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      One Way Back review: Christine Blasey Ford faces down Brett Kavanaugh again

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      In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Brett Kavanaugh, then an intermediate appellate judge nominated by Donald Trump to the US supreme court, sexually assaulted her 36 years earlier when they were high school students, fixtures of the suburban-DC country club set.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. He also professed his penchants for suds.“We drank beer … I liked beer,” the judge memorably told Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, at his Senate hearing. Pressed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota over whether he had ever blacked out because of drinking beer, Kavanaugh ratcheted up the heat. On SNL, Matt Damon memorialized the rabid performance. PJ, Squi, Handsy Hank and Gang-Bang Greg: all are now part of TV lore. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh anyway, 50-48, a party-line vote.Ford now returns to retell her story, in One Way Back: A Memoir. In essence, she dares Kavanaugh to sue her for defamation. Both know truth constitutes an absolute defense.Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person”, Ford writes. “The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.”Ensconced on the high court, Kavanaugh holds his peace.Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a faculty member of Stanford medical school. She is an avid surfer. Metallica is her favourite band. She invokes personal circumstance to explain why she delayed coming forward, electing not to bring her story to the attention of law enforcement as Kavanaugh rose in the Washington legal firmament.“Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything,” Ford writes, adding that this is “a sad, scary thing to admit”.From Kavanaugh’s clerkship to Anthony Kennedy, his immediate predecessor on the supreme court, to his time in the White House of George W Bush and on the US court of appeals, Ford stayed silent. Even with her explanation, the reader is left wondering why.Ford also sheds light on her own college days.“I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before, but now also explored MDMA, which helped me get outside of myself,” she writes, adding: “At the time, I just knew that they seemed to call bullshit on everything, including my self-esteem issues … I never got into anything harder, since cocaine didn’t help with my anxiety and heroin never crossed my path until I was out of college, and by that point I’d kind of missed the window of experimentation that heroin would have required.”Should any rightwingers seeking vengeance think of pouncing on such admissions, it should be noted that Trumpworld is littered with tales of drugs and alcohol. Consider the very public cases of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, and Ronny Jackson, the Trump White House physician turned congressman from Texas. The GOP likes to hound Hunter Biden, who has struggled with addiction. But he never held office.For Ford, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight took a heavy personal toll. There were threats on her person and family. There were wounds to her psyche. One day, she recalls, she stared at a construction site and imagined it to be a Lego set. “That’s so cool,” she thought. “I wish I was a construction worker. Perhaps people were right. Perhaps I was crazy.”Ford writes favorably of meeting Anita Hill, the staffer who in 1991 confronted Clarence Thomas over his alleged sexual harassment, stoking another epically nasty supreme court nomination fight. Like Kavanaugh, Thomas was confirmed. In 2019, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh fight, Hill told Ford time can help salve wounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFord’s politics shade left. In One Way Back, she records her satisfaction with the “blue wave” of 2018, “progressive wins” and in particular the victory in a New York House race that year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, praises One Way Back on its jacket. So does Hill.Kavanaugh is a consequential and controversial figure. In 2022, he cast his lot with four other conservatives in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to overturn Roe v Wade. Those five justices eviscerated the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy. In a separate concurrence, Kavanaugh said that in doing so the court had not undercut precedents protecting contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex unions. Other justices differed.The tremors of Dobbs reverberate across the political divide. In the 2022 midterms, a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize, thanks in part to Dobbs. In reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, voters have conferred legal protections for abortion rights.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s successors as House speaker are also subject to the whims of Republican zealots. Kevin McCarthy is no longer even a congressman. Mike Johnson holds the gavel by the narrowest of margins. In February, Democrats flipped the seat previously held by George Santos, the indicted fabulist. Postmortems found that abortion rights played an outsized role in that Republican defeat. The threat of a national abortion ban drove voters to the polls. For the moment, for Democrats, Dobbs is a gift that keeps on giving – thanks to Kavanaugh and co.“I’d like to believe we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in the years to come,” Ford writes.Maybe sooner than that.
      One Way Back: A Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      Israel defence chief to head to Washington for Gaza talks

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      Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant will leave on Sunday for talks in the United States, the Israeli government said, amid growing tensions between the allies over the war in Gaza.Gallant will meet with US counterpart Lloyd Austin, US secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan “and additional senior officials”, a statement said.“The parties will discuss developments in the war against the Hamas terrorist organisation in Gaza, efforts undertaken to return the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, humanitarian efforts and measures required to ensure regional stability,” it said.The visit comes after Blinken’s latest whistle-stop tour of the region during which he warned that an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah would be a “mistake” that “risks further isolating Israel around the world”.Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel was prepared to move ahead with the Rafah operation “alone”, without US support.There are widespread fears of mass civilian casualties in Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge during the war which erupted after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October.Gallant’s visit will be his first to Washington since the fighting broke out.US president Joe Biden said Monday he had told Netanyahu to send a team to Washington to discuss how to avoid a full-scale military operation in Rafah.A US defence official said this week that Gallant’s scheduled meeting with Austin was separate from the delegation visit requested by Biden.The Hamas attack on 7 October resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory military campaign to destroy Hamas has killed at least 32,142 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. More

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      Undertaxed and over here: why the UK welcomes US mega firms | Phillip Inman

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      Americans love Britain, and in many ways the British admire Americans, but the benefits of the relationship are becoming increasingly one-way.That’s the argument set out in a book published next month documenting how US companies have made inroads into the UK economy by exploiting a desperate need for investment, weak regulation and a public that seems oblivious to the cost to themselves and, ultimately, the economy.Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden: whichever administration is pulling the levers, presidents pay lip service to a special relationship with the UK. Each one makes sure US companies leverage Washington’s power to gain entry, kill off local competition, secure monopoly control and run off with the profits largely tax-free.But UK companies that try to break into the US face huge legal and regulatory hurdles. It’s true that selling goods to America is a lucrative business. That’s not the same as setting up a US subsidiary in the US and going head-to-head with domestic corporations.Labour leaders fall into the trap of lauding energetic and profitable US companies as much as their cheering Tory counterparts do. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were more ardent Americanophiles than most. And Keir Starmer shows every sign of rushing to Washington should he be elected, even if Trump is in charge – much as Theresa May did in 2017, before a humiliating return visit two years later.The new book is not an anti-American leftist call to arms of the kind published in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s admiration for Ronald Reagan generated tomes about the UK being the 51st state of America. Vassal State by Angus Hanton (Swift Press) examines for the first time the disparate data showing how much US companies have embedded themselves in the UK, capitalising on our willingness to pay them outlandish fees and subscriptions and afford them the hefty tax breaks needed to keep them in the UK.We know about the power and influence of Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Alphabet/Google. Other high-profile names include online sellers eBay, Wayfair and Etsy, and streaming companies Sky, Disney and Apple TV.The internet’s cloud storage is mostly provided by American companies. All our data, bit by bit, is being collected by US firms, whether at the front end as we buy stuff using Amazon or travel using Google Maps, or at the back end, so to speak, as health data is scraped by US spy technology firm Palantir – which is run by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of another US web behemoth, PayPal.Hanton, a London-based entrepreneur who co-founded the Intergenerational Foundation charity, documents their rise, but also that of less well-known firms which have acquired the UK’s financial and physical plumbing.A classic example is WorldPay, a payments system used by tens of thousands of UK businesses to process card transactions. Once owned by NatWest, it was offloaded after the 2008 crash to US private equity firms Advent International and Bain Capital for £2bn.That was a European Commission order that the UK could have ignored but chose to obey. Advent and Bain floated the company on the London stock market for a handsome profit in 2015, but it soon went private again. Another Advent-owned firm, payments processing technology company Vantiv, paid $10.4bn for it in 2018, then Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) paid $35bn in cash and shares for WorldPay in 2019.What ties these firms together is that they offer popular services that somehow we accept should be charged for, without any reference to the cost of production or market influence.It doesn’t happen on the continent in nearly the same way – and some would probably argue France, Germany, Spain and Italy are the poorer for it. WorldPay executives would no doubt say US companies are big investors, enhancing and expanding the UK businesses they buy, often with a long-term vision. Except that the vision includes domination and control of the economy, holding the government to ransom with threats of cutting investments if tax subsidies are not generous enough or tax rates low enough.Google’s soon-to-be-opened monster HQ in London’s King’s Cross is emblematic of the way the UK’s red-carpet treatment for investors has profited US companies and offset the threat of an exodus after Brexit. Google has found the UK, unlike the EU, willing to turn a blind eye to its monopolistic practices.That is great news for Brexiters. It’s not so good for the rest, who, wherever they turn, must pay for the services of an ever-expanding array of US mega-companies. More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Israeli Gaza campaign an ‘unfolding genocide’

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      Progressive US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Israeli military campaign in Gaza an “unfolding genocide” in a scathing speech that demanded the Joe Biden White House suspend aid to Israel’s armed forces.“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor on Friday.Citing 30,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and noting 70% were women and children, she continued: “A famine … is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government. This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated.“This was all accomplished – much of this was accomplished – with US resources and weapons. If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes.”Ocasio-Cortez’s comments marked the first time the congresswoman, one of the most prominent members of the US’s political progressive left, referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide. Israel mounted the campaign there in response to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,100 and took hostages.While other American progressives – including congresswomen Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian – have used the term “genocide”, Ocasio-Cortez had refrained from doing so until her remarks on Friday.In January, Ocasio-Cortez implied that she was waiting for the UN’s international court of justice to weigh in on the term, noting that “the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think, demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing”.Earlier in March, a group of protesters confronted Ocasio-Cortez at a movie theater in Brooklyn, criticizing her for “refus[ing] to call it a genocide”.Ocasio-Cortez on Friday called on Biden to suspend the transfer of US weapons to aid the Israeli government, saying “honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer,” she said. “Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional. We have a responsibility to prove the value of democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law and commitment to human and civil rights.”Ocasio-Cortez was one of 22 House Democrats who voted against the $1.2tn, six-month spending package that both the House and Senate passed on Friday. The package includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025.Biden is expected to sign the bill, which was sent to his desk early on Saturday morning after it passed the Senate. More

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      ‘It’ll be bedlam’: how Trump is creating conditions for a post-election eruption

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      A bloodbath. The end of democracy. Riots in the streets. Bedlam in the country. Donald Trump has made apocalyptic imagery a defining feature of his presidential election campaign, warning supporters that if he does not win – and avoid criminal prosecution – the US will enter its death throes.The prophecies of doom, repeated ad nauseam at rallies and on social media, have raised fears that the former president is making an electoral tinderbox that could explode in November. While there has been much commentary assessing the implications of a Trump win, some experts warn that a Trump defeat could provide an equally severe stress test of American democracy.“Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses, there’s going to be violence,” said Michael Fanone, a retired police officer who was seriously injured by pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. “If Donald Trump loses, he’s not going to concede and he’s going to inspire people to commit acts of violence, just like he did in the weeks and months leading up to January 6, 2021.“If he wins, I also believe that there’s going to be violence committed by his supporters, targeting people who previously tried to hold him to account, whether it was members of the press, average citizens like myself, Department of Justice officials, state and federal prosecutors. I believe him when he says that he will have his vengeance.”Trump has long sought to sow distrust in the electoral system while using rhetoric outside the boundaries of modern political discourse, dehumanising opponents and immigrants and portraying the US as a nation on the verge of collapse.During his first run for president, in 2016, he encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap out” of protesters and said he would pay their legal bills if they got into trouble. Should he be denied the presidential nomination at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, he warned: “I think you’d have riots.”In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have called for the military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. When he disputed his election defeat that year, he suggested that an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania supreme court would “induce violence in the streets”.Then, at a rally before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, Trump said: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness … If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”After the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August 2022, he predicted that “terrible things are going to happen”, and then quoted the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham warning of “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.View image in fullscreenSince declaring his candidacy in November 2022, Trump has intensified inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail. He has promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggested that Gen Mark Milley should be executed and asserted that immigrants who are in the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country”.At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared: “This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”He threatened “potential death & destruction” if he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney over a hush-money payment and criticised those urging his supporters to remain peaceful, fuming on his Truth Social platform: “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”In November, at a rally in New Hampshire, he promised that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. In January this year, returning to New Hampshire, Trump told supporters: “I only want to be a dictator for one day.”Addressing efforts to remove him from the ballot under the 14th amendment, Trump warned that “if we don’t [get treated fairly], our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.” And referring to those 88 criminal charges that could yet scupper his electoral chances, he opined: “I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes. It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.”Campaigning this month in North Carolina, Trump claimed that Biden’s immigration policies amounted to a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States” because, in his view, they allow millions of people to stream across the border with Mexico.History has shown that Trump’s words are taken both seriously and literally by his base. Hannah Muldavin, a former spokesperson for the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack, said: “We know when Donald Trump says something – whether it’s in a tweet or in a speech – his supporters listen.“That’s what we saw on January 6. His tweet – ‘Be there. Will be wild!’ – led to a rise in activity online that led people to organise and come to DC on January 6. When Trump uses this incendiary language, it’s concerning.”Last week, appearing alongside a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Trump again referred to immigrants in the country illegally in subhuman terms. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.”At the same rally, Trump warned: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” At the time he was discussing the need to protect the car industry from overseas competition, and Trump and allies later said he had been referring to the car industry when he used the term. Biden’s campaign team rejected that defence.Once again, Trump has crossed lines and broken conventions like no other politician in his lifetime. Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Since 1945 I don’t think there has been a politician in a democracy who’s used such authoritarian language, ever. It’s hard to think of anybody. Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin when running for office don’t use the kind of language that Donald Trump uses, so that’s pretty notable.”As historical examples around the world have shown, such language can create a permission structure for violence. Ziblatt added: “No matter what happens, there will be some effort to deny the results of the election if he loses. My best-case scenario is a decisive defeat so that his claims of a stolen election are just simply not credible. But if it’s close, as it seems like all indicators suggest, then I would expect violence and threats of violence and at least protests of the sort that we experienced in 2021.”Opinion polls suggest another tight race. Several have shown Trump with a narrow lead and, in the bars and cafes of Washington DC, it is not hard to overhear idle chatter predicting a Trump victory as more likely than not. This, combined with Trump’s own exaggerated projections, raises the prospect that his supporters will take victory for granted – and assume foul play if, in fact, he loses again.View image in fullscreenLarry Jacobs, director of the center for the study of politics and governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Donald Trump is engaged in a misinformation campaign both to raise the expectation of his supporters that he is going to win, he’s ahead, it’s in the bag, and also to set the conditions for claiming that the election was stolen if he doesn’t win. Obviously, these polls are far out and not predictive but he’s clearly using them now to set the conditions.”In an early preview of how aggressively Trump’s supporters might react to defeat, Charlie Kirk, a far-right political influencer, told an audience at a faith-based event last week: “I want to make sure that we all make a commitment that if this election doesn’t go our way, the next day we fight. It’s a very important thing; a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They say: ‘What do you mean it doesn’t go our way? It has to go our way. We have to win.’ I agree.”Trump’s divisive rhetoric and election denialism in 2020 culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. But members of Congress returned the same night to certify Biden’s election victory, and Trump reluctantly departed the White House two weeks later. This time Biden is the incumbent and Trump has no control over the levers of government, making a replay of the insurrection in Washington less likely.Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots movement, said: “Trump is already spreading lies that this election is rigged and we know there is no realistic scenario where he concedes after losing.“One big difference between his loss this year and 2020 is this time they’re better prepared and have already gone through a dress rehearsal. But the other big difference is he won’t be a sitting president – he’ll just be a sore loser who the nation rejected in record numbers two elections in a row.”Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, added: “What I fear is that the repetition of violent rhetoric will lead to the normalisation of violent acts. There’s no sugarcoating it. This is a dangerous period for American constitutional government.“In the end, the institutions are no better or worse than the men and women who are sworn to defend them and, if they do their duty, we’ll be OK. If they’re stormed, or if they’re paralysed by fear, then there’s a chance that they would not hold. It’s more likely than not that it won’t happen, but this election will be the ultimate stress test.” More

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      ‘Rotten fruit thrown at you’: Robert Hur speaks out on vitriol after Biden report

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      The former special counsel who investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents has said he is stunned at “the level of vitriol” that greeted him across the US’s political spectrum after he declined to prosecute the president yet portrayed him in a report as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.“I knew it was going to be unpleasant” taking on the investigation, Robert Hur told The New Yorker in a lengthy interview Friday, more than a week after he appeared at a congressional hearing in which both Democrats and Republicans heavily criticized him. “But the level of vitriol – it’s hard to know exactly how intense that’s going to be until the rotten fruit is being thrown at you.”Hur’s comments to the publication – his first media interview since his House testimony – largely centered on the Biden report, which he released in February. In it, he concluded that Biden’s handling of classified materials from his time as vice-president to Barack Obama did not warrant criminal charges.Biden’s Democratic allies subsequently hailed that determination but excoriated Hur for throwing into the report a stinging opinion on the president’s memory, which Republicans seized on in their support of Donald Trump’s efforts to return to the White House in November.Meanwhile, Republicans who were enthusiastic about Hur’s thoughts on Biden’s memory were simultaneously furious that he had refused to file charges against the president. Their preferred candidate, Donald Trump, on the other hand, faces more than 80 criminal charges for not only his handling of classified materials after his presidency – but also for attempting to subvert his 2020 electoral defeat to Biden and in connection with hush-money payments.Tensions for Hur hit a fever pitch when he testified in front of a House committee on 12 March. On one side, Democratic congressman Adam Schiff accused Hur of knowing full well that his words would create “a political firestorm” for Biden as he seeks re-election.And at the opposite end, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz berated Hur for purportedly applying a “double standard” benefiting Biden at Trump’s expense.Hur maintained to The New Yorker that he had harbored no partisan intentions when he authored his report. He also said that the document’s intended audience was of one: the US attorney general Merrick Garland, a fellow ex-prosecutor.“I didn’t write it for law students. I didn’t write it for the lay public, and I didn’t write it for Congress,” Hur said of his report, according to The New Yorker. “I wrote it for the attorney general of the United States, who himself was an experienced prosecutor.“I’m just doing the work. I don’t have a particular ideology or crusade that I’m trying to go after.”Also in Friday’s interview, Hur addressed his resignation from the justice department on the eve of his congressional testimony. Among those to criticize that move was Harry Litman, a former US attorney turned law professor and legal analyst who contended that Hur could be more free to vilify Biden before Congress if he testified as a “private citizen”.To that possibility, Hur alluded to a recent precedent set by the former special counsel Robert Mueller. Hur said Mueller stepped down from the justice department upon concluding an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election won by Trump.“Look, if Mueller did it this way, then there must be some reasons,” Hur remarked. “I don’t want to make history here.”Hur received his appointment from Garland to investigate Biden’s handling of government secrets in January 2023. At the time, lawyers for Biden reported having found classified government documents at his home and former thinktank.Garland’s selection of Hur – a former US attorney appointed during Trump’s presidency – was meant to protect the Biden White House from appearances of a conflict of interest or political interference.Hur said to the New Yorker that he accepted the appointment in part to honor his family history. His mother’s family had fled from North Korea to South Korea shortly before the Korean war.After his parents arrived in the US in the early 1970s, and shortly before Hur was born, his father embarked on a career as an anesthesiologist. His mother used her nurse’s training to manage her husband’s medical practice, Hur recounted to the New Yorker.Hur, 51, said he realized he would be living differently if the US had not gotten involved in the Korean war and then accepted his parents, and as a result he believed he had “a real debt to this country”.“And in my view,” Hur added, “if you’re in a position where the attorney general of the United States says there is a need for someone to do a particularly unpleasant task, if it’s something that you can do, ethically and consistent with your own moral compass, then you should do it.” More

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      US politicians exploit loophole to skirt campaign finance rules, study finds

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      A study published in Election Law Journal reveals politicians’ widespread exploitation of a loophole to skirt the law barring campaigns from coordinating with outside spending groups.It’s a strategy that takes place not in smoke-filled rooms or encrypted chats, but out in the open.Campaigns leave a directive to groups on their public-facing websites describing the kind of targeted advertising that they want, which outside spending groups then use to craft advertisements on their behalf. Around the text on their website is a literal red box – flagging committees to pay attention.Given its prevalence, examples of red-boxing are easy to find.“Voters, especially women over 50 and voters outside Pittsburgh, need to know that they have a choice to make between Bhavini Patel and Summer Lee,” reads a typical example – outlined by a little red box – at the bottom of the “media” page on Democratic candidate Bhavini Patel’s website.Patel, who is challenging the progressive incumbent Pennsylvania congresswoman Summer Lee in a 24 April primary, establishes a short but specific campaign narrative in her red-boxed statement.“Bhavini is a principled progressive and lifelong Democrat who will fight for abortion rights and freedom from gun violence,” it says. Lee, on the other hand, it continues, “wants to ‘dismantle’ the Democratic party, she undermines President Biden and even wants to ‘abolish’ the police”.It’s a clear narrative that an outside group could easily turn into a campaign advertisement.Since the US supreme court ruled in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission in 2010 that corporations and outside groups can lavish unlimited amounts of money on elections, spending has increased dramatically, with wealthy donors pouring money into elections – including state and local ones. In its ruling on Citizens United, the court added a caveat: groups can spend unlimited funds on elections as long as they are not coordinating directly with the campaign to do so.To get around that requirement, authors Gabriel Foy-Sutherland and Saurav Ghosh found, at least 240 Senate and House candidates in the 2022 elections cycle employed red-boxing; the strategy was most commonly used in competitive races. And it pays off – campaigns that engaged in red-boxing earned hundreds of times more dollars in advertising by “independent” groups supporting their candidate.The Federal Elections Commission has not only declined to prosecute red-boxing cases, it has also practically endorsed the strategy. In response to a complaint that the 2020 presidential campaign for Pete Buttigieg had violated the rule against coordinating with independent groups by tweeting out a suggested advertisement strategy, FEC commissioners wrote in a memo that “the request or suggestion standard is meant to cover requests to select audiences, not statements to the general public”.In effect, said Foy-Sutherland, campaigns engaging in red-boxing are “outsourcing responsibility” to Super Pacs that “don’t face the same kind of regulations on raising and spending money”.The practice is not limited to either party. Foy-Sutherland and Ghosh found that the strategy was deployed in 2022 by Democrats and Republicans alike.Sometimes candidates use red-boxing to coordinate with a specific group. In other cases, said Foy-Sutherland: “It’s more of a kind of cry for help, being like: ‘We’re running against this incumbent, we’re not going to be able to raise as much money as them and so we’re going to need somebody to come in and help us.” More

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      The Exvangelicals review: fine study of faith under fire in the age of Trump

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      Sarah McCammon’s new book about “exvangelicals” like herself is a powerful memoir of her complicated journey away from Christian fundamentalism. Because she experienced it from the inside, she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have ever read of how so many Americans became part of the non-reality-based cult that remains so stubbornly addicted to the insanities of Donald Trump.Brought up by rigorous evangelicals equally opposed to abortion and in favor of corporal punishment of their children, McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble supposedly designed to protect everyone within it from the evils of a secular world.Now 43 and national political correspondent for NPR, she was born at the dawn of the Reagan administration, which also marked the beginning of the alliance between religious extremism and the Republican party.The number of Americans who identified as evangelical or born again peaked in 2004, when it reached 30%. McCammon’s parents, though, came of age at the height of the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution. Like millions of others who felt unhinged by the chaos, they cast aside the “love ethos” of their youth, replacing “drug culture and anti-war protests” with “praise choruses” and the teachings of religious reactionaries such as James Dobson.The McCammons took Dobson’s teachings very seriously, especially his book Dare to Discipline, which taught them to spank babies as young as 15 months and to use “a small switch or belt” which should be seen by the child as an “object of love rather than an instrument of punishment”.As the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has explained, McCammon’s generation grew up during the creation of “a massive industry of self-reinforcing Christian media and organizations” and a media network that functioned “less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals … maintained their own identity.” Or as DL Mayfield, another writer born into an evangelical family, put it: “Being born into white evangelicalism as marketers were figuring out how to package and sell Christian nationalism … was really bad timing.”The literal interpretation of the Bible McCammon grew up with of course required the rejection of evolution. Everything, including “our understanding of basic scientific facts” had to be “subordinated to this vision of scripture”. By pulling their children out of public schools, parents could guarantee that “they could graduate from high school without ever taking a course on evolution or sex ed” and then move “seamlessly to a four-year Christian college with the same philosophy”.View image in fullscreenEvolution had been invented by scientists so they could reject God’s authority and construct “a world … where they were free to pursue their sinful lusts and selfish desires. What other motive could the there be” for dismissing the story of Adam and Eve?The real-world consequences of this indoctrination include a Republican party blithely unconcerned with the effects of global warming. As Jocelyn Howard, an exvangelical interviewed by McCammon, observes: “When you’re taught that science is basically a fairytale … then why would you care if the world is burning around us … The world around us doesn’t matter, because this is all going to burn like in Revelations anyway.”By distancing so many evangelicals from mainstream thought, their leaders created “a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories that can be nearly impossible to eradicate”. As Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center told FiveThirtyEight: “People of faith believe there is a divine plan – that there are forces of good and forces of evil … QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.”Part of the time, McCammon manages to remember her youth with humor, particularly in a passage describing a discussion of the meaning of “oral sex” with her mother, inspired by the release of Ken Starr’s report about Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House.“I think,” said the author’s mother, “if you have Jesus, you don’t need oral sex.”McCammon can’t remember how she responded but she has been “telling that story for decades when people ask me to describe my childhood”.The first cracks in her evangelical faith began when she spent a semester as a Senate page and befriended a fellow page who was a Muslim.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Do you believe that because I’m Muslim I’m going to hell?” he asked.“Suddenly,” McCammon writes, “everything that felt wrong about the belief system I had been told to promote crystalized in my mind. All she could muster in response to his question was, ‘I don’t know. I think it’s between you and god.’”By the time she graduated from college, McCammon “was exhausted from trying to get my brain to conform to the contours of the supposed truth I‘d been taught. Why did certain types of knowledge seem forbidden, and why were only our experts to be trusted?”Her solution was to choose a career in journalism: “I craved a space to ask questions about the way the world really was, and the freedom to take in new sources of information. Journalism required that: it honored the process of seeking truth and demanded the consideration of multiple points of view.”This book is an elegant testament to how well McCammon has learned her craft. The hopeful message she leaves us with is that her own journey is being replicated by millions of others in her generation, many finally convinced to abandon their faith because of the racism and xenophobia embraced by evangelicals’ newest and most unlikely savior: Trump.Since 2006, evangelical Protestants have experienced “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” among Americans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, shrinking from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2020. In November, we will learn if that is enough to keep democracy alive.
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More