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      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

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      in US Politics

      Vance to talk at tour hosted by ‘prophet’ who thinks Harris practices witchcraft

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      JD Vance will speak at an event on Saturday hosted by the self-styled prophet and political extremist Lance Wallnau, who has claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft and has written that the US is headed toward bloody internal conflict.The campaign announced earlier this week that the Republican vice-presidential candidate will participate in a “town hall” as part of the Courage tour, a traveling pro-Trump tent revival, during a stop in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.Wallnau, who hosts the tour and broadcasts its speakers on his online show – drawing hundreds in-person and sometimes tens of thousands virtually – is a proponent of the “seven mountains” mandate, which commands Christians to seek leadership in seven key areas of society – the church, the education system, the family, the media, the arts, business and government.He is also a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement that features modern-day apostles and has taken hold in particular in non-denominational charismatic churches that embrace faith healing and believe that the Holy Spirit can speak directly through believers in the form of speaking in tongues and prophesy. These religious spaces often also practice “deliverance ministry” and “spiritual warfare” to cleanse people of demonic entities.Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood, a scholar whose research focuses on such groups, noted that NAR-aligned practitioners engage in a unique form of “spiritual warfare” – fighting malign forces in not only individuals who are believed to be inhabited by a malign entity, but also entire geographic areas.“Spiritual warfare is the belief that a demon has taken up residence and is controlling anything from a large geographic space to a culture, to the White House or the supreme court,” said Gaspard-Hogewood.Extremism researchers worry that spiritual warfare, which is by definition waged in the supernatural realm, could become dangerous if interpreted excessively literally. On January 6, spiritual warriors affiliated with the Jericho March rallied at the Capitol to protest against the election results, engaging in a form of spiritual warfare on the National Mall. Wallnau, who himself prophesied that Trump would win the 2016 election and rejected the outcome when he didn’t win again in 2020, doubled down on his position at a stop of the Courage tour in Wisconsin.“January 6 was not an insurrection – it was an election fraud intervention!” Wallnau exclaimed to the roaring crowd.Wallnau has also written in his book, God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J Trump and the American Unraveling, that he believes the United States is headed toward a potentially bloody clash – a “fiery trial” that will come “both to believers and nations”. In his book, in which he also claims to have met with Trump on multiple occasions, Wallnau writes that the US is entering a “crucible”, which will involve “a ‘conflict’ of ideologies, often arms, to determine a victor in the power clash”.The Courage tour has made stops in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.The inclusion of Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, in the tour highlights the Trump campaign’s increasing alignment with a movement on the religious right that seeks to subordinate US government and society to Christian doctrine.A typical day at the Courage tour involves faith healing and music in the morning, followed by a series of speakers preaching about the scourge of secular society and espousing their opposition to LGBTQ+ inclusion. Trump-aligned organizations including TPUSA Faith and America First Policy Institute have had a presence on the tour handing out pamphlets and posting up at stands outside the tent.Vance’s speech marks the first time the Trump campaign has officially linked with the tour. In response to a request for comment about Vance’s participation in the Courage tour, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, did not directly comment on Wallnau or Vance’s participation in the event, but wrote that neither “President Trump, nor any of his supporters, ever engaged in an alleged ‘insurrection’.”Wallnau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Republicans have long enjoyed the support of conservative, and in particular, evangelical Christians. In 2016, Trump, whose profile as a twice-divorced billionaire who has faced multiple accusations of sexual assault, managed to maintain that alliance by assuring his presidency would represent the Christian right through conservative judicial appointments. Trump made good on his promise, ushering in an ultraconservative supreme court, which in 2022 overturned Roe v Wade – delivering opponents of abortion a stunning win.Since 2020, a burgeoning movement of evangelical leaders who seek to separate the church from Maga politics could threaten that alliance. If Trump is able to hold on to those voters and turn out enough conservative Christians at the polls, he could win back the White House.With its 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania could be a make-or-break state for Harris and Trump. Some polling shows Kamala Harris holding a narrow lead over Trump in the state; other polls suggest the candidates are virtually tied there.Vance’s participation in the Courage tour could alienate some. The campaign is probably betting the support he could shore up from rightwing Christians there will outweigh the risk of appearing at an event with extremist overtones. More

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      MyPillow founder Mike Lindell denies nod to neo-Nazis in new ad campaign

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      The MyPillow company and its founder, Mike Lindell, a far-right influencer and acolyte of Donald Trump, are continuing to run a promotion despite criticism that it utilizes numerical symbols associated with neo-Nazism.The company has been touting a promotion for a pillow with a sale price of $14.88 and it was still on offer on Friday morning.Apart from being an odd price on its face, the Anti-Defamation League has noted that “1488” is a numeric hate symbol – “14” being a nod to the “14 Words” white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” and “88” being a code for “Heil Hitler”, as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.The company first introduced the promotion on 20 September and has continued to post about it on X, despite users on social media pointing its association with neo-Nazis.Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow for the American Immigration Council, pointed out on X a day after the first MyPillow post about the promotion that it mirrored the numeric hate symbol.A post from Seth Cotlar, a professor of history at Willamette University, on Bluesky said the promotion was a “disturbing wink at Nazis, wrapped in the seemingly innocuous, plausibly deniable form of an advertisement”.“I doubt Lindell is behind this or would ever get the reference, but that doesn’t really matter,” Cotlar wrote.Neo-Nazi groups have worn the “88” in public demonstrations, like one in September of last year in Orlando, Florida, where a group of neo-Nazi demonstrators wearing masks and red shirts and waving swastika flags were seen marching through an Orlando suburb.When asked by the New York Post about the promotion, Lindell denied the allegations that the price is associated with the hate symbol and dismissed it as another attack on his company.“I have no idea what this is all about,” Lindell told the New York Post. “We’ve done this many times before. It had nothing to do with whatever you guys are trying to make it out to be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn the conservative talkshow FlashPoint, Lindell said the company used “a bunch of price points” ending with $0.88, like $19.88, $18.88.“Kind of like Walmart does when they have a sale,” he said.The pillow company, founded by Lindell in 2009, has been mired in controversy over the last few years as Lindell became a far-right influencer after the 2020 election. Lindel has promoted conspiracy theories, including a fake cure for Covid and that the 2020 election was stolen, and is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.Lindell is facing a $1.3bn lawsuit from voting machine manufacturer Dominion for making defamatory false statements about the company to promote his pillows.Lindell is facing another lawsuit from delivery company DHL for $800,000 of unpaid bills. Companies like Wayfair and Kohl’s stopped selling MyPillow in 2021, citing poor sales. More

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      Republicans think Kamala Harris can’t be president because she hasn’t had children | Moira Donegan

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      Introducing Donald Trump is a strange occasion to talk about humility. To put it mildly, humility is not a quality that the former president is known for. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary and current governor of Arkansas, decided to muse about humility on stage in Michigan on Tuesday night. She told a story about watching her daughter get ready for a father-daughter dance, and of the moment when her daughter turned to her and said: “It’s OK, Mommy. One day you can be pretty, too.”“My kids keep me humble,” Sanders said of the exchange. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”It was the latest in a series of attacks by Republicans on childless Americans, and among the more direct comments by Trump surrogates suggesting that Harris is morally suspect and unqualified for power because she has not given birth.This is usually JD Vance’s line. The vice-presidential candidate and Ohio senator has been the most prominent face of Republican pro-natalism, responding to the overturning of Roe v Wade by the conservative-controlled supreme court with a series of public statements seeking to degrade childless women and advocating for their diminished citizenship.It is Vance who has derided prominent Democrats as “childless cat ladies”, referred to adults without children as “sociopathic” and suggested that Americans who have not reproduced should have fewer votes. That Sanders, largely seen as an heir to the party’s Christian conservative wing, has taken up this pro-natalist rhetoric indicates that other sections of the Republican party are willing to make misogynist contempt of childless women a center of their campaign strategy.Supporters of Harris are quick to point out that the vice-president does have children: she has stepchildren. Cole and Ella Emhoff, the products of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff’s first marriage, have been a part of Harris’s family since they were teenagers; reportedly, they sometimes call her “Momala”. (Ella Emhoff, in particular, has become a target of rightwing ire for her tattoos, large glasses and a fashion sense I can only describe as “Ridgewood basement chic”: her style of femininity, the right never tires of reminding us, is one of which they do not approve.)In the wake of Sanders’ remarks disparaging Harris for not being a mother, her campaign surrogates were eager to cite her enmeshment in a loving and very modern blended family. Kerstin Emhoff, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife and the mother of Harris’s stepchildren, took to Twitter to defend Harris. “Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families,” she wrote.These efforts to correct Republican smears about Harris’s childlessness are true enough, and they have noble motives as well as strategic ones. It is worthwhile on its own terms to reaffirm the legitimacy of blended families; and it is smart, in a campaign where median voters may well be swayed by appeals to “family values”, to depict Harris as a devoted member of a loving family.But the rejoinder that Harris is not childless leaves intact the right wing’s suggestion that it would be a problem if she were. And it leaves untouched, too, the unspoken bigotry that animates those remarks: their assertion that women who devote themselves to things other than marriage or motherhood are somehow suspect, deficient or defective.It seems almost silly to have to say this, but being a parent is not a qualification for the presidency. If it were, it’s not clear how well Donald Trump himself would measure up: the onetime reality TV star has five children with three different women, has reportedly made repeated remarks about his sexual attraction to his oldest daughter, Ivanka, and seems only distantly aware of his youngest two progeny, Tiffany and Barron.Even setting aside the caliber of Trump’s own fatherhood, a total of five US presidents have not had biological children at all – including Trump’s own professed hero, Andrew Jackson, and no less a figure than George Washington. What is different – and to the right, offensive – about Harris is not that she has no biological children. It’s that she is a woman.So far, the prospect of becoming the first female president has not played a major role in Harris’s case for her own presidency. Aside from things like the selection of a VP candidate (which, it was assumed, would have to be a man) and Harris’s comfort talking about abortion (which, it is assumed, is necessarily because she’s a woman), the campaign has largely sought to moot the salience of their candidate’s gender.Perhaps this is because after 2016 and the crowded 2020 primary, the prospect of a woman at the top of a presidential ticket no longer seems novel; perhaps it’s because the Harris/Walz staff have taken the lesson from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign that too great a focus on the election as a possible feminist achievement could foment backlash. Whatever the reason, there is little public chatter now, either from the Harris campaign itself or from the pundit class, about how having a female president will change Americans’ view of the office – or of themselves. If there were, maybe someone would be willing to say what is obvious: that comments like Sanders’ are meant to suggest that women should be at home raising babies, instead of seeking positions of power. Instead, everyone is acting very conspicuously as if they think that Harris’s gender does not matter.It does matter. And that vacuum of gendered critique is being filled, on the right, with a great deal of gendered resentment. As the gender gap in American politics continues to widen, Trump, Vance and increasingly the rest of the Republican party that they lead have begun to parrot talking points from the so-called “manosphere”, the collection of web forums and content creators that push misogyny as an ideological agenda.The far-right drift of young men, after all, seems largely to stem from anxiety over their perceived loss of gendered status: their fear and anger that men are no longer uncontested in their social dominance, and that women are no longer uniformly compelled to serve them. What could be more comforting to young men descending into this kind of bigoted woundedness than the confident declaration that women who do not organize their lives around traditional roles are worthless? And what could be more threatening to them than the notion that a woman might ascend to that superlative position of patriarchal power – the presidency?

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Amazon, Tesla and Meta among world’s top companies undermining democracy – report

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      Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore are the corporations included in the report. The companies’ lobbying arms are attempting to shape global policy at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York City on 22 and 23 September.At Amazon, the report notes the company’s size and role as the fifth largest employer in the world and the largest online retailer and cloud computing service, has had a profound impact on the industries and communities it operates within.“The company has become notorious for its union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centres, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level,” states the report.The report cites Amazon’s high injury rates in the US, the company challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), its efforts in Canada to overturn labor law, the banning of Amazon lobbyists from the European parliament for refusing to attend hearings on worker violations, and refusal to negotiate with unions in Germany, among other cases. Amazon has also funded far-right political groups’ efforts to undermine women’s rights and antitrust legislation, and its retail website has been used by hate groups to raise money and sell products.At Tesla, the report cites anti-union opposition by the company in the US, Germany, and Sweden; human rights violations within its supply chains; and Elon Musk’s personal opposition to unions and democracy, challenges to the NLRB in the US, and his support for the political leaders Donald Trump, Javier Milei in Argentina and Narendra Modi in India.The report cites Meta, the largest social media company in the world, for its vast role in permitting and enabling far-right propaganda and movements to use its platforms to grow members and garner support in the US and abroad. It also cited retaliation from the company for regulatory measures in Canada, and expensive lobbying efforts against laws to regulate data privacy.Glencore, the largest mining company in the world by revenue, was included in the report for its role in financing campaigns globally against Indigenous communities and activists.Blackstone, the private equity firm led by Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire backer of Donald Trump, was cited in the report for its roles in funding far-right political movements, investments in fossil fuel projects and deforestation in the Amazon.“Blackstone’s network has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting politicians and political forces who promise to prevent or eliminate regulations that might hold it to account,” the report noted.The Vanguard Group was included in the report due to its role in financing some of the world’s most anti-democratic corporations. ExxonMobil was cited for funding anti-climate science research and aggressive lobbying against environmental regulations.Even in “robust democracies” workers’ demands “are overwhelmed by corporate lobbying operations, either in policymaking or the election in itself”, said Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organizing at the ITUC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is about power, who has it, and who sets the agenda. We know as trade unionists that unless we’re organized, the boss sets the agenda in the workplace, and we know as citizens in our countries that unless we’re organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it’s corporate power that’s going to set the agenda.“They’re playing the long game, and it’s a game about shifting power away from democracy at every level into one where they’re not concerned about the effects on workers – they’re concerned about maximizing their influence and their extractive power and their profit,” added Brogan. “Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized.”The ITUC includes labor group affiliates from 169 nations and territories around the world representing 191 million workers, including the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, and the Trades Union Congress in the UK.With 4 billion people around the world set to participate in elections in 2024, the federation is pushing for an international binding treaty being worked on by the Open-ended intergovernmental working group to hold transnational corporations accountable under international human rights laws. More