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    ‘This victory is a mandate’: rightwing groups ready with policy proposals for new Trump administration

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    As Donald Trump prepares to move back into the White House, he’ll have a host of rightwing groups trying to influence his staffing choices and policy proposals, including the group behind Project 2025, despite Trump’s insistence they won’t be involved.Democrats repeatedly ran attacks on Trump over Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that its writers want to guide a second Trump administration. Trump tried to distance himself from it and from the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, one of DC’s biggest thinktanks.The Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, congratulated Trump on his “hard-fought victory” that came despite the “sham” indictments and against a “relentless leftwing machine”.“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” Roberts said.Other groups, namely the America First Policy Institute, have avoided the limelight that backfired on Project 2025 and instead worked behind the scenes to ally themselves with Trump and seek to influence his administration. Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the institute’s board, as a co-chair of his transition team, giving the America First Policy Institute a critical role.The institute, started in 2021 and stacked with Trump allies, said in a tweet that it “stands ready to support bold governance that puts Americans first”. It also shared a video clip with the former acting United States attorney general Matt Whitaker talking about deportations and sanctuary cities, key alignments with Trump’s policy goals.“This victory is a mandate to restore our nation to a place of safety, opportunity, and prosperity rooted in freedom,” the America First Policy Institute said. “Together, we’ll secure borders, strengthen the economy, & uphold the freedoms that define us – for a stronger future.”The institute has held trainings for people that could serve in the Trump White House and has a lengthy agenda published online, complete with plans for immigration, education, energy and elections. The New York Times recently reported that the group has “installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again”.The heads of both the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have roots in the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a state-based conservative thinktank. Brooke Rollins, CEO of the America First Policy Institute, ran the Texas foundation for 15 years, and Roberts was the foundation’s CEO before he was tapped by Heritage.Another organization, America First Legal, is headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. It has been filing lawsuits that boost Trump and other conservatives on issues like election fraud, diversity programs, public records disputes and government overreach. Miller could return to the Trump administration, but it’s likely the group will remain an outside rightwing legal monitor to help the incoming president.What could Trump’s policies be?Project 2025’s sprawling “mandate for leadership” details in 900-plus pages how each government agency could be altered under a conservative president. The project includes a database of potential hires and a training program for those who could staff a Trump administration, though Trump’s team has said none of the people associated with Heritage’s staffing suggestions would be hired. That would be a feat, given the extensive reach the project had – it was signed on to by more than 100 conservative groups, and many of those who wrote chapters or otherwise contributed had played some kind of role in the previous Trump administration.The project’s biggest suggestion is to designate exponentially more federal government employees as political appointees rather than non-partisan civil servants. It also wants to downsize the government. Trump’s plan also involves downsizing the federal government, something he tried to start implementing near the end of his first term.The project suggests many ways to restrict immigration, both through beefed-up border security and through limiting legal immigration programs for groups like students and low-skilled workers. That’s another pillar for Trump, who made mass deportations a central theme of his campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn education, the project wants to get rid of the Department of Education and increase the use of vouchers that use public money for private schools – both of which Trump has suggested as well. Conservatives have sought the dismantling of the department for decades, so far without success.Most chapters of Project 2025 mention discarding any programs that promote LGBTQ+ rights and diversity. Trump has railed against these ideals on the campaign trail, promising to root out trans women from sports and in schools.Abortion access is one area where Trump and the project could differ, though Trump’s plans for abortion have been muddled. The project wants to end federal approval of abortion pills, track abortion data and root out anything that is seen as promoting abortion as healthcare. It doesn’t call for a direct ban on the procedure, and Trump has said he wouldn’t approve of one either, but many of these policies would make access significantly more difficult.The America First Policy Institute suggests many of the same policies, though it wants to go further than Project 2025 with federal employees, the New York Times notes, by making most federal workers at-will employees who would not receive civil service protections.Other ideas the institute has pushed include, according to the Times, “halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.”A policy agenda pamphlet from the institute starts by discussing the Christian foundations of the US and imploring Christians to get involved in the government “before it’s too late”. The policy agenda for the pamphlet was written “through the lens of their biblical foundations and applications to provide Christians more information on the issues and solutions needed for the restoration of the nation”. More

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      It’s OK to feel despair at Trump’s victory. The important thing is not to give up | Polly Toynbee

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      With wailing woe in the small hours, many of you shared that wrenching despair when the US election result extinguished hope. Beyond reason, beyond reckoning, a nation that was once the beacon of the democratic world has knowingly elected a dangerous, racist demagogue, a “pussy-grabbing” criminal who tried to overthrow the government, a wild conspiracy spreader, a squalid, reckless beast of fathomless vanity and corruption. Caligula, Commodus, Nero, Domitian … This is the way a civilisation dies: by suicide not murder.Donald Trump could now command both houses of Congress and the supreme court, with no steadying countervailing instinct for national self-preservation. “America first” means no allies, no “special relationships”, tariffs for all. Encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want”, Nato be damned. He will send in the military to force mass deportations of millions of migrants. He threatens the justice system with revenge, with protesters and opponents branded “the enemy within”. This democratically elected self-described “dictator” can do whatever he wants. And the tides will carry this poison across the Atlantic, invigorating Europe’s hard right from Nigel Farage to Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders to Marine Le Pen, the Alternative für Deutschland to the Sweden Democrats.On the morning of the result I was speaking to US students visiting the UK from Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey. One had her head bowed, sighing. Another told me she had wept. They were mainly liberals, the sort who might choose a semester in Europe, and were distressed at how many fellow students had not voted. “My Republican uncle lives up the road, but we don’t speak, not since he had Obama toilet paper when we visited at Thanksgiving. He genuinely believes Kamala is a street walker.” They talk of abortion rights and deep dark misogyny: “American men will not vote for a woman,” one said, and others agreed. Trump voters live across a divide for ever unbridgeable to them. How can this be happening, they want to know. How can civilisation be so fragile?But enough of this, before I rant myself to lunacy, fearing a dark future for children and grandchildren. Is it wise or useful to feel a political event as such a visceral, gut-punching personal calamity? Pollsters remind us that most normal people most of the time think little about politics. Asked “How often, if at all, do you discuss government and politics with others”, 30% say never, 19% a few times a month, 19% less often, leaving 32% at a few times a week and 10% nearly every day. Political obsessives (you and me, Guardian readers) are odd. If you live and breathe it, if you see the world and everything that happens through a political and sociological lens, you are unusual. Many others can travel through life thinking only of family, work and friends without much curiosity about who is governing, how and why, beyond perhaps a distant dislike.Out canvassing you find plenty who say they don’t care about “politics”, as if it were a hobby for a few and not a citizen’s duty nor a question of self-interest. I resist the instinct to shake some sense into them. I do say that “politics” is everything: the ambulance or police car that does or doesn’t arrive, the quality of your air and water, safety of your food or medicines, tax you pay, pensions you draw, the streets and parks, the arts, sports stadiums – and the fairness of how we live. I usually expect a laconic shrug.Is that a better way to be for your own sanity? Life on the left is a long and often unhappy journey through dashed hopes and deep disappointments, elections lost and lost again. The people will insist on making the wrong choices at the ballot box – perverse, nonsensical and against their own interests. Once in a while all that losing gets punctuated by a burst of radiant sunlight when the left occasionally wins – in Britain in my lifetime in 1964, 1974, 1997 and this good year. But when they do succeed, watch how many on the left prefer to get their disillusion in early when their government fails to fix everything all at once, veers off course or compromises with the voters.The Brexit referendum result felt like a shutter falling across the country, dividing us as never before, while casting us adrift from the mainland of our home continent. I found it hard enough then to inhabit the mind of Brexit voters who had done this to us, but to think yourself into the impenetrable Trump-voting psyche is 100 times harder. No, this is not just “metropolitan elite” obtuseness: the other side is equally uncomprehending.Not long before he died, I had a long conversation with the economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who said research shows that those on the left are much less happy than those on the right: US Republicans have always outscored Democrats on the happiness scale. I can see why seething outrage at social injustice and indignation at reactionary governments that defend the interests of the rich against the chances of children is not a pathway to contentment. In comparison, look at the easeful life of complacent conservatism, perched like a Cheshire cat beaming down from the high branches of power.Would it be better to give up all this angst and agonising and arguing? Let things be? Do the gardening, try gourmet cooking, re-read classics of yesteryear, forget whatever public realm lies beyond the immediate horizon of your own small sphere. No, of course not. There is no escaping the danger of Trumpism, only escapism. The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, and that applies equally to the unexamined society in which we live. And when you do examine it, action is required. Each time, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again confronting the forces of conservatism. The more vicious they become now, the greater the duty to resist. “Never give up,” said the vanquished and exhausted Kamala Harris.

      Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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      Mass production of genetically selected humans: inside a Pennsylvania pronatalist candidate’s fantasy city-state

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      When Simone Collins, a Republican running for a seat in Pennsylvania’s state legislature, and her husband, Malcolm, were privately asked last year about their ideas for the model “pronatalist” city-state, they sensed an opportunity.With their own YouTube channel, online education platform and foundation, the couple are among the most high-profile and outspoken proponents of the pronatalist cause, which is centered on the belief that the developed world is facing a demographic collapse and that birthrates must rise to stave off disaster.The couple, who have four children, were approached last year by an individual posing as a wealthy donor willing to finance their work. In response to his request, they created a 15-page slide deck entitled The Next Empire: Leveraging a Changing World to Save Civilization. It contained ideas that seem plucked out of a dystopian science fiction movie. According to their presentation, the city-state they envisaged would become a magnet for “no-holds-barred” medical research, which in turn would open the door to the “mass production of genetically selected humans”.The voting rights of citizens of the city-state would be linked to their value to society, according to the Collinses’ presentation. The proposed city-state government would have “incentive systems that grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents” and would be run by a single “executor” – which the proposal also called a “dictator” – with full control of the government’s laws and operational structure. The executor would be replaced every four years by three “wards”, according to the slide deck. Wards would be elected by previous executors.It may appear that the Collinses’ views are so far outside the mainstream that one could shrug off pronouncements as eccentric and alarmist. But the Collinses are part of a movement they call the “new right”, which rejects some aspects of traditional conservatism and bills itself as pragmatic, family-oriented and anti-bureaucratic. They staunchly support the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance, and billionaire Elon Musk.Last year, Malcolm Collins said he thought the Isle of Man would be the best place to begin.“I actually think that’s the most viable place to do it. You’re near the center of Europe, you’re in a rapidly depopulating area, you can tell them look, this will obviously bring a lot of technology and investment to your country. But the great thing about a proposal like this is even if they turn it down, you can take it to other countries,” Malcolm told the man purporting to be an investor at the time.The funding never materialized and the proposal was never pitched to the Isle of Man, a British crown dependency located in the Irish Sea, because the man who claimed to be a wealthy investor was actually an undercover researcher with Hope Not Hate, a UK-based anti-racism group. It shared video recordings of the encounters with the Collinses – and a copy of their presentation – with the Guardian.Asked about the slide deck in an interview with the Guardian last week in their home in Audubon, Pennsylvania, Simone and Malcolm, who work together and appear rarely to be apart, acknowledged that their proposal “wasn’t supposed to be public”. But Simone Collins nevertheless said she stood by its core tenets “100%”, including the idea of mass-producing embryos, and of giving people who they deem to be less productive members of society less voting power.“If you are draining resources, you should have less influence,” she said.Asked about how it felt to be the subject of undercover research, Malcolm Collins said: “The experience was quite validating for both us and our movement.” He added: “Now I think it is pretty clear that despite us not socially isolating people with toxic views, the worst views we actually have are being slightly elitist and weird eccentrics (which isn’t exactly surprising to anyone).”The couple say their ideas were meant to be experimental and fit for a city-state, not a democracy such as the US. But the views are not dissimilar to ones expressed by one of Simone and Malcolm’s political heroes, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. In a July 2021 speech, Vance said parents should be given “an advantage” and “more power” in the voting process than those who don’t have children.Simone Collins previously worked as managing director of Dialog, which she describes as an exclusive secret society, co-founded by Peter Thiel. Thiel, the PayPal founder, helped launch and fund Vance’s political career, and has supported the rightwing blogger Curtis Yarvin, who in 2012 said he believed the US should install a monarchy and “get over their dictator phobia”.‘We do target the elites’The Collinses often describe their pronatalist agenda in humanitarian terms – part of a wider bid to save the developed world from impending social and economic catastrophe. Their website outlines their desire to work with “any person or organization that shares our goal to preserve as much of civilization and as many cultures as possible”.But in the recordings made by Hope Not Hate, Malcolm describes their pronatalist agenda as being principally designed to transform the current socioeconomic elite into a future biological elite.“It’s easy to forget how small the population of people in the world who actually impacts anything or matters is,” he said. “When we do our campaigns we work really aggressively on how do we spread ideas within that narrow network, because also they are the people we want having kids and we want in the future.”View image in fullscreen“When we talk to reporters we’re very ‘Oh, this isn’t just for the elites’, but, in truth, we do target the elites – ha ha – unfortunately.”Malcolm said he and his wife are working to create a network of other pronatalist families, with whom their children can go to summer camp, grow up alongside “knowing this isn’t weird, what we’re doing” and, ultimately, marry. But this goes beyond the average desire to find family friends with shared values and be part of a community. “What I’m really trying to do is ensure that my kids have an isolated and differential breeding network,” he said.The so-called “elites” appear to be a central preoccupation for the Collinses and it is a theme they return to repeatedly and unprompted. “The very few families – and I think we might be talking about a hundred, 500 families in the world today – who are high fertility and really technologically engaged and economically engaged … own the future of our species,” Malcolm said.When the Guardian asked the Collinses about the remarks, Malcolm said they were “not incongruent with our other messaging”, and that they were better off “convincing Taylor Swift to have kids than John Doe on the street if we want to create ripple effects society-wide leading to more kids”.Race for the statehouseSimone Collins’s run to represent Pennsylvania’s 150th district in the state’s house of representatives was born, she said, out of frustration with traditional political campaigns. She acknowledges that her odds of success are low and that she has eschewed traditional local campaign tactics, like investing in ads or mailers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut she is a big supporter of Donald Trump’s run for the presidency and has sought through her own candidacy, which has mostly been self-funded by what she calls the family’s “what the hell” savings account, to encourage so-called low propensity voters in her Pennsylvania district to boost the former president’s chances.“We are very interested in tipping the election [in Trump’s favor] and one of the most meaningful ways I can do so is as a Republican candidate running in a key, key swing spot,” she said. The Collinses have done this, she said, by printing out “hundreds and hundreds” of mail-in ballot applications, filling them out, and sending them to potential Republican voters to sign and send back so that they can be sent mail-in ballots. She said it is part of an effort to examine whether there are “low-cost and highly effective ways” to sway election results, even in Democratic-leaning districts like hers, where incumbent Democrat Joe Webster was first elected in 2018. Records show Webster has spent about $80,000 on his campaign, while Collins has spent just under $5,000.“I didn’t have enough money to send mail-in ballot applications to every low-propensity voter, but we’ll look after the election of what percent of those people voted,” she said.Asked whether there are aspects of Trump’s candidacy that trouble her – from his criminal convictions to being found liable for sexual assault – Collins said she is no more troubled by the Republican nominee’s record than that of Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee.“Nobody elects a president. You elect a team,” she said. “So many smart people I know are tapped into who his team is going to be.”She is most excited about billionaire Elon Musk’s high-profile involvement in the Trump campaign, and the Republican nominee’s promise that Musk would lead a cost cutting and “efficiency” drive in government spending. Musk has admitted it would lead to “temporary hardship” for Americans.Musk is reportedly a father of “at least” 11 children, according to a recent New York Times report that detailed the Tesla co-founder’s effort to fill a compound full of his own children and their mothers. Although he has been open about his pronatalist views, the New York Times reported that Musk likes to keep details about his own growing family a secret.It is the emergence of Silicon Valley as key partners in “the new right” that has the couple most excited about Republicans today. The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (a father of five) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collinses’ pronatalist foundation in 2022.The issues“I’m very pro-gun. If you walk around this house you’ll find guns all over the place,” Simone Collins said, pointing to an old musket that is mounted on the wall. She said the guns are locked up and not loaded, and that ammunition is kept in proximity. While others might not like the constant sound of gunfire from a nearby gun club and shooting range, Collins said she loved the sound.Child protective services (CPS), the state agency people can call if they fear a child is being abused or neglected, has visited the Collinses at home on two occasions. Asked what prompted the first visit, Malcolm told the Guardian in a written statement that it “was supposedly because our kids were wearing used clothing, played outside in our fenced-in yard (with us watching from inside), and got sick frequently (this was before we took them out of preschool and during a time when sickness in preschools post-pandemic was brutal as kids returned from isolation)”.The second visit by CPS, Simone Collins said, followed the publication of the last Guardian article about the couple, published in May, which included a description of how Malcolm had slapped their then two-year-old on the face for nearly knocking over a table in a restaurant. Slapping a child is legal in Pennsylvania if it doesn’t cause serious pain or injury.View image in fullscreen“After the Guardian piece came out, CPS was here again. They walked through every room of this house because the internet decided that we were abusive, terrible people. They came again. I feel bad wasting their time. They’re like, ‘Please don’t beat your infants, or whatever. But no, you’re obviously fine,’” she said.Some voters in her district have called her directly to ask about her stance on issues, including abortion. Abortion is legal in Pennsylvania up until 24 weeks, though there are some restrictions in place. Simone Collins said she would support what in effect would amount to an abortion ban in the state after 12 to 15 weeks, with exceptions if a woman’s life was in danger or the fetus had an anomaly. Any abortion performed after 15 weeks, she said, would have to include giving the fetus pain medication.Collins is, however, an unabashed advocate for IVF, which is opposed by many conservative and anti-abortion Republicans. Simone and Malcolm have used IVF themselves and plan to continue having more children. They also are “huge early supporters” of embryo selection based on a “polygenic score” related to intelligence. In other words, selecting embryos based on IQ.Collins is planning for her next embryo transfer in January. More

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      ‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

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      Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times, despite the negative impact that they have on trans people’s safety and wellbeing, and scant evidence of its effectiveness in swaying voters. And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people. “I have a belief that when you see the same thing happening in different parts of the country at the same time, that that’s something to look into,” Jones said. “I think that coincidence is always great as a fertile ground for journalism and for looking under the hood about what’s going on.”In the first episode of this year’s season, Jones looks at how the paramilitary group Proud Boys uses anti-trans rhetoric to stoke political upheaval. Far-right militia groups have grown at unprecedented numbers in recent years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), while political violence in general has also increased.For trans people, such rhetoric can lead to increased violence against them, as well as suicidal ideation. A recent report from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project found that suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth increased by up to 72% in states that enacted anti-trans laws.“We know that trans people overall have been facing more violence since there’s been an uptick in anti-trans rhetoric in terms of hate crimes,” Jones said. “So we know that there is an impact on people’s safety and wellbeing solely because of the [public] conversation.”Jones hopes that through her work, that the press and political leaders will begin to see anti-trans rhetoric as a serious threat to democracy and community safety.“The biggest solution is to take these attacks seriously,” Jones said, “to understand the way in which they are being deployed for paramilitary violence, for political violence, to destabilize communities, to undermine democratic conversations politically, to take votes away”.A ‘trans moral panic’Anti-trans ads are being deployed by the Republican party now due to the tightness of the presidential election, according to Jones. During their September debate, for instance, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments about her support of gender-affirming surgery for imcarcerated trans people. “Anti-trans issues work the best in really tight elections where the margins are really close and you’re just trying to convert one or two votes per precinct, and that’s enough to help you win,” Jones said.Another reason why anti-trans ads are particularly salient now is because the GOP is using them to court voters who supported the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who ran on an anti-trans platform, she added. Many of those voters are suburban women who lean Republican, but sometimes vote Democrat in local elections. Both parties are now vying for their votes. “Harris is making a play for the Nikki Haley voter, and there’s some indication that she is gaining enough ground to maybe get her over the top,” said Jones. “That’s exactly the type of population that would be receptive to anti-trans messages.”Christian nationalists and rightwing politicians view trans people as collateral damage as they strive for political wins, according to Jones. And bundled in with anti-trans rhetoric is opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. A “trans moral panic” among the far-right has led to an uptick in legislation that bans both DEI policies and trans protections, said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the intelligence project at the SPLC. At the Intelligence Project, Hodges tracks hate and extremism through in-person and online monitoring.“Anti-LGBT groups that are in alliances with trans-exclusionary groups also push what they call ‘viewpoint diversity’ to roll back DEI protections in state houses and in corporations,” said Hodges. Billed as the inclusion of various perspectives in an argument, viewpoint diversity is problematic because it promotes this false narrative that DEI is a threat to white Christian men,” he said, “and they utilize that to push these anti-trans, anti-LGBT bills”.Along with an increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary people, anti-trans legislation can lead to violence against trans people of color, said Hodges. Twenty-seven trans people have been killed this year, according to HRC, with 74% of them being people of color and 48% being Black. “When we look at these trends of violence towards trans people,” Hodges said, “it’s important to remember that those trends of violence are affected by legislation and the politicization of trans affirmation.”While Jones began her podcast in 2019 to highlight the dangers of anti-trans legislation, she hopes to one day celebrate the lives of trans people. But first, political leaders must work toward creating a society where trans and gender nonconforming people can live without the fear of violence.“We would love to focus on telling all of the good news and the positive stories that surround trans people from all walks of life and all backgrounds,” Jones said. “But the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.” More

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      Political violence has marked the 2024 race – but risks rise after election day

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      A year punctuated by two assassination attempts, high levels of threats and harassment, and a number of troubling, violent incidents in the lead-up to election day will culminate on Tuesday with an election deemed existential by all sides.It’s the first presidential election since the January 6 insurrection, a reminder of the ways political violence can manifest that leaves Americans with a fear that such an attack could happen again. Those who study the attack and its participants say they aren’t convinced criminal convictions against them will fully deter those involved on January 6 from future political violence, but that the biggest threat is a lone actor, not a large, coordinated event.In the last few weeks, a man in Arizona was allegedly stockpiling weapons and plotting a “mass casualty” event, according to police who arrested him for shooting at Democratic party offices. The person behind explosive devices that burned hundreds of ballots in two drop boxes in Oregon and Washington is suspected to be a metalworker who could be planning more attacks. Arguments at polling places over political paraphernalia, banned at the polls in some places, have become physical. A young man waved a machete at a polling place in Florida.The risk of political violence only increases after election day, experts say, once races are called. Certain places could become targets of people or groups upset about results or who claim fraud.“The strategic value of political violence will go up once there’s an initial winner,” said Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “I would not say the left is totally off the hook, but it’s most dangerous on the right, simply because Trump did it before.”Trump and his supporters have turned to incendiary rhetoric in recent days, contributing to the tense environment. A speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally called Kamala Harris the devil, while another spoke of the “slaughter” of Democrats. Trump said on Thursday that the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Social media platforms have enabled some of the conditions that could lead to offline violence. Militias are using Facebook to organize, and in some instances, Facebook has auto-generated militia pages, Wired reported. X, formerly Twitter, has become a frequent source of election disinformation that could be weaponized to stir people up post-election. The platform created a new “election integrity community” where users can post unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Online forums frequented by the far right are showing patterns similar to those that preceded the January 6 attack.“It’s absolutely possible that someone motivated by mis- or disinformation that they see online about some polling place in their community could show up with a gun and try to enforce vigilante justice,” said Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.Alex Jones, the longtime conspiracist, has issued reports on his show for several days warning of a deep state plot to sow chaos around the voting process. “And then there will be a big disputed election and it will get Democrats and Republicans all mad at each other, and that’s the civil war conditions,” Jones said on a broadcast this week.Elections officials emphasize that voting is still very safe in the US, and the threat of political violence should not deter people from casting a ballot. Levels of political violence have actually been lower this year than recent years, but there has been a continuation of high levels of threats and harassment, said Shannon Hiller, executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University, which studies and tracks political violence. Elections officials in particular have been consistent targets of threats and harassment campaigns. Concerns about political violence among local elected officials have also risen.“Whether it’s bad actors or foreign actors, even trying to create that environment of fear is part of what people are doing to undermine our democracy,” Hiller said. “So the best way to push back on that is to remind folks it’s very safe and secure to vote and people feel confident to do so.”Still, voters feel a sense of unease. A recent survey of swing state voters by the Washington Post found fears that there would be violence if Trump loses the election. In six swing states, 57% of voters said they were at least somewhat worried about Trump supporters turning violent if he loses, far more than the percentage of voters who feared the same for a Harris loss.January 6 memory holeThe January 6 insurrection serves to some as a reminder of what a riled-up populace ready to take action for political aims can do. But for Trump, it’s now a “day of love”. He has promised to pardon many of those involved in the attack and referred to them as political prisoners.Having a leader encourage acts of violence or “fear and loathing” of the other side “creates a permission structure for people who want to commit acts of violence to go ahead and do so. They feel more justified, and they expect that they’ll be protected,” Hughes said.Experts don’t believe the US Capitol could see a similar attack because of precautions taken since January 6, but state capitols and other buildings may not be as prepared.Pape has studied those involved in January 6. So far, more than 1,300 have been arrested for their actions that day, the vast majority of whom were not clearly affiliated with a domestic extremist group like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Most of those sentenced have since stayed off the radar and are not commenting online about their political beliefs, Pape has found. Of those who do speak publicly about their charges or beliefs, many have doubled down on the issues that motivated them after the 2020 election. They have continued to express support for Trump and for election fraud narratives.Billy Knutson of South Dakota was charged for his actions on January 6 and has since rapped about the insurrection: “Since they stole the election we living behind enemy lines … We are the people, we won’t be defeated / No peace and no quarter, we never retreated.”Jake Lang, who is alleged to have swung a baseball bat at police on January 6, has been in prison for more than three years awaiting trial. He has brought in more than $240,000 in an online fundraiser on GiveSendGo, the rightwing crowdfunding site, to fund a “J6 truther” website: “This is the single most important thing you can do to support the Jan 6 political prisoners and help exonerate these brave patriots,” he tells donors. He has also been helping set up a “network of election deniers and conspiracists” known as the North American Patriot and Liberty Militia, or Napalm, Wired reported.The “patriot wing” of the DC jail where some violent January 6 participants are being held may be further radicalizing the people staying there, a New York Magazine report posited. Extremism experts told the magazine that “its inmates might re-enter society more primed to take violent action than they were before the Capitol riot”.By reframing what January 6 was, Trump has given permission for his supporters to take similar action again, political violence experts warn.Lone actors a riskA memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned in September that there was a “heightened risk” of domestic violent extremists mobilizing “against ideological opponents, government officials, and law enforcement in an attempt to initiate a civil war” until at least early 2025. The document, obtained by the public records watchdog group Property of the People, said the threat comes from lone offenders, as large group action would probably be deterred by the January 6 convictions.The two assassination attempts against Trump could inspire copycats or retaliation, the agency said. “Real or perceived mistakes or discrepancies in the electoral process” could also play into broader election fraud narratives that stir up domestic violent extremists. Issues like mass migration could drive these extremists.“Widespread or high-profile civil unrest, mass immigration, or crimes by migrants or minorities perceived as threatening the United States may drive some DVEs [domestic violent extremists] to mobilize to violence to ‘save America’ from perceived threats,” the memo said. “For example, online users discussed the potential of a sweeping Executive Order that would have given some migrants citizenship, with one user stating, ‘Biden does that executive order, we shoot all democrat officials. And the supporting federal agents.’”Another DHS and FBI intelligence bulletin obtained by Property of the People from early October said the threat was heightened until inauguration day in January 2025 and extremists could use tactics such as “physical attacks, threats of violence, swatting and doxing, mailing or otherwise delivering suspicious items, arson, and other means of property destruction”. The memo also said there was potential for violence based on grievances related to immigration, LGBTQIA+ rights and abortion access.Surveys have shown increased support for the use of violence to achieve political goals. When support for violence is more mainstream, it can nudge volatile people who are considering taking action over the edge because they believe they are fulfilling a popular mandate, Pape said.“There’s a political cause that they sense from the media is popular, and then they want some of that popularity and fame for themselves, so they do a violent act in the name of that political cause,” Pape said.The risk of violence doesn’t automatically dissipate after the election. But while a Trump loss could inspire his supporters to take action, it could also release the hold he has on the right.“When you have a very influential leader who acts as the center of gravity for a movement that engages in threats and even violence, when the leader recedes from you, that center of gravity has a way of dissolving, and the problems have a way of dissipating,” Hughes said. “So there is a possibility that the outcome of this election will in itself improve the problem somewhat.” More

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      ‘Leaning into the whiteness’: journalist Paola Ramos on why some Latinos have turned to the far right

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      When the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist and disparaging comments about Latinos and referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”, at a Donald Trump rally in New York on Sunday, it was met with outrage from many Latino politicians, voters and celebrities. Still, those comments did not deter some Republican Latinos from affirming their support for Trump.“If you were already supporting Trump, I don’t think this is a comment that will make you reconsider that choice,” said the journalist Paola Ramos, the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America.However, Ramos said that she has talked to some Latino voters who are now realizing that Trump’s xenophobia could include them: “The question is for those that are independent, or those that were flirting with the idea of voting for Trump. The biggest difference is that the narrative, for the first time in a while, shifted from being targeted at immigrants to suddenly being targeted, not just directly at Latinos, but even US citizens. That has sort of awakened a lot of people for the first time to be like, ‘Oh, wait a second.’“We’ve been so used to pinpointing a narrative at the border, on immigrants, on migrants, on undocumented people, and then suddenly the conversation has shifted to people within us and inside us.”

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      In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump has gained inroads from Latino voters, a base that was once reliably Democratic. While the majority of Latinos favor Kamala Harris, the shift is pronounced among Latino men, with 44% saying that they support Trump, up from 37% in 2020, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat political shift toward far-right sentiments in Latino communities can be attributed to tribalism, traditionalism and trauma, Ramos writes in Defectors. Tribalism refers to internalised racism, while traditionalism is based on conservative moral values and the ongoing effects of colonialism, and trauma comes from grappling with political upheaval in Latin America. Additionally, fantasy heritage, a concept coined by the civil rights activist and historian Carey McWilliams in the late 1940s in which Latinos whitewash their Indigenous or Black roots in favor of their Spanish ancestry, draws some Latinos to white supremacist values.“One of the entry points for far right Latinos into the world of white supremacy and white nationalism is by leaning into the Spanish heritage, leaning into the whiteness,” Ramos said. For instance, she interviewed Mexican American border vigilantes who held anti-immigration beliefs because they distanced themselves from their immigrant roots.Ramos also spoke with African Dominican Trump supporters in the Bronx who highlight their Spanish ancestry over their African roots, although they are racialized as Black in the US. “But in their minds, because of fantasy heritage, they see themselves more aligned racially with Trump’s America than they do with Blackness, and so I think that that’s where Trump is able to tap into some of that racial grievance.”View image in fullscreenThe path toward democracy in Latin American countries has often involved an authoritarian strongman, Ramos writes in her book. In the late 1970s, for instance, 17 out of 20 Latin American nations were ruled by dictators. Ramos interviewed Eulalia Jimenez, the leader of the conservative parents rights group Moms for Liberty, and Anthony Aguero, a border vigilante in Texas, whose political trauma manifested into far-right sentiments.Trauma is also what drew some supporters, such as the Cuban American Gabriel Garcia, a Proud Boys member, to join the January 6 insurrection after Trump lost the election. Garcia’s parents, who were unaccompanied minors airlifted out of Cuba during a covert US program in the 1960s, instilled in him a fear of communism and conservative sentiments that would inform his political beliefs. “At a time when democracy seems to feel a little messy for some folks,” Ramos said, “the elements of authoritarianism [aren’t] as scary for some Latinos.”In order to win back Latino votes, Ramos said, progressives must understand the complicated and rich nature of Latino identity and their quest for belonging in the US – which is all the more important now, as the country is projected to become a majority minority nation in 2045.Younger Latinos over the past decade have grown emboldened to challenge the Democratic party. “Part of that requires a level of curiosity to understand why internalized racism works so well, and why colorism is so present, and why anti-Blackness and these anti-immigrant sentiments can really manifest themselves,” Ramos said. “And I think part of that is just having conversations around identity that I think in the party they haven’t had.”Since her book launched in September, Ramos has talked to Latino voters while touring cities from New York to Los Angeles, an experience she described as “group therapy”. Some readers shared the pain that they felt of having undocumented immigrants as well as Trump supporters in their family, or young Latinos seeking acceptance from their religious families. “They’ve been really emotional, really personal, and I think painful too.” She urged progressives to understand “the pain that a lot of people are going through with not feeling a big solidarity right now”.While it is easy to see Trump supporters as radical, Ramos said that a deeper understanding of Latin American history is crucial to regaining the trust of Latino voters who are disillusioned by politics. Toward the end of Defectors, Ramos illustrated a future in which Latinos embrace their complex history and identity in a quest for collective liberation. “In that future, we finally wake up freer,” Ramos concluded in the book. “Welcome to the year 2045.” More

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      How a rightwing machine stopped Arkansas’s ballot to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans

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      Theresa Lee was 22 weeks pregnant last year when her doctor confirmed the news: she had no amniotic fluid and the baby she was expecting, who she had named Cielle, was not growing.In many states across the US, Lee would have been advised that terminating the doomed pregnancy was an option, and possibly the safest course to protect her own life.But in the state of Arkansas, Lee was told she had just one choice: wait it out.A doctor who had confirmed the diagnosis was apologetic but insistent: the state’s laws meant he could be fined or jailed if he performed an abortion. In the wake of the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Arkansas activated a so-called trigger law that made all abortion illegal except if a woman was in an acute medical emergency and facing death. There are no other exceptions: not for rape victims, minors or fatal fetal anomalies.For the next five weeks, on a weekly basis, doctors knew Lee – already a mother to one-year-old Camille at the time – was at risk because she had placenta previa, which could cause bleeding and death. But she returned regularly to her OB-GYN’s office to be scanned, waiting to hear if Cielle’s fetal heartbeat had stopped.“I was having to prepare for if I passed. Me and my husband had to have a lot of really tough conversations about all the outcomes, just to prepare in case I wasn’t going to be there for my husband and my daughter,” she said.Lee never seriously considered leaving the state to get an abortion because the cost seemed exorbitant, childcare would be an issue, and she was uncertain about whether she could face criminal charges once she came home. None of her doctors ever suggested it, either.“I would have had an abortion, 100%. I am very much a realist. I knew she was going to pass. Having to carry her week after week and knowing she was going to pass, it was a horrific waiting game,” she said.Once Cielle stopped moving, and no fetal heartbeat was detected, she traveled three hours to the UAMS hospital in Little Rock from her home in Fort Smith because doctors thought delivering at the larger hospital would be safer in case of complications.There, she was induced and delivered a stillbirth. Luckily, the labor proceeded without any incident.“When I came in they had blood ready just in case. I remember seeing it out of the corner of my eye,” Lee said.The delivery room seemed prepared especially for women like Lee. She saw signs on the wall that said her baby was in heaven.When she was told the cost of transferring Cielle’s remains back home would be more than $1,000, she opted to take her in her car by herself. She held the casket in her arms the whole way.A chance for changeVoters in 10 states will cast ballots next week to expand their state’s abortion protections or maintain the status quo. Arkansans won’t be among them.But for seven weeks this summer, it looked like Arkansas voters would have an opportunity to change the state’s constitution to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.There are few places in the US where it is more dangerous to be a pregnant woman than in Arkansas. The state had the worst maternal mortality rate in the country, according to data collected by the CDC from 2018-2021. It showed that about 44 mothers die for every 100,000 live births. An Arkansas maternal mortality review board, which reviews such data, found that 95% of pregnancy-related deaths in that period were considered preventable. The Guardian’s reporting has not identified specific cases in which the state’s ban on abortion has led directly to a death, but abortion rights advocates believe the risks are high.In July, a dedicated network of about 800 grassroots organizers in Arkansas had collected the necessary signatures to get a measure on the 5 November ballot that – if passed – would have changed Arkansas’s constitution to protect the right to abortion for any reason up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It also would have legalized exceptions for abortion after 18 weeks, including in cases involving rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and life and health of the mother.It would have saved a woman like Lee from facing potentially fatal outcomes, and emotional and financial distress.View image in fullscreenThe measure did not provide the same rights that existed under Roe – which protected abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks – a fact that organizers said kept national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU from getting involved in the effort. But organizers believed that it was a measure that even conservative voters would support. After all, voters in neighboring Kansas, another Republican stronghold, overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights when its ballot was put to voters in a referendum in 2022.To the dismay and shock of the grassroots organizers, however, the Arkansas initiative was ultimately quashed before it ever reached voters. A paperwork error by organizers prompted a legal challenge by Arkansas’s secretary of state, John Thurston, who rejected the abortion amendment. On 22 August, the Arkansas supreme court upheld his decision.For Arkansas women, there is no end in sight.A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise tells a more complicated story than just a bureaucratic screw-up, revealing a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure it never got to voters: a reclusive donor who has helped shape the anti-abortion movement across the US; the inner circle of the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has proclaimed Arkansas “the most pro-life state in the country”; and judges who are supposed to be non-partisan but are deeply aligned with the state’s Republican party.“Everyone knew there was going to be a pretty organized and well-funded effort to keep it off the ballot, said Ashley Hudson, a rising Democratic star who represents west Little Rock in the Arkansas state legislature. “Is it collusion, directly? I don’t know. But I think there are a lot of people with aligned interests.”Changing the rulesThe atmosphere was euphoric on 5 July 2024 when grassroots organizers and activists marched into the domed capitol building in Little Rock armed with dozens of boxes of signed petitions. They had accomplished the seemingly impossible: collecting more than 100,000 signatures across 50 counties in Arkansas in support of getting the abortion rights measure on November’s ballot.For grassroots organizers like Kristin Stuart, the effort had been all consuming. Stuart had previously worked as an escort at Little Rock’s only surgical abortion clinic, helping patients get through the throng of protesters who were usually assembled outside. The clinic no longer performs abortions but is used as resource center for women looking for financial support or information about how to get abortion pills from out of state.She was motivated to try to change the state’s constitution because she believed the ban was deeply unjust. Stuart was particularly incensed by circumstances that are especially dire for poor women and children in Arkansas, like the fact that it remains the only state in the nation that has not expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage to give poor women health insurance for a year after they give birth.“There was a small group of us that worked it like it was a full time job,” she said. The campaign, led by Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), divided the state into 50 clusters. There were cluster leaders and county leaders. Volunteers were trained three times a week. For a signature to be valid, they needed a person’s name, address, birth date, the date they signed and city. They also had to make sure the signer was a registered voter.“We knew we had to be perfect. We knew we had to do everything correctly, because they would be looking for anything to disqualify it,” Stuart said.They sometimes faced harassment, including protesters who could be “loud and mean and scary” who tried to stop people from signing, Stuart said. There were moles in chat and message groups where hundreds of volunteers were communicating. Sometimes the locations where canvassers were planning to collect signatures would be published ahead of time by Arkansas Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group. Organizers had to adjust the ways they communicated to adapt.But what volunteers discovered, said Lauren Cowles, was that there were “blue dots” in even the reddest counties of the state.View image in fullscreen“We found people who were desperate to connect. There are a lot of people out there who believe women should have the right to choose,” Cowles said. Voters were also being educated. Many did not understand that the total ban did not include any exceptions, including for rape.“There were many months when I did not believe we could get enough signatures. The last few weeks before the deadline, we saw such a surge of urgency,” Stuart said.Hudson, the Democratic legislator, believes the Republican effort to stop the measure from succeeding began in 2023, when Republicans first proposed an amendment to the Arkansas constitution that would make it significantly more difficult to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. Instead of calling for signatures to be collected from at least 15 counties, as is stated in the Arkansas constitution, Republicans wanted to increase the number to 50 counties. Voters rejected the proposal in a referendum. But the Republican legislature passed a law to that effect anyway.“That was done in anticipation of a ballot like this,” says Hudson. It was a difficult challenge but organizers got the signatures they needed. In a move that would later prove to be a fatal flaw, leaders hired paid canvassers in the final weeks of the campaign to help get the petitions over the line.The chicken tycoonRonnie Cameron, a poultry billionaire from Arkansas, is one of the most important rightwing power players you’ve never heard of. While Republican megadonors like Harlan Crow, Charles Koch and Dick Uihlein have become well known as big conservative donors, Cameron, a conservative evangelical Christian, has shied away from the spotlight, even as he has donated tens of millions of dollars to anti-abortion causes nationwide.According to public records, Cameron was the largest single donor in the fight against the abortion amendment, giving about $465,000 to groups that fought the initiative. This included $250,000 to a group called Stronger Arkansas, which was formed to fight the petition as well as a separate ballot initiative that would have increased rights to medical marijuana.Stronger Arkansas was run by Chris Caldwell, a consultant who is Sanders’s closest political adviser and served as her campaign manager in 2022. Two other officials with close ties to Sanders served as vice-chair and treasurer of the group.View image in fullscreenCameron, the chairman of the chicken company Mountaire Farms, also donated about $215,000 to Family Council Action Committee 2024, a group formed by Jerry Cox, the conservative head of the Arkansas Family Council, which is staunchly anti-abortion. The conservative advocacy group was accused in June 2024 of using intimidation tactics when it published a list of names of paid canvassers who were working on the abortion petition. The names were obtained after the Family Council obtained them via a freedom of information request.AFLG said in a statement at the time that the publication of canvassers’ names put its team at great risk for harassment, stalking and other dangers.“The Family Council’s tactics are ugly, transparently menacing, and unworthy of Arkansas. We won’t be intimidated,” it said.In a 2020 New Yorker report by the investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Cameron was described as a reclusive businessman who had donated $3m to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy in 2016. The report found that Trump had weakened federal oversight of the poultry industry even as he accepted millions of dollars in donations from Cameron and other industry figures. Cameron, whose grandfather founded Mountaire, also served on Trump’s advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact.Cameron and his wife, Nina, reportedly attend Fellowship Bible church, which the New Yorker called a hub of social conservatism that lists condemnation of homosexuality as a key belief. Cameron also founded the Jesus Fund, and is a funder of both that private group and another called the Jesus Fund Foundation. According to public records, the Jesus Fund has donated $159m over the last decade to the National Christian Foundation, a highly influential multibillion-dollar charity that is considered the largest single funder of the anti-abortion movement.View image in fullscreenAccording to Opensecrets, Cameron and his wife are considered the 28th largest contributors to outside spending groups in this election cycle. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the couple’s donations is the Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, who has called for fetuses to be given constitutional rights. Cameron also donated $1m to the pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July.Nina Cameron was reached by the Guardian at her home but she declined to answer questions about her political activity.A spokesperson for Mountaire did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Family Council did not respond to a request for comment.A staple and a photocopyFive days after grassroots activists celebrated their milestone on 5 July, reality hit.Thurston, Arkansas’s secretary of state, who had participated in the state’s March for Life, an anti-abortion rally on state grounds, and had won the endorsement of Arkansas Right to Life in 2022, challenged the legality of the petition. In a claim that would be hotly contested, Thurston said AFLG had not submitted the documents that were required to name the paid canvassers and confirm they had been properly trained. He rendered 14,143 signatures they had collected in the final stretch invalid, leaving the final count at 88,000. They were a few thousand short of the 90,704 they needed under Arkansas’s legal requirements. Thurston offered no “cure period” for organizers to fix the issue. Abortion was off the ballot.Thurston seemed to be quibbling over a staple and a photocopy: AFLG had already submitted the required paperwork related to training a week earlier, but it should have stapled a copy of it to the petition it submitted on the due date.Privately, some grassroots organizers seethed at what they saw as an unforgivable mistake by AFLG leaders following a grueling campaign. Others say that even if the paperwork had been perfect, Thurston would have found another issue to challenge.In legal briefs and statements, AFLG argued that the 2016 secretary of state had counted signatures for other ballot measures even after those organizers failed to submit some paperwork. Thurston’s personal views on abortion, they said, meant he was discriminating against them. They also claimed that they had been verbally assured by Thurston’s assistant director of elections, Josh Bridges, that their paperwork was in order.Sarah Huckabee Sanders seized on the decision. In a post on X, the governor posted a photograph of Thurston’s letter and wrote “the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent”.Then the matter went to court.The judgesJudges in Arkansas are supposed to be non-partisan. But when Sanders announced in June 2023 that Cody Hiland, a former US attorney who served as the head of the Arkansas Republican party, would be appointed to the state’s supreme court following a vacancy, she boasted that her pick would give Arkansas a “conservative majority” for the first time.“I know it will have the same effect on our state as it has had on our country,” she said at the time, in a reference to the US supreme court.View image in fullscreenHiland would become one of four justices to strike down the abortion amendment on 22 August. The majority decision, written by the justice Rhonda Wood – who counts Ron Cameron’s Mountaire as one of the largest individual donors to her election campaign and had months earlier been endorsed by Arkansas’s state Republican party – found that Thurston had “correctly refused” to count the signatures by paid canvassers because the organizers had failed to file the necessary training certificate.The August ruling faced strong criticism, including from an unlikely source: a Washington DC lawyer named Adam Unikowsky, a parter in the supreme court practice at Jenner & Block, and former law clerk to the late conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia.“The Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision is wrong,” Unikowsky wrote in a lengthy post on his legal newsletter. The majority’s decision, Unikowsky wrote, said that the allegedly missing paperwork had to be stapled to the organizers petition. Except, he said, Arkansas law does not say that.The three dissenting judges made the point in their dissent, saying Thurston had “made up out of whole cloth” that such a requirement existed. The dissenting judges said the majority’s endorsement of Thurston’s rationale was inexplicable.View image in fullscreenWhen AFLG argued that it had relied on Thurston’s office’s alleged verbal assurance that their paperwork was in order, the court rejected the argument in their majority opinion saying his comments did not change the law.Unikowsky also argued that Arkansas law made it clear that AFLG should have been offered time to correct its mistake. “Taking a step back, I have to dwell on the injustice of it all. Arkansans are being disenfranchised,” he wrote. He also noted that conservative groups who had made similar errors in their own ballot initiatives had not faced pushback.Sanders celebrated the supreme court’s ruling. “Proud I helped build the first conservative supreme court majority in the history of Arkansas and today that court upheld the rule of law, and with it, the right to life,” she said.The governor has long made touting the state’s so-called “pro-life” stance a priority. In March 2023 she signed a bill to create a “monument to the unborn” near the Arkansas state capitol.Shortly after the judges’ made their decision, the Pike county Republican committee issued a flyer for a political event in October. It featured a picture of Wood, the justice, alongside Thurston. They were both scheduled to appear at the Republican event. Wood reportedly “panicked” over the flyer and had the Republicans remove her picture but still planned to attend.Organizers say they will probably try again in 2026. Sanders will also be up for re-election that year.‘There is no way we can stay here’Looking back, Danielle – an Arkansas resident – realized she had eloped and closed on a house in Little Rock in June 2022, in the same week that Roe fell. A native of Philadelphia, Danielle (who asked the Guardian not to use her last name) and her husband, a doctor, moved to Arkansas so that he could work in underserved communities.They tried to conceive for months before turning to IVF. Danielle quit her job and commuted back and forth to Texas to receive treatment – her options were limited in Arkansas – and ultimately got pregnant. She was 18 weeks pregnant when a routine scan revealed that there was no fluid around the fetus, which also had no kidneys and no stomach. The pregnancy was not viable, even though the fetus had a heartbeat.When she was told by her doctor in Arkansas that her only option after the Dobbs decision was carrying the pregnancy to term, she and her husband knew they needed to find another solution. Even her IVF doctor in Texas urgently advised her to terminate the pregnancy. If she ended up needing a C-section during labor, it would take a long time before she would be physically ready to try again, he said.View image in fullscreen“My husband and I scrambled and got the earliest appointment in the closest place we could, which was in Illinois,” Danielle says. It was a six-and-a-half-hour drive and a two-day medical procedure. They stayed in a hotel for two nights.Danielle knows she was relatively fortunate to have the means to leave the state, unlike many women in Arkansas who lack resources. She and her husband also understood her life was at risk, even though it was never made explicitly clear. Her local hospital had only offered “palliative care” for the fetus, which meant scans every two-three weeks to check on its fetal heartbeat – not the kind of care Danielle knew she would need to avoid the risk of becoming sick and septic.After terminating her pregnancy in April 2024 and returning to Arkansas, Danielle got involved in the grassroots effort to collect signatures for the abortion ballot initiative. She remembers how one protester called her a “murderer” for collecting signatures. The person doing the shouting was an anesthesiologist she recognized who had attended one of her husband’s lectures and worked at the UAMS hospital in Little Rock.She went to the statehouse when the signatures were turned in, full of hope. She was photographed by a friend that day holding a sign that read: “I deserved better.”“We felt so accomplished when we turned those in. I was so excited. I felt very triumphant. We did this in a state where it’s really hard to do,” she said.When the supreme court of Arkansas ruled against them, Danielle knew she would have to leave. Then she became pregnant again with the one IVF-created embryo she had left.View image in fullscreen“I said there is no way we can stay here and my husband agreed. It’s not a safe place for me to be,” she told the Guardian. “We cannot raise a daughter here.”There were things about life in Arkansas – like their nice home – that she loved. But now they are moving back to Philadelphia.“I think I was naive moving from a big city where I never would have thought twice about what I could do with my own body. It’s a shame. It’s so sad.”Theresa Lee, the woman who was forced to deliver a stillbirth, echoed Danielle’s disappointment. “You want to believe that we as citizens have a chance at voting for what we believe in, but with the precedent set by the supreme court in the state of Arkansas, it’s clear we don’t,” she said.“I do not desire to have another pregnancy in Arkansas. I don’t feel safe and I don’t feel cared for as a woman in our state. What happened to me can happen to any woman and it has. Arkansas is a dangerous place to be pregnant.” More

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      in Elections

      Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’

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      The founder of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that played a major role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and was memorably instructed by Donald Trump to “stand back and stand by”, has told the makers of a Trump documentary: “We want to make America hate again.”Gavin McInnes, the UK-born British Canadian citizen who co-founded Vice magazine and was influential in the New York hipster scene of the early 2000s before becoming a far-right militia figure, also claimed to the BBC that his group wasn’t responsible for what happened that day.“It was you,” he told the makers of the documentary, which has aired on the BBC’s Panorama strand. “If anyone should apologise … it should be the corrupt leftwing media, and I’ll accept your apology now if you want to do it.”The program – Trump: A Second Chance? – talks to ardent Trump supporters about their enduring support for the New York property developer and reality TV show figure who faced two impeachment inquiries during four years in office and has been indicted in four separate criminal cases since, including being found guilty of 34 felony counts.Polls suggest an exceptionally tight US presidential race, with the final few days of campaigning before next week’s vote characterized by Democrats’ claims that a second Trump term would plunge the US into a period of neo-fascism.At a packed Trump rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, the speakers rotated between patriotism and grievance, including a podcaster who called the unincorporated US territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, made lewd comments about Latinos, depicted Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers.McInnes, designated a “terrorist entity” by the Canadian government and described by Vanity Fair as “one of our era’s most troubling extremists”, was not at the January 6 protest. But about 50 members of the Proud Boy group faced charges for their part in the insurrection, which was staged to prevent the certification of the 2020 election.The Proud Boys chair, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, 39, of Miami, Florida, was sentenced to 22 years in prison last year after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the sentences that the Proud Boy members received reflected “the danger their crimes pose to our democracy” and Tarrio had “learned that the consequence of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power”.McInnes resigned from the Proud Boys in November 2018 after 10 members were charged in connection with a brawl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But in 2022, he was pictured in a black hoodie embroidered with the gold Proud Boy logo.McInnes said on his Get Off My Lawn podcast that he was wearing the Proud Boy regalia “as an homage to our brothers behind bars”.Last month, McInnes was scheduled to speak at dinner hosted by Uncensored America, a student organization at the University of South Carolina. The invitation misspelled Kamala Harris’s first name in a sexually suggestive way, the news station WIS 10 reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcInnes’s planned appearance at the event sparked controversy over free speech on campus. A petition protesting against the event argued it contributed to “overall negative environment that the university continues to allow”.In response, McInnes said he would not be the one bringing hate to the event, and repeated the sentiment he offered to Panorama.“If you’re looking for violence you’re looking on the wrong side of the political spectrum. The left are the violent ones. They burnt down this country for two years straight. We had one riot on January 6,” he said.He said the dinner, a “roast” in colloquial terms, was set to “make fun of what could be the worst president in American history”, referring to Harris’s candidacy.The impending election is predicted in polls to fall along gender lines. Polls show men are more likely to say efforts to promote gender equality have gone too far and plan to vote for Trump. Women are more apt to say those efforts haven’t gone far enough, and plan to vote for Harris. The margins for each are split roughly 60-40. More

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      ‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

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      Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.From the media to far-right conspiracyThe materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”View image in fullscreenClean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting,” she said.From disinformation to violent threatsBeirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Joe Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit.The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFueling paranoiaOver the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.View image in fullscreen@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.‘Millions of illegals’On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”. More