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    ‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word

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    I got into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”. More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.Trump reportedly used the word to denigrate both Joe Biden and Harris in private conversations during the 2024 election. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.” (Interestingly, this banker chose to remain anonymous.)I’ve spent my life on the lookout for this word: how it shrinks people with intellectual disabilities down to a caricature, incorrectly depicting them as incapable of coherence and, ironically enough, social decorum; how it communicates a lack of respect for their humanity. It’s just something that you do when you have an autistic brother. And while the slur was certainly more prevalent when we were teenagers in the early 2000s, this resurgence is still menacing, not least because I can’t fight Musk after class.Right now, the right wants a word that stings, and the R-word does the trick, according to Dr Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. In the 2000s, disability advocates waged a moderately successful social campaign to stop kids (and everyone else) from using the slur. Now, its proponents cling to it because of its taboo nature, lauding it as a victory over censorship by the woke mob (like the insults “libtard”, “fucktard” and “gaytard” before it).“Conservatives are empowered … People struggle with holding back what they actually want to say, so there’s something psychologically ‘freeing’ for this group of empowered people to be able to be like: ‘I’m going to punch up my words with something edgy and get attention,’” said Wright, whose work focuses on self-censorship, or the ways we limit ourselves when speaking.“[It is used] in a ‘please see me’ way.”They are getting seen. A recent study from Montclair State University found that Musk’s use of of the slur in early January correlated with a 200% spike in usage of the word by users on X, the platform Musk owns, in the days following.“There’s this whole generation of people who did use it in a more neutral way in the beginning, especially when we were younger,” Wright said. Now, “it’s like, ‘Oh, this other person who I identify with is using it.’ It gives people permission.” Cut to inauguration weekend, when the tech right and Maga youth descended on DC, throwing around the slur as they celebrated their win over the left. Just this week, Musk responded to a critical post on X: “I’m tempted to call this guy a retard, but I won’t because I’ve used that word too many times.” (Ironically enough, X’s own AI chatbot outlined the slur’s offensive history in the replies.)But the R-word isn’t just a rallying cry. It’s an attack on someone’s personhood.We’ve seen this before. Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.View image in fullscreenAdvocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.“[The use of the R-word] is absolutely historically linked to the understanding that ‘retarded’ children are defective children and that we can eliminate defective children for the good of society,” said Topher Endress, a reverend in Missouri who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. His focus is disability theology, including the words used to describe people with intellectual disabilities, and he spends much of his days working with this community. “I mean, that’s the basis of eugenics. I’m a little fearful of seeing this word pop back up because it does have such a strong eugenic connotation,” he continued.Today, approximately 7.4 million people in the US have an intellectual or developmental disability. Vocational services have connected them to employment in service, healthcare and food industries. Madeline Stuart, a model with Down syndrome and autism, walked her first runway in 2015 after falling in love with modeling at a fashion show. The chef Adam Libby, who has Down syndrome, treats his 2.6 million TikTok followers to cooking demos and recipes (pizza sauce and dough, all from scratch). Stories like these are everywhere, chipping away at the stigma around intellectual disabilities. But this is a highly vulnerable community, and their recent successes have hinged in part on government support systems put in place to foster growth and independence. This progress is still so fragile.Musk, a man who launched a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration festivities, has aligned himself dangerously closely with eugenicist thinking. Musk, who has said he is on the autism spectrum himself, also wields oligarchic power as he attempts to eliminate “unnecessary spending” in the federal government with Trump’s blessing. Early on, Musk set his sights on Medicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are looking to slash Medicaid spending to support Trump’s tax cuts. When the Trump administration temporarily froze federal funds in its second week, programs like vocational rehabilitation and disability housing assistance were put into jeopardy, according to the American Association of People with Disabilities, which condemned the move. One source told ProPublica that even one more spending freeze could keep their organization from delivering hot meals to people with disabilities.Trump, who has used eugenicist language to describe undocumented immigrants, implied that February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was linked to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions”, dragging disability into his anti-DEI crusade.And Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, could be disastrous for children with disabilities, reports the New Yorker, as the department helps fund special education programs across the US. It’s also likely that McMahon would advocate for school choice, redirecting tax dollars to private schools that are not legally required to accept students with intellectual disabilities.According to Endress, people who use the slur “understand at a deep level that there is a bottom rung to our social hierarchy, and that is intellectually disabled people. And so because the word ‘retarded’ still links to them and pretty much to them alone, it becomes the worst insult you could give somebody,” Endress says.If the government were to withhold care from our most vulnerable, leaving them unhoused and uneducated and without healthcare or employment, it would make it easier to point a finger at them and say: “What a burden.”“It [suggests] you are the worst of the worst … You don’t deserve to be part of our social fabric,” Endress said.Casey works at a Wendy’s in our hometown – he’s been employee of the month twice (I have to brag about him when I can). We talk on the phone weekly, and he recently told me that, unfortunately, someone called him a “retard” late last year. One of his coworkers jumped over the counter and laid into the guy. Again, one person in the right place at the right time.In that way, I see the rise of the R-word as a gauge for how far society is willing to let people like Musk and Trump go. And while I believe that in most reasonable environments, it’s still very much taboo to say the word aloud, the fact that it’s being said by some of the most powerful people in the world, with no recourse, says enough. More

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      ‘They worship death’: Trump ‘border czar’ reveals extremist views in interview

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      Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson talked about a bizarre range of extremist and racist conspiracy theories in an interview just weeks before Homan took office and was trusted with implementing a wide-ranging crackdown on migrants.The conversation included Carlson’s claim that Mexican cartels come “from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years”, connected the racist “great replacement” theory to Biden’s immigration policy, and advocated the arrest of elected US leaders who opposed Donald Trump’s policies on migrants.On immigration policy, Homan expressed a desire to get the Department of Defense to assist with “intelligence” and “targeting” domestically and took the view that Immigration and Border Enforcement (Ice) should arrest “a mayor or a governor” that “harbored” immigrants in sanctuary cities.Meanwhile, Homan faces questions over the network of associations he built up in his non-profit work during the interval between his appointment in the first Trump administration and his new White House role.While the interview has been fleetingly reported previously, the details of Homan’s conspiracy theory-laden conversation with Carlson have not.With Trump’s deportation efforts seeing Ice agents attempting to take enforcement actions in schools, colleges and workplaces around the US, Homan’s business dealings and extremist political views have come under scrutiny as the public face of the nationwide crackdown.UN ‘pulling’ Biden’s ‘strings’In the podcast interview, recorded for Carlson’s online show and published to X, YouTube and other platforms on 18 December, Homan painted Biden’s border policy as a “great replacement”-style effort to flood the country with potential Democratic voters, and both men characterized the previous administration’s immigration policy as the outcome of a conspiracy involving NGOs, religious charities and the UN.At one point, Homan accused the Biden administration of having deliberately worked to “unsecure the border”.Carlson asked: “What do you think the goal was?”Homan responded: “I think they see a future political benefit. I think they think these people will be future Democratic voters.“But we don’t even have to get there, Tucker,” added Homan, saying that Biden’s census rules allowed “all these illegal aliens to be counted in sanctuary cities, which is going to result in more seats in the house for the Dems”.While the idea that an elite was conspiring to orchestrate mass immigration for political gain at the ballot box was mostly confined to the white supremacist racist far right for decades, in recent years “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories such as this have increasingly been voiced by mainstream conservatives and Republicans.Later in their conversation, Homan and Carlson sought to extend the purported conspiracy theory well beyond the Biden administration. Carlson suggested a wide-ranging plot involving international bodies such as the UN and NGOs and Homan responded by calling for an investigation.Homan said: “I think under the Trump administration there needs to be an investigation.”He revealed that “I’ve had numerous conversations with Mark Green, who is the head of homeland oversight.” Green is a Tennessee Republican who chairs the House’s homeland security committee and is an ex-officio member of the oversight, investigations and accountability committee, which has oversight over the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.Homan said Green “plans on having some oversight hearings on this when it comes to the NGOs. I think they were complicit.”He then asserted without evidence that “certainly the United Nations were south of our border, working on this global illegal immigration to the United States”.Homan rounded out the conspiracy theory, saying: “This was by design. Do I think Joe Biden had the expertise to do it? No, I think someone’s pulling his strings.“This is something that needs to be investigated, people need to be held accountable,” he added.Cartels ‘have operational control of the south-west border’The two returned obsessively throughout their conversation to the issue of drug cartels, which they claimed had deprived the US of sovereignty over parts of perhaps five US states and the entire south-west border.Early in the conversation, Homan stated his basic position on the cartels: they should be “designated terrorist organizations and wiped off the face of the earth”.Later, Carlson asked Homan about what he said “informed people” had told him: “In parts of New Mexico, Arizona, California, even Florida, Texas, there is real control, in the way they control Mexico.”In those locations, purportedly, “they’re basically a state within a state, they have their own armored personnel carriers, tanks, you know”. He then asked Homan: “Do you think that’s real, do you think they have that kind of beachhead here?”“Absolutely,” Homan answered, continuing that “I’ve seen the intelligence reports, they have military-grade weapons. It’s not just my opinion, they have control, operational control of the south-west border.”‘They worship death’Later in the conversation, Homan and Carlson attributed the cartels’ motivations in part to their worship of “satanic” ideas or “death”, seeking to tie that to their “cultures” which “practice human sacrifice”.Carlson began by claiming to “know that in El Salvador when MS-13 ran the country, before Bukele, there was a religious component of voodoo witchcraft to MS-13 where they were worshipping the devil openly.”Nayib Bukele is the authoritarian, populist president of El Salvador, whose promotion of cryptocurrency and brutal crackdown on gangs in the country have won him fans on the “new right” in the US and beyond.Earlier this month, Marco Rubio met with Bukele in El Salvador, and the latter offered to hold deportees and US citizens alike in its vast network of prisons. That network includes the largest prison in the Americas, built to accommodate 40,000 people, which is around half the number Bukele has locked up since his war on the gangs commenced.Later in the podcast conversation, Carlson claimed that devil worship was a “component of the cartels, you see it in Mexico as well”, and asked Homan: “Have you come across that?”“Yeah,” Homan answered. “They worship death.”“Formally worship it?” Carlson shot back.“Yeah,” Homan answered. “I won’t call it religious, but even Texas [department of public safety] have found some of these places where the cartels are operating, they got statues there and memorabilia worshipping death as a consequence of not letting them do their business.”Homan may have been referring to Santa Muerte, a Mexican “folk saint” whose currency among cartel members has been an intermittent focus of US conservative media coverage of crime at the border, and enforcement actions in Mexico, where “the Mexican army, under orders from the Mexican state, has obliterated thousands of shrines dedicated to the folk saint across the country”.Researchers have found, however, that Santa Muerte devotion is not confined to criminals, and is also found “increasingly [among] police and others involved in law enforcement”.Carlson appeared to assert that there was a connection between cartels and the historical practice of human sacrifice in some pre-colonial Meso-American cultures, saying: “And these are from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoman answered: “I got a video on my phone showing a member of the cartel skinning a man alive.”He added: “Skinning him alive on video to send a message that if you snitch on the cartels they’re not gonna just kill you, they’re gonna make you suffer immensely.”‘Why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor?’Homan also asserted Ice’s right to arrest elected officials responsible for so-called “sanctuary cities”, which do not cooperate with Ice operations within their boundaries.He said: “I as an agent … have arrested United States citizens for knowingly harboring an illegal alien in their home.”He continued: “If I can arrest a US citizen for violating those crimes, why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor who has given their staff explicit instructions to impede us and to hide from us?”Homan added: “We need to prosecute these people and send a message that this is unacceptable.”That is a message Homan has continued to assert since taking office. Last week, Homan warned that the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may “be in trouble” over a webinar about Ice that was hosted by her office.The congresswoman on Wednesday aired a “Know Your Rights With ICE” webinar on her Facebook page which advised attendees of “trends” of arrests by Ice in New York and explained what rights they have. Ocasio-Cortez did not attend it.But Homan told Fox News: “So maybe AOC’s gonna be in trouble now, but I need the [office of the attorney general] to opine on that … Impediment is impediment, in my opinion.”On Friday, Homan and the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, appeared in a joint interview on Fox News, where Adams endorsed a Trump executive order which would allow Ice agents to operate at the city’s Rikers Island jail.In the Fox and Friends studio, Homan said of Adams and his promises of cooperation: “If he doesn’t come through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, Where the hell is the agreement we came to?”Adams is at the center of a political firestorm after top justice department attorneys in New York and Washington DC resigned in the face of orders to drop their prosecution of the New York mayor over corruption allegations.Financial entanglementsLike every senior administration appointee to date, Homan is an unstinting supporter of Trump, and a full-throated 2020 election denialist. This, and his espousal of anti-immigrant rhetoric, have led to controversy but also to associations with far-right extremists, and sprawling business relationships that some say present conflicts of interest.Between his departure from the first Trump administration and his appointment as border czar, a White House role, Homan had stints as a Fox News contributor, was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and was credited as a contributor in “Mandate for Leadership”, the central document of Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for the second Trump administration.Apart from these blue ribbon conservative appointments, Homan has involved himself in several interrelated non-profit organizations.The Border911 Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, was founded in 2023 in Virginia, Homan’s state of residence. At the same time, he also founded Border911 Inc, a 501(c)(4) organization. (501(c)(4)s differ from 501(c)(3)s in that donations to them are not tax-deductible, but they are permitted to engage in electoral advocacy.)Both the Border911 Foundation and Border911 Inc were spin-offs from the America Project (TAP), a Michael Flynn-founded election-denial non-profit that was reportedly funded to the tune of $27m by rightwing overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.Homan was reportedly TAP CEO for part of 2023. His appointment to that role occasioned a fundraising gala at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that year.From early 2024, Homan was out at TAP and focused on the Border911 Foundation and Border Inc, as well as a Trump-endorsed for-profit consultancy Homeland Strategic Consulting LLC, which, Homan boasted, secured “tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts” for his clients.Throughout the campaign season, the Border911 Foundation was a virtual speaker’s agency for a stable of rightwing anti-immigration activists, many of them former law enforcement officials who appeared at rallies organized by the non-profit or by political candidates, such as Arizona’s Kari Lake, throughout south-western border states.Previous reporting has highlighted seeming irregularities in tax filings by the non-profits. Coda reported that in 2023, “both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue”. Non-profit compliance experts expressed concerns to the outlet that “the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through” the 501(c)(4).Steve Lentz, an attorney acting as a spokesperson for both Border911 organizations, told Coda that this was due to errors in the filings, “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) [filing] that shouldn’t have been there,” he said, and said it would be amended.The Guardian’s review of the filings indicates that amendments were subsequently made.The Transparency non-profit Accountable.US, however, has raised concerns about what it says is a potential for conflicts of interest arising from the 501(c)(3) non-profit and its board in newly published research.Partly the worries arise from ambiguities in Homan’s public statements about his relationship with the foundation while he is in office.Accountable.US says that while Homan has said that he will take a “leave of absence” from Border911, he has also appeared to claim that the non-profit will continue to act as “data-mining site” that will provide “real up-to-date data on anything related to the border”, including “apprehensions”, “ICE arrests” and other information.And some of the foundation’s board members work for federal government contractors.Charles Sowell is chair of the Border911 Foundation’s board. He is also the founder and CEO of SE&M Solutions, a security and IT consulting firm that touts its “access to senior leaders in government” and “hopes to secure local and federal contracts using the best experts in the government consulting industry”.The Border911 Foundation’s director, Mark Hall, meanwhile, is currently the US security lead and chief security officer for Dragados USA, a construction contracting firm, where he claims to lead security for “a $6bn international border crossing construction project” whose cost indicates that it is likely the Gordie Howe international bridge between the US and Canada, which is budgeted for that figure.While there is no evidence of wrongdoing from these board members, a mass deportation effort on the scale promised by Trump, Homan and other administration immigration hawks such as Stephen Miller could be a bonanza for US government contractors.Accountable.US fears the worst. Its executive director, Tony Clark, said in a statement: “Homan appears to be using division, fear and chaos in a way to pad his friends’ pockets. Why should anyone believe Homan won’t steer lucrative government contracts to members of his ‘non-profit’ board?” More

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      UK populists mix faith and politics with parroting of ‘Judeo-Christian values’

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      The splendours of the Parthenon, Colosseum and Great Pyramid of Giza were in stark contrast to the utilitarian conference centre in London’s Docklands, but they were there to make a point.As 4,000 people from dozens of countries filed in for a three-day jamboree of rightwing discourse this week, the images were a reminder that great civilisations of the past had risen, declined and fallen. A commentary warned that western civilisation was at a tipping point, in crisis because it had lost touch with its “Judeo-Christian foundations”.The message greeted those attending a sold-out conference for politicians, policymakers, businesspeople and “culture formers” organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) at the ExCeL centre in east London, where non-discounted tickets cost £1,500.The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, and the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, addressed the gathering in person. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, and the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel joined via video link from the US.It was not explicitly a faith-based event, but a distinctly religious flavour ran through the proceedings. The Arc’s co-founders and principal faces are Philippa Stroud, a Tory peer and devout Christian, and Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist whose lectures draw heavily on the Bible.Among the group’s known funders is the GB News investor Paul Marshall, a hedge fund boss and media tycoon whose worldview is shaped by his evangelical Christian faith. According to one well-connected former Conservative MP, Marshall’s influence on UK rightwing discourse is growing, not just through GB News but also his ownership of the Spectator magazine and the Unherd website.Marshall is not a member of any political party and said in a pre-conference interview last week that faith and politics were a “dangerous combination”. But some rightwingers – energised by Donald Trump’s victory and beguiled by the rhetoric of his Catholic vice-president, JD Vance – see populist potential in advocating for “Judeo-Christian values”.View image in fullscreenThe meaning of this phrase, much repeated at the Arc conference, is the “moral foundation of western civilisation” based on the shared values of Christianity and Judaism, according to Dennis Prager, an American conservative talkshow host. He added: “The ultimate embodiment of Judeo-Christian values has been the United States of America.”The term, drawing on both faiths’ biblical roots, was first used in the early 19th century to refer to Jewish converts from Christianity. Much later, it was adopted by conservative Christians in the US. The former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has fought court battles in an attempt to set up an academy for the Judeo-Christian west – a “gladiator school for culture warriors” – in an Italian monastery.Some believe the phrase has become code for Islamophobia. During Trump’s first term as US president, Meredith Warren of the University of Sheffield said it was a dog-whistle myth peddled by the far right “to draw a line between imagined Christian values and a perceived (but false) threat of Muslim immigration”.Farage, whose populist brand of politics has rarely made reference to the Christian faith, told this week’s conference that Britons should have more children to restore traditional Judeo-Christian culture. “We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture and that’s where we need to start. And if we recognise that, and if we value that, then I think everything comes from that,” he said.Badenoch did not use the phrase in her speech to the conference but has often described herself as a “cultural Christian”. She understands the “importance of Christian values as the foundation of family and community life”, David Burrowes, a former Tory MP and co-founder of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, said last year.View image in fullscreenThe influence of evangelical Christianity in the Conservative party remains relatively marginal, but it has grown in recent years via two prominent voices: Danny Kruger, an MP since 2019 who has become a leading opponent to legalising assisted dying; and Miriam Cates, who was elected to parliament in 2019 but lost her seat last year, who is a vocal proponent of traditional family values. Kruger and Cates are on the Arc’s advisory board.Georgina Waylen, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester who has been researching the influence of evangelical Christianity on British politics, said it had “grown in recent years, and most notably in the Conservative party, following the election of a small number of rightwing socially conservative evangelical MPs who were well organised, knew what they wanted to achieve and oppose, and have been aided by the increasing influence of evangelical Christians in the rightwing ecosphere.”She added: “The evangelicals work effectively with others, including some rightwing populists, and have taken advantage of the chaos in the Conservative party. They have been active around gender identity issues and oppose assisted dying.”Evangelical conservative Christian groups have been active in lobbying MPs on issues such as abortion and assisted dying, although their involvement has not always been explicit. In November, an Observer investigation found that Christian pressure groups were secretly coordinating and funding anti-assisted dying campaigns ostensibly led by grassroots healthcare workers and disabled people.Organisations on the US Christian right have been accused of “infiltrating” the UK, lobbying MPs to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Last year, the UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom provided “briefing material and legal analysis” to MPs before a vote on introducing buffer zones to prevent anti-abortion activity outside abortion clinics.One reason for the sometimes covert involvement of such groups is the resistance of many people in a largely secular society to religious individuals or organisations seeking to impose their worldview on others. Evangelical Christians have fared poorly in UK politics whenever their views have come into conflict with principles fundamental to British liberal democracy.“Religion is much less of a factor in politics here than in the US,” said Nick Spencer of Theos, a Christian thinktank. “But the Christian right is gaining momentum. I don’t think the Arc conference would have got off the ground 10 years ago.”Those speaking at the conference appeared to be a mixture of conservative Christians, social conservatives, libertarians and “Maga-types”, he said. “It is clear what they’re against – internationalism, net zero, the denigration of national history – but these aren’t necessarily theological positions.”Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, said there was “no comparison whatsoever between the US and UK. Britain is one of the most secular societies in the world. Very few people go to church. The largest group are the people who say they have no religion at all. The kind of highly polarised debate that the Americans have had over abortion is inconceivable in the same way.”But he added: “At the level of political elites, that’s where you get the most interesting similarity that is also a difference. In the US, evangelical Christians are a huge part of politics because they are a huge part of US life. Here you have quite a remarkably high density of evangelical Christians in elite politics.”Some evangelical Christian organisations have sought to nurture potential high-flyers in order to ensure a Christian presence in the upper reaches of public life. Half a century ago, the Iwerne Trust’s Christian holiday camps, mainly for boys attending elite public schools, had precisely this goal. Holy Trinity Brompton, London’s foremost evangelical church, has counted many high-flyers among its congregation – including Marshall.Not all evangelical Christians share the same political views. Tim Farron, the former Liberal Democrat leader who resigned in 2017 saying the role was incompatible with his Christian faith, said the use of the term “Christian values” was sometimes “a proxy for things that aren’t very Christian at all”.He said: “People who talk about the loss of Christian values often have actually lost touch with Christian values themselves. It’s really dangerous when political parties seek to appropriate Christianity for their own ends.” More

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      French far-right leader cancels CPAC speech over Steve Bannon’s ‘Nazi’ salute

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      The French far-right leader Jordan Bardella on Friday morning cancelled a scheduled speech at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, after Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon flashed a fascist-style salute there hours before.Bannon, who helped Trump win office in 2016 and is now a popular rightwing podcast show host, finished his CPAC speech on Thursday with an outstretched arm, fingers pointed and palm down – a sign that echoed the Nazi salute and a controversial gesture made by the tech billionaire Elon Musk at the US president’s second inauguration in January.Bardella, of the far-right National Rally party in France, pulled out of CPAC citing Bannon’s allusion to “Nazi ideology”.The salute during Bannon’s speech brought cheers from the audience at the US gathering.Bardella, who was in Washington ahead of his appearance and had said he intended to talk about relations between the US and France, issued a statement saying: “Yesterday, while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers, out of provocation, allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology. I therefore took the immediate decision to cancel my speech that had been scheduled this afternoon.”The National Rally party was bested in France’s snap election last summer by a leftwing alliance.Bannon on Thursday night fired up the CPAC crowd, where he spoke directly after Musk, the man who has eclipsed him in Trump’s circle and with whom Bannon is not on good terms.“The only way that they win is if we retreat, and we are not going to retreat, we’re not going to surrender, we are not going to quit – we’re going to fight, fight, fight,” Bannon said of opponents, echoing Trump’s exhortation to supporters following the assassination attempt on him.Bannon then flung out his right arm at an angle with his palm pointing down. The Nazi salute is perhaps more familiar, especially from historical footage of Adolf Hitler, with the arm pointing straight forward – but the fascist overtone of Bannon and Musk’s signals has been unmistakable.The Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.“Steve Bannon’s long and disturbing history of stoking antisemitism and hate, threatening violence, and empowering extremists is well known and well documented by ADL and others,” the Anti-Defamation League wrote on X in response, adding: “We are not surprised, but are concerned about the normalization of this behavior.”Bannon, speaking to a French journalist from Le Point news magazine on Friday, said the gesture was not a Nazi salute but was “a wave like I did all the time”.“I do it at the end of all of my speeches to thank the crowd,” Bannon said.However, from video, when he shoots his arm in the brief, straight-arm gesture, then nods sharply with a smile, to audience cheers, and says “amen”, it looks distinctly different from the very end of his address, when Bannon walked about the stage saluting the audience, throwing first his right arm out, then his left arm out, in a looser gesture that looked much more like conventional post-speech acknowledgment of a crowd.Online, some far-right users suggested Bannon had made the gesture purposely to “trigger” liberals and the media. Others distanced themselves.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNick Fuentes, a far-right influencer and Trump ally who uses his platform to share his antisemitic views, said in a livestream that Bannon’s salute was “getting a little uncomfortable even for me”.Bannon’s gesture, like Musk’s, has been characterized by some as a “Roman salute” – though some historians argue that is a distinction without a difference. Some rightwing supporters have argued, without evidence, that the Roman salute originated in ancient Rome. Historians have found, instead, that it was adopted by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, and then Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany.However the ADL concluded that in that group’s view Musk had “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute”.The Bannon speech showcased CPAC’s evolution from a traditional conservative conference to an all-out Trump-centric rally. Bannon also spoke about the forthcoming election in 2028, prompting cheers of “We want Trump,” and saying himself: “We want Trump in 28.”The statement echoed those of Trump himself, who on Wednesday asked a crowd if he should run again, was met with calls of “four more years”, and called himself a “KING” in a post on social media. US presidents are limited to two terms.Meanwhile, Musk on Thursday brandished a chainsaw at CPAC, gloating over the slashing of federal jobs he is overseeing across multiple departments, in the face of legal challenges and protests. He called it “the chainsaw for bureaucracy”.It was handed to him on stage by Argentina’s rightwing president, Javier Milei. More

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      Anti-Trump conservative summit charts alternative to CPAC Maga-fest

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      While Donald Trump and his acolytes take a victory lap at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, some of the president’s staunchest right-leaning critics will convene for their own event just 10 miles away.The Principles First summit, which will be held in Washington from Friday to Sunday, has become a venue for anti-Trump conservatives to voice their deep-seated concerns about the “Make America great again” faction of the Republican party, and the gathering has now grown in size and scope. As its organizers confront another four years of Trump’s leadership, they are stretching beyond party lines with speakers such as the billionaire Mark Cuban and Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, to craft their vision for a new approach to US politics.That vision looks quite different than it did six years ago, when the conservative attorney Heath Mayo founded Principles First. At the time, Mayo, formerly a rank-and-file Republican who supported the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, hoped to present an anti-Trump alternative to fellow conservatives.“It started as disgruntled Republicans and conservatives, but that was back in 2019 when that objective seemed to be perhaps more realistic or people were holding out hope that the party would come to its senses,” Mayo said. “Over the years, it’s grown.”The group’s first summit attracted just a couple of hundred attenders in 2020, but the guest count at this year’s sold-out event has increased to about 1,100.“We’ve been surprised actually with the number of people that have signed up to come,” Mayo said. “I think it’s this hunger for new spaces in our politics – new ideas, new faces.”Those new faces include Cuban, who plans to address the summit on Saturday as his name has been floated as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. A vocal supporter of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the White House last year, Cuban might seem like an unorthodox choice for a presidential candidate, as he has never served in public office, but the same was said of Trump 10 years ago.“Clearly we live in a moment of disruption. Things are changing really fast … Democrats may have learned that lesson the hard way in November,” Mayo said. “That’s what I hope the weekend will be – a time for people to set aside the party labels and really ask where we’re going as a country.”The summit’s list of speakers reflects that mission, ranging from John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, to Polis, the Colorado governor who has occasionally clashed with fellow Democrats over how to navigate the new Trump era. Other speakers include Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who has become a fierce critic of Trump, and four of the police officers who responded to the Capitol on 6 January 2021, as a group of the president’s supporters attempted to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.View image in fullscreen“I feel like character and integrity are two non-negotiable, key components of Principles First,” said Rich Logis, founder of a group called Leaving Maga and a speaker at the summit. “If you look at the attendees, it’s a large, diverse swath of authors, thinkers and former elected officials. It doesn’t skew rightwing. It doesn’t skew leftwing. But what they all share in common is that they’re devoted to truth, democracy, liberal democracy and the rule of law.”Kyle Sweetser, another speaker at the summit and a former Trump supporter who voted for Harris in November, hopes that the event can offer an example of productive political discourse to fellow voters.“I think it’s more crucial than ever to offer some sort of platform, at least to reaffirm our commitment to core democratic values and principles,” Sweetser said. “And I’m really looking forward to some good discussion and hopefully some exchange of ideas that will strengthen our democracy.”Sweetser knows firsthand how difficult it can be to reach Trump supporters who have embraced the Maga movement. He voted for Trump twice before starting to question that loyalty, prompting him to diversify his media diet and seek out more information about the president’s record. He considers himself proof that Trump supporters can change their ways, a message he wants to bring to the Principles First summit.“I want some of the Democrats to understand that there’s a lot of Republicans out there that are good people, and if Democrats work for those people, then they will be able to pull some of those people over to their side,” Swisher said. “But unfortunately, it’s going to be a heavy lift. It’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to take patience.”Sweetser and Logis both predicted that Trump’s eventual failure to follow through on key campaign promises, like addressing the high inflation seen in recent years, would chip away at the president’s base and perhaps spur some of his supporters to reconsider their political identity.Some early examples of this trend may already be emerging. In Sweetser’s home state of Alabama, about 250 customers of a public utility company based in Huntsville just learned they would see a $100 surcharge on their energy bills after one of Trump’s executive orders paused a program aimed at lowering heating costs for low-income households.“I am wagering a bet that many in the Maga community right now are going to realize that the president is not going to fix anything for them,” Logis said. “When the scales start to fall a bit from the eyes, I want them to know that there’s an exit ramp.”That exit ramp eventually brought Logis to the Democratic national convention, where he was featured in a video explaining his transformation from a diehard Trump supporter to a Harris voter. Harris may not have been successful in November, but Mayo still sees a potential path to victory for a pro-democracy candidate who can unify the ideologically diverse group represented at Principles First.“There’s still a broad coalition out there that can be assembled, and it has got to be constructive. It’s got to have ideas and solutions for the challenges that Americans face, like the affordability crisis,” Mayo said. “At a time when it feels hopeless, it feels like there is a reason to be hopeful when you see that many people coming together to talk about these things.” More

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      ‘The deification of Trump will be complete’ at CPAC 2025

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      “I am your retribution.”When Donald Trump made this solemn promise to his supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) two years ago, millions of Americans felt comfortable looking the other way.After all, opinion polls suggested that Trump was a spent force in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, disappointing midterm elections and a lacklustre start to his US presidential election campaign. He was the closing act of a CPAC that critics dismissed as a fringe freak show with obscure speakers addressing a half-empty ballroom.It won’t feel like that this time. CPAC 2025 kicks off at the National Harbor in Maryland on Wednesday with Trump set to return in triumph after regaining the White House and with Republican allies in control of Congress. The conference will be a vivid demonstration of how his “Make America great again” (Maga) movement has gone from the margins to the mainstream.“CPAC always been the the ideological north star for the conservative grassroots movement,” said Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill who used to regularly attend the conference. “Unless you weren’t paying attention, CPAC was the roadmap for what Maga becoming mainstream would look like and what they wanted to accomplish.”The history of CPAC mirrors the recent history of the Republican party. It began in 1974 in the throes of the Watergate scandal and the birth of a new conservative movement. The first CPAC was addressed by Ronald Reagan, then governor of California and destined for the White House. An annual dinner is still held in Reagan’s honour.The event spent years in the wilderness during Barack Obama’s presidency: the further its voices were from power, the louder they shouted. Among the speakers in 2011 was a businessman, TV celebrity and former Democrat from New York named Donald Trump, airing a grievance that America was being ripped off by China.In 2015, CPAC heard from nearly all the major Republican presidential candidates, including Trump and Jeb Bush, but a year later Trump cancelled his planned appearance amid fears that he would be booed by protesters. It did not prevent his hostile takeover of the Republican party by winning both the nomination and the presidency.CPAC impresario Matt Schlapp, a veteran of the George W Bush White House, then made a big bet on Trump as the future. The conference went all-in for Maga, casting Trump as a messianic figure saving America from illegal immigration and woke culture. His 2020 election defeat and the January 6 riot made no difference. A dedicated marketplace inside the event continued to sell Maga merchandise.View image in fullscreenAt last year’s event, as he closed in on the Republican nomination again, Trump described himself as a “proud political dissident” and his myriad legal troubles as “Stalinist show trials” orchestrated by then president Joe Biden. He promised the election would be “liberation day” for his supporters but “judgment day” for perceived enemies who had weaponised the government against him.The old Republican party, meanwhile, was left far behind. Trump has used CPAC to attack its establishment figures as “freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools”. Out are Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence; in are far-right nationalists such as Steve Bannon from the US, Viktor Orbán from Hungary and Nigel Farage from Britain.The lineup of speakers announced so far this year includes both Bannon and Farage along with the border czar, Tom Homan; the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, the US ambassador-designate to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik; senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida; the rightwing media personality Megyn Kelly; Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder; the Argentinian president, Javier Milei; and the British ex-prime minister Liz Truss.CPAC did not respond to an email asking whether this year’s conference will also include Elon Musk, the tech oligarch appointed by Trump to shrink the federal government, or individuals recently pardoned by the president for taking part in the January 6 insurrection.But nothing will top the expected appearance by Trump himself after what has been billed as the greatest political comeback in history. His early efforts to crush illegal immigration, transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes are sure to receive ecstatic cheers. His claim that, in surviving an assassination attempt, he was “saved by God to make America great again” will be embraced with religious fervour.Setmayer, who now leads the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, commented: “The deification of Trump will be complete ad nauseam at CPAC this year. We’ve already seen a golden calf-like statue of him. I’m not quite sure what’s next, but they’ll figure it out.”View image in fullscreenOne potential measure of CPAC’s devotion to Trump will be its annual straw poll, which asks attendees to state their preference for the next Republican presidential nominee. Senator Rand Paul topped the poll in 2013, 2014 and 2015 while Ted Cruz prevailed in 2016 with 40% of the vote, ahead of Marco Rubio at 30% and Trump at 15%.Trump has dominated ever since. He is constitutionally barred from running for a third term but has repeatedly hinted that he might try. Congressman Andy Ogles has even introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run again. Setmayer believes that next week’s CPAC straw poll will include him – and he will win it again.“They absolutely will do it again and Trump will overwhelmingly win at North Korea-style numbers and he will continue to talk about a third term,” she said. “This is not a joke. He has been talking about this since his first term. He talked about it during the election in ‘jest’ and he’s been talking about it already three weeks into his new term. We need to pay attention to what they are doing concerning our elections.”Trump’s resurrection is a boost for CPAC, which has survived scandals of its own. Schlapp was hit by allegations that he groped a Republican operative’s genitals when the two men were alone in a car after a campaign event in Georgia in 2022. Carlton Huffman’s lawsuit was dropped last year after a reported $480,000 settlement.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, observed: “They never got him. He was so close. Of course in this day and time nothing matters. Trump has made anything possible.”In recent years Schlapp has sought to ride the nationalist-populist wave by staging CPAC events in Hungary and Argentina. Next week’s return to the National Harbor in Maryland will feel like vindication for a movement that just a few years ago seemed to be heading off a cliff to irrelevance. Now CPAC believes it represents the new political orthodoxy.Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “This is an extremist freak show that retains that quality but has taken political power in the United States. By any reasonable definition, what you’re looking at is a gathering of fascists, political extremists coming together, a fusion of the youth arm, the Christian nationalist arm, the Catholic Maga extremist arm.”Schmidt added: “It is an event that portends what’s coming. These people have immense power. This should all be taken literally and seriously. Millions and millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump should appreciate that this is what they purchased and what they purchased is now emboldened. There will be a very pungent nationalism present – and extremism lurking below the surface.” More

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      What does Elon Musk believe?

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      View image in fullscreenElon Musk is not a people person, as millions around the world will be able to attest after the planet’s richest man cut off food supplies, healthcare and probably even life itself to some of the most vulnerable without so much as a fore- or afterthought.Musk sees himself as a data man, wielding numbers like a machete to slash and burn his way through government waste and corruption as he leads the rightwing charge to capture the US state.Within days of Musk dispatching his minions to kick down the doors of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and rifle through its finances, the agency was in effect out of business. Musk claimed USAid was “a criminal organisation” and full of Marxists – an assertion called “laughable” by the agency’s former administrator under George W Bush, Andrew Natsios, who describes himself as a conservative Republican.Musk didn’t care. Less than three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of the new “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group that Trump created, has built an extensive power base in Washington of a kind not seen before.Trump has given free rein to Musk to send his operatives into more than a dozen federal agencies to look for evidence of mismanagement and subversion, and to generally create chaos, outside of the usual bounds of oversight and regulation.Crucially, Musk now in effect controls the office of personnel management (OPM), which oversees federal employment. He immediately encouraged more than 2 million government workers to resign with the stated aim of forcing a few hundred thousand out the door.View image in fullscreenIt’s clear who Musk thinks should be running the country instead, from his recruitment to Doge of “special government employees” from his own companies and the wider tech industry to storm the federal citadels. They include a significant proportion of young male software engineers of the kind who tend to worship tech billionaires like Musk, including a teenager who has gone by “Big Balls” online.Few, if any, have undergone the security clearances other government workers need to access sensitive and personal information. If they had, Doge might have been discouraged from hiring another recruit from Silicon Valley, Marko Elez, who was sent into the US treasury department, where he had access to taxpayer records. Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had posted racist messages on social media and defended eugenics.“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez wrote on X in July.He was reinstated on Friday.On the face of it, Musk is implementing Trump’s commitment to cut spending, “dismantle the deep state” and sack “rogue bureaucrats”. But his embrace of the far right, including an unrestrained endorsement of the German nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and what looked to much of the world like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration celebrations, has raised urgent questions about Musk’s political beliefs and how he intends to use his newfound power.As it happens, much of what Musk is doing is also good for his businesses, including scrapping regulatory bodies and curtailing the power of unions and workers. The labor board, which upholds workers’ rights, has been frozen and agencies that regulated the financial industry have either been scrapped or told to abandon key parts of their work.Musk’s politics have been eclectic. In the past, he has backed universal basic income and a tax on carbon emissions. At the same time, he has a deep dislike of trade unions and public transport because it means being around “random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer”. He espouses a visceral hostility to diversity programmes and appears to regard those who believe in helping the less fortunate as subversive.Thrown into this mix is Musk’s fascination with the pro-natalism movement, for which he has done his bit by fathering 12 children, and his hope that one day his rocket company, SpaceX, will help them colonise Mars.Raised in South Africa under apartheid, Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces. His grandfather headed a fringe political movement in Canada in the 1930s, Technocracy Incorporated, which sought to abolish democracy in favour of government by elite technicians, but its overtones of fascism saw it banned during the second world war.Musk shows some of the same tendencies, as do other libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley billionaires unhappy with the messiness of elected government. He has spoken in support of direct democracy, where policies and other issues are decided by popular referendums rather than elected representatives.In the meantime, Musk appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler through the Republican right’s “unitary executive theory”, which regards the authority of the president as paramount and Congress as an impediment to the implementation of his or her will.Over the years, Musk has described himself as “not a conservative” and “politically moderate”. He backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 until he soured on the party in the past few years.View image in fullscreen“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he wrote on X in 2022.But there were clues to other motives, including a statement that he would be voting Republican because of Joe Biden’s support for trade unions and what he regarded as insufficient Democratic backing for his companies.Not long before last year’s presidential election, Musk declared that Trump would save American democracy from Democrats trampling on individual liberties. But he kept moving ever further to the right in public, with an open embrace of racist European political leaders, including the AfD, and the promotion of claims of a “white genocide” in the country of his birth, South Africa.Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, has linked his shift from Obama voter to cheerleader for the AfD to the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.Wilson was 16 when she texted a relative: “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna. Don’t tell my dad.” The day after Wilson turned 18 in 2022, she changed her name because of “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.Musk told Isaacson he was sanguine about the change but then Wilson became a fervent Marxist and wouldn’t speak to him any more, a situation he described as one of the most painful of his life.“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told the author.Musk blamed Wilson’s progressive Los Angeles school and said he was disturbed at the “woke mind virus” holding back America.After California passed a law barring school districts from requiring teachers to tell parents of changes to a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity, Musk announced he was moving the headquarters of his two largest companies, SpaceX and X, to Texas. He said that the law caused “massive destruction of parental rights” and put children at risk of “permanent damage”.Musk did not say that moving his companies also had significant tax advantages for himself and his businesses, which would additionally be subject to fewer climate regulations than in California.Still, his apparent anger over his daughter’s transition appears to have set in motion a broader hostility toward identity issues, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, a favourite target of the Trumpian right. Musk announced that the words “cis” and “cisgender” were considered slurs on X, and he came out against pronouns, tweeting that they “suck”.In late 2022, another tweet linked Musk’s hostility toward the way people choose to identify themselves – an odd position for a man who claims to be a champion of free speech – to his anger at the Biden administration’s Covid restrictions.View image in fullscreenMusk mocked Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, who was instrumental in the lockdown and other measures to contain the crisis.“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he wrote.Some saw the tweet as evidence that Musk was now openly identifying with the far right, which defied mask regulations and stay-at-home orders and called for Fauci to be locked up for intruding on their liberties.But while Musk’s hostility toward pronouns was personal, Covid regulations touched on his businesses and net worth.Musk refused to close his Tesla factory at the height of the pandemic, claiming without evidence that “panic” over the virus would do more damage than the disease itself. He disparaged social distancing, predicted that the virus would claim few lives in the US (it eventually claimed more than 1.2 million), and described the lockdown as “fascist” and “erasing people’s freedoms”. Musk tweeted a meme comparing Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Hitler over his government’s Covid restrictions.Musk may have dressed up his position as a concern about people’s welfare but its immediate effect was to keep his factories rolling even if the people working in them were at greater risk of infection and death. And while Musk claimed a principled position in favour of individual liberty, he has a history of suppressing the rights of his own workers.In 2023, he said that he disagreed with the concept of trade unions.“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing,” he told the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “Unions naturally try to create negativity in a company.”One reason Musk may not like unions is they tend to stand up for their members. He has faced accusations from former employees of aggressively using a secretive dispute-resolution process to fend off repeated claims of sexual and racial harassment within his companies, including accusations of women enduring a “frat house” atmosphere of groping and other abuses ignored and even perpetrated by high-level managers.Tesla has paid out millions of dollars to Black workers subjected to racial harassment.Yet, while Musk restricts the rights of his employees to seek redress from the courts, he and his companies filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts in the year to August 2024, according to Fortune magazine.They include a legal action by X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate over a report accusing the social network of making millions of dollars out of accounts spewing hate from “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories”. A California judge threw out the lawsuit last year, saying it was clear the “case is about punishing the defendants for their speech”.Musk will probably spend a lot more time being frustrated by the courts. Judges have already put on hold his push for mass resignations from the civil service and placed some restrictions on Doge’s mass collection of data. Federal workers, unions and civil rights organisations are lining up a flurry of lawsuits to challenge Musk’s actions.But the courts themselves may become a target for Musk as he works to tear down the old order.Isaacson in his biography wrote that Musk once described being in “a state of war at all times” as one of his default settings.No one thinks that, so long as Trump continues to regard the billionaire as more of an asset than a liability, Musk’s thirst for power will stop at gutting federal agencies. The question is where he will launch his next offensive. More

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      in US Politics

      White supremacist Nick Fuentes charged over Chicago pepper-spray incident

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      The notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes is facing battery charges in Illinois because authorities say he pepper-sprayed a woman who had knocked on his front door after he enraged many on the internet by tweeting the misogynistic slogan “your body, my choice” following Donald Trump’s victory in the recent presidential election.Fuentes, 26, was arrested on 27 November on a count of misdemeanor battery and released the same day, according to documents filed on Wednesday in the Cook county circuit court that were reported on by the Chicago Sun-Times. He is tentatively scheduled to appear in court on 19 December.The far-right, avowedly antisemitic influencer seemingly sought to make light of his legal predicament on Friday on social media, publishing a post on X that contained a thinly disguised racial slur as well as the words “Free me”.Meanwhile, the Jewish feminist activist pressing the case against Fuentes, 57-year-old Marla Rose, also commented on social media, writing on Facebook: “It. Is. On.” She added “civil case pending” to the post that displayed three fire emojis.Fuentes invited the digital sphere’s fury by celebrating Trump’s return to the presidency at the expense of Kamala Harris on 6 November with a barb tweeted on X reading: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”The post taunting the concept of women’s bodily autonomy – along with the 2022 elimination of federal abortion rights at the hands of a US supreme court dominated by judges either appointed by or aligned with Trump – had gained more than 99.7m views as of Saturday. And some of Fuentes’s political opponents retaliated by publishing his home address on social media while declaring: “Your house, our choice.”Rose ultimately told police that she had gone to record the outside of Fuentes’s home in the Chicago-area suburb of Berwyn on 10 November. He soon allegedly pepper-sprayed her, pushed her on to the concrete and broke her cellphone.Video of the encounter that Rose later released showed Fuentes open his front door as she reached up to ring the doorbell. He extended his left arm while holding a bottle of pepper spray, which prompted Rose to say: “Oh my God, what are you doing?” The phone was then seen falling while Fuentes could be heard saying: “Get the fuck out of here.” Fuentes then seemingly used his foot to drag the phone inside his house before closing the door and locking it.A police report filed on 11 November said another woman driving by Fuentes’s house at the time called officers. That witness described seeing a man shove a woman outside a home, the report recounted.Rose was still at the scene when police arrived, and officers reportedly spoke with her as well as Fuentes separately.The report added that Fuentes claimed to police that he had received death threats as well as “people showing up to his house unannounced” after posting “a political joke online” had left him “in fear for his life”. He eventually “became uncooperative” and refused to further address the confrontation with Rose, as NBC News reported.Rose had “watery” eyes but listed no other visible physical injuries, the report said.Possible punishments for misdemeanor battery under Illinois law include relatively short jail sentences, probation and fines.Some of the earliest news media headlines given to Fuentes came when he withdrew from Boston University after participating in the 2017 white supremacist rally objecting to the removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. A demonstrator protesting the white supremacists was murdered by a neo-Nazi sympathizer who intentionally drove a car into her as well as others.Trump then ignited a scandal by hosting Fuentes as a dinner guest at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022 as he geared up to run for a second presidency. Another guest at that dinner was the rapper previously known as Kanye West, who had propagated antisemitic remarks that – among other consequences – cost him a business partnership with the sportswear company Adidas. More

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      in Elections

      2,000 Mules director apologizes to man falsely accused of voter fraud in film

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      Conservative film-maker Dinesh D’Souza has issued a rare apology for his controversial documentary 2,000 Mules, a cornerstone of post-2020 election fraud conspiracy theories, but a prominent organization in the election denialism ecosystem is standing behind the film’s false claims.The film alleged a massive voter fraud scheme involving individuals supposedly stuffing ballot drop boxes with illegal votes. Central to these claims was cellphone geolocation data provided by True the Vote, a Texas-based non-profit that has become a prominent actor in the election denial ecosystem.True the Vote on Monday maintained that the film’s central premise “remains accurate”. The group insists its geolocation data proves suspicious voting patterns, despite repeated debunking by election experts, including the former attorney general William Barr.In a statement from last week, D’Souza acknowledges the video was mischaracterized.“I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team,” D’Souza’s said in the statement. “If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently.”D’Souza’s public admission focuses on Mark Andrews, a Georgia voter featured in the film at a ballot drop box. Despite blurring Andrews’ face, the documentary suggested he was part of a coordinated voter fraud operation.D’Souza said he was apologizing to Andrews “because it is the right thing to do”, and “not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress”. Andrews sued D’Souza, True the Vote and the film’s distributor, Salem Media Group, for defamation in 2022 over the film. Salem settled the lawsuit earlier this year, agreed to stop distributing the film and apologized to Andrews. The lawsuit against D’Souza and True the Vote in federal court in Georgia is ongoing. Motions for summary judgment, which could make public details of how the film was made, are due to be filed on 12 December.The cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, a Department of Homeland Security agency which has dominion over elections in the United States, declined a request for comment.The concession from D’Souza marks the latest example of a prominent vector of misinformation about the 2020 election acknowledging their claims were false. Amid a separate defamation lawsuit, the Gateway Pundit, the influential far-right news outlet, acknowledged earlier this year that it had falsely accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta election workers, of fraud.OAN, another network that spread false claims about the election, also apologized to the two election workers. Freeman and Moss won a $148m judgment in a libel suit against Rudy Giuliani last year and are moving to seize his assets.Founded by Catherine Engelbrecht, True the Vote has transformed from a fringe organization into a key player in challenging election results. The group claims to protect elections through technological surveillance, but has repeatedly failed to substantiate its expansive fraud allegations.It’s not the first time the organization’s credibility has been undermined in recent memory. An app developed by True the Vote contained a security flaw that exposed user email addresses ahead of the US election, and the group is facing an IRS complaint for potentially illegal political coordination with the Georgia Republican party in 2020.The documentary’s impact extended far beyond the fringes of the internet. Months after the film premiered at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, armed individuals were documented stalking voters at drop boxes in Arizona, an illustration of how such conspiracy theories can translate into real-world intimidation.Salem Media Group – which originally distributed the film – has already ceased its circulation and issued its own apology to Andrews. Lawyers for Andrews declined to comment.Another incident that inspired the film was a video recording made of a woman, Guillermina Fuentes, collecting her ballot from her neighbor in San Luis, Arizona, a largely Hispanic town on the US-Mexico border. Fuentes was prosecuted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and her neighbor was sentenced to a year of probation. Luis Marquez, a community activist, said he was glad to hear of an apology, but the damage may have already been done. “It really made people not vote,” he said. “It made people afraid.” More