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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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      in US Politics

      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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      in US Politics

      ‘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

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      We are witnessing the making of a fascist president in real time | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “But stupidity is not enough,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. The facts must be eliminated. “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” Followers must “forget that one has ever believed the contrary”. Memory must be erased. “This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” The past, like the facts, must be reinvented. “For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”Donald Trump keeps saying that if he is elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”At the very moment Trump delivered his remarks highlighting his campaign for a dictatorship, the Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg confirming his motive. He reported that Trump, as president, had rebuked the US military command, stating: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”Then, Trump’s former chief of staff, the former general John Kelly, stepped from behind the curtain in an interview with the New York Times. “Certainly,” he said, “the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Kelly added, the Times wrote, that “in his opinion, Mr Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law”.The warning of the generals against Trump’s fascism is unanimous among those who have served most closely with him. The former chair of the joint chiefs, the retired general Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward, in his new book War, that Trump was “fascist to the core”. Trump’s secretary of defense, the former general James Mattis, emailed Woodward to express his agreement with Milley that Trump was “the most dangerous person ever”, and “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.” It’s Defcon 1.In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump’s despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his “enemies”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn’t mean it. There is no reason to take him seriously. In any case “the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump”. The “fascist meme” is just partisan propaganda. “The answer is that most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances.”Not satisfied with absurdly dismissing Trump’s unapologetic statement, the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to airbrush the present and the past in the Orwellian tradition of “doublethink”. Within 48 hours, however, its dismissal of the supposedly “Democratic claim” about “the fascist meme” was swept away by Kelly. Having discarded Milley’s and Mattis’s earlier statements, the Journal must have figured it could deposit Kelly’s as well in the burn bag for facts in order to be able to embroider its sophistry. But, at least for the moment, creating doublethink is a demanding job.An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president – his “first term”, as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he’s already elected to his second. Conjuring up an air of inevitability is another demoralizing Newspeak tactic. Trump’s threats, when they are not dismissed as mere rhetoric, are too generally reported as if they are something new, that they exist solely in the vacuum of this campaign, and that he has no past. Trump’s history is consigned to the memory hole.View image in fullscreenBut Trump’s presidency was a rehearsal for fascism. Quite apart from his record of kleptocracy, allegedly pervasive corruption and obstructions of justice, pardons of criminal associates and dangling of pardons to insure their silence, contempt for the law, maniacal obsession with Hitler, who “did some good things”, scorn for military service (“suckers” and “losers”), worship of foreign tyrants, congenital lying, paranoid conspiracy mongering, disdain for climate science, willful neglect of public health, ignoring warnings and spreading falsehoods in the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands, the organization and incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and indifference to the near-assassination of his vice-president by a mob he had unleashed (“So what?”), Trump systematically abused the Department of Justice to investigate, harass and prosecute his “enemies within”. Trump’s current rage is hardly a new threat. In a second term he intends to smash through the constraints that inhibited him in his first.The Just Security website of the New York University School of Law reports: “The cascade of election coverage, commentary and speculation about how Donald Trump might use the power of the presidency to retaliate against his perceived political enemies has overlooked important context: Trump has done just that, while he was president.” Just Security distilled “A Dozen Times Trump Pushed to Prosecute His Perceived Enemies”, but there were many more.“The saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the justice department,” Trump said on 2 November 2017. “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated.”Trump’s years in office showed him on a learning curve of fascism. He saw democracy as a plot against him that he had to break down. Like a hotel burglar jimmying door locks, through trial and error he discovered how to turn the keys. He pushed and prodded looking for weaknesses and loopholes. He located the places where he encountered resistance. He felt for the limits and how to go beyond them. He found out who would deter him and who would enable him. He calculated the price of everyone. He discovered those whose craven ambition would serve him. He realized that ideology was a tool he could use like a crowbar. He absorbed the lessons of crime and punishment in order to commit greater crimes without punishment. His administration was a school for the making of a fascist.Trump was frustrated that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself so that he could not kill the former FBI director Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign connections to the Russians. The Mueller report stated: “According to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton …”After publicly attacking the justice department for not investigating “Crooked Hillary”, Trump succeeded in intimidating Sessions into naming a special counsel to investigate the already debunked conspiracy theory that Uranium One, a Canadian company, made a deal with the Russians in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. A grand jury was empaneled, issued subpoenas and prosecutors concluded there was no there there. But it was not until two years later that the case was closed without any charges on 15 January 2021, five days before Trump left office.Trump blamed the FBI for the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign. His paranoia morphed into ever widening conspiracy theories about the “deep state”. He fired the FBI director, James Comey, for not exonerating him. He forced the firing of the deputy director, Andrew McCabe, on 16 March 2018, two days before McCabe’s scheduled retirement. The justice department opened an investigation into whether McCabe illegally leaked information about the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation probes. The federal judge overseeing the McCabe case, Reggie Walton, a George W Bush appointee, stated: “I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted. I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road …”The case against McCabe was dropped without charges on 14 February 2020, and his back pay and pension were restored.On 20 May 2018, Trump demanded a justice department investigation into a “deep state” conspiracy theory going all the way up to Barack Obama, in which Trump stated that “the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes” – “Spygate”. An investigation was opened. But on 11 December 2019, the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued a report stating that, contrary to Trump’s assertions, there was “no evidence that the FBI attempted to place any [confidential human sources] within the Trump campaign … ”On 23 August 2018, Trump declared that his appointment of Sessions was a terrible mistake. In response, Sessions issued a statement: “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” The next day Trump tweeted a long list of his people he designated as enemies whom he demanded Session should investigate. “Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting!” On 8 November, he forced Sessions to resign. The new attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, a compliant mid-level rightwing operative from Iowa, was a stand-in until William Barr took over in February 2019.Barr, who had been attorney general under George HW Bush, was advertised as a conservative Republican institutionalist. He knew how to game the system for the gamester in the interest of his own game. The cultural reactionary, on the board of the reactionary Opus Dei organization’s Washington DC front, the Catholic Information Center, believed he was using the depraved Trump in a crusade for the restoration of traditional morality. More importantly, Trump was the useful idiot to stock the federal bench with Federalist Society-stamped judges. Leonard Leo, chair of the Federalist Society, served on the Opus Dei group’s board with Barr.Barr was the adult in the room who became Trump’s enabler, enforcer and teacher. On 24 March 2019, Barr issued a letter pre-empting the release of the full Mueller report so that he could to distort its conclusions and present those distortions as truthful. He wrote that Trump’s campaign had not “conspired or coordinated” with the Russians, that Trump had fully cooperated with the investigation and that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice. He redacted and withheld from the public key sections of the report. “Mueller’s core premise – that the President acts ‘corruptly’ if he attempts to influence a proceeding in which his own conduct is being scrutinized – is untenable,” Barr wrote to justify his cover-up.View image in fullscreenThe US House of Representatives held Barr in contempt for withholding the full report. It revealed that Trump had committed 10 indictable obstructions of justice to keep evidence and witnesses from investigators, which neither Barr nor his Biden-appointed successor, Merrick Garland, ever prosecuted. The report identified 272 contacts between Trump agents and Russian operatives, not one of which Trump reported to the FBI. Judge Walton ruled that Barr had “distorted” and been “misleading” about the contents of the report. On 30 September 2020, he decided Barr had violated federal law and that the redacted sections should be released, which they were, only days before the 2020 election. But Barr was not about to open a prosecution of himself.The bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, released on 18 August 2020, disclosed literally hundreds of instances of Trump campaign involvement with Russian operations. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, regularly shared “sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy” with a Russian intelligence officer, Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he had a long relationship on behalf of Russian interests in Ukraine.One of Trump’s obstructions, cited by Mueller, was his dangling of pardons for Manafort, who was convicted of numerous tax and financial frauds, and for Mike Flynn, the former national security adviser convicted for lying to the FBI and not registering as a foreign agent. Trump was enticing them not to testify. Both stonewalled, and both received pardons.After Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime dirty trickster, was convicted of lying to the Congress and obstructing justice about acting as a conduit for Russian intelligence through WikiLeaks on hacked Clinton campaign documents, among other murky things, and sentenced to nine years in prison, Trump expressed outrage: “The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them.” Barr instantly intervened to reduce the sentence. The four prosecutors on the case resigned in protest.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump tweeted: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!” Just before leaving office Trump would commute Stone’s sentence.Meanwhile, as soon as Barr assumed his post he revived the “Spygate” conspiracy theory, declared “spying did occur” and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate what Trump called an “attempted coup” against him. Trump denounced the Mueller investigation as “illegal”: “Everything about it was crooked – every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people.”Barr appointed John Durham, the former US attorney for Connecticut, who spent four years trying to prove Trump’s accusation that the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Russian interference was a “hoax”, as Trump claimed. Durham’s chief prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, quit because she thought he was running a political operation and that Barr had “violated DoJ guidelines”. Durham interviewed nearly 500 witnesses, including Hillary Clinton, to determine “whether the conduct of these individuals or entities [with ties to the Clinton campaign] constituted a federal offense and whether admissible evidence would be sufficient to obtain a conviction for such an offense”.Durham’s two high-profile cases, against the attorney Michael Sussmann and the Russian analyst Igor Danchenko, resulted in embarrassing acquittals. Durham wound up convicting an FBI lawyer for altering an email in his effort to shortcut a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, for which he received probation and community service. Durham ended his snark hunt by criticizing the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference as “seriously flawed”, but without anything of consequence to show. Trump tweeted: “WOW! After extensive research, Special Counsel John Durham concludes the FBI never should have launched the Trump-Russia Probe! In other words, the American Public was scammed …”For two years, Barr waged a war against Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, a Republican, who indicted Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen on campaign finance charges for paying hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels to silence her about a sexual relationship with Trump. Trump clearly appeared in the indictment as Unindicted Co-Conspirator No 1. Barr pressured Berman to reopen the case in order to toss it out. Berman refused.Barr then tried to strong-arm Berman at Trump’s instigation into indicting the former secretary of state John Kerry for trying to keep alive the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated during the Obama administration. Berman refused. Barr pushed Berman to indict Greg Craig, Obama’s former legal counsel, on flimsy charges of not registering as a foreign agent, in order to have a prominent Democrat’s scalp. Barr sent a deputy to tell Berman he should prosecute Craig to “even things out” before the election. Again, Berman refused.Barr moved the Craig case to the District of Columbia, where he leveraged an indictment. On 4 September 2019, the jury acquitted Craig in less than five hours. “Throughout my tenure as US attorney,” Berman wrote in a memoir, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining – in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired. I walked this tightrope for two and a half years. Eventually, the rope snapped.”Berman was conducting a criminal investigation into Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney who had sought to fabricate dirt against Joe Biden in Trump’s blackmailing of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in exchange for Stinger missiles, which precipitated Trump’s first impeachment. On 19 June 2020, Barr announced Berman was resigning. It was news to him. He refused to go. Then, Trump fired him.After Trump lost the election of 2020, Barr was on board with Trump’s claim it was stolen, sending a memo to DoJ prosecutors to investigate “vote tabulation irregularities”. Sixteen assistant US attorneys resigned in protest. Later, Barr acknowledged, of Trump’s assertion that the election was fixed: “It was all bullshit.” On 14 December 2020, Trump attempted to get Barr’s involvement in the fake electors scheme. Barr declined to be ensnared in an obviously illegal act in a losing cause. He saved himself from becoming incriminated and resigned.Trump had already got whatever he wanted from Barr up to the last minute, when Barr’s instinct for personal self-preservation asserted itself. On the eve of 6 January, Barr relinquished the Tom Hagen role for his godfather. Trump was done with the disloyal consigliere. He turned to other helpers.After the January 6 insurrection, Barr accused Trump of a “betrayal of his office”. “All of a sudden, Bill Barr changed. You hadn’t noticed,” Trump remarked. Yet this past April, Barr endorsed Trump for re-election, explaining that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left.” Trump sneered: “Wow! Former AG Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him ‘Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy’. Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement. Thank you Bill.”The conservative majority on the US supreme court, three of whose members Trump appointed, rescued him from facing trial for January 6 before the 2024 election. Taking up Trump’s appeal, the court languidly spent months to render an opinion bestowing on him and future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts”. In its ruling, with a sharp understanding of Trump’s methods, the court stated that a president could order a sham investigation of his political enemies, if he wished, without any restraint or accountability.The decision was explicit in granting free license to political prosecutions: “The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials. Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.”The court has ruled: Trump’s past efforts to stage “sham” show trials of his “enemies” and launch a coup involving the DoJ are above the law. His future dictatorship in which he could exact retribution from his “enemies within”, deploying the DoJ, has received advance approval.The supreme court’s immunity decision justifying Trump despotism, presented by Chief Justice John Roberts, was better explained in the twisted language of an apparatchik from the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984:“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”On 24 October of this month, Trump boasted about the unlimited power that he would possess once he is back in the White House. Speaking to the rightwing radio talkshow host Hugh Hewitt, he declared that he would at the start fire the special prosecutor Jack Smith, who has indicted him for his crimes of January 6 and stealing national security secrets. “We got immunity at the supreme court,” Trump said. “It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.” Trump would then have 86,398 seconds left to be a dictator on “day one”.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      What I learned when Turning Points USA came to my campus | Cas Mudde

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      This Tuesday, Charlie Kirk brought his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour to the campus of my public university in a Republican-controlled state. It was nothing like the last time Kirk and his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization had visited. Although the different timing matters – this was literally two weeks before election day – the differences between the 2018 and 2024 events in many ways reflect the dangerous radicalization of the US right wing.In 2018, Kirk had a fairly similar agenda when coming to my university: “exposing leftist lies and progressive propaganda” at US universities. I wrote a column about the rather bland event, describing it as a “rightwing safe space”, in which Kirk railed against the “cultural Marxists”. Most students seemed more amused than aggrieved. How different this week’s event was.When I came to campus early, I saw them set up their stands. I drank my coffee opposite to a lone female student with a Trump hat – a rare sight even at my university. I then went to teach my course on far-right politics, where TPUSA’s event was the talk of the class. I told my students that I totally understood if they wanted to observe the event – who am I to stand in the way of them getting “de-brainwashed”? – and approximately half of my students indeed left halfway through class to attend the event.After class, I walked down to Tate Plaza, the open space in front of the student center, and was perplexed by the sight. I saw what looked like a sea of Maga hats on the large open space. I bumped into one of my students, who told me that TPUSA handed out the Maga hats for free, and that he was leaving because you couldn’t hear anything anyway. In the background Kirk was droning on about Kamala Harris, wokeism and his other favorite enemies. But there was something to the meeting, an energy that was lacking six years ago. This was not just a safe space, this was a boisterous and proud rally!Sure, almost anyone wearing their own Maga hat was older and not related to the university, but a couple hundred students happily accepted and wore the hat. Moreover, most kept them on when they left the rally, and went to the food court, to class or even downtown. Turns out that a hat that is the most recognizable symbol of support for a man that has been loudly and openly authoritarian and racist in the last months is a rather cool gimmick for privileged young white men.View image in fullscreenThere are important broader lessons to be drawn from the differences between these two TPUSA events. First, the 2024 meeting shows the radicalization of conservative America. While Turning Point was already supportive of Trump in 2018, it still had a largely independent program, ostensibly focused on traditional conservative values as small government and capitalism. In the past years, Kirk has not only fully embraced the authoritarian and nativist agenda of Trump, he and his organization have pivoted to full-on Christian nationalism.Second, Turning Point USA targets college and high school students, that is, those 21 and under. These kids and young adults have been socialized in a world in which 1 Trump is a former president; 2 the Republican party is the party of Trump; and 3 the US Capitol got stormed by Trump sympathizers. For those raised in Republican households, which means most of the students at my university, this means that Trump and the far right are completely normal. What we see as far right, they see as mainstream conservatism. They have no conception of the Republican party of George Bush Sr or Jr.Third, radicalized organizations like TPUSA have overtaken the role of mainstream conservative organizations such as the College Republicans, not just on campus but also as training grounds for the next “conservative” elite. Kirk has literally been training the cadres for the next Trump administration, should it happen. This is a very different kind of “Republican”, if they are Republicans at all. They are more assertive and extremist but less tied to traditional conservative organizations, including the Republican party.Fourth, and most optimistically, the sea of Maga hats also gave me a shimmer of hope for the upcoming election. Since Trump’s shock 2016 win, the media has obsessed about “shy Trump supporters”, that is, people who support Trump in the elections but do not say so in polls because of social desirability. Although empirical evidence has always been weak, the “shy Trump voter” never disappeared from the public debate. Seeing these students wear the Maga hats, not for fun or provocation, but as a “normal” expression of support for the “conservative” candidate in the presidential election, confirmed my suspicion that there are no “shy Trumpers” left in 2024.And, if this is true, there might still be hope, in the sense that the current polls are overrepresenting the Trump vote, because they are overcompensating for a dated phenomenon, the shy Trump voter, yet another victim of the normalization of Trump.

      Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More

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      The far-right megadonor pouring over $10m into the US election to defeat ‘the woke regime’

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      Thomas Klingenstein, chairperson of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has cemented his place in the pantheon of Republican megadonors with a more than $10m spending spree so far in the 2024 election cycle, according to campaign contributions recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).Klingenstein has been one of Claremont’s largest donors for decades. As the institute has made its hard-right, pro-Trump drift in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe US politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a “cold civil war”, and has encouraged rightwingers to join the fight to defeat what he calls “the woke regime”.His spending puts him at the forefront of a class of donors who are explicitly supporting more extreme and polarizing politics in Trump’s Republican party.The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans, and has included seven-figure donations to at least four pro-Trump Pacs in recent months.The Guardian emailed Klingenstein for comment on this reporting but received no reply.Increased largesseFederal Election Comission (FEC) data is a lagging indicator: currently available data only reflects contributions made before early July, so it is possible that Klingenstein’s spend has increased since the last available filings.Nevetheless, Klingenstein’s almost $10.7m in contributions during this cycle is already more than his combined giving in the previous five cycles stretching back to 2013-2014.The amount fits with a pattern of increasing giving to political causes in recent years.Until 2017, Klingesntein was an intermittent and moderate donor: in the 2014 cycle Klingenstein made just 11 donations totaling $32,500, and in 2016 he scaled that back, contributing just $7,700 including $2,000 to Trump’s first campaign, according to records of his giving in previous cycles.In the 2018 cycle there was a sudden uptick to almost $350,000 in contributions. The next two cycles saw six-figure spends: $4.23m in 2019-2020, and just over $4m in 2021-2022. It remains to be seen how much Klingenstein will add to his unprecedented spend this cycle.Klingenstein’s contribution has also grown relative to other political donors.The transparency organization Open Secrets maintains a ranked list of the top 100 political donors in each cycle.Klingenstein first landed on the list at number 85 in 2020, according to Open Secrets. In 2022 he nudged up to 78. This year he is the 35th largest individual political donor in the country according to the rankings.His contributions this year put him in a similar league as Republican donors such as Walmart heiress Alice Walton – currently the world’s richest woman – who is the 32nd largest donor per Open Secrets, and Democratic donors such as James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn, the 28th largest political donors in the US.Funding Super PacsKlingenstein has donated to individual congressional campaigns, but the recipients of his largest donations in this and other recent cycles have been Pacs, including several favored by the biggest Republican donors.One favorite is Club for Growth Action (CFG Action), a Pac which is ostensibly committed to “small government”, and whose biggest funders are billionaire megadonors including Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein and Virginia James.Klingenstein has contributed almost $9m to CFG Action over several cycles, including $3m in 2020, $1.45m in 2022, and $4.45m this cycle. That figure included a single donation of $2.5m last December.Other recipients of six-figure Klingenstein donations include the Sentinel Action Fund, a Pac launched in 2022 by Jessica Anderson, until then executive director of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is the force behind Project 2025.This cycle, Sentinel has positioned itself as the sole conservative pro-cryptocurrency Pac, and has spent in support of Republicans in crucial senate races in states including Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada, according to FEC records and Facebook and Google advertising libraries.Sentinel president Anderson also served in the Trump administration. Klingenstein gave Sentinel $1m in May.Klingenstein has also been a rainmaker for prominent Maga-verse organizations this cycle, giving $1m to pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July, and $495,000 to Charlie Kirk-linked Turning Point Pac in February.Not all of Klingenstein’s bets pay off. Last September, he handed $1m to American Exceptionalism Pac, a Super Pac supportive of failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.Rightwing tiesThe Guardian has previously reported on Klingenstein’s role as a financier and influencer in far-right circles.Last March, it was revealed that he had funded Action Idaho, a far-right political website set up by Boise State political science professor and Claremont Institute fellow Scott Yenor.In documents pitching the idea of the site during late 2021, Yenor wrote that the site’s goal was to “translate anti-critical-race-theory (anti-CRT) movement and anti-lockdown movements into a durable political movement to radicalize political opinion in Idaho and shape the primaries to the advantage of conservatives”.Yenor used the now defunct website and an associated account on Twitter/X to make rightwing attacks on Idaho politicians and activists, including Republicans.Last August, the Guardian reported on Klingenstein’s growing largesse including his donations to his own Pac, American Firebrand, whose funds were spent in part on producing a series of videos that showcased Klingenstein’s apocalyptic vision of US politics.Those videos portrayed liberals and the left as implacable internal enemies, and as “woke communists”.In one, Klingenstein said: “We find ourselves in a cold civil war,” and defined the warring sides as “those who want to preserve the American way of life, and those who want to destroy is”, and adding: “These differences are too large to bridge. This is what makes it a war. In a war you must play to win.”Klingenstein’s recent rhetoric has continued in much the same vein.On X, he has portrayed disparate political developments as elements of “cold civil war” such as Trump’s New York felony convictions, the Colorado supreme court’s judgement that Trump was ineligible to be on the ballot due to the 14th amendment’s prohibition on elected officials who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”, and former Republicans’ public support of that reading of the amendment.He has also opened up his personal website to a rotating cast of rightwing writers, whose articles have claimed that the US is subject to “woke totalitarianism”, advocated for a total freeze on immigration, and claimed that Kamala Harris’s nomination is an outcome of “group quota regime – the paradigm of racial outcome-engineering”.He has also been the leading financial supporter of the rightwing Claremont Institute, where he also serves as chair.Available tax filings for his foundation, the Thomas D Klingenstein fund, indicate that he has directed at least $22m to Claremont since 2004.That giving has stepped up significantly in the Trump era: in returns from 2004 to 2014, Klingenstein gifted an average of about $307,000 to Claremont, and even skipped a year in 2013. In returns from 2015 on he has given an average of $2.3m, and in 2021 his donation to Claremont was just shy of $3m.His heightened giving has coincided with Claremont’s embrace of Trumpism, which writers including Laura Field have argued has transformed it from a respected conservative thinktank into a propaganda juggernaut that envisions a radical remaking of the US along far-right lines.The Guardian has reported extensively on the Claremont Institute’s ties to radical far-right politics.Claremont’s president is one of the senior figures there who are members of the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”. Claremont has also provided direct funding for SACR. In turn, one of SACR’s leading lights, shampoo tycoon and would be “warlord” Charles Haywood, has made five-figure donations to Claremont. More

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      Project 2025 ex-director denounces Heritage president’s ‘violent rhetoric’

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      The former director of Project 2025, a conservative plan to overhaul the US government, has blamed “violent rhetoric” from his former boss Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation thinktank, for the blueprint’s downgrading as Donald Trump has sought to publicly distance himself from it.Paul Dans, who resigned as head of the project in July after it threatened to become an electoral liability for Trump, said it was damaged after Roberts made inflammatory comments in a podcast that were widely interpreted as a veiled threat against leftwingers if they resisted an envisioned conservative takeover.In an interview with the Washington Post, Dans also called on Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, to withdraw a foreword he wrote for Roberts’s forthcoming book, which has been criticised for perceived violent undercurrents, partly due to its appeal to rightwingers to “load the muskets”.“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Dans told the newspaper. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”Roberts made headlines in July when he told Dave Brat, a former Republican congressman who was presenting Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”The comments intensified scrutiny on Project 2025, a 922-page policy document detailing plans for – among other things – the mass firing of thousands of civil servants and a drastic curtailment of reproductive rights. The project had been run, in collaboration with other thinktanks, under the Heritage Foundation’s auspices and the ultimate authority of Roberts.Trump subsequently sought to disown the project – in public at least – as the Democrats seized on Roberts’s remarks to highlight its most radical provisions and depict it as a roadmap for a second Trump presidency. The Republican nominee falsely claimed that he did not know its architects, even though many of them – including Dans – had served under him when he was US president.Dans said he warned Roberts against media interviews and provocative language and squarely blamed his comments for damaging the project and those who had worked on it.“There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august thinktank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

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      Roberts has been criticised for using similarly strident terms in promoting his book, Dawn’s Early Light, whose original September publication date has been postponed until after next month’s presidential election.Its original subtitle, Burning Down Washington To Save America, has been watered down and its cover illustration of a lit match has been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDans has also urged Vance – whose relationship with Roberts has undermined Trump’s efforts to dissociate himself from Project 2025 – to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation president by retracting the foreword he has written for his book.In it, Vance calls for a more aggressive conservative line of action, writing: “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’A foundation spokesman, Noah Weinrich, dismissed Dans’ criticism and said Roberts’s podcast comments had been referring to the threat of leftwing violence.“Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making,” he told the Post.Vance, whose links to the thinktank long predate his support for Trump, has not commented.Dans previously blamed Trump campaign officials for the downgrading of Project 2025’s status in the Republican nominee’s priority list. He singled out the campaign aides Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita for publicly denigrating the project in a September interview with the New York Times and said they had jeopardised Trump’s chances of beating Kamala Harris. More