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      ‘We are staying in this race’: behind the unraveling of Mark Robinson’s campaign in North Carolina

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      Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s tub-thumping Republican candidate for governor, had been trying to extricate himself from problems caused by his own words long before CNN dumped a truckload of dirt on him Thursday afternoon.Robinson has treated outrage over his ever-increasing litany of racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic offense as a badge of honor during the course of the campaign and his term as the state’s lieutenant governor. But CNN’s report tilled his pornographic internet history, unearthing comments that still managed the power to shock.CNN’s report connects Robinson’s name, email address and biographical details to the “minisoldr” persona, where Robinson described himself as a “Black NAZI!”, praised Hitler, described Martin Luther King Jr in racially offensive terms, expressed sexual interest in transgender pornography and described peeping on girls in a public shower when he was 14.“Slavery is not bad,” Robinson reportedly wrote. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few.”CNN refrained from exposing the entirety of its findings because some of it was too disturbing to address in public, the news organization said.Shortly before the report came out, Robinson claimed he would remain in the race. If Robinson did not drop out before midnight, he couldn’t drop out; the deadline in North Carolina would have passed.Knowing how the left has sought the removal of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas for receiving questionable largesse from billionaires, it was characteristic of Robinson to liken his situation to Thomas’s “hi-tech lynching” 33 years ago over allegations of sexual misconduct with Anita Hill. “We’re not going to let them do that. We are staying in this race. We’re in it to win it,” Robinson said.But the bombastic candidate had already been facing a crushing defeat after a mix of resurfaced remarks and poor polling led the national Republican party, and Donald Trump, to back off from their support.Robinson’s apparent interest in transgender pornography stands in sharp contrast to his public opposition for trans rights. Calls for his resignation began in 2021 after comments surfaced in which he described education that discussed trans issues as “child abuse”, LGBTQ+ content as “filth” and suggested that trans people should be arrested for using the wrong bathroom.Robinson’s opponent, the North Carolina attorney general, Josh Stein, has needed to do little more than saturate the airwaves and social media with campaign ads drawing on Robinson’s own rhetoric, while speaking in broad positive terms about the state and his platform and reaffirming his support for reproductive rights.“As your next governor, I will veto any further restrictions on reproductive freedom,” Stein said at a rally in Greensboro for Kamala Harris.Abortion policy is at the center of Robinson’s appeal to the right and perhaps at the center of the electoral disaster unfolding for Republicans in North Carolina as well. Robinson’s pro-life politics have not just been strident but defiant and accusatory.In one recently unearthed video from a church sermon in 2022, he attacks women’s empowerment and birth control. “Why don’t you use some of that building up of your mind and building up of empowerment to move down here, to this region down here,” he said, waving his hand around his crotch. “Get this under control.”Notably, Robinson has admitted to paying for an abortion for his then girlfriend, now wife, in the 80s, something he said he regrets. It is the stridency of his anti-abortion rhetoric that has kept North Carolina’s religious right in his corner.Lorra Parker lives in McDowell county, where Republicans have a three-to-one advantage. She went to hear Robinson speak last week. Though she has a broad set of conservative political interests, abortion policy was critical to her identity as a voter, she said. Even as Trump appeared to vacillate on this issue in the debate, he doesn’t need to be the perfect candidate, just the better candidate.She applies the same logic to Robinson. Now, she’s reserving judgment while the reporting sorts itself out, she said.“Honestly, I’d need to hear it from a source other than CNN,” she said. “I think if he’s not guilty of this, then he should fight to prove that he’s not guilty of this. He’s got time to do that. But he’s been lieutenant governor for four years and they just found this out now? That’s a little suspicious to me.”Robinson’s public appearances and social media posts are a treasure trove of opposition research for Democrats painting their opponents as extremists.“The choice couldn’t be clearer,” reads one ad. “Donald Trump and Mark Robinson, their vision is one of division, violence and hate. Mark Robinson just fights job-killing culture wars … Just a few weeks ago, from of all places a church pulpit, he said ‘some folks need killing.’”On defense from all angles, Robinson went to ground shortly after winning the Republican primary earlier this year, refusing interviews with all but the most stridently conservative publications and broadcasters and largely avoiding public appearances.But a strategy of riding Trump’s coattails and counting on the state’s generally conservative lean had been collapsing as waves of negative press – about his campaign finances, the maladministration of his wife’s government-funded non-profit, and always his incendiary rhetoric – flooded the field.Robinson has not led in a poll since June; even before CNN’s revelations, the withdrawal of Joe Biden from the race in July threatened to turn a close race into a rout. The latest poll from Emerson College shows him losing to Stein by eight points.So, Robinson resurfaced a few weeks ago. He had made tentative steps in small venues far from the scrutiny of big-market news reporters to test messaging that retained as much heat as possible without burning people: cayenne rhetoric, not Carolina Reaper.On 11 September, the day after the Harris-Trump debate, Robinson stepped into the back room of Countryside Barbecue in cherry red Marion, North Carolina, looking for friendly territory and as much of a rhetorical rebrand as he might muster under fire.His stump speech touched on gas prices and teacher salaries and state taxes – policy issues instead of the culture war molotov cocktails about abortion and guns and gay people which launched his career and won him the nomination.But time and again, his attention turned to how the press and his Democratic opponent, had been lighting him up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve got a guy named Josh Stein who wants to talk about any and everything except the truth,” Robinson said. “He’s got something about me from Facebook eight or nine years ago, where he cut it off just to play about three seconds of it. He didn’t play the whole thing, something about ‘keep your skirt down.’”Robinson was referring to the wall-to-wall ads playing across the state replaying a Facebook video from 2009 in which he says abortion “is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down”.“He cut off the part where he said ‘or keep your pants up’,” Robinson said to the conservative crowd last week, for whom that was convincing. Then he suggested that ad and others were deceptive. He called his opponent a liar. He dared the press to report it. He also demanded a debate, which Stein has been refusing.Shades of the Robinson bluster lay under the fresh paint of respectability.He spent almost as much time haranguing the president and vice-president in the mountain towns of western North Carolina as he did his actual opponent.“The same one that was right there riding shotgun with [Biden] while he was doing it was on TV last night talking about how she was going to fix it all,” Robinson said of Harris. “She tore it up, but she can’t fix it. What policy has she ever championed since she’s been in any office that will fix the problems that we’re facing right now?”Robinson has been walking back his previous, strident calls for a total abortion ban in North Carolina. Earlier this year, he argued for a six-week “heartbeat” law limiting abortion. Earlier this week, he argued for the public to “move on” from the abortion issue.In a room packed with church-going Republicans in Marion, he said: “Everybody may have a different opinion on that.“My opinion is this: no matter where that law sits, as the governor of this state, I’m going to fight to save every single solitary life in the womb. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 12 weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, 20 weeks – we’re going to fight for life in this state.In a reference to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy, some of Robinson’s road team wore shirts printed with the words “Felon / Hillbilly”.The shirts reflect the tone of Robinson’s race. He has tied himself for good or ill to Trump’s tenor and politics. But even Trump’s team has had enough.According to the conservative Carolina Journal, the Trump campaign has been pressuring Robinson to withdraw, out of fear that North Carolina’s election-deciding swing voters will not just abandon the lieutenant governor but the entire Republican ballot.Citing anonymous campaign sources, the Carolina Journal reported that the Stein campaign leaked the material to CNN, and that the Trump campaign told Robinson that he was no longer welcome at rallies for Trump or Vance. Trump has not mentioned Robinson in the last week. Vance held his first solo rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. Robinson did not appear. His office announced that Robinson had contracted Covid-19.Trump campaign officials denied that they had been pressuring Robinson to quit the race in comments to NBC.The Stein campaign released a terse statement shortly after the CNN piece aired.“North Carolinians already know Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be Governor,” the campaign said. “Josh remains focused on winning this campaign so that together we can build a safer, stronger North Carolina for everyone.”The Harris campaign, however, has gleefully circulated videos with Trump praising Robinson. Trump referred to Robinson as “Martin Luther King Jr on steroids.”Robinson, in comments under his “minisoldr” persona, said: “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” More

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      Biden says ‘good Republicans’ are scared out of pro-LGBTQ+ stances by far right

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      Joe Biden believes “good Republicans … who don’t have a prejudiced bone in their body” are letting far-right elements of their political party intimidate them out of stances that would protect LGBTQ+ rights, he said in the first interview that a sitting US president has given to an LGBTQ+ news outlet.In a conversation that the Washington Blade published on Monday, Biden also said Donald Trump “was a different breed of cat” who had been “anti-LGBTQ … across the board”.The Democratic president’s remarks about his Republican predecessor and the Maga (Make America Great Again) movement behind him come as Trump seeks a return to the White House in the 5 November election.Trump has offered contradictory comments on LGBTQ+ rights, claiming to be “fine” with same-sex marriage during his victorious 2016 campaign but then stripping away protections for medical patients who are transgender once he was in the Oval Office.Then, in June 2023, three US supreme court justices appointed to the bench during Trump’s presidency joined three conservative colleagues in dealing a major blow to the LGBTQ+ community by ruling that a Colorado law that compels groups to treat same-sex couples equally violated the constitutional right to free speech.Republican-led state legislatures, meanwhile, have enacted a broad array of laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth and, in some cases, adults. They have also placed barriers to schoolchildren to express their gender, whether by the pronouns they use or the sports team on which they compete.Without naming anyone, Biden told the Blade he met “a lot of really good Republicans” in particular when he previously served as a US senator. He said they “don’t have a prejudiced bone in their body about this but are intimidated – because if you take a position, especially in the Maga Republican party now, … they’re going to go after you”.“Trump is a different breed of cat,” Biden added. “I mean, I don’t want to make this political, but everything he’s done has been anti, anti-LGBTQ – I mean across the board.”Biden ruled out running for re-election in July and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him. Drawing a contrast with Trump, the president said that the Biden-Harris administration had made a number of decisions to advocate for the LGBTQ+ community.He singled out the Respect for Marriage Act, which he signed in 2022 and in part required all states to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages. He also alluded to how the Food and Drug Administration during his presidency implemented a new rule allowing sexually active gay and bisexual people to donate blood so long as they had not had sex with new or multiple partners.Biden furthermore touted what he described as having appointed a record-breaking number of LGBTQ+ officials across his administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. And the president also noted how – days after his inauguration in 2021 – he issued an executive order reversing the Trump administration’s ban on transgender military service members.“They can shoot straight,” Biden said to the Blade, which described the president as lowering his voice for emphasis. “They can shoot just as straight as anybody else.” More

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      Walz, Bill Clinton and surprise Oprah: Democratic convention day three key takeaways

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      The third night of the Democratic national convention featured a surprise speech from Oprah Winfrey, along with scheduled remarks from Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz and other major party figures, many emphasizing the “joy” of Kamala Harris’s campaign.Here are some key takeaways:1. Tim Walz’s pitch to voters: ‘We’ll turn the page on Donald Trump’Kamala Harris’s running mate gave his keynote pitch to supporters at the end of the third night of the convention, talking about his military service, coaching and teaching days, and his family’s fertility journey. He leaned into his humble roots and deployed repeated football metaphors: “I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks … It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field, and boy do we have the right team.”He called on his supporters to step up with urgency: “We got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re going to leave it on the field. That’s how we’ll keep moving forward. That’s how we’ll turn the page on Donald Trump. That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, healthcare and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom. That’s how we make America a place where no child is left hungry, where no community is left behind, where nobody gets told they don’t belong.”2. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Kenan Thompson and other celebrities invigorate the crowdThe convention continued with a packed celebrity lineup. Oprah Winfrey earned huge cheers when she made an unannounced appearance. She denounced “people who would have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe” and took a swipe at JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment. She put Harris’s candidacy into the historical context of other trailblazing Black women, including Tessie Prevost Williams, one of the “New Orleans Four” who helped integrate public schools. And she roused the audience with her call to action, singing the word “joy”.Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson had a lively appearance, entering with a large Project 2025 book and virtually interviewing Americans who would be harmed by the rightwing agenda: “You ever see a document that can kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”Musician Stevie Wonder urged the crowd to choose “joy over anger”. Actor Mindy Kaling gave a personal account of cooking with Harris. And musicians John Legend and Sheila E performed at the end of the night.3. Bill Clinton: ‘We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy’Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, addressed his 12th Democratic convention, reading off written notes, not the teleprompter, suggesting the speech was edited last-minute. He warned Democrats against complacency: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phoney issues. This is a brutal business.” He mocked Trump for his narcissism and obsession with crowd sizes, following Barack Obama’s widely cited joke on Tuesday: “[Trump] mostly talks about himself … his vendettas, vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.”Clinton preached a message of unity, echoing Obama’s comments, encouraging supporters not to demean or disrespect neighbors they disagree with. He praised Joe Biden for “voluntarily” giving up power and celebrated the hope Harris has injected into the race: “If you vote for this team … you will be proud of it for the rest of your life.”4. Parents of a Hamas hostage were featured while protesters and AOC pushed for a Palestinian speakerJon Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave emotional remarks about their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is held hostage by Hamas. Polin praised the White House and said they had met with Harris and Biden: “They’re both working tirelessly for a hostage and ceasefire deal that will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren home, and will stop the despair in Gaza.”Members of the uncommitted movement, who have been advocating for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, said they welcomed the speech, but continued to advocate that a Palestinian leader get an opportunity to address the crowd. Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who has treated patients in Gaza, spoke on a Democratic convention panel centered on Palestinian human rights, but there hasn’t been a Palestinian American on the main stage. Gaza solidarity protesters staged a sit-in outside the convention, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on the convention to “center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment”, posting: “To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.”5. Pete Buttigieg went hard after JD Vance: ‘Doubling down on negativity’Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation, went hard after Donald Trump’s running mate: “JD Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life that he has in mind for you, then you don’t count, someone who said that if you don’t have kids, you have ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country’ … When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids … but our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical. Choosing a guy like JD Vance to be America’s next vice president sends a message … They are doubling down on negativity and grievance, committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word: darkness.”6. Prominent Republicans again rallied for Harris: ‘Our party acts more like a cult’Prominent Republicans and former Donald Trump supporters continued to earn loud applause at the convention, arguing that GOP voters should reject the former president, even if they don’t agree with all of Harris’s positions. “If Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative, it’s chaotic and crazy, and the only thing left to do is dump Trump. These days, our party acts more like a cult, a cult worshiping a felonious thug,” said Geoff Duncan, former lieutenant governor of Georgia.Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence also spoke, saying: “Being inside Trump’s White House was terrifying. But what keeps me up at night is what will happen if he gets back there.”7. Speakers uplifted LGBTQ+ rights: ‘Trump wants to erase us’Speakers repeatedly promoted LGBTQ+ rights, offering a sharp contrast to the Republican national convention which continually featured extremist, anti-trans rhetoric. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ+ organization, warned: “Trump wants to erase us … He would ban our healthcare, belittle our marriages, bury our stories. But we are not going anywhere. We are not going back.”Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor and the first gay man to serve as a US state governor, highlighted the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of Project 2025: “Democrats welcome ‘weird’, but we’re not weirdos telling families who can and can’t have kids, who to marry or how to live our lives.” Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said LGBTQ+ Floridians were enduring “endless state-sponsored hate”. And Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, earned loud applause when she said: “I got a message for the Republicans and the justices of the United States supreme court: you can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead gay hand.”Democratic convention highlights:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Tim Walz rallies Democrats: ‘We’re gonna leave it on the field’

      Watch speeches from Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro

      Oprah Winfrey in surprise speech

      Here are the rising stars and politicians to watch this week

      What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz More

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      Republicans are on the offensive, and ‘Tampon Tim’ Walz is to the rescue | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Watch out world, Republicans are on the offensive. Still smarting from being called “weird”, it looks like a bunch of GOP strategists got in a room this week to workshop devastating nicknames for Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. After combining their dozen or so braincells, they came up with a winner: Tampon Tim. The name has been trending on social media as people on the right desperately try to make #TamponTim stick.Apart from the fact that it alliterates, what prompted this moniker? Well, in 2023 Walz signed a wide-ranging Minnesota education bill that, along with a number of other provisions, mandated public schools offer free menstruation products in their bathrooms.To anyone with an ounce of common sense, this sounds like a great thing to do. Tampons are expensive! And “period poverty” – the inability to afford menstruation supplies – is a serious problem in the US. According to a 2021 study commissioned by Thinx, a period product company, 38% of US teenage students who menstruate said that they “often or sometimes cannot do their best schoolwork due to lack of access to period products”. A 2019 edition of the same study also found that more 84% of students in the US have either missed class time or know someone who missed class time because they did not have access to period products.For a long time, period poverty was an overlooked problem; in recent years, however, there has been a wave of legislating to address it. According to the Alliance for Period Supplies, 28 states and Washington DC have passed legislation to help students have free access to period products while in school. So, while the bill Walz signed was commendable, it wasn’t radical in any way – it was part of a nationwide trend to combat a serious problem.I’ve got to hand it to the Republicans, it’s quite difficult to turn “implemented a mainstream policy making kids’ lives easier and helping them stay in school” into something negative, but it seems they are always happy to try. Predictably the right has been using the bill as a way to attack, not just Walz, but trans people.“As a woman there is no greater threat to a woman’s health than leaders … who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools. Those are radical policies Tim Walz supports,” a Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt,told Fox News on Tuesday.The actual legislation, I should be clear, does not explicitly state that tampons should be put in men’s bathrooms. It says that free menstrual products “must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades four to 12”. But the very idea that a policy might be inclusive and help trans students seems to drive Republicans up the wall.The “Tampon Tim” attacks aren’t just born out of a hatred of trans people, they also reflect the Republicans’ disdain for women. There are memes with Walz’s head on a tampon and showing him menstruating into his jeans – all of which are meant to convey the idea that Walz is feminine. Which, to many men on the right, seems to be the most insulting thing you can call a man. Last week, for example, the Fox News host Jesse Watters wondered why any self-respecting man would vote for a woman. “[T]o be a man and then vote for a woman just because she’s a woman is either childish – that person has mommy issues – or they are just trying to be accepted by other women,” Watters said. “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” Ah yes, that is exactly what the scientists say.While Republicans may be having fun with their silly nickname, I’m not sure it’s going to help them in the polls. If anything, it will help Walz. As Hillary Clinton posted on Twitter: “How nice of the Trump camp to help publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and common-sense policy of providing free menstrual products to students in Minnesota public schools.”Republicans’ juvenile tampon jokes also reinforce how Walz represents a very different model of masculinity than the one Trump and JD Vance embody. In 1999, for example, when Walz was a high school teacher and football coach in rural Minnesota, he helped students create the school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). Walz has said he thought it was important for him to be the adviser to the GSA because “it really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.” He wanted to show, in other words, that masculinity didn’t have to be toxic, that a real man had empathy.All of this to say: thanks for the nickname, guys! Rather than being the insult they think it is, Tampon Tim is a compliment. One that reinforces the fact that the GOP is suffering from a severe case of Toxic Schmuck Syndrome.New York’s oldest person said her secret to longevity is staying single“That’s why I am living … because I didn’t get married,” Louise Jean Signore, 112, told reporters this week. “I’d rather be single. When you are married, you have a lot of trouble.” The fact that Signore doesn’t drink or smoke probably also has something to do with it.Outcry on social media prompts new IUD insertion guidelinesWho says that complaining online is a waste of time? After TikTok users recently shared their painful experiences with getting intrauterine devices inserted, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued updated guidance on how doctors should share options for pain management with their patients. This is one small step towards taking women’s pain more seriously.Bulgaria’s parliament bans LGBTQ+ ‘propaganda’This mirrors regressive legislation passed in Russia and Hungary in recent years.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe gender police consistently target female athletes of colour“More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by sex testing in sports,” the executive director of a sports advocacy organization told the AP in the wake of the Imane Khelif “controversy”. The AP further notes: “International sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.”Israel minister says starvation of millions in Gaza might be ‘justified and moral’While extremist Israeli leaders are fantasizing about starving 2 million people to death and defending rape, Harris has said she doesn’t support an Israel arms embargo. It is becoming clear that, just like Joe Biden, Harris has no red line when it comes to Palestinian suffering.Women in China spread secret, female-only languageNushu, sometimes called “script of tears”, is a secret language that goes back centuries in China.A political candidate who told voters not to be ‘weak and gay’ lost her raceValentina Gomez, the Missouri Republican who released homophobic campaign videos, lost her bid to become secretary of state by an embarrassing margin.The week in pawtriarchyBehind their prickly demeanor, cats are big softies. New research suggests cats will grieve after the death of fellow pets. They’ll even grieve dogs. Cats, it would appear, have more empathy than the average Republican politician. More

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      Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025

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      Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Heritage Foundation also created the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981.The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan. More

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      Colorado Republican party chair told to ‘step down’ after ‘God Hates Pride’ email

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      The chair of Colorado’s Republican party is facing calls to resign from members of his own group after the state organization sent out an email criticizing Pride month – and later calling for rainbow-colored Pride flags to be burned.Dave Williams, who is also a representative in Colorado’s legislature, has faced swift backlash from his fellow Republicans in the wake of the controversial email sent Monday.Much of the criticism aimed at Williams by other Republicans focused on the potential for his remarks to hurt the chances for members of their party to be elected.In a post to X on Friday, Valdamar Archuleta, a candidate for Colorado’s first district and head of the state’s Log Cabin Republicans, said that Williams “does not have effective communication skills” and should resign.“Building an effective winning team takes skills and talents not everyone has,” wrote Archuleta, who on Wednesday rejected the state Republican party’s endorsement. “Dave Williams should resign … or be removed.”Archuleta, who has supported transphobic groups in the past, previously defended Williams, telling 9News that the state party chair was attempting to get a reaction and mimic the persona of former president Donald Trump.When asked whether Williams should resign, Colorado’s house minority whip, Richard Holtorf, said: “Hell, yeah.” Holtorf added that a petition is being initiated for Williams’s removal.“He’s incompetent and he should step down,” Holtorf said. “He’s done so many destructive things in Colorado to not promote unity and [done] things that are outside the boundary and the scope of his role and responsibility as the state party chair.”He added: “Dave Williams should not be preaching to the Colorado electorate. It is not his place and it’s not the state party’s role.”In an email to the Guardian, Mary Bradfield, a representative who serves as the chair of the Colorado house Republican caucus, called on Williams to resign.“I think these statements made by chairman Dave Williams are inappropriate,” she wrote. “He should step down.”Nancy Pallozzi, the chair of the Jefferson county, Colorado, Republicans, told Fox21 News in a statement that several of the party’s county chairs, candidates and other members had called for Williams’s resignation over his latest comments and for sending out emails endorsing Trump, despite the party’s stance on primary neutrality.The email sent by the Colorado Republican party, with the subject line “God Hates Pride”, accused members of the LGBTQ+ community of being “godless groomers” who were out to “harm children”.Pride month is an annual celebration of LGBTQ+ people held in June each year. It recognizes the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where patrons essentially sparked the modern LGBTQ+ protest and celebration movement by resisting police harassment and extortion.“The month of June has arrived and, once again, the godless groomers in our society want to attack what is decent, holy, and righteous so they can ultimately harm our children,” read the state Republican party email, which was signed by Williams.The email also included a sermon from the controversial anti-LGBTQ+ pastor Mark Driscoll, entitled “God Hates Flags”, a pun alluding to Pride flags and a homophobic slur that rhymes with flag.A subsequent tweet on Wednesday from the official Colorado Republican account called for Pride flags to be burned. “Burn all the #pride flags this June,” read the tweet.Williams has been relatively unapologetic despite backlash.In an email to USA Today on Wednesday, Williams said Colorado Republican party officials “make no apologies” for their comments.“We make no apologies for saying God hates pride or pride flags as it’s an agenda that harms children and undermines parental authority, and the only backlash we see is coming from radical Democrats, the fake news media, and weak Republicans who bow down at the feet of leftist cancel culture,” Williams said.Williams did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Friday.The latest remarks from Williams come as the state has politically wrestled against anti-LGBTQ+ groups.Last year, in a blow to LGBTQ+ rights, the US supreme court ruled that a Colorado civil rights law that mandates businesses and organizations treat same-sex patrons equally was unfair to a Christian web designer based in the state who refused to make wedding websites for same-sex couples.Furthermore, Williams’s “God Hates Pride” email came just days after police in Carlisle, Massachusetts, launched an investigation into the theft of more than 200 Pride flags as June and the annual LGBTQ+ celebration arrived. More

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      Harrison Butker’s jersey sales rise as right wing lauds Chiefs kicker after rant

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      Harrison Butker’s university commencement address at Benedictine College excoriating Pride month, working women, abortion rights activists and others has prompted the National Football League to disavow his remarks – but the Kansas City Chiefs placekicker’s jersey sales have spiked as conservatives seize on their latest culture war.Butker has also drawn an impassioned statement of support from Josh Hawley, the far-right US senator from Missouri known for his opposition to abortion and a viral video which showed him running away from the mob he incited during the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.“We need a different generation of kids that are willing to say no that’s not right, there is such a thing as right and wrong, I’m not going in for all of this lefty garbage and I just thought that his calls for folks to stand up and be bold was great,” Hawley said in reference to Butker during an interview on Wednesday with Spectrum News.An NFL spokesperson on Thursday said the comments Butker delivered as the graduation speaker at Benedictine College five days earlier ran contrary to the league’s “commitment to inclusion”.“Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” said the statement from the NFL senior vice-president Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization.”The NFL’s statement aligned relatively closely with a separate one issued by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad), which dismissed Butker’s 20-minute address as “a clear miss” and “woefully out of step with Americans about Pride, LGBTQ people and women”.Another notable rejection of Butker’s opinions came in the form of a statement from the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Saint Scholastica, which co-founded the college where the kicker spoke.“The sisters … do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments … represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested,” their statement said. “Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division.”Yet, in scenes that called to mind the political right wing’s enthrallment with the film Sound of Freedom last year, Butker’s jersey was among the most sold as of Thursday, according to NFL.com.His jersey sales still trailed that of his Chiefs teammate Travis Kelce, whose support for vaccines and the Black Lives Matter movement – as well as his relationship with Taylor Swift – have infuriated the far-right set that is now coddling Butker. However, Butker’s jersey sales were outpacing that of the Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who has led Kansas City to three Super Bowl victories since the 2019 season.The Kansas City news station KCTV reported that a local store named the Rally House had completely sold out of Butker jerseys amid his speech’s controversy.“Just the demand after the speech – it’s been men and women. It’s been both calling to get his jersey,” the store’s manager, Aaron Lewis, reportedly told KCTV.Hawley on Wednesday then offered himself as one of the most public faces of the conservative delight inspired by the offense Butker caused with his speech.“He talks about not being too nice when you’re standing up for your convictions,” Hawley said to Spectrum News, a little more than three years after he threw up a clenched fist at – and then was caught on video running from – a mob of Donald Trump supporters who carried out the deadly Capitol attack after the former president’s 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. “And I just think he’s right about that.”In his speech to the conservative Catholic school’s graduating class, Butker referred to “dangerous gender ideologies” in an apparent allusion to Pride month, which has been celebrated annually in June since the Stonewall riots in 1969.He also told the women in the audience that “homemaker” should be the “most important title” they hold.“I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” Butker said.Among a host of other arguments, Butker contended that access to abortion – which most Americans favor – stemmed from “pervasiveness of disorder”.The 28-year-old Butker’s conservative Catholic beliefs are well known, and so are his on-field exploits, including booting a field goal that forced the decisive overtime period in Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory over the San Francisco 49ers in February.Benedictine, a private liberal arts school about 60 miles north of Kansas City, invited Butker to be its commencement speaker nearly three years to the day after the college removed its chaplain from his position after he disclosed “inappropriate conduct” with a female student.Meanwhile, a report on Friday from the Chicago Sun-Times documented how an Illinois-based monk belonging to the religious order which is associated with Benedictine pleaded guilty to a felony battery charge against a former student of the school where he taught – and has now landed on a list of organization members deemed to have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Morning After the Revolution review: a bad faith attack on ‘woke’

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      Writing on Substack in 2021, Nellie Bowles described some of the less attractive qualities that motivated her work as a reporter: “I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. One easy path toward the top of the list … is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple of years, that desire for attention … propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon.”Bowles is married to Bari Weiss, a former editor on the opinion section of the New York Times whose furious resignation letter earned her encomiums from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr.But Bowles wrote that her decision to convert to the faith of her Jewish wife had actually softened her approach to journalism: “I want to cultivate my empathy not my cruelty. I am trying to go back to being closer to the mirror than the knife.”However, her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, is dazzling proof she is completely incapable of changing her approach to her profession.Bowles is a former tech reporter for outlets including the Guardian and the New York Times. For many reporters, the decision to write a book comes from wanting to dig deeper into a particular subject, or a desire for freedom from the restrictions of one’s former employer. For Bowles, longform turns out to be the chance to jettison the standards of accuracy of her previous employers in favor of the wildest possible generalizations.Here are a few fine examples: “The best feminists of my generation were born with dicks.” This is the author’s jaunty description of trans women, who, she informs us, are “the best, boldest” and “fiercest feminists”, who unfortunately – according to her – have concluded “that to be a woman is, in general, disgusting”.On the ninth page of Bowles’s introduction, meanwhile, readers realize how much we must have underestimated the universal impact of the movement to Defund the Police. Did you know, for example, that “if you want to be part of the movement for universal healthcare … you cannot report critically on #DefundThePolice”?Bowles identifies a similar problem with marriage equality: “If you want to be part of a movement that supports gay marriage … then you can’t question whatever disinformation is spread that week.”The wilder the idea, the more likely Bowles is to include it, almost always in a way that can never be checked. To prove the vile effect of wokeness on the entire news business, she informs us that colleagues “at major news organizations” have “told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super-racist. Worrying about plastic in the water is transphobic.” And a “cohort” took it “as gospel when a nice white lady said that being on time and objectivity were white values, and this was a progressive belief”.Writing about a tent city in Echo Park, Los Angeles, Bowles explains why nobody living there was interested in a free hotel room: “Residents could not do drugs in the rooms. And the rooms were, of course, indoors. People high on meth and fentanyl prefer being outdoors, with no rules, with their friends.”Predictably, the book reaches a whole new level of viciousness when it reveals Bowles’ attitude toward trans people.Intelligent people know three essential facts about the debate over whether children under 18 should have access to hormones or surgery to make their bodies conform to the gender in which they think they belong.First, a large majority of trans people of all ages never take hormones or get surgery. Second, nearly all of those who do choose to use medicine to alter their bodies report a dramatic improvement in personal happiness. Third, a very small number of those who have undergone surgery or taken hormones to block puberty do change their minds and opt for de-transition.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNaturally, Bowles mentions none of those facts. According to her narrative, “the transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless … I don’t think this was planned or orchestrated. The movement simply pivoted.”No mention, of course, of polls conducted by Christian nationalists and their allies which determined that the best new fundraising tool would be an all-out attack on trans people, including the denial of their very existence, as well as the introduction of hundreds of bills in state legislatures across the country to make this tiny minority as miserable as possible.Instead, Bowles wants us to believe the debate is dominated by websites you might not have heard of, like Fatherly, which asserts: “All kids, regardless of their gender identity, start to understand their own gender typically by the age of 18 to 24 months.” One parent who appeared on PBS in 2023 is equally important in Bowles’s book, because she said her child started to let her parents know “she was transgender really before she could even speak”.Needless to say, Bowles is horrified that as America became more aware of the existence of trans people, the number of clinics available to treat them grew to 60 by 2023. Then she makes another remarkable claim: “If a parent resists” medical changes requested by a child, “they can and do lose custody of their child.”Is that true? I have no idea. If Bowles had written that sentence in the Times or the Guardian, her editor would most certainly have requested some sort of proof. Fortunately for her – but unfortunately for us – her publisher, a new Penguin Random House imprint, Thesis, does not appear to impose any outdated fact-checking requirements. The only visible standard here is, if it’s shocking, we’ll print it.
      Morning After the Revolution is published in the US by Thesis More