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      Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up

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      While Donald Trump made baseless, dangerous claims that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets in front of millions of viewers at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Johnson Salomon, a Haitian man who moved to Springfield in 2020, was watching cartoons with his kids before putting them to bed.He got a text from a friend telling him to turn on the debate. When he saw the headlines about what the former president and Republican nominee in November’s election had said, he was in total shock.“This was a false claim. I couldn’t believe that such a high official could make such a claim,” Salomon said.Trump’s running mate JD Vance, Elon Musk and prominent Ohio Republicans had already spread the false rumors, lying about how Haitian immigrants had been killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, a blue-collar town of 60,000 people in western Ohio. But the rumors, leaving Salomon and other Haitians in fear of being targeted for violence and discrimination, didn’t start with them.They were initially spread online in August on social platforms used by far-right extremists and by Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi hate group.Springfield officials and police say they have received no credible reports of pets being harmed by members of the immigrant community, instead suggesting the story may have originated in Canton, Ohio, where an American woman with no known connection to Haiti was arrested in August for allegedly stomping a cat to death and eating the animal.View image in fullscreenBut that hasn’t prevented Republican party politicians from scapegoating Springfield’s 15,000 Haitian immigrants as Trump and others attempt to propel immigration to the center of their fall political campaigns. In addition to Tuesday’s debate, Trump held a news conference Friday in which he rambled without evidence about how Haitians had descended on Springfield “and destroyed the place”.When Haitian immigrants began trickling into Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories in 2017, some thought the new residents could help the city regain its former vigor as a once-thriving manufacturing hub. Once home to major agricultural machinery companies in the mid-20th century, Springfield has lost a quarter of its population since the 1960s.“They came to us for one reason: they were looking for ways to find out how to work,” Casey Rollins, executive director of the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Springfield chapter, said of those who came to the Ohio city from Haiti.“So we got together immigration lawyers and interpreters to figure out how to help them work. We are getting them online and getting them to apply [for work permits]. We wanted workers here [in Springfield] – they want to work.”View image in fullscreenHaitians and immigrants from Central American countries have been in high demand at Springfield’s Dole Fresh Vegetables – where they’ve been hired to clean and package produce – and at automotive machining plants whose owners were desperate for workers due to a labor shortage in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.New Caribbean restaurants and food trucks have opened across south Springfield where once abandoned neighborhoods are now bustling with residents. A popular Haitian radio station has been broadcasting for several years. And every May, thousands turn out for Haitian Flag Day that’s celebrated at a local park.But the glut of new arrivals has also stretched hospitals and schools in the area, angering many locals who resented their presence. The outrage reached a crescendo last August, when an 11-year-old boy was thrown from a school bus and killed after its driver swerved to avoid an oncoming car driven by a Haitian immigrant who didn’t have an Ohio driver’s license.The child’s death fueled anger and racism on Facebook and at Springfield city commission meetings, where public comments about immigration have often run for more than an hour. Locals upset by the growing immigrant community wondered if they were being taken over – if Springfield had become ground zero for the baseless “great replacement theory”.Soon, rightwing extremists seized on Springfield’s unrest.Armed neo-Nazi members of Blood Tribe – a hardcore white supremacist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League – flew flags bearing swastikas and marched through a prominent downtown street while a jazz and blues festival was taking place nearby in August.One witness to the march, who declined to be interviewed by the Guardian due to fearing for their family’s safety after being doxed by rightwing extremists online, reported that members of the group pointed guns at cars and told people to “go the fuck back to Africa”.A Springfield police representative, however, appeared to downplay the scene, telling local media that the hate group’s march was “just a little peaceful protest”.Several days later, a leading member of Blood Tribe who identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, but whose real name is Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield city commission meeting.“I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late,” Berentz told Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue. “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”Berentz was promptly kicked out for espousing threatening language. Nonetheless, on Thursday morning, a bomb threat prompted Springfield’s city hall, a school and other government offices to be evacuated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe same group has marched in South Dakota and Tennessee this year.Last year, having turned up to protest a drag story time event in Wadsworth, Ohio, where white supremacists gave Nazi salutes and shouted “Sieg heil”, the organization allegedly set up a chapter in the state. Last year, Blood Tribe members were driven out of Maine having attempted to set up a compound and Nazi training camp in the rural north-eastern part of the state.View image in fullscreen“Blood Tribe celebrated Donald Trump bringing up the [immigrants killing cats] lie during the debate,” said Maria Bruno of Ohioans Against Extremism, a non-profit founded last month in part due to a rising presence of extremists in Ohio. “They are thrilled that there are politicians willing to echo their talking points.”JD Vance has regularly claimed that “illegal immigrants” are “generally causing chaos all across Springfield” on the campaign trail in recent weeks. Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, said he plans to direct his office to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities”.However, the vast majority of Haitians in Springfield are in the US legally through a temporary protected status (TPS) that’s been allocated to them due to the violence and unrest in their home country. Citizens of 16 countries, including Afghanistan and Myanmar, are eligible for TPS. It is not a pathway to US citizenship and is valid for only 18 months, at which point it must be renewed by the federal homeland security department for a status holder to remain in the country legally.“They are entrepreneurs, they want to innovate,” Rollins said of Haitian people in Springfield. “They just work excessively once they are eligible.”But many Haitians have been targeted in Springfield.View image in fullscreenIn December, a Springfield man was sentenced to 20 years in federal jail for hate crimes after attacking eight Haitians earlier in 2023. Last year, the local Haitian church was broken into and damaged twice. Longtime Black residents of Springfield have reported being verbally abused when walking on the city’s streets, having been confused with members of the Haitian community.The effect is plainly obvious.“Normally, when I drive through south Springfield, where a lot of Haitians live, you see people walking on the streets, at the Haitian markets and restaurants,” Salomon said.“For the past few days, I have seen far fewer people.”Rollins said she has received threats that the St Vincent de Paul branch would be destroyed for its support of Haitians.“People are messaging me, telling me that I’ve destroyed Springfield,” she said. “We’re just trying to help people.” More

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      Republicans want to steal reproductive freedom. Black women will suffer most | Monica Raye Simpson

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      As the 2024 elections continue to heat up, there are increasing concerns about the rise of fascism around the world and in the United States. Regardless of the word or label used, Black people, living with the legacy of slavery and multiple forms of reproductive oppression including rape and forced pregnancies, sterilizations and the killing of our children and loved ones by vigilantes and police, have a lot of experience with authoritarian regimes that oppress and dehumanize.There is a strategic agenda from the far right – laid out in clear language in Project 2025 to keep power in the hands of a chosen few and prevent the United States from becoming a truly representative, multiracial democracy that embraces and supports all people including those with the capacity for pregnancy.According to US census projections, people of color are on par to be the majority by the middle of the century. With this imminent reality, the focus on controlling our fertility and denying us bodily autonomy is the age-old strategy of authoritarian, democracy-denying regimes. And to have a conservative-leaning supreme court that has proved that it will roll back some of the most critical protections further supports their agenda.One of those critical protections was the right to abortion recognized and protected in Roe v Wade. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe – and not only denied women the right to abortion, but also laid the groundwork for dismantling all reproductive rights and aspects of pregnancy-related healthcare.For decades, we have seen a focus on reversing Roe v Wade with numerous states implementing barriers to access through proposing Trap (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws, expanding funding to crisis pregnancy centers and promoting declarations of personhood for the unborn from the moment of fertilization, all while gerrymandering states to stack our state legislatures with conservative leaders. We are also fighting abortion bans and increased criminalization for those seeking abortions and for pregnant women who are targeted for creating imagined risks of harm to personified eggs, embryos and fetuses.And it is not just about ending a pregnancy. Before the Dobbs decision, the US already had an appalling and shameful rate of maternal mortality that is from four to 12 times higher for Black women. As OB-GYNs flee states that have banned abortions and women are forced to wait out ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths and continue pregnancies with non-viable or already dead fetuses – because doctors have been terrorized into inaction – that rate will no doubt go up. As if that wasn’t enough, research consistently finds that US Black maternal mortality is fueled by racism that goes unaddressed and reinforced by our opposition.While devastating, we can at least note that the Dobbs decision shook the nation and brought the longstanding fight for abortion to the mainstream. While so many wondered how we got here, Black women and people of color had warned about the danger of single-issue litigation and organizing strategies within the historically predominantly white-led reproductive health and rights movements for decades.Thirty years ago, Black women came up with the term reproductive justice and started a human-rights-based movement that not only fought for the right to prevent or end pregnancies but to expand the fight to have the children that we want, to parent them in safe and sustainable communities. This new intersectional movement centered the leadership and lived experiences and bodily autonomy of those historically pushed to the margins.Fascism thrives when the masses are conditioned to think, organize and create policies that are not intersectional thus creating fertile ground for authoritarianism. I believe the kryptonite to fascism is the work being done by those who laid the foundation for the reproductive justice movement – Black women.Black women have found every way possible to resist while also remaining innovative. We consistently vote for our values to save our democracy. From the Black women who were the backbone of the civil rights and Black liberation movements to the Black women who redefined feminism at the Combahee River, to the Black women who created new movements like reproductive justice, Black Lives Matter and Me Too – it is clear we have decades of receipts that show our commitment to dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal authoritarian regimes.With this election we are faced with a serious question: “What world do we want for ourselves and the generations to come?” Do we want to live in a world where we do not have the human right to make our own decisions around our bodies, our families and our futures? Or do we want to live in a world where our lives are dictated by insidious policies?Our future is in the hands of those who are ready to fight for our freedom. This is the time to not only vote but also organize. This is the time to sit at the table and build with people we don’t know and deepen our relationships with our current allies. This is the time to study and learn from the historical victories over fascism. Because fascism always loses when it comes against the collective power of those determined to achieve our human rights.

      Monica Raye Simpson is the executive director of SisterSong, the southern-based national Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Monica is a proud Black queer feminist & cultural strategist who is committed to organizing for LGBTQ+ liberation, civil and human rights, and sexual and reproductive justice by any means necessary. She was also named a New Civil Rights Leader by Essence Magazine and as one of TIME 100’s most influential people of 2023. More

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      American democracy is in peril. And racism will be the sledgehammer that destroys it | Kimberlé W Crenshaw

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      Racism has been the achilles heel of American democracy since its founding as a racialized project, predicated on theft of land, of labor and of the reproductive autonomy of Black women. These are truths that Maga extremists want to erase.But it is not just history that Maga wants to silence and it isn’t just Maga that has acquiesced. Because we have not normalized the important conversation about our racial history and its present consequences, the dangerous nexus between anti-democratic forces in our nation and its racist foundations is among the least talked about dimensions of our slide into fascism.The anti-woke assault on race-conscious history and knowledge and against the hard-fought policies to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is extremely dangerous, not only to people of color, but to stakeholders of racial justice and democracy. Despite the intentional misdirection, the war against woke is not just a war against critical race theory, but it is a war against Black history and the entire infrastructure built out of the civil rights movement. It is a war against our multiracial democracy that too many are unable to name. And because assaults that cannot be seen or named cannot be fought, the consequences are disastrous.The mainstream media contribute to our collective incapacity to wrestle with the forces that continue to bedevil our democracy. In coverage of the January 6 insurrection, the racist and white nationalist underbelly that informs the mantra “we want our country back” is merely a footnote in the story of how we almost lost our democracy. This erasure denies the centrality of the racist narrative that defines who this nation belongs to, who gets to govern and who gets to belong.Exclusive notions of who belongs and who doesn’t are fundamental features of fascist regimes. Yet in the drama unfolding in the United States, the racial narratives that continue to target racial others to receive the wrath of disgruntled masses escape the grasp of those who now decry the collapse of our democracy. The media’s widespread reluctance to confront the racist underbelly of the “big lie” obscures the impossibility of saving our democracy without addressing racial denialism.Where did Trump target his venomous big lie? It was Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix. Who were the voters there who “illegitimately” denied him the White House? Black and brown voters. Who were the poll workers who supposedly did this dirty work? African American women like Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. The failure to confront the racial contours of the myth of a stolen election has facilitated a dangerous and misleading wormhole to the past. It was no accident that among the most chilling symbols that marched through the Capitol that day – for the first time ever – was the Confederate flag.Congressman Jamie Raskin was one of a very few observers alarmed by this reflection of Maga’s “common cause with extremist groups steeped in racism and hellbent on insurrection”. And yet, the insight gained from a fully realized encounter with our past languishes in the margins of our national discourse. As the great poet Langston Hughes wrote, “we are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism. We Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know.” It is an enduring awareness that is being written out of our usable history.Toni Morrison, writing across the decades, explained how the creation of a pariah class was one of the first steps of fascist regimes. As she noted, such regimes “isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse”.So it is not merely ironic that Morrison, one of the most celebrated American authors of the 20th century, has become one of the most banned writers in this country. It is evidence. The fact that Morrison was so prophetic in telling us what this crisis means is all the more reason that our response to so-called “anti-woke” censorship should be reflexive. If the Maga faction wants to silence and suppress our voices, we must go to the mat to sustain them all the more. What is at stake is more than a book, a theory, a practice or a value. What is at stake is our democracy itself. We cannot save it without fortifying the tools, histories and ideas that are the legacies of the long fights against racial injustice.Derrick Bell once wrote something that may, unexpectedly, open a pathway to recover the lost momentum that was quashed by the fierce reaction to the post-George Floyd reckoning. The backlash against the demands for racial justice that erupted in all 50 states has metastasized into the anti-woke juggernaut against anti-racism, critical race theory, 1619 and now DEI. For too long, too many of our allies and stakeholders sat it out, thinking that the stakes were not that high, that we could simply pivot and not use certain words, effectively dodging the backlash by saying “we don’t do that here”.Now that this assault came for something that most Americans really do care about – their country – the potential for interest convergence is ripe. Our country cannot be saved without the input of “the other”, without our history, and without the knowledge about this country that we have long brought to the table. We cannot pivot our way out of this crisis. Our only choice is to fight – to fight for our freedom to speak our history, to name our reality, to learn our condition and to vote to change it.

      Kimberlé W Crenshaw is the Co-founder and Executive Director of African American Policy Forum and Faculty Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS). She is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the Promise Institute Chair on Human Rights at UCLA Law School More

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      Black US voting ‘bloc’ composed of five distinct political groups, survey finds

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      Black voters in the US are often lumped into one bloc, but a new national survey has found that they can be defined by specific clusters: legacy civil rights, secular progressives, next-gen traditionalist, rightfully cynical and race-neutral conservative.“These clusters indicate that there are incredible differences within the Black community, in terms of how people think about democracy and their role in our democracy,” said Katrina Gamble, CEO of Sojourn Strategies during a press conference on Wednesday,Out of the 2,034 registered voters and 918 Black unregistered voters surveyed, 41% of respondents were found to be legacy civil rights voters who skewed older than 50 years of age and had the highest voter turnout rates. Legacy civil rights voters were also the most likely group to believe that their vote has the power to drive change. On the other end, the rightfully cynical, 22% of respondents, were the youngest cohort and the least likely to vote. Based on their personal experiences of racism at work and with the police, this cluster was the least likely to believe that their vote matters.Next-gen traditionalists, 18% of respondents, were the most religious and least educated cluster, mostly consisting of millennial and generation Z voters. They had a low voter turnout rate and a moderate belief in the power of their vote. The most progressive respondents fell within the secular progressives cluster, at 12%, of which the majority were educated women who were highly likely to vote.Finally, the race-neutral conservatives, 7% of respondents, consisted mostly of men and were the second oldest cohort as well as the most conservative. Race-neutral conservatives had a moderate voter turnout rate and were likely to blame systemic barriers on individual choices.Community-based organizations from Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan discussed the need to tailor mobilization efforts to different types of Black voters during a Wednesday press conference. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the grassroots group Power Interfaith is using the results of the survey to engage 50,000 eligible Black voters throughout the state. Ahead of the election, the organization will tap Black Muslim and Christian congregations to help recruit 2,000 hosts who will serve soul food dinners to young people.Hosts from the legacy civil rights cluster will use the survey results to inform discussions with younger generations at the dinner. “For Black folk, food actually is our love language,” said Rev Dr Gregory Edwards, interim executive director of Power Interfaith. “Something magical happens when folks sit around the dining room table with some good food; it creates space for conversation about politics, about relationships, about dreams, hopes and aspirations that aren’t happening elsewhere.”This fall, the Georgia-based voter engagement group New Georgia Project plans to use the research findings to tailor its door canvassing, phone and text scripts. “We’re able to train our canvassers and others to talk to people and to listen to them and to make sure that they are addressing what they care about, versus some traditional operations that may just talk at people,” said Ranada Robinson, the group’s research director.In Michigan, a series of events called Just Effing Care Fest hosted by the grassroots group Detroit Action will engage rightful cynics by showcasing local influencers and artists while convening young Black people to discuss the issues that they’re most concerned about. “Young Black community artists have a strong influence with the rightful cynics,” said Branden Snyder, the group’s senior advisor. “They’re able to talk about how they’ve transformed their own cynicism into artistic expression, building a world that should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Black registered voters overwhelmingly favor Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the Black values research is not targeted toward a particular campaign or party, said Gamble from Sojourn Strategies.Instead, the survey is designed to help the Black electorate see that their vote matters. “It really centers understanding, how do we not only increase Black folks across the segments’ perceptions of their own power, but also get this research into the hands of organizations that can organize them into having actualized power in our democracy and our elections?” said Gamble. More

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      ‘We captured magic’: the telenovelas reaching Latino voters in swing states

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      “Una chingona always knows when to use her own voice.”So begins the first installment of a telenovela geared toward young Latina voters. Chingonas, which means empowered women in Mexican Spanish, are the target audience for the non-profit Poder NC Action – a Latino North Carolina-based voter engagement group. This year, the largest ever cohort of young North Carolina-born Latinos will be eligible to vote in a presidential election.The unique eight-part series released last month on YouTube was created to close the gap between registration and turnout for Latino voters, who have historically voted less than some other groups, in the key battleground state. In the short films, the main character Alexia is a young Latina who goes from struggling to voice her opinions with her community and family to encouraging strangers to turn out to vote.“We captured magic somehow,” Irene Godinez, the executive director of Poder NC Action, said about the telenovelas. “The fact that 18-year-old boys to a 70-something-year-old woman feel seen in this and are excited about it is unheard of.”Now, the films’ reach has extended beyond North Carolina, with voter engagement organizations in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Colorado featuring them on social media platforms. The videos appear in Hulu and YouTube TV ads; the non-profit Voto Latino will use them in a digital public service announcement ahead of the election, and in the fall, Latino fraternal chapters, such as Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc and Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc, will screen the telenovelas on campuses around the country.Nationwide, an estimated 36.2 million Latino voters will be eligible to vote this year, nearly 15% of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center. Godinez foresaw the large swath of eligible voters coming to age when she launched the non-profit in 2020: “My calculation was, if we start talking to them right now that they’re in high school and we can get them in as volunteers,” said Godinez. “Then by the time that they become actual voting age, they’ll be not only informed, but they’ll be willing to inform their peers.”Before Poder NC Action’s inception in 2020, political parties and advocacy groups did not invest in voter engagement efforts for Latino voters in North Carolina, said Godinez. She sought to create culturally relevant voter engagement initiatives that spoke directly to young Latino voters.“The people who absolutely are being neglected, it doesn’t mean that they’re not interested,” Godinez said. “It just means that no one has made an effort to reach out to them.”The organization’s strategy has been to focus on courting around 150,000 Latino voters who have voted twice or less since registering to vote in 2016. Their outreach consists of political mailers, phonebanking, canvassing, and monthly social hours where voters meet local politicians.In 2020, Poder NC Action hand delivered 4,000 voter information cards throughout the state, made over 1m calls, delivered over 1m mailers, and worked with 130 young Latino volunteers. Godinez said that their efforts helped North Carolina Latino voters become 40% of the overall Latino voter turnout in 2020.And in 2022, a quarter of the organization’s targeted voters voted in the midterm election. The organization is taking cue from its members on whether they will endorse a presidential candidate. “It’s even likely that we would endorse Kamala Harris,” Godinez said, “but it will boil down to what our membership determines”.In February, Poder NC Action hosted a Barbie movie-themed event where volunteers escorted the 50 attendees down a pink carpet that led to a barbie photo booth so they could post photos on social media. It was the second time that the organization hosted the voter registration event called Ballots y Belleza, where attendees get free beauty services including makeup and waxing as they study sample ballots and volunteers inform them about voting issues. In September, the group will host another Ballots y Belleza event for Latinx Heritage Month that focuses on the theme “Poder (Power) is our Heritage, too,” said Godinez.View image in fullscreenThe event was inspired by a 15-year-old who begrudgingly attended one of the group’s social hour events with an older sibling last summer. The teen told Godinez that she would willingly sit through a daylong civic engagement meeting if she could simultaneously get her nails done. “We wanted to create a space where folks could come and learn and build community with each other,” Godinez said, “and then create some sort of connection with us as well”.Following Poder NC Action’s events, attenders have told Godinez that they feel “seen” in her programming. “Organizations create different types of programming tailored to voters, but they do it as if voters are different from their loved ones. They don’t look at voters particularly as an extension of themselves,” Godinez said. “We see our families in our voters. We see ourselves in our voters.”The work that Poder NC Action is doing to engage Latino voters could serve as a model for organizations in other states throughout the nation, said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic party strategist and president of consulting firm Solidarity Strategies. As a consultant to the organization for the past six years, Rocha said that Poder NC Action’s work stood out because it was rooted in the Latino community: Poder NC Action is run by a Latina woman, while the staff, consultants and artists that work on products are also Latino.“There’s lots of Spanish ads made by congressional candidates or governors candidates, but it’s just made by their same white consultants, normally translated from English,” Rocha said. “They’re all well-meaning, but it just doesn’t have the same look and feel when it’s made from the community, by the community, for the community.”At the end of September, Poder NC Action will launch another telenovela series that focuses on reproductive justice. Starting in mid-October, the organization will host a mobile Ballots y Belleza on a party bus where young voters will receive beauty services at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as public universities around North Carolina.Ultimately, Godinez hopes that Poder NC’s initiatives will help inspire a new generation of voters to become civically engaged. “We’re creating a paper trail of everything so that we can share it with organizations that our values align no matter where they are, so that way, if something is working well here, there’s no reason that we would hold on to it and not share it.” More

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      ‘Dangerous and un-American’: new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration

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      Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.Now this latest recording raises renewed questions about Vance’s contribution to the Republican ticket, which is trailing behind Kamala Harris and her bid to be America’s first woman of color president.In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in [their] own community”.At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response.‘Racial and gender resentment’A video version of the podcast was published to YouTube on 20 September 2021, and events discussed in it suggest that it was recorded in the days immediately before. The liberal watchdog Media Matters had previously flagged the broadcast.At that time, Vance was a relatively new political candidate. He achieved national prominence as a writer in 2016, but on 1 July 2021 he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. That March, the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel donated $10m to Protect Ohio Values, a Pac established to support a potential Vance candidacy.View image in fullscreenThe recording was initially published as an episode of the podcast of American Moment, a rightwing 501c3 non-profit whose website says its mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all”. At the time of the recording, Vance sat on the non-profit’s advisory board; he’s now listed under “board members emeritus” on the organization’s website.Vance’s hosts were American Moment’s president and founder, Saurabh Sharma, and its COO Nick Solheim. Introducing the discussion, Solheim speculated that Vance “may end up with some angry texts after this one. It was a very spicy episode.”In the recording, Vance repeatedly offered a dark vision of the lives of women who prioritized their professional careers.At about 39 minutes into the recording, when asked what he saw inside elite institutions like Yale Law School that made him view them as corrupt, Vance answered: “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”Vance added: “What they don’t realize – and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God – is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.“The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” Vance said. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.”Minutes later, Vance adopted the perspective of a hypothetical professional woman to answer Sharma’s question about where “the racial and gender resentment comes from”.“OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible,” Vance began, “And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.”He continued: “But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”Last weekend, Vance tried to clean up previously reported comments about childless women by claiming it was “sarcasm”.‘Soy boys who want to feed the monster’On the other hand, Vance depicted men and boys as “suppressed”, saying 52 minutes in that “one of the weird things about elite society is it’s deeply uncomfortable with masculinity”.Warming to the theme, Vance said: “This is one weird thing that conservatives don’t talk about enough … We don’t talk enough about the fact that traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood.”Assessing his young son’s habit of fighting imaginary monsters, Vance said: “There’s something deeply cultural and biological, spiritual about this desire to defend his home and his family.”He connected this with a hypothetical invasion: “If the Chinese invade us in 10 years, they’re going to be beaten back by boys like you who practice fighting the monsters who become proud men who defend their homes.”By contrast, for Vance, “They’re not going to be defended by the soy boys who want to feed the monsters.”“Soy boy” is a term, originating on the “alt-right”, which is used to impugn the masculinity of its targets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion‘The left uses racism as a cudgel’Looming over the conversation was the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which had been completed on the orders of Joe Biden on 31 August, just weeks before the recording was published.These events led the trio to discussions of immigration and asylum, in which Vance expressed doubts about the suitability of Afghan and Somali people for immigration to the US, even those who had assisted the US military overseas.At about 22 minutes into the recording, Vance mocked the claims of Afghan refugees to have helped the US military in its occupation, saying: “Apparently, Afghanistan is a country of translators and interpreters because every single person that’s coming in, that’s what they say is this person is: a translator and interpreter.”He attributed the idea that the US should grant asylum to those who helped US forces to “the fraudulence of our elites”, saying: “You talk to people who served in Afghanistan. And one of the things they will tell you is, yeah, a lot of the translators and interpreters who helped us were great guys.”Vance added, however, that “a lot of the interpreters who said they were helping us were actively helping terrorists plant roadside bombs, knowing our routes”, without substantiating the claim.Vance continued: “The idea that every person in Afghanistan, even those who said they were helping us, are actually good people is a total joke.”Vance expressed similar skepticism about another immigrant group, while characterizing himself and others as victims of the left.At about 25 minutes into the recording, Solheim said: “There’s like a whole section of downtown Minneapolis that they call Little Mogadishu. Like that’s what they call it. There’s nothing in English. People are frequently hatcheted to death in the street.”Solheim added: “I was just down there a couple of weeks ago. It’s like a totally different country.”View image in fullscreenReplying, Vance said: “The thing that I hate about this is the left uses racism as a cudgel. And I myself was guilty of being a little worried about that. Like, I don’t want to be called a racist because I knew it can be career-ending and they can destroy a person’s life.”Vance then asked, rhetorically, “Why don’t you want, you know, people getting hatcheted in the street in downtown Minneapolis? Is it because you’re a racist or is it because you don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in your own community?”“Like, obviously, the answer is the latter,” he concluded. “But the left uses racism as a cudgel to shut us up and to make it impossible to complain about obvious problems.”Last July, not long after being named as Trump’s VP pick, Vance suggested in a speech that Democrats would describe drinking Diet Mountain Dew as racist. The comment backfired and was widely mocked.‘You would be living in a craphole’Several times, the three steered assessments of migrant groups and their capacity for assimilation into negative personal commentary on the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.View image in fullscreenAt about 28 minutes in, Sharma said: “You know, thinking about the Minnesota example, specifically, that’s how you get someone like Ilhan Omar, who despises the country.”Vance replied, “I mean, [the US] gave her an incredible amount of opportunity and she has a complete lack of gratitude,” later adding: “My family has been here as far as I can tell for nine, 10, like many generations. I’ve never heard a person in my family express the ingratitude towards this country that Ilhan Omar does towards this country.“And look, this is the way the laws work. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me,” Vance allowed.“But my God, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a craphole if this country didn’t bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too,” he concluded.Congresswoman Omar’s full response to the Guardian took Vance to task over the comments.“The ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance is not just troubling – it’s dangerous and un-American. I love America fiercely, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to public service,” she wrote.Omar added: “America deserves better than Vance’s hateful, divisive politics. We are a nation of immigrants, and we will continue to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – no matter how much it terrifies small-minded men like JD Vance.”Vance also talked about institutions like universities and the media as components of a “broken elite system”, and portrayed their inhabitants as enemies whom conservatives would need to reckon with.“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.” More

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      in US Politics

      Black voters in Georgia want affordable access to healthcare. Will Kamala Harris win them over?

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      Around 4am last Christmas Eve, Kuanita Murphy’s father suddenly became short of breath and briefly passed out. Without a medical facility nearby, Murphy had to drive him 45 miles east to Albany, Georgia, to the Phoebe Putney memorial hospital. The only hospital in their small town of Cuthbert, Georgia – Southwest Georgia regional medical center – had closed down three years earlier due to financial strain from failing infrastructure and an increase in uninsured patients.After waiting for several hours, Murphy’s dad was finally admitted at noon into a hospital room for internal bleeding and a restricted heart valve. While he eventually underwent lifesaving surgery, Murphy said that he would have received treatment faster had Cuthbert still had a hospital.“He had some pain dealing with his chest and the anxiety of not knowing exactly what was going on with him,” Murphy, the editor of Rural Leader magazine, said. “That made it worse off than it probably was, not knowing and having to wait.”Hospital closures are top of mind for Black voters throughout Georgia, since it’s one of 10 states to reject Medicaid expansion. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris launched a two-day bus tour through south Georgia that will culminate with a rally in Savannah on Thursday afternoon. “Campaigning in this part of the Peach state is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban and urban Georgians – with a large proportion of Black voters and working-class families,” the campaign said in a statement.Since 2013, 12 hospitals have closed down in rural and urban areas throughout the state, according to the Georgia Hospital Association. In 2022, two Wellstar Atlanta medical centers closed in the Atlanta metro area, where more than two-thirds of the 4,281 emergency room patients were Black, according to 2019 data from the private, non-profit Wellstar Health System cited by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.In Murphy’s eyes, the shuttered medical facility where she was born 49 years ago has served as a rallying cry before the upcoming presidential election. The city’s residents, she said, want to “back a candidate that is going to support Medicaid expansion, or affordable access to healthcare”.Murphy, like most residents in majority-Black Cuthbert, has long voted Democrat. Although Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since 1992, the Republican-led state legislature has rejected expanding Medicaid coverage to more lower-income adults. The Biden-Harris administration has long urged all states to expand Medicaid – a legacy that health policy experts predict Democratic nominee Harris will continue if she becomes president.Throughout her vice-presidency, Harris has discussed the need to expand Medicaid coverage for postpartum mothers from two to 12 months after giving birth. “We also must work together to call on Congress to advance other components of our Build Back agenda, to expand Medicaid in every state,” Harris said during a speech in 2021. “People live in every state, that’s the logic.”Floundering healthcare facilities might stay open if they have received Medicaid reimbursements for patients who otherwise couldn’t pay their bills, according to health policy experts. As they gear up for state and federal elections, healthcare advocates and community organizations say they want Georgians to vote for candidates who prioritize affordable and equitable access to healthcare.Bobby Jenkins, the Cuthbert mayor, believes that the state’s hospital closures could drive voter turnout there. “That’s a way of engaging people in the electoral process to get them to understand this is a direct impact of your vote, or it could be a consequence of your lack of voting,” he said. Case in point, Jenkins said, is that Biden-Harris’s 2025 fiscal year budget includes “Medicaid-like” coverage to people in states that haven’t expanded the program. Meanwhile, Donald Trump sought to repeal Medicaid expansion and supported work requirements for people to qualify for free government healthcare during his presidency.‘Our governor said no, which is crazy’According to surveys and canvassing sessions, access to healthcare has remained the most pressing concern only behind the economy for Black and brown communities over the past two years, said Kierra Stanford, the lead community health organizer for the non-profit New Georgia Project. At ice cream teach-ins and public meetings, Stanford tells residents that hospitals could stay open if state and federal leaders expanded Medicaid. While the group is nonpartisan, they encourage voters to research candidates’ stances on healthcare.Healthcare redlining, which Stanford defined as “the deliberate managing of healthcare resources in Black communities”, has led hospital systems to divest from historically marginalized areas. “It’s an ongoing trend,” Stanford said, that “has been exacerbated by not expanding Medicaid”.In May, Stanford held a public meeting with 30 attendees in East Point, Georgia, a majority-Black city south-west of Atlanta, to discuss the connection between hospital closures and the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid. A few days later, the New Georgia Project packed the public comment period of an East Point city council meeting to share their concerns about access to healthcare.On the state level, the New Georgia Project releases a voting guide to alert voters of pressing healthcare concerns before elections. Eventually, they plan to roll out a scorecard that shows the state politicians who didn’t vote to expand Medicaid. On the national level, Stanford explains to voters: “Georgia has literally been offered the funds, but our governor said no, which is crazy.”“I try to tell people that the money that’s being taken out of your check for federal taxes,” Stanford said, “you’re paying for healthcare for people in California, for people in these other states that have expanded Medicaid.”Hospital closures hit Black rural communities the hardest, said Sherrell Byrd, executive director of Sowega Rising, a Georgia-based non-profit focused on coalition-building and rural revitalization. “When a hospital closes in rural areas, it’s much more devastating than in urban areas, because it’s like a black hole,” Byrd said. “It takes out a whole subset of the economy side of the community.”It’s common for residents to drive up to an hour or to cross state lines to access hospitals. The organization encourages rural residents to speak to their legislators about their healthcare access concerns, but Byrd said that politicians have not shared any steps they have taken to solve the issue.“That’s where people start to be frustrated, because year after year, they still don’t have hospitals,” Byrd said. “And so that’s when people become disenfranchised.”Hospital closures are top of mind for Medlyne Zamor, a Rockdale county voter who was previously unconcerned about candidates’ healthcare platforms. She didn’t see the need to expand Medicaid and thought that the state would benefit from funding other institutions. However, after a spate of hospital visits due to fibroids in 2022, Zamor met other patients who had been personally affected by the closures. Some of them had needed to wait several months to see specialists. That opened her eyes to the issue, she said: “When I saw how the hospital closures … impacted them in the community, it definitely made me shift my vote to expansion.” Now she only votes for candidates in state and federal offices who support Medicaid expansion.As a result, Zamor began volunteering at the New Georgia Project, where she hosts events to inform Georgians about the lack of access to healthcare. She also addresses the issue by phone banking, sending out email blasts to residents and writing senators. “These hospital closures, not only does it affect the nearby citizens,” Zamor said, “but also it affects the workers, and it affects the [remaining] hospitals, too.”State and federal politicians hold the power in slowing down the closures by extending healthcare coverage to lower-income adults, “relieving fragile hospitals from providing free care to uninsured patients”, said Laura Colbert, the executive director of the non-profit Georgians for a Healthy Future. “After that, state and federal leaders should work together to slow consolidation among hospitals and other investors, which can accelerate some rural hospital closures.”Congress members have stepped up to save Cuthbert’s healthcare system after its only hospital closed four years ago. The city plans to establish a new hospital after recently receiving nearly $12m in federal funding. The Randolph County Hospital Authority is currently working with an accounting firm on a feasibility study to ensure that the facility stays in the community for good. More