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      ‘Brat, what’s that?’: Harris’s meme fame (sort of) makes its way to the DNC

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      Six hours and 26 minutes after Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris to be the Democratic presidential nominee, a three-word tweet upended the presidential race.“Kamala IS brat,” singer Charli xcx tweeted.The British pop star’s tweet wasn’t just referencing her album, brat – already the soundtrack of the summer – but merely adding to the viral cacophony of mashup videos that featured Harris laughing and dancing to songs from her album.It was also a larger exaltation of Harris’s personality. Being “brat”, according to Charli xcx, is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.Put another way, “the brat girl is authentic and unabashed, wholly herself, says what she thinks, means what she says, can’t be shamed because she owns all of her messiness, awkwardness, shortcomings”, said Abigail De Kosnik, a professor at the Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley.“Harris has long come across in interviews and social media videos as real and very much herself, unafraid to laugh loud and dance in public, proud to geek out and be weird about things she loves (Venn diagrams, her campaign buses), so she has never been invested in being or seeming ‘perfect’,” she said.The meme exploded on Twitter, TikTok and beyond, helping the Harris campaign engage younger voters – a critical demographic. The Harris campaign immediately embraced the meme, changing the background of its rapid response account on Twitter to match the chartreuse album cover with its plain font.The Guardian asked some attendees at the Democratic convention whether they had heard of the meme.“Brat? What’s that?” said Pamela Cleveland, 60, who had travelled up to Chicago all the way from Temple, Texas. “I don’t know what brat is, though I’ve been hearing it a lot recently.”Her friend and travelling companion, Sharon Rose, 66, was equally bemused: “I’ve been hearing that it’s something cool, but I don’t know why.”After the Guardian gave one explanation of brat as slightly messy, strong, street smart and authentically real, both faces lit up.“Then Kamala is definitely brat,” exclaimed Cleveland. “She’s relatable, people of all races and nationalities can relate to her. It makes sense.”Harold Love, a Democrat who represents Nashville in the Tennessee legislature, told the Guardian he also hadn’t heard of the meme.“I haven’t seen that,” he said on the floor of the Democratic convention Monday evening. “I don’t know what that means.”Raumesh Akbari, the Democratic leader in the Tennessee state senate and a self-described “geriatric millennial”, said she had learned the term recently.“Kamala is brat,” she said. “I’m like, OK, Charli, I get it, I get it. I understand what it means. I need to get a button, I’ve seen them around.”Priya Sundareshan, an Arizona state senator who just turned 40, was wearing lime-green shoes to signify brat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’m a little too old for that, but I heard about it and that’s why I wear these lime-green shoes, because apparently that is the colour of brat!” she said with a laugh.Asked whether brat signifies that Harris has a strong connection with young voters, Sundareshan replied: “Absolutely. I know we’ve seen that with the gen Z and millennial influencers who have come out in support and are spreading the message. Kamala is definitely #brat and I’m a young cool kid, yeah!”The Guardian attempted to approach Greta Gerwig, the Barbie director, on the convention floor Monday evening to ask her whether Kamala was brat.“No, sorry, she can’t talk,” an assistant said before a Guardian reporter could pose the question.An effort to inquire with Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, was also unsuccessful.“I’m not doing interviews,” Klobuchar said.Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who has studied social media and presidential campaigns, said that it made sense that some voters may not have heard of the meme. She noted the campaign had visibly embraced the meme on Twitter, but not on other platforms.“That’s strategic on the part of the campaign. They didn’t amplify it across platforms,” she said. “It’s strategic because it only resonates or resonates clearly with a particular demographic, which is meaningful to the Democrats. The Democrats need young voters.“They’re an important voter segment for the Democratic party, but they’re not the base. And so they can’t alienate the base by going too far into this pop culture reference that they don’t get.“Strategically, it is a dance that the campaign has to walk,” she added. “That’s because their voter base doesn’t get Kamala as brat, because for the most part, right, voters tend to be older. And that meme in particular is confusing. Those older voters, like, they’re not listening to Charli xcx’s music.” More

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      Democrats are finally done with the ‘high road’ – and hitting Trump where it hurts | Robert Reich

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      I’m glad Democrats are finally hitting back at Trump. Enough with the “high road”.They’re calling him “weird”.They’re mocking him. “Donald Trump fell asleep at his own trial,” Hillary Clinton sneered at the Democratic convention. “When he woke up, he’d made his own kind of history – the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”Barack Obama noted Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”.Michelle Obama asked: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”Trump hates to be laughed at. He cannot abide ridicule. So, keep it up.But in addition to the mockery, we must not forget Trump’s treachery.The values a president enunciates and demonstrates ricochet through society, strengthening or undermining the common good.George Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, noted that by June 1775, when Congress appointed him to command the nation’s army, Washington had already “become a moral rallying post”.In the 2016 presidential campaign, 240 years later, candidate Donald Trump’s moral squalor was on full display. When accused of failing to pay his income taxes he responded: “That makes me smart.”He thereby signaled to millions of Americans that paying taxes in full is not an obligation of citizenship.Trump also boasted about giving money to politicians so they would do whatever he wanted. “When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”In other words, it’s perfectly OK for business leaders to pay off politicians, regardless of the effect on our democracy.After Trump launched an attack on NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem, Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, explained that the players were trying to protect a core American value. “They’re protesting excessive police violence and racial inequality,” said Kerr. “Those are really good things to fight against. And they’re doing it in a nonviolent way. Which is everything that Martin Luther King preached, right?”Before Trump, the peaceful transfer of power was assumed to be a central feature of American democracy.As the Harvard political scientist Archon Fung has noted, when losing candidates congratulate winners and deliver gracious concession speeches, they demonstrate their commitment to the democratic system over the result they fought to achieve – an important means of reaffirming the common good.Think of Al Gore’s gracious concession speech to George W Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the US supreme court ruled in favor of Bush:“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country … Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”Consider what might have occurred had Gore bitterly accused Bush of winning fraudulently and blamed the five Republican appointees on the supreme court for siding with Bush for partisan reasons. Or if, during his campaign, Bush had promised to put Gore in jail for various alleged improprieties, and then, after he won, accused Gore of spying on him during the campaign and trying to use the FBI and CIA to bring his downfall.These statements – close to ones Trump actually made – might have imperiled the political stability of the nation.Instead, Gore made the same moral choice his predecessors made at the end of every previous American presidential election, and for the same reason: he understood that the peaceful transition of power confirmed the nation’s commitment to the constitution, which was far more important than his own loss.Trump has had no such qualms. When he lost, he embarked on a coup against the United States and instigated an assault on the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths.At this moment, Trump and his lackeys are installing loyalists in state and county election offices to deny certification to the Harris-Walz ticket and other Democrats down the ballot.The essence of Trump’s failure as president – and the fundamental reason he doesn’t merit a second term – is not that he has behaved in childish and vindictive ways or is “weird”.It is that he sacrificed – and continues to sacrifice – the processes and institutions that undergird America to achieve his own selfish aims.He abused the trust we place in a president to preserve and protect the nation’s capacity for self-government.Trump is a traitor.He and the Republican party – now a personality cult based on Trump’s “big lie” – violate everything America stands for.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      ‘Excited to show up for her’: mixed-race voters finally feel seen with Harris’s nomination

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      For Sonia Smith Kang, it hasn’t come as a surprise that Kamala Harris’s ethnic background has been challenged by her opponent and other members of the Republican party. “It’s what mixed folks have been dealing with for a long time,” said Smith Kang, who is both Mexican and Black and is married to a Korean man.Since Donald Trump’s false attacks on the racial identity of Kamala Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention last month, he has purposely mispronounced her name, posted a photo of her in a traditional Indian sari and employed supporters to claim that the Democratic presidential candidate is not Black. For mixed-race voters who heard Trump state that Harris “happened to turn Black”, feelings of anger, frustration and annoyance instantly arose.“Everyone thinks we’re in this post-racial time, but Trump proved why classes and courses still need to be taught,” Smith Kang said.When the landmark case Loving v Virginia overturned state laws that restricted interracial marriage in the US in 1967, just 3% of marriages were interracial. By 2019, that number grew to 11%. Today, about one in 10 Americans – 33.8 million people – identify as mixed race.The rapid rise of multiracial people could not only affect the 2024 election, but reshape American electoral politics since mixed-race people tend to be young and the country’s white population is ageing. The Guardian spoke to numerous biracial and multiracial Americans who see their own stories in Harris and believe her mixed heritage gives her a political advantage.Smith Kang, the founder of the multicultural children’s apparel line Mixed Up Clothing and the vice-president of the non-profit advocacy group Multiracial Americans of Southern California is organizing a national call later this month to galvanize the mixed-race community to support Harris. “We’re really excited to mobilize and show up for her,” said the San Fernando Valley resident.View image in fullscreenAfter Barack Obama, Harris is the second-ever presidential nominee of a major political party to identify as biracial or mixed race. The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris has long embraced her south Asian and Black ethnic background. As her popularity has shot up in recent weeks, the topic of multiracial identity has been thrust into the spotlight.“I had to reread Trump’s quotes and the first things I felt were shock and also anger and defensiveness of Kamala Harris,” said Charlee Thompson, who lives in Seattle and works on clean energy and climate policy. “The fact that mixed identity is in the mainstream media on this political stage is shocking to me.”Thompson, who has a Japanese mother from Hawaii and a Mexican and white father, said multiracial people like herself and Harris were still treated as different or exotic even in 2024. “In the last month, I had three different people in completely different situations ask me or guess what I was,” she said. “I think light needs to be shed on the fact that multiracial people exist and how people respond can be othering or make people feel like they don’t belong in the community they belong to.”Dr Jenn Noble, a psychologist and educator who coaches parents of mixed-race kids, believes something more sinister than ignorance is going on when it comes to Trump questioning Harris’s identity. “He’s doing something a lot of people accuse mixed-race people of, which is being deceitful or somehow playing their background in a way that benefits them or suits them when it fits them,” she said.Los Angeles-based Noble, who is of Black and Sri Lankan heritage, said research shows there are benefits to being mixed race such as cognitive flexibility, which allows for people who are exposed to multiple languages or cultures to switch between groups easily, which could benefit the vice-president during her run. “I think Harris would have quite a bit of the skills to see the needs of varying groups and meet them in a way that works for that group,” she said.View image in fullscreenAfter Trump received widespread criticism for his remarks about Harris, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, defended the former president’s comments, saying Harris was “fundamentally a fake person” and “chameleon-like”. Vance has biracial children with his Indian American wife, Usha. (Vance recently told CNN he believed Harris was “whatever she says she is”.)Academics and mental health professionals have said they worry about the implications of Trump’s comments, as “identity denial” – telling someone they are not what they actually are – is a common stressor for mixed-race Americans. Historically in the US, the one-drop rule asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor was considered Black and even today, multiracial people are often spoken about in fractions rather than using words like “both” or “and”.The 2020 US Census made it easier for multiracial people to identify themselves, which led to an increase in population and a more accurate portrait of a racially diverse country. According to a recent New York Times analysis, the number of Americans who identify as both Black and Asian has tripled over the last 15 years to more than 600,000 – and about 20% of them live in Harris’s home state of California.For David Chetlain, a resident of Newberg, Oregon, who was born to a white American mother and a Black father from Ghana and adopted by a Native American mother and white father, Trump’s recent remarks made him recall the times strangers interrogated his own appearance, making comments such as: “Where did you come from?” and asking his mother: “Did the milkman pay you a visit?”“When people do that it’s to demean you or put you in a box,” said Chetlain, a navy veteran who works in software sales. “People try to make you feel less of an American.” What Chetlain has learned so far about Harris and her late mother, a breast cancer researcher, and father, a prominent economist, impressed him.“They are the American Dream,” said Chetlain of Harris and her immigrant parents. “That’s a true meritocracy. Nobody gave [Harris] $400m to start a career of fraud and tax evasion.” More

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      Environmental activists urge Kamala Harris to go big on climate: ‘She’s got to seize the moment’

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      As Donald Trump accuses Kamala Harris of waging “war on American energy”, some advocates are pressing the vice-president to embrace a bold climate message at the Democratic national convention this week.Harris will have a major opportunity to lay out her key platform as she accepts the Democratic party’s presidential nomination on Thursday evening. Some are hoping climate features heavily in her speech.“There’s a moment here and we think she’s got to seize it,” said Saul Levin, legislative and political director of the progressive advocacy group Green New Deal Network.Harris’s candidacy has excited much of the climate movement, with scores of green groups, including Levin’s, endorsing her presidential run. At a Wednesday meeting, influential climate hawks such as Ed Markey, the Massachusetts senator; Gina McCarthy, the former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator; and Robert Bullard, the esteemed environmental justice scholar and advocate encouraged climate voters to stand behind Harris.But Harris has yet to release an official plan to take on the climate crisis. Unlike Joe Biden, who placed climate at the heart of his 2020 presidential run, Harris has so far only mentioned the issue in passing on the campaign trail. And though the issue has been woven into Democratic national convention events, it has not yet been a central focus of the convention.“It’s a bit of a bummer that it hasn’t gotten more time,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay Campaign, which focuses on climate accountability.Harris may find it difficult to make bold climate promises amid Trump’s attacks. At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania this week, the former president called Harris a “non-fracker”, though she has distanced herself from past support for a fracking ban, disappointing climate advocates.Trump has also repeatedly claimed Harris wants to ban red meat and “get rid of all cows”. In response, she said she enjoys eating the occasional cheeseburger but added that Americans should be incentivized to eat a lower-carbon, healthier diet.Amid this pressure from the right, some climate advocates have said they will stand behind Harris no matter how much she mentions climate.“Regardless of whether this issue is in the speech or not tomorrow night, we know Vice-President Harris is an environmental champion,” said Michelle Deatrick, who chairs the Democratic National Committee’ Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis. She said Harris’s record speaks for itself.Recent polling from progressive group Data for Progress and environmental organization Climate Power shows that a strong majority of US voters prefer Harris’s approach to climate.It’s an indicator that focusing on climate is “good politics”, said Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement.“Climate is one of the issues where voters trust Harris the most over Trump,” she said. “To capitalize on that, she needs to talk about it.”An ‘existential threat’The 2024 Democratic party platform approved on Monday refers to the climate crisis as an “existential threat” and “a consequence of delay and destruction by people like Donald Trump and his friends in Big Oil”.It also includes a commitment to “making polluters pay”. It’s something DiPaola said she was “stoked” to see, though she added that she’d eventually like to see “less vague language about how they’re going to make climate accountability real”.Additionally, the platform underlines the creation of hundreds of thousands of clean-energy jobs and highlights the historic green investments spurred by the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).But Levin says he hopes Harris lays out plans to go beyond the IRA and increase investments in green jobs, public transit and renewable power. Though the bill constitutes the largest downpayment on climate policy in US history with hundreds of billions of dollars in green funding, experts say that is a fraction of what the US must ultimately spend.“We can’t just say, oh, we did the IRA, so we did climate and now let’s move to another issue,” said Levin. “The IRA made tremendous progress, but it was just a start.”He said some aspects of the platform, including pledges to double funding for public transit and cut down public subsidies for oil companies, inspired hope that a bolder climate platform will emerge.That platform and Harris’ rhetoric, said DiPaola, should lean “populist,” said DiPaola.“Voters are frustrated with corporate power and influence,” she said. “She can ultimately appeal to both climate-motivated voters as well as economically motivated voters … by highlighting the need to clamp down on big oil’s greed.”‘Big oil’s hold on our economy’Though the Democratic party platform rails against “big oil’s hold on our economy”, the Democratic convention itself has not been unfriendly to the industry. The American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest fossil fuel lobby group, participated in several events this week.Oil major ExxonMobil sponsored two Wednesday panel discussions hosted by Punchbowl News on the sidelines of the convention, one of which featured the firm’s senior director of climate strategy and technology and a representative from gas lobby group the American Gas Association.Activists with environmental non-profits including Friends of the Earth, Oil Change International, and Climate Hawks Vote disrupted the event.“I am here because Exxon lied and people died,” chanted RL Miller, the Climate Hawks Vote founder and a former Democratic National Committee member, before being escorted from the room.Federal data shows Exxon has poured $111,500 into Republican congressional campaign committees. Collin Rees of Oil Change International, who took part in the protest, said if the party is looking to take on big oil, the company “should have no platform at the DNC”.War in GazaGaza solidarity protesters interrupted a meeting of the environment and climate crisis council at the convention on Wednesday, chanting “free, free Palestine”.“If you want to show some political courage, go and interrupt one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” responded Jamie Raskin, the Maryland representative, who had been speaking. “Anybody who interferes with that is objectively helping Donald Trump … so cut it out.”Some climate groups, however, are pushing for the Harris campaign to stop supporting Israel’s deadly war in Gaza by issuing an arms embargo. Among them is the Sunrise Movement.“Young people want a livable world for our generation and generations. We want everyone to have clean air and water and safe homes,” said O’Hanlon. “Everyone must have those rights and freedoms, including Palestinians.” More

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      No tax on tips fires up Nevada hospitality workers: ‘I want that!’

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      Kristine serves gamblers playing countertop video poker screens at the center bar of Las Vegas’s Ellis Island casino. She declines to share her last name for privacy reasons, but is not timid about her support for Donald Trump when asked about his campaign promise to end federal taxation on tips.“I want that!” Kristine says as she fulfills cocktail waitresses’ orders. “Our tip compliance is too high. They take so much from our paycheck.”Tip compliance – the tax process for expected earnings from tips – has become a political football in Nevada, with federal lawmakers from both parties piling in to co-sponsor bills or present their vision for how tax exemption for tips should work.The push for tax relief for a specific sector of wageworker may seem out of the blue if the idea wasn’t so brazenly opportunistic. According to state employment figures, one in four jobs in this crucial swing state are in leisure and hospitality, many if not most of which are tip-earning positions at bars, restaurants, casinos, spas and hotels in Las Vegas and Reno.The frenzy over the issue started in June, during a Trump rally in Las Vegas, where he surprised supporters, press and members of his own party, saying: “Hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy because when I get to office we are going to not charge taxes on tips.”It was a “wild-ass promise”, says Ted Pappageorge, treasurer for the Culinary Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada.He points out that during Trump’s four years in office and the four years since, the union’s heard “not a peep out of him” regarding overtaxed wage workers. Indeed, Trump’s signature legislative achievement as president was a tax cut that mainly benefited corporations, real estate developers, and billionaires and millionaires transferring wealth to their scions. “One of the problems is Trump lies, and he lies a lot,” Pappageorge said.But, Pappageorge added, Trump’s comments created an opening. “There’s actually a requirement now to have a discussion and an opportunity for us to wedge into the discussion, to make it real.”The union is now seeking tip compliance relief for their members while also advocating to raise the federal sub-minimum wage, which allows employers in some states to pay tipped earners as little as $2.13 per hour.Trump’s opponents have been listening. In Kamala Harris’s first Las Vegas rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee, she announced that she wouldas also pursue no taxes on tips, delighting rank-and-file Democrats who had become intrigued with the proposal, and irritating Trump supporters who wanted him to have the policy all to himself.“Why is she copying him?” says Kristine, the Ellis Island bartender. She voted for Trump in the last two election cycles and will again this fall. “I believe in women power, but I feel like we need a better president, like a strong personality, a tough one, to put [things] back to normal.”Wistful for the pre-pandemic economy, before food, fuel and housing prices shot up, Kristine says it would be nice if people could afford to enjoy themselves again: “Go on vacation again, because everything we make goes to bills, that’s it, and it’s not enough still. Everything is so expensive and you’re making the same money.”Southern Nevada’s vulnerability to economic slumps has led to two local sayings: the region is “the first to suffer, last to recover” because “when the economy gets sick, Las Vegas catches pneumonia.”The city was hit hard by pandemic-era travel restrictions. Since then, resorts have recovered strongly, reporting record profits from gaming each of the past three years. In resorts and casinos that are unionized (Ellis Island is not), the culinary union leveraged these historic profits to negotiate higher wages for their members.Still, many workers say their tip earnings have remained stagnant.Machines such as the Smarttender beverage-mixer and screen-based ordering systems have depressed tip earnings by dehumanizing the experience and distorting the scale of service, says Sheri Earl, 51, a cocktail waitress at Mandalay Bay. “It looks like a lot of the servers are bringing out so many drinks, but we’re not being tipped on all of those.View image in fullscreen“Also,” Earl adds, “people just aren’t tipping the way that they used to because they don’t have the money. I noticed when I’m serving, more people will give $1 for four drinks, whereas it used to be $1 per drink, so I’m serving more drinks, but bringing back less money.”A lifelong Democrat, Earl’s loyalty to the party had wavered in recent years, and her conversations in the employee break room suggest that many her colleagues will support Trump out of nostalgia for how they thrived before Covid.But Harris’s candidacy has reaffirmed her allegiance to the Democratic ticket, Earl says. “She’s very optimistic about changes that she wants to do as a female president, and a lot of the tax cuts for the working class helps.“Now, I don’t think there will ever be no taxes on tips,” Earl clarified. “I expect to pay it, but not at rates where it’s unrealistic, or I can’t support my family, or I can’t pay my bills at the end of the month.”Others were less inspired.“It’s a ‘so you vote for me’ promise,” says Samantha, a blackjack dealer at Ellis Island. “I don’t think Congress will let it happen. [The candidates] can say it, and they can hope that because they said it, you’re going to vote for them, but it isn’t going to happen.” Shrugging, she says she does not intend to vote. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe that my vote matters.”Democratic presidential candidates have enjoyed a winning streak in Nevada that goes back four cycles from Biden’s narrow 2020 win, to Hillary Clinton’s 2.4% margin over Trump, to Barack Obama’s victories in 2012 and 2008. Survey averages currently show Trump leading Harris by 2 to 3 percentage points.Before Biden dropped out, Trump led by 9 points in Nevada. Harris has rejuvenated Democratic enthusiasm and made strides to corral the unwieldly coalition that defeated Trump four years ago, but Nevada is proving to be a different beast. It’s one of the few swing states in which Trump continues to lead in most major polls. But her canny decision to jump on the no tax bandwagon may help.Badass Tax Guys, a tax preparation company in Henderson, Nevada, has hundreds of tip-earning clients, and many have mentioned to owner Robert Wagner that the proposal, while intriguing, seems too good to be true.“‘We see all the upside, and we love keeping our money, but what’s the catch potentially?’ is what I’m hearing right now,” he paraphrases while warning that it would be exploited if not written carefully to solely target those who need relief.“I would put a tip jar on my desk, you know what I mean?” Wagner quips. “I’ll charge lower fees and you can throw the difference in the tip jar. All of a sudden, my income is to going to go down quite a bit. I generally like the idea overall, but if you’re going to do that there needs to be a way to stop Wall Street from taking advantage of it.” More

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      If you are outraged by Trump’s use of AI and deepfakes, don’t be – that’s exactly what he wants | Sophia Smith Galer

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      A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump decided it would be fun to accuse the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, of using AI in images showing a large crowd greeting her at an airport. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump furiously thumbed into his phone. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘AI’d it […] She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”Just as some animals are more equal than others, some politicians are more honest. So this week, when the former president himself posted an obviously AI-generated image of what looks like the back of Harris’s head in front of an enormous communist crowd with a huge hammer and sickle unfurled above them, he presumably did not consider it election interference. Trump has also recently shared AI-generated images of himself, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.These images are concerning – especially given most image generators have put up guardrails against making content of real people. But it seems that Trump isn’t trying to pass the images off as real: I think this is him trying to be funny.Over on the Trump campaign team, someone has learned how to work an AI-image generator and has become a little prompt-happy. A weird video of Trump and Elon Musk dancing together isn’t exactly an example of the kind of election-manipulating deepfake media that many disinformation commentators are worried about. It is an example of a candidate desperately trying to remain on your algorithm. AI generation just requires a few prompts and maybe a paid subscription to a generator. It’s a lot cheaper, and quicker, than hiring creatives who need to spend time ideating and creating before something is ready to publish.AI-generated images and deepfakes are the poor man’s meme. Actual successful memes – a humorous piece of content designed to be spread online – are crafted by individuals who have adopted the language and culture of the internet, and know how to inject zeitgeisty topics into social posts designed to resonate and go viral. The combination of text with images or video is a subtle art, and it is one that Harris’s campaign team practises well. Everyone online knows about the coconut tree, and the chronically online will know about the Charli xcx accolade that “Kamala IS brat”.By contrast, the AI posts Trump has shared are not high internet humour; they’re cheap algo-fodder. A trick he is also trialling is combining AI images with real ones in an attempt to lend them some veracity, or perhaps just to sharpen the comedy potential. In his post where he states “I accept!” alongside images suggesting Swifties are “turning to Trump”, he has combined a real photograph of a woman wearing a “Swifties for Trump” T-shirt with a satirical AI compilation of fans wearing T-shirts with the same slogan and an AI-generated image of Swift as Uncle Sam, captioned “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump”. It’s the kind of content your family’s errant uncle might forward to you, that he in turn got from his mate, because they haven’t got anything better to do.Trump doesn’t expect or need Swift’s endorsement, and so the humour is in the incredulousness of it. Posts like this aren’t about genuinely persuading audiences that Swift supports him; it’s about ensuring the intravenous drip of content into his supporters’ Facebook groups and WhatsApp conversations never runs dry. Trump has also always been a wind-up merchant. He knows Swift fans would react angrily to his post. He also knows that such rage-baiting will amplify his content on Truth Social’s and X’s algorithms – and garner coverage in the mainstream media. When people wag their fingers at him for posting content like this, some see it as righteously battling misinformation, but to his fans it looks like not getting the joke. (Of course, it is easier to understand jokes when they have at least one measly crumb of decent comedy to them.)The idea that Harris is a communist, that Trump and Musk are dancing pals, and that even Swifties can’t escape Trump fandom aligns with the narrative of popularity, relatable light-heartedness and prestige that Trump likes to court. Narrative is far more important than truth, particularly in the US, where political ideology is so powerful it was one of the most significant factors determining whether somebody would take the Covid-19 vaccine or not. Trump’s AI posts are best understood not as outright misinformation – intended to be taken at face value – but as part of the same intoxicating mix of real and false information that has always characterised his rhetoric. Trump isn’t interested in telling the truth; he’s interested in telling his truth – as are his fiercest supporters. In his world, AI is just another tool to do this. Whether he is willing to accept the reality that he can’t make a joke, or take one, is another story.

      Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist, content creator and the author of Losing It More

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      ‘She may be family, but we need to hold her accountable’: Howard students cautiously excited by Kamala Harris

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      On Tuesday, day two of the Democratic national convention in Chicago, Howard University, in Washington DC, was abuzz with students excited about alumna Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy. The Guardian spoke to several students who expressed pride that one of their own may assume the highest office, which they hoped would shine a light on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Others emphasized the need to hold Harris accountable on Gaza policy, as well as on issues that affect Black communities, such as overpolicing and high maternal death rates.“I was pretty happy to not only be a Howard student, but to be Black as well,” Shondo Green, a 20-year-old biology major, said about Harris’s nomination. The general sentiment on campus since classes started on Monday has been uplifting – everyone is smiling, he said. “There’s something different about this year compared to my previous two years. There’s something in the air.”Hundreds of Howard University students milled around the Yard, the central hub of campus life, in between classes during the first week of school. Surrounding the grassy area were trees painted with Greek letters that represent the Black sororities and fraternities known as the Divine Nine. Harris, a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, pledged as a Howard student in the 1980s.Dezmond Rosier, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and a senior studying political science and economics, said he was thrilled to vote in a presidential election for the first time. His main concerns were about cancelling student debt and ensuring that “the justice system is justice for all”. Rosier wants to see Harris create just policies around the possession of cannabis as it becomes legalized in states throughout the nation while “there’s still people in our prison systems who are unfortunately being held up for things that are now considered legal”.View image in fullscreen“She may be our family member in the sense of the university,” Rosier said, “but we also need to hold her accountable.”Outside the university’s auditorium, Ruqayyah Taylor, a senior from Norristown, Pennsylvania, attended a back-to-school pop-up event hosted by DTLR Radio. The 21-year-old journalism major wants to see Harris continue working toward the student debt forgiveness plan put forward by the Biden-Harris administration, which was thwarted by court challenges. She lauded the Harris campaign’s use of social media to galvanize gen-Z voters.“I think that she has the ability to [change course on Gaza policy],” Taylor said. “She has a different sense of awareness that Biden doesn’t have, whether it be because of age or demographics.”At the library, senior Jaden Lopes da Silva said he wanted to see more outreach efforts that catered to young Black voters. “[Her engagement] is more of a broad gen-Z sort of thing, but it appears to be more towards pop culture,” he said, referencing the Harris campaign’s embrace of the “brat” label from the pop musician Charli xcx. “I haven’t really seen anything specifically towards the Black gen-Z community.” Sitting next to him, junior Nala Francis said she considered Harris’s nomination her generation’s version of Barack Obama, who became president when she was a toddler. “I never had the experience of ‘oh we could get a Black president,’ and now that we get a Black president that is also a woman and from Howard,” she said. “This is literally history in the making and I’m now old enough to be a part of it.”Friends Jada Phillips and Jada Freeman, 19-year-old sophomores from Chicago, chatted on a walkway in between classes. “I think it’s going to bring a lot of light to Howard itself and how good of a school it is,” Freeman said about an alumna being the Democratic nominee. She plans to vote for Harris, but Phillips said that she wants to see how Harris’s economic policies will differ from previous administrations.View image in fullscreenAt a nearby cafe, Msia Kibona Clark, an associate professor in Howard’s department of African studies, recalled receiving a pop-up alert on her phone that Harris would be the presumptive nominee. She said that she was waiting to see if Harris changes course on US’s Gaza policy; however, she felt hopeful that Harris seems to be more empathetic toward the plight of Palestinians than Biden does. “From her talks before, her appearances, she definitely has been less embracing of Israel, so that has given me hope,” Kibona Clark said.Marcus Board, an associate professor of political science, said that if Harris becomes president, he would like to see her work with racial justice organizers. “I hope that they do choose to work with movement organizers who, as my research shows, are the people who are reinforcing democracy … reinforcing inclusion, access to care, access to human rights,” he said. “Without them, this whole thing is gonna fall faster than a freshman’s GPA.”View image in fullscreenLast week, freshman Elijah Sanford Abdul-Aziz waited in a long line to hear Harris speak on campus. “I’ve only been here for like two weeks, so that’s fire to me,” said Sanford Abdul-Aziz, an 18-year-old political science major. “It was like when one of the old ladies from church tells you about how they used to know you, when she talked about her orientation in the auditorium.” He said he was inspired by her statement that students could become president of the United States with hard work and determination. “She’s a vision of what you can be,” he said.Even though he said that he will cast a ballot for Harris in November, he wasn’t “super-duper excited”, given the US’s continued funding of Israel’s war on Gaza, in which more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October. “It’s either Kamala or Donald Trump,” Sanford Abdul-Aziz said. “I look at it as we can’t advocate as much as we can under Trump as we can for Kamala.” Sanford Abdul-Aziz said that he has one message for Harris about US allyship with Israel: “In 2020 I remember she said during a vice-presidential debate that allies are like your friends. And I know that to be a good friend, you have to hold your friends accountable.” More

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      Stop using the term ‘centrist’. It doesn’t mean what you think it does | Arwa Mahdawi

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      I would like to start a petition for journalists – and everyone else – to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability.Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic.Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since 7 October, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.This narrative is so entrenched that people don’t believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians. Last October, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes may have told her that those innocent children were terrified; the narrative, however, was more complicated.Around the same time, Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel”. When it was pointed out the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.In 2022, a picture of a small blonde confronting a soldier was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people though. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of a then 10-year-old Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, interest in the image fizzled out.Again: when you lay out what is happening in clear language it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes. As someone who had to run from soldiers shooting teargas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an IDF soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another. If you experience life under occupation for even a day it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism”. Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist – and therefore reasonable – position.See, for example, this paragraph from the New York Times, earlier this month, when Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, was still being considered as a possible candidate for Kamala Harris’s running mate.“Mr Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”This paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means. Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own”. He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English. So let’s begin with “centrism”. If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead. The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It’s up to you whether you want to acquiesce.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More