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      RFK Jr’s animal antics are bizarre – but his treatment of women, along with a litany of Kennedy men, is far more disturbing

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      America’s first family has been in the news again recently. This time, the focus has been Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. After nominating as an independent candidate for the US presidential election, he subsequently withdrew and endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump.

      His staunch anti-vaccination stance had already been reported, but then came the bizarre stories about him chainsawing the head off a dead whale and driving around with it attached to the roof of his car – after he’d already admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park ten years ago.

      Review: Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan (HarperCollins)

      The nephew of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and son of Robert (Bobby) F. Kennedy, the former US attorney general who was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, RFK Jr has a long history of inconsistent and embarrassing behaviour.

      But what is more concerning, according to Maureen Callahan’s new book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is his behaviour towards women, including the neglect and gaslighting of his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died by suicide in 2012.

      RFK Jr neglected and gaslit his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, before she died by suicide in 2012.
      AAP

      She writes that he “remains unbothered and unquestioned about the circumstances” leading to the death of this “fragile woman who he tormented toward the end of their marriage and in the lead up to her suicide, cheating on her, cutting off her credit cards and access to cash, trying to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her she’d be ‘better off dead’.”

      RFK Jr’s prominence in the 2024 US election (Trump has appointed him to a senior role in his transition team) makes Ask Not particularly timely and topical. While the book mostly focuses on people and events from the past, it highlights the persistent influence of the Kennedy legacy on American politics.

      Entitlement and recklessness

      Ask Not draws a line between the Kennedy history and contemporary America, while also connecting the stories of the many women who have suffered at the expense of the Kennedy men’s extraordinary sense of entitlement and recklessness.

      Divided into 12 parts, with sections on 13 different women, Ask Not turns the attention from the prominent Kennedy men to the women they “destroyed”. Some of these women are well known. There are two sections devoted to Marilyn Monroe and three to Jackie Kennedy. Other women would have barely been noticed by the Kennedys until their lives were ended or ruined through associations with the family.

      Robert and Ethel Kennedy with their children, 1966. From right: Kathleen, 15; Joseph, 14; Robert Jr, 13; David, 11; Mary Courtney, 10; Michael, 8; Kerry, 7; and Christopher, 3.
      AAP

      Callahan identifies Pamela Kelley as one of those women. As a teenager, she was friends with RFK Jr and his brothers David and Joe. In August 1973, she reluctantly agreed to travel with David and Joe and others on a trip to Nantucket. Seven teenagers piled into an open jeep.

      According to Callahan, Joe tore through the streets of Nantucket, driving in circles before crossing into the other lane and incoming traffic. He swerved and the jeep flipped at least twice. “The carnage,” Callahan writes, “was unbelievable”. Two of the girls had broken necks. Pamela was thrown 30 metres into the air before landing on a tree trunk. She would never walk again.

      Six days later, Joe Kennedy pled not guilty in court, standing before Judge George Anastos, an old classmate of his late uncle, Joseph Kennedy. Callahan recounts the scene: “You had a great father and you have a great mother,” Anastos said. “Use your illustrious name as an asset instead of coming into court like this.” He gave Joe a $100 fine and let him go.

      There was a similar lack of accountability when Joe’s uncle, US Senator Ted Kennedy, faced court over the death of Mary Jo Kopechne a few years earlier. The young political staffer was the only passenger in a car that Ted Kennedy crashed after a party at Martha’s Vineyard in 1969.

      Ted had been drinking and was speeding when the car plunged from a bridge into the water. He left Mary Jo in the car to seek help but did not call the authorities. By the time trained rescuers arrived, Mary Jo had suffocated.

      Senator Ted Kennedy’s car is pulled from the water in July 1969. Mary Jo Kopechne was killed after Kennedy drove his car off Dyke Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island.
      AAP

      Defying belief

      The stories in Ask Not often defy belief. But most of the older stories in the book have been well and truly verified by now. For the more recent examples, Callahan has relied on original interviews with friends and families of the affected women, plus additional sources including other books and media reports. She provides notes for each woman included.

      She conducted original interviews with (mostly unnamed) people who knew John F. Kennedy Jr’s wife Carolyn Bessette, who died along with her sister when a plane he was flying crashed in 1999. She also spoke to those who knew RFK Jr’s second wife Mary Richardson, Mary Jo Kopechne, Pamela Kelley and a young girl called Martha Moxley.

      Martha Moxley, aged 14, a year before she was murdered.
      AAP

      Moxley was brutally murdered aged 15. RFK Jr’s then-teenage cousin, Michael Skakel, was convicted and jailed for the crime. After serving 11 years of a 20-year sentence he was released and the conviction was vacated, pending a retrial that never happened. RFK Jr later published a book, Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.

      Callahan also drew on “a long history of reporting on the Kennedy dynasty” as a writer for Vanity Fair and the New York Post. Callahan’s author note doesn’t specify whether she interviewed any of the Kennedy men. Although there is very little direct attribution in the book, Ask Not appears to be thoroughly researched and she is an excellent writer.

      Her language is concise and evocative. Each section reads like a tightly edited feature story. She draws the reader in, and at various points, leaves them wanting more. Ask Not is a long book, but it is also compulsively readable (not to be confused with an easy read; it’s frequently disturbing).

      A key strength is the unconventional structure. Divided into 12 parts, it does not follow a chronological order, instead combining the various stories of the women by themes such as “Rebels”, “The Girls”, “The Survivors” and “Falling Stars”.

      Unexpectedly, Ask Not includes sections on women within the Kennedy family: the matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and two of her four daughters, Rosemary and Kathleen (known as Kick), sisters to JFK, Bobby and Ted.

      These sections provide insights into the family’s attitudes towards women, driven largely by pervasive patriarchal values and misogyny, but also through Rose’s religious beliefs: “The only Catholic more devout than Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy may have been the pope.”

      From left, are, seated: Eunice, Jean, Edward, on lap of his father, Joe Kennedy Sr, Patricia, and Kathleen, and standing, Rosemary, Robert, John, mother Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Joseph Jr. 1938.
      AAP

      When Kick Kennedy decided to marry an English protestant, she continued to have a relationship with her father Joe, while Rose completely cut her off. She died, aged 28, in a horrific plane crash in 1948.

      Her sister Rosemary lived a long life, but her story is no less tragic. According to Callahan, Rosemary was seen as different to her smart and sporty siblings. She was “slow at school, earnest, child-like and needy”. The Kennedys were winners; yet she was a loser.

      Her father Joe was so embarrassed of Rosemary that he hid her away for years before arranging for her to have experimental surgery at age 23. She was lobotomised and “left functionally as a two-year-old” and subsequently “stashed away in another state without any contact from her siblings or parents”.

      Dangerous men

      Ask Not starts with “Icons” and Carolyn Bessette, detailing her initial reluctance to allow her husband, JFK Jr, to fly her to Martha’s Vineyard on the night of July 16 1999.

      Long before he made a series of rash and senseless decisions that led to the plane crash that killed him, Carolyn and her sister, Lauren, JFK Jr had a history of selfish risk-taking. “No one could have believed that the kind, humble, gorgeous John Kennedy had a habit of putting others in danger too – most often his closest friends and girlfriends,” Callahan writes.

      JFK Jr had a history of selfish risk-taking before he, wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister died in a plane crash he piloted.
      Luca Bruno/AAP

      “Speeding, swimming too far out into the ocean, driving recklessly onto sidewalks or while high on pot, skiing in whiteout conditions, acting like an expert in all sports when really he was just an amateur – there was little John wouldn’t dare and he bullied almost everyone in his life to be as wild as he was.” Like many of his male relatives, JFK Jr was not used to being told “no”. Whatever he wanted, he got. His life was defined by a sense of entitlement others would struggle to comprehend.

      The initial focus on JFK Jr works well, as he exemplifies the recklessness and carelessness of the Kennedy men that Callahan outlines throughout the rest of the book. For most of the Kennedy men, a sense of entitlement extended beyond their professional lives and into their interactions with women. JFK Jr was somewhat of an exception, according to Callahan. His father, on the other hand, may have the worst reputation for womanising.

      Even though some of the women in JFK’s life had shared their experiences publicly before, they make for confronting reading. As president, JFK would invite young women who worked at the White House to drinks in his office before offering them “a tour of the residence”. When 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley agreed, the president pushed her onto Jackie Kennedy’s bed, pulled off her underwear and had sex with her.

      Jackie Kennedy famously endured her husband’s relentless womanising.
      John Rous/AAP

      According to Callahan, JFK Jr had a voracious sexual appetite. He constantly slept around, repeatedly infecting his wife with sexually transmitted diseases, sharing lovers and prostitutes with his friends and brothers. Concerningly, his womanising was well known in Washington circles, including among the press who turned a blind eye.

      A destructive force

      Other Kennedy men may not have been as extreme, but they tended to share a perception that women were objects of lust, something that they were owed.

      In diaries he left around for the house for his wife Mary to read, RFK Jr kept a list of all the women he had been with. There were so many – “astronomical numbers”. He ranked them from 1 to 10, as if he were a teenager, according to Callahan.

      “The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and in our culture,” Callahan writes in the prologue, citing RFK Jr’s current influence as an example.

      We must examine the Kennedy history, Callahan argues, and question the family’s enduring legacy. “Do the Kennedys deserve to remain a power centre in American life and politics?” she asks. She ends the prologue with an explanation for the book’s title, taken from JFK’s famous 1961 inaugural address, and a call for the question to be reframed.

      “Ask not” has also forever been an admonition to women in the Kennedy sphere: Ask no questions. Don’t ask for help or respect, for fairness or justice.This book takes that as a dare. Ask Not?Let’s. More

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      Ex-aide to New York governors charged with being agent of Chinese government

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      A former New York state government official who worked for the former governor Andrew Cuomo and current governor, Kathy Hochul, was charged on Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.Linda Sun, who held numerous posts in New York state government before rising to the rank of deputy chief of staff for Hochul, was arrested on Tuesday morning along with her husband, Chris Hu, at their $3.5m home on Long Island.Prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to the governor’s office, shaped New York governmental messaging to align with the priorities of the Chinese government and attempted to facilitate a trip to China for a high-level politician in New York, the indictment said. Hu is charged with money-laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.In return, she and her husband received benefits including help for Hu’s China-based business activities and undisclosed tickets to performances by visiting Chinese orchestra and ballet groups, the indictment says. A Chinese government official’s personal chef prepared “Nanjing-style salted ducks” that were delivered to Sun’s parents’ home, it adds.The couple then laundered the financial proceeds, using them to buy their property in Manhasset, a condominium in Hawaii for $1.9m and luxury cars including a 2024 Ferrari, the indictment says.“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the … state executive chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the” country’s communist party, US attorney Breon Peace said. “The illicit scheme enriched the defendant’s family to the tune of millions of dollars.”A lawyer for Sun, Seth DuCharme, did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Sun and Hu were expected to make an initial court appearance on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn said.The indictment outlines a series of exchanges Sun had with officials in the Chinese consulate in New York in January 2021, when Cuomo was still governor and Hochul was lieutenant governor. Neither leader is named in the document, but they are instead referred to as “Politician-1” and “Politician-2.”After Chinese officials requested a lunar new year video from the governor, Sun said Hochul could probably do it and asked for “talking points of things you want her to mention”.“Mostly holiday wishes and hope for friendship and cooperation / Nothing too political,” an official told her, according to the indictment.Sun later told a different official that she had argued with Hochul’s speechwriter over the draft because the speechwriter insisted on mentioning the “Uyghur situation” in China. She promised that she would not let that happen, and the final speech did not mention the Muslim ethnic minority, according to the indictment.The FBI searched the couple’s $3.5m home in Manhasset in late July but declined to release details at the time.Sun worked in state government for about 15 years, holding jobs in Cuomo’s administration and eventually becoming Hochul’s deputy chief of staff, according to her LinkedIn profile. In November 2022, Sun took a job at the New York labor department as deputy commissioner for strategic business development, but she left that job months later in March 2023, the profile said.In a statement, a spokesperson for Hochul’s office said the administration fired Sun after “discovering evidence of misconduct”.“This individual was hired by the executive chamber more than a decade ago. We terminated her employment in March 2023 after discovering evidence of misconduct, immediately reported her actions to law enforcement and have assisted law enforcement throughout this process,” the statement reads.A spokesperson for Cuomo did not immediately return an emailed request for comment.Sun and Hu live in a gated community on Long Island called Stone Hill. The couple bought the house in 2021 but placed it in a trust earlier this year, records show. More

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      JD Vance endorsed anti-IVF report that contradicts Trump’s new stance

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      A rightwing thinktank report proposing sweeping restrictions to abortions and fertility treatments was endorsed by JD Vance years before he became a fervent backer of Donald Trump and – eventually – his vice-presidential running mate known for his derisive views on childless women.In 2017, months into Trump’s presidency, Vance wrote the foreword to the Index of Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays by conservative authors for the Heritage Foundation that included ideas for encouraging women to have children earlier and promoting a resurgence of “traditional” family structure.The essays lauded the increase in state laws restricting abortion rights and included arguments that the practice should become “unthinkable” in the US, a hardline posture the Democrats now say is the agenda of Trump and Vance, who they accuse of harbouring the intent to impose a national ban following a 2022 supreme court ruling overturning Roe V Wade and annulling the federal right to abort a pregnancy.The report also includes an essay lamenting the spread of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments, with the author attributing them as reasons for women delaying having children and prioritising higher education rather than starting families.IVF has emerged as an issue in November’s presidential race after Trump said last week that he favoured it being covered by government funding or private health insurance companies – a stance seeming at odds with many Republicans, including Vance, who was one of 47 GOP senators to vote against a bill in June intended to expand access to the treatment.The report’s contents provide fresh insights into the philosophy informing some of Vance’s inflammatory later public statements, which have included saying that America is run by “childless cat ladies” and that he is disturbed by the idea of teachers who do not have children.He has also suggested that people without children are likely to become “more sociopathic”.The 2017 report was released a year after the publication of Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and also after he had made a series of statements denouncing Trump, whom the US senator called “cultural heroin” and speculated could become “America’s Hitler”. He also described himself as “a never Trump guy”.However, its foreword contains hints that Vance’s thoughts on the then president were already evolving.“We all seem to be waking up to the fact that things are not quite what they used to be,” he wrote. “When president Trump has spoken of the country as trapped in a losing game of international trade or decried the carnage on so many American streets, he has earned criticism for painting an overly pessimistic view of his own country. Yet that pessimism struck a chord with many Americans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The question for those concerned about the future of the country is not whether negativity is justified, but why negativity inspired so many at the polls.”Vance’s views ultimately went full circle, and Trump endorsed his successful election campaign for the US Senate in Ohio in 2022.The foreword to the 2017 report also seems to be one of Vance’s first known links to the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank responsible for producing Project 2025, a controversial and radical blueprint for remaking US government and society in a conservative image. Trump has disowned the 922-page document. But the campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has depicted it as an assault on basic freedoms and typical of what lies in store under a second Trump presidency. More

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      Schumer says McConnell will ‘go down poorly in history’ for rightwing policies

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      The Democratic leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, has warned his opposite number, the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that history will judge him “poorly” because he paved the way to rightwing policies out of touch with the American people.In an interview with Punchbowl News conducted at the Democratic national convention in August but published on Monday, Schumer accused McConnell of enabling Donald Trump’s remaking of US politics and the judiciary. By helping to shift the supreme court sharply to the right through the former president’s three appointments to the top judicial bench, McConnell had played a part in abolishing the federal right to an abortion in the ruling ending Roe v Wade, and much more, Schumer contended.“Not just on Roe, but on issue after issue where they’re so far out of touch with the American people … Even when McConnell thought Trump was wrong, he went along with [Trump] too many times,” Schumer told the political news site.He concluded that McConnell’s “role in history, in my opinion, will go down poorly”.That the leaders of the two main parties in the US Senate should trade barbs is not at all surprising, given the track record of acrimony between them. Schumer and McConnell have frequently been at loggerheads over judicial appointments, campaign finance laws and other policy areas.But Schumer’s comments may wield an extra sting as they come just four months before McConnell is set to step down as minority Senate leader. The Republican has led his party’s group in the Senate since 2007, making him the longest serving party leader in the chamber in US history.In recent months, McConnell, who has indicated he will complete the remaining two years of his term, has struck a more independent posture from Trump. That is especially the case on foreign policy, on which he has criticized the former president’s isolationist stance on Ukraine.In his Punchbowl News interview, Schumer encouraged his counterpart to go further in that direction. He said McConnell could improve his legacy by resurrecting what he called the “old Republican party”.“He can salvage some of that reputation – and I’m not trying to tell him what to do – by trying to get the old Republican party back. He will ally with us in not being isolationist. He feels that passionately.”Schumer mused that if Trump were to lose badly in November’s presidential election against Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, there would be greater hope of a return to a more collaborative form of the Republican party. “If he loses by quite a bit, we may find the old Republican party and we’ll be able to work with them,” Schumer said.He added: “I know from my Senate experience and my friendship with Senate colleagues that many of them, even if they go along with Trump, don’t like him and don’t think he’s good for their party or what they believe in.“Exhibit A is Mitch McConnell.” More

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      Donald Trump is backing free IVF? You can practically smell the desperation | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Would you like to do your bit to curb population decline in the west? Fancy a home full of babies with very high IQs and extremely blond hair? Well, let me introduce you to the Donald J Trump Insemination Institute. On a sprawling ranch in New Mexico, women can be impregnated, free of charge, with Trump’s sperm, ensuring that future generations, on Earth and Mars, are blessed with a steady supply of very stable geniuses.Sorry if I turned your stomach there, but I’m afraid I’m only half-joking. It was actually Jeffrey Epstein – who used to party with Trump – who was besotted with the idea of a ranch where 20 women at a time would be impregnated, in order to seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk, who is obsessed with babies and Trump, may harbour similar fantasies. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that Musk has “volunteered his sperm” to help seed a colony on Mars. (Musk has denied these claims.)While Trump hasn’t announced plans for a baby ranch of his own yet, he is suddenly a big fan of artificial insemination. Last week the former president announced that he would support free in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments if elected again. “We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said during a town hall campaign event in Wisconsin. He didn’t provide many details about how this would work other than saying that either the government or insurance companies would pay for everything.Another fuzzy detail? How government-sponsored IVF would coexist with the Republican party’s 2024 platform, which supports states’ rights to pass foetal personhood laws. It is impossible to support widespread access to IVF while also supporting the idea of foetal personhood, which holds that an embryo is a person and destroying one is homicide. I am fairly sure that Trump has no idea how IVF actually works, so here is a little explainer: you typically fertilise multiple eggs because you have no idea how many of them will develop into viable embryos. You could fertilise 20 eggs and end up with no viable embryos or end up with 20. The only way to control how many embryos you create is to harvest a single egg at a time, which is hugely expensive, inefficient and emotionally exhausting. In short: Trump seems to be running on a platform where IVF would be free but also effectively illegal.While it may be half-baked, Trump’s free IVF policy makes it clear that he is desperate to woo female voters. Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every US presidential election since 1980 and now – for obvious reasons – they are leaning heavily towards Kamala Harris. I’m not sure a last-minute IVF policy is going to cancel out the fact that abortion rights are a key issue in this election and Trump has boasted about being the guy who overturned Roe v Wade. Nor will it cancel out the fact that Trump is a legally defined sexual predator who can’t stop himself from saying every misogynistic thought that creeps into his little head. During a recent rally in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump praised his male supporters for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them.While Trump is clearly trying to appeal to women with his IVF policy, you also have to wonder whether his buddy Musk – one of the most influential voices in the US’s growing pro-natalist movement – has a hand in this. If the billionaire did get a position in a Trump administration (a possibility that has been repeatedly floated) one imagines Musk would encourage the US to emulate Hungary’s pro-natalist policies, which stem from a racist desire to encourage births and repopulate the country with the “right” (AKA white) kind of children. “We want Hungarian children,” Viktor Orbán said in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.”Free IVF may sound like a progressive policy on the surface but, for many on the right, it is linked to a belief that women are nothing more than baby-making machines designed to pass on the legacy of men. A future Donald J Trump Insemination Institute may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Young male voters are flocking to Trump – but he doesn’t have their interests at heart | Steven Greenhouse

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      It’s the most startling thing I’ve seen in this year’s presidential campaign – the astoundingly large gap between how young men and young women plan to vote this November. Among women under age 30, an overwhelming 67% plan to vote for Kamala Harris, while just 29% say they’ll back Donald Trump. But among young men, a majority – 53% – plan to vote for Trump, while 40% say they’ll support Harris, according to a New York Times/Sienna College poll. That’s an astonishing 51-percentage-point gender gap.It’s easy to understand why so many young women favor Harris – she has an inspiring life story, champions reproductive freedom and would break the biggest glass ceiling of all by becoming the first female president. But I’m mystified why so many young men back Trump.Many of them seem to like Trump’s machismo. They like that he talks tough. They see him as an icon of traditional manhood. But all this raises an unavoidable question: should Trump be looked to as an icon of manhood considering that he boasted of grabbing women’s genitals, was found liable for sexual assault and had an affair with an adult film star soon after his wife gave birth? That shouldn’t be anyone’s model of manhood.Many young men seem to admire Trump’s king-of-the-jungle vibe: he roars, he bellows, he boasts that no one can ever beat him (unless they cheat). But when you cut through Trump’s tough talk and look at the record, it becomes clear that Trump did very little for young men in his four years as president.Whoops, I should note that if you’re a young man making more than $1m a year, Trump did do a lot for you, thanks to his colossal tax cuts for the richest 1%. But for the more than 99% of young men who don’t make $1m a year, sorry, Trump didn’t do diddly for you, other than cut your taxes a wee bit, a tiny fraction of the tax cuts that he gave to the richest Americans.I recognize that many young men feel uncomfortable about the Democratic party, partly because some Democrats unfortunately treat men as a problem – and sometimes as the problem. If the Democrats were smart, they’d see that young men – like every other group in society – have problems that they need help with, problems like affording a home, finding a good-paying job, obtaining health insurance, affording college and having enough money to raise a family.Regardless of how you feel about Harris, the truth is that her policies will do far more for young men than Trump’s policies will. It’s not even close. She is serious about lifting up young men and young women, and she has plans to do so.Unlike Trump, Harris will help with soaring rents and home prices. She has pledged to build 3m new homes to help drive down housing prices. In another big step to make housing more affordable, she plans to give a $25,000 subsidy to first-time home buyers. Unlike Trump, Harris is also attacking the problem of high grocery prices – she has promised to crack down on price-gouging at the supermarket.For many young men, health coverage and high health costs are a problem. On those matters, Trump will only make things worse. He has repeatedly promised to repeal Obamacare. That would be a disaster for millions of young men and women because they would no longer be able to be on their parents’ health plan until age 26. What’s more, repealing Obamacare will push up healthcare prices.Many young people complain about their mountains of student debt. Trump won’t help on that; he has condemned the idea of forgiving student loans. In contrast, Harris wants to expand Biden’s debt cancellation program, which is hugely popular with young Americans. What’s more, Trump backed huge cuts in student aid – a move that would make it harder for young people to afford college. Harris is eager to make college more affordable by increasing student grants. Not only that, she is looking to what Tim Walz, her running mate, has done as Minnesota’s governor. He has made Minnesota’s state universities and community colleges free for students from middle-class and lower-income families.If you’re a young man frustrated by how little your job pays, you should know that Trump – doing a big favor for his corporate allies – did nothing to raise the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage. Harris strongly supports raising the minimum wage.Trump has made two big promises to make your life more affordable. Without giving details, he says he will cut auto insurance prices nationwide in his first 100 days in office. He also says he will cut energy and electricity prices in half during his first year in office. If you believe those far-fetched promises, then you’ll probably believe me when I say I have a bridge to sell you.If you’re a young father or if you hope to have a family someday, you should know that Harris’s policies will do far more for you than Trump’s. Recognizing how expensive it is to raise a family, Harris has called for creating a children’s tax credit of $3,000 per child per year and $6,000 for a newborn.To improve work-family balance, Harris has long pushed to enact paid family and medical leave so that people can take much-needed paid time off to spend with their newborns or care for sick parents or children. (Most Republicans oppose a paid leave law because their corporate donors oppose it.) Trump doesn’t have similar pro-family policies – his main policy proposals are huge tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich and large tariffs on imports that will dangerously push up inflation.Although many young Americans don’t realize it, Biden and Harris have worked hard to create good-paying jobs for those who don’t go to college. Biden and Harris fought to enact three important pieces of legislation – an infrastructure bill, a green energy bill and a computer chips bill – that will create about 1m construction jobs, factory jobs and other jobs across the US, many of them unionized jobs with strong benefits.If you’re one of the many young people at Starbucks, REI, Apple or elsewhere who support unionizing as a way to increase your pay and improve your working conditions, you should know that Harris is a strong supporter of unions and enthusiastically backs legislation to make it easier to unionize. But billionaire Trump dislikes labor unions. When he was president, he and his appointees did dozens of things, large and small, to weaken unions and create roadblocks for workers seeking to unionize.There’s no denying that Trump’s tough talk makes many young men feel good. But tough talk is cheap. It won’t help anyone pay the rent, afford college or raise a family. Harris doesn’t talk as tough as Trump, but her record and her policies make undeniably clear that she will do far more for America’s young men and women than Trump will.

      Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer More

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      Kamala Harris should launch a national campaign to end the US diabetes epidemic | Neil Barsky

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      Before addressing the political opportunity in front of the vice-president, let us first confront the sacred cow in the room.Contrary to recent claims by Donald Trump, JD Vance and Ted Cruz, Kamala Harris loves a good cheeseburger; she positively does not want to take our red meat away. She has cited sugars and sodas as major culprits in our poor health. Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration has demonstrated that it is unafraid to challenge the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has over insulin prices, and the cost that industry charges Medicare patients for drugs.Next, let’s dispense with the false narrative that Trump and his acolyte Robert F Kennedy Jr, have the capacity to “make America healthy again.” As part of RFK Jr’s recent endorsement, Trump vowed to appoint “a panel of top experts, working with Bobby, to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems …” Kennedy, whose anti-vaccine work is more likely to make America have measles again, has recently become the darling of many metabolic health advocates for his series of half-truths about America’s obesity epidemic.Let’s not be fooled. To paraphrase Harris, these are not serious people, and the consequences of putting America’s healthcare in their hands would be deadly.I happen to live with type 2 diabetes, and have spent the past year chronicling the ways one of the country’s most lethal, expensive and ubiquitous diseases is actually reversible through a diet low in carbohydrates – the macronutrient that diabetics like me cannot safely metabolize without the help of drug therapies. Nutrition in America has become quite politically polarizing, as shaky science often collides with ideology, leaving us at a loss to know why we get fat, why we get sick, and even whether red meat causes diabetes (it doesn’t). Our healthcare budget is $4tn a year, yet our life expectancy is only 48th in the world, and we seem to be getting heavier and sicker. Something is terribly wrong.In this abyss lies a golden opportunity for presidential candidate Harris to present a healthcare agenda that would save thousands of lives, billions of dollars, as well as her appeal to voters in conservative states. She can do what no president has ever had the courage to do before: launch a national campaign to reverse America’s diabetes epidemic and, in the process, improve our metabolic health. She might even declare the destructive disease a national emergency.This initiative would be both good policy and good politics, and it is not as quixotic as it might first sound. Type 2 diabetes is a condition where the hormone insulin does not naturally function properly, leading to high blood sugars, and leaving its victims at risk of cardiovascular, kidney, eye and other disease. Currently, 38 million American adults have diabetes, while another nearly 100 million more have pre-diabetes – or more than a third of adult Americans. At $420bn per year, it is one of America’s costliest diseases, accounting for over 10% of the country’s $4tn annual healthcare budget. It kills over 100,000 Americans annually, more than die of opiate overdoses.And while it is true that people of color are more likely to get diabetes than white people, it is also the case that, like the opiate crisis, diabetes is a color-blind disease that has disproportionately ravaged red state America. In fact, 14 of the 15 states with the highest diabetes mortality rates voted Republican in 2020. And 14 of the 15 states with the lowest mortality rates voted Democratic in 2020.What form should a Harris initiative take? Here are my personal recommendations, based on my own experience with the disease, and a year’s worth of interviewing well over 100 researchers, clinicians, advocates and patients. Frankly, it is baffling that this disease – which is killing us widely, breaking our budget and reversible through diet – is not yet a matter of national urgency.1. First, she should announce her intention to appoint a diabetes czar whose job, among other things, would be to solve this puzzle – over the past quarter-century, America’s pharmaceutical and medical technology industry have made extraordinary strides developing various forms of insulin and other drugs, continuous glucose monitors and test strips. So why have seven times more Americans been diagnosed with diabetes than in 1980? Eventually commonsense solutions would emerge, such as restricting cereal companies’ ability to market their sugary treats to children.Not only would the czar be empowered to confront things like the scandalous $1bn-plus in sugar subsidies provided by US taxpayers, she would explore common-sense treatments for treating diabetes that are diet and lifestyle-focused. (A good place to start would be the excellent 2024 book Turn Around Diabetes, written by endocrinologist Roshani Sanghani.)2. We must defund, disqualify and otherwise delegitimize the American Diabetes Association (ADA). As I have written, the ADA has become a virtual branch of big pharma and big food. Yet it sets standards of care for clinicians and de-emphasizes mountains of evidence that the low-carbohydrate diet is a powerful tool in reversing the disease. Frankly, it is mind-boggling that the world’s most powerful diabetes-fighting organization (2023 revenue: $145m) has so utterly failed to stem the disease, but still sets standards of care, controls research dollars and dictates the diabetes narrative in this country.Late last year, the ADA was sued by its former director of nutrition. She claimed she was fired for refusing to include the artificial sweetener Splenda, whose parent company donated $1m to the ADA, in the ADA’s list of approved recipes. It is one of American healthcare’s great tragedies that the ADA and the plaintiff, Elizabeth Hanna, settled before the facts of the inner workings of the ADA were brought to light in a trial. In any case, the complaint is a stinging indictment of the organization and should be read by every clinician interested in learning how corporate donations have corrupted the organization’s nutrition guidance.3. Perhaps most urgently, the federal government, including the National Institutes of Health, should expand its research budget to include researchers treating patients with low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets. Over the past two decades, there has been an explosion of courageous clinicians who prescribe the low-carbohydrate diet to their patients, as well as at least two startups – Virta Health and OwnaHealth – with promising results treating diabetes and obesity with low-carbohydrate diets.But because their research does not include the search for the next blockbuster drug, researchers often cannot access ADA, NIH and big pharma research dollars. They don’t get prominent spots in pharma-funded conferences. This is an enormous impediment to the low-carbohydrate diet becoming part of the medical mainstream and in my opinion is responsible for the persistence of the diabetes plague.4. We should give platforms to people who actually have diabetes, especially those who have reversed their condition by taking control of their diet. Of all the misconceptions I uncovered in my reporting on diabetes, the most common was that the low-carb diet was too difficult for patients, particularly low-income patients, to maintain. Of course, resisting bread, sweets, rice and starches is not easy, but it is made far more difficult by the utter lack of a national consensus that these are the foods responsible for diabetes and obesity. Stopping smoking is hard too, but once it became a national imperative, usage plummeted. In my experience, when patients are told the truth (“Stop eating carbs or your disease will progress and you may die”), they can change their behavior. And they feel empowered.Take the case of Jemia Keshwani, a 40-year-old LaGrange, Georgia, woman who has had diabetes for 25 years, and who narrowly escaped amputation of her right foot after her doctor prescribed a low-carbohydrate diet. She has lost 120lb (54kg) and no longer shoots insulin into her belly four times a day. “I didn’t understand you could change things around if you eat the right foods,” she said. “You know how sometimes you feel helpless? Now I don’t feel that way.”Or the case of Ajala Efem, a 47-year old Bronx woman, who, according to a recent article in Medscape, lost nearly 30lbs and got off 15 medications after her Bronx-based healthcare provider, OwnaHealth, prescribed a low-carb diet.“I went from being sick to feeling so great,” she told her endocrinologist. “My feet aren’t hurting; I’m not in pain; I’m eating as much as I want, and I really enjoy my food so much.”This past March, Harris asked an audience in Las Vegas how many people had family members living with diabetes. “A sea of hands went up,” she wrote on her Facebook page.Harris clearly understands the diabetes scourge and needs only a gentle push to make it a priority. So here is one final word of affectionate advice. The next time she attends a state fair, she might consider having one of those cheeseburgers she loves. It’s delicious, nutritious and will make a great photo op.Just lose the ketchup and bun.

      Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of the Marshall Project More

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      America’s New Female Right review – this lazy BBC documentary fails to tackle dangerously extreme views

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      I am going to go out on a limb and say that most Guardian readers who watch a BBC documentary called America’s New Female Right are unlikely to be in accord with the views espoused therein. We are not going to empathise with statements such as: “Women getting the right to vote has led to every form of degeneracy,” “Feminism was absolutely created to destabilise the family [and] western civilisation,” and: “Feminism is a thousand times more toxic than the ‘toxic masculinity’ we hear so much about.” We are unlikely to agree that “Satan’s agenda” is to destroy the nuclear family structure in order to control society.All these statements are uttered – with certainty and apparent sincerity – by women championing rightwing causes, often in a way that seems to run counter to what we would consider their best interests.The presenter, Layla Wright, has three main interviewees. There is the online influencer Morgonn McMichael, 24, who says she wants only to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. She believes that encouraging women to move into the corporate world is to encourage them to go against “our inherent nature”.There is middle-aged Christie Hutcherson, who leads Women Fighting for America – an online and slightly smaller real-life troop of volunteers who patrol parts of the US-Mexico border and livestream what they find. Wright accompanies her as she finds a rough camp created by people crossing. “What a great little setup they’ve got here,” she notes for her audience, gesturing towards propane tanks and mosquito repellent. She and her companions ignore the scattered children’s toys in favour of the “camo gear” they unearth (mainly sensible rucksacks) and talk of “high‑value targets being smuggled in”. “Do I think there are any innocent individuals in this camp? That would be a no.”Third is Hannah Faulkner, 17, who came to her particular brand of fame three years ago when she organised a Teens Against Genital Mutilation rally in her native Nashville, Tennessee, supporting a ban on medical intervention for young transgender people. She is one of several siblings homeschooled by devoutly Christian parents – her father is a former pastor – and is increasingly embraced as a darling of the right.There is so much to unpack with each of them (especially Faulkner). It’s a fascinating subject that deserves attention and rigorous interrogation of all the factors at play, especially with subjects as bright, articulate and confident as these (again, especially Faulkner). What we get instead is a cheap, shoddy programme apparently thrown together in 10 minutes, presumably on the grounds that everything and everyone is so obviously awful and evil and bad-bad-bad that it is enough just to film them, show Wright’s pained face occasionally and have her lob in a few wet questions to show that she is still listening and still on the side of right (which is, of course, left, not right).Sinister music is played in certain scenes, in case we are in danger of forgetting which side “we” are on – all of us, without doubt, without question, without occasionally wondering if the “other side” might have half a point buried in there that might be worth pulling out and examining in the light.It’s so lazy. “Point and weep” documentaries are only half a step removed from the “point and laugh” kind that commissioners have supposedly left behind as we move into a more sensitive, sophisticated era.If you are going to interview people such as McMichael, Hutcherson and Faulkner, you need a presenter who is capable and unafraid of going toe to toe with them. These are people with sincerely held beliefs. You need someone with the intellectual and temperamental firepower to challenge them – someone who is not afraid to, in British terms at least, be “rude” to their subjects and see if they can really defend assertions that are otherwise allowed to stand as truth. At one point, Wright tries to stand up to Hutcherson – who comes across as a bully, with “illegal immigrants” the perfect, self-serving target – but it’s the unfairest of fights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYes, some things said here are extraordinary – but only to the ears of those who are already on side. Without going further, the BBC is doing just what the influencers and ideologues it is condemning do – preaching to the choir and failing to move along the conversation. More