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      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

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s attacks on migrants: smirking racism is no less dangerous | Editorial

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      There is a humanitarian crisis involving Haitians and, despite JD Vance’s lies, it isn’t in Ohio. It’s in Haiti itself, where violence has reached terrifying levels. Five children a week are killed and injured and almost 5 million people – about half the population – face acute hunger. Little wonder families flee. Most of the 15,000 Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield are in the US through the temporary protected status (TPS) granted to them because of the turmoil in their own country.Now they face fresh danger thanks to the vicious and baseless lies of Donald Trump’s campaign. In his debate with Kamala Harris, Mr Trump declared that “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats.” He had picked up on his running mate Mr Vance’s slanders on X that “pets [have been] abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country”.These were claims first spread by far-right groups and neo-Nazis. Promoting them had predictable results. Hospitals, schools and government buildings have been forced to close after bomb threats. The town as a whole has been endangered, though of course the Haitian population – or those who might be mistaken for them – are most at risk. Some say they are living in constant fear, and are too scared to leave their homes.The woman who first aired the pet-eating slurs has admitted they are baseless. The city’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, has stressed that “your pets are safe”. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has dismissed the claims. A grieving father, Nathan Clark, asked Mr Trump and others to stop exploiting his 11-year-old child’s death in a bus crash involving a Haitian immigrant to stoke hatred in the town. The lies have led to an emergency order being issued in Springfield. When Mr Trump said he was planning a visit there, Mr Rue, backed by Mr DeWine, said it would be better if he stayed away.Mr Trump and Mr Vance continue to lie because it allows them to focus, in a hateful way, on immigration. The Republican vice-presidential nominee openly admits as much. The former president has already called migrants who enter the US illegally “animals” and “not human”, and accused them of “poisoning the [country’s] blood”. The claim about pets taps into old tropes about “savagery”, the threat of the sinister outsider, and associating foreigners with “weird” eating habits, evoking not only loathing but disgust.The current administration is not beyond criticism when it comes to Haiti – despite the TPS measures, it has continued to deport some Haitians. But that’s a world away from this cynical fomentation of hatred. As Joe Biden put it last week: “We don’t demonise immigrants. We don’t single them out for attacks. We don’t believe they’re poisoning the blood of the country. We’re a nation of immigrants, and that’s why we’re so damn strong.”Writing of the Trump presidency’s cruelties, the author Adam Serwer observed that “the cruelty is the point” and that “their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump”. Now Arizona Republicans run LoLtastic “EAT LESS KITTENS” hate posters and Mr Vance instructs his supporters to “Keep the cat memes flowing”. Smirking racism is no less lethal. Haitians in Ohio have not been singled out because they are a threat, but because the far right knows they are an easy target.

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      Activist with far right ties fronts Marco Rubio-linked anti-immigration effort

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      The rightwing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for employing neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank’s efforts to spread anti-immigrant panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.Videos featuring Hochman recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been boosted on X by a range of rightwing figures including the platform’s owner, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.In recent days Hochman, 26, has recorded several videos on location in Charleroi for America 2100, a rightwing thinktank where he is an adviser, according to his biographies on X and at websites where he has published articles. Hochman is also a staff writer and podcaster at the rightwing website the American Spectator, where his recent output has mostly consisted of anti-immigrant messaging.Like Springfield in Ohio, Charleroi has attracted a community of Haitian migrants.The borough manager, Jim Manning, told CBS News on Wednesday that immigrants including Haitians “have been a benefit to the town”.He added: “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”At the time of reporting, Hochman had only published interviews with older white residents of the town, who have variously complained that the newcomers do not speak English and that migrants have taken “American jobs”.One interviewee appears to concede that the Haitians are in Charleroi legally but dismisses the importance of that fact.“The perception is that it’s not legal,” the interviewee says at one point. “Now, you get a lot of people saying they’re illegals and everyone wants to fight about that term, but it doesn’t really matter.”In an email sent after publication, Mike Needham, America 2100’s founder and president, pointed to an interview with a Black resident that had been published on the organization’s X account on Friday afternoon.Needham added in the same email: “Nate also recorded interviews with multiple Haitian workers in the course of his week-long investigation.” As of noon on Saturday, no interviews with Haitian immigrants had been published on the X account.Most have not been shared extensively, although one of the videos was reposted by far-right account End Wokeness, and reposted in turn by Musk to his nearly 200 million followers along with a nugget of political analysis. “Pennsylvania is a swing state,” Musk wrote. His repost was shared in turn by the America 2100 account.America 2100 is ostensibly a thinktank, launched by Needham, Rubio’s one-time chief of staff, in June 2023. Rubio is a Republican senator from Florida. Coverage of the launch presented it as a project with Rubio’s blessing, whose mission was to “begin the work of codifying and institutionalizing the ideas Rubio helped pioneer”.In July, however, Needham was also appointed as chairman of another thinktank, American Compass, which is led by a former Mitt Romney aide, Oren Cass.Cass and American Compass have drawn attention by promoting interventionist economic policies. Those policy ideas overlap with those of JD Vance: in reporting on the Needham hire, Politico called American Compass a “Vance-aligned think tank”, and Vance “an ally whose own staff has deep ties to the organization”.American Compass’s policy director, Chris Griswold, meanwhile, is another former Rubio staffer.After being dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump in a 2016 primary in which he, in turn, mocked the size of Trump’s hands, Rubio moved closer to Trump politically over the succeeding eight years, and in May even refused to commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election.At that time, Rubio was under consideration as Trump’s running mate but was eventually passed over for JD Vance.Although there was reporting on America 2100 at launch, there is little information on the site about its current personnel or the nature of the entity underlying its activities.America 2100 was registered as a non-stock corporation in Virginia in June 2023.Officers listed in filings include Needham and another former Rubio staffer, Albert Martinez, along with Lisa Lisker, a lawyer who was reportedly previously involved in an organization that spread misinformation about solar power in 12 states, and was also secretary for JD Vance’s campaign committee during his run for Senate in the 2022 election.The Guardian emailed America 2100 for comment via an email address designated for “press”, and emailed Needham and Lisker. The Guardian also contacted Rubio’s office.Only Needham responded, writing that: “I know this article will be bad-faith political hit job.”Needham added: “Nate did a great job reporting on the tragic story playing out in Charleroi.”In mid-2022, Hochman appeared poised for a high-profile career in conservative media, having been rewarded with blue ribbon fellowships and a staff job at the home of mainstream conservative opinion, National Review.His status as a representative of the emerging, harder-edged “national conservative” movement made him “the leftwing media’s go-to voice for insight into this crowd”, according to a story on rising rightwing influencers published at that time by the Dispatch, a “never Trump” conservative website.Hochman’s appearance in that story, however, was the start of his undoing.The Dispatch reported on a recording of Hochman in a Twitter spaces conversation with the white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.In that conversation, Hochman reportedly disagreed with Fuentes on some topics, but also appeared to compliment the “America First” far-right activist, telling Fuentes: “You’ve gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure,” and “I think Nick’s probably a better influence than [the conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservatives.”Amid the furore that followed, Hochman was stripped of his fellowships. In March 2023 he left the National Review to work for DeSantis’s abortive presidential campaign. He was fired by the campaign that July, however, after he retweeted a meme-drenched pro-DeSantis video on his personal account that embraced the aesthetics of the online far right.As the Guardian reported at the time, the video portrayed “a ‘Wojak” meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about Trump policy failures before showing the meme cheering up to headlines about DeSantis and images of the governor at work”, all to the tune of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.Then finally it superimposed DeSantis on to ranks of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norse symbol frequently appropriated by neo-Nazis.As Hochman departed the campaign, Axios reported that Hochman had made the video, but endeavored to make it “appear as if it was produced externally”.Since then, Hochman has more fully embraced the more extreme actors of the so-called “new right”.A week ago, he published an essay at the far-right magazine IM–1776, which appeared to embed conspiratorial claims about the media in a jeremiad against democracy.Hochman claims at one point in the piece: “The US constitution was conceived to thwart tyranny; but it did so, in part, by limiting mass democracy. Once those limits were removed, power was no longer dispersed across a system of checks and balances, but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.”Another recent essay published at IM–1776 characterized critics of Darryl Cooper – the “Holocaust revisionist” who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s webcast – as adherents of “Hitlerian Satanism”.IM–1776 also gave space for the alt-right influencer Douglass Mackey to characterize his prosecution under Klan-era election laws as the government “prosecuting people [for] posting election jokes”.The Guardian previously reported on IM–1776’s close links to the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, who has spent much of the last week trying in vain to substantiate Donald Trump’s false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating “dogs” “cats” and “pets”.In his essay, Hochman praises Rufo, saying that he “has won an impressive string of culture war victories by actively crafting news cycles rather than responding to them”.In May, in the American Mind, Hochman began a glowing review of The Unprotected Class, a book by the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl that claims America is racked by anti-white racism, with the line: “Ethnic discrimination is as old as human civilization itself,” and goes on to argue: “Racial revenge is the germ of the sustained campaign to defame, attack, and disenfranchise white Americans on behalf of their country’s most powerful institutions.” More

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      Ohio city’s mayor issues emergency order over false migrant rumors

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      The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, has issued an emergency proclamation following the continued rise in public safety threats over false rightwing rumors about the city’s migrant communities.On Thursday, Rob Rue released a statement, saying: “Ensuring the safety of Springfield’s residents is our top priority.” He added: “We are addressing these threats with the seriousness they warrant and are taking immediate steps to ensure the security of both our community and our employees. Our commitment to preventing harm is unwavering.”According to a city statement, the proclamation allows Rue and other city officials to “swiftly acquire resources needed to address potential threats” and will “enable departments to respond more efficiently to emerging risks, including civil unrest, cyber threats and potential acts of violence”.In recent days, following Donald Trump, JD Vance and other rightwing politicians publicly repeating falsehoods about the city’s Haitian immigrants eating other locals’ pets, the city has received more than 30 bomb threats against its schools, government buildings and city officials’ homes.On Wednesday, local outlets reported multiple clinics and grocery stores across the city being forced to evacuate because of bomb threats. Among the establishments forced to evacuate were two branches of Walmart, one Kroger supermarket, as well as the Pregnancy Resource Center of Clark county and Planned Parenthood in Springfield.In response to the spread of the false rumors on social media, then taken up full throat by Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate Vance, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, also a Republican, said such escalations by national figures were “very hurtful” to the Haitian migrant community, adding: “They need to stop.”On Tuesday, Vance defended his comments about Haitian migrants eating pets, saying at a Wisconsin rally that “the media has a responsibility to factcheck” stories, rather than the candidate or his campaign. Earlier this week, Vance admitted on CNN that he was willing to “create stories” to get media attention.Trump and Vance have been told repeatedly by various authorities in Springfield and Ohio that the rumors about pets and animals such as local ducks are not true. More

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      With their lies about Haitian immigrants, Trump and Vance have reached a new low | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      During his debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September, Donald Trump proffered the outrageous lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating residents’ pets. He wasn’t alone in promoting this little bigoted nugget, either. Earlier that day on X, formerly known as Twitter, JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, had already pushed the idea that Springfield’s residents “have had their pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants”.Vance subsequently tripled down on the falsehood, even later admitting to CNN: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”Behold, the political lie. We’re not talking about spin, which bends the truth to something usable. We’re dealing with an outright fabrication. None of what Trump and Vance are saying about the Haitian community is true. Not a single bit of it. The Haitian community of Springfield is there because its members have been granted temporary protected status, a US government program that allows them to live and work legally in the United States for a defined period of time. And none of them have been known to eat your pets.But there is something almost refreshing in Vance’s moment of honesty about his own dishonesty. In an era where cynicism prevails, it feels almost naive to believe in something, and Vance and Trump are showing us they do believe! But what they believe in is the power of spreading the most shocking, contemptible and brazen lies possible to secure their political victory.What’s a little lie, after all, if it helps their cause? Or, as Vance put it on X: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”The luxury of the political lie, however, is that the tellers of the lie never have to live directly with the consequences of their actions. But others do.On 12 September, Springfield’s city hall was forced to close because of a bomb threat, and all Clark county buildings, including the offices of the department of job and family services, the common pleas court, and the board of elections, were similarly closed “out of an abundance of caution”.By Friday, four other schools had been evacuated due to bomb threats, which similarly emptied the bureau of motor vehicles and the Ohio Southside license bureau. Then, on Saturday, two hospitals, the Springfield regional medical center and the Kettering Health Springfield medical center, were also forced into lockdown. By Sunday, Springfield’s Clark State College received emailed threats of violence and subsequently moved all its classes online for a week due. The local Wittenberg University was also threatened with a mass shooting, forcing it to cancel all its events on Sunday and move classes online for Monday.When Monday rolled around, two more of Springfield’s elementary schools, the Simon Kenton elementary school and Kenwood elementary school, also had to be evacuated “based on information received from the Springfield Police Division”, the Springfield city school district announced. The city of Springfield also axed its CultureFest, the city’s annual celebration of diversity. At a press conference, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, announced that he is deploying the Ohio state highway patrol to schools in Springfield after they received nearly three dozen bomb threats since late last week.Fox News and Trump’s partisans on the media responded to this harrowing turn of events by emphasizing something that DeWine said during his press conference. The bomb threats had thus far (thankfully) been hoaxes, and many of them seemed to originate abroad. “We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions,” the governor said.What Trump’s supporters fail to mention is that Trump and Vance created the conditions for these hoaxes to happen in the first place. But, true to form, it seems they would rather blame shadowy foreigners instead.You can’t blame foreigners for the arrival of armed neo-Nazi members of the Blood Tribe, an extremist North American white supremacist group that marched through Springfield in August while carrying swastika-emblazoned flags. You can’t blame foreigners for a member of the Blood Tribe addressing a Springfield city commission meeting days later, telling Rob Rue, Springfield’s mayor: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” You can’t blame folks overseas for the fact that Springfield’s Haitian church has been vandalized twice in one month. You can’t blame foreigners for the increased racism that many Haitians are reporting.Springfield’s already vulnerable Haitian community (particularly after a tragic traffic accident in August that left an 11-year-old boy dead) is now living on a razor’s edge. Fleeing Haiti for their lives, members of his community currently live as if their “temporary protected status” has been summarily taken away from them while they live in the United States, where they are supposed to be safe.Meanwhile, the work they perform sustains the Springfield’s businesses and can be felt far beyond. Springfield’s Haitians are legally employed in local microchip manufacturing and Amazon fulfillment centers. Your Toyota may have an axle fabricated at the hands of a member of this community, and that salad you’re eating may have been packaged by them at a Dole Fresh Vegetables in Springfield.Springfield has seen a substantial increase in Haitian immigration in recent years. A city of 58,000 is hosting 12,000 to 15,000 newcomers. That puts pressure on city services while also adding to the city’s tax revenue. Time and proper planning can pave a path of prosperity forward for everyone.On the other hand, a new Black population moving into a largely white town is a huge temptation to those who want to stoke division. It looks like a windfall. Spin a lie about immigrants and their barbarism and you get to hate on Democrats, the media and immigrants, simultaneously.But at the heart of it is a lie, a cowardly invention that you knowingly want others to promote. That basic fact ought to reveal the salient truth of today’s political lie. If Trump and Vance can’t take responsibility for their actions now, why would anyone think they could take responsibility for the country later?

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More