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    ‘It’s not a theoretical proposition’: the ‘war game’ imagining a coup in the US

    On 6 January 2025, US democracy stands at a crossroads. Congress must certify the results of an election that the loser refuses to concede. The Capitol is besieged by a wave of protesters who believe the election was stolen. Some of them are armed and determined to seize power for their leader. Similar groups have amassed at state capitols around the country. And a portion of the DC National Guardsmen – as well as a portion of the US military, including a handful of high-ranking officials – are on their side.This is a fictional scenario, played out in a “war game” simulation with real government and military officials in a mock situation room. But according to a new documentary capturing the role-playing exercise, such a crisis of authority – and the fracturing of the military along partisan lines – is a very real possibility in the politically polarized US, one that we should prepare for. “It’s not a theoretical proposition,” said Jesse Moss (Boys State, Girls State), a co-director of War Game, now playing in US theaters. “Even a very small sliver of the US active duty military that chooses to side with, say, a defeated candidate in a national election, could destabilize our country and put our democracy in jeopardy.”War Game, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, observes the six-hour event held at a Washington DC hotel room in January 2023. The simulation, developed by the Vet Voice Foundation, is one of several role-playing exercises developed in response to the events of January 6, to help military and government officials prepare for another worst-case scenario. How will the US government react if it happens again? And what if the president can’t count on the support of the military? Nearly one in five January defendants had a military background. In May 2021, 124 retired general and admirals signed an open letter propagating the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. As Benjamin Radd, a game producer who viscerally recalls living through the breakdown of institutional authority in 1979 Iran, puts it: “Think about the unthinkable.”While other exercises, such as those recently led by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Democracy Futures Project, focus specifically on role-playing responses to a second Trump presidency, War Game mostly doesn’t name the elephant in the room, examining instead the forces and potentials of political extremism in the US. The distance – using footage of January 6, but not naming the names – allowed for some renewed urgency and clarity. “Sometimes it’s impossible to see something that’s right in front of you,” said Tony Gerber, the film’s other co-director. “And you have to find new ways to show people that thing, because there’s this sort of intentional blindness to see that thing that’s right there.”The exercise participants, a bipartisan group of military and cabinet officials from the last five presidential administrations, must respond to what is essentially a more organized version of January 6. The so-called “red cell”, developed by military veterans Kristofer Goldsmith and Chris Jones, present a multi-faceted and mutating threat on the ground and online, where the situation room – comprised of mock president-elect Hotham (former Montana governor Steve Bullock) and his team of advisers – must also fight an information game. Jones and Goldsmith, both experts on domestic extremist movements who understand veterans’ disillusionment with the government’s status quo, based their mock insurgency group, the Order of Columbus, on Trump’s Maga movement, the conspiracy quasi-religion known as QAnon and far-right paramilitary groups involved in the Capitol attack, such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.Participants – including former senator Heidi Heitkamp, retired major general of the Maryland national guard Linda Singh, Lt Gen (Ret) Jeffrey Buchanan, former senator Doug Jones and Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump – must decide how to combat a metastasizing threat, complete with mock news coverage, speeches and social media posts egging insurgents to follow their “real” leader. They must contend with a video from a high-ranking general, based on the former Trump official and Stop the Steal rally speaker Michael Flynn, calling on the military to disobey the commander in chief. With the DC Guardsmen compromised, should they mobilize other national guards? Should the federal government get involved in coup attempts at state capitols? How much force is too much? And when, if ever, should the president invoke the Insurrection Act, considered the game’s nuclear option, which allows the executive to deploy the US military on its own citizens? (Though the film-makers had total editorial control, they ran potential security issues by Vet Voice: “We didn’t want to give any insurrectionists a handbook to stage a coup,” said Moss.)That last decision is particularly resonant, given the law’s potential for great destruction in the wrong hands. The film’s one mention of Donald Trump by name comes in footage from the Congressional January 6 hearings, in which Jason van Tatenhove, a former member of the Oath Keepers, confirmed that the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, urged then president Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, promising that veterans would support him. “Regardless of the outcome of this election, that act is a power the president has, and it’s a power that’s worth thinking about,” said Moss.View image in fullscreen“This film doesn’t lose its meaning and its relevance with this election,” Gerber added. “A problem like this doesn’t metastasize overnight. This has been cooking and growing and coming to fruition for years. And we as a nation have to ask ourselves, how did we get here?”To that end, the film attempts to “understand, with empathy, how a young man or a young woman coming home after serving overseas could be radicalized”, said Gerber. In cutaways from the real-time exercise, Goldsmith, Jones and game designer Janessa Goldbeck movingly discuss the real threat of extremism in the military, particularly for veterans struggling to reintegrate into society after service, in wars based on government lies or obfuscation, in a country where fewer and fewer civilians have personal ties to the armed forces. They’ve witnessed it, in themselves or in loved ones. “I do understand the insurgents,” says Goldsmith in the film. “I understand what led them down that path. Because I was there after I got home from Iraq.”For participants in the game, the exercise offered a rattling six hours of both anxiety and the empowerment of preparation. The simulation had “real intentional utility”, said Moss, in that it produced a report shared with policymakers, but also as way to excise fear, anger and shock over what happened four years ago this January, over what is still dividing the country. “These divisions, these fears, this extremism – it’s not over there. It’s right here. It’s within our country. It’s within our family,” said Moss. The film provides “a kind of catharsis to deal with the traumas that we carry, and to think about, in hopefully a constructive way, where we might be going”.

    War Game is out now in New York and will expand to other cities on 9 August, with a UK date to be announced More

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    Doctors told Pelosi of concern for Trump’s mental health, ex-speaker says in book

    In early 2019, at a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” told Nancy Pelosi they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong” with Donald Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.“I’m not a doctor,” the former speaker writes in an eagerly awaited memoir, “but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”Pelosi’s book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Pelosi was speaker between 2007 and 2011, and between 2019 and 2023, the latter spell coinciding with Trump’s chaotic presidency. Her memoir comes out amid a tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, in which Trump is the Republican nominee for a third successive election.Questions about Trump’s fitness for office form a thread through the book. At 78, Trump is the oldest candidate ever, his campaign-trail utterances studied for frequent mistakes, his speeches are often rambling and marked by bizarre references.Trump’s volcanic behavior and disregard for societal norms also stoke such questions, not least because he left office having been impeached twice, the second time for inciting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack; has been convicted on 34 criminal charges and faces 54 more; has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil cases including one concerning a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”; and has promised if re-elected to govern as “a dictator” on “day one”.On the page, Pelosi says she did not solicit statements about Trump’s mental health from attendees at the memorial for Dr David Hamburg, “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace”, and who died in April 2019.Elsewhere in The Art of Power, however, the former speaker is not shy of stating her views about Trump’s mental health, calling him “imbalanced” and “unhinged”.By 6 January 2021, Pelosi writes, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”She describes how subordinates including Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, indulged improper behavior, allowing Trump to “surreptitiously listen” to private meetings with congressional leaders, eventually prompting Pelosi to ban all cellphones from her meeting rooms on Capitol Hill.Pelosi also describes getting calls from Trump, often late at night, including one in which she says Trump insisted missile strikes on Syria he had just ordered were Barack Obama’s fault, eventually prompting Pelosi to tell him: “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”Pelosi devotes attention to the events of 6 January 2021, when she and other congressional leaders were hurried from a mob who meant them harm, then spent hours trying to get Trump to call them off.Much of Pelosi’s account is familiar, thanks to the work of the House January 6 committee, which she created, and of her own daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, a documentarian who was filming her mother that day.“People still ask me how I remained so calm,” Pelosi writes, of the hours when Congress was under attack, she and other leaders were evacuated to Fort McNair, and Vice-President Mike Pence was in hiding as the mob chanted about hanging him.“My answer is that I was already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.“He continues to be dangerous. If his family and staff truly understood his disregard for both the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules, and if they had reckoned with his personal instability over not winning the [2020] election, they should have staged an intervention. Whether because of willful blindness, money, prestige, or greed, they didn’t – and America has paid a steep price.”Saying she had quickly realised she had “more respect for the office of president of the United States than Trump”, Pelosi says “it was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he knew it”.Still she is not done. After describing how electoral college votes were eventually counted and Joe Biden’s victory confirmed, she says she “and many others wanted a consequence for the deranged, unhinged man who was still president of the United States”.That led to an impeachment and a second failed Senate trial, after the Republican leader there, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made a historic miscalculation: that Trump did not require conviction and barring from office, as he was politically finished.Pelosi describes another failed effort to remove Trump from office, on grounds of being unfit.“Following January 6,” she writes, “the Democratic leadership discussed asking the vice-president to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for the vice-president and a majority of cabinet members to certify that a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.”She and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, “placed a call to Vice-President Pence about this possibility”.Elsewhere, Pelosi writes that she admires Pence for his actions on January 6, when he refused to be spirited from the Capitol despite having to hide from a murderous mob sent by his own president, then ultimately presided over certification of election results.But when it came to the 25th amendment, Pence let Pelosi down.“The vice-president’s office kept us on hold for 20 minutes,” Pelosi writes, adding that “thankfully” she was at home at the time, “so I could also empty the dishwasher and put in a load of laundry.“Ultimately, Vice-President Pence never got on the phone with us or returned our call.” More

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    A Storm Foretold review – a terrifying glimpse into Trump’s time in the White House

    The most immediately convincing words out of the subject’s mouth in A Storm Foretold are when he is threatening the director. “Obviously,” says Roger Stone to Danish film-maker Christoffer Guldbrandsen at the end of an anti-Trump rant, “if you use any of that I’ll murder you.”As Guldbrandsen notes earlier in the film, their relationship is complicated.The 90-minute documentary follows Donald Trump’s longtime ally – friend, possibly, if either man is capable of friendship – and political adviser for three years from 2019 to 2022. Except, that is, for a short hiatus when Stone switches allegiance to another crew and cuts Guldbrandsen off, the stress of which surely contributes to the Dane’s ensuing heart attack. It’s a busy time for Stone. He splits his time between using diatribes on Infowars to inflame his boss’s base with a hatred for liberals – who, naturally, are in love with “rapist” Bill Clinton and his supposed accessory to the crimes, Hillary – and managing a manchild president who throws tantrums if he feels he is being managed at all. Stone describes, for instance, how, if he wants Trump to say something in particular, he tells him that he needs to use a line in a speech that he used brilliantly before. “Doesn’t matter if he never said it.” It’s one of several terrifying glimpses into the internal mechanics of Trump’s time in office and the scope of its – and his – inadequacies. Such is the destabilising force of these revelations that you start to feel almost grateful that there was someone recognisably politician-like in the mix. Stone is just as arrogant, vain, bullying and thuggish. But he has a genuine analytical intelligence running alongside the same populist touch, instinctive animal cunning and talent for geeing up a crowd that Trump has. You feel glad someone somewhere knows what they are doing, even if everything they are doing is awful and bent on destroying democracy. Like I say – it’s a very destabilising documentary.We watch as Trump’s election campaign is investigated for interference by Russia and Stone goes on trial for allegedly covering up Trump’s various improprieties. He is convicted but his sentence is commuted by Trump, though Stone had been confident of a full pardon.We follow Stone through 2020 as he prepares the backup plan for the increasingly likely event that Trump loses the election to Joe Biden: the “Stop the Steal” campaign that will, we know, culminate in a march on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 and an outbreak of violence that essentially amounts to an insurrection. He rallies the troops, especially the rightwing group known as the Proud Boys, who have appointed themselves his voluntary security force and seem to worship him with almost as much fervour as they do Trump himself. Stone strides on, dropping jokes about it being “Shoot a Liberal for Christ” day and, like a jovial barracuda, reckoning they should “fuck the voting – let’s get right to the violence”, advising crowds on “what you can do for the Republic”, turning truths into plausible lies and generally fostering the tension, conspiracy theories, fear and sense of powerlessness (“a thousand years of darkness” will follow a Democrat win) that fuels the Maga membership. When Biden does win, they are assured that Trump won and the lie falls on perfectly prepared ground. The march takes place, the Capitol is breached, lives are lost and hundreds injured.Trump abandons Stone during the fallout. It turns out that a face contorting with rage is not just something that happens in books. In the back of Guldbrandsen’s car, Stone’s face twists and tics as if snakes are rising from his soul. He denounces Trump, says he will support impeachment charges against the “cocksucker” who “surrounded himself with morons … Fuck you and your abortionist bitch daughter.”It’s a scene that, in the damage it potentially does to his cause – the preservation and exaltation of Roger Stone in the coming new New World – crystallises the question floating throughout the film: why did he agree to it? Why didn’t he get one of any number of patsies who would have been delighted with an all-access three years and delivered a pile of fawning goods at the end of it? What kind of documentary was he expecting from a serious film-maker such as Guldbrandsen? Did he think he could fool him or win him over? Does he actually believe in the cause and want it legitimised in the mainstream media? How deep do the arrogance and delusion run?Guldbrandsen pushes him on little – that’s the price you pay for that all-access pass – though his voiceover generally clarifies his stance, or points up Stone’s latest hypocrisy. But, by the end of a film full of jaw-dropping footage of what seem to be very incriminating moments for Stone personally and Trumpism generally, it comes together as a terrifying testimony to the deliberate nature of the destruction of the literal and metaphorical fabric of US politics. It is also an even more terrifying poser of the question – what storms are yet to come?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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    Autocracy, Inc review – fears for liberalism and democracy

    “There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real,” Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.In the eyes of many, US failure in Iraq coupled with the great recession discredited rules-based democracy. Parents of privilege shielded their children from war and economic downturn. The rest were not so lucky. The world’s current crop of rising strongmen are not operating on a blank slate.Russian belligerence and the rise of China play out against this roiling landscape, so too the challenges of Iran and North Korea. The emergence of a reinvigorated Brics bloc is another reminder of western unsteadiness. Indeed the west itself – from Hungary to Paris to Washington – is far from immune to the trend.“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying upon kleptocratic financial structures,” Applebaum argues. She is a Pulitzer-winning historian, a staff writer at the Atlantic and married to Poland’s foreign minister.Looking back, Applebaum got it wrong on the Iraq war (she had advocated regime change), nailed it on Vladimir Putin (“personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people”) and came close to the mark on Ukraine (“Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist”).The strength of Autocracy, Inc lies in its description of how autocrats bend and distort opinion, and find allies across national boundaries.In retrospect, the west was too eager to treat China as just another trading partner, not as a rival. The Tiananmen Square massacre signaled what might come next. Xi Jinping is a product of a system.In such systems, Applebaum writes, elites operate “not like a bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”.No single caricature-like figure calls the plays alone. Rather, ad hoc collectives are driven by cash and power.“The members of these networks are connected not only one to another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”Such elites have lawyers in New York and London, bank accounts and holdings strewn across the world. Applebaum notes that Marc Kasowitz, who counseled Donald Trump during the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, also represented alleged US conduits for a Ukrainian oligarch. As it happens, David Friedman, Kasowitz’s former law partner, was Trump’s ambassador to Israel.As Applebaum writes, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.”Putin is estimated to be worth between $70bn and $200bn, wealth to rival that of Elon Musk. Xi and his family clock-in north of $1bn.Applebaum examines gas pipeline deals between the then Soviet Union and what was West Germany. The US was rightly concerned.Richard Nixon saw the danger that such transactions would “detach Germany from Nato”. Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on the sale of US pipeline technology, on account of Soviet human rights violations. Decades later, the Nord Stream pipeline emerged as a battleground between Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin and Washington.Applebaum turns her gaze to Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor between 1998 and 2005. Since then, he has worked for Nord Stream, Rosneft and Gazprom – all Russian. Now 80, he has chaired the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning around $270,000 a year. He also led the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, now shuttered.He is unapologetic. In February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told the New York Times: “I don’t do mea culpa, it’s not my thing.”Applebaum also discusses so-called “hybrid states”, which she characterizes as countries that are a “legitimate part of the international financial system” and possess many of the trappings of democracy but that are “also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned”.She points to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. “Russian property purchases in the Emirates rose 100% after the invasion of Ukraine,” she writes.Not surprisingly, Applebaum lauds patriotism but fears nationalism and isolationism. By such metrics, Brexit was a bust.“Did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world?” Applebaum asks.The answer is self-evident.“Did it prevent foreign money from shaping UK politics?”Want a hint? Evgeny Lebedev, son of Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and ex-KGB agent, is now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, neatly ensconced in parliament.“Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”Nigel Farage’s dream has left the UK worse for wear. Farage’s admiration for Putin is a feature, not a bug.“I said I disliked him as a person,” Farage recently said of the Russian president, while campaigning for election as an MP. “But I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia.”Applebaum hopes liberalism and democracy are sustainable but is uncertain of their fate.“Nobody’s democracy is safe,” she writes. Still, “there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.”For autocrats, liberty and autonomy are inconveniences. Conformity is king. There is little surprise that Putin portrays himself as the defender of faith and traditional values.American democrats – as well as Democrats – have reason to be concerned. During the 2016 election, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. A lot has happened since then. Come November, LePage just may get his wish.

    Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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    Mingus, Blige, Beyoncé: Black Twitter celebrates Kamala Harris’s pop-culture cred

    Within moments of Joe Biden announcing his decision to hand his presidential campaign over to Kamala Harris, the greatest hits of her meme stardom re-entered circulation: the “We did it, Joe” call, the “Momala” interview with Drew Barrymore. Never mind callbacks to the vice-president quoting her Indian mother’s habit of asking, in frustration, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”Black Twitter users, however, quickly recalled Harris’s august history as the Black girl nextdoor – starting with the 2019 Breakfast Club interview in which Harris defended herself against charges that she was not “African American” because her parents were immigrants. “Look, this is the same thing they did to Barack [Obama],” she said. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”There will be countless stories about Harris’s record, voter support and her amorphous role as a headlining campaigner serving under a lame duck, one-term president unfolding through November. But what appears to be resonating most with many Black social media users in the wake of Harris’s surprise promotion is the cultural significance of it all. Here’s a woman who was Oakland-born and Berkeley-raised who has whiled away her share of Sundays in Baptist church.Earlier this week the hashtags #WinWithBlackWomen and #WinWithBlackMen began trending while their eponymous organizations hosted separate video calls gathering support for the vice-president. And in those strategy sessions, which drew tens of thousands of participants, presenters made proud and repeated shoutouts to their “soror” Harris, a product of Howard University and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority – both historically Black institutions. Over the course of two days, the groups raised nearly $3m in a matter of hours.Where the guest speakers on the women’s call tilted toward powerhouses of politics such as Jasmine Crockett and Donna Brazile, the celebrities on the men’s call – which was hosted by the media maven Roland Martin – ranged from the film super-producer Will Packer to the Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle. “I’ve been a friend and a fan of her journey,” the actor-comedian Bill Bellamy said. “She didn’t just come from anywhere.”Harris once traveled through the same Black Hollywood scene that defined fin-de-siècle Black culture. Longtime friends include the OJ Simpson expert Star Jones and 21 Jump Street lead Holly Robinson Peete, who visited the then senator at the California capitol in 2017 to discuss national legislation that would address the policing of Black teens with autism. (“We’re so lucky to have her as a friend and a fighter and a warrior,” Robinson Peete said on her reality show.)For a spell in 2001, Harris dated the chatshow host Montel Williams; not long after the bombshell news of Harris’s promotion landed, Williams retweeted an endorsement of the vice-president from the Maryland governor, Wes Moore – who was also on the #WinWithBlackMen call. “We’ve got 100 days to make sure we protect the future for our children, our families, our communities and neighborhoods by making sure we have a president of the United States who sees us, believes in us and honors us,” Moore said.View image in fullscreenIn Harris’s candidacy, there are unmistakable echoes of Obama, another immigrant’s son in whom Black voters readily saw themselves. This month, the two converged in Las Vegas to send off the USA basketball team before the Olympics, in clips that were widely shared. When Harris shook hands with Steph Curry, the Golden State Warriors star mentioned a letter the vice-president had sent following the birth of his fourth child in May. “I appreciate it,” Curry told her. The personal touch recalled another prominent hoops fan who worked in the White House.Even Obama’s and Harris’s music tastes overlap. Where Obama gets rightful credit as the country’s first hip-hop president, from brushing off his shoulders to actually hobnobbing with Jay-Z, Harris is poised to break ground as America’s first b-girl in chief. After the 2020 Democratic national convention, Harris strutted out for her nomination acceptance speech to Mary J Blige’s Work That. “I was so surprised,” Blige told Bravo TV of Harris’s choice – a deep cut, she added. “That made me go back and listen to the Growing Pains album where the song came from. The lyrics in that song are, like, oh my God; I see why she [chose it]. I forgot what I wrote!”Harris’s sharp ear was recognized again on social media again this week as streaming music patrons returned to her 2019 campaign playlist – a mix that includes A Tribe Called Quest, Jazmine Sullivan and Prince. But to hardcore crate-diggers, Harris’s coolest music moment remains her 2023 shopping trip to Black-owned HR Records in Washington DC that saw her come away with vinyl albums from Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers and the Porgy and Bess studio album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. “She knows her music,” the store’s owner, Charvis Campbell, told DCist. “I tried to give her a softball and give her Coltrane. And she was like, ‘No, no, no. Where’s the Mingus?’”Not long after Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential frontrunner, Beyoncé gave her permission to use her song Freedom – Harris had walked out to the 2016 track for her first appearance as a presidential candidate. On Instagram, the radio host DL Hughley posted a remixed video of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us diss record that includes Harris highlights (her strolling with another Black sorority, her dancing with an umbrella in the rain) intercut with photos of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. “Who did this?” Hughley wrote. “Y’all quick!”In the coming months, there will be those who question Harris’s pop culture credentials. But to her supporters in the Black community, online and beyond, every time Harris reflects the culture, she leaves no doubt about who she is. More

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    ‘Kamala IS brat’: Harris campaign goes lime-green to embrace the meme of the summer

    After Kamala Harris announced her bid for president, she reportedly raised a record-breaking $81m donations in just a day – but her most culturally powerful endorsement may have come from a single tweet.As nearly all Democrats rallied behind the vice-president offering support in tweets and TV interviews, a perhaps unlikely voice weighed in: the British pop singer Charli xcx, who tweeted, “kamala IS brat.”That’s high praise from the musician, who released her album, also titled Brat, last month. Brat is not just a name, but a lifestyle, one inspired by noughties excess and rave culture.The archetypical brat, Charli explained on TikTok, 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”.Brat summer essentials, again according to Charli, are “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”.Perhaps most importantly, Charli chose a neon lime backdrop for her album cover, one that’s sickeningly sweet, representing both the highs of a long night out and the impending crash of a hangover.Canonical brats include the actor and model Julia Fox, who appeared in the music video for Charli’s 360 alongside a cast of fellow proclaimed it girls such as Chloë Sevigny, Hari Nef, and Emma Chamberlain. Now, Harris joins their ranks.Soon after receiving Charli’s apparent approval, the Harris campaign’s official Twitter page (@kamalahq) changed its backdrop to brat green. Charli’s song 365, an ode to “bumpin’ that” – meaning beats, and club drugs – soundtracks one of the team’s TikTok videos.Politicians have long used celebrities to court the youth vote, walking a fine line between speaking their language and grasping for relevancy. Millennials considered Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Pokémon go to the polls” line from 2016 peak cringe. Last year, Taylor Swift urged fans to vote in primaries – she didn’t say who for – driving a surge in voter registrations.Gevin Reynolds, a former speechwriter for Harris, said he believes it’s “extremely smart for her to lean into the meme”.“It shows a recognition of how critical young voters are to winning in November, and a commitment to meeting them where they are.”So far, there’s been little Brat back-lash, though pundits over the age of 35 seem confused by the topic. CNN’s Jake Tapper dedicated a roundtable to the topic, concluding that he “will aspire to be brat”. Stephen Colbert took up a Brat-themed TikTok dance during The Late Show.David Hogg, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and gun control activist, wrote on X that “The amount [Charli’s] single tweet may have just done for the youth vote is not insignificant.” He later confirmed that “Nancy Pelosi has been informed of the meaning of Brat”.Memes alone do not win elections, but Charli’s tweet livened up a race that Harris’s bid had already revived. But there is more to be done. Kelley Heyer, the TikTok creator who choreographed a popular dance to Charli’s song Apple, said: “If Kamala wants to be brat, then she needs to promise to legalize and protect abortion at a federal level. And also wear apple green.” More

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    Voices: Does the BBC pay its stars too much? Join The Independent Debate

    Support trulyindependent journalismOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorFind out moreThe BBC has revealed its highest-paid stars in an annual report – but is the corporation paying too much for its personalities?Gary Lineker again topped the list for the seventh year running, with a salary of £1.35m.The Match of the Day anchor was followed by radio presenter Zoe Ball, at £950,000. Huw Edwards, who left in April 2024 for medical reasons, saw a £40,000 raise. Greg James, Stephen Nolan, and Fiona Bruce also received salary increases. Notably, the likes of Michael McIntyre and Claudia Winkleman were absent from the list, as their salaries, paid through commercial entity BBC Studios, are not disclosed.The BBC has published its annual report amid increased scrutiny of its flagship show Strictly Come Dancing over its culture and treatment of contestants. The report also reveals that half a million households cancelled their TV licence last year, as the BBC struggled to retain younger audiences who are increasingly turning to streaming platforms. The BBC has until the end of 2027 to negotiate a new funding deal with the government. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy have expressed strong support for public funding of the BBC, in contrast to the previous government, which aimed to abolish the licence fee.Now we want to know what you think. Is the BBC paying stars like Gary Lineker too much? Is the licence fee value for money? And should the corporation continue to be funded by the public?Share your thoughts by adding them in the comments — we’ll highlight the most insightful ones as they come in.All you have to do is sign up and register your details — then you can take part in the discussion. You can also sign up by clicking ‘log in’ on the top right-hand corner of the screen.Make sure you adhere to our community guidelines, which can be found here. For a full guide on how to comment click here.Join the conversation with other Independent readers below. More

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    Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum: ‘Often, for autocrats, the second time in power is worse’

    A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.“Nowadays,” Applebaum wrote, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources – the troll farms… [that] pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.”The article took as examples the relationships between Russia and Belarus and between China and Turkey, ad hoc alliances created specifically to preserve their leaders’ authoritarian power and vast illicit personal wealth, and to undermine the chief threats to it: transparency, human rights, any pretence of international law. Three years on, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza further fomenting those forces, with the real prospect of a second Trump presidency, Applebaum has published a book-length version of her thesis: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a necessary, if anxiety-inducing read.Applebaum, long a scourge of repressive regimes, is the author of Gulag, the definitive history of the Soviet Union’s forced labour camps. She divides her time between her homes in Washington DC and Poland – where her husband, Radek Sikorski, has recently returned to frontline politics as foreign minister (they tend to discover each other’s whereabouts in the world, she says, through Instagram posts). I met her in London for lunch a couple of weeks ago to talk about her book. She arrived making apologies about jet lag, ordered briskly, and shifted gear seamlessly into foreign affairs. The subsequent fortnight has, of course, proved a very long time in geopolitics. The UK has finally elected a grownup government; France has perhaps temporarily averted the prospect of a far-right administration; and Trump has dodged that bullet and raced ahead in the polls. Having Applebaum’s book closely in mind through all those events is vividly to sense the underlying precariousness of our world, the perils immediately ahead.In many ways, Applebaum is the consummate witness of this new world order, in that she moves comfortably in rarefied political worlds and maintains a robust view from the ground (she has spent a lot of time of late reporting from Ukraine, for example). She grew up in the US, daughter of a prominent anti-trust lawyer and an art gallery director, in a family with Republican roots in the south. “The elder George Bush would have been my father’s idea of a president,” she says. “Statesmanlike, committed to alliances and stability.”After studying Russian at Yale and in St Petersburg, she got her political education on the frontline of the “end of history”, seeing first-hand the collapse of Soviet communism in eastern Europe as a correspondent for the Economist and the Spectator. Having married Sikorski in 1992 – he had been a student leader in the Solidarity movement and for a while lived in flamboyant exile in Oxford (he was a member of the Bullingdon Club with Boris Johnson) – she literally cemented the optimism of the era by helping him restore an old manor house in western Poland. The building became a potent symbol of liberal and democratic rebirth not only in Poland but across Europe. (It was, for example, the first place that David Lammy visited earlier this month on becoming foreign secretary.)The house – Sikorski wrote a book, The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland, about what it stood for – was the venue of a famous new year party on the eve of the millennium, attended by the couple’s many political friends, mostly on the centre right in Europe and the US. Applebaum’s last book, Twilight of Democracy, looked back at that event, and offered a highly personal, insider’s account of the way in which so many of those friends had been seduced by the siren voices of authoritarian populism and the far right in subsequent years. How Polish friends had sought favour in the thuggish Law and Justice party that gained power in 2005; how British allies – including Johnson – became self-serving Brexiters; and how American Republicans shamelessly fell in behind Trump.As ever, Applebaum’s analysis unpicked difficult truths: notably that significant groups in every society will always support corruption and authoritarianism because they believe they can directly profit from it. That the arc of history does not naturally bend toward democracy.Sikorski and Applebaum had dreamed of a new world order with their country manor somewhere near its centre. “On this patch of land it will seem as if communism had never existed,” Sikorski wrote. “We have won the clash of ideas. It’s now time to stop wagging our tongues and get down to work.” In Applebaum’s case that involved researching and writing her monumental Pulitzer prize-winning book Gulag, drawn from newly opened archives in Russia and first-hand experience of survivors. She watched on, appalled, as that history and those archives were shut down again by Vladimir Putin soon afterwards.View image in fullscreenThe Russian president, a focus of Applebaum’s journalism for 25 years, is the most obvious example of the new-style autocrat she identifies. “The motivation is only power and wealth,” she says. “And towards that end, they think it’s important to weaken democracy and the rule of law. And it’s pretty explicit. I mean, in the case of Russia and China, that’s literally their public doctrine. The Chinese have a document that was published in 2013, which has this marvellous name of Document Number Nine, which lists seven perils threatening the Chinese Communist party. Number one is western constitutionalism. Putin has been talking about this since 2005.”One difference with the cold war, she says, is that by weaponising social media, these states – she also includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, North Korea and others – have been able to exploit and deepen divisions in countries in which free speech exists. Applebaum and her husband have been targets of all kinds of threats and abuse as defenders of those apparently “elite” interests: an independent judiciary and functioning democratic institutions.“At first,” she says, “I didn’t understand it at all. You are suddenly in this world of unbelievable hatred, all this vitriol focused on you. Some of it was Russian, some of it was Polish, some from the American right, and they all feed off each other. They all use the same bad English.” The attacks were fuelled by a series of magazine stories in Poland and Russia, that suggested, as she writes, that she “was … the clandestine Jewish co-ordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland” or that she was in the pay of the Ukrainian government. “To begin with, you think,” she says, “who do I sue? But then you just have to learn to get used to it.”That campaign was backed in Poland by harassment from the ruling Law and Justice party. “It had got to the point where they were investigating everybody,” she says. “For example, the equivalent of the tax service demands all of your stuff, papers and information, and you have to get lawyers. We were targeted, of course, and my fear was that if they won again this time, then they would move towards really prosecuting people and putting them in prison.” As it was, the pro-European liberal democrat Donald Tusk unexpectedly prevailed in last year’s election and appointed Sikorski to his cabinet. “You think,” she says, “OK, so now we’re not going to jail. Instead, the foreign ministry.”Applebaum had already been redoubling her efforts to fight for democracy. In her book she writes of a new network, a democratic forum, that had its first meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2021. The group is imagined as a countervailing force to her autocracies and involves activists and exiles from the women’s movement in Iran, from among Hong Kong’s umbrella protesters, and former political prisoners from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Turkey and beyond. “There’s an international network of dictators,” she says, “so why shouldn’t there be an international network of democrats? They helped me frame this subject – really, the idea comes from them.”View image in fullscreenThere is an understandable urgency about this work, not least because of the threats posed by Donald Trump to existing multilateral cooperation. “Trump has a vision for how the US should work, which involves him being in direct charge of the military and them fighting not to uphold the constitution but for his personal interests.”She fears that a second administration will be more effective in overcoming constitutional checks and balances. “It’s also often the case for these figures that the second time it is worse. Chávez [in Venezuela] made one coup attempt, and then he went to jail. The second time, when he was released, he knew how to do it differently, take revenge. The same thing with Orbán in Hungary. He was prime minister for one term, and then he lost. When he came back, he seemed determined to make sure he never lost again.”Did it surprise her that the 6 January insurrection didn’t help former Republican friends to come to their senses? “It did. There was a moment – had the Senate agreed to impeach Trump – that would have been the end of it. The fact that they were too partisan to do that meant he survived. And then Trump was incredibly successful at doing something that is a common feature of autocracies, which was seeding a conspiracy theory, convincing something like a third of Americans that the 2020 election had been stolen.”Her book examines some of the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires have become effectively complicit in enabling autocracies to thrive, agreeing to censorship on their platforms, following the money. She has been prominent among those writers shining a light on the ways that coordinated propaganda strategies in autocracies are fuelling division in the west.“Of course, I don’t think either Trumpism or the Brexit campaign were foreign ideas,” she says. “I mean, because I worked at the Spectator in the 1990s I knew many people who were anti-EU then and who had grassroots deep in the English countryside. But as we know, what the Russians do, and now others, they don’t invent political movements – they amplify existing groups.”In the case of Trump, she suggests, “he is clearly somebody who they cultivated for a long time. Not as a spy or anything. But they were offering him opportunities, you know, he was trying to do [property] deals there [in Moscow]. And he’s been anti-Nato since the 80s. He’s openly scorned American allies all of his life. In one of his books, he talks about what a mistake it was for the US to be fighting the second world war. So of course, the Russians would want someone like that, because their aim is to break up Nato. And if they can help get an American president who doesn’t like Nato in office, that’s a huge achievement. It’s a lot cheaper than fighting wars.”Applebaum despairs at the way anything can now become a binary which-side-are-you-on? culture war. “Taylor Swift!” she says, as a case in point. “Taylor Swift is a blond, blue-eyed country and western singer, who lives in Nashville. And whose boyfriend is a football player in the midwest. And yet you’re going to make her into some kind of symbol of leftwing degeneracy?”View image in fullscreenShe fears that the horrific war in Gaza has become a similar kind of simplistic “wedge issue”. Her book was mostly written before the Hamas attack on 7 October. “I was able to make some adjustments to it later on,” she says. “But it was not conceived as a book about the Middle East.”The nature of the rhetoric around the war emphasised that for her. “The fact that the [commentary] became so toxic online so fast, when I saw that happening, I thought: ‘OK, I’m staying out of this,’” she says. “I’m not an expert in the region. I’m not there. I’m certainly not going to talk about it on Twitter. I mean, do people have completely settled views about what’s happening in Sudan, say? That’s another huge crisis.”In the terms of her book, she suggests to me that “clearly, Hamas, which is connected to Iran, is a part of that autocratic world. And clearly, Netanyahu has designs on Israeli democracy. I wouldn’t say he’s a dictator. But he clearly is willing to preside over a decline in Israeli democracy.“As journalists,” she adds, “our role is to try to collect information as accurately as possible and analyse it. If the interpretation leads to describing Israeli war crimes in Gaza or whether it leads in the direction of describing Hamas atrocities in Israel, that’s what it should do. But I think, for example, that it’s a great mistake for universities to announce what their ‘policy’ is on the war…”In this regard, I ask, have our governments been cowardly or naive in not confronting the implications of the great shift in information in our times, the unaccountable algorithms of social media?“We have been very cowardly about that,” she says. “Anonymity online is a big problem. If someone walked into the room right now with a mask over his face and stood in the centre of the room and started shouting his opinions, we would all say: ‘Who’s that crazy person? Why should we listen to him?’ And yet online that is what happens.”Given the prognosis of her book, does she never despair, I wonder, about the implications?“There are always other stories,” she says. “For example, people really misunderstood the recent European election. The French story – the rise of Le Pen – was obviously dominant. But actually everywhere else the far right underperformed: in Germany the big victor was the Christian Democrats, in Hungary Orbán’s party won fewer seats than in previous elections.”And here in the UK, too, she suggests, though Farage hasn’t gone away, the re-emergence of the liberal-left is the real story.“I think the actual transformation of the Labour party – they’re not getting enough credit for that,” she says. “Because they were fighting two kinds of populism, both on the right and from Corbyn. What impresses me about Starmer is that he had a whole career as a human rights lawyer before he went into politics. It’s pretty rare these days to have somebody come from a different walk of life and be at the top of that world. He understands how institutions work and how government works.”So real grounds for hope?“Well,” she says, “I also feel like, here we are sitting in this nice restaurant in London. Do we have any right to be pessimistic? To just say everything’s terrible, and it’s all going to get worse? We just can’t say that to our children, and we can’t say it, for example, to Ukrainians. What right do we have to be pessimistic? We have to do better than that.” More