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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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      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

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      in US Politics

      Trump Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth’s books foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric

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      Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, who has the crusader motto “deus vult” tattooed on his arm, has put bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric at the center of several of his published books, according to a Guardian review of the materials.Hegseth, especially in 2020’s American Crusade, depicts Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in “great replacement”-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the US; and idolises medieval crusaders.Experts say that Hegseth’s view of Islam is riven with falsehoods, misconceptions and far-right conspiracy theories. Yet Hegseth, if his nomination is successful, will head the world’s largest military force at a time of conflict and instability in the Middle East.The Guardian emailed Hegseth and the Trump transition team for comment and received no response.The Guardian has previously reported that in his 2020 book Hegseth calls for an “American Crusade”, targeting both “internal” or “domestic enemies” and the enemies of Israel. Hegseth also connected the two, writing: “We have domestic enemies, and we have international allies … it’s time to reach out to people who value the same principles, relearn lessons from them, and form stronger bonds.”‘False, totally wrong’In American Crusade, Hegseth presents the medieval crusades as a model for Christian-Muslim relations, but one historian of the period says his presentation of the history of that period is “just totally wrong”.In a chapter entitled Make the Crusade Great Again, Hegseth writes: “By the eleventh century, Christianity in the Mediterranean region, including the holy sites in Jerusalem, was so besieged by Islam that Christians had a stark choice: to wage defensive war or continue to allow Islam’s expansion and face existential war at home in Europe,” adding: “The leftists of today would have argued for ‘diplomacy’ … We know how that would have turned out.”Hegseth continues: “The pope, the Catholic Church, and European Christians chose to fight – and the crusades were born,” and “Pope Urban II urged the faithful to fight the Muslims with his famous battle cry on their lips: ‘Deus vult!,’ or ‘God wills it!’”Hegseth has a tattoo of the same crusader slogan, which is also associated with Christian nationalism, white supremacist and other far-right tendencies.For Hegseth, the crusaders’ short-lived victories in the Holy Land means they can be credited with safeguarding modern values. “Enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice under the law? Thank a crusader,” having written the same thing again earlier in the chapter.Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and the author, with David Perry, of Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.In a telephone conversation, he said that Hegseth’s picture of Muslim encroachment in the 11th century was misplaced.“There were absolutely no incursions into mainland Europe,” he said, adding “If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well. So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe.”On Hegseth’s presentation of the crusades as a victory for the west against Islam, Gabriele said: “The Crusaders lost. They lost everything.“The idea that they kind of like emerged victorious is absolutely false.“This narrative of the crusades as a defensive war, where if the Christians didn’t launch this offensive towards Jerusalem that Europe would be overrun has been a bog-standard narrative on the right: it’s something that was espoused by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, in 2011 and by the Christchurch shooter a few years ago.”On Hegseth drawing a direct line between the crusaders and the modern west, Gabriele said: “It’s the worst kind of simplistic thinking,” adding: “Anybody who tells you these simple stories is selling something.”“The British were invaded, and they didn’t even know it”Elsewhere in American Crusade, Hegseth repeatedly characterizes Muslim immigration to Europe as an “invasion” in a way that mimics racist “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories about immigrants displacing white populations.At one point he tries to connect – an expert says falsely – an aspect of Islamic history with the purported “capture” of Europe.Hegseth writes: “In Islamist circles, there’s a principle known as hegira,” and then claims: “This term refers to the nonviolent capture of a non-Muslim country.”Hegseth writes: “Hegira is a cultural, physical, psychological, political, and eventually religious takeover. History is replete with examples of this; and because history is not over, it’s happening in the most inconceivable places right now.”Hegseth posits the US as an example where, he claims: “Radical mosques and schools are allowed to operate. Religious police control certain sections of many towns. Sharia councils dot the underground landscape. Pervasive political correctness prevents dissent against disastrous policies such as open borders and nonassimilation.”Adducing proof, Hegseth bizarrely writes: “Take the British cities of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Blackburn, Sheffield, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale. What do they all have in common? They have all had Muslim mayors.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor Hegseth, this shows: “The British were invaded, and they didn’t even know it. In one generation – absent radical policy change – the United Kingdom will be neither united nor a Western kingdom. The United Kingdom is done for.”He adds: “The same can be said across Europe, especially following the disastrous open-borders, pro-migrant policies of the past few decades. Countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands threw open their doors to Muslim ‘refugees’ and will never be the same because of it.”According to Hegseth, countries that do not restrict Muslim immigration ignore that “Islam itself is not compatible with Western forms of government. On the other hand, countries that want to stay free … are fighting like hell to block Islam’s spread.”Jasmin Zine is professor of Sociology and Muslim Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the author of a book-length report, The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North.Zine said Hegseth’s narrative appeared to be an “Islamophobic conspiracy theory distorting the practice of ‘hijra’ or the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and early Muslims from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD looking for safety from persecution”, which “is now being used to promote the xenophobic idea of a Muslim ‘takeover’ of the west”.Zine added: “These ideas are also linked to white nationalist demographic replacement conspiracies about Muslim birth rates in the west (AKA ‘demographic jihad’) and scare stories about ‘creeping shariah’, which have spawned retaliatory ‘crusader’ narratives in far-right subcultures.”‘Hard-core leftism provides the best gateway for Islamism’At other points in American Crusade, Hegseth appears to try to scapegoat Muslims for familiar conservative grievances, in narratives that suggest Muslims and leftists are colluding to undermine the US.In case of a Biden victory in 2020, Hegseth predicted that an “anti-Israel and pro-Islamist foreign policy” would be introduced along with “speech codes instead of free speech, bye-bye Second Amendment” and “naked socialism, government-run everything, Common Core education for everyone, a tiny military, and abortion on demand – even postbirth”.Hegseth also tries to connect his narrative with gripes about supposed censorship on social media platforms. “Who are the first people being banned on social media?” he asks, answering: “Not intolerant jihadists or filthy leftists but outspoken conservatives.”At times he seems to admire what he imagines to be the thoroughgoing religious zealotry of Muslims compared with an increasingly secular west.“Almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to, and learning to read from, the Quran,” Hegseth writes. “Contrast this with our secular American schools – in which the Bible is nowhere to be found – and you’ll understand why Muslims’ worldview is more coherent than ours.”At another point in the book he engages in a lengthy diatribe about the Council for American Islamic Relations (Cair), which has been a bugbear for US conservatives since the “war on terror”, and claims Democrats are helping the organization cement a radical “Islamist” agenda.“Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and [Cair] have advanced the radical mission of Islamism for decades,” Hegseth claims, adding: “In the past two years alone, more than one hundred members of Congress – including Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Rashida Tlaib, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar – have signed letters endorsing CAIR.”Hegseth then singles out “Socialist Bernie Sanders”, who he claims is “a favorite among Muslim Americans due to his support for Palestinian causes and distaste for Israel”.Sanders has repeatedly publicly supported Israel’s right to defend itself, even after the commencement of the current war in Gaza, while also saying: “Innocent Palestinians also have a right to life and security,” and calling for humanitarian pauses and ceasefires, and last week leading efforts to restrict the sale of offensive weapons to Israel on the grounds that it was in violation of the international laws of war.Some of Sanders’s positions since 7 October 2023 have drawn criticism from the left, who have seen them as insufficiently critical of Israel and insufficiently supportive of Palestine.Hegseth meanwhile, as previously reported in the Guardian, is unconditionally supportive of Israel, and has appeared to argue that the US military should ignore the Geneva conventions in favor of “winning our wars according to our own rules”.According to Hegseth in American Crusade, though: “Leaders of CAIR speak very highly of Bernie because his hard-core leftism provides the best gateway for their Islamism.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘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