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      Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American'

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      Donald Trump has directed the Office of Management and Budget to crack down on federal agencies’ antiracism training sessions, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.The OMB director, Russell Vought, in a letter Friday to executive branch agencies, directed them to identify spending related to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege” or any other material that teaches or suggests that the United States or any race or ethnicity is “inherently racist or evil”.The memo comes as the nation has faced a reckoning this summer over racial injustice in policing and other spheres of American life. Trump has spent much of the summer defending the display of the Confederate battle flag and monuments of civil war rebels from protesters seeking their removal, in what he has called a “culture war” ahead of the 3 November election.Meanwhile, he has rejected comments from Democratic nominee Joe Biden and others that there is “systemic racism” in policing and American culture that must be addressed.Vought’s memo cites “press reports” as contributing to Trump’s decision, apparently referring to segments on Fox News and other outlets that have stoked conservative outrage about the federal training.Vought’s memo says additional federal guidance on training sessions is forthcoming, maintaining that “the President, and his Administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States”.“The President has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” he added. “The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the Federal government.” More

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      in US Politics

      'A political awakening': how south Asians could tilt key US elections

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      This article was published in collaboration with the JuggernautAround 2016, Aamina Ahmed found herself wondering why, for all the talk about getting out to vote, no one had been canvassing in her neighborhood in Canton, Michigan.Canton is a township between Detroit and Ann Arbor with a growing south Asian population. Ahmed, who is Pakistani American and works and volunteers for several civic engagement organizations, started to speak up about the absence of activity at local candidate forums. Intrigued, a worker at a voter outreach organization went back to their colleagues to inquire if they had visited these neighborhoods. It turned out that the field workers had skipped visiting voters with names they felt they couldn’t pronounce.“They were viewing it as, ‘Well, we don’t want to offend the person by mispronouncing their name versus you are actually excluding them from the opportunity to participate in democracy,” Ahmed said.Such is the kind of story that turns up when probing why south Asian Americans, who historically have high voter turnout rates and lean toward the Democratic party, might not cast their vote. Coupled with voter suppression tactics and difficulty understanding the complex US political process, targeted outreach has lagged, and some south Asians face issues related to language access and gender inclusion. These factors are hindering a burgeoning American political awakening, according to more than a dozen community organizers, researchers and political campaigners.But it would be a mistake to overlook the south Asian community’s political significance. Growing numbers among multiple south Asian communities underscore their strength within the Asian American demographic, the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the US electorate.The south Asian American population – those who trace their ancestry to the southern region of Asia – grew by 43% from 2011 to 5.7 million people in 2018, according to the American Community Survey, while the total US population grew by only 4.7% during that same time period. And about 2 million Indian Americans, the second largest immigrant group in the country, are eligible to vote in the US, according to Devesh Kapur, professor of south Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America. More

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      in US Politics

      Anohni on her new track R.N.C. 2020: 'It's me, screaming in the past, for the present'

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      I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.After bombarding us with media campaigns pressuring us not to wear masks in March and April, the US now accounts for 22% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide. I personally know three New Yorkers who died in April, I believe as a result of this official guidance.Trump has stoked racist police violence in the US to even more atrocious heights. Scaring voters with fake tales of impending anarchy and “dark shadows”, he then promises that if re-elected he will crush BLM protesters and “restore law and order”. Is he getting this stuff from Steve Bannon or Mein Kampf? Probably both.Trump is hosting federal executions in the countdown to the election as another prong of his racist, fake “law and order” platform. Last Thursday, the US government defied Navajo tribal sovereignty and executed Lezmond Mitchell, injecting him with a massive quantity of pentobarbital in a death chamber in Indiana.Behind this curtain of carefully orchestrated chaos, the network of corporate lobbyists that form the core of the GOP pillage the US Treasury and dismantle scores of environmental regulations, driving the country and the world even more hopelessly into global boiling and mass extinction.Australian-born Rupert Murdoch blares his obscene propaganda into American homes, hypnotising viewers with lies, rage and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, 40,000 square miles of Australian wilderness burned last summer, killing over a billion animals. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef has collapsed in the last five years due to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures. The same kinds of awful, permanent losses are engulfing nature on every continent.For many people, economic suffering looms while Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple and others expand their global footprints, sucking dry local economies. Some of the CEOs pour the wealth of the world into colonial space programs. They fantasise that they might finally shed their dependence upon Mother Earth and become the heroic creators and patent-holders of life on Mars.Unlike the Koch brothers, who paid for the malevolent spread of climate change denial, today’s tech billionaires scent themselves with a pheromone of liberal philanthropy while monetising the dismantling of checks and balances that once helped to protect us. They take meetings with Trump, provide him with the viral platforms he needs to retain the presidency, advertise themselves as having done the opposite, and then hedge their bets in private. Huge swaths of California’s ancient redwood forests continue to burn around the perimeter of Silicon Valley.Incessant, nihilistic assaults on truth, empathy and the biosphere ensure that life on earth will become much, much worse.On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump’s team described him as the first presidential candidate since Harry Truman with “the guts” to “drop the bomb”. Trump stood there, grinning with pride, and a wave of nausea spread through me. I had the same feeling a few months ago, when I heard Trump utter the words “the Chinese virus”.What waits for us on the other side of this is a world undone by endless cataclysm and aching with senseless loss.The sound of this track, RNC 2020, is pretty rough. The loop is from a concert I did at a club in New York City in my early 20s. So that’s me screaming in the past … for the present.Can you visualize a different path forward? We all have to focus on this now, with everything we’ve got. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is trying to pin Kenosha on Biden – but he created the chaos and violence | Richard Wolffe

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      Donald Trump took a trip to a place called Biden’s America on Tuesday. It is a strange land where the president of the United States is a helpless guest, a doomed corner of his own country that is somehow ruled by a former vice president.It is a topsy-turvy place, this Biden’s America. Occasionally, the president can regain his magical ruling powers by summoning assorted minions in uniforms and incanting a spell with his thumbs to tweet the words LAW AND ORDER.But mostly our president is lawless and disorderly, wandering through a country that has been laid low by a virus from China, a candidate from Delaware, and a bunch of friendly questions from Fox News.It’s weird that the Republican party finds it so hard to see homegrown terrorists in places like KenoshaHe is as befuddled as anyone on Facebook about what the hell is going on around him. But rather than trying to fix this dysfunctional version of the land of the free, he prefers to scare the bejesus out of white voters so they might forget this historic pandemic and recession.To steady his wobbly step, Trump leaned on two men who best represent what he understands by “law and order”. Sitting on one side of our impotent leader was Chad Wolf, the illegally appointed acting secretary of homeland security, who likes to send unidentified paramilitaries to assault American citizens but insists that they are not “the Gestapo, storm troopers or thugs”.Sitting on the other side was Bill Barr, the totally impartial attorney general – who called Black Lives Matter protesters “essentially Bolsheviks” – driven by some kind of religious lust for power. Heaven knows that politics and religion are the kind of bedfellows this president would never lust for.Together, these three outlaws descended on a small outer suburb of Milwaukee and Chicago home to fewer than 100,000 souls, where the Bolsheviks have decided to stage a pivotal uprising against everything good.The facts can be tricky here on the mostly white shores of Lake Michigan, but one thing is clear: Trump cannot feel your pain in Biden’s America.His audience at what this White House called “a community safety roundtable” included a pointless smattering of local suffering – mere pimples on the face of a horrified nation.There were the owners of an office furniture store. “You got hit pretty hard. That’s all right,” said our discomforter-in-chief. “It’s going to get rebuilt.”There was the owner of a candle store. “That’s a very fancy name you have there,” said the man trying to scare white America to its core. “But I’ll bet it was beautiful. Is it – are you going to rebuild? Will you be rebuilding?”“We were not destroyed, very fortunately,” said the candle lady.“Well, we’ll be giving you some help,” Trump said anyway.You never know, the Bolsheviks might come tomorrow.Then there was the camera store guy, who has been in business for 109 years, according to Trump.“You’re insured, right,” he asked. Yes, said the camera guy. “And so they’re helping, and they’re being responsible?” Why yes, said the store owner.So much suffering caused by the strange revolutionary forces of Biden’s America, gathering on the shores of a great lake for no great reason.“To stop the political violence, we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence,” said our explainer-in-chief. “Reckless, far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist. They’ll throw out any word that comes to them.”It’s almost as if these politicians throw out words like bullets fired into the back of a father climbing into his car where his three children were waiting for him.You see, in Trump’s version of Biden’s America, violence springs like Athena from the head of Joe Biden, or AOC, or Lenin. It has no relationship to Jacob Blake, who was not named by Trump or his sidekicks at their community safety roundtable. It has nothing to do George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery.It doesn’t even have anything to do with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with killing two protesters and injuring another in Kenosha, as part of a self-styled white militia that arrived from out of state. Somehow the town’s non-racist law enforcement turned a blind eye to Rittenhouse, walking the streets with his AR-15-style assault rifle, and his friends even after the shootings.Some types of radical ideology are good, and some are bad. The original Bolsheviks understood that distinction pretty well.There are many strange things that happen in Biden’s America. As Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News on Monday, there were people wearing black clothes on “a plane from a certain city this weekend” who were headed to the Republican convention that just ended. “A lot of people were on the plane to do big damage,” said the man tasked with protecting the constitution, as well as a nation of confused citizens.As if that isn’t bad enough, there are police who shoot unarmed civilians because they can’t take the pressure. It’s a bit like playing golf, Trump told the audibly horrified – but otherwise entirely supportive – Fox News interviewer.“You know, a choker, they choke,” Trump explained, somehow managing to dehumanize both the shooting victim and the police officer who pulled the trigger. “Shooting the guy in the back many times. Couldn’t you have done something different? … But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot.”It’s weird enough that a Republican party that campaigned for so long on the war on terrorism finds it so hard to see homegrown terrorists in places like Kenosha. It’s weirder still that the party now blindly follows a man who likens shooting someone in the back to missing a putt.But the weirdest thing in Biden’s America is that Donald Trump can only echo Joe Biden. One of them said this week, “I know most cops are good and decent people. I know the risk they take every day with their lives.” The other said: “The vast and overwhelming majority of police officers are honorable, courageous, and devoted public servants.” Which candidate hates law enforcement again?The last Republican president to promise to keep us safe was George W Bush, running for re-election after 9/11. But every few days in Trump’s America, we lose more Americans to the rampant pandemic than to the terrorist attacks that traumatized this nation 19 years ago.That’s not just weird. It’s the symptom of a political sickness inflicted by three and a half years of a lawless and lying president. This is Trump’s America, and we just vote in it.• Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Jacob Blake family reject 'orange man in the White House' as Trump tours nearby

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      As Donald Trump toured parts of the Wisconsin city of Kenosha on Tuesday – against the wishes of local government officials – the family of Jacob Blake, the young Black father now paralyzed after being shot by city police, had a message for the visiting US president.Justin Blake, Jacob’s uncle, kicked off a community party on the same Kenosha block where his nephew was shot multiple times in the back by a police officer. The shooting triggered yet another harsh examination of US police practices and led to the gun deaths of two protesters, killed by a white militia supporter last week.“We’re not going to let anyone smudge my nephew’s name,” said Justin Blake, as Trump held court elsewhere with local law enforcement and criticized the protesters who had taken to streets after the shooting.“We don’t have any words for the orange man in the White House,” Blake added.Trump’s visit came to a town at the center of US politics following Blake’s shooting, the nights of protest and vandalism that it triggered, and finally the deaths of two protesters allegedly at the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse, who now stands charged with murder.Trump had billed his trip to Kenosha as a unifying move, but Blake’s family declined to meet with him and his schedule was dominated by meetings with local police officials and business leaders. He toured damaged property and paid far more attention to the destruction than to the police shooting that preceded it.To many residents, especially Black citizens, Trump’s visit was roundly unwelcome, echoing the local mayor, John Antaramian, and Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers, who had asked the president not to come. At the local courthouse, about 100 Trump supporters and a similar number of Black Lives Matter supporters traded chants back and forth. About 50 yards away, members of the national guard sat laughing and joking behind the courthouse wall.Jacob Ansari, a 42-year-old IT security adviser, wore a shirt depicting the Republican party being thrown into the trash. He said: “The president has no business being here and inflaming tension. He’s riling up his supporters and bringing in all these people who aren’t wearing masks and who have the potential to incite more violence.”He added: “People frame everything around broken windows and property, and not the actual human lives that are being hurt by bad cops and white supremacists. I think we all need to come out and stand up in this moment and say that none of this is OK. It’s not OK for the president to come out and whip up his potentially violent supporters.” More

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      in Elections

      'We're not taking it any more': Jacob Blake's family lead Washington rally – video

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      The family of Wisconsin shooting victim Jacob Blake condemned racism and demanded criminal justice reform as they spoke in front of thousands at the Commitment March in Washington DC. Earlier this week Blake was shot multiple times in the back by police, leaving him paralysed. The protest, announced in early June following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, marked the anniversary of the demonstration at which Martin Luther King gave his historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
      Tens of thousands join Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march in Washington DC
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