light.But Biden’s age-related decline was a media issue long before his disintegration at the debate, which the Biden campaign asked for partly in an effort to discredit such speculation. Little more than a week beforehand, widely circulating videos purporting to depict the president in varying states of confusion were reported in several respected outlets as tendentiously-edited “cheap fakes”.“The evidence was there for people to see, and it’s somewhat disingenuous in the press corps to say, well, you know, we were kept in the dark,” said W Joseph Campbell, professor emeritus of communication of American University in Washington.“Trump was ranting about Biden’s troubles and his gaffes in the 2020 campaign, so I think it depends on what outlets you were following. And to use a phrase the administration seems to be employing these days, this is a big-boy town and you find your news where you can – it doesn’t necessarily have to be ladled out to you by the White House press office.”Yet those who did report the matter quickly found themselves rounded on by an outraged White House. When the Wall Street Journal published a 3,000-word front-page article in early June carrying detailed anecdotes that questioned Biden’s cognitive faculties, an administration spokesman, Andrew Bates, dismissed the stories as “false claims” made by Republicans.The article – which has since been vindicated by reports in other US news sources, including the New York Times – was also attacked by the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a Biden supporter who later called on him to stand aside after the debate.In a social media post showing that disquiet over Biden’s cognitive faculties was neither secret nor new, James Rosen, White House correspondent of the hard-right Newsmax outlet, recalled being ostracised after asking Biden in a press conference two and a half years ago about polling showing public concern about his perceived decline.“When I asked Potus on January 19 2022, ‘with utmost respect for your life accomplishments and the high office you hold’, why the electorate harboured such profound concerns about his cognitive fitness, it was considered rude, and I was blackballed in briefings for eight months,” he wrote on X the day after the debate, accompanying his post with a transcript of the exchange.Just as the whisperings over the president’s age and health have escalated into a roar, so too have the long-running tensions between the administration and the New York Times, which this week published its second editorial in 10 days urging Biden to end his campaign.The calls have been in line with similar pleas from rival outlets but animus may have been sharpened by a lack of access to the president, keenly felt by an organisation that styles itself as America’s newspaper of record.“The newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright,” Politico reported earlier this year.Biden has given fewer press conferences and media interviews than any US president since Ronald Reagan, in what now looks like a deliberate strategy to conceal his deterioration. Trump – who has frequently denounced the media as “enemies of the people” – gave nearly three times more news conferences and interviews in office than Biden.With a rash of hastily organised interviews and a high-profile news conference at Thursday’s close of the Nato summit, the administration is now trying to rectify that – a panicked tactical change which, if it results in more verbal flubs, may only serve to justify the previous approach.It is an unintended irony that the White House has been shielding Biden from media accountability – a key component of the democratic process – and rubbishing questions over his age in an effort to maintain his credibility as a self-proclaimed defender of democracy and a bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian visions, which the administration insists is inimical to press freedom.That circle, says Campbell, cannot easily be squared.“It does seem to be in conflict with this greater goal as a protector or defender of democracy if you’re protecting the chief executive for an extended period of time, and then really criticising any attempts to pierce the veil.” More

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      Meta lifts restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts

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      Meta has removed previous restrictions on the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Donald Trump as the 2024 election nears, the company announced on Friday.Trump was allowed to return to the social networks in 2023 with “guardrails” in place, after being banned over his online behavior during the 6 January insurrection. Those guardrails have now been removed.“In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for president on the same basis,” Meta said in a blogpost, citing the Republican national convention, slated for next week, which will formalize Trump as the party’s candidate.As a result, Meta said, Trump’s accounts will no longer be subject to heightened suspension penalties, which Meta said were created in response to “extreme and extraordinary circumstances” and “have not had to be deployed”.“All US presidential candidates remain subject to the same community standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, including those policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence,” the company’s blogpost reads.Since his return to Meta’s social networks, Trump has primarily shared campaign information, attacks on Democratic candidate Biden, and memes on his accounts.Critics of Trump and online safety advocates have expressed concern that Trump’s return could lead to a rise of misinformation and incitement of violence, as was seen during the Capitol riot that prompted his initial ban.The Biden campaign condemned Meta’s decision in a statement on Friday, saying it is a “greedy, reckless decision” that constitutes “ a direct attack on our safety and our democracy”.“Restoring his access is like handing your car keys to someone you know will drive your car into a crowd and off a cliff,” said campaign spokesperson Charles Kretchmer Lutvak. “It is holding a megaphone for a bonafide racist who will shout his hate and white supremacy from the rooftops and try to take it mainstream.”In addition to Meta platforms, other major social media firms banned Trump due to his online activity surrounding the 6 January attack, including Twitter (now X), Snapchat and YouTube.The former president was allowed back on X last year by the decision of Elon Musk, who bought the company in 2022, though the former president has not yet tweeted.Trump returned to YouTube in March 2023. He remains banned from Snapchat.Trump founded his own social network, Truth Social, in early 2022. More

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      New York judge dismisses Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case

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      A New York judge dismissed Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case on Friday, clearing the way for two Georgia election workers to try to recover nearly $150m Giuliani was ordered to pay them for defaming them after the 2020 election.“The court finds that cause exists to convert or dismiss the case. The record in this case reflects Mr Giuliani’s continued failure to meet his reporting obligations and provide the financial transparency required of a debtor in possession,” US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane wrote in his ruling. Lane also barred Giuliani from filing for bankruptcy again within one year.The decision comes after lawyers for the two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, as well as other creditors accused Giuliani of concealing information about his finances.“Since day one, Giuliani has regarded this case and the bankruptcy process as a joke, hiding behind the facade of an elderly, doddering man who cannot even remember the address for his second multimillion-dollar home and claims impending homelessness if he must sell that second multimillion-dollar home,” lawyers for creditors wrote in a filing earlier this month.Giuliani had initially asked a judge to convert the case from chapter 11 bankruptcy – a type of bankruptcy that allows a debtor to reorganize their assets – to a chapter 7, which would allow him to liquidate his assets. He abruptly reversed course and requested that Lane dismiss the bankruptcy altogether.In addition to retaining control of his finances, dismissal also means that Giuliani can pursue an appeal of the judgment awarded to Freeman and Moss.“We’re pleased the court saw through Mr Giuliani’s games and put a stop to his abuse of the bankruptcy proceeding. We will move forward as quickly as possible to begin enforcing our judgment against him,” Rachel Strickland, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss, said in a statement.While Freeman and Moss requested the case be dismissed, a lawyer representing all creditors in the case favored instead appointing a trustee to take control of Giuliani’s finances. If the bankruptcy case were to continue with a trustee, Lane noted in his ruling, the claims of all creditors would be treated equally. Dismissing the case allows Freeman and Moss to pursue their claim faster.Lane chose dismissal, writing that continuing the bankruptcy case with a trustee could allow Giuliani to delay things further and accumulate additional expenses that could cut into his ability to pay creditors.“There is little reason to conclude that the Mr Giuliani’s uncooperative conduct will change after the appointment of a chapter 11 trustee,” he wrote.At another point in his ruling, Lane said Giuliani had engaged in “self-dealing” and that his business practices were “concerning”.Giuliani lied repeatedly about Freeman and Moss after the 2020 election, promoting false claims that they had been involved in a scheme to steal the election in Georgia. During a trial in Washington DC in December, both women – who have spoken little publicly – detailed the severe harassment they faced and the fear they continue to feel when they go out in public.Freeman and Moss also have a pending defamation case against The Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet that played a critical role in spreading false claims and targeting them. The outlet has also declared bankruptcy to delay the case, and Freeman and Moss have asked a judge to dismiss it.The defamation cases – and related bankruptcy proceedings – are being closely watched because they are a test of whether libel law in the United States can be used as an effective tool to punish and deter those who knowingly spread false information. The bankruptcy cases are largely seen as a tool to avoid paying judgments and full accountability. More