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    JD Vance threatens crackdown on ‘far-left’ groups after Charlie Kirk shooting

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    JD Vance assailed what he called the “far left” and its increased tolerance for violence while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Monday, saying the administration would be working to dismantle groups who celebrate Kirk’s death and political violence against their opponents.Vance, hosting the podcast from his office next to the White House, spoke to high-profile members of the Trump administration and some of Kirk’s long-time friends in the movement, including Tucker Carlson and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.Vance said the administration would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”.The administration would be working to do that in the coming months and would “explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don’t like what they say”, Vance said.Miller also detailed how the administration would use the federal government to achieve this goal.“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, [Department of] Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.Vance added: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”Miller said he had been feeling “incredible sadness, but there’s incredible anger” and would be focusing his “righteous anger” on the “organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks”.Detailing what he believes is a “vast domestic terror movement”, Miller pointed to what he said were “organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence”.The political leanings of the shooter who killed Kirk are not yet clear. Bullet casings found with the shooter’s gun were inscribed with references to video games and online culture. Still, prominent figures on the right – before a shooter was apprehended – declared war on the left, claiming it was responsible for Kirk’s death.There is no evidence of a network supporting the shooter, and Miller did not provide substantiation of his claims that there is a “vast domestic terror movement” at play.Since Kirk’s death, rightwing influencers have found examples of people they say are glorifying or celebrating the violence and have sought to get them fired. One post that Miller retweeted said people should go beyond contacting employers and should go after professional licenses for lawyers, teachers and medical professionals because they “cannot be trusted to be around clients, children, or patients”.Trump has also said the problem today is on the left, not the right. “When you look at the agitators – you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place – that’s the left, not the right,” Trump said on Sunday.On the podcast, Vance said that after he left Kirk’s family in Arizona, he read a story in the Nation, a leftwing publication, where the author detailed Kirk’s views and, he said, took a quote about several prominent Black women out of context to imply it applied to all Black women.The magazine is not a “fringe blog” but a “well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American civil war. George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement”, Vance said, hinting at the organizations the administration might target.Vance later mentioned that the foundations that helped fund the magazine are tax-exempt, a sign that the government could go after that status.“Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder,” Vance said. “This is soulless and evil, but I was struck not just by the dishonesty of the smear, but by the glee over a young husband’s and young father’s death.”The writer of the Nation article said on Bluesky that she was not paid by the Ford Foundation or Open Society to write the article.Vance said he “desperately” wants national unity and appreciated the many condolences he has received from Democratic friends and colleagues, but he said there was no unity without confronting the truth. “The data is clear, people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence,” he said, citing the results from a recent YouGov poll. “This is not a both-sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth.”On the show, Vance also interviewed Kirk’s friends and political allies, showing how Kirk worked to keep the warring factions of the right aligned behind Trump and tried to bring in other political movements by elevating them into roles in the administration. They shared how Kirk was omnipresent in the transition after Trump won the White House.Robert F Kennedy Jr said Kirk was a “spiritual soulmate” to him and that his endorsement of Trump, at a Turning Point rally in Arizona amid fireworks and sparklers on stage, was “Charlie’s orchestration”. Kirk helped shepherd Kennedy into his role as health secretary, Kennedy said, and also helped his daughter-in-law get a role in the administration.On breaks between guests, the live stream rolled footage of Kirk during his typical college campus visits debating about the Trump administration’s first 100 days or the left’s views on immigration.Since Kirk’s killing, Turning Point USA has seen a massive rise in inquiries to start new chapters on high school and college campuses. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for the organization, said on X that the group received over 32,000 inquiries over the course of two days. Turning Point currently has about 900 official college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters.“Charlie’s vision to have a Club America chapter (our high school brand) in every high school in America (around 23,000) will come true much much faster than he could have ever possibly imagined,” Kolvet wrote. More

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      Democrats are facing a gerrymandering armageddon. It was avoidable | David Daley

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      There are many reasons why Democrats find themselves on the wrong end of a gerrymandering armageddon.There’s John Roberts and the US supreme court, who pretended partisan gerrymandering is just politics as usual, left voters naked to extreme power grabs, and failed the nation when voters most needed the courts’ protection.That 5-4 decision in 2019 would have been different if not for Mitch McConnell, who prevented Democrats from filling an open seat on the court in 2016, and preserved it for the Republican party and Neil Gorsuch.But perhaps the most important reason is the brilliant 2010 Republican strategy called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority Project – which left Republicans in charge of drawing lines for four times as many congressional seats as Democrats, and close to 70% of state legislatures nationwide.Just a few years earlier, jubilant Democrats had celebrated Barack Obama’s 2008 victory and dreamed that America’s changing demographics would lead to a decade of triumphs and a new permanent majority. It did not work out that way – because they fell asleep on redistricting.The following election, Republicans captured the approximately 110 state legislative districts they needed to dominate congressional redistricting. They held the House in 2012 despite winning 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats, and haven’t looked back since. Democrats are still trying to catch up – and now, even as the party insists it’s going to fight back against Republican gerrymandering, remain hamstrung by snoozing more than a dozen years ago.How could a party with such a genuine demographic edge get out-organized, out-strategized and out-energized in election after election? How could no one have seen the looming redistricting nightmare? How did they do nothing about this when they controlled a trifecta in Washington with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate?Turns out some people did issue warnings. When I wrote my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, the definitive history of how Republicans gerrymandered the nation, I went in search of the wise men and would-be Paul Reveres, the people who knew all about the importance of redistricting, but whose shouts vanished into a black hole of complacency, overconfidence and unimaginative thinking.Had Democratic leadership listened to Steve Israel, John Tanner and Martin Frost then, all of this could have been avoided.After the Republican rout of 2010, Israel, a New York congressman then in his sixth term representing suburban Long Island, took over as chairman of the Democratic congressional campaign committee. If Washington is a city filled with unpleasant jobs, Israel stepped into one of the most hopeless. The DCCC chair serves a two-year sentence as a party road warrior, raising money, barnstorming chicken dinners and county barbecues, and most importantly, trying to recruit congressional candidates who might actually be able to flip a district. A successful term pole-vaults a politician into leadership. But swing districts are few – and few ambitious mayors or state senators want to sacrifice careers and endure those barbecues themselves only to lose an unwinnable race. So the chairman bounces from one Hampton Inn to the next, marshalling every drop of persuasion.Israel spent four years doing this. His second marriage collapsed. The late nights, the loneliness, the flight delays all seemed so unbearable that the only relief came from writing a novel on his iPhone that was a vicious satire of Washington ridiculousness.You can imagine why all that travel might have seemed worth it. The 2010 spanking meant that basic competence would look good by comparison. Also, 2012 brought a presidential cycle, and Democrats actually turn out to vote in presidential years. Sometimes that enthusiasm even trickles down-ballot and helps elect Democrats to Congress. But that was before it became clear how the Republicans had used gerrymandering to push their 2010 advantage into a durable and lasting majority. As he studied the new districts and criss-crossed the country, Israel may have been the first national Democrat to realize how ratfucked his party was – and how long it would last.“What shocked me when I first came into the DCCC was when I learned that the expansive battlefield that I thought I would have at my discretion was actually a pretty small map,” Israel told me. “There are a couple dozen competitive districts, maybe … You can have the best recruit, the best candidate, the best fundraising. But if you have an uncompetitive district, there’s no path.“I mean, the math proves it,” he says, and you hear the anguish of every night at a chair hotel bar with a burger and a bad Syrah. “Look, we won 1.4 million more votes than they did in 2012 and we only picked up eight seats. That tells you that this whole thing was jury-rigged in order to stop Democrats from playing in competitive districts. It worked brilliantly for them. I’m just sorry we didn’t figure that out in 2008.”As Israel sees it, that’s the year when Democrats really screwed up. He thinks the party should have been thinking ahead then to redistricting and down-ballot races. Instead, they planned for nothing. Redistricting, he says, never seemed to cross the mind of Democratic leadership. It was, he says, “a catastrophic strategic mistake”. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats “won districts that we had no business winning. But then we started losing state legislatures and governors across America – and that’s what destroyed us in 2010 and 2012. Had we devoted resources to protecting Democrats in state houses across America, the Republicans still would have won the majority in 2010. But we would have had a seat at the table in redistricting and we might have been able to take it away from them in 2012.“The DNC,” he says, shaking his head, “they just whistled past the graveyard. I don’t understand why.”Republicans, he says, “have always been better than Democrats at playing the long game. And they played the long game in two fundamental ways. Number one, on the judicial side. They realized they had to stock courts across the country with partisan Republican judges and they did it. The second long game was on redistricting. The center of gravity wasn’t an immediate majority in the House. It was rebuilding the infrastructure in courts and state houses across the country so when they got the majority back they could stay in it for a long, long time.”Israel walks me to his office door. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. “This wouldn’t have happened if Martin Frost was still here.”Frost, a Texas Democrat who served from 1979 until 2005, and Tanner, a Tennessee Democrat who held office from 1989 until 2011, were the two Democrats in previous Congresses who really understood the long-term ramifications of redistricting and agitated, usually alone, for action. Both are long gone from the Capitol, but when I hunted them down for my book I found them where I half expected: steps from K Street, along the Washington DC legal and lobbying corridor where former pols cash in on years of connections and experience.Tanner, then the vice-chair of Prime Policy Group, had a cushy corner office with a putting green, a cushy landing for an 11-term Democrat from Tennessee. Exhausted by partisanship, and well aware that even his reputation for bipartisanship would not save him when Tennessee Republicans redrew congressional lines after 2010, Tanner chose not to seek re-election. And so Republican gerrymandering claimed one Democrat who had repeatedly tilted at a then lonely windmill: redistricting.As his fellow moderate Blue Dog Democrats disappeared, white southern Democrats went extinct, and congressional partisanship began to harden, Tanner was moved to take action. In three successive Congresses, under both Democratic and Republican control, he tried to put a stop to partisan gerrymandering. He proposed national standards that removed the power to draw distinct lines from state legislatures and handed it to commissions. His plan also prohibited redrawing lines more than once in a decade, which would have prevented the gerrymandering armageddon now under way. This was not an issue that made the otherwise garrulous Tanner a lot of friends. Neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted anything to do with it.“Here?” Tanner says of Washington. He pushes at a cup of coffee. “Ha! They’re drawing their own districts. I had many members come up to me and say, ‘What are you doing?’ They have deals. ‘Don’t come around here fucking with the maps. I won’t fool with your map if you don’t fool with mine.’”Tanner first introduced his plan in 2005, when Republicans ran the House. Tanner knew it would be an uphill battle, and indeed, his bill never earned as much as a committee hearing. When Democrats took back the chamber after the 2006 election, he thought he might convince his leadership to listen. He flagged down the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, who ignored him and wriggled free.“I told them, if you don’t do this, all the population growth is under Republican control. The only stronghold left for Democrats is cities … They didn’t want anything to do with it.”Tanner remembers Pelosi saying: “We’ll take a look at it.” But he couldn’t get a hearing on his bill in 2007 or 2009 either. Partisan warriors, he suggested, never really want to reform the process. They might fight to take away the other side’s advantage, but never, ever do they want to risk their own.Might Democratic elders regret ignoring him now, as leaders of a permanent minority? Tanner snorts again. “It’s just not something anyone wants to take up. I went through (redistricting) three times. There’s a lot of power connected to that system.”Tanner says that far more than 300 seats are responsive only to the most partisan elements.“We can’t even do the small problems now, let alone the big ones,” he says. “These guys are trapped in this system where the only threat is from their base in a primary … No one will do what they all know has to be done to keep the country from going adrift. Is that because of redistricting? Hell, yes.”Tanner speaks with appealingly frank disgust for a man whose living was long based on his relationships with these same pols. “Democracy? The people’s will? It doesn’t matter,” he says. “That’s redistricting, too. The average citizen is a pawn. Without the protection of a fairly drawn district, the citizen is a pawn of billionaires who use the map of the country as a checkerboard to play politics on.”Hidden behind owlish glasses, Frost doesn’t look the part of an aggressive warrior, but he is the last hardened Democratic street fighter to serve in the House. When we spoke, he escorted me into a conference room with a well-appointed cookie tray and explained how he had learned the importance of redistricting after Texas gained three seats in Congress after the 1990 census.In the 1990s and 2000s, Frost watched as Republicans sought maps that packed as many voters of color as possible into one district – knowing that doing so would create whiter and more Republican seats in the surrounding areas. Sometimes they even worked together with Black Democrats. Frost represented the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it became clear that one of these new seats would be a majority Black district, which had the potential to cut into his base. Frost wanted to stay in Congress, and wanted white and Black Democrats to work together to create districts that would benefit both. As he wrote in his book The Partisan Divide: “The survival of white Southern Democrats would be determined by how many Black voters were left over for their districts after the new majority Black seats were created.“So I started asking the question, ‘Who is doing redistricting for the Democratic party? I wanted to talk to that person. I was stunned by the answer. No one.”Texas by the 1980s was trending red, but Democrats still controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, and therefore redistricting. They came up with a plan that added three new districts whose voters were largely people of color without dismantling the bases of the white incumbents. Frost calls it “a classic example of what could be done when all members of a state Democratic delegation work together for the common good.” Texas Democrats extended their advantage in the US House from 19-8 to 21-9. The Frost gerrymander held until Republicans took the state house in 2002, and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, pushed the legislature into a mid-decade redistricting plan, much as is happening now.The problem for Democrats is that despite these repeated lessons in the importance of line-drawing, no one continued Frost’s work after the DeLay map knocked him out of Congress. “For a while, we fought them to a standstill because we had good legal talent and technical help. Then we just got overcome on the political side.”How is this possible? I ask. “I’m not the right one to ask that question to,” he demurs, but says he thinks about it all the time. He has concluded that the party’s coastal and white leadership simply doesn’t understand what it’s like to run for office as a Democrat outside of Pelosi’s San Francisco. “Leaders in the Democratic party come from safe, white districts. So they don’t worry about these things, because nothing can be done to them. You can’t do anything to Nancy Pelosi’s district.“White northern leaders don’t think of this the same way that white southern politicians think about it. We instinctively understand the problem, but white liberals didn’t really focus on this very much. They said, ‘Well, everything’s fine. We’ll just continue what we’re doing’ and didn’t make this a priority. I argued for 20 or 30 years about the importance of paying attention to state legislatures, but I couldn’t get enough people in the party to really embrace that. The Republicans understood that and had a strategy. We didn’t.”Frost even became chairman of the DCCC after the 1994 Newt Gingrich rout, but, like Israel later, could never convince anyone else in power to take redistricting seriously. I tell him what Israel said, that this wouldn’t have happened had anyone listened to Frost, and he gives a quick nod that suggests he agrees.“No one else in the party cared about this or understood how important it was, for whatever reason.” The Republicans not only got it, but knocked out the one Democrat who did too. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to change history, but we sure as hell would have gone down fighting.“It didn’t have to be. If the Democrats had put the same type of emphasis on redistricting that the Republicans did, there might have been a different outcome. Could have been. Should have been. We’ll never know.”

      David Daley is the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      Kathy Hochul backs Zohran Mamdani in race for New York City mayor

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      Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, has endorsed Zohran Mamdani in his run for mayor of New York City, a major boost for the democratic socialist.Writing in a New York Times opinion piece, Hochul said: “In the four years since I took office, one of my foundational beliefs has been the importance of the office of New York governor working hand in hand with the mayor of New York City for the betterment of the 8.3 million residents we both represent.”“The question of who will be the next mayor is one I take extremely seriously and to which I have devoted a great deal of thought. Tonight I am endorsing Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.”In a post on X linking to the column she wrote: “New York City deserves a mayor who will stand up to Donald Trump and make life more affordable for New Yorkers. “That’s @ZohranKMamdani.”Mamdani welcomed the endorsement in a post on X. “I’m grateful for the Governor’s support in unifying our party, her resolve in standing up to Trump, and her focus on making New York affordable. I look forward to the great work we will accomplish together. Our movement is only growing stronger,” he wrote.The endorsement suggests that centrist Democrats, some of whom have been wary of Mamdani’s campaign, may be willing to back the 33-year-old.Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, overcoming the establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo with progressive promises to freeze rent, introduce a $30 minimum wage and increase rent on the wealthiest New Yorkers.With a message of change and a savvy social media presence, Mamdani turned out thousands of new voters, and polling on the mayoral election shows him comfortably ahead of Cuomo, who is now running as an independent candidate. Mamdani also has a large lead over Eric Adams, the unpopular incumbent mayor who is also running as an independent, and the Republican Curtis Sliwa.Yet Hochul, the most powerful Democrat in New York, had resisted endorsing Mamdani or any other candidate for mayor, telling journalists in June: “Obviously, there’s areas of difference in our positions.”The governor appears to have come round, however, having met with Mamdani in recent weeks. Hochul, who is running for re-election next year, released her first campaign ad in late August, casting herself as a straight-talking “fighter” who will stand up to Donald Trump.Mamdani’s victory has inspired more than 10,000 progressives to consider a run for office, the Guardian reported in August, and earned big-name endorsements from progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the campaign.Yet the center of the party has appeared wary. Senior Democratic figures in the state, including the senator Kirsten Gillibrand and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, are yet to endorse anyone for mayor.Chuck Schumer, the influential Senate majority leader who represents New York, has also yet to endorse in the race. Schumer is a staunch supporter of Israel, while Mamdani has repeatedly criticized the country’s war on Gaza, and described the situation there as a genocide, as have many human rights groups, including some from Israel. More

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      Iowa official defies governor’s order to fly flags at half-staff for Charlie Kirk

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      A local government official in Iowa has said he would refuse to comply with orders from the Republican state governor to fly flags at half-staff in honor of rightwing political activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot on Wednesday.Jon Green, the chair of the Johnson county board of supervisors in Iowa, announced on Thursday on social media that he would not follow governor Kim Reynolds’s directive to fly flags at half-staff for Kirk through Sunday evening.“I condemn Kirk’s killing, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why,” Green, who is a Democrat, wrote. “But I will not grant Johnson county honors to a man who made it his life’s mission to denigrate so many of the constituents I have sworn an oath to protect – and who did so much to harm not only the marginalized – but also to degrade the fabric of our body politic.”Green told the Gazette newspaper that his stand was motivated by Reynolds’ failure to issue a similar order after other prominent cases of gun violence. For instance, Iowa did not honor Minnesota’s Democratic house speaker Melissa Hortman when she was shot to death alongside her husband, Mark, at their home in June in what investigators suspect was an act of political violence.The announcement from Green did say that Johnson county flags would fly at half-staff on Friday in remembrance of those killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks 24 years earlier. And he also paid tribute to two students at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, who were shot and wounded at their campus, apparently by a peer who died by suicide on the same day of Kirk’s killing.“Johnson county flags will fly as usual,” Green added. “I will accept any consequence, whether legal or electoral, for my decision. It is mine alone.”Reynolds responded by criticizing Green’s decision on social media, saying that it was “disgraceful that a locally elected official has chosen to put politics above human decency during a time like this”.In a statement given to the Des Moines Register, Democratic Iowa state senator Zach Wahls, who represents parts of Johnson county, said he disagreed with Green’s decision to not lower the flags.“I don’t think that’s the appropriate decision,” Wahls said, adding: “I think they should comply with the governor’s instructions on this topic.”However, supervisor Mandi Remington, another Democratic member of the Johnson county board of supervisors in Iowa, supported Green’s decision. She told the Des Moines Register: “While I condemn political violence, lowering our county’s flags is an honor that should reflect our community’s values.”“Charlie Kirk spent his career working to marginalize LGBTQ+ people, undermine women’s rights, and divide our country along lines of hate and exclusion,” Remington said.“Johnson county is home to a diverse community, including many who were the direct targets of Kirk’s rhetoric. To honor him with our flags would be to dismiss the harm he caused to our neighbors and constituents.“Supervisor Green’s stance affirms that our county will not elevate voices that work to strip others of dignity, freedom, and belonging. I believe this decision is a principled one, rooted in respect for the people of Johnson county and the constitutional values we are sworn to protect.”Green’s defiance of Reynolds came amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on critical commentary about Kirk, leading people across the US to either be fired from or disciplined at their jobs.According to what Green told HuffPost, he is “entirely confident” he has acted within his rights, saying has not satisfied any of the conditions under Iowa state law which could enable Reynolds to oust him from his post.“The governor has no authority to remove me from office,” Green remarked to the outlet. “I’m sure if she thought she had some legal basis to do anything to me, she wouldn’t have posted on [social media]. She would’ve sent the law for me.”On Saturday, the Kirk-founded Turning Point USA announced that a memorial service would be held for him on 21 September at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals play their home games. More

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      As Starmer’s popularity tanks, what can Labour learn from Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York?

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      Progressives in the UK and US are grappling with the same question. Why have rightwing populists become so much more successful at tapping into public concern? And why are so few politicians on the left connecting with ordinary people?Barely a year after taking power in Britain, Labour’s popularity has collapsed with unprecedented rapidity against surging support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.In the US, a year after Joe Biden’s defeat, the Democrats are still derided by swathes of voters and remain at a loss for how to take on Donald Trump’s unique brand of politics.But while Labour and the Democrats languish in nationwide polls, there are exceptions. In New York over the summer, Zohran Mamdani rose from little-known assembly member to social media sensation and heavily favoured Democratic nominee in November’s mayoral contest.His success in the Democratic primary comes on the back of a highly impactful people-powered campaign that looks likely to propel him to victory. A poll for the New York Times this week concluded that Mamdani held a commanding lead over his three rivals for the mayoralty, including the scandal-hit incumbent, Eric Adams, and the multimillionaire former governor Andrew Cuomo.What if anything, can Labour learn from his success?It’s the economy, stupidPolitical observers in the UK believe Labour has a communications problem. But for good comms, you need substance. For Mamdani, that has come in the form of a laser-sharp focus on the economy and affordability.According to the NYT/Siena poll this week, 49% of likely voters thought Mamdani would perform best on affordability issues, compared with 23% who said the same of Cuomo and 10% for Adams.“Elections are almost always about very, very fundamental things,” said Matthew McGregor, the chief executive of 38 Degrees who is a former digital adviser to Ed Miliband and worked as a digital campaign strategist in Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.“Mamdani has got an agenda that clicks with people’s real lived experience of a city that has become just farcically expensive, doesn’t work for working-class people, and where there is very stark inequality between people in the boroughs and the rich parts of Manhattan,” he said.Claire Ainsley, a former Labour policy chief who now runs the centre-left renewal project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a US thinktank, said: “He’s highlighted the cost of living and affordability, and that’s right – that is the major issue that’s bothering Americans. Even if inflation is under control, cost of living is a big problem.”By comparison, Labour’s first year in power has been characterised by constantly changing policy priorities. Before and after being elected, Starmer has variously talked about his six first steps, six “milestones”, five “missions” and three “foundations”.Most recently, the prime minister has sought to reset his government by announcing a “phase two” focused on delivery, including the economy – but for many Labour MPs these constantly shifting priorities betray a frustrating lack of vision that makes it difficult to connect with the public.Champion compelling, costed policiesWith his focus on affordability, Mamdani has identified the key problem for many New Yorkers. Crucially, he is also presenting clear and compelling solutions.His policies include free bus transport, a rent freeze on the city’s 2.3m regulated apartments, a crackdown on bad landlords and commercial rent control, free childcare for parents starting at six months, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030.“His answers aren’t ‘Have you read through my 12-page white paper on breaking down planning so we can get New York building again?’. It’s not ‘We’re going to make work pay by encouraging businesses to invest’. It’s ‘We’re going to make buses free, we’re going to fill in the grocery deserts’,” McGregor said. “Practical, meaningful things that people can grasp and understand.”Mamdani is seeing off criticism about the feasibility of his promises by setting out clearly how they will be paid for – imposing a 2% tax on the top 1% of residents earning more than $1m annually, and raising New York City’s top corporate tax rate from 7.25% to match neighbouring New Jersey’s at 11.5%.For its part, Labour is implementing a whole slate of progressive policies that are very popular with voters – strengthening renters’ and workers’ rights, including a ban on fire-and-rehire practices, increasing the minimum wage, cutting down hospital waiting lists and making it easier to see a GP.The trouble is, these are not being properly championed. Ministers seem reluctant to bang the drum for some of their most popular moves, sometimes for fear of angering business. Last year, Downing Street disowned a press statement that called P&O Ferries a “rogue operator” for past fire-and-rehire practices after the firm threatened to pull out of an investment summit.Craft an overarching story – and pick a sideDavid Axelrod, a former strategist to Obama who then advised Ed Miliband in 2015, memorably said Labour’s campaign that year failed because it could be summed up with: “Vote Labour, win a microwave.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis point was that Labour in 2015 offered voters a set of loosely connected transactional promises but lacked any overarching narrative. Many believe this is a problem plaguing the current Labour government and a key to explaining the success of Trump in the US and Farage in the UK.Both Trump and Farage have clear narrative stories to tell about the problems of the country and their proposed solutions. So does Mamdani. McGregor said: “He wants to be a politician that says this whole system isn’t working, and we’re going to change things in a bigger way. Politics is a vibes-based business in the modern media environment, and everything you do is a demonstration of whose side are you on.”He added: “I think you can learn from Mamdani without saying we have to be more leftwing. Those policies need to connect to that bigger story that you’re telling. Farage is telling a story, and Trump is telling a story, and Mamdani is telling a story about the country, its challenges and problems and who’s to blame for them.”That final point – picking a side and identifying your adversaries – is key. Ed Owen, a former UK government special adviser during the New Labour years who is now a visiting fellow at the centre-left US thinktank Third Way, said: “We on the centre left are great at being rather po-faced, rational, logical, and establishing ourselves inadvertently as the defenders of the status quo that most people hate.“We are in a period of history where people’s faith in politics and politicians is at an all-time low. Insurgent political figures like Mamdani, and also on the right, are good at positioning themselves as agents of change.”Get social media-savvyEven when you tick all those boxes – a focus on people’s biggest concerns, popular policies and a compelling overarching narrative – you need a way to cut through to the public, including to voters who don’t follow politics closely.Mamdani is a hugely talented communicator who has built a huge presence on social media. His masterful campaign videos and direct, easy style are shared with 1.4 million followers on TikTok and 4 million on Instagram. Unlike most politicians, at 33 he is a social media native.“These TikTok videos, I think, are a really compelling and interesting manifestation of something,” McGregor said. “Understanding the modern media environment and the fact that huge swathes of people consume information in completely different ways to how they did five, 10, let alone 20 years ago.”The decline of traditional media means many voters consume news only through snippets on their social media feeds. The only UK politician with a major TikTok presence is Farage – he rivals Mamdani’s reach with 1.3 million followers.Despite the efforts of successive No 10 comms chiefs, the UK government has been slow at adapting to new forms of communication – though Starmer and other ministers are increasingly popping up on alternative platforms such as digital-only outlets and parenting podcasts.Owen said: “We’ve got to be able to communicate where people are – and that’s increasingly on social media channels – in the form they want. And we’ve been really bad at it.”Be an authentic local voiceMamdani is a very New York success story – and one that observers say can’t be simply copy-pasted to the UK or other parts of the US. “It isn’t as if this is some sort of template you can just transpose to any political environment,” Owen said.Ainsley said: “If there is a lesson to be drawn, it’s about the importance of authentic candidates that speak to the voters that you need. Clearly, his victory has energised parts of the left, but they are not representative of the mainstream of America, that is where the midterms and the next presidential election will be fought.“He’s played to the base that he needed, which is a narrow selectorate in New York City. He’s got conviction, and one of the things that the swing voters who’ve moved away from the Democrats over time have said to us is that they want politicians with conviction – but they also want candidates that have got the competence and credible policies that they think are going to meet their everyday needs.” More

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      US college campuses have faced hoax calls about gunmen since Charlie Kirk shooting – live

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      Donald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Erika Kirk, the widow of right wing activist and provocateur Charlie Kirk, said in a statement Friday evening that her late husband’s message and mission will be “stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever” and that her “cries will echo around the world like a battle cry”.“I loved knowing one of his mottoes was ‘never surrender’,” she said of her late husband. “We’ll never surrender.”Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of the hard-right youth organization Turning Point USA, died after being fatally shot while speaking at an event hosted at Utah Valley University (UVU) on Wednesday afternoon. The event was the first in the organization’s fall tour of college campuses. Erika Kirk said that the campus tour will continue despite her husband’s untimely death.“In a world filled with chaos, doubt and uncertainty, my husband’s voice will remain and it will ring out louder and more clearly than ever and his wisdom will endure,” she said.Erika Kirk, speaking from her husband’s Turning Point USA office on Friday evening, said Charlie had been killed because “he preached a message of patriotism, faith and of God’s merciful love”.During a news conference on Friday morning in Utah, FBI Director Kash Patel lauded the work of the FBI leading the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s killing, while also twice saying the decision to release photos and videos to the public, which led to the arrest of suspect Tyler Robinson on Thursday evening, were made at his direction.However, Patel has come under fire over his handling of the most high-profile moment of his tenure so far. Some FBI employees told CNN they found it galling for Patel to claim personal credit for the most successful parts of the investigation.In the early hours after the shooting, Patel had prematurely indicated on X that a suspected shooter was in custody, before it later turned out the killer was still at large.Less than two hours later after his initial post, Patel wrote a note saying the person had been released – a clear signal that law enforcement had not apprehended the correct person.The following day, in a meeting reported by The New York Times, Patel fumed to subordinates over failure to give him timely information, including photos of the suspect, the now-arrested Robinson. Patel reportedly went on a profanity-laced tirade, telling agents he would not tolerate “Mickey Mouse operations.”Patel personally knew Kirk and gave a tribute to the Turning Point USA founder on Friday.“To my friend Charlie Kirk: Rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla,” Patel said, making a reference to the hall of slain warriors from Norse mythology.About 50 college campuses across the US have been deluged in recent weeks with hoax calls about armed gunmen and other violence, AP reported on Saturday. Students at some schools spent hours hiding under desks, only to find out later the threat had been fabricated. On Thursday, several historically Black colleges locked down or canceled classes after receiving threats, a day after the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college.According to CNN’s analysis of events reported by the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been 47 school shootings in the US so far this year, as of 10 September. Twenty-four were on college campuses, and 23 were on K-12 school grounds. The incidents left 19 people dead and at least 77 other victims injured.

      The killing of Charlie Kirk is being used to mobilise support before what is expected to be Britain’s largest far-right rally in decades, which will include speakers from Britain, the US and Europe. The rally is expected to attract upwards of 40,000 attenders, according to the anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate. A smaller gathering organised by the group Stand Up to Racism is also taking place.

      A fundraising page, organised by Tucker Carlson’s nicotine pouch company ALP on the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, has already raised more than $3.7m for the Kirk family after ALP’s initial $1m donation. According to multiple sources, Kirk’s estimated net worth at the time of his death was $12m.

      Erika Kirk, widow of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, gave a combative speech saying her late husband’s message and mission will be “stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever” and that her “cries will echo around the world like a battle cry”. A tour of college campuses by his hard-right youth organization Turning Point USA would continue, she said, in her first public statement since her husband’s killing. She urged students to start Turning Point USA chapters at their schools.

      Authorities announced on Friday that they had arrested a suspect in connection Charlie Kirk’s killing at a speaking event at Utah Valley University (UVU) on Wednesday. Tyler Robinson, 22, is now in custody at Utah County Jail.

      Robinson’s family friend turned him in, and told officers that Robinson “confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident”, governor Spencer Cox told a press conference. A family member that investigators interviewed described Robinson as becoming “more political in recent years” and was aware that Kirk was due to speak at UVU, said Cox.

      The weapon used was identified as a high-action bolt rifle, and Cox noted that several bullet casings were found at the scene of the crime. One of three unfired casings read “Hey fascist! Catch!”, a second read “Oh Bella Ciao” (which is the name of an anti-fascist Italian anthem), and a third casing had the following engraved: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO”. The Wall Street Journal initially reported on Thursday that an internal law enforcement bulletin said that ammunition recovered after the Charlie Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of unspecified “transgender ideology”, but within an hour the New York Times, citing multiple sources, reported that these claims were likely not true. The WSJ has since posted an Editor’s Note saying that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “urged caution” around inaccurate reports of the transgender engravings.

      Donald Trump told Fox & Friends in an interview – during which he also announced that a suspect was in custody – that he hoped the shooter “gets the death penalty”. He declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions, saying “I couldn’t care less” and instead casting “vicious and horrible radicals” on the left of US politics as the sole problem. He added that these radicals “want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”

      Jeff Gray, the Utah county attorney, plans to file formal charges against Tyler Robinson on Tuesday, his office said. According to court records obtained by CNN, Robinson is being held without bail on several initial charges, including aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm, and obstruction of justice.

      A Utah Valley University spokesperson confirmed today that Robinson is a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College. He also briefly attended Utah State University. More

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      Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

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      Donald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”.In more recent times, Joe Biden used his inaugural address in 2021, just days after the insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, to call for unity, without which, he said, “there is no peace, only bitterness and fury”.Trump’s appearance on Fox News made clear he has no intention of following that rhetorical tradition. Instead, the tenor of his response to the Kirk shooting has been hyper-partisan and grounded in retribution.In Friday’s comments, he threatened the philanthropist George Soros with a Rico investigation of the sort normally reserved for organised crime. He accused Soros of funding “professional agitators” who were engaging in “more than protest, this is real agitation, this is riots on the streets”.In an Oval Office address delivered hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, Trump made menacing remarks indicating he would seek revenge against “organizations that fund and support” political violence. He laid blame for the current plight entirely on what he called the “radical left”.The president has already used his second term in the White House to turn the heat up on those he regards as his political enemies. He has authorised an investigation into the main fundraising channel for the Democratic party, ActBlue, and threatened to rescind the tax-exempt status of progressive groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and environmental groups. More

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      Missouri Republicans approve redistricting that gives GOP additional seat in Congress

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      Missouri Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday that adds an additional GOP-friendly seat in Congress, a boost to Donald Trump as he tries to redraw districts across the US to stave off losses in next year’s midterms.Republicans currently hold six of Missouri’s eight congressional seats. The new map would eliminate a district currently represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver in Kansas City. Cleaver, who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor, has been in Congress for two decades. The new map splits up voters in the district and places them instead into more GOP-friendly ones.The plan now goes to Missouri’s governor, Mike Kehoe, a Republican, who is expected to sign it into law.Opponents of the measure pledged they would use a legal maneuver to force a statewide vote on the maps next year. Activists must gather more than 100,000 signatures in the next 90 days to put it up for a referendum.“This fight is not over. Missouri voters – not politicians – will have the final say,” Elsa Rainey, a spokesperson for the group People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.Missouri is the first state to pass a new congressional plan after Texas adopted a map that gives Republicans between three and five new seats. California voters are set to vote on a ballot referendum later this year that would add five congressional districts in that state.“Missourians will not have fair and effective representation under this new, truly shameful gerrymander. It is not only legally indefensible, it is also morally wrong,” Eric Holder, the former US attorney general and chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement.Each seat is important because Republicans only hold a three-seat majority in the US House and the president’s party typically loses seats in a midterm election. Typically, redistricting is done only once, after the decennial census at the start of the decade, but Trump has pushed an anti-democratic effort to redraw district lines mid-decade, allowing politicians to pick their voters instead of having them face competitive elections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOhio, where Republicans also control the redistricting process, is also set to redraw its maps in the coming months. Indiana Republicans are also considering redrawing their state’s map as well. More

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      The US is on the brink of another era of political violence – and Donald Trump ‘couldn’t care less’ | Jonathan Freedland

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      The killing of Charlie Kirk has left the US and those who care about it on edge. The arrest of a suspect, Tyler Robinson, has hardly settled the nerves, not when the revelation of any supposed political allegiances could touch off a fresh round of recriminations. The fear is that the country is about to descend into a new era of political violence, becoming a place where differences are settled not with words and argument but by guns and blood. After all, it has plumbed those depths before.The US was born in violence, fought a civil war less than a century after its founding and in living memory seemed to be on the brink of another one – with a spate of assassinations in the 1960s that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and John and Bobby Kennedy. That should provide some consolation, the knowledge that the country has been through this before and survived.And yet the comfort is scant, because these are different times. For one thing, guns are even more available now than they were then: there are more than 850m firearms in private hands in the world, and nearly half of those are owned by Americans. For every 100 Americans, there are 120 guns.For another, today’s information supply is dominated by social media, amplifying the most extreme voices and rewarding the angriest sentiments. Where once the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite could break the news of a presidential assassination and provide sombre balm, now grief is inflamed into fury, with footage of Kirk’s horrific shooting entering global circulation mere moments after his death.But the crucial difference is at the top. An act of political violence used to be met by a standard, reassuringly predictable response: the president would condemn it, grieve for the dead and their families, plead that there be no rush to judgment, and call for calm and for unity, insisting that Americans not give the killers what they want, which was division, but rather come together as fellow citizens of a republic they all loved. I heard versions of that speech, delivered at different moments by Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump chose an alternative path – one that proved that, as he later admitted to Fox News when asked about bringing the country together, he “couldn’t care less”.Instead, and at a time when no one was in custody and nothing at all was known of Kirk’s killer, Trump said the blame for his death lay with “the radical left”. It was its “rhetoric” that was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today”. The problem was not political violence in general, but “radical left political violence”.Put aside the inaccuracy of such a statement. Put aside the documented fact that not some, but all extremist-related killings in the US in 2024 were connected to rightwing extremism, just as they were in 2023 and in 2022. Put aside that, although Trump listed incidents in which figures associated with the right had been attacked, he pointedly did not mention and wilfully chose to ignore the murder of the Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June; or the arson attack on the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, in April; or an earlier plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan.Put it all aside, even though it exposes the transparent falsity of Trump’s declaration that US political violence comes from one side only. Consider instead the likely effect of his words. At best, they add fuel to an already incendiary situation. At worst, they encourage retaliation and revenge.Witness Trump’s allies and cheerleaders. “We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,” promised Fox News host Jesse Watters. Elon Musk declared that “The Left is the party of murder”. A legion of other rightwing influencers have already taken this talk to its logical conclusion, announcing, as one put it, that “THIS IS WAR”. Could the message being sent to a furious and well-armed support base be any clearer?And notice something else Trump said on Wednesday. He pledged to find those “organisations that fund and support” what he classifies as political violence. Given that one of his closest aides said before Kirk’s murder that the Democratic party should be viewed as a “domestic extremist organisation”, it’s not hard to imagine who he will be coming for. Surely any group that opposes him.How should they – Democrats, liberals, the left – be responding to this moment of peril? So far they have observed the old norms, with almost every Democratic figure of any standing, whether former president or serving politician, offering the decent, human response: horror at such a brutal act, sympathy for Kirk’s wife and now-fatherless young children, fear for where this leaves the country. Watch MSNBC, or listen to the Pod Save crowd, and you’ll see that that’s how most of the leading lights in the anti-Trump universe have, rightly, responded. Any deviation from that norm has been punished.It is one of the asymmetries of the US culture wars that this etiquette, rigorously enforced from left to right, is not observed in the other direction. So when an intruder broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly clubbed her husband, Paul, then 82, to death, the leading Republican in the country did not offer condemnation or words of consolation. No, Trump responded by making repeated jokes at Paul Pelosi’s expense.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDifferent rules apply. After an act of violence, Democrats must be gracious, empathetic and call for calm on all sides, while Republicans can mock the victims, blame only one side and demand more violence. And there’s a further asymmetry: a single post from a random, anonymous user online will be treated as a statement from “the left”, while the outpourings of the right’s most powerful voices, in politics or the media, and including the president himself, somehow get a free pass.As part of this etiquette, it’s become poor taste to point out Kirk’s actual views. It’s as if the belief that no one should be killed for their opinions requires you to withhold any judgment of those opinions. But Kirk did not hold back. He was happy to tell people that he would be nervous getting on a plane flown by a Black pilot, and to talk of “prowling Blacks”; to tell Taylor Swift to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband … You’re not in charge”; to deny the truth of the 2020 election; to recommend that children should watch public executions; and to suggest “Jewish dollars” were to blame for the spread of “cultural Marxism”.Many liberal luminaries have swerved past this back catalogue, preferring to express their admiration for Kirk’s willingness to debate and his genuine gift for engaging the young. That has left the field clear for the right to redefine Kirk not as the extremist he was – and was proud to be – but as a paragon of civic participation, one who merits a posthumous presidential medal of freedom and a lowering of the flag. While the liberal left is observing the conventional pieties, the right is swiftly sanitising Kirk’s views and canonising him, hailing him as a martyr for the cause of what they insist is “simple common sense”. As a result, it will have moved the Overton window yet further in its direction.These are dynamics Kirk knew well and that he was adroit at using to his advantage. He understood that a culture war inherently favours those willing to disregard the rules. It is a lesson that liberals and the left are, rightly, reluctant to learn – but that reluctance comes at an increasingly high price.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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