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      Biden faces test in Wisconsin as Gaza supporters call for ‘uninstructed’ vote

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      Voters in Wisconsin cast their ballots today in an election that will test voter enthusiasm for Joe Biden and Donald Trump – and potentially enshrine two amendments in the state constitution affecting election administration across the state.The president and former president are already the presumptive nominees and will almost certainly face off in the general election in November, and it seems that the threat of prosecution, general unpopularity and advanced age can’t stop them.But while the primary will not offer alternative candidates, a group of activists in Wisconsin see it as an opportunity to push Biden on his policy toward Israel’s war on Gaza. The organizers, inspired by Michigan’s “uncommitted” campaign, which garnered more than 100,000 votes there, are calling on voters to choose “uninstructed” instead of Biden.“The margins of our elections are so incredibly close – less than 1% in the last two presidential election cycles – so I think it would behoove the administration to pay attention,” said Reema Ahmad, the lead organizer of the Listen to Wisconsin campaign.Organizers with the campaign aim to turn out as many voters for “uninstructed” as Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 to demonstrate their critical role in November, Ahmad said. The campaign has relied on the support of a broad network of progressive organizations, including the state’s largest network of Latino voters, Voces de la Frontera Action and Black Leaders Organizing Communities (Bloc), groups that helped propel Biden to his narrow 2020 victory.Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York also hold presidential primaries today, and voters in Arkansas and Mississippi will participate in primary runoffs. Voters in Rhode Island and Connecticut will also have an “uncommitted” option on the ballot, and in New York, pro-Palestine activists are encouraging voters to leave their presidential primary options blank in protest.The Trump campaign faces no similar challenge within the party, making Republican discontent with him harder to gauge. On 6 March, the former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, whose campaign gave anti-Trump Republicans a means to show their frustration with him, dropped out, and Trump snapped up enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination less than a week later. Haley and four other Republicans will still appear on the Wisconsin ballot alongside Trump.Brandon Scholz, a retired Wisconsin GOP strategist, said primary turnout could lend some insight into how both candidates will fare in November. In 2020, Biden clawed back parts of the country that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016 – especially in the suburbs, and especially suburban women. Biden also benefited from strong support from Black and Latino voters – groups that recent polls show could be slipping away from him.“You want to do what you can to turn your base – your hardcore Dems and your hardcore Republicans, you want to be able to get them to the polls, because the last thing you want to do is come out looking like you didn’t do anything,” Scholz said.Whether or not the Trump campaign will mobilize voters outside the Maga movement is another question.“Observers will look to see what sort of participation traditional Republicans will have in this primary,” said Scholz. “And then finally, for both campaigns what are the ‘double haters’ going to do?”Also on the ballot in Wisconsin are two constitutional amendments that voting rights and government watchdog groups warn could have a negative impact on elections administration in the state.The first proposed amendment, which would ban elections offices from accepting private grant money to fund their operations, comes amid GOP anxieties – and election-denying conspiracy theories – about the role of funding from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Center for Tech and Civic Life. During the 2020 election, the Facebook co-founder and his wife used funding from their organization to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19 in polling places and send voters information during the 2020 election.The donations from Center for Tech and Civic Life became a key focus of Republicans, many of them activists who questioned the results of the 2020 election. “Zuckerbucks”, they argue, unfairly benefited Democratic strongholds – although there is no evidence that the grants, which reached small and large municipalities across the state, played a role in Biden’s victory.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe second proposed amendment would enshrine in the state constitution a provision that already exists in Wisconsin statute, mandating that “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums”.Both proposals were passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature, which sent them to voters after the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, vetoed them. And both, worries Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of Wisconsin’s League of Women Voters, could hurt voters.“There’s no guarantee that the election will be funded fully in the absence of outside money,” said Cronmiller, of the proposal to ban elections offices from accessing private grants. Without sufficient funding – and the state legislature has not proposed additional resources to elections offices – she argued towns and counties are forced to hire fewer poll workers and host fewer polling locations, causing longer lines and a slower tally of the votes and disproportionately impacting poorer and smaller towns.“They might not have the opportunities that a bigger municipality, that has deeper pockets, might have in order to serve their citizens,” she said.The second proposed amendment, Cronmiller and other elections experts and voter advocates say, could prevent non-profits and other third-party groups from assisting voters in critical ways during elections. Groups that assist in driving voters to the polls, provide residents with information about voter registration, or help in the recruitment of poll workers, for example, could find themselves facing legal challenges for their work.“We’re all scratching our heads and wondering: is this allowed? If this passes, and if we don’t do those things, how do voters get to the polls?” said Cronmiller.“Is this a way to suppress the vote?” More

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      Extremist ex-adviser drives ‘anti-white racism’ plan for Trump win – report

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      The anti-immigration extremist, white nationalist and former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller is helping drive a plan to tackle supposed “anti-white racism” if Donald Trump returns to power next year, Axios reported.“Longtime aides and allies … have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints – some of which have been successful,” Axios said on Monday.Should Trump return to power, Axios said, Miller and other aides plan to “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of civil rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of colour”.Such an effort would involve “eliminating or upending” programmes meant to counter racism against non-white groups.The US supreme court, dominated 6-3 by rightwing justices after Trump installed three, recently boosted such efforts by ruling against race-based affirmative action in college admissions.America First Legal, a group founded by Miller and described by him as the right’s “long-awaited answer” to the American Civil Liberties Union, is helping drive plans for a second Trump term, Axios said.In 2021, an AFL suit blocked implementation of a $29bn Covid-era Small Business Administration programme that prioritised helping restaurants owned by women, veterans and people from socially and economically disadvantaged groups.Miller called that ruling “the first, but crucial, step towards ending government-sponsored racial discrimination”.Recent AFL lawsuits include one against CBS and Paramount alleging discrimination against a white, straight man who wrote for the show Seal Team, and a civil rights complaint against the NFL over the “Rooney Rule”, which says at least two minority candidates must be interviewed for vacant top positions.Reports of extremist groups planning for a second Trump presidency are common, not least around Project 2025, a blueprint for transition and legislative priorities prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right Washington thinktank.Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, told Axios: “As President Trump has said, all staff, offices, and initiatives connected to [Joe] Biden’s un-American policy will be immediately terminated.”Throughout Trump’s term in office, Miller was a close adviser and speechwriter – though one of the 45th president’s less successful TV surrogates, ridiculed for using “spray-on hair”.Controversies were numerous. Among them were reported advocacy for blowing up migrants with drones (which Miller denied); for sending 250,000 US troops to the southern border; and for beheading an Isis leader, dipping the head in pig’s blood and “parad[ing] it around to warn other terrorists” (Miller denied it and called the source of the story, the former defense secretary Mark Esper, a “moron”).In 2019, after Miller was discovered to have touted white nationalist articles and books, 55 civil rights groups wrote to Trump, protesting: “Stephen Miller has stoked bigotry, hate and division with his extreme political rhetoric and policies throughout his career. The recent exposure of his deep-seated racism provides further proof that he is unfit to serve and should immediately leave his post.”On Monday, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, said: “It’s not like Donald Trump has been hiding his racism … [but] he’s making it clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy … It’s up to us to stop him.”Despite his legal advocacy in the cause of eradicating “anti-white racism”, Miller is not himself a lawyer.Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer, recently told the Guardian those close to the former president were now “looking for lawyers who worship Trump and will do his bidding. Trump is looking to Miller to pick people who will be more loyal to Trump than the rule of law.” More

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      Mike Johnson hints vote on Ukraine aid is up next despite threat to speakership

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      The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has raised expectations that a vote on funding for Ukraine could be imminent in the chamber, even at the risk of the Republican losing his leadership position.Johnson touted “important innovations” to a possible Ukraine package during an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy, and he suggested a vote on a standalone bill could come soon after Congress returns from Easter recess on 9 April.But the Louisiana Republican acknowledged forces in his party were trying to unseat him over his efforts to find a bipartisan solution to stalled US funding for Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russia’s military invasion, which began in February 2022. The far-right extremist Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to remove Johnson in March, but she stopped short of calling it for a floor vote.The White House, meanwhile, has warned that delays are costing Ukraine lives and territory because Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, “gains every day” Congress does not pass a funding measure.“What we have to do in an era of divided government, historically, as we are, you got to build consensus. If we want to move a partisan measure, I got to have every single member, literally. And some things need to be bipartisan,” Johnson said, acknowledging the shrinking Republican majority in the House.“We’ve been talking to all the members especially now over the district work period. When we return after this work period, we’ll be moving a product, but it’s going to, I think, have some important innovations.”Those innovations include efforts to placate Republican hardliners, who have cooled on continuing to support Ukraine financially with the war there now in its third year. They include a loan instead of a grant, or harnessing Russian assets confiscated in the US under the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity (Repo) for Ukrainians Act.“If we can use the seized assets of Russian oligarchs to allow the Ukrainians to fight them, that’s just pure poetry,” Johnson said. “Even [former president Donald] Trump has talked about the loan concept, where we’re not just giving foreign aid, we’re setting it up in a relationship where they can provide it back to us when the time is right.”The specter of Trump, the prospective Republican nominee for November’s presidential election, has loomed large over the wrangling for a Ukraine deal. He was instrumental in Johnson’s refusal to call a House vote on a $95bn wartime funding bill that passed the Democratic-led Senate in February, which also included aid for Israel in its war in Gaza.Trump has also demanded Republicans reject any Ukraine funding measure that ties in money for US border security in order to deny the Joe Biden White House a “win” on immigration ahead of November’s election, hence Johnson’s pursuit of a standalone solution.The friction has led to rightwingers, such as Greene, threatening Johnson’s position. Other Republican colleagues, however, have leapt to the speaker’s defense. The New York congressman Mike Lawler blasted Greene’s motion to vacate as “idiotic” on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “It’s not actually going to help advance the cause she believes in, and in fact it undermines our House Republican majority,” he said.Some Democrats have indicated they would support Johnson if a vote to remove him were called, though other Republicans have acknowledged his precarious position.“I’m not going to deny it. It’s a very narrow majority, and one or two people can make us a minority,” the Nebraska congressman Don Bacon told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.Without identifying Greene by name, he added: “We have one or two people that are not team players. They’d rather enjoy the limelight, the social media.”Bacon is one of several Republicans who have worked across the aisle to craft a Ukraine aid proposal. “We put a bill together that focuses on military aid, a $66bn bill that provides military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. There’s enough support in the House to get this done,” he said.Of Johnson’s plans to bring a House vote next week, Bacon added: “He’s doing the right thing.” More

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      RNC plan for 2020 denialist to head ‘election integrity’ unit raises alarms

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      As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.Last year Bobb wrote Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024, a book that was chock full of baseless charges about 2020 election fraud.Former judges, ex-Republican congressmen and election watchdogs voice strong concerns about Bobb’s mission and the potential dangers posed by her flood of erroneous charges of voting fraud.“By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.“There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”The RNC’s hiring of Bobb comes as Trump keeps falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and talks up new efforts this year to “guard the vote” to ferret out potential fraud. Experts have conclusively said fraud was not a factor in Trump’s loss by over 7 million votes, and stressed that historically voting fraud has been minimal.Bobb’s “election integrity” post at the RNC is expected to involve teams of poll workers, poll watchers and other efforts in swing states and she has begun talking with key Maga allies with similar missions. Bobb last month told the far-right reporter Breanna Morello that her top goal is “empowering the grassroots”.Bobb was on at least one conference call in March with a half-dozen Trump-allied groups including ones that echo her false claims about 2020 election fraud, according to a person on the call, who said: “We’re all going to coordinate.”Among the groups on the call, he added, was Arizona-based Turning Point Action, which has a track record of promoting falsehoods about 2020 election fraud.Many experts raise red flags about Bobb’s new RNC post.The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said the RNC’s hiring of Bobb “is a further indication of how the RNC has not only become an arm of the Trump campaign, but an outlet for the most extreme elements of the election denial movement”.Likewise, the ex-Republican congressman Dave Trott predicted: “Bobb will be leading the charge and saying the election was rigged if Trump loses.”Some key Democrats are also alarmed by what Bobb’s RNC role may presage.“Putting Christina Bobb in charge of election integrity is like putting Donald Trump in charge of integrity,” the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said. “They’re designing a platform for lies to wage the next insurrection.”Although Bobb’s “election integrity” slot is new and a work in progress, the RNC’s new leadership seems to be banking on her.Lara Trump, the new RNC vice-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on 12 March: “We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [RNC]. That means massive resources going to this one thing.”Lara Trump added: “We will have trained poll watchers, poll observers, poll workers, people in tabulation centers all across this country,” and signaled that volunteers for these slots and lawyers are needed.Bobb, whose official RNC title is senior counsel for election integrity, wrote on X: “I’m honored to be a part of the new team at the RNC.”Besides Bobb, the RNC in March tapped Charlie Spies, who had previously served as its election law counsel, to be its chief counsel.Further, the RNC also named William McGinley, a veteran election lawyer who worked in the Trump administration, as outside counsel for election integrity, a move that could presage more litigation.But Bobb’s litany of baseless fraud claims as she worked with key Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results, shadow her new RNC role.For instance, Bobb used her perch at One America News Network (OAN) to spread bogus claims of fraud that led to a defamation lawsuit against her and OAN by the voting technology firm Dominion; Bobb and OAN have both denied any wrongdoing.Separately Bobb signed a letter falsely certifying to the justice department on Trump’s behalf in 2022 that after a “diligent search” he had returned all the classified documents the special counsel Jack Smith later charged the former president with illegally taking to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.A subsequent FBI raid found about 100 classified documents; Bobb, who reportedly was interviewed by the FBI, indicated that another lawyer drafted the letter she signed.Given that Bobb was only tapped for her RNC post this month, it is unclear whether she has begun recruiting staff or taken other steps to develop the RNC’s election integrity program.But a source close to the Trump campaign stressed that “the key to election observing is redundancy”, meaning that it would involve multiple coordinated efforts, which suggests that the RNC program will be done in tandem with similar poll-watching and poll worker drives by Trump allied groups.The need for “redundancy” and Bobb’s early conference call with several outside groups are emerging as key strategies for Bobb, as she revealed in an interview on 15 March with Morello, a conservative journalist who used to be with Fox News.Bobb told Morello that her top goal at the RNC is “empowering the grassroots. This has to be a grassroots approach … We have to empower people in their communities.”The RNC press office did not reply to a request for comment.The RNC’s election integrity drive this year comes after a few decades when a moratorium was imposed on RNC poll-watching operations due to aggressive tactics it employed in 1981 that went beyond permissible programs.At some polling places in New Jersey in 1981, the GOP used off-duty police officers and provided rewards to some people who claimed they had evidence of voting fraud. After those incidents, the party agreed to halt poll-watching efforts until 2018, when the moratorium terminated.Still, some lawyers and election veterans are troubled by the RNC’s hiring of Bobb given her history of election denialism and Trump’s obsession with debunked claims of fraud in 2020.“I don’t think it’s a good thing when a major party hires fringe characters who don’t understand how elections work,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.Other lawyers express similar worries about Bobb’s background.“It’s unclear whether the RNC wants those who are not already loyalists to take its commitment to ‘election integrity’ seriously,” said the former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman.“But if it does, picking someone who, according to the Florida indictment against Trump, was the vehicle for certifying his false statements about returning all the classified documents in his possession, is an odd choice.”Looking ahead, Chioma Chukwu, the deputy executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, called Bobb’s hiring by the RNC “a dangerous sign of how entrenched the election denial movement has become on the right”.“Elevating Bobb – who continues to push baseless lies about voter fraud – to a top post focused on ‘election integrity’ serves no purpose other than to sow chaos and confusion in November, allowing partisan actors to cry ‘foul’ if their preferred candidate loses.” More

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      Ronna McDaniel mess shows problem of politics-to-pundit conveyor belt

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      It should have been a straightforward appointment in the often lucrative world of political punditry: a former high-ranking party official making the move from actual politics to America’s television screens with a mission to pontificate, opine and spin.US cable news is littered with such figures: ex-congresspeople, former presidential candidates, reformed spin doctors, one-time campaign leaders. All of them on fat contracts for sitting behind desks and arguing the political talking points of the day.So it was somewhat of a surprise when NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel triggered a staff revolt, legal fights, endless inches of bad press and a stunning media conflagration that seemed set to burn down America’s premier liberal cable news network, MSNBC. It also ended in McDaniel being canned last week shortly after her appointment was announced.But in an American political landscape still being profoundly reshaped by Donald Trump and his conspiracy-laden rhetoric – especially when it comes to the big lie of a stolen 2020 election – more savvy network bosses should perhaps have expected the turmoil.McDaniel presented a conundrum. On one hand, she had served as Trump’s chosen RNC chair from early 2017, through the turbulence of January 6 Capitol riot, winning re-election to the post in unanimous elections in both 2019 and 2021. Her perspective could be a valuable resource.But along the way, she had participated in a 2020 phone call pressuring Michigan county officials not to certify the vote from the Detroit area. “Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” she had said. She has been far from dismissive when it comes to Trump’s promotion of the idea of widespread electoral fraud in the US. For many McDaniel was not just a career politico; she had sought to help a bid to subvert an election.For any network, but especially NBC and its liberal MSNBC sibling, McDaniel’s role in being a threat to American democracy could not be ignored. On her first appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday McDaniel said that the Capitol riot “doesn’t represent our country. It certainly does not represent my party.”But she was immediately grilled as to why she hadn’t said that earlier. “When you’re the RNC chair, you … you kind of take one for the whole team right now. I get to be a little bit more myself, right?” she suggested.Apparently not. Her words were nowhere near enough to quell a rebellion within the broadcaster. The MSNBC anchors Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough condemned the move, along with Jen Psaki (herself fresh from serving as White House spokesperson), Mika Brzezinski and NBC’s Chuck Todd.Maddow said the choice to hire McDaniel was “inexplicable” and accused her employer of giving airtime to someone who is “about undermining elections and going after democracy”. Todd said that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”The rage continued for several days, and soon McDaniel was gone. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” Cesar Conde, NBCUniversal’s News Group chairman, wrote to staff. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”Previously it had been typical that the head of talent at a broadcaster made the hires, and newsroom employees went along with it, right or wrong. But these are no longer normal times in America: Trump is virtually certain to be the 2024 Republican nominee and frequently leads Joe Biden in the polls, despite continuing to voice his 2020 election fraud lies.“There are continuous arguments at the networks about how to give voice to the conservative side of the equation without giving voice to fringe elements,” said Rick Ellis, author of the Substack newsletter Too Much TV. “If NBC News had said, yeah, we’re going to have her on our shows to hear her point of view, there wouldn’t have been so much squawking. The tipping point was that she was going to be a paid analyst.”MSNBC already employs one former RNC chair. Michael Steele works as an on-air analyst and host of a weekend show. He, however, did not try to reverse the result of an election.McDaniel has yet to comment, but Politico reported she is considering legal options and expects to be paid out in full for her reported $600,000 two-year deal. A “person close to McDaniel” was quoted criticizing NBC for allowing its talent “to drag Ronna through the mud and make it seem like they were innocent bystanders”.The incident plays into a wider debate about partisanship in the US media. The McDaniel’s blowup follows well-publicized efforts by CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery to broaden its political perspective, an effort that led to the firing of the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht.In statement, the RNC hinted it could pull NBC’s credentials from its convention in Milwaukee this summer. “We are taking a hard look at what this means for NBC’s participation at the convention,” said Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for the RNC and the Trump campaign.But McDaniel and NBC’s predicament also speaks to a larger issue – that of a plush-carpeted corridor between political and media jobs that undermines the integrity of both. In many ways, the only people this system satisfied were the bosses and the pundits. At a time of an extraordinary American election McDaniel and NBC found out that was no longer enough.“There’s entirely too much of this highway between working in the White House or in Congress and ending up on cable news. I understand that its helpful because they know how government works, but the problem is they’re seen coastal or Beltway perspectives and they push out other voices that would be helpful to have in the mix,” said Ellis. More

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      Congressman rebuked for call to bomb Gaza ‘like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

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      Rather than provide humanitarian aid in Gaza, the US should ensure it is subjected to atomic bombing the way that “Nagasaki and Hiroshima” were at the end of the second world war, a Republican congressman said in shocking remarks that by all indications were recorded recently at a gathering with a relatively small group of his constituents.The comments by US House representative Tim Walberg of Michigan drew condemnation from progressive political quarters, including from some who expressed disbelief that a former Christian pastor would advocate for what they called the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.“A sitting US rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing privately about genocide,” said a user on X who circulated video of Walberg’s comments late Friday. A reply to that comment read: “Exactly what Jesus would do, right?”Entries on Walberg’s congressional calendar – along with videos on social media – establish that he met with members of the public in Dundee, Michigan, on 25 March. As Mediaite recounted Saturday, a clip of the session that was posted on YouTube and other sites, and recorded by an activist, showed Walberg telling his audience that the US should not spend a “dime” on humanitarian aid in Gaza, where Israel has been carrying out a military campaign for months.The aid would be better spent on supporting Israel, which Walberg labeled the US’s “greatest ally, arguably, anywhere in the world”.“It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Walberg said, alluding to the Japanese cities where the US dropped atomic bombs at the end of the second world war, killing hundreds of thousands of people. “Get it over quick.”Walberg also spoke in favor of affording similar treatment to Ukraine, which has been defending itself from a Russian military invasion since 2022. But Walberg said the purpose there would be to topple Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s forces expeditiously rather than spend the bulk of US “funding for Ukraine … for humanitarian purposes” as the war there dragged out.“Defeat Putin quick,” Walberg said.Once video footage of Walberg’s pronouncements went viral, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement denouncing the congressman’s declarations as a “clear call to genocide”.“This … should be condemned by all Americans who value human life and international law,” Cair’s executive director, Dawud Walid, said in a statement.Walid, whose group is the US’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, added: “To so casually call for what would result in the killing of every human being in Gaza sends the chilling message that Palestinian lives have no value.”A spokesperson for Walberg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.Israel began carrying out an air and ground onslaught in Gaza after Hamas attacked on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking hostages. The military strikes in Gaza have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, and the US said Friday that the Israeli campaign had probably already pushed the area into famine.Some of the Joe Biden White House’s fellow Democrats have been increasingly pressuring the president to cut off the almost $4bn in military aid that the US provides annually to Israel, which has persistently hindered the delivery of humanitarian relief in Gaza. On 26 March, the US abstained from a United Nations vote that saw 14 other members ratify a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, leaving Israel nearly isolated on the global political stage.Nonetheless, within days, Reuters reported that Biden’s administration had authorized the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and fighter jets to Israel, whom Republicans in the US like Walberg generally support steadfastly.“We should be resourcing Israel just like they want to – to kill Hamas on their own,” Walberg said at the meeting in Dundee.Walberg was first elected to Congress in 2007. He reportedly entered the year with more than $1.1m in campaign funds as he prepared to seek a ninth term in the US House. More

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      in US Politics

      Politician who attended Charlottesville white-supremacist rally faces recall

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      Voters in the north-west Oklahoma city of Enid are being asked to decide whether a councilmember who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 should be removed from his post.Iraq war veteran Judd Blevins, 42, was elected to Enid’s city council to be the commissioner of its first ward last year. He soon faced an effort by the Enid social justice committee, which claimed Blevins “embraces the same Nazi ideology [the US] defeated almost 80 years ago” during the second world war.Accusations against Blevins levelled by the group are not limited to his attendance in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazi groups protested the removal of a Confederate monument in a demonstration that led to the murder of a counterprotester.He also has been linked to chatroom posts planning the march, and posted hate group propaganda and recruited members to Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been disbanded.In addition to the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer, the Charlottesville rally was marked by a state police helicopter crash that killed two.Blevins’ election to office came after a local newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle, ran a story about his ties to white nationalism.“Our initial desire was for either Judd Blevins to address these questions and denounce any sense of neo-Nazism or white supremacy or for Enid’s leadership to step up and get those answers and demand those answers,” the committee’s James Neal said in a petition to remove Blevins.He added: “Neither of those things have occurred, and we are left to take it to the voters, to the people, to address the issue.”In his response, Blevins said: “Regrettably, this fringe group has chosen to continue a smear campaign against me.” He maintained that the effort to remove him would be an added cost to taxpayers.He invoked the wishes of his predecessor, Jerry Allen, who had said: “Mr Blevins deserves the respect of the office, and I hope you give him the opportunity that I was given many years ago.”Blevins noted his achievements, including voting for a movie theater in his ward, storm water drainage improvements and the opening of a branch of the Texas Roadhouse steak restaurant chain. Blevins added that voters had elected him “because they believed I was the best candidate who shared their values, their concerns and their hopes for the future of Enid”.In November, a resolution to censure Blevins for his failure to explain or apologize for aligning himself with white nationalists was brought before the city council. The measure was then dropped after a fellow commissioner, Derwin Norwood, the only Black member of the city governing body, said he accepted Blevins’ statement that he was opposed “to all forms of racial hatred, racial discrimination and any form of government that would suppress the rights that are enshrined in our constitution”.Blevins acknowledged in recent days that he participated in the Charlottesville rally, where white nationalists held a tiki torch-light parade across the University of Virginia campus chanting “Jews will not replace us” and said he had been connected to Identity Evropa.But he repeated that he is “opposed to all forms of racial hate and racial discrimination”.He told a community forum that his involvement in the rally and ties to Identity Evropa were to bring “attention to the same issues” that won Donald Trump the presidency in 2016.Those included, he said, “securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on … anti-white hatred”.When voters go to the polls on 2 April to decide whether Blevins should continue in office, they could opt to replace him with his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, a grandmother and longtime youth leader at an area church, who is also a Republican.One of the organizers of Blevins’ recall push, Democrat Nancy Presnall, told the Associated Press: “There are people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who are totally together with us on this. This isn’t a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing.”However the vote falls, some of the city’s 50,000 residents are concerned about lasting damage to Enid’s reputation. Some residents blamed a decline in newspaper readership and voter apathy, particularly in municipal elections, for allowing a small group of hard-core Blevins supporters to help him with the seat by a margin of 36 votes out of 808 cast.Neal, who is pastor of the Holy Cross Orthodox-Catholic church in Enid, agreed with that assessment, saying: “I think a lot of people in the community, myself included, thought that he had no chance of winning,” Neal said. “The people who support that ideology are very passionate and very dedicated, and up until this point we haven’t been.”The pastor added: “This has been galvanizing and helped us get off our asses, quite frankly, and fight back.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Feeble, desperate, mentally unfit’: Biden changes tack to mock Trump

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      With November set to be one of the most consequential elections in US history, it would be understandable if Donald Trump and Joe Biden reached for soaring, lofty rhetoric: if they attempted to match the high-minded ideals of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the nation’s founding fathers.American voters, and the country’s political class, are long used to Trump’s insult-laden and often crude rhetoric. “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit,” Trump said in Georgia earlier this month, during a rally at which he also also mocked Biden’s stutter.But recently Biden and his campaign team appear to have decided to fight fire with fire, after previously seeking to stay above the fray. It’s a shift that seems to accept that Trump has moved the standards of US politics and that it’s more effective to embrace that notion than remain out of the fight.But it also probably reflects the unique threat that Trump’s bid to return to the White House for a second term represents to American democracy and that the time to sugarcoat the fight against that is long past. For many, Biden and his team’s insults aren’t just political hardball, they also smack of the truth.In recent months, Biden has dubbed Trump “mentally unfit”, while this week his campaign declared that the US “deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump”.The president’s campaign has dubbed Trump “weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for president”. They’ve also taken to calling Trump, who says he is a multibillionaire but was recently unable to pay a court-ordered $454m bond, “Broke Don”.It’s a remarkable shift for Biden, who less than a month ago raised eyebrows for only referring to Trump as “my predecessor” during his State of the Union speech.Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, suggested to the Guardian Biden’s reason for this shift was “very straightforward.“What he was doing before obviously wasn’t working. Typically, we all learn from bad experience and Biden has been behind in the polls to a candidate who is quite frankly hated by almost half of the American electorate,” she said.“I think that Biden was under considerable pressure from his advisers, from activists, to do something different.”Notably, polling this week showed Biden gaining on Trump in six key states – after his supporters previously had a wake-up call when the incumbent reported dismal numbers.View image in fullscreenSo far, Biden seems to be fully embracing his new persona. On Wednesday, the president, not known for his comic timing, even cracked a joke at his rival’s expense.“Just the other day, this defeated-looking man came up to me and said: ‘Mr President, I need your help. I’m in crushing debt. I’m completely wiped out,’” Biden chortled.“I said, ‘Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.’”While negative campaigning is not new, Trump took the practice to a new level almost from the moment he announced his run for president in June 2015. At the time, he claimed his rivals for the presidential nomination had “sweated like dogs” during their own campaign events, and said Mexico was sending “rapists” into the US.With Trump having spent the last four years peppering Biden with insults, it seems Biden and his team have decided they need to respond in kind.“We’ve learned that ignoring negative campaigning doesn’t work well,” Hershey said.“People are more likely to remember negative charges than positive statements. People are more likely to give negative statements greater weight than they do positive statements.“And so trying to take the high road and create a contrast between yourself and a negative opponent by not responding simply doesn’t work.”With Biden in the political ring throwing verbal punches back at Trump, he has hewn closer to the “Dark Brandon” meme that is popular among some of his supporters. That concept, which frequently sees Biden depicted with red laser eyes, imagines Biden as a sort of edgy hero or even antihero – the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice about sarcastically congratulating an opponent on a golf tournament win.If we rewind back to the 1980s, there were plenty of negative, and nasty, political campaigns afoot. The New York Times reported from the 1982 Tennessee Senate race that the Republican candidate Robin Beard hired an actor to dress up as Fidel Castro in an attempt to paint his opponent as soft on Cuban communism – but there is hard evidence that Trump dragged things to a new low.According to a study published in 2023, “the frequency of negative emotion words” used by American politicians “suddenly and lastingly increased” when Trump entered the 2016 presidential race.Researchers analyzed quotations from politicians from millions of news articles, and found that the use of negative language by politicians had begun to decrease during Barack Obama’s presidency.“Then in June 2015, precisely the month when Trump started his campaign, there was a massive jump in negativity,” said Robert West, a professor in the school of computer and communication sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the co-authors of the study.View image in fullscreenIt wasn’t just Trump’s own language that accounted for the increase. When West and his colleagues removed all Trump quotations from the data, they found that the amount of negative language had still gone up: people had begun to copy Trump’s tone, just as Biden appears to have done.“It’s very sad that the other side is now starting to play the same game. This looks like we’ve lost as a society, because everyone plays that game now,” West said.For now, it is hard to tell whether Biden cracking jokes about Trump will be a winning strategy. There is evidence, however, that Republican and Democratic voters increasingly view members of the opposing party with contempt.In 2022, Pew Research found that 72% of Republicans consider Democrats to be “more immoral” than the average American, compared with just 47% who felt that way in 2016 (63% of Democrats thought Republicans were more immoral, up from 35% in 2016). In this climate, perhaps there is a real appetite among Biden supporters for him to swing for Trump’s kneecaps.While some say a negative campaigning strategy is effective, others point out – like Stephen Craig, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has studied political campaigns – that is not always the case.View image in fullscreen“There is a humongous amount of literature testing the effectiveness of negative ads, and negativity in other media as well – whether its speeches, radio or mail – and the bottom line is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Craig said.“And no one can tell in advance when something is going to work and when it won’t.”In the modern era, it is only Trump who has fully embraced mockery and insults as presidential campaigning, although during the 1988 presidential election George HW Bush’s team got plenty of mileage from making fun of Michael Dukakis, his opponent, for trying to look tough in a military tank.But going back in time, it turns out the founding fathers weren’t really all that polite. The 1796 presidential election, in which John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson, saw Adams’s camp claim Jefferson would promote prostitution and incest, and suggest that Jefferson had an affair with an enslaved woman.Jefferson’s backers, meanwhile, claimed Adams was a hermaphrodite, and dubbed Adams, who they said was overweight, “His Rotundity”.Neither Biden nor Trump have gone quite that low yet – although there are still seven months to go until election day. More