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      ‘He gives them the green light’: Trump’s rhetoric revives hate groups across US

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      For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past several weeks have been testing to say the least.Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants were distributed by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, in Black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.“I’m telling people: do nothing – don’t approach them. But it’s not easy for people to see this,” she said.“I think that is what a lot of folks cannot understand – why do we have so much hate?”About 22% of Springfield residents are African American, according to the US Census Bureau.“People are mad. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to take this for a minute. I know it’s hard.”Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington in July as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a PO box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a phone number.Ever since Donald Trump claimed during a 10 September televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets – a claim that has been found to be baseless – Springfield has seen a groundswell in far-right extremism.On a recent weekend, several people affiliated with Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group founded in 2020, stood in front of the home of the mayor of Springfield holding flags bearing swastikas. The same weekend, individuals holding signs that said: “Haitians Have No Home Here” in English and Haitian Creole were seen outside Springfield’s city hall offices.And in another incident, a volunteer with the Clark county Democratic party was verbally threatened by a group of Proud Boys members last month, according to a report by the Dayton Daily News.Proud Boys is a far-right group that, according to Reuters, has re-emerged in recent months as “unofficial protectors of ex-president Donald Trump”.That followed a group called the Israel United in Christ, a hate group as designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, holding a large public gathering in south Springfield on 21 September.Though Israel United in Christ says it does not “advocate or condone any acts of violence against any race, ethnicity or gender”, the Anti-Defamation League has accused it of antisemitism.During the vice-presidential debate, the Republican party candidate, JD Vance, repeated the false claim that Springfield’s Haitian community were “illegal immigrants”. The vast majority of Haitians in Springfield have legally entered the US through the temporary protected status program, a status that is provided to nationals of certain countries experiencing significant security challenges.“They feel emboldened by the former president. They feel like it’s OK to do this,” said Williams.“He gives them the green light. By him saying hateful things and falsehoods, they feel comfortable in speaking the way they are speaking [and] coming in here doing what they are doing.”But the rise in hate group activity in recent weeks hasn’t been confined to Springfield.In Charleroi, a town of about 4,000 people in western Pennsylvania, a digital flyer was this week distributed on Facebook by or on behalf of the Trinity White Knights.It read, in part: “Do not let the government destroy your town. These 3rd world immigrants are destroying every single city they arrive in. The government is pushing these 3rd world immigrants into every single town across America.”Joe Manning, the Charleroi town borough manager, said there were about 700 Haitian immigrants living in Charleroi, with many working at a local food processing plant.“They’ve been here for five, maybe six, years and nobody really paid attention to them,” he says.That was before 15 September, when Trump said at a rally in Tucson, Arizona, that Charleroi “isn’t so beautiful any more” and that the town had become “composed of lawless gangs”, comments aimed at the town’s growing immigrant population.“We’re a pretty small community here in western Pennsylvania, and to be identified by name [by Trump], that sort of set off this whole firestorm,” said Manning, who believed the appearance of the KKK-linked flyer after Trump’s comments wasn’t coincidental.“Before this, no one really paid attention to the immigrant community here but now, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re being invaded.’ They say it’s a crisis. Well if it is, it’s the slowest goddamn crisis I ever saw.”In Wyoming, graffiti in clear view of a major interstate supporting Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, appeared on a bridge last week, while a banner promoting the same group and calling for the “recaiming” (sic) of America was removed from a bridge in downtown Winston-Salem in North Carolina days after Trump’s debate comments. A student event held at the University of South Carolina featuring the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, on 18 September is believed to have attracted about 150 attendees.“Springfield is not happening in isolation. We have tracked four other incidents, such as targeting the Haitian community in Alabama,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks incidents of hate across the US.“We’ve also seen the sharing and pushing of the racist and antisemitic great replacement theory in various campaign and hate group messaging in the last few weeks.”For Williams, who finds herself managing growing community outrage at the rise in KKK and other hate group activity in Springfield, recent events have come at a personal cost.She said she had received text messages from someone claiming to represent Blood Tribe and had increased her security in recent weeks. Last weekend, when members of the same group appeared at the mayor of Springfield’s home, the chief of police sent a security detail to her home.“I’m looking over my shoulder,” she says.“You would think that this would be over – I don’t get it, in 2024.” More

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      Thousands rally at Christian nationalist event in DC to ‘turn hearts back to God’

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      Tens of thousands of Christians poured onto the National Mall on Saturday to atone, pray and take a stand for America – which, in their view, has been poisoned by secularism and must be ruled instead by a Christian god.Summoned to Washington DC by the multilevel marketing professional-turned-Christian “apostle” Jenny Donnelly and the anti-LGBTQ+ celebrity pastor Lou Engle, they streamed onto the lawn holding blue and pink banners emblazoned with the hashtag #DontMessWithOurKids – a nod to the myth that children are being indoctrinated into adopting gay and transgender identities.It was no coincidence that the event was held on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, or that many attendees carried shofars and Israeli flags: evangelicals and charismatic Christians find spiritual meaning in Old Testament scripture, Jewish rituals and support for Israel – where they believe the end times prophecy will take place.Although most of the day was spent in prayer and worship, November’s presidential election hung heavy over the crowd. A promotional newsletter for the event called on “the Lord’s authority over the election process and our nation’s leadership”, and organizers handed out flyers promoting a pre-election prayer event hosted by the Donald Trump-aligned organization Turning Point USA Faith.Lance Wallnau, a Maga evangelist who rose to prominence after prophesying Trump’s first term in office, delivered remarks at the gathering.“We have 31 million Christians, I just found out, they’ve just been so bombarded by woke preachers and apathetic Christians that they don’t think they’re gonna vote this year,” said Wallnau. “Folks, this meeting, on Yom Kippur, is our governmental moment to shift something in the spirit.” Wallnau called on pastors to urge their congregants to vote.“I was here at January 6,” said Tami Barthen, an attendee who traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally, and who described her experience of the Capitol riot as profoundly spiritual. “It’s not Democrat versus Republican,” she said. “It’s good versus evil.”It’s the first of a series of Christian nationalist gatherings in DC to rally believers to the Capitol ahead of the 2024 election.Donnelly billed the event as a rallying call for mothers concerned about changing gender norms in the modern US and casting the gathering at the Capitol as an opportunity for women to stand their ground and play a pivotal role in changing the country’s cultural and political trajectory.The rally is a collaboration organized by multiple far-right Christian leaders affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement on the political far right that seeks to establish long-term Christian dominion over government and society as well as get Trump a second presidency in November.Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, said the effort was aimed at “creating a network – a mass of people – who see it as their spiritual mission to take over Washington DC”Most prominent in the push to turn out women to the National Mall is Engle, a rightwing pastor and staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, whose tutelage of anti-gay Ugandan pastors and coordination of mass prayer mobilizations has earned him international notoriety and celebrity.The Southern Poverty Law Center, which characterizes Engle as an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist, notes that Engle has in the past compared the anti-LGBTQ+ push to the secessionist south during the American civil war, calling on opponents of gay rights to emulate the Confederate general Robert E Lee, who “was able to restrain Washington”.Donnelly’s vision – of a crowd of moms descending on the Capitol in pink and blue – is her own. Engle, whose mass prayer rallies have drawn hundreds of thousands to DC in the past, offers a platform to turn people out.View image in fullscreen“We are seeing a million women and their families coming together to see this great country turn their hearts back to God,” said Donnelly, on a 21 June podcast promoting the march. Donnelly, who lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family, described how during the Covid-19 lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests – twin forces she says shut down her church – she was called by God to go deeper into the political realm.“I said: ‘Lord, I’m just a mom of five, I have a great church – it’s not huge. I’ve done women’s retreats, I think I’ve been doing my part in the kingdom and I love Jesus so much, but I don’t even know where to begin, but would you put me in the fight?’” she said.Donnelly has sought to pass along that message to other Christian women through an organization called Her Voice Movement Action, which organizes women into decentralized, independently-run “prayer hubs” – a source of spiritual community for women that also functions as a political mobilization tool.“We’ve been praying for our nation for a couple years in small prayer hubs,” said Louette Madison, who traveled from Washington state to DC for the rally. Madison has teenagers in the public school system and described hoping for a day when prayer is embraced in schools, saying: “I think that the schools are kind of getting rid of the values, and also getting rid of the discipline, [and] when there’s no consequences, that can cause a lot more chaos in school.”The decentralized organizing model carries echoes of Donnelly’s previous life: before reinventing herself as a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, Donnelly earned millions through the multilevel marketing company AdvoCare, which collapsed after settling with the Federal Trade Commission for $150m in a lawsuit alleging the company was an illegal pyramid scheme.From Peru to PortlandYears before Donnelly flew the #DontMessWithOurKids flag, a movement under the same name took hold in Peru, promoted by Christian Rosas, a conservative Christian political strategist and consultant in the mining industry. The evangelical “No te metas con mis hijos” – “don’t mess with my kids” – coalition, which opposed LGBTQ+ inclusion and abortion, earned followers in 2016 during a wave of conservative backlash against governmental efforts to introduce themes of gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the school system.When the government issued lockdown orders to slow the spread of Covid-19, it issued travel restrictions by gender, allowing women and men to leave the house on different days of the week and affirming that trans people’s gender identities would be respected in enforcing the rule. Rosas took issue with the trans-inclusive policy, claiming that police officers were obligated to enforce the rule based on travelers’ identification cards, not their gender identities.During the lockdown orders, the Peruvian investigative reporting outlet OjoPúblico reported on 18 incidents of humiliating and abusive arrests of trans women by the police.What started as street protests has turned into an electoral strategy to elect ultra-conservative allies of the Christian right into office in Peru. These lawmakers have passed a slew of socially conservative laws, including one this year that classifies transgender identities as mental illnesses.Donnelly has taken up the mantle of this movement among Christian moms in the US, drawing directly from Rosas’s vision in Peru and consulting him on strategy.“We challenged the law, why? Because the law was unjust. We challenged the curriculum. Why? Because the curriculum was unjust,” said Rosas on a podcast interview with Donnelly on 6 November 2023. “TV, news [outlets], they mocked us every day, they mocked us, they ridiculed us, saying: ‘Look at them, they’re radical, religious, whatever,’ but they saw that we are not retreating.”Rosas spoke at the Capitol rally on Saturday, too, where he preached against LGBTQ+ acceptance and promised that his movement could be replicated in the US.“Obedience to the Lord also requires us to stand up strong against weakened structures,” Rosas said. “Against evil, against unjust laws.”Don’t Mess With Our Kids and No te metas con mis hijos have both attempted to cast their organizations as grassroots mobilizations. In a 2017 interview with Vice News, a spokesperson for the group spoke on the condition of anonymity, claiming to speak for “the collective”.Donnelly’s Her Voice Movement adopts a similar approach. In a recording of a Zoom call in August – which journalist Dominick Bonny obtained and shared with the Guardian – Her Voice Movement spokesperson Naomi Van Wyk said the group had teamed up with Moms for Liberty to launch a multi-state campaign called March for Kids, but cautioned members to keep the association private.“The parent company is Moms for Liberty, but they don’t wanna be recognized. They really want this movement to be grassroots, and to make a public statement that there are hundreds and thousands of people across the country that are coming together under one umbrella,” said Van Wyk.Elizabeth Salazar Vega, a reporter covering gender and politics in Peru, said she was not surprised that the push had taken hold in the US – or that it had found expression just weeks before a presidential election.“This is the ideal scenario to bind these voices together, that could normally appear siloed in civil society,” Salazar Vega told the Guardian in Spanish. “I don’t think it would be impossible for this to escalate rapidly in the United States.”Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist pastor who has organized “Kingdom to the Capitol” protests in swing states, is planning a similar march in DC later this month. More

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      in Elections

      Far-right website admits there was no fraud at 2020 vote-count in Atlanta

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      The far-right website The Gateway Pundit acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that there was not any fraud during ballot counting in Atlanta in 2020 when Donald Trump lost the presidency, a significant concession from one of the most influential conservative sites that plays a key role in spreading election misinformation.The statement, the first acknowledgment from the site that there was no proof of fraud in Atlanta, came days after the site settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, two local election workers who the site falsely accused of wrongdoing. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed publicly, but the site appears to have removed all mention of the two women.“Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020,” the site’s co-founder, Jim Hoft, said in a statement posted on Gateway Pundit on Saturday. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night. A legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”As Trump sought to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden, Gateway Pundit relentlessly amplified a misleading video it said showed poll workers fraudulently counting ballots on election night. Gateway Pundit was the first site to identify Freeman and Moss as the two women in the video and published dozens of articles falsely accusing them of wrongdoing.Moss and Freeman have publicly spoken out about the severe harassment they faced. They received many death threats. People showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home, and she feared they were going to kill her. Both women testified last year that they were still afraid to go out alone in public.Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, who is also a contributor to the site, refused to back down from their false claims. They held a press conference on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July insisting that the video showed wrongdoing.Freeman and Moss previously settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right conservative outlet, which subsequently broadcast a correction to its reporting and noted the two women had not engaged in fraud.A Washington DC jury also ordered Trump ally Rudy Giuliani to pay the two women nearly $150m in damages last year. Giuliani has appealed the verdict and undertaken legal maneuvers to avoid payment. Lawyers for Freeman and Moss have asked a federal judge in New York to give them control over his assets.Gateway Pundit still faces a defamation lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of Dominion voting systems, whom the outlet falsely accused of rigging the election. More

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      Hurricane misinformation signals how US election lies could intensify

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      Alex Jones, the longtime conspiracy theorist liable for millions for defaming school shooting victims, started a broadcast this week with one of his favorite topics: weather manipulation.“All right, I did a lot of research and a lot of preparation the last 30 years for what I’m going to be covering today,” he said. “Coming up, I’m going to do a big presentation for everybody on what’s really going on with weather weapons.”Amid two hurricanes – one of which hit two swing states – formerly fringe characters like Jones contributed to a swirl of conspiracy theories, many becoming uncomfortably mainstream. The weather was being controlled, some of the theories went, to prevent Republicans from voting and fend off a Trump victory.The misinformation since Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina and Georgia and Milton hit Florida offers a test run for how election day could go – and it’s not looking good.Social media sites like X, Facebook and TikTok all gave a platform to hurricane truthers and politicians who saw an opening to spread doubt and distrust of government. That distrust in some cases then led to threats and harassment against aid workers, meteorologists and government officials.The hurricanes hit at a crucial time in the US election calendar – about a month out from November’s presidential contest. Because Helene hit two swing states, turnout could be affected by the storm’s devastation and affected states are considering rule changes to accommodate people who may not have transportation or identification. Those changes will become fodder for allegations that the election will be rigged.“This is the singularity of rumoring: procedure change, powerful people, aid money, location changes, swing states,” said Danielle Lee Tomson, the election rumor research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. “My bingo card is filled up.”Already, many on the right, encouraged by Donald Trump, have claimed Democrats are trying to steal the election through a variety of means, none of which are proven.“Add a hurricane to that, and you have a compounded and highly opportunistic situation to jump in and create rumors or narratives or frame certain events for political gain,” Tomson said.Voters in hurricane zones are likely uncertain after losing their documents, being displaced from their homes, and losing access to reliable transportation. That uncertainty creates a vacuum where rumors can grow, and people with incentives to capitalize on the uncertainty can step in and advance their political goals.They can – as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has – double down on the weather manipulation claims. They can – as Donald Trump has – falsely claim federal disaster funds have run out because it instead went toward migrants.“There are a lot of good reasons to critique aspects of Fema from an emergency management perspective,” said Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies disaster response. “But critiquing the way the system unfolds according to the National Response Framework is a little bit different than blatantly false information about funding being diverted to support illegal immigrants instead of hurricane victims.”In North Carolina, the board of elections made changes to increase accessibility for people affected by the hurricane, allowing increased use of absentee ballots and dropoff options. The Trump campaign had requested improvements for access in Hurricane-ravaged areas, many of which disproportionately hold Republican voters. Still, the move immediately drew skepticism from the right.“I don’t know if I love or hate these late changes in the election law,” Fox host Jesse Watters said in a broadcast. “But I know Marc Elias, the Democrat election lawyer who specializes in shenanigans, loves it, so that makes me a little suspicious.”The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website, contributed to the doubt cast on the rule changes, headlining its story: “Here We Go: North Carolina Officials Change Election Rules in Hurricane-Devastated Counties that Mostly Voted for Trump, Fueling Republican Election Integrity Concerns.”The conspiracies about the hurricanes racked up massive views on social media. In one video shared on X of clouds, a woman claims “they’re chemtrailing the fricking crap out of us”. It got nearly 8m impressions. Another post encouraged people in Florida to ignore evacuation orders, claiming a plot was afoot to prevent Floridians from returning to their homes after the storm. “This looks a lot like a J6-style trap to invoke an insurrection and declare martial law to cancel the election,” wrote the account @healthranger, which has 245,000 followers on X.Chuck Edwards, a Republican representative from North Carolina, put out a lengthy release debunking a series of rumors about Fema, search-and-rescue efforts and weather manipulation. Fema’s response has had “shortfalls”, he said, but “nobody can control the weather”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I encourage you to remember that everything you see on Facebook, X, or any other social media platform is not always fact,” he wrote. “Please make sure you are fact-checking what you read online with a reputable source.”DeYoung, who is originally from western North Carolina, is in a lot of local disaster recovery groups on Facebook as part of her research. One of the groups, which has more than 7,000 members, was sharing information about supplies and relief areas. After a few days, it changed its cover page to say Fema was funneling money to illegal immigrants.“That’s just an example of some of the challenges we’re facing, because it’s become hyper-partisan, which actually gets in the way of people receiving accurate information about relief, supplies, response,” she said.Abbie Richards, a video producer at Media Matters for America who studied climate change conspiracies on TikTok for her master’s thesis, found a host of videos on the platform that alleged Fema was confiscating resources, blocking roads or stealing donations – all false claims the agency has confronted in Helene’s aftermath.“They’re seeing this misinformation, they’re believing it, and they feel like Fema is against them,” she said. “I’ve seen people call for civil war, and then I’ve seen explicit calls to unalive Fema personnel, or saying that Fema personnel can be arrested or shot or hanged on the spot.”Election conspiracies are baked into a lot of these videos, such as the idea that Democrats are controlling the weather or the government isn’t responding at the level it should because the areas affected are Republican-led, she said.The spread of misinformation and ties to the election don’t bode well for how lies or rumors will unfold on election day and afterward, she said.“The infrastructure for communication via social media has grown more complicated in the last four years,” Richards said. “More people are online. More people know how to make videos. More have their phones out, recording every moment. But that just adds to the sheer volume of it, and it’s quite clear that the social media platforms are not prepared.”Rightwing figures are using these storms not only to sow doubt, but to rally the troops against the people they allege are trying to prevent them from voting for Trump.Mike Flynn, the short-lived national security adviser under Trump who is now a far-right figure with 1.7 million followers on X, laid out the crises facing the nation: hurricanes, fires, overseas wars, censorship, “fake and real declared pandemics”, “stolen elections”.“The globalists are pulling out all the stops,” he wrote on X. “Don’t worry, we have them right where we want them, and oh yeah, the real storm is coming. @realDonaldTrump and the tens of millions of Americans who will #MAGA.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump and his allies are whipping up a whirlwind of lies about the hurricanes | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Whipping up hurricanes to merge with great replacement theory took hardly a week, about the time it takes for hurricanes themselves to form. The overheated atmosphere warmed the waters that were drawn up into the winds to churn them into a menacing storm.After Hurricane Helene hit, Donald Trump unleashed a whirlwind of humid lies: the federal government was deliberately preventing aid and even water from reaching areas that held Republican voters, “not getting anything”; Kamala Harris “spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants”; and Fema was offering only $750 in disaster relief – all false, all debunked by the Republican governors in the affected states. The Republican congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina felt compelled to issue a statement to his constituents not to listen to “untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts” and the “outrageous rumors spread online”.Undoubtedly, he had in mind Elon Musk, who accelerated the circulation of the lies on his platform X: Fema “actively blocked” aid and “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” The Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, called the calculated spread of disinformation “absolutely the worst I have ever seen”, and announced that Fema for the first time had established a webpage for “Hurricane Rumor Response”.“No money is being diverted from disaster response needs,” Fema stated. “Fema’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, leaped in to tweet: “Yes they can control the weather.” She added: “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”In 2018, she infamously blamed a California wildfire on “space lasers” controlled by “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm”, a classic antisemitic trope. Now, on 5 October, following up on how “they can control the weather”, she tweeted: “CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather.”Republican leaders instantly fell into line in a demonstration of Trump fealty. The congressman Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, the number two in the Republican leadership of the House, campaigning for Trump on 8 October, repeated his lie: “They use that money helping illegals here that they brought into America.”By now, Trump’s lies were a typhoon. JD Vance, his running mate, was sent out to stir it up further with an op-ed planted in the Wall Street Journal on 9 October – Rupert Murdoch again predictably handing over his paper to Trump – to echo that Fema funds were being diverted to help illegal immigrants. Vance added a new wrinkle to the conspiracy theory, suggesting that Fema was giving “special treatment” to gay and trans people over ordinary Americans because it held a seminar in 2023 on how those communities can prepare for disasters.As Hurricane Milton barreled down on Florida, Joe Biden, in a TV briefing on Wednesday afternoon, felt compelled to condemn Trump’s “onslaught of lies” that is “undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been undertaken and will continue to be undertaken”.View image in fullscreenThe political effect of the hurricanes on Trumpism has been to congeal free-floating elements into the racist replacement theory and Hitlerian rhetoric. Trump’s lies set in motion an antisemitic wave in North Carolina blaming Jewish local officials there and Fema administrators for taking the money for illegal immigrants. Of the falsehoods after Hurricane Helene, “30% of the posts on X contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the Fema director of public affairs; and the secretary of the department of homeland security. These collectively garnered 17.1m views as of October 7,” reported the non-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.Vance’s inclusion of gay and trans people into the overarching replacement theory fits the intensive Trump negative advertising campaign. Trump has spent more than $15.5m on TV commercials linking Harris to support for trans prison inmates – his most aired ad. In fact, in 2019 she stated she supported gender-affirming care for state prison inmates, according to the law, and responded similarly to an ACLU questionnaire about federal inmates. The Senate Republican political action committee has also invested tens of millions into anti-trans ads against Democratic candidates. Trump’s tagline: “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.”Now, Vance implies, “they/them”, presumably in league with Greene’s “they”, are stealing the funds from the rest of us folks as a nefarious subplot of the great replacement. Adherence to every aspect of the theory proves loyalty to Trump. Vance and Scalise showed how to bend the knee.Trump’s transition chief on 7 October insisted on this unquestioning fealty to the leader. The self-described adults in the room, or “normies”, of the first term, who saw their mission to be curbing Trump’s lunatic or criminal impulses, will not be tolerated in the second. “Those people were not pure to his vision,” Howard Lutnick, the head of the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm and the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, recently told the Financial Times. He explained that the “establishment” did not understand Trump’s “objectives” or “intuition” and “thought they knew better”. In the second term, “loyalty” and “fealty” would be the first qualification for consideration.Both Trump and Vance have stated that the senior federal civil service will be fired for their disloyalty. Consistent with Trump’s “vision”, his appointees would be required to swear an oath of loyalty to the leader above the constitution and laws of the United States. This oath was known as the “Führereid” in Nazi Germany, where public servants had to pledge: “I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German reich and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God!” All soldiers had to take a similar oath. Some of those who failed to swear the Hitler oath were executed.Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric and threats have ramped up with each passing day closer to the election that will decide whether he will be the president or perhaps a prisoner. When Harris appeared on The View, a daytime TV talkshow with an all-female panel, he demeaned her as a “dummy” and the other women as “dumb” and “degenerates”. Women should be subordinate and submissive. According to his running mate, Vance, women who do not have natural children are essentially worthless, not truly women, unqualified to be teachers, and women over 50 years old have value principally for childcare. “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – children, kitchen, church – was the policy slogan for the proper place of women in the Third Reich.The concept of “degenerate” – “entartete” – was a central category in Nazism. Modern art and music were deemed “Entartete Kunst”, or degenerate art, and banned. “Degenerates” constituted a broad swath of people, some of whom were infected with “poison in the blood”, as Hitler classified Jews and Trump counts certain types of immigrants, which is the basis of the replacement theory embraced by both Hitler and Trump. The degenerate also included disabled people, gay people (who wore pink triangles in concentration camps), Gypsies, psychiatric patients and the mentally ill (“behinderte”). Under the program beginning in 1939 of “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (“destruction of unworthy lives”), Aktion T4, the mass murder of “degenerates” was launched, officially called “Gnadentod”, or “mercy death”.Trump openly entertains fantasies of violence and vengeance. He called on 29 September for “one really violent day … One rough hour. And I mean real rough.” He was speaking about shoplifters. He promises the roundup of 11 million undocumented people and camps. In late August, he reposted under a headline “How To Really Fix The System” an image of his perceived enemies in orange prison jumpsuits – Harris, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Hunter Biden and Jack Smith. He called for the indictment of the congressional members of the January 6 select committee and military tribunals for Barack Obama and others.View image in fullscreenOn 5 June, the Fox News host Sean Hannity gave Trump an opportunity to soften his threat of retribution. “People believe that you want retribution and will use the system of justice to go after your political enemies,” said Hannity. Trump doubled down, saying: “I have every right to go after them.” On 7 October, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham tried again. “A lot of people will say: ‘Well, he’s just going to do to them what he – they did to him back at them.’” Trump replied: “A lot of people say that’s what should happen, right?” Or as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “We had declared one of our principles thus: ‘We shall meet violence with violence in our own defense.’”Trump’s rhetoric eerily continues to paraphrase Hitler’s, which eludes American audiences. His first wife, Ivana, claimed that a book of Hitler’s speeches was on his bedstand. Trump’s language just happens to be extraordinarily resonant.Campaigning on the debunked myth that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets”, Trump used unusual language for him to make his bogus point on 16 September. “Allowing millions of people, from places unknown, to INVADE and take over our Country, is an unpardonable sin,” he tweeted. His reference to “sin” in the context of his racist replacement theory, was, knowingly or not, an echo of Hitler, to convey exactly the same meaning. “The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world and it brings disaster on every nation that commits it,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.Lately, Trump has used over and over in speech after speech the same metaphor conflating personal and national humiliation. On 12 August, Trump tweeted: “Kamala has no ideas, and would be an absolutely horrible, RADICAL LEFT, President, laughed at all over the World. We’ve had enough of that!”On 22 August, Trump continued the “laughed at” meme: “She stands for Incompetence and Weakness – Our Country is being laughed at all over the World!” On 16 September, he tweeted: “THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER.” Trump has used variations of this “laugh” meme to highlight national dishonor dozens of time on his Truth Social account.On 30 September, at two rallies, one in New York City and the other in Walker, Michigan, Trump said: “Boy, what a group of people we have. It’s a joke. We’re laughed at all over the world for our leadership. Because this country has never been laughed at [like] a bunch of dopes. It’s never been laughed at like it is right now.”On 1 October, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump said: “What a miserable few years. It’s just been horrible. And people all over the world, especially the leaders, are laughing at how stupidly our country is run.”On 30 January 1939, Hitler delivered his notorious “prophecy” speech calling for “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. The most memorable image he evoked was of Jews laughing at him and at Germany. “During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the state, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face.”After Hitler ordered the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, he returned to the imagery of Jews laughing in a speech that referenced his “prophecy”. “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies,” he said on 30 September 1942. “I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing.”The Nazis underscored Hitler’s speech by producing a propaganda poster depicting caricatures of laughing Jews surrounding Franklin D Roosevelt, with the slogan: “Das Lachen wird ihnen vergehen!!!” – “Their laughter will disappear!!!”On 7 October, Trump returned for a rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, to revisit the site of his near assassination. “And we want to get respect like we had it four years ago, the entire world respected us, they respected us,” he said. “They respected us more than they’ve ever respected us, and now they laugh at us. We can’t have them laugh at us, can we?”

      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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      in Elections

      Far-right site Gateway Pundit settles defamation suit with election workers

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      The Gateway Pundit, the far-right news website that played a critical role in spreading false information about the 2020 election, has settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers it falsely accused of wrongdoing.Notice of the settlement was filed in circuit court in Missouri, where Freeman and Moss had sued the site for defamation. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing.Nearly 20 articles that Freeman and Moss said had falsely accused them of wrongdoing were no longer available on The Gateway Pundit’s website as of Thursday afternoon, according to a Guardian review.“The dispute between the parties has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the legal team for Moss and Freeman said in a statement. Attorneys for the Gateway Pundit did not immediately return a request for comment.After the 2020 election, the Gateway Pundit published a series of stories amplifying a misleading video that showed Freeman and Moss counting ballots. The site pushed the false claim that the two women were committing fraud and counting illegal ballots after counting had ended for the night. The Gateway Pundit was the first news outlet to identify Freeman and later identified Moss, who have been cleared of all wrongdoing.Even after Georgia election officials debunked the video, the site continued to publish numerous articles falsely accusing Moss and Freeman of fraud. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, also attacked the two women publicly. A Washington DC jury ordered Giuliani to pay nearly $150m to the two women last year for libel, a decision the former New York mayor is appealing. At the trial, Giuliani’s lawyer at one point accused the Gateway Pundit of being the basis of the false claims about the two women.The two women faced vicious harassment, including death threats, and fled their homes and went into hiding after people showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home. Moss’s son received death threats on his phone and fell behind in school. Freeman testified last year that she had nowhere to live. Moss testified to the committee investigating the January 6 attack in 2022, but has otherwise not spoken much publicly.“I was terrorized,” Freeman said during a trial in Washington DC last year. “I’d rather stay in my car and be homeless rather than put that on someone else.”The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, had refused to concede that the site said anything false about the women, even though the state quickly debunked accusations of wrongdoing and a longer investigation formally cleared them. Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, also a contributor, held a press conference in Milwaukee during the Republican national convention in July and repeated many of the false claims about Freeman and Moss.The settlement with the Gateway Pundit is notable because of the influential role the site plays in spreading misinformation. One recent analysis by the group Advance Democracy found that the site is continuing to spread false information about voting and seed the idea that the 2024 election could be stolen.The two women have already settled a settled suit with One America News, another far-right outlet. The network issued an on-air apology after the settlement.They are also seeking to collect on the money Giuliani owes them. Their lawyers recently asked a New York judge to allow them to take control over Giuliani’s assets.The Gateway Pundit still faces a libel suit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of the voting system company Dominion who was falsely accused of subverting the 2020 election.The site had declared bankruptcy in an attempt to delay the case, but a judge dismissed the effort earlier this year.The case was one of several libel lawsuits filed against Trump allies and conservative networks that aired false claims about the 2020 election. Nearly all of those cases have settled, which observers have said may underscore the limited role defamation law can have in curbing misinformation.More details soon … More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans threaten to punish colleges that allow pro-Palestinian protests

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      Top Republicans are threatening to pull billions of dollars of federal funding from some of the most prestigious universities in the US, stripping them of official accreditation to punish them for allowing pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses.The Guardian has reviewed a video recording of a meeting in Washington last week between House majority leader Steve Scalise and the powerful pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). In it, Scalise outlined how he planned to unleash a massive attack against universities that fail to squash criticism of Israel.The offensive, which would be coordinated with the White House should Donald Trump win the presidential race in November, could even threaten the existence of universities, Scalise warned. He talked about revoking accreditation, the system by which higher education institutions are approved and to which the bulk of federal funds are tied.“Your accreditation is on the line,” Scalise said. “You’re not playing games any more, or else you’re not a school any more.”The Aipac meeting was held on 1 October, and was attended by Scalise and his fellow Republican congressman, Pat Fallon from Texas. The event was ostensibly billed as a discussion on the spread of antisemitism in the US since the start of the Gaza conflict on 7 October last year, when Hamas killed 1,200 people inside Israel and took 250 hostage.The attack sparked the Israeli offensive, which has destroyed much of the Palestinian territory and killed almost 42,000 people, according to local health authorities. The fall-out continues to roil campuses and cities throughout the US.Latest FBI figures show that the monthly rate of hate crimes against Jewish people in the US spiked in the aftermath of 7 October from 103 offenses in September 2023 to 389 in November. Anti-Muslim incidents have also surged.Despite the Aipac-Scalise meeting’s framing on antisemitism, most of the talk was about how to crush criticism of Israel’s military operation in Gaza. There was no attempt during the hour-long conversation to distinguish hatred of Jews from pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli government sentiments.Aipac is the most influential pro-Israel lobby group in the US. It has a $100m war chest to spend on the election this year, and is using that muscle to support political candidates that back the actions of the Israeli government and oppose those who are critical.This summer Aipac invested $23m in unseating in primary contests two core members of the progressive Democratic group the “squad”, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri. The pair had called for a ceasefire in Gaza and have highlighted the death toll of civilians there.Fallon praised Aipac for intervening in the races. “I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for firing Jamaal Bowman, and even more so, Miss Cori Bush. Great work,” he said.“That’s accountability, by the way,” Scalise added. He further commended Aipac for having “tentacles throughout the Republican and Democrat circles in 435 districts. You can see how people are voting – just put the pressure on those who are voting the wrong way.”Scalise reserved his most potent threats for universities that in his view have failed to quash anti-Israel protests. He told Aipac that a second Trump administration would wield federal purse strings to punish the schools.“We’re looking at federal money, the federal grants that go through the science committee, student loans. You have a lot of jurisdiction as president, with all of these different agencies that are involving billions of dollars, some cases a billion alone going to one school,” Scalise said.The congressman from Louisiana is the second highest-ranking Republican in the House. He has travelled to Israel several times on trips paid for by the American Israel Education Fund, a group created by Aipac.Scalise singled out Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, which have been rattled by the controversy over student protests around the Gaza war. Penn’s president Elizabeth Magill resigned last December and Harvard’s Claudine Gay a month later after they were accused of being evasive under Republican questioning about how they would respond to calls for the genocide of Jews.Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik stepped down in August after also facing criticism over her handling of pro-Palestinian protest encampments.In the Aipac meeting, Scalise scolded the former university chiefs for existing in a bubble in which Palestinians were painted as the real oppressed group. “You start siding with a terrorist organization, and you think that’s mainstream, because all your friends are in this little bubble, and I don’t know who you’re talking to – you’re sure not talking to normal people any more,” he said.The congressman went on to denigrate Jewish students who engage in pro-Palestinian protest, saying they “just feel guilty that they’re alive. I don’t know how you’re brought up to where you feel, ‘I’m a Jewish student, and I’m on the side with terrorists who want to kill me.’”Scalise said Republicans were determined to confront anti-Israel protests, which he called “disgusting” and “unacceptable in America”. “We’re bringing legislation to the floor to continue to confront it, to stand up against it, to show we support Israel,” he said.The Guardian invited Scalise, Fallon and Aipac to comment on the meeting and their discussion about punishing universities for pro-Palestinian campus protests, but they did not immediately respond.Part of the Republicans’ gameplan is to use House oversight powers to investigate colleges for alleged civil rights violations. Scalise told Aipac that any college deemed to have breached the law would have their accreditation revoked.“If you have a change in administration, President Trump has made it clear day one, if you’re a college that is violating the civil rights of your students, we’re taking away your accreditation. We have that ability,” he said.Under the current system, the bulk of federal money that flows to higher education institutions comes through student loans that are in turn dependent on formal approval of the school’s academic and other standards, known as accreditation. That approval is granted by 19 accrediting agencies, independent bodies that are in turn recognised by the US education secretary.Under a second Trump administration, the education department could decertify accrediting agencies that pursue liberal policies towards campus speech and favour agencies that follow a more draconian approach. Republicans could effectively punish universities by forcing the removal of their accreditation, with potentially dire consequences.“If accreditation becomes a political tool, then the concern is it will be used ideologically to punish particular views on campus, threatening free inquiry which is the bedrock of universities,” said Mark Criley of the American Association of University Professors.The plans being laid by top congressional Republicans chimes with Trump’s own vision of a second term. In his manifesto for a return to the White House, Agenda47, he says that “our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system”.He pledges that once back in the White House, “I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” He would then appoint new accreditors who would defend “the American tradition and western civilization” and remove “all Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats”.“We are going to have real education in America,” Trump said.Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, has taken a similarly hard line, calling universities “the enemy” in a 2021 speech. He said he would “aggressively attack the universities in this country”.In May, Vance introduced to a bill to the US Senate which he titled The Encampments or Endowments Act. Were it passed, it would give universities an ultimatum: remove protest encampments from campus grounds within seven days, or lose all federal funding.David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the Republican vendetta against universities over pro-Palestinian protests was deeply disturbing. “That is viewpoint discrimination at its core. It’s an attack on academic freedom in its most basic form, and would raise serious constitutional concerns.” More

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      in US Politics

      Two men have re-engineered the US electoral system in favor of Republicans | David Daley

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      Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy: if Donald Trump, rightwing courts, gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two men cleared the path.The single-minded determination of Leonard Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US supreme court and stacked lower and state courts with Republican ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.Chris Jankowski masterminded the partisan gerrymanders that tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans, ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and rendered elections in Wisconsin and North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar. They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice John Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it.Leo’s relentless focus on turning the judiciary Republican, first identifying and fast-tracking conservative jurists through his various roles at the Federalist Society, then coordinating the often eight-figure efforts to secure their confirmation on the US supreme court, helped conservatives to unpopular court-imposed victories on voting rights, abortion restrictions, gun access and gutting the regulatory state that would not have been won through the political process.As I revealed in my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, Jankowski pioneered Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project. That 2010 strategy, coordinated when he worked at the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), flipped state legislative chambers in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and several other states just ahead of the decennial redistricting. Then, with complete control of those processes, as well in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, the RSLC helped draw some of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in history, locking in huge Republican advantages in state legislatures and congressional delegations.The supreme court’s decision in Citizens United helped make possible the $30m that funded Redmap. Redmap’s lines then proved so stout that they could hold back electoral waves. In 2012, the Republican party would easily hold the US House of Representatives even as they won 1.4m fewer votes nationwide; Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin all went for Obama statewide, but the Republicans got 64 of those states’ 94 congressional seats.Meanwhile, as Republicans drew themselves giant edges in the US House and state chambers, and packed Democrats into fewer seats they won with bigger majorities, low-turnout, base-driven Republican primaries became the key races to win, producing a new generation of lawmakers fixated on solutions for “voter fraud”.This grim result is a US supreme court that has been captured by conservatives, which has delivered a decade of anti-democracy decisions that have advantaged the Republican party in elections, as well as an audacious plan to gerrymander Republicans into power in state legislatures nationwide and helped produce ever-more-extreme caucuses eager to adapt draconian voter restrictions in the name of stopping fraud that they cannot prove exist. The Roberts court has blessed this as well.Call it the Shelby county-Redmap two-step. The US supreme court’s decisions in Shelby county and other crucial Voting Rights Act (VRA) cases first ended preclearance – the VRA’s enforcement mechanism, which for nearly 50 years prevented lawmakers in states with the worst track records on voting rights from changing the rules without prior approval. Then the court handed lawmakers wide latitude to enact voting restrictions – even those with a demonstrated partisan edge or disproportionate impact on racial minorities – just as long lawmakers said that they believed they were battling fraud.If voters wanted to toss out lawmakers who force citizens to endure harder processes to make their voices heard, well, the politicians and Leo’s rightwing judges had that covered too. Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and Texas – states that the Voting Rights Act has required to pre-approve the equity of legislative maps – were suddenly liberated by the US supreme court to gerrymander themselves into safe districts..Then, in 2019’s disastrous Rucho v Common Cause, Roberts closed off appealing to federal courts to help fix partisan gerrymanders and suggested, apparently with a straight face, that voters still had the power to fix this through the ordinary political process, or by passing a law through Congress. Just like that, time and again, whether on voting rights or reproductive rights, the court would issue a ruling that benefited the Republican party, while telling citizens to fix it through a political process that the court helped engineer against them.It could get worse still. If Georgia’s state election board – appointed largely by the gerrymandered legislature, empowered by Shelby county’s evisceration of preclearance – succeeds in slowing the state’s count or certification to a crawl, it could push the battle for the state’s electors toward courts hand-picked and packed by Leo.Likewise, a close win for Trump in Arizona or Georgia – where fewer than 11,000 and 12,000 votes, respectively, made the difference in 2020 – could easily be attributed to aggressive new voting restrictions that target minority communities, passed by gerrymandered legislatures freed from preclearance after Shelby. And if certification runs aground in the US House, where a majority of the Republican caucus voted against certifying free and fair results from Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2020, one big reason will be the new breed of extremist lawmaker elected to Congress from districts gerrymandered to be wildly uncompetitive.This would be the ultimate proof of concept for the right’s judicial capture and gerrymandering schemes: tilted legislatures, newly liberated by the courts, tipping the presidency back to a supreme court supermajority packed with three justices who proved their conservative bona fides working on Bush v Gore in 2000.Moneyball did not last forever. Big-market teams caught on to Oakland’s methods. But whether or not this election ends with a Bush v Gore redux, this anti-democratic moment is here to stay. It has proven nearly impossible to defeat because Leo remains a step ahead of hapless Democrats, and because the unfair after-effects of hijacked courts and hijacked legislatures have proven so long-lasting. Then, when the supreme court shuttered federal courts to redistricting cases, state supreme courts became the last bulwark. So Leo and the RSLC have worked together to identify, fund and elect conservative justices in crucial states in part to protect the tilted maps.Now they’ve combined forces: Jankowski brokered the $1.6bn bequest that built Leo’s latest dark money operation, the Marble Freedom Trust. Last month, Leo said he’d spend as much as $1bn to “crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious”, in the worlds of media and culture.If Redmap cost just $30m to execute, if it cost upwards of $17m to keep a seat warm for Neil Gorsuch before confirming him after Trump took office, just imagine what they might bankroll now. Installing a conservative supermajority in the nation’s impoverished newsrooms, buying once-trusted brands and remaking them in their ideological image, could be both a bargain and a finishing masterstroke in their push for the radical right’s ongoing push for an enduring minority rule.

      David Daley is the author of the new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50 Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More