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    The Long Wave: Unearthing the real story of Black voters at the US election

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    Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I had a chat with Lauren N Williams, the deputy editor for race and equity at the Guardian US, about the country’s election results and the role Black voters played. I wanted to discuss the reported swing among Black voters to Donald Trump, which seemed pretty significant. However, talking to her made me see things from a different angle. But first, the weekly roundup.Weekly roundupView image in fullscreenBarbados PM invites Trump for climate talks | At the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mia Mottley told the Guardian that she would “find common purpose in saving the planet” with the president-elect of the US. Trump’s re-election has aggravated fears about the future of climate action.Malcolm X family sues over assassination | The family of Malcolm X have filed a $100m federal lawsuit against the CIA, FBI and New York police department over his death. The lawsuit alleges that law enforcement agencies knew of the plot to assassinate the civil rights leader in 1965 but did not act to stop it.Kenyans embrace standup comedy | Comedy is booming in Kenya, with new venues and a fresh wave of standups picking up the mic. As our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi, reports: “Topics encompass daily life and the entire range of challenges that beset the country … as performers tap into the power of standup to make people laugh about their difficulties.”Steve McQueen reveals cancer treatment | The Oscar-winning film director and artist Steve McQueen underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. The Blitz producer, whose father died of the disease in 2006, has helped raise awareness of the higher risk of prostate cancer among Black men, and directed a short campaign film, Embarassed.Evaristos connect at Rio book festival | The British Booker prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo and Brazil’s most celebrated living Black author, Conceição Evaristo, met for the first time at Festa Literária das Periferias in Rio de Janeiro last Wednesday. The two Evaristos, who are unrelated, spoke on a panel discussion about their shared surname and its ties to Brazil and the transatlantic slave trade.In depth: A Black political shift – math or myth?View image in fullscreenThe headlines seemed clear: Trump’s support among Black voters had soared. In the US election this month, some media reported that he doubled his share of the Black male vote and won more Black voters than any other Republican in almost 50 years. This was history! Well, not quite, Lauren N Williams tells me. “The numbers overall are almost identical to how people voted in 2020,” she says. According to exit polls, Black voters turned out for Harris at 85%, and for Joe Biden at 87%. The only real difference is that the number of Black men who voted for Kamala Harris dropped slightly, while Black male Trump support increased slightly from 19% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. But, she says, more than 7 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden. While Trump picked up more Black male voters than he did back then – a detail heavily emphasised in media coverage before and after the election – the prevailing narrative does not account for the fact that: “It’s not only this switch to Trump,” Lauren says. People stayed home, or people voted third party. If you don’t look at the whole picture, then yes, you arrive at the narrative that Black people are swinging one way.”Why was this contextualisation missing from post-election analysis? Because it doesn’t make for a sexy story. “It’s really interesting to people when you have a character like Trump and he attracts folks who you wouldn’t normally think would be into his policies and persona,” Lauren says. “It’s typical that white male voters vote for him overwhelmingly – but what’s not typical is when people of colour do so. For a lot of news media, that is a really attractive story.”I asked her about the viral clip of Barack Obama scolding Black male voters for seemingly not turning out as strongly for Harris as they did for him when he ran. Even I flinched when I saw it, and thought, wow, the Democrats must really be in trouble. But, according to Lauren, the emergency button on that narrative had so constantly been pressed by poll analysts (a narrative that, if I may, the Guardian avoided), that even the Democrats panicked and fell for it, sending Obama to “finger-wag” at prospective voters.‘Complicating the narrative’View image in fullscreenIt’s still interesting to me that a candidate like Trump, with his record on racism, could win over more Black men, even in context. But Lauren calls my attention to a far bigger and more interesting story that has been reduced to a footnote of the election: Harris won almost the entire Black female vote. “If you had white women voting 90%-plus for a candidate, you would not hear the end of that story. It would be endlessly curious and interesting and fascinating. We lose a lot by not applying that same level of curiosity to the ways that other demographics vote.” I can see that this also applies to Black men, three-quarters of whom still voted Democrat. “This story could have been ‘look at the power that Black voters wield’, but that’s just not the American narrative.”And what we lose is a big deal. By writing off those who voted for Harris as doing so simply out of blind loyalty, the reasons for Trump’s victory risk becoming detached from reality. Another broad headline after the election was that there was actually nothing sinister going on – it was “just” the economy. But the Black people who voted for Harris are disproportionately working class, Lauren says, and have made informed decisions despite their economic status because they are accustomed to making compromises and always thinking about “the greater good”. “In the discussions that a lot of the media has about the working class, the undertone is that they are only talking about the white working class”, because considering Black voters as part of the American working class “complicates the narrative”. People would have to reckon with the fact that “Black Americans who experience disfranchisement and a huge racial wealth gap were not wooed by this idea of economic anxiety”.Anti-racism has fallen out of fashionView image in fullscreen“Complicating the narrative” raises the question: why is it that white people are seemingly more anxious about the economy than Black people who are less well off? There is little interest in the answer to this question, says Lauren. “I think people have decided that race is boring,” she says, even though it’s “at the root of so much. Any time we talk about identity politics, we’re talking about people of colour, even though Trump ran on white male identity.” By only treating white people as rational economic voters, we pay “an undue amount of attention” to factors outside race, even though it’s “right up there”. I have definitely noticed a shift since Trump’s first election victory eight years ago. The myriad “white rage” takes of 2016 are thin on the ground this time, despite Trump’s 2024 campaign being even more explicitly racist.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA growing backlash to Black Lives Matter also played a role. “We shifted so far after George Floyd,” Lauren says, “whether we saw corporations – symbolic or not – changing their behaviour and relationships to racism and people were pissed about that. Not everyone was on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon.”What next for Black Americans?View image in fullscreenIf this is how the election analysis has played out, it does not bode well for the next four years. Perhaps we’ll see wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s “appeal” to the white working class and continued disregard for the millions of Black people who didn’t vote for him, who now have to live under a regime that “aims to dismantle federal anti-discrimination policies”. Lauren’s approach is to widen the historical lens. “One thing that has helped me is just remembering that we have been here before. Any time there is progress, there is always a backlash to it. One step forward, two steps back. That is peak American history.”As a journalist, Lauren says showing Black lives as fuller than they are often depicted in the mainstream media, insisting on art, culture, and “the Black rodeo down in Mississippi”, is the way to plough ahead. In other words: if you’re a glass-half-full person, which I am, it’s focusing on that one step forward and then the next one. Or, to borrow from Harris, “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning”.What we’re intoView image in fullscreen

    I am broadly not a fan of beauty pageants. But I can’t lie, the variations of African dress during this year’s Miss Universe had me mesmerised. It’s impossible to pick a favourite as each one was more stunning the next. Nesrine

    The Afrikan Alien mixtape by Pa Salieu is going platinum on my phone. I love his musings on family, alienation and freedom (he was released from a 21-month prison stint in September). Jason

    I know we are at a saturation point with social media, but hear me out: Bluesky is like the old, less toxic Twitter, and has a handy way of grouping users so you can follow by theme. I mass followed Blacksky, a selection of interesting Black accounts on the app. Check it out. Nesrine

    I can’t wait to catch Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Elphaba in the film Wicked. She is a generational talent and I can’t stop watching her perform an R&B rendition of The Sound of Music on The Tonight Show. Jason
    Black catalogueView image in fullscreenWhen the prominent Fani-Kayode family fled the civil war in Nigeria, the UK gained a curious and radical artist and photographer in Rotimi Fani-Kayode, famous for his portraits exploring race, culture, sexuality, desire and pain. He had a short career, with much of his work accomplished between 1983 and his death from Aids-related complications in London in 1989. Fani-Kayode was a member of the Brixton Artists Collective and a founding member of the Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers), and much of Rotimi’s never-before-seen works are being presented at a new exhibition in London that captures his legacy and impact.Tap inDo you have any thoughts or responses to this week’s newsletter? Share your feedback by replying to this, or emailing us on thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in a future issue. More

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      With Trump heading for the White House, the Democrats must learn these lessons – and fast | Owen Jones

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      Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems was in fact Kamala Harris’s “Wall Street-approved economic pitch”, which her brother-in-law – chief legal officer at Uber – reportedly helped craft, and which “fell flat”.The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here’s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats “represent the working class” has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they “stand up for marginalised groups” has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class – in all its diversity – as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for “marginalised groups” rather than “the average Joe”. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third.This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.In this context, white American workers became increasingly associated with conservatism, as converts to Richard Nixon’s Republicans and the segregationist George Wallace. “The typical worker – from construction craftsman to shoe clerk,” wrote New York Times labour correspondent AH Raskin in 1968, “has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.” But as the working-class writer Andrew Levison wrote a few years later: “There is nothing strange in the fact that workers began deserting liberalism once liberalism so decisively deserted them.”There are obvious differences today. The previous backlash against liberal failures paved the way to Reaganism, which did at least offer a coherent vision for society. Trumpism, on the other hand, is more emblematic of what the American literary critic Lionel Trilling said of US conservatism in 1950, that it was a series of “irritable mental gestures”, defined by fiery opposition to perceived progressive sensibilities rather than a cogent plan for what the US could look like. Policies that favour wealthier Americans – rather than many of the struggling Americans who voted for Trump – piggyback on this emotive backlash.But Kamala Harris made her dividing lines abortion rights and the defence of democracy: crucial questions, no doubt, but not answers to the struggles of workers on stagnating wages. Trumpism, on the other hand, attempted to vocalise the rage many Americans felt about their difficult circumstances, and sought to portray the Democrats as driven by championing demonised minorities instead, such as migrants and transgender people. That Harris did no such thing in her campaign is irrelevant: the lack of a compelling cut-through message on bread-and-butter issues allowed the Republicans to “flood the zone with shit”, as Republican strategist Steve Bannon puts it.The answer, then, is not to throw minorities under the presidential Cadillac. That will alienate progressive Americans, and given Trump won a similar number of votes as 2020 – while Democrats haemorrhaged natural supporters who stayed home – this would be a political as well as a moral failure. It is also true that the majority of citizens in any country will never be driven by a desire to improve the lot of minorities, and nor should the left wish to focus only on the most marginalised.Instead, an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority – irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity – will drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised “other”. Instead of the Democrats being drawn into toxic rows about the existence of transgender people, the Republicans would be forced on the defensive instead: as Reagan once wisely put it, in politics, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”. The Democrats need a plan that unites the shared interests of low- and middle-income Americans in an age of crisis and turmoil.As for the siren voices demanding a corporate-friendly Democratic party which refuses to champion minorities: the voters were just offered that, and it lost.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Harris ran from the Biden policies that were actually popular with voters | Daniela Gabor

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      The post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits charge, pointing to the now infamous October appearance on ABC’s The View, where Harris said “There is not a thing that comes close to mind” that she would have done differently. But the pundits are wrong.Harris did distance herself from Biden where it hurt her most. She dumped his Rooseveltian transformative ambitions to bring back big government. Instead, she returned to the Obama-Clinton of a small or neoliberal state that highly influential Democrats like Jake Sullivan had already known was an electoral dead end during the first Trump administration.Freshly bruised from his experience as senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, Sullivan set out a new vision for the Democratic party in his 2018 essay The New Old Democrats. The nutshell: “It’s not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems.”The problem for Democrats, he warned, was not that the party had been hijacked by progressive forces (a familiar lament, now framed in the conservative language of “woke”) but the opposite. The political centre of gravity had shifted, leaving the Democrats behind an American public clamoring for more energised government. To stave off the long-run threat of Trumpism, Democrats had to abandon centrist politics and embrace a new policy playbook, a return of the state guided by Roosevelt’s principles of “bold, persistent experimentation”. The main task was to “embrace the fact that transforming our economy will require substantial public investments”, paid for through progressive taxation of wealth and concentrated corporate power – big government, beating back big business.As Biden hung a portrait of Roosevelt above the Oval Office fireplace after winning the election, his team, with Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, set to work on the return of big, transformative government. Even with congressional politics in the way, the several legislative initiatives together – Chips, IRA, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act – amounted to a $2tn push to reshape the American economy. The conflation of transformative ambitions and China hawkishness, once remarkably absent from Sullivan’s vision, worried some, but most took it as either imperative or the price to pay for bipartisan support.By late 2023, even ideological enemies approved of Bidenomics. The free market evangelists at the Economist applauded Biden’s as the most “energetic American government in nearly half a century”. It helped revive beleaguered unions, and “produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy”, with immediate results: investment in manufacturing facilities more than doubled, soaring to its highest on recent historical record. Similarly, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, was taming concentrated corporate power without destroying corporate profitability or slowing the record number of new businesses created during Biden’s first years.If the Economist expected four more years of Biden to mean even bigger government, Harris backtracked. Where Sullivan called for a Democrat-led economic revolution for America, her “opportunity economy” read like a sad list of bullet points on a crammed slide headed “Smallish Government”: boost child tax credits, increase deductions for new small businesses, help for first-time homebuyers, incentives for new developments.This was not the transformative vision that Biden had championed. Her plans to oppose price gouging framed corporate power as an occasional, rather than structural, threat against American consumers, and said nothing about American workers. Alongside speculation that she would bow to billionaire pressure to oust Khan, Harris dropped union leaders and her early position as a scourge of Big Business to instead court favor with Wall Street, Mark Cuban and the minuscule Liz Cheney fanbase.Under Harris, the Democratic party returned the mantle of change to the Trump campaign, and to a JD Vance prepared to denounce corporate power and voter economic misery often more trenchantly than Harris.What if Harris shifted to the right of Biden because she had no choice? The most energetic government in decades had failed to make it through to voters, who heard inflation when Democrats shouted Bidenomics. But here Sullivan, by now tainted by his unwavering support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, had already given the answer, or, rather, asked the important question in his 2018 essay: The New Old Democrats, he had insisted, should not ask whether transformative government, but how? How can transformative government both check corporate power and support workers and families?The hard truth about Biden’s transformative project is that it failed its ambitions to roll back the power of capital. There was a brief moment in 2021 when big finance spoke and nobody listened, when investors lamented being excluded from Biden’s old-style “government spending on infrastructure”. But then the “politics of the possible” in Congress curtailed that momentum, in no small part due to conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, private equity’s best friend.Bidenomics might not have started, but it certainly ended, as a capital-first, trickle-down-to-workers project. Its transformative ambitions morphed into generous subsidies (tax incentives) for private investors. These investors got to opt out of worker-friendly tax credits. Where Roosevelt would have decried the new generation of subsidy-chaser capitalists as class and democracy enemies, Biden invited the biggest of them all – Larry Fink, CEO of the asset manager BlackRock – to join him at the G7 meeting in Rome in June 2024. There, Fink delivered a long sermon on why the privatisation of social and climate infrastructure, with state subsidies for investors, is the only way forward.Biden officials might have waved a copy of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution on their way to the White House, but distributional politics hasn’t changed that much since the glory days of neoliberalism. The richest 20% by income account for 40% of spending, twice as much as the poorest 40%. This is the widest gap on record, according to Oxford Economics.Rich millennials got virtually all the $51tn gains to US wealth this decade. Having tried and failed to extend the Covid-19 social safety net, the Biden administration instead continued to hand big finance – in its private equity guise – chunks of the state’s social contract with citizens, from housing to healthcare, dentistry, prisons, retirement homes. Voters heard inflation because nowhere does the paycheck rule as it does in a deeply unequal United States.If Sullivan was right this time too, and there is little reason to believe otherwise, the winning strategy for Harris was to revive and even amplify Biden’s Rooseveltian dream of big government. Democrats now choosing to interpret her defeat as “progressive hijacking” would do well to heed Sullivan’s warning against a return to centrist politics, the most accurate prediction of his entire career.

      Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London. She is working on The Wall Street Consensus, a book on the return of the transformative state More

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      Why Kamala Harris couldn’t convince an anti-establishment America | Samuel Hammond

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      Two weeks have passed, and Kamala Harris’s convincing electoral defeat still has Democrats pointing fingers at who – or what – to blame. If only Biden had dropped out sooner. If only Harris had picked a different running mate. If only she went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If only, if only, if only.There is an obvious reason for the lack of consensus. From failing to defend Biden’s record on inflation and immigration to being perceived as too leftwing, Harris’s loss was in some sense wildly overdetermined. And while Democrats were quick to attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 to white racial resentment, that’s a harder story to tell against the backdrop of Republican’s sizable gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters.Harris was a bad candidate, to be sure. But more than any particular individual, this election was a referendum on America’s incumbent political establishment. Starting with Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, swing voters have repeatedly demonstrated a strong preference for change agents. This trend was only briefly interrupted in the 2020 primary, when the pandemic and chaotic dénouement of Trump’s first term allowed Joe Biden to campaign on a “return to normal”. Voters instead got prolonged school closures, surging inflation and a dramatic expansion of progressive cultural politics, putting change back on the menu.The backlash against the establishment is being driven by two longer-term structural trends. The first is the electorate’s political realignment along educational lines. The historic realignment of white, non-college educated voters toward the Republican party won Trump the election in 2016, and brought him to within a hair of re-election in 2020. With this election, the working-class realignment broke through to non-college-educated Black and Hispanics voters as well. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini explained on the Ezra Klein Show, minority voters finally “shed that sense of … racial group solidarity” and “moved toward the party that shared their basic ideological predispositions”.The second structural trend is simply the growth of the internet and social media. In his book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, the former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri observed how the tsunami of information unleashed by the internet tends to leave legitimacy crises in its wake, from the Arab spring to Brexit. With social media, corruption has never been more easily exposed, and mass movements never more easily mobilized.This election was a consequence and accelerant of both these trends. Rather than resist education polarization, the Harris campaign leaned in, targeting Liz Cheney Republicans and college-educated suburban women. Mainstream media, meanwhile, took a backseat to alternative media, Twitter and the podcast circuit.Gurri argues that the internet-era rewards politicians with a degree of unfiltered authenticity, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live to Trump’s meandering, marathon speeches. Harris’s authenticity gap, in contrast, was reaffirmed at every turn, from her unwillingness to do interviews, to her stock “as a middle-class kid” non-sequitur in the few interviews she did. Even Harris’s Call Her Daddy podcast appearance was manufactured – literally: the campaign spent six figures building her a bespoke set.Authenticity is ultimately a way to signal one’s independence. In a year when incumbents are losing elections worldwide, Harris had to not just signal her independence from the incumbent political establishment, but to do so credibly. Instead, Harris doubled down on the Democratic party as the defenders of “institutions” – the very institutions that many voters were clearly fed up with.Again, this was less the fault of Harris as a person than reflective of the constraints any candidate in her shoes would have faced. As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment?Democrats are thus guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from this election. They will focus-group economic policies that appeal to the working class and excise wokeness from their political messaging. They will try to engineer their own Joe Rogan and uplift candidates that shoot from the hip. But this will all be a version of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Until the elites in the Democratic party loosen their grip and allow authentic, anti-establishment party factions to arise organically, they will remain the party of control and stasis in a world hungry for change.

      Samuel Hammond is the senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation More

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      To protect US democracy from tyrants, we must protect the truly free press | Robert Reich

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      Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians.The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to enlarge their political power around the world, but that is what is happening.This is why I write for and read the Guardian, and why I’m urgently appealing to you to support it.During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the United States government. Trump’s Maga Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress as well.Most members of the US supreme court, some of whom have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts, have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for anything he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into US politics.All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.It’s a vicious cycle: citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.Trump and his lapdogs have lionized Victor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.Trump’s success will likely encourage other authoritarians, such as Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical rightwing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.Trump’s triumph will embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch – not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation seeking to undermine democracies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEvidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the US presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice-president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It received hundreds of millions of views.According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2bn views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Rupert Murdoch, another oligarch who champions authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into outlets of rightwing propaganda, which have amplified Trump’s lies.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts and his largest – Amazon – is already the target of a federal antitrust suit.Bezos’s decision demonstrated that even the possibility of a Trump presidency could force what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the US to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”.Citizens concerned about democracy must monitor those in power, act as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenge those abuses, organize and litigate, and sound the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.But not even the most responsible of citizens can do these things without reliable sources of information. The public doesn’t know what stories have been censored, muted, judged out of bounds, or preemptively not covered by journalists who’d rather not take the risk.In the final weeks before the election, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent”, adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require. Americans and the citizens of other countries must have access to the truth if we have any hope of standing up to tyranny.The Guardian remains a reliable and trustworthy source of news because it is truly independent. That’s why I’m writing this, and why you’re reading it.Unlike other US media organizations, the Guardian cannot be co-opted by the growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. It does not depend for its existence on billionaires or the good graces of a demagogue; it depends on us.Please support the Guardian today. More

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      Federal agents raid hotel owned by Eric Adams supporter linked to suspicious donations

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      Federal law enforcement agents have raided a hotel owned by a businesswoman who has been linked to potentially illegal campaign contributions to the New York City mayor, Eric Adams.Federal officials executed a search warrant on Thursday at a hotel that the hotel developer Weihong Hu owns in Long Island City, Queens, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter. The hotel hosts a shelter program for formerly incarcerated people which has resulted in millions of city contract dollars going to Hu’s business.Hu was the subject of a previous investigation by the Guardian in conjunction with the news sites the City and Documented that found Hu had scored lucrative contracts and other benefits from city agencies after hosting fundraisers for Adams.The raid is part of an ongoing criminal investigation by federal prosecutors with the eastern district of New York, one law enforcement source with knowledge of the matter confirmed.In a phone call, Hu’s attorney, Kevin Tung, said he had not heard about the raid from his client, but speculated that it could have to do with the people who are part of the social services program at the site.“Maybe it has nothing to do with her,” Tung said. “She rents this place to the city. The city is running the place. Maybe there are people making trouble.”In a statement to the Guardian, Elizabeth Koke, a spokesperson for Housing Works, the social service non-profit operating the shelter program at the site, said that the federal raid did not target any parts of the hotel that their program operates in.“Housing Works was not the target of the action by federal authorities – nor were any of the clients Housing Works serves at this site, agency management, any subsidiaries, subcontractors, etc,” said Koke. “The agency will continue to provide the highest quality services to all its clients in over 30 locations throughout New York City. Management will endeavor to minimize any action that could disrupt the wellbeing of staff and clients.”Earlier this year, in the wake of reporting by the Guardian, the City and Documented, federal authorities also raided two of the homes of Winnie Greco, a longtime aide to Adams with close ties to Hu.Greco lived for several months in another hotel owned by Hu in Queens, despite the fact that the hotel was also the host of a city-funded shelter program. The aide also appeared with Adams at a fundraiser, hosted by Hu, which was the subject of subsequent allegations of illegally reimbursed campaign contributions, as the Guardian previously reported.Greco has since resigned from her position in the Adams administration. Through her attorney, Greco has previously declined to reply to questions about campaign donations she helped raise for Adams.In a statement, Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokesperson for Adams, sought to distance his administration from the law enforcement raid.“Mayor Adams has been clear that this administration is dedicated to following and upholding the law and we will continue to cooperate with any law enforcement requests, including those unrelated to the mayor,” she said.Tung, Hu’s attorney, has previously disputed allegations of wrongdoing on behalf of his client.“All of these are allegations … and most of them, I don’t think they’re true,” he said at the time. More

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      Union calls Democratic party staff layoffs after record fundraising ‘callous’

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      The union representing workers at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has accused the party’s leadership of a “callous” betrayal of party values after the sudden announcement of layoffs of permanent employees without severance.“Despite record-breaking fundraising, the DNC failed to provide any financial support to those who have tirelessly served the Democratic Party and its mission,” said the union in a press release.They compared the lack of severance to laid-off employees with the Harris-Walz campaign, which provided three weeks of severance to laid-off employees. “These cuts go far beyond typical campaign turnover and impact employees who were previously told their positions would be retained after the election,” the union claimed.“I’m heartbroken. These are single parents. These are new parents. These are recent graduates. You can ask any laid-off employees, friend or family, and they will vouch for the toll this job takes on you. You already give up so much when you decide to work for this organization and now they’re taking our financial security as well.” said a former DNC staffer and union member who was one of the workers laid off.They requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from future job prospects. “Losing an election does not absolve the organization of its responsibility to treat workers with basic dignity.”Over 100 staff at the DNC voted to unionize with Service Employees International Union Local 500 in January 2022.Workers were notified at night on 13 November of the layoffs, according to the press release, and the union claimed the DNC had not disclosed to the union the full extent of the layoffs or if additional cuts were planned.The former staffer argued that nothing in the union contract precludes the DNC from providing severance and transparency regarding layoffs.“How could we have raised record-breaking numbers and still find ourselves in this situation?” they added.The press release claimed DNC leadership had not been responsive in the wake of the layoffs and criticized the layoffs in contrast to the staff management whose decisions “created this situation” remain on payroll.“Every cycle, political organizations scale up to meet the demands, and as the cycle comes to a close, it’s a tough reality of our industry that we must part with talented, hardworking staff,” a DNC spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian “While the DNC has met the terms of the union agreement negotiated by the CBA, we share the entire DNC family’s frustration and continue to provide resources to all members of the team to support them in this transition.”They claimed, per the Warn Act, staffers were notified 60 days in advance of termination, that 95% of staffers laid off were cycle hires. They also claimed that all union contract terms were upheld and that the DNC union and DNC management had been in communication, adding that the current DNC staff were focused on the transition ahead of the new DNC chair election early next year, ongoing fundraising and infrastructure upkeep, and holding Trump’s Republican party accountable. More

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      How Trump 2.0 might affect the wildfire crisis: ‘The harms will be more lasting’

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      In the days that followed Donald Trump’s election win, flames roared through southern California neighborhoods. On the other side of the country, wildfire smoke clouded the skies in New York and New Jersey.They were haunting reminders of a stark reality: while Trump prepares to take office for a second term, the complicated, and escalating, wildfire crisis will be waiting.As the climate crisis unfolds, communities across the country are spending seasons under smoke-filled skies. Federal firefighters are overworked and underpaid, the cost of fire suppression has climbed, and millions of people are at risk of losing their insurance. Landscapes and homes alike have been reduced to ash as the world continues to warm.The president-elect has offered few plans to address the emergency. Instead, he’s promised to deliver a wave of deregulation, cripple climate-supporting agencies, and clear departments of logistical experts relied upon during disasters.His allies, including the authors of Project 2025, a conservative playbook for a second Trump administration, have recommended privatizing parts of the federal government that now serve the public good.In the past week, Trump’s announcements for key cabinet nominations has already shown he’s begun to solidify an anti-science agenda.“Whatever happens at a broad scale is going to affect our ability to manage risks, respond to emergencies, and plan for the future, “ said University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain. “I don’t see any way there won’t be huge effects.”Here are the challenges ahead:Setting the stakesLooking back at his first term, Trump had a poor record managing large wildfire emergencies – and he had many opportunities. After presiding over the response to destructive blazes that left a devastating toll, including the Camp fire that claimed the lives of 85 people in and around the town of Paradise, in 2020 he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that high-risk fire states such as California, and their residents, were to blame.“I said you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up,” he said. That year, a record 10.2m acres were charred across the US.In a signal of how politicized disaster management in the Trump era became, he added: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”Such comments raised fears among experts and officials working to protect these landscapes and the neighborhoods near them that Trump didn’t understand the magnitude of the risks US forests faced.He’s been unwilling to embrace the strategies that the scientists and landscape managers recommend to help keep catastrophic fire in check, including a delicate and tailored approach to removing vegetation in overgrown forests, protecting old-growth stands, and following those treatments with prescribed burning.The risks and challenges have only intensified since his first term.Some in the wildfire response communities are hopeful that Trump will cut red tape that’s slowed progress on important forest treatments, but others have highlighted a blunt approach could do more harm than good.Many have voiced concerns over ambitions set out in Project 2025 to curb prescribed burning in favor of increasing timber sales.Meanwhile, federal firefighters are waiting to see whether Trump and a Republican-led Congress will secure long-overdue pay raises.The US Forest Service (USFS), the largest employer of federal firefighters, has seen an exodus of emergency responders over abysmally low pay and gaps in support for the unsustainable and dangerous work they do.Federal firefighters who spend weeks at a time on the fireline and rack up thousands of hours in overtime each summer, make far less than their state- and city-employed counterparts with paychecks that rival those of fast-food employees. That exodus has hampered its ability to keep pace with the year-round firefighting needs.“Doing less with your resources makes a task like fire suppression and fuels management extremely more challenging,” said Jonathan Golden, legislative director of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.Joe Biden facilitated a temporary pay raise for federal wildland firefighters, but those expire at the end of the year. With Trump promising large cuts to federal budgets and the bureaucrats who operate them, many fear the Republican leadership in Congress won’t push the legislation needed to ensure these essential emergency responders keep their raise.If the pay raises are allowed to expire, many more federal firefighters will walk out the door – right when they are needed most.“The job isn’t going to get any easier,” Golden said. “My hope is that we continue to have a well-staffed and well-funded professional workforce that can answer the call year-round – because that’s what is required.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEmergencies on the riseBillion-dollar weather and climate disasters are on the rise. There was a historic number in the US in 2023 with a total of 28 – surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2022. With more than a month left, there have already been 24 this year.Trump has a history of stalling in the aftermath of natural disasters, opting instead to put a political spin on who receives aid. For wildfires during his first term, that meant threatening California and other Democratic-majority states with delayed or withheld funding to punish them for their political leanings.This time, some fear he may also reduce the amount of aid provided by Fema. Project 2025 has called for a shift in emergency spending, putting the “majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government” and either eliminating or armoring grants that fund preparedness to push Trump’s political agenda.The framework advises the next president to remove all unions from the department and only give Fema grants to states, localities and private organizations who “can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission”, including the deportation of undocumented people.These tactics could hamper both preparedness and recovery from wildfires and other disasters, especially in high-risk blue states such as California and others across the west.The administration has also been advised by Project 2025 authors to dismantle or severely hamper the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose forecasting has been essential to warn when dangerous weather arises, and remove all mention of the climate crisis in federal rhetoric and research.Trump’s picks of a former congressman Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as the Department of Interior secretary – two agencies deeply connected to US climate policy – indicate his strong skepticism of the climate crisis. Zeldin and Burgum have clear directives to oversee rampant deregulation and expedite extraction on public lands.“Folks at federal agencies are already being gently advised to think about the language they use to describe things,” Swain said. He thinks the effects will be far-reaching, especially when it comes to wildfire preparedness and response. Disabling science and weather-focused agencies could reduce important intel that responders rely on, reduce nimbleness and hamper efforts to plan into the future.“A lot of people are thinking this is going to be the second coming of the first Trump administration and I don’t think it’s the right way to be thinking about it,” Swain said.“This time, it’s highly plausible that the disruption and the harms will be a lot deeper and more lasting – it will be much harder to reverse.”Big picture problemsEven before Trump retook the White House, the US was missing the mark on its ambitious climate goals. But scientists and experts have offered clear warnings about how Trump’s policies could accelerate dire outcomes.“Climate change is a huge crisis and we don’t have time to spare,” said Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment at the UCLA School of Law.Stein pointed to the potential for many of these policies to be challenged in court, much like they were the first time around. States such as California, which is also home to one of the world’s largest economies to back it, are already preparing to challenge Trump’s policies. The directives of the first Trump administration were often legally vulnerable, Stein said, and she thinks they might be again this time around, especially if he attempts to rid the agencies of career bureaucrats and their deep knowledge of how things work.In a state where wildfires are always a risk, California is also bolstering its own approach, doubling down on landscape treatments and investing in preparation, mitigation, and response according to Stein, who noted the $10bn climate bond just passed by voters there that will go toward wildfire prevention and mitigation.Still, fires don’t recognize borders. The threats continue to push into areas that aren’t accustomed to them, and larger swaths of the country will be forced to grapple with smoke. Without partners in federal agencies that manage lands across the US, states will struggle to address the mounting challenges on their own.“Continuing to enforce those laws in California will blunt some of the impact for Californians,” she said. “The unfortunate thing – especially when it comes to climate change – there are going to be national and global consequences for inaction at the federal level.” More

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      Uncommitted achieved its goal in making Gaza a mainstream issue | Camonghne Felix

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      In the days following the 2024 election, a cadre of pundits have been eager to call the uncommitted voters’ impact on the presidential race both a failure and a significant factor in Vice-President Kamala Harris’s loss. Despite those contradicting analyses, the movement’s success lies not in its voter count, but rather in the clarity it offered voters, even those who changed their minds and chose to vote for Harris in the end.As with the anti-war campaigns of the 1960s, the Uncommitted National Movement, the more than 500,000-person effort which called on Americans against the genocide in Gaza to withhold their votes, was a representation of the nation’s shifting consciousness around US responsibility in Israel’s war. By asking the public to confront imperialism, the movement opened the door to a confrontation between the people and the Democratic party, awakening its voters to an issue once seen as someone else’s concern.When the uncommitted movement offered to endorse Harris in exchange for having a speaker at the Democratic national convention and were denied, it allowed the movement to more extensively highlight the contradictions that mark the party. If the Democrats weren’t giving marginalized people an opportunity to speak, what does that say to Muslims, Arabs and voters of color who know intimately this kind of erasure and disregard at the hands of the party that purports to represent them?While some in the Democratic party billed Israel’s carnage as an issue that concerned only the left, many liberals across the spectrum, from the far left to centrists, actually consider it a mainstream issue, one that dominates their political perspectives and positions.More and more people, through the activism of uncommitted voters, learned that American democracy is a feature of western imperialism – Republicans and Democrats alike would supply arms to Israel and allow its government impunity on the world stage. Even though more than 60% of US voters supported an arms embargo, including 77% of Democratic voters and 40% of Republican voters, and even though stopping arms transfers polled highly in swing states, the Democratic party ignored demands for an embargo and ceasefire. (The Biden administration has repeatedly said it is pushing for a ceasefire.) That ceasefire has yet to come, and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with many more unaccounted for.The anti-war college campus protests also furthered the cause of uncommitted: students across the country were unduly labeled as antisemitic antagonists because they pressed their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers. Democratic voters across the country became more and more sympathetic to the students’ actions, marking an even more pronounced break from the party position. That consciousness only grew once the expansion of the war into Lebanon and Syria underscored the extent of US involvement in the creation and exacerbation of regional warfare.Uncommitted voters in Michigan, which has the largest population of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim people in the country, helped deliver a loss to the Harris campaign on election night. To be clear: there is no basis to the accusation that Harris losing Michigan was the lone cause of Trump’s win. But it matters that Arab and Muslim voters in cities such as Dearborn rejected the Democrats’ agenda, while Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian representative from Michigan and Ilhan Omar, a representative from Minnesota, held on to their seats. Biden and Harris had room to choose a different approach on Israel, even if it meant appealing to a smaller group of Democrats who would have been happy to campaign and organize for Harris had the party shown any significant steps to end the war.Even those uncommitted voters who decided to vote for Harris were participating in a consciousness-raising effort that revealed existing contradictions within the party and democracy as a whole. Their demands dominated headlines, especially before the Democratic national convention.Uncommitted voters, in the end, are the ones coming away from this election with a win. In raising awareness, the movement has provided an example for future anti-war actions, by redefining the function of the vote as less of a compulsion and more of an opportunity to center morality instead of myopic harm-reductionist tactics meant to maintain the status quo.The movement also offers a useful retrospective on the race: when the party of the people chooses to remain hostile to Palestinian protests and refuses to show any proportional empathy to Palestinian people, the voters they need will reject them. Anger and disappointment took up the space that hope might have, and was the dominant emotion felt by many in the electorate, due in part to the persistence of uncommitted voters in elevating their voices and pushing others to consider the value of their vote.That this was possible was news to many Americans until uncommitted voters began to organize. Because of their activism, the Democrats are learning that the genocide in Gaza is a hard line for more people than they thought, and that chances of winning back the House and Senate in 2026 will remain slim unless some shift is made in the strategy, a shift that requires the party to aggressively pursue an end to the hecatomb of Gaza.America is slowly opening its eyes to the violent truths of American hegemony. Because of uncommitted, more people now have a working criticism of America’s position on the world stage. This is what the seams of Harris’s loss reveal: the Democrats are in trouble, and democracy is in trouble, too. More