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    ‘Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth’: a Chinese journalist on the US under Trump

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    On a Friday night in late May, Wang Jian was getting ready to broadcast. It was pouring outside, and he was sitting in the garage apartment behind his house, just outside Boston, eating dinner. “I am very sensitive to what Trump does,” Wang was telling me, in Mandarin, waving a fork. “When Trump holds a cabinet meeting, he sits there and the people next to him start to flatter him. And I think, isn’t this the same as Mao Zedong? Trump sells the same thing: a little bit of populism, plus a little bit of small-town shrewdness, plus a little bit of ‘I have money.’”Wang was sitting next to a rack of clothing – the shirts and jackets the 58-year-old newsman wears professionally – and sipping a seemingly bottomless cup of green tea that would eventually give way to coffee. By 11pm, he would walk across the room and snap on a set of ring lights, ready to carry on an unbroken string of chatter for a YouTube news programme that he calls “Wang Jian’s Daily Observations”. It was a slow news night but he would end up talking until nearly 1am. This was his second broadcast of the day. Different time zones, he explained to me, different audiences.Wang, who has more than 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, is representative of a small but influential part of the Mandarin-language media landscape. He is part of an exodus of media professionals who have left Hong Kong and mainland China in the past decade; and one of a handful who have started posting news and analysis videos on YouTube. Wang serves an audience of Chinese expatriates – along with mainlanders savvy enough to get round China’s great firewall – who tune in hoping that he can fill in the gaps left by propaganda, censorship and disinformation.Wang’s fans find him entertaining and reassuringly professional. (“He’s very objective, I think,” one told me.) His broadcast manner moves from the impersonal, rhythmic cadence of a veteran newscaster to personal asides that bring to mind a slightly incredulous university lecturer. He loves a rhetorical question (“Is this the way a US president speaks?”) followed by his favourite English-language interjection: “C’mon.”I have spent the months since Trump’s inauguration watching Wang on YouTube. He was first recommended to me by a journalist working at a prominent Chinese news outlet who, even while reporting for a similar audience, frequently checked in on Wang’s broadcasts. “He’ll be perfect for you,” they said. Americans have always loved looking at themselves from a distance.Watching the US through Wang makes our political reality appear more comical and more dangerous. He centres China in all his broadcasts, offering a kind of been-there-done-that account of authoritarian creep. He places the US on an arc of history we have long pretended to transcend. “Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth,” he told me. They were born into democracy and have no appreciation of what life is like without it. Chinese people, on the other hand, “have been bullied by rulers for thousands of years. We’re very familiar with these situations.”There are many American reporters, Wang said, who report competently on China. But when I asked how the US media was doing covering the US, he burst into laughter. “If I were the New York Times, I would be putting curse words on the front page every day,” he told me. “F-word, F-word, F-word.”In the US, the China narrative can fluctuate depending on the day. We thought, briefly, that the outbreak of the pandemic in Wuhan constituted a “Chornobyl moment” that would undermine the regime. It did not. We wonder, on and off, how China builds rail systems so quickly. We worry about whether China will overtake us in AI development. Our sense of national decline is intensified by China’s rise. In April, a New York Times op-ed by Thomas Friedman ran with the headline, “I just saw the future. It was not in America.” (It was in China.)In China, meanwhile, people looking to understand the US are also subject to a push and pull based on the political climate and – under Xi Jinping, China’s long-serving president – the narrowing space for free expression. China’s propaganda operation no longer resembles the lumbering machinery of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are still fustier national newspapers – Xinhua and the People’s Daily – that clearly represent a Communist party perspective. There is also the more nationalistic Global Times. “If the US did not interfere in China’s internal affairs or challenge its sovereignty,” said one recent article, “there would be no need for it to worry about China’s defence development”.View image in fullscreenAt the turn of the last century, these bigger publications were balanced by a handful of independent, market-driven media outlets pushing the boundaries of censorship in China, although these mostly reported on domestic issues. Over time, however, most Chinese media consumers have moved online and today, just like Americans, they get most of their information on social media. Mainland China blocks Facebook, YouTube, X and Google. Instead, information spreads on Sina Weibo or, most commonly, WeChat. These platforms are monitored by human censors and AI programmes that hunt for sensitive phrases or keywords. China’s censorship is not monolithic or infallible, but these combined efforts mean that, typically, the news that spreads is the news that the government permits to spread.“Mostly, the things that spread on WeChat are video clips or screenshots with text,” Yaqiu Wang, a researcher based in Washington DC. Clips that highlight American gun violence, protests or inflation flow freely, without any censorship. She mentioned the popularity of snippets from the Trump-friendly Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Yaqiu Wang’s parents will, not infrequently, call at night, concerned about her safety. They are not reading government propaganda so much as a curated selection of American bombast, spin and disinformation.How much Chinese people know about the reality of life in the US varies wildly. “There are those people with power, or those people working in universities, who will jump the great firewall,” Yaqiu Wang told me. These people can read BBC’s Mandarin news service, for example, or listen to the Mandarin-language podcast run by the New York Times journalist Yuan Li. But if these are too dry for news consumers, Wang Jian is there to chatter the night away. “I think this satisfies people’s needs,” said a Chinese government employee who watches Wang’s programme every day. “You can get real information.”Wang has told viewers that, in all his years as a journalist, the last two had brought about some of the biggest global changes he had seen. Trump, Wang explained, has misidentified the US’s strengths. “Your strengths aren’t your people,” he told me later, expanding on his theme. “I could find a bank teller in Hong Kong, bring them here, and they could do the job of 10 Americans.” What the US has got, according to Wang, is allies and a reliable currency. (“And now you’re threatening to annex Canada?”)Trump, according to Wang, would like to be more like Xi Jinping – a strongman leading a nation with a huge manufacturing base. He likes to point out that the two leaders have birthdays a day apart. Trump would like to take back the supply chain and manufacture everything in the US – an idea that drew a “c’mon” from Wang. There are, in turn, things about the US that Xi would like to emulate – the global influence, the financial power of the dollar. “Maybe we should just let Xi and Trump switch places. We wouldn’t need to do anything. They could leave the rest of us out of it,” Wang joked. “Although I think Xi Jinping would get beat up in the United States.”It’s this kind of irreverence that Wang’s audience most enjoys. His viewers call him “Teacher Wang” and as he talks, a string of congratulatory messages pop up. They often say: “Teacher Wang, JiaYou!” (a term of encouragement that literally means “add oil!” but is closer to “let’s go!”). Sometimes: “Teacher Wang, well said!” And sometimes, when Wang is particularly critical: “Teacher Wang, well scolded!”View image in fullscreenFormally, there are three parts of Wang’s programmes. He opens with a segment of recent news, moves on to a segment that offers opinions and deeper explorations of a particular topic. Finally, he will end with about half an hour of viewer comments and questions. Recent topics have included immigration protests in Australia (“Without immigration, Australia has no chance of being an influential country”) and China’s diplomatic overtures to India. This segment can also involve questions – “Should I emigrate to another country?” “Should I buy an iPhone now?” – that require him to play a variety of roles: agony uncle, consumer advice columnist, financial adviser. He does an episode every year while he makes dumplings. He is part newscaster, part professor, part friend.Few of Wang’s fans wanted to talk on the record, but two of the handful I spoke with pointed to this as their favourite segment. Local news that might be censored in China makes its way out in the comments. Wang will discuss issues viewers have raised about mainland China – complaints, for example, that government employees are no longer allowed to go to restaurants in large groups; or that factory workers are being forced to take Breathalyser tests when they get home at night; or that falling real estate prices have wiped out someone’s savings. Some of his listeners will address the US directly. “Introducing a tariff of this size is suicidal!” wrote one viewer. “Is it too simple to blame it on arrogance and wilfulness?”Wang, when he’s interested in a question, will stare into the camera. “You think Trump has thought it through?” he asks. “I don’t think so. Trump is really simple. He doesn’t think very deeply.” Trump’s brain, Wang told me, is a “qian dao hu” – a lake with 1,000 islands, none of them connected.Wang does not sleep much. He starts preparing for the broadcast somewhere between four and five hours in advance. Wang’s first daily broadcast runs from around 11am to noon. He then eats lunch, sleeps if he can, and spends time with his family. Around 6pm, he starts the process again, aiming to go live at 11pm. And then at about 12.30 or 1.00am, he walks across the yard, back to his house, and gets his second, truncated, sleep.Wang has wanted to be a journalist since he was a teenager. He was born to middle class parents in Nanshan County, China, a protrusion of land in the south-west part of Shenzhen. When Wang, in high school, decided he was interested in studying journalism at university, his parents told him they couldn’t support his choice. Wang understood their reservations. “During the Cultural Revolution, the people who were most targeted were writers and journalists. They were afraid I would be denounced.” Wang, however, had a stubborn streak. He stopped speaking at home. “I had a cold war with my parents,” Wang told me. He held out until they agreed.Wang arrived at Jinan University in Guangzhou in the mid 1980s, intending to study journalism, but it wasn’t journalism, exactly, that he learned. “We studied the CCP’s theory of media,” Wang told me. According to the CCP, facts were secondary to the health of the party and the populace. Then, in 1990, Wang managed to land a job as a reporter in Hong Kong, which was still under British rule and enjoyed relatively robust freedom of the press. (Though the British did not extend Hongkongers the right to elect their leader.)View image in fullscreenIn Hong Kong, Wang was suddenly in the privileged position of writing honestly about his new city and the country that he had recently left. Wang won multiple press awards as a young reporter at the daily newspaper Ming Pao and then, in 2001, he joined Sing Tao Daily – the oldest Chinese-language newspaper in the city. By this time, Hong Kong had been transferred to PRC rule and, while Sing Tao operated independently, it had significant ties to Beijing. Wang would eventually oversee the publication’s international expansion efforts, helping establish offices in New York, Toronto and San Francisco. He travelled to all these places but didn’t do much exploring. He was working or meeting Chinese émigrés for dinner. (“You ask me my impression of the United States. I didn’t have a impression! My impression of New York was only: Chinatown.”)Reporters in Hong Kong, at this time, were in a unique position. In authoritarian systems, reliable information has a special value, and Hong Kong journalists were granted some access to PRC officials. “This access made Hong Kong media influential not only among Chinese audiences but also among Chinese officials, who treated Hong Kong media as an alternative source of information,” says Rose Liuqiu, a professor in the Department of Journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University. This was particularly true for journalists covering the economy, Wang’s speciality.This work required diplomacy. Charles Ho, who owned the Sing Tao Daily, maintained close ties with Beijing. He famously said that if he followed Beijing’s directives 100% of the time, he would lose value in Beijing’s eyes. Wang’s own work has always walked a line between attracting viewers, reporting the facts and balancing the concerns of a global power.The precarious balance that sustained Hong Kong’s media did not last. Business ties between Hong Kong’s media outlets and Beijing grew steadily, as did concerns about self-censorship. After democracy protests swept through the city in 2014, prominent editors and journalists became the targets of violent attacks. Jimmy Lai, the founder of Next Media, had his house firebombed more than once. Kevin Lau, the editor of the newspaper Ming Pao, was hospitalised in 2014 after being assaulted in the street with a meat cleaver. In 2016, Wang decided to retire. Beijing was beginning to limit press freedoms in the city and Wang didn’t think the city would recover the openness that had changed his perspective so drastically as a young man.Wang decided to step back from work and, instead, focus on caring for his young daughter, while his wife continued her work in real estate. At the end of 2018, after a visit to his sister-in-law in San Francisco, Wang decided to move his family to the US. He called his wife and told her that he didn’t think there was much future in Hong Kong. His daughter could attend high school in the US, he reasoned. By the time I met him, Wang told me that many of his friends – editors and reporters at news outlets like the now-shuttered Apple Daily – had either fled or were in jail.Wang thought he was done as a news man. But character is sometimes fate, and Wang loves to talk. In 2019, he started holding impromptu gatherings at his sister-in-law’s house on the weekends. At the time, Trump was engaging in the first iteration of a trade war with China and many of their acquaintances in the Bay Area, most of whom worked in the tech industry, wanted to meet and discuss current events. The weekly crowd grew and it was his sister-in-law who suggested that Wang move the conversation online and out of her back yard. By the end of the year, Wang had started his YouTube channel. It was, initially, a chatty, informal programme. And then the pandemic hit, and Wang became a professional again. “All of a sudden it felt serious,” he told me. “I had a responsibility.”It didn’t take long for Wang to acquire an audience, especially after he started broadcasting twice daily. (His is a volume game.) The pandemic was driving people online and China was limiting the flow of information coming out of the cities it had locked down. One regular viewer I spoke with – another government worker in China who asked to remain anonymous – came across Wang around this time, when they were at home during one of China’s restrictive lockdowns. They still listen to his broadcasts daily, looking for news on the economy – still hoping for information that might not be flowing freely from town to town. “During the comments you get a glimpse of what’s happening locally in China,” they told me.Eventually, Wang hired a handful of researchers – some of whom were journalists who had fled Hong Kong after a crackdown in 2019 – paying them from the advertising revenue from his broadcasts. He also started a membership programme and a Patreon and began offering a small selection of goods for sale. The tea he sells through YouTube, he told me, was sourced by a fan. “We don’t make any money on the tea,” he laughed. “I’m the one who buys most of it.”Wang, and the handful of other newscasters like him, are part of an ecosystem of influencers, often called “KOLs” in China for “Knowledge and Opinion Leaders” (an English term that likely originated in Hong Kong). The KOLs compete for attention with western sources – the Joe Rogan and Fox News clips. Most KOLs are apolitical; posting on TikTok or XiaoHongShu about beauty trends or daily life. Within China, many of these influencers are tacitly approved by the CCP. A woman named Li Ziqi, for example, runs the most popular Mandarin-language programme on YouTube and cross-posts on sites in mainland China. Her videos offer an idealised portrait of village life – making traditional crafts while soothing music plays in the background. Political KOLs are less likely to be making video content, and those within China are either pro-CCP or frequently find their accounts blocked. One, who goes by the name Gu Ziming, is famous for managing to pop up with new accounts after having an old one shuttered by censors.View image in fullscreenWhen I visited Wang, it was Friday evening. His researchers – who also wished to remain anonymous – had submitted the evening’s potential topics via a shared Google document. They laughed about Trump’s negotiation strategies (“No one trusts him!”) and speculated as to why a large job recruitment platform in Shanghai had stopped reporting salaries (“It means they’re scared to issue the report”). They moved topics up and down the list, in the order that Wang would plan to address them. In some cases, Wang questioned the news that they brought to him and urged them to seek out more sources.The proposed topics included elections in South Korea; a systemwide shutdown on San Francisco Bart trains; and a Texas ban on Chinese nationals buying property. “Have those Chinese living in Texas done nothing?” Wang asked. “No resistance or protest?”“I think there were protests before,” came the researcher’s voice through the phone. “But it turns out they’re giving exemptions to some people, but otherwise you have to have a green card.”“That’s fine, then,” Wang answered. “Don’t go to Texas to buy a house, then. The housing prices are falling in Texas anyway. This is a very red state. I can clearly see the momentum of this state.” The topic made the broadcast.Years ago, when I first started reporting on the media landscape in China, I thought of it as a foil to the more raucous and open media environment in the west. Now it feels more like a funhouse mirror – a different, exaggerated version of something fundamentally the same. Chinese readers have long approached their news sources with cynicism. In the US and most of the west, media sources are, for the most part, still free and unrestricted. Facts, on the other hand, are increasingly under attack.According to the researcher Wang Yaqiu, there is a division she sees in the US and China. Those who have political power, money, or enough education or energy, will do their best to seek out reliable information. This was true when Wang Jian began his career in Hong Kong, when Communist party officials looked to Hong Kong media as a reliable source. It is true now, when reliable information often comes at a cost – to unlock paywalled information, or to get a VPN to evade the great firewall. Wang’s programme is free to watch, but accessing it takes knowledge, desire and knowhow. Good information, and the ability to find it, Wang Yaqiu pointed out, is more and more a matter of privilege and money – and this is true on both sides of the Pacific. “The rest of us,” she said, “will all be swimming in the same trash.”Wang doesn’t get asked, often, what to do about the authoritarian creep he is commenting on in the US. He has been in this position nearly his entire life – reporting from Hong Kong as its democratic freedoms were eroded, and now the US. He enjoys enough of a distance to look at things from a bird’s-eye view, able to see events as funny and alarming. He has, at the same time, a truculent, slightly traditionalist, belief in the value of the news. After a lifetime patrolling the boundary between truth and nonsense, Wang believes that people build their realities based on what is available to them: their lived experiences, their teachers, the media they consume. They are reasonable. They just need access to reliable information.In recent months, as political violence and censorship in the US have grown, his references to the value of journalism have multiplied. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, he gave a rapid, dispassionate explanation of Kirk’s record. “Kirk pushed forward conservativism and Christian nationalism,” Wang informed his viewers. “He denied the efficacy of vaccines. After Kirk’s death, Trump ordered all the flags fly half-mast.” The next day, Wang made a fresh argument for his line of work. “Media’s role is helping everyone regulate power,” he told his audience. “China castrated the media.” A few days later, he returned to the question. “How do you change your destiny?” he asked. “You change your destiny with knowledge. How do you gain knowledge?” Wang continued. “You read the news.”Wang issues warnings, but his work is fundamentally hopeful. He often returns to his own experience arriving in Hong Kong. He walked the streets, looked at the buildings, and marvelled at the fact that he could just go and look up who owned them. That had not been possible back home. He read old copies of Life magazine and began questioning the Communist party’s version of history. It was an epiphany. “My mission is to provide everyone with an opportunity to change their view of the world,” Wang told me, as he transitioned from tea to coffee. “This is the value of this programme. You need to know that this world is made up of countless puzzles. This, what is happening in the US, is one of them.”On the night I visited, Wang wrapped up around 1am. He thanked his audience. He sighed, momentarily letting his exhaustion slip through. He asked for upvotes and follows. “Join us as a member and help support us,” he said. And then he closed with his regular signoff. “Broadcast better,” he said. “Be better.” More

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      in US Politics

      How memes, gaming and internet culture all relate to the Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Dara Kerr here, filling in for Blake Montgomery, who promises he’ll come back from vacation. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the memes, gaming and internet culture behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk.The bullet that killed conservative activist was inscribed with a message: “Notices bulge OwO whats this?” The online world quickly recognized the reference. It’s a phrase used in internet culture to troll people in online role-play communities, specifically furries (a subculture that cosplays as anthropomorphic animal characters).“The phrase has been popularized not only as a way of making fun of furries and related communities for being cringe, but has also been embraced by furries as a way of owning the meme,” writes Know Your Meme, a website that documents viral phenomena. “Ultimately, the phrase is portrayed in memes as being one of the most cringeworthy things someone could possibly write to another person.”Other bullet casings recovered by law enforcement in Utah also had etched inscriptions that appeared to nod to online gaming and insider memes, which have become part of the intense social media speculation on a possible motive for the killing. One said: “O Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao”, another said: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO.” The first message refers to an Italian anti-fascist folk song that has become a gamer reference that’s big in Twitch and Discord circles. The second message is what web culture writer Ryan Broderick calls “just boilerplate edgelord speak” in his newsletter last week titled “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme”.The final inscribed casing that law enforcement released said: “Hey fascist! Catch!” and was followed by an up arrow, right arrow and three down arrow symbols. The arrow sequence appears to reference the video game Helldivers 2, and is a set of commands used by players to release a 500kg bomb in the game.The alleged shooter, Tyler James Robinson, is a 22-year-old from a small town in Utah near the Arizona border. He is accused of killing Kirk at a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Kirk was struck by a single bullet fired with a “high-powered bolt action rifle” from a distant rooftop.As the suspect was steeped in online culture, so was Charlie Kirk, who was 31. He was at the school on behalf of his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA. He’d become known worldwide speaking about and debating others, often on his extremist views on race, immigration, gender identity and gun rights. Kirk’s rise to fame was also largely bolstered by being extremely online.As my colleague Alaina Demopoulos wrote:A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Read the full story here.Whistleblowers against Meta stack upView image in fullscreenMeta was hit by two separate whistleblower claims last week. One by a group of six former and current employees, who allege the social media company has covered up harm to children on its Metaverse virtual reality devices and apps. And another by Meta’s former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who alleges the company brushed aside major security and privacy flaws in its messaging app, according to the New York Times.In response to my reporting about VR devices, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever said the company has approved 180 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022, which include research on youth safety and wellbeing. “These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative,” she said, adding that Meta has introduced features to its VR products to limit unwanted contact and supervision tools for parents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne of the first whistleblowers was Sophie Zhang, who brought her findings to the Guardian in 2021. Zhang documented how Facebook allowed political manipulation in more than 25 countries, which led to disastrous circumstances in several places including Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Honduras. Later that same year, Frances Haugen turned over to the Wall Street Journal reams of documentation verifying much of Zhang’s allegations and also bringing to light Facebook’s knowledge of how its social media apps harmed teens.In 2023, Arturo Bejar also went to the Wall Street Journal with evidence that Meta knew its algorithms for Facebook and Instagram were pushing content to teens that promoted bullying, drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm.This year alone, eight more whistleblowers have come forward. Baig and the group of six former and current employees went public last week.US lawmakers are taking the allegations seriously. Politicians as disparate as Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, the democrat from Connecticut, have said they see eye-to-eye when it comes to regulating Meta and other social media companies.“The details in these disclosures are hard to stomach – because they reveal such major risks to kids’ safety, and because they are so painfully familiar. Yet again, Meta is revealed to be willfully misrepresenting abuses on its platforms,” Blumenthal said of the whistleblower claims last week. “‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil’ is simply not an acceptable business philosophy.”Blumenthal added that he and other senators were looking forward to pushing ahead with “long overdue reform”.The wider TechScape

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    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right

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      After clinching the title of top conservative podcast in America (and second overall news podcast, according to Apple’s ranking) in March, Charlie Kirk said: “We’re not just talking. We’re activating a revolution.”In the hours after his killing at age 31 on the first stop of a buzzy college campus tour, the rightwing activist’s words echoed through young conservative circles. Social media eulogies rolled in, with users reposting clips of Kirk with his wife and children. Parents of teens wrote on X of learning about Kirk’s death through their children. “My 17 year old is bumming. Told me he plays Charlie in the background on his computer when he’s on it,” the conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on X. Another X user wrote about speaking to teens at a church youth group: “Everyone I talked to is so distraught and heartbroken at his passing.”A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Kirk’s ideology was caustic; he espoused openly homophobic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and Christian nationalist views while uplifting misinformation and conspiracy theories. He also campaigned on issues that mattered to young Americans, engaging directly with them – no matter how virulently – on hot-button topics such as abortion, transgender rights, race and Palestinian solidarity.View image in fullscreenAmy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who studies politics and education, describes Kirk’s values as “insurgency conservatism” that was “designed to get attention”.It worked: TikTok users under 30 who voted for Trump in 2024 said they trusted Kirk more than any other individual, according to a New York Times profile, despite the fact that he never held office or a role in the White House. That election saw male voters ages 18 to 29 swing hard to the right; Trump also made inroads with gen Z women. Earlier this year, Trump praised Kirk for “what he’s done with the young people”.As a millennial growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kirk was obsessed with Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement. His fans also felt like outsiders within the American political system.“After Trump was elected in 2016, I was really surprised to see just how many students who were conservative were no longer identifying with the Republican party or with college Republicans, and had instead pivoted over to being really intrigued with what Turning Point was doing on campus,” Binder said. “They were doing much more exciting programming. It was less electorally focused, less about campaigning, and more about having events that were really confrontational.”Kirk appeared equally at ease chumming it up with high-powered donors as he did debating 20-year-olds in sweatpants. Kirk sparred directly with young people through video templates such as “prove me wrong” (a one-on-one debate, where students could wait in line to ask him a question), and he was an early guest on the YouTube series Surrounded, where he sat in a room with 25 liberals and goaded them with statements such as “abortion is murder and should be illegal” and “trans women are not women.”Turning Point USA raked in funding – the New York Times estimated a $92.4m revenue in 2023 – while advancing campus culture wars. Kirk’s content brought classic and extreme rightwing ideals to young people’s media feeds; he looked like both an old-school, suited conservative in the style of a Fox News host, and a social media-savvy man of the times. His video titles usually bent toward hyperbole (“Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State,” was posted less than a week before the shooting). There were gonzo premises, such as when Kirk and the YouTube prank team Nelk Boys showed up at a Wisconsin frat party to get out the vote in 2024. His meme literacy showed when he handed out hats that read: “White Boy Summer”, a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” catchphrase.With his wife, Erika, owner of a faith-based fashion brand and a former Miss Arizona USA, Kirk softened his image, presenting himself as devoted husband, father and a bit of a lifestyle influencer. He talked to tweens in Maga hats about his preferred Starbucks order and promoted “cuteservatives” like Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster who branded her show on Maha culture as a rightwing Call Her Daddy. After Kirk’s death, Brett Cooper, a 23-year-old conservative influencer in the “womanosphere” with more than 1 million Instagram followers, reposted a video homage that depicted him as a champion for girls and young women. (Yet this was a man who compared abortion to the Holocaust and claimed that women over 30 “aren’t attractive in the dating pool”.)View image in fullscreenFor 10 years, Turning Point USA hosted a “women’s summit”, where Kirk and others like Clark and Cooper encouraged attenders to focus on finding husbands. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, published an obituary that called Kirk a “loving father, patriot, and husband”.Even young people who were disgusted by Kirk’s rhetoric could not deny his impact. Hasan Piker, the hugely popular leftwing Twitch streamer whose ideology stands in direct contrast to Kirk, was scheduled to debate with Kirk at the end of September at Dartmouth University. Both Piker and the gun control activist David Hogg spoke against political violence in the wake of the shooting (as did many Democratic figures such as Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani). Piker told his followers not to make jokes about Kirk’s shooting. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. Hogg called the news “horrifying” on X.“I think it’s undeniable to say that Kirk was one of the first and most prominent people to shape what it means to be young and on the right in the US,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies extremism.After Kirk’s death, Braddock said he had seen “individuals calling this an inflection point, or a turning point where the left can no longer be tolerated”. Rightwing pundits have been eager to blame the left for the shooting.Adam Pennings, 25, is the executive director of Run Gen Z, a non-profit that supports young Republican candidates. “He’s always just been such an important part” of the young conservative party, Pennings said of Kirk. “He was everywhere.”Pennings knew Kirk through his work, but the two were not close. Still, Pennings said, due to Kirk’s omnipresence: “I feel like I lost a friend.” More

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      in US Politics

      Maga star Katie Miller’s new podcast reeks of toxic femininity. I listened so you don’t have to | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      Want to hear a cute little story about JD Vance and a Dutch baby? Don’t worry, he didn’t deport it, he cooked one for breakfast. Then he sat down with Katie Miller to tell her all about his baking skills in the very first episode of her brand-new podcast. Which, by the way, I have heroically listened to all 44 excruciating minutes of so that you don’t have to.Miller, for the uninitiated, is a Maga bigwig and married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s far-right chief of staff and a man so odious his own uncle once wrote an article calling him a “hypocrite”.A Trump loyalist, Miller has form when it comes to surrounding herself with odious men: she held top communications jobs during Trump’s first term and, earlier this year, became a spokesperson for Elon Musk’s pet project, the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).In May, she absconded to a mysterious role at Musk’s private ventures. I imagine that she was attracted to Musk’s views on free speech (summed up as: I can say whatever I fancy but you can’t) because it’s been reported that when Miller was in university she once stole and threw away student newspapers because she didn’t like the politician they endorsed.Now, she’s launched the Katie Miller Podcast, the first episode of which came out on Monday. Why jump from the highest echelons of government into podcasting? According to Miller, it’s because “as a mom of three young kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full-time, I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself”.In a promo video, in which she sits cross-legged on an armchair (with shoes on!) in front of a bookshelf with three books on it, including The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, she explains that “there isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online” and she wanted to create a space to have “real honest conversations” about what matters to women.Apparently what matters to women is the minutiae of vice-president Vance’s life: the first 44-minute episode, which I suggest she rename Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, was devoted to fawning over a man who has said professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over children.Miller, who is not a natural host, awkwardly serves softball questions (“is a hotdog a sandwich?”) while Vance drones on about what a great daddy and vice-president he is and how much he loves ice-cream and joking around with Marco Rubio. The closest they get to a controversial topic is Vance talking about all the memes he’s inspired and saying that one of his favourites features the pope, Usha Vance and a couch. (There have been online jokes that Vance was intimate with a couch and that he killed the pope.) There is also light mockery of Late Show host Stephen Colbert, whose show recently got cancelled.Other than the memes, the most memorable moment of the episode is when Miller seems to imply that her husband subsists entirely on a diet of mayonnaise, like some sort of anaemic vampire. Stephen Miller also apparently runs around his house with his shoes on, as does JD. Usha, sensibly, takes her shoes off at the front door. All of this is exactly the sort of content I’m sure the busy mums are desperate for.Miller has said she thinks there is a gap in the market for podcasts aimed at conservative women, but the market says otherwise. While young women in the US tend to be progressive, there is a thriving “womanosphere” of anti-feminist media aimed at conservatives. Some of these outlets don’t explicitly cater to young conservative mums in the way that the Katie Miller Podcast says it does, but they’re still aiming for the same general demographic.Gen Z commentator Brett Cooper, for example, who has 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, looks at pop culture with a rightwing slant and her show attracts conservative female listeners. In between hot takes on Justin Bieber, Cooper argues that feminism’s goal is to “make men angry and dominate them”, a worldview that recently got her a gig at Fox News. Then there’s Candace Owens, a conservative conspiracy theorist who recently turned on Maga over the Jeffrey Epstein files fiasco. Owens has 4.57 million subscribers on YouTube and her streams get millions of views. Bari Weiss also has a successful podcast and is currently in talks to sell her “anti-woke” media startup The Free Press for more than $200m to CBS News. The Financial Times recently reported: “Weiss has won over [CBS owner David Ellison] partly by taking a pro-Israel stance … as well as her ability to build a younger, digitally savvy audience.”Then, of course, you’ve got all the trending “tradwife” content on TikTok, where creators such as Estee Williams and Gwen the Milkmaid glorify traditional gender roles. Beyond tradwives, there’s an ecosystem of lifestyle content aimed at young women that camouflages rightwing messages. Think: makeup tutorials with a running commentary about how feminism will make you miserable. Canadian media outlet Global News recently obtained a report prepared by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre that warns female “extremist influencers” are using popular online platforms to radicalize and recruit women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A body of open-source research shows that women in extremist communities are taking on an active role by creating content specifically on image-based platforms with live streaming capabilities,” the report says. “These women foster a sense of community and create spaces that put their followers at ease, thereby normalizing and mainstreaming extremist rhetoric.”While Miller’s podcast may not exactly be revolutionary, it is yet another reminder that Republicans are doing a far better job of spreading their talking points on new media than the Democrats. Sure, the Katie Miller Podcast isn’t an “official” White House podcast, but the humanizing interview with Vance, along with Miller’s deep Maga ties, suggest it is very much Trump-approved. In an interview with the Washington Post published on Tuesday, Miller also insinuated that her podcast is a voter recruitment drive for 2028. “In order to cultivate the future of Maga, we have to talk to women,” she said.As the Republicans stretch their tentacles further into the world of podcasting and TikTok, Democrats are still desperately jumping on cringe memes to appeal to a younger audience while flailing around writing long policy documents about how they can spend millions of dollars manufacturing a “Joe Rogan of the left”. The Katie Miller Podcast may not end up being a hit, but it’s just one small part of a very effective Republican messaging strategy.Of course, the really important issue here – the question I’m sure you’re pondering right now – is whether the veep thinks a hotdog is a sandwich? The answer is: definitely not. Which, coincidentally, is also my answer to the question: will you ever voluntarily listen to the Katie Miller Podcast again? More

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      in US Politics

      The inside story of the Murdoch editor taking on Donald Trump

      by

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      Jess Glynne feels ‘sick’ over use of Jet2 song to promote US deportations

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      It is the internet meme of the summer, sparking laughter and thousands of wry smiles at the pitfalls of a British summer holiday.But the journey of the viral Jet2 holiday advert – with its promotional voiceover played out over cheerless summer holiday footage, including water-slide disasters and images of pouring rain – took a darker turn this week when it was used by the White House in a post on X to promote Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) deportations.Jess Glynne – whose 2015 single Hold My Hand accompanies the advert – responded to the post on Wednesday, saying she felt “sick” that her music was being used to spread “division and hate”.She told the Guardian on Thursday: “I’m devastated to see my song used in this way. Hold My Hand was written about love, support, and standing by someone through everything – it’s meant to offer hope and empowerment. Using it to promote something I fundamentally disagree with goes completely against the message of the song.”On Thursday afternoon Jet2 also condemned the post, saying it was “disappointed to see our brand being used to promote government policy such as this”.The official White House account posted a clip on X on Wednesday evening showing people wearing handcuffs and being taken out of cars and on to planes, captioned: “When Ice books you a one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation. Nothing beats it!”In the six months since Donald Trump took office, the US president has supercharged the country’s immigration enforcement, overseeing a sweeping mass arrest and incarceration scheme, which resulted in a record number of arrests by immigration officers in June, according to Guardian analysis.The post delighted Trump supporters but was decried as disgusting, embarrassing and unchristian by critics. Glynne, who has previously joined in with the fun spirit of the Jet2 holidays meme by posting a TikTok video miming the voiceover, expressed her disapproval of the White House’s appropriation of the trend on Instagram.“This post honestly makes me sick,” she wrote. “My music is about love, unity and spreading positivity – never about division or hate.”Jet2 had previously appeared to welcome the extra publicity generated by the meme, launching a challenge that offered a £1,000 holiday voucher as a prize.A spokesperson said the company welcomed the “good humour” of the viral phenomenon, but not the White House’s contribution. “We are of course aware of a post from the White House social media account,” they said. “This is not endorsed by us in any way, and we are very disappointed to see our brand being used to promote government policy such as this.”The advert’s voiceover actor, Zoë Lister, said she would never condone her voiceover “being used in promotion with Trump and his abhorrent policies”.She told the BBC: “The Jet2 meme has spread a lot of joy and humour around the world, but the White House video shows that Trump has neither.”The White House Ice deportation post is the latest example of an unorthodox digital communications strategy that has veered away from previous administrations’ traditional – and relatively sedate – use of social media platforms.In February, the White House used X to promote Trump’s congestion pricing policy, posting a fake Time magazine front cover portraying the president as a monarch, along with the phrase: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”The post was described as “revoltingly un-American” by Adam Keiper, the executive editor of the conservative Bulwark news site, while New York state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said: “New York hasn’t laboured under a king in over 250 years and we sure as hell are not going to start now.”The administration also faced criticism after Trump shared an AI-generated video that showed him in a transformed, glittering Gaza, topless and sipping a cocktail with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. After criticism, the administration recently posted on X: “Nowhere in the constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”Last month the Trump administration appeared to be on track to oversee one of the deadliest years for immigrant detention after the deaths of two men – one from Cuba and another from Canada – while in federal custody.Human rights experts have raised concerns about the detention of children with their parents at the newly recommissioned “family detention centres” in Texas, and while Trump has repeatedly claimed his administration is trying to arrest and deport “dangerous criminals”, analysis shows that most of the people Ice is now arresting have never been convicted of a crime. More

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      in US Politics

      Why is the media paying millions to Trump? – podcast

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      Archive: CBS News, PBS, NBC News, WHAS11, CNN, Fox 5 New York
      Read Edward Helmore’s piece on Trump’s war on the media
      Listen to Science Weekly’s episode on the Texas floods
      Listen to Season 10 of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

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      in US Politics

      Welcome to a new ‘gloomcycle’ of news. Here’s how to stop compulsive scrolling | Margaret Sullivan

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      The threat of a world war. Political assassinations. Federal raids on unsuspecting migrants.There seems to be no end to terrifying news these days. In fact, it comes at us so unceasingly that numbness can set in. Or even depression or melancholy, like a black cloud over every part of our lives.The “gloomcycle” is what Rachel Janfaza, who founded the gen Z-oriented site known as the Up and Up, has dubbed what’s going on. In a recent piece, she quoted one 23-year-old from Alabama: “I am really overwhelmed by all of the bad news I am seeing right now.”Whatever generation we’re from, that’s a familiar sensation.The question is, how to deal with it? After all, particularly because of Donald Trump’s chaotic ways, it shows no signs of slowing down. And while it’s important not to tune out altogether, it’s also important to stay grounded.Where’s the balance?I’m certainly not a life coach but as someone whose work requires me to stay connected and informed, I’ve developed some coping resources.Here are three recommendations to manage the firehose of bad news and to protect your spiritual and emotional health while still staying engaged in the world.Set thoughtful limits. Can you put your phone in another room or in a drawer for a period of each day? Can you pledge never to sleep with it nearby? I have a friend who has made a pact with her spouse to have an hour after waking and an hour before going to bed in which they don’t talk about current events, and certainly never utter the name of the 47th president.Can you decide not to be on social media during significant hours of the day? And maybe even to ignore your email unless it’s during loosely defined business hours? (This is an especially tough one for me; I always want to respond immediately, which only elicits another response.)Engage in self-care. Maybe you go to the gym or for a run. Maybe it’s a bubble bath. Maybe it’s listening, without any other distractions, to Mozart – or Jon Batiste. For me, it’s daily yoga (the challenging ashtanga practice) followed by meditation. And it’s reading fiction or memoirs unrelated to politics – most recently, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Fredrik Backman’s My Friends, Molly Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother, and, in galley form, Susan Orlean’s not-yet-published memoir, Joyride.A friend told me recently that she’s rereading all six novels of Jane Austen as an antidote to these fractious times. I like to read books in print, not on a device, since screens are already too dominant in my life. Can you slow down enough to give your full attention to literature for an hour? It will help, and it will also help to build back your undoubtedly frayed attention span.Rely on trusted voices and sources of news. I think the Guardian is one of these, and I would think so even if I didn’t write here almost every week. I know a lot of people who count on the perspective of Heather Cox Richardson, the history professor who writes a daily newsletter, Letters from an American. Robert Reich, a former labor secretary, is one of my go-to sources of perspective, as are a few columnists, including Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Lydia Polgreen at the New York Times.While traveling in Asia recently, I read the Japan Times and the international edition of the New York Times each morning; they were bundled together and delivered to my hotel room. There was something about that well-organized news – delivered in old-fashioned print form – that was incredibly calming. A prominently displayed column about Israel by Thomas Friedman gave me more context than a freaked-out social media thread, no matter how smart. While it’s unlikely that we’re going to return to reading a print newspaper as a major news source, the daily pacing and the sensible curation of what’s important has a lot to recommend it.In Chris Hayes’s recent book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, the political commentator identifies what’s going on for all of us – and the dangers. Hayes confessed in a Vox interview that despite his knowledge about the “attention economy” and its personal costs, he still struggles.“I’ve written a recovery memoir,” Hayes joked that he told his wife, “and I’m still drinking.”The bad news will keep coming. As citizens, we need to know what’s happening so we can act – in the voting booth, at a protest rally, in conversations with our neighbors or loved ones.But that doesn’t mean constant immersion. A little of the gloomcycle goes a long way.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on online safety: don’t let Trump dictate the terms of debate | Editorial

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      In 1858, when London could no longer tolerate the stench of raw effluent in the Thames, city authorities commissioned a system of sewers that operates to this day. A century later, when noxious fog choked the capital, parliament passed the first Clean Air Act, limiting coal fire emissions.When a dangerous toxin assails the senses, polluting public space to the detriment of all that use it, the case for legislation is self-evident. The argument is more complex when the poison has no chemical properties; when it exists in a virtual realm. This is the conceptual challenge for regulation of digital content. It is made all the more complex by conflation with arguments about free speech and censorship.The UK has a law that grapples with these questions. The 2023 Online Safety Act makes social media companies, websites and search engines responsible for harmful content published via their services. Offending material named in the statute is uncontroversially horrible – violent pornography, incitement to violence and terrorism. Such things are commonly proscribed even in very liberal jurisdictions on the basis that, with some types of communication, the state’s duty of public protection is paramount. No one argues that child abuse images, for example, are a legitimate expression of free speech.Yet implementation of the Online Safety Act is now in question because Donald Trump’s government has identified it as a symptom of wider European infringement of free expression. As the Guardian revealed this week, US state department officials expressed their concern in a meeting with Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcing new digital regulations.That intervention should be seen in the context of an aggressive trade policy that cannot tolerate any foreign restriction on the extension of American economic interests overseas. That explicitly includes regulation that “incentivises US companies to develop or use products and technology in ways that undermine free speech or foster censorship”.The invocation of liberal principle here is cynical and ideological. The Trump administration defines freedom of speech as the right to propagandise for the president. Any effort to correct wilful misinformation or conduct public discourse on a foundation of verifiable fact is liable to be denounced as censorship.Mr Trump’s power is bolstered by alliance with tech industry oligarchs. The unwritten deal is that the president’s cause is boosted on social media and the platforms’ commercial interests are driven by the president. That is why US trade policy is being deployed against European regulators that have tried to make the internet – or the part of it over which they have legal jurisdiction – less lawless.Yielding to that pressure would cede control of the digital information space to people who actively subvert it for the cause of American ultranationalism. It would mean accepting that a vital part of the digital infrastructure for a free society operates according to rules set by companies that are poisoning the wells of public discourse.There is a legitimate debate to be had about the boundary between safety online and censorship. The two issues are entangled because regulation of information space involves a distinction between permitted and intolerable content. But no European democracy can conduct that debate on terms dictated by a US administration that sees all digital space as its sovereign domain, and that holds tenets of liberal democracy in contempt. More