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      ‘January 6 was just the warm-up’: the film that tracks three Maga extremists storming the Capitol

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      Homegrown is a documentary about three American patriots who love their country, revere Donald Trump and balk at the result of the 2020 presidential election. Director Michael Premo spent months trailing his subjects – Chris, Thad and Randy – in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol building of 6 January 2021, and his illuminating, gripping film looks back at a dark period of recent US history. Implicitly, though, it also warns of further unrest.“I think January 6th was just the warm-up,” Premo says. “This November, we’re going to see an even more frantic and desperate attempt to attack every level of the electoral system.” He is not optimistic about the US’s current direction of travel. The country, he argues, is effectively on the brink of civil war.Homegrown premieres in the International Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. It is one of a number of campaigning political pictures that could put the event at loggerheads with Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing Italian government. Joining it on the programme is Separated, Errol Morris’s documentary about family separation on the US’s southern border; Dani Rosenberg’s harrowing Gaza-themed drama Of Dogs and Men; and Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which is billed as an audiovisual diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Another highlight, says festival boss Alberto Barbera, will be the epic M: Son of the Century, Joe Wright’s eight-part TV biopic charting the life and times of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose government established the Venice film festival back in 1932. “And I must add,” Barbera told Variety magazine, “the time it describes has some pretty striking similarities with the present day.”View image in fullscreenLinks with the past are certainly clear in Homegrown, which spotlights a right-wing insurrectionist movement that had flourished on the fringes for decades before finding a new energy and focus under the Maga banner of Trump. Premo, a New York-based film-maker, began researching the documentary in 2018, eventually homing in on his three main protesters. One, Chris Quaglin, is a New Jersey electrician who divides his time between preparing a nursery for his soon-to-be-born son and stocking his “man-cave” with firearms in readiness for war. He says: “An AR-15 and enough people is enough to take our country back.”This, Premo argues, remains a distinct possibility. “Most prominent thinkers still dismiss the idea of civil war, because their reference is an event that occurred in 1860 under a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s discounting the way that modern political violence manifests itself, and particularly the way that sectarian violence plays out around the world. If this was happening in another country, say in Africa or Asia, I think American journalists would already be referring to the situation as a cold civil war. That’s how it feels to me.”Homegrown climaxes with powerful, ground-level footage of the January 6 attack. We see Quaglin in the thick of the action, resplendent in his stars-and-stripes Maga jumpsuit. He is swept up in the moment, storming the DC police by the metal barricades. “Almost a victory, I would say,” he brags afterwards, although this moment of near triumph proves short-lived. Quaglin was later found guilty of assaulting police and obstructing Congress and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.Premo has spent his career filming direct action protests. January 6 felt different, he says. “This was one of the most well-documented crimes in history. It was planned in public: a collaborative conspiracy involving numerous actors and institutions. Everyone knew it was coming.”View image in fullscreenThe director says he anticipated a massive police presence which would prevent protesters from gaining access to the Capitol. In the event, he was shocked by the lack of security; he says it almost felt deliberate. “I have to imagine that there are many law enforcement people who are part of these same conservative Facebook groups. They’re watching Fox News, watching Alex Jones and all the other pundits bang the drum about storming the Capitol. They had the same information I did and chose to do nothing about it.”What Homegrown highlights, however, is how broad-based and diverse America’s right-wing populist movement has become. Premo, who is black, claims that its main organising principle is not race hatred so much as despair and disillusion, characterised by a widespread loss of faith in American democracy’s ability to safeguard public interests. Significantly, the film chooses to cross-cut Quaglin’s journey with that of his fellow rebel Thad Cisneros, a charismatic Latino activist from Texas. Cisneros explains that he was first radicalised by watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He now dreams of forming an alliance with Black Lives Matter organisers.Cisneros, it transpires, is now also serving time and thus unavailable for comment. But he represents an increasingly fractured and muddied political landscape, one in which the old left-and-right stereotypes no longer apply. “We need to have a more nuanced understanding of the people driving this movement,” Premo says. “We need to know who these people are, what they look like, where they come from. Only then can we understand what we need to do to support the principle of a pluralistic democracy that stands any chance of surviving beyond this current era of us-versus-them politics.” More

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      ‘It’s not a theoretical proposition’: the ‘war game’ imagining a coup in the US

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      On 6 January 2025, US democracy stands at a crossroads. Congress must certify the results of an election that the loser refuses to concede. The Capitol is besieged by a wave of protesters who believe the election was stolen. Some of them are armed and determined to seize power for their leader. Similar groups have amassed at state capitols around the country. And a portion of the DC National Guardsmen – as well as a portion of the US military, including a handful of high-ranking officials – are on their side.This is a fictional scenario, played out in a “war game” simulation with real government and military officials in a mock situation room. But according to a new documentary capturing the role-playing exercise, such a crisis of authority – and the fracturing of the military along partisan lines – is a very real possibility in the politically polarized US, one that we should prepare for. “It’s not a theoretical proposition,” said Jesse Moss (Boys State, Girls State), a co-director of War Game, now playing in US theaters. “Even a very small sliver of the US active duty military that chooses to side with, say, a defeated candidate in a national election, could destabilize our country and put our democracy in jeopardy.”War Game, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, observes the six-hour event held at a Washington DC hotel room in January 2023. The simulation, developed by the Vet Voice Foundation, is one of several role-playing exercises developed in response to the events of January 6, to help military and government officials prepare for another worst-case scenario. How will the US government react if it happens again? And what if the president can’t count on the support of the military? Nearly one in five January defendants had a military background. In May 2021, 124 retired general and admirals signed an open letter propagating the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. As Benjamin Radd, a game producer who viscerally recalls living through the breakdown of institutional authority in 1979 Iran, puts it: “Think about the unthinkable.”While other exercises, such as those recently led by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Democracy Futures Project, focus specifically on role-playing responses to a second Trump presidency, War Game mostly doesn’t name the elephant in the room, examining instead the forces and potentials of political extremism in the US. The distance – using footage of January 6, but not naming the names – allowed for some renewed urgency and clarity. “Sometimes it’s impossible to see something that’s right in front of you,” said Tony Gerber, the film’s other co-director. “And you have to find new ways to show people that thing, because there’s this sort of intentional blindness to see that thing that’s right there.”The exercise participants, a bipartisan group of military and cabinet officials from the last five presidential administrations, must respond to what is essentially a more organized version of January 6. The so-called “red cell”, developed by military veterans Kristofer Goldsmith and Chris Jones, present a multi-faceted and mutating threat on the ground and online, where the situation room – comprised of mock president-elect Hotham (former Montana governor Steve Bullock) and his team of advisers – must also fight an information game. Jones and Goldsmith, both experts on domestic extremist movements who understand veterans’ disillusionment with the government’s status quo, based their mock insurgency group, the Order of Columbus, on Trump’s Maga movement, the conspiracy quasi-religion known as QAnon and far-right paramilitary groups involved in the Capitol attack, such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.Participants – including former senator Heidi Heitkamp, retired major general of the Maryland national guard Linda Singh, Lt Gen (Ret) Jeffrey Buchanan, former senator Doug Jones and Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump – must decide how to combat a metastasizing threat, complete with mock news coverage, speeches and social media posts egging insurgents to follow their “real” leader. They must contend with a video from a high-ranking general, based on the former Trump official and Stop the Steal rally speaker Michael Flynn, calling on the military to disobey the commander in chief. With the DC Guardsmen compromised, should they mobilize other national guards? Should the federal government get involved in coup attempts at state capitols? How much force is too much? And when, if ever, should the president invoke the Insurrection Act, considered the game’s nuclear option, which allows the executive to deploy the US military on its own citizens? (Though the film-makers had total editorial control, they ran potential security issues by Vet Voice: “We didn’t want to give any insurrectionists a handbook to stage a coup,” said Moss.)That last decision is particularly resonant, given the law’s potential for great destruction in the wrong hands. The film’s one mention of Donald Trump by name comes in footage from the Congressional January 6 hearings, in which Jason van Tatenhove, a former member of the Oath Keepers, confirmed that the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, urged then president Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, promising that veterans would support him. “Regardless of the outcome of this election, that act is a power the president has, and it’s a power that’s worth thinking about,” said Moss.View image in fullscreen“This film doesn’t lose its meaning and its relevance with this election,” Gerber added. “A problem like this doesn’t metastasize overnight. This has been cooking and growing and coming to fruition for years. And we as a nation have to ask ourselves, how did we get here?”To that end, the film attempts to “understand, with empathy, how a young man or a young woman coming home after serving overseas could be radicalized”, said Gerber. In cutaways from the real-time exercise, Goldsmith, Jones and game designer Janessa Goldbeck movingly discuss the real threat of extremism in the military, particularly for veterans struggling to reintegrate into society after service, in wars based on government lies or obfuscation, in a country where fewer and fewer civilians have personal ties to the armed forces. They’ve witnessed it, in themselves or in loved ones. “I do understand the insurgents,” says Goldsmith in the film. “I understand what led them down that path. Because I was there after I got home from Iraq.”For participants in the game, the exercise offered a rattling six hours of both anxiety and the empowerment of preparation. The simulation had “real intentional utility”, said Moss, in that it produced a report shared with policymakers, but also as way to excise fear, anger and shock over what happened four years ago this January, over what is still dividing the country. “These divisions, these fears, this extremism – it’s not over there. It’s right here. It’s within our country. It’s within our family,” said Moss. The film provides “a kind of catharsis to deal with the traumas that we carry, and to think about, in hopefully a constructive way, where we might be going”.

      War Game is out now in New York and will expand to other cities on 9 August, with a UK date to be announced More

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      Mingus, Blige, Beyoncé: Black Twitter celebrates Kamala Harris’s pop-culture cred

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      Within moments of Joe Biden announcing his decision to hand his presidential campaign over to Kamala Harris, the greatest hits of her meme stardom re-entered circulation: the “We did it, Joe” call, the “Momala” interview with Drew Barrymore. Never mind callbacks to the vice-president quoting her Indian mother’s habit of asking, in frustration, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”Black Twitter users, however, quickly recalled Harris’s august history as the Black girl nextdoor – starting with the 2019 Breakfast Club interview in which Harris defended herself against charges that she was not “African American” because her parents were immigrants. “Look, this is the same thing they did to Barack [Obama],” she said. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”There will be countless stories about Harris’s record, voter support and her amorphous role as a headlining campaigner serving under a lame duck, one-term president unfolding through November. But what appears to be resonating most with many Black social media users in the wake of Harris’s surprise promotion is the cultural significance of it all. Here’s a woman who was Oakland-born and Berkeley-raised who has whiled away her share of Sundays in Baptist church.Earlier this week the hashtags #WinWithBlackWomen and #WinWithBlackMen began trending while their eponymous organizations hosted separate video calls gathering support for the vice-president. And in those strategy sessions, which drew tens of thousands of participants, presenters made proud and repeated shoutouts to their “soror” Harris, a product of Howard University and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority – both historically Black institutions. Over the course of two days, the groups raised nearly $3m in a matter of hours.Where the guest speakers on the women’s call tilted toward powerhouses of politics such as Jasmine Crockett and Donna Brazile, the celebrities on the men’s call – which was hosted by the media maven Roland Martin – ranged from the film super-producer Will Packer to the Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle. “I’ve been a friend and a fan of her journey,” the actor-comedian Bill Bellamy said. “She didn’t just come from anywhere.”Harris once traveled through the same Black Hollywood scene that defined fin-de-siècle Black culture. Longtime friends include the OJ Simpson expert Star Jones and 21 Jump Street lead Holly Robinson Peete, who visited the then senator at the California capitol in 2017 to discuss national legislation that would address the policing of Black teens with autism. (“We’re so lucky to have her as a friend and a fighter and a warrior,” Robinson Peete said on her reality show.)For a spell in 2001, Harris dated the chatshow host Montel Williams; not long after the bombshell news of Harris’s promotion landed, Williams retweeted an endorsement of the vice-president from the Maryland governor, Wes Moore – who was also on the #WinWithBlackMen call. “We’ve got 100 days to make sure we protect the future for our children, our families, our communities and neighborhoods by making sure we have a president of the United States who sees us, believes in us and honors us,” Moore said.View image in fullscreenIn Harris’s candidacy, there are unmistakable echoes of Obama, another immigrant’s son in whom Black voters readily saw themselves. This month, the two converged in Las Vegas to send off the USA basketball team before the Olympics, in clips that were widely shared. When Harris shook hands with Steph Curry, the Golden State Warriors star mentioned a letter the vice-president had sent following the birth of his fourth child in May. “I appreciate it,” Curry told her. The personal touch recalled another prominent hoops fan who worked in the White House.Even Obama’s and Harris’s music tastes overlap. Where Obama gets rightful credit as the country’s first hip-hop president, from brushing off his shoulders to actually hobnobbing with Jay-Z, Harris is poised to break ground as America’s first b-girl in chief. After the 2020 Democratic national convention, Harris strutted out for her nomination acceptance speech to Mary J Blige’s Work That. “I was so surprised,” Blige told Bravo TV of Harris’s choice – a deep cut, she added. “That made me go back and listen to the Growing Pains album where the song came from. The lyrics in that song are, like, oh my God; I see why she [chose it]. I forgot what I wrote!”Harris’s sharp ear was recognized again on social media again this week as streaming music patrons returned to her 2019 campaign playlist – a mix that includes A Tribe Called Quest, Jazmine Sullivan and Prince. But to hardcore crate-diggers, Harris’s coolest music moment remains her 2023 shopping trip to Black-owned HR Records in Washington DC that saw her come away with vinyl albums from Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers and the Porgy and Bess studio album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. “She knows her music,” the store’s owner, Charvis Campbell, told DCist. “I tried to give her a softball and give her Coltrane. And she was like, ‘No, no, no. Where’s the Mingus?’”Not long after Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential frontrunner, Beyoncé gave her permission to use her song Freedom – Harris had walked out to the 2016 track for her first appearance as a presidential candidate. On Instagram, the radio host DL Hughley posted a remixed video of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us diss record that includes Harris highlights (her strolling with another Black sorority, her dancing with an umbrella in the rain) intercut with photos of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein. “Who did this?” Hughley wrote. “Y’all quick!”In the coming months, there will be those who question Harris’s pop culture credentials. But to her supporters in the Black community, online and beyond, every time Harris reflects the culture, she leaves no doubt about who she is. More

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      Which Home Alone child star should everyone blame if Trump is re-elected? | Stewart Lee

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      The assassination attempt on Donald Trump last weekend is a tragedy; a tragedy for democracy, a tragedy for America and, above all, a tragedy for the whole world, because it means Donald Trump will be re-elected. And it is a tragedy for Donald Trump, who, whatever one thinks of his politics or his personality, is still a living creature, and as such, like Eamonn Holmes, is capable of suffering.Last week, I had a standup special, Basic Lee, on Sky Comedy, which even came as a surprise to me. I wish someone had shot me last weekend. The resulting publicity might have driven some traffic towards my work. Here’s hoping I’m at least wounded by a gunman while it’s still available to view on the Now streaming service. (Did you see what I did there?)When the free world’s last line of defence against a Trump MacTatorship ™ ® is Joe Biden, we are already doomed. I’m quitting quitting drinking. Stubborn Biden is too selfish to become the focus of a popularity elevating tragedy, preferring instead to let the world burn while he clings to his candidacy, a limpet in linen trousers, sitting there smiling, like something futile made of felt you’d win at a travelling fair.The now inevitable re-election of demagogue Donald, and the implementation of the puritanical Project 2025 agenda by Oliver Dowden’s Heritage Foundation friends, makes a Handmaid’s Tale-style Christian fascist America a certainty, ending not only the shared enlightenment values of the postwar western world, but also the Fifty Shades of Grey women’s erotica franchise. And Trump’s fandom for fossil fuels will hasten the inevitable extinction of all life on Earth, the only positive being that he may yet see his Scottish golf courses reclaimed by rising seas.American liberals and intellectuals with means and money, like Kacey Musgraves and the singer from Tool, must already be considering escape options as the nation begins its descent into the hell of an evangelical religious dictatorship. Trump’s presidency will, however, strengthen ties between Trump and the Clacton constituency of his right-hand man Nigel Farage, which is poised to be bulldozed and made into a private golf course-cum-leisure facility-cum-seaside stolen document storage unit.I’m joking, of course. But the attempted assassination of Trump and its butterfly flap consequences are no joke. Last Saturday, a piece of Trump’s ear was shot away by a gunman. Trump, with a presence of mind Biden might have benefited from when trying to remember the name of the president of Ukraine, struggled to his feet and, in a spirit of peace and reconciliation, shouted: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, energising supporters who three years ago forced entry to the Capitol aiming to lynch Mike Pence, the Hartlepool monkey of American politics.But what if it had been Trump himself who had been shot away, and only Trump’s ear fragment had been saved by security? Could Trump’s meat ear rim itself have been persuaded to run for the presidency? Could Trump’s ear flesh fragment have beaten Biden in a democratic election? Almost certainly. And would an America governed by a small severed slice of Trump’s ear have offered the world a more secure future than an America governed by Trump, or an America governed by Biden? Again, the answer, sadly, is a resounding yes.The American Christian right believes that Trump, despite his obvious moral corruption, is a massive tool of a God bent on shaping America into their own twisted theocracy. Evangelical Christian America believes their selectively myopic deity actually intervened to save Trump from the gunman, while leaving a heroic volunteer firefighter to take the bullet. Blessed are the firefighters. But how much more useful to this morally equivocating God is a simple severed ear, unencumbered by accusations that it tried to overturn an election, or paid an adult film star hush money, or stole classified documents, or sexually assaulted a woman in a department store. The ear would be innocent and pure and good, like Jesus, or the unborn child.And if an ear had, as Trump did, repeatedly socialised with the unsavoury sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his young friends, it is unlikely it would have been able to do anything inappropriate, due to its being an ear. And should the ear be found to have lost the public trust, it could, due to its inability to defend itself or argue its case, be easily dispensed with by the Republicans without too much fuss. Ear today, gone tomorrow.Imagining different ways the Trump shooting might have played out raises deep ethical questions. Philosophers call this concept “killing baby Hitler”. Would it be ethical for someone to travel back from the future and kill Hitler in his cot in order to prevent the second world war? And would it be ethical to travel back in time and carry out an attack on Trump that ensured future government by Trump’s ear alone? Of course not. And the idea of replacing Trump himself with Trump’s own ear is, at this stage, neither ear nor there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRather than risking the future on the policymaking of Trump’s unpredictable ear, the precise political leanings of which remain ill-defined at best, would it be better to go further back in time and stop the rise of Trump sooner? Perhaps, when he encountered Trump in Home Alone 2, Macaulay Culkin could have comforted the troubled billionaire with the same innocent friendship he gave to the sad dancer Michael Jackson, on the proviso that Trump abandon political ambition. But Macaulay Culkin didn’t do that. And now we all suffer for his selfishness. Macaulay Culkin has blood on his astonished infant face. Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on the streaming service Now. He is previewing 40 minutes of new material in Stewart Lee Introduces Legends of Indie at the Lexington, London, in August with Connie Planque (12), Swansea Sound (13) and David Lance Callahan (14)

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      Films, fashion, law,d politics: George and Amal Clooney’s growing global reach

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      It took a famous TV doctor to diagnose the patient. After two weeks of turmoil in the US Democratic party over President Biden’s re-election bid, it was ER’s Doug Ross, AKA George Clooney, who wrote up a devastating evaluation of the incumbent president.The 63-year-old actor was not in theatrical mode when he wrote a more-in-sorrow letter published by the New York Times last week that called on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race that the White House reportedly begged him not to submit, coming three weeks after Clooney helped raise $30m for the Biden-Harris ticket at a lavish Hollywood fundraiser.But Clooney’s bedside manner was impeccable: “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice-president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him,” he wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can.”Clooney was speaking for ­himself – and for a large swathe of liberal-leaning Hollywood donors angry at what they see as White House deception over the apparent decline of Biden’s health. Clooney said the man at the fundraiser “was the same man we all witnessed” in his debate performance two weeks later.In the current spirit of panic and recrimination, with a White House press corps turning every Biden appearance into a test of competence, Democrat money bundlers, including co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign and movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, are under suspicion of helping to cover up Biden’s apparent health issues.Clooney’s letter has put the Ocean’s Eleven actor out of political harm’s way. The Democratic party may not be so lucky. Democrats, says James Carville, the Clinton strategist who last week called for a blitz primary to select a new candidate, “are hellbent on a mission to force the American people to do something they don’t want to do – to vote for Joe Biden”.“George has come out, [former house speaker] Nancy Pelosi has come out – I don’t know what else people can do,” Carville told the Observer. “Other than a few people in Congress, everybody thinks this is a terrible idea [for Biden to run]. But you’re up against a guy who doesn’t want to leave, and that’s just where we are.”View image in fullscreenGeorge Clooney is not the only Clooney making waves on a global stage. Last month his wife Amal Clooney was revealed to have played an important role in making the case for arrest warrants to be issued by the international criminal court (ICC) to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and three top Hamas leaders.Biden called the ICC move “outrageous” and said that whatever the ICC prosecutor might imply, “there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”. According to the Washington Post, George Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, counsellor to the US president, to protest about the administration’s willingness to impose sanctions in which his wife could get caught.This week, the Biden-Harris campaign attempted to blame Clooney’s letter on “pre-existing tensions” – hinting at the ICC dust-up. A Hollywood producer familiar with the couple told the Observer that the White House’s explanation for the letter was “bullshit” and the lawyer had been smeared because her work is on human rights irrespective of political division.“George has power in Hollywood. Amal doesn’t, except as George’s wife,” they added. “Her power is in the UK, at the Hague and on the pages of Vogue.”The lawyer has not commented on her husband’s political intervention, which may have come with Barack Obama’s tacit approval. But after 10 years together, George and Amal Clooney are seen as one of the most stable couples in Hollywood.View image in fullscreenThey’d met at the actor’s home in Lake Como, Italy, when a mutual friend brought her by. Clooney’s agent had also got wind of the ­introduction, the actor later revealed. “My agent said: ‘I met this woman who is coming to your house, who you’re going to marry.’ It really worked out that way.”“It felt like the most natural thing in the world,” Amal said. “I always hoped there could be love that was overwhelming and didn’t require any weighing or decision-making.”A safari in Kenya to see giraffes sealed the deal. In 2014 he proposed, they married in Venice and now have twins.The political instinct which had surfaced in Clooney films including Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and The Ides of March (2011), soon took flight. By 2016 the couple were meeting with then-German chancellor Angela Merkel to talk refugee policy; that year they were at a UN refugee summit and soon after established the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which focuses on legal rights for those targeted by oppressive governments, tracking the money of human rights abusers and those profiting from war crimes.“We’re both inspired by the young people out there challenging injustice in their communities, a new generation that won’t accept the status quo,” the actor said in an awards acceptance speech two years ago.But Clooney’s intervention comes with potential costs. The Bidens, like the Clintons and Obamas, may see themselves as benefiting from rubbing shoulders with celebrities, but the intersection of entertainment and politics, and the money and ideologies that underpin it, is repulsive to many outside political-entertainment enclaves. In an echo of Trump, Biden now says the rising chorus against him is coming from members of “the elites”, despite the bad timing of first lady Dr Jill Biden appearing on the cover of the August US Vogue.The tradition of celebrity-political endorsements goes back to Frank Sinatra, who organised his friends, the Rat Pack, to campaign for John F Kennedy. Two decades later, disagreements over Ronald Reagan forced celebrities to choose where they belonged.“That’s where we are still,” explains veteran Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “Celebrities see themselves as an important part of the Democratic fundraising and thought-based operation, which a lot of Americans would not agree with.”View image in fullscreenSheinkopf says that the fight over Biden’s future is as much about the future of the Democratic party as it is about Biden’s health – and Clooney’s intervention will make Maga Republicans fight harder for candidate Trump.“Democrats are the party of the elites despite the fact that they see themselves as the party of the non-elites,” he says. Regardless of who is writing the cheques – Hollywood celebrities or a rightwing Texas industrialist – “what all elites want is a party that does what they want because they think it’s right”.“But that’s not who Joe Biden is. He represents the old pro-union, almost colour-blind left, but that’s not who the operators behind the scenes are,” he adds.Peter Bart, previous editor of the Hollywood trade bible Variety, wrote in a Deadline column that he had “great respect for Clooney’s decision” but it was also one that “will cost him”.He recalled other Hollywood stars who had mixed politics with entertainment, including Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston and John Wayne. “Apart from potential career damage, Clooney must confront donors who have spent millions at his ­urging to support a ticket he now renounces,” Bart, 91, warned.He recalled a conversation he’d had with Ronald Reagan about Nixon. “I want people to like me, even voters who vote against me,” Reagan told him. “Nixon doesn’t seem to care, but I’m still an actor.”Still, Clooney’s intervention has set him up for criticism. The progressive left and African-American voters, both voting blocs Biden is courting to firm up his support, slammed the actor for taking a position afforded him by being famous, white and male.Others have implied that perspectives are different from the window seat of a Gulfstream jet flying between homes in Los Angeles, England, France and Italy. (Besides being a successful actor, known for pranking friends, Clooney and partner Rande Gerber, husband of Cindy Crawford, split up to $1bn from the sale of their tequila brand Casamigos.)Clooney has been criticised, too, from the other side. Trump weighed in, saying Clooney “turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are”, and some have questioned why Clooney, and Hollywood more broadly, waited until after the debate to disclose what they had witnessed at the fundraiser.Still, the New York Times letter establishes the Kentucky-born actor as a modern-day Warren Beatty, the actor who made his political beliefs part of his public image. Beatty never ran for office and quipped it would be “more like running for crucifixion”, nor has Clooney, allowing both to ride over the humdrum day-to-day of retail politics.“George’s op-ed was provocative, well done, but voters don’t want this anyway: 73% of the voting public say they want something different,” says Carville. “They’re not asking for anything difficult – just a different nominee. We’re in a crisis.” More

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      Will Biden’s loss of celebrity support make a real difference?

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      The last two US presidential election cycles haven’t been especially notable in the already-marginal world of celebrity endorsements. Both 2016 and 2020 pitted a well-established Democrat with heavy ties to previous administrations against a fringe-gone-mainstream Republican candidate whose own previous occupation was as a celebrity, and not a particularly hip one. So it wasn’t surprising to see an even more dramatic divide between mainstream celebs endorsing the Democrat (or saying nothing more controversial than a bland “vote!”) and a bunch of C- and-D-listers stumping for Trump, as they might any number of faulty late-night infomercial products.This might well have gone similarly in 2024, if not for Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate a few weeks ago. Now a less lopsided divide has formed as a form of anti-endorsement has come in: celebrities who have called upon Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race and let a younger candidate attempt to take the Democrats across the finish line.At first, it was an interestingly eclectic group, notable for aligning the likes of Michael Moore – who isn’t exactly the core constituency for a career politician fixated on bipartisan cooperation in the first place – with the likes of classic limousine liberals like Rob Reiner and Stephen King. This suggested some real traction to the idea that Biden should drop out, but was still largely limited to figures who seem a bit more likely to hop on social media and fire off some opinions. More writers than actors, in other words; same goes for figures with mock-pundit experience, like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. So there was particular headline-news grabbiness when George Clooney – who recently attended a Biden fundraiser – wrote a New York Times op-ed saluting the man’s service and integrity while also arguing that it was time for Joe to go. It may be the most talked-about celeb endorsement (or anti-endorsement) since Taylor Swift came out for Biden (and, probably more importantly, against Trump) shortly before the 2020 election. It even prompted a Biden response, with the president claiming – somewhat nonsensically – that Clooney, only being at the fundraiser he referred to for a brief period, couldn’t have gotten a proper impression of the president’s acuity.View image in fullscreenThough he doesn’t give off the glamour of his former running mate Barack Obama, Biden has long been able to claim some degree of default and/or anti-Trump A-list support: Julia Roberts attended the same fundraiser as Clooney earlier this year, while Robert De Niro, an outspoken critic of fellow New Yorker Trump, narrated a campaign ad, though this seems likely to stem from De Niro’s genuine – and, frankly, delightful! – seething hatred for Trump more than some personal allegiance to Biden. (In the meantime, who has been one of Trump’s biggest boosters on Insta? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.) Dwayne Johnson, who long identified as some manner of Republican, endorsed Biden late in the 2020 race. Earlier this year, though, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t be endorsing any candidates for 2024, Biden apparently not having done enough to help change the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe.It would be easy to see a shift like that as evidence of eroding support for Biden, and it probably is; having a major star specifically say, months and months before the election, that they don’t endorse either candidate (implying that this is unlikely to change), when it would be easy enough to simply say nothing or bide his time, feels unusual – just as it’s unusual for another major star to write an op-ed suggesting that a presidential candidate from his party must step down for the good of the country. But it’s also a sign of how micro-targeted a celebrity niche has become – maybe by force – in the social media era, where even silence has begun to seem like a tacit statement, rather than PR-managed decorum. Biden’s once-solid base of A-listers still skews on the older side, reflecting a time when endorsing a candidate felt at once simpler and less conspicuous. That’s true, too, of celebrities who have called for Biden to drop out: Michael Douglas and John Cusack are big names, but they’re sure not south of 50. Younger celebrities, mirroring younger demographics in general, may not be especially impressed with Biden’s handling of Israel and attendant failure to stop the bloodshed – which means they may not have been endorsing him to begin with.Of course, there’s a certain tempest-in-a-designer-teapot quality to tracking the whims of celebrity endorsements, which at least some of the general public probably views with skepticism – those clueless stars and their pet causes! George Clooney isn’t casting his vote in a swing state – or, for that matter, against Joe Biden, if it comes down to it. Biden could even argue that the shifting tastes of celebrities don’t interest him, as he’s maintained the image of a folksy, get-it-done underdog for much of his political career, even after ascending to the vice-presidency. Courting celebrity? Isn’t that a Trumpian hunger to begin with? Yet big celebrities can help with big-donor fundraising – and smaller ones arguably have bigger platforms than ever before. (John Cusack movies may not bring a million-plus people to the box office in a weekend, if they’re even released theatrically at all. But that’s his social-media audience.)From Hollywood’s love of Obama to Trump’s resurgence beginning on NBC to the sheer number of meme-based campaign posts, celebrity and politics have become more entwined than ever. Biden may not need celebrities to win, or for his sense of worth. But he does need actual support, and Clooney’s op-ed helped make him seem more like a cause than a candidate. More

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      in US Politics

      George Clooney implores Biden to step aside in opinion article

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      The Hollywood actor George Clooney, one of the Democratic party’s biggest fundraisers, has called on Joe Biden to step aside to save democracy from Donald Trump.In an opinion article in the New York Times, Clooney expressed deep affection for the US president but said that personal interaction with him at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles – the Democratic party’s most successful ever, raising more than $30m – suggested that the stumbling performance in last month’s debate in Atlanta was not an aberration.“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” the actor and longtime Democratic party member and fundraiser wrote.“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw,” he said, referring to explanations from the White House and Biden himself for his bad debate performance.More bluntly, he said explicitly that Biden could not prevail in an electoral rematch with Trump: “We are not going to win with this president.”Stressing that his call was made reluctantly, Clooney paid tribute to the political battles that Biden had won throughout his career but said his age represented an insurmountable adversary.“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he wrote.Clooney’s plea came as Biden continues to insist on staying in the race while senior Democrats agonise about how to apply pressure on him to change his mind, and serious questions continue over Biden’s health and viability for re-election.The actor called on leading party figures to come off the fence and make the case to Biden, while dismissing as “disingenuous” the president’s argument – stated in a letter to Democrats in Congress this week – that the party’s membership had already chosen the nominee in the primaries.‘Most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” he wrote in remarks clearly critical of continuing inaction. “But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe concluded: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”Clooney’s intervention comes weeks after a disagreement with the White House over Biden’s criticism of the international criminal court’s move to issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.The actor’s wife, Amal Alamuddin Clooney, worked on the case. Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, the president’s counsel, to complain about Biden’s labeling the warrant as “outrageous”.Warrants were being sought for the arrest of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, and three leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.Shortly afterwards, however, Clooney appeared at a huge fundraising event in Los Angeles for the campaign, which headlined with Biden and Barack Obama. More

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      in Elections

      Publisher of debunked voter-fraud film apologizes to falsely accused man

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      The publisher of 2000 Mules issued a statement Friday apologizing to a Georgia man who was shown in the film and falsely accused of ballot fraud during the 2020 election.The widely debunked film includes surveillance video showing Mark Andrews, his face blurred, putting five ballots in a drop box in Lawrenceville, an Atlanta suburb, as a voiceover by the conservative pundit and film-maker Dinesh D’Souza says: “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”Salem Media Group said in the statement that it had “removed the film from Salem’s platforms, and there will be no future distribution of the film or the book by Salem”.“It was never our intent that the publication of the 2000 Mules film and book would harm Mr Andrews. We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr Andrews’ image in the movie, book, and promotional materials have caused Mr Andrews and his family,” the statement said.A state investigation found that Andrews was dropping off ballots for himself, his wife and their three adult children, who all lived at the same address. That is legal in Georgia, and an investigator said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Andrews.The film uses research from True the Vote, a Texas-based non-profit, and suggests that ballot “mules” aligned with Democrats were paid to illegally collect and deliver ballots in Georgia and four other closely watched states. An Associated Press analysis found that it is based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data.Salem said it “relied on representations by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote, Inc (‘TTV’) that the individuals depicted in the videos provided to us by TTV, including Mr Andrews, illegally deposited ballots”.Lawyers for D’Souza and True the Vote did not immediately respond to emails Friday afternoon seeking comment on Salem’s statement.Andrews filed a federal lawsuit in October 2022 against D’Souza, True the Vote and Salem. The case continues, and representatives for Salem and for Andrews’ legal team did not immediately respond to emails asking whether the statement came as a result of the lawsuit. More