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      US justice department to review conviction of former election clerk

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      Donald Trump’s justice department said it will review the Colorado conviction of former election clerk Tina Peters, who received a nine-year prison sentence for her role in a voting system data-breach scheme as part of an unsuccessful quest to find voter fraud in 2021.Yaakov Roth, an acting assistant attorney general, wrote in a court filing on Monday that the Department of Justice was “reviewing cases across the nation for abuses of the criminal justice process”, including Peters’.“This review will include an evaluation of the state of Colorado’s prosecution of Ms Peters and, in particular, whether the case was ‘oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives’,” Roth wrote, echoing the language in a Trump executive order on “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government”.Peters, then the clerk of Mesa county, allowed a man affiliated with the pillow salesman and election denier Mike Lindell to misuse a security card to access the Mesa county election system. Lindell posted about the DoJ’s statement on his fundraising website, telling donors their assistance had “contributed to positive developments at the Department of Justice that give us hope that the wheels are in motion for the early release of Tina Peters”.Jurors found Peters guilty in August, convicting her on seven counts related to misconduct, conspiracy and impersonation, four of which were felony charges. Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced her in October to nine years in prison, calling Peters “as defiant as a defendant that the court has ever seen” and said he believed Peters would do it all over again if she could.Peters had argued for probation and is appealing against her conviction.The DoJ’s statement of interest notes that Peters’ physical and mental health have deteriorated while she’s been in prison, and that “reasonable concerns have been raised” about her case, including the “exceptionally lengthy sentence” the court imposed and the denial of bail for Peters while her appeal plays out. Her appeal deserves “prompt and careful consideration” by the court, Roth wrote.Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa County district attorney, said in a statement that “nothing about the prosecution of Ms Peters was politically motivated”.“In one of the most conservative jurisdictions in Colorado, the same voters who elected Ms Peters, also elected the Republican district attorney who handled the prosecution, and the all-Republican board of county commissioners who unanimously requested the prosecution of Ms Peters on behalf of the citizens she victimized,” Rubinstein said.“Ms Peters was indicted by a grand jury of her peers, and convicted at trial by the jury of her peers that she selected.”Peters has become a cause célèbre on the right, with some Republicans promoting a “free Tina Peters” movement. A small rally in Fort Collins, Colorado, over the weekend called attention to Peters’ appeal, and protesters there insisted she was innocent and had discovered election fraud.Trump cannot pardon Peters because she was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones. Some Colorado Republicans have suggested Trump should withhold federal funds from the state until the Democratic governor Jared Polis agrees to pardon Peters, Colorado’s 9News reports. More

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      Yes, Trump is a hypocrite. But is pointing that out an effective attack? | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      Historians and psychologists will study when exactly the meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy started to descend into political disaster. A plausible contender for an answer is the – in itself trivial – moment when Brian Glenn, representative of the far-right outlet Real America’s Voice (newly admitted to the press pool) asked the Ukrainian president why he was not wearing a suit.That framing – the wartime president was somehow “disrespecting” America – was then picked up in the vile attack on Zelenskyy by JD Vance and repeated by a chorus of sycophants in the Republican party (including Glenn’s girlfriend Marjorie Taylor Greene). Critics immediately pointed out the hypocrisy: if Elon Musk can appear in a T-shirt and a baseball cap at a cabinet meeting, what is wrong with someone wearing fatigues? That gotcha might provide momentary psychological satisfaction – but it’s important to understand why the charges of hypocrisy achieve little with the Maga-world and why, as a matter of political psychology, something different is needed.According to a much-repeated maxim from a 17th-century French moralist, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. According to this logic, hypocrisy actually contributes to moral standards being upheld, as no one wants to be seen flaunting them openly. Wearing a suit is obviously not an important “norm” – part of the problem with the whole debate about aspiring authoritarians breaking norms and crashing through guardrails has been that those diagnosing violations of norms have not always distinguished between different kinds of norms. They have also not made it clear why some norms matter for democracy much more than others (Trump was criticized for breaking the “norm” of having a pet in the White House).The larger issue, though, is that charges of hypocrisy do not land if the supposed hypocrite is not committed to any kind of consistency in the first place. They can simply assert that that the inconsistency happens to be justified: Musk de facto presiding over the cabinet meeting is OK because, hey, he’s a genius who can see more clearly than the rest of us why stopping cancer research and making hurricanes more deadly are actually making America greater in the long run. Zelenskyy, by contrast, is a Democrat in disguise who just does “propaganda”, according to Vance.An even better option for seeming hypocrites is to assert their superiority over those making the charge: Viktor Orbán is frequently accused of having betrayed his original liberal convictions; after all, he had been financed by George Soros to spend time at Oxford, his political party had a liberal, even outright anti-clerical, and pro-European program – before Orbán transformed himself into a cheerleader for the international far right. The response easily available to the authoritarian prime minister is that he has actually learnt something over the course of his career – to wit, that liberalism doesn’t work in his country – whereas the liberal critics, contrary to their self-image as sophisticated thinkers, cling to dogmas. Vance has kept pulling the same trick: he has learnt to stop worrying about Trump being Hitler and simply come to love the good felon, always emphasizing that he was able to see something in Trump that lesser mortals fail to get.A final reason why the accusation of hypocrisy is hardly a knock-down argument – and the one most applicable to Maga – is that those always ready to lie can hardly be caught out by claims about inconsistency. It is now clear that the Trump campaign was based on deceptions – starting with strident denials of any association with the Project 2025 Christian nationalists-cum-authoritarians. By the same token, Trump’s nominees were not exactly truthful in their confirmation hearings; and the entire Republican party is now evidently lying about their intended spending cuts.Pointing out the inconsistencies between what Maga Republicans – it’s not clear at this point whether there are any others – say one day and do the next will not be seen as a cause for moral introspection; rather, the inconsistency is proof of Maga’s power. What observers call performative lying is part of authoritarianism – think of Vladimir Putin lying to his interlocutor’s’ face, smiling, knowing that they know that he is lying, but cannot do anything about it.What about broader audiences? Do they not care about hypocrisy? True, some might; but, given the self-enclosed rightwing media ecosphere which has been created in the United States over decades – and the attention deficit of the public more broadly, to put it bluntly – it is unlikely that finer points about inconsistencies will get much of a hearing.The challenge is to devise rhetoric – and powerful gestures – that do not rely on complicated comparisons but stress how Trump and Musk are sabotaging the country. Democrats might simply boycott the Trump address to Congress next week and instead hold rallies and town halls establishing meaningful connections with citizens who Republicans are now refusing to listen to – and, yes, on those occasions, also slip in a point about hypocrisy: that the party that blathers about “giving power to the people” is afraid of any contact with the people.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word

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      I got into my one and only physical fight when I was in seventh grade. It was right after school let out, the other boy was called Nathan, and moments before I launched at him, he knocked the books out of my brother Casey’s hands and called him “retarded”. More than 20 years after that scuffle, I still wonder how often Casey, a now 35-year-old autistic man, is called that word. Given the current political landscape, I’m certain he’s going to start hearing it more often.The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles – especially on 4chan and X. A favorite of those who currently hold power or stand to gain power under Donald Trump’s second administration, the slur is being used with gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.In the past year, Elon Musk has used the R-word at least 16 times on X. He thought Ben Stiller was one for endorsing Kamala Harris; so was the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz for comparing Tesla to Enron.Elsewhere, brash, right-leaning personalities such as the political commentator Dave Rubin, and Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare, frequently throw the word around with provocative irreverence, attempting to discredit those who don’t align with their politics.Trump reportedly used the word to denigrate both Joe Biden and Harris in private conversations during the 2024 election. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.” (Interestingly, this banker chose to remain anonymous.)I’ve spent my life on the lookout for this word: how it shrinks people with intellectual disabilities down to a caricature, incorrectly depicting them as incapable of coherence and, ironically enough, social decorum; how it communicates a lack of respect for their humanity. It’s just something that you do when you have an autistic brother. And while the slur was certainly more prevalent when we were teenagers in the early 2000s, this resurgence is still menacing, not least because I can’t fight Musk after class.Right now, the right wants a word that stings, and the R-word does the trick, according to Dr Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist, lexicographer and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. In the 2000s, disability advocates waged a moderately successful social campaign to stop kids (and everyone else) from using the slur. Now, its proponents cling to it because of its taboo nature, lauding it as a victory over censorship by the woke mob (like the insults “libtard”, “fucktard” and “gaytard” before it).“Conservatives are empowered … People struggle with holding back what they actually want to say, so there’s something psychologically ‘freeing’ for this group of empowered people to be able to be like: ‘I’m going to punch up my words with something edgy and get attention,’” said Wright, whose work focuses on self-censorship, or the ways we limit ourselves when speaking.“[It is used] in a ‘please see me’ way.”They are getting seen. A recent study from Montclair State University found that Musk’s use of of the slur in early January correlated with a 200% spike in usage of the word by users on X, the platform Musk owns, in the days following.“There’s this whole generation of people who did use it in a more neutral way in the beginning, especially when we were younger,” Wright said. Now, “it’s like, ‘Oh, this other person who I identify with is using it.’ It gives people permission.” Cut to inauguration weekend, when the tech right and Maga youth descended on DC, throwing around the slur as they celebrated their win over the left. Just this week, Musk responded to a critical post on X: “I’m tempted to call this guy a retard, but I won’t because I’ve used that word too many times.” (Ironically enough, X’s own AI chatbot outlined the slur’s offensive history in the replies.)But the R-word isn’t just a rallying cry. It’s an attack on someone’s personhood.We’ve seen this before. Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.View image in fullscreenAdvocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.“[The use of the R-word] is absolutely historically linked to the understanding that ‘retarded’ children are defective children and that we can eliminate defective children for the good of society,” said Topher Endress, a reverend in Missouri who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. His focus is disability theology, including the words used to describe people with intellectual disabilities, and he spends much of his days working with this community. “I mean, that’s the basis of eugenics. I’m a little fearful of seeing this word pop back up because it does have such a strong eugenic connotation,” he continued.Today, approximately 7.4 million people in the US have an intellectual or developmental disability. Vocational services have connected them to employment in service, healthcare and food industries. Madeline Stuart, a model with Down syndrome and autism, walked her first runway in 2015 after falling in love with modeling at a fashion show. The chef Adam Libby, who has Down syndrome, treats his 2.6 million TikTok followers to cooking demos and recipes (pizza sauce and dough, all from scratch). Stories like these are everywhere, chipping away at the stigma around intellectual disabilities. But this is a highly vulnerable community, and their recent successes have hinged in part on government support systems put in place to foster growth and independence. This progress is still so fragile.Musk, a man who launched a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration festivities, has aligned himself dangerously closely with eugenicist thinking. Musk, who has said he is on the autism spectrum himself, also wields oligarchic power as he attempts to eliminate “unnecessary spending” in the federal government with Trump’s blessing. Early on, Musk set his sights on Medicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are looking to slash Medicaid spending to support Trump’s tax cuts. When the Trump administration temporarily froze federal funds in its second week, programs like vocational rehabilitation and disability housing assistance were put into jeopardy, according to the American Association of People with Disabilities, which condemned the move. One source told ProPublica that even one more spending freeze could keep their organization from delivering hot meals to people with disabilities.Trump, who has used eugenicist language to describe undocumented immigrants, implied that February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was linked to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions”, dragging disability into his anti-DEI crusade.And Trump’s pick to run the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, could be disastrous for children with disabilities, reports the New Yorker, as the department helps fund special education programs across the US. It’s also likely that McMahon would advocate for school choice, redirecting tax dollars to private schools that are not legally required to accept students with intellectual disabilities.According to Endress, people who use the slur “understand at a deep level that there is a bottom rung to our social hierarchy, and that is intellectually disabled people. And so because the word ‘retarded’ still links to them and pretty much to them alone, it becomes the worst insult you could give somebody,” Endress says.If the government were to withhold care from our most vulnerable, leaving them unhoused and uneducated and without healthcare or employment, it would make it easier to point a finger at them and say: “What a burden.”“It [suggests] you are the worst of the worst … You don’t deserve to be part of our social fabric,” Endress said.Casey works at a Wendy’s in our hometown – he’s been employee of the month twice (I have to brag about him when I can). We talk on the phone weekly, and he recently told me that, unfortunately, someone called him a “retard” late last year. One of his coworkers jumped over the counter and laid into the guy. Again, one person in the right place at the right time.In that way, I see the rise of the R-word as a gauge for how far society is willing to let people like Musk and Trump go. And while I believe that in most reasonable environments, it’s still very much taboo to say the word aloud, the fact that it’s being said by some of the most powerful people in the world, with no recourse, says enough. More

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      Bernie Sanders dismisses Republicans’ ‘horrific’ calls for Zelenskyy to resign

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      Independent US senator Bernie Sanders has dismissed as “horrific” claims that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy may have to resign after a diplomatic meltdown in the Oval Office with Donald Trump.Sanders’ comments, in an interview with NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday morning, served as a retort to pro-resignation remarks from his fellow US senator Lindsey Graham, which in turn had been affirmed by the Republican House speaker Mike Johnson.“I think that is a horrific suggestion,” Sanders told NBC’s Kristen Welker in the interview. “Zelenskyy is leading a country, trying to defend democracy against an authoritarian dictator, [Vladimir] Putin,” the Russian dictator whose forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022.“I think millions of Americans are embarrassed, are ashamed that you have a president of the United States who says Ukraine started the war, that Zelenskyy is a dictator,” Sanders continued, referring to Trump. “He’s got it exactly backwards.“The people of Ukraine have lost tens of thousands of soldiers, their cities are being bombed as we speak. Our job is to defend the 250-year tradition that we have of being the democratic leader of the world, not turn our backs on a struggling country that is trying to do the right thing.”The comments from Johnson came after Zelenskyy’s contentious meeting on Friday at the White House with Trump and JD Vance. As part of a deal with the US involving minerals in Ukraine, Zelenskyy had sought security guarantees from the US as Ukraine defended itself from Russia’s invasion. That prompted the US vice-president to accuse Zelenskyy of not being grateful enough for US aid – and for the US president to ask Zelenskyy to leave the White House without the minerals deal being signed.Trump is the not first US president during Ukraine’s war to accuse him of being ungrateful for the US military’s assistance.In October 2022, citing four sources familiar with the exchange, NBC News reported that then president Joe Biden lost his temper in a phone call with Zelenskyy in which he told Zelenskyy he had authorized another $1bn in assistance for Ukraine – to which Zelenskyy responded by listing the additional help he needed.NBC reported that Zelenskyy issued a statement praising the US for its aid after that call with Biden. And, in an Twitter/X post on Saturday, Zelenskyy thanked the US and Trump “for all the support … during these three years of full-scale invasion”.Nonetheless, on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio accused Zelenskyy of undermining Friday’s talks by failing to “contain himself” trying to “Ukraine-splain on every issue”.“I hope this could all be reset,” Rubio said.Meanwhile, on Meet the Press on Sunday, Johnson told host Kristen Welker that “something has to change” with Zelenskyy.“Either he needs to come to his senses and come back to the table in gratitude or someone else needs to lead the country to do that,” Johnson said.Johnson claimed Zelenskyy should have shown gratitude and thanks to the US in the meeting and argued the push for US mineral rights in Ukraine as part of a peace agreement is “a win for everyone” that will give the US minerals it needs and Ukraine a level of security.On CBS’s Face the Nation, Johnson’s fellow Republican congressman Mike Turner, the chairperson of the House intelligence committee, added: “Instead of taking that win, Zelenskyy turned it into a debate on American security guarantees [on the] peace negotiations.”Turner also said: “[Zelenskyy] needs to not have this precondition of American security guarantees, which are not coming.”The derailed meeting incited pro-Ukraine protests around the US. And leaders across Europe, along with the prime ministers of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, posted messages of support for Ukraine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“For three years now, Ukrainians have fought with courage and resilience. Their fight for democracy, freedom and sovereignty is a fight that matters to us all,” Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau wrote on X after the White House meeting. “Canada will continue to stand with Ukraine and Ukrainians in achieving a just and lasting peace.”Only 4% of Americans say they support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, according to the results of a CBS poll published on Sunday.Notably, though, only a slim majority of Americans say they support Ukraine: 52%. And a large minority – 44% – say they do not support either Russia or Ukraine.Speaking to Face the Nation on Sunday, Democratic US senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said Zelenskyy was “cornered” and “bullied” in the Oval Office on Friday during what was “a sad day for our country”.“It was a dumpster fire of diplomacy,” Kelly said.Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski was one Republican US senator who condemned the Trump administration over the way Friday’s meeting with Zelenskyy unfolded.In an X post, she called the meeting a “shocking conversation”.“I know foreign policy is not for the faint of heart, but right now, I am sick to my stomach that the administration appears to be walking away from our allies and embrace Putin, a threat to democracy and US values around the world.”Republican US senator James Lankford, for his part, said he disagreed with calls for Zelenskyy to resign.“I’m not interested in calling on the resignation of other world leaders,” Lankford told Meet the Press. “Quite frankly, I think that would spiral Ukraine into chaos right now.” More

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      ‘They worship death’: Trump ‘border czar’ reveals extremist views in interview

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      Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson talked about a bizarre range of extremist and racist conspiracy theories in an interview just weeks before Homan took office and was trusted with implementing a wide-ranging crackdown on migrants.The conversation included Carlson’s claim that Mexican cartels come “from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years”, connected the racist “great replacement” theory to Biden’s immigration policy, and advocated the arrest of elected US leaders who opposed Donald Trump’s policies on migrants.On immigration policy, Homan expressed a desire to get the Department of Defense to assist with “intelligence” and “targeting” domestically and took the view that Immigration and Border Enforcement (Ice) should arrest “a mayor or a governor” that “harbored” immigrants in sanctuary cities.Meanwhile, Homan faces questions over the network of associations he built up in his non-profit work during the interval between his appointment in the first Trump administration and his new White House role.While the interview has been fleetingly reported previously, the details of Homan’s conspiracy theory-laden conversation with Carlson have not.With Trump’s deportation efforts seeing Ice agents attempting to take enforcement actions in schools, colleges and workplaces around the US, Homan’s business dealings and extremist political views have come under scrutiny as the public face of the nationwide crackdown.UN ‘pulling’ Biden’s ‘strings’In the podcast interview, recorded for Carlson’s online show and published to X, YouTube and other platforms on 18 December, Homan painted Biden’s border policy as a “great replacement”-style effort to flood the country with potential Democratic voters, and both men characterized the previous administration’s immigration policy as the outcome of a conspiracy involving NGOs, religious charities and the UN.At one point, Homan accused the Biden administration of having deliberately worked to “unsecure the border”.Carlson asked: “What do you think the goal was?”Homan responded: “I think they see a future political benefit. I think they think these people will be future Democratic voters.“But we don’t even have to get there, Tucker,” added Homan, saying that Biden’s census rules allowed “all these illegal aliens to be counted in sanctuary cities, which is going to result in more seats in the house for the Dems”.While the idea that an elite was conspiring to orchestrate mass immigration for political gain at the ballot box was mostly confined to the white supremacist racist far right for decades, in recent years “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories such as this have increasingly been voiced by mainstream conservatives and Republicans.Later in their conversation, Homan and Carlson sought to extend the purported conspiracy theory well beyond the Biden administration. Carlson suggested a wide-ranging plot involving international bodies such as the UN and NGOs and Homan responded by calling for an investigation.Homan said: “I think under the Trump administration there needs to be an investigation.”He revealed that “I’ve had numerous conversations with Mark Green, who is the head of homeland oversight.” Green is a Tennessee Republican who chairs the House’s homeland security committee and is an ex-officio member of the oversight, investigations and accountability committee, which has oversight over the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.Homan said Green “plans on having some oversight hearings on this when it comes to the NGOs. I think they were complicit.”He then asserted without evidence that “certainly the United Nations were south of our border, working on this global illegal immigration to the United States”.Homan rounded out the conspiracy theory, saying: “This was by design. Do I think Joe Biden had the expertise to do it? No, I think someone’s pulling his strings.“This is something that needs to be investigated, people need to be held accountable,” he added.Cartels ‘have operational control of the south-west border’The two returned obsessively throughout their conversation to the issue of drug cartels, which they claimed had deprived the US of sovereignty over parts of perhaps five US states and the entire south-west border.Early in the conversation, Homan stated his basic position on the cartels: they should be “designated terrorist organizations and wiped off the face of the earth”.Later, Carlson asked Homan about what he said “informed people” had told him: “In parts of New Mexico, Arizona, California, even Florida, Texas, there is real control, in the way they control Mexico.”In those locations, purportedly, “they’re basically a state within a state, they have their own armored personnel carriers, tanks, you know”. He then asked Homan: “Do you think that’s real, do you think they have that kind of beachhead here?”“Absolutely,” Homan answered, continuing that “I’ve seen the intelligence reports, they have military-grade weapons. It’s not just my opinion, they have control, operational control of the south-west border.”‘They worship death’Later in the conversation, Homan and Carlson attributed the cartels’ motivations in part to their worship of “satanic” ideas or “death”, seeking to tie that to their “cultures” which “practice human sacrifice”.Carlson began by claiming to “know that in El Salvador when MS-13 ran the country, before Bukele, there was a religious component of voodoo witchcraft to MS-13 where they were worshipping the devil openly.”Nayib Bukele is the authoritarian, populist president of El Salvador, whose promotion of cryptocurrency and brutal crackdown on gangs in the country have won him fans on the “new right” in the US and beyond.Earlier this month, Marco Rubio met with Bukele in El Salvador, and the latter offered to hold deportees and US citizens alike in its vast network of prisons. That network includes the largest prison in the Americas, built to accommodate 40,000 people, which is around half the number Bukele has locked up since his war on the gangs commenced.Later in the podcast conversation, Carlson claimed that devil worship was a “component of the cartels, you see it in Mexico as well”, and asked Homan: “Have you come across that?”“Yeah,” Homan answered. “They worship death.”“Formally worship it?” Carlson shot back.“Yeah,” Homan answered. “I won’t call it religious, but even Texas [department of public safety] have found some of these places where the cartels are operating, they got statues there and memorabilia worshipping death as a consequence of not letting them do their business.”Homan may have been referring to Santa Muerte, a Mexican “folk saint” whose currency among cartel members has been an intermittent focus of US conservative media coverage of crime at the border, and enforcement actions in Mexico, where “the Mexican army, under orders from the Mexican state, has obliterated thousands of shrines dedicated to the folk saint across the country”.Researchers have found, however, that Santa Muerte devotion is not confined to criminals, and is also found “increasingly [among] police and others involved in law enforcement”.Carlson appeared to assert that there was a connection between cartels and the historical practice of human sacrifice in some pre-colonial Meso-American cultures, saying: “And these are from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoman answered: “I got a video on my phone showing a member of the cartel skinning a man alive.”He added: “Skinning him alive on video to send a message that if you snitch on the cartels they’re not gonna just kill you, they’re gonna make you suffer immensely.”‘Why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor?’Homan also asserted Ice’s right to arrest elected officials responsible for so-called “sanctuary cities”, which do not cooperate with Ice operations within their boundaries.He said: “I as an agent … have arrested United States citizens for knowingly harboring an illegal alien in their home.”He continued: “If I can arrest a US citizen for violating those crimes, why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor who has given their staff explicit instructions to impede us and to hide from us?”Homan added: “We need to prosecute these people and send a message that this is unacceptable.”That is a message Homan has continued to assert since taking office. Last week, Homan warned that the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may “be in trouble” over a webinar about Ice that was hosted by her office.The congresswoman on Wednesday aired a “Know Your Rights With ICE” webinar on her Facebook page which advised attendees of “trends” of arrests by Ice in New York and explained what rights they have. Ocasio-Cortez did not attend it.But Homan told Fox News: “So maybe AOC’s gonna be in trouble now, but I need the [office of the attorney general] to opine on that … Impediment is impediment, in my opinion.”On Friday, Homan and the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, appeared in a joint interview on Fox News, where Adams endorsed a Trump executive order which would allow Ice agents to operate at the city’s Rikers Island jail.In the Fox and Friends studio, Homan said of Adams and his promises of cooperation: “If he doesn’t come through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, Where the hell is the agreement we came to?”Adams is at the center of a political firestorm after top justice department attorneys in New York and Washington DC resigned in the face of orders to drop their prosecution of the New York mayor over corruption allegations.Financial entanglementsLike every senior administration appointee to date, Homan is an unstinting supporter of Trump, and a full-throated 2020 election denialist. This, and his espousal of anti-immigrant rhetoric, have led to controversy but also to associations with far-right extremists, and sprawling business relationships that some say present conflicts of interest.Between his departure from the first Trump administration and his appointment as border czar, a White House role, Homan had stints as a Fox News contributor, was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and was credited as a contributor in “Mandate for Leadership”, the central document of Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for the second Trump administration.Apart from these blue ribbon conservative appointments, Homan has involved himself in several interrelated non-profit organizations.The Border911 Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, was founded in 2023 in Virginia, Homan’s state of residence. At the same time, he also founded Border911 Inc, a 501(c)(4) organization. (501(c)(4)s differ from 501(c)(3)s in that donations to them are not tax-deductible, but they are permitted to engage in electoral advocacy.)Both the Border911 Foundation and Border911 Inc were spin-offs from the America Project (TAP), a Michael Flynn-founded election-denial non-profit that was reportedly funded to the tune of $27m by rightwing overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.Homan was reportedly TAP CEO for part of 2023. His appointment to that role occasioned a fundraising gala at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that year.From early 2024, Homan was out at TAP and focused on the Border911 Foundation and Border Inc, as well as a Trump-endorsed for-profit consultancy Homeland Strategic Consulting LLC, which, Homan boasted, secured “tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts” for his clients.Throughout the campaign season, the Border911 Foundation was a virtual speaker’s agency for a stable of rightwing anti-immigration activists, many of them former law enforcement officials who appeared at rallies organized by the non-profit or by political candidates, such as Arizona’s Kari Lake, throughout south-western border states.Previous reporting has highlighted seeming irregularities in tax filings by the non-profits. Coda reported that in 2023, “both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue”. Non-profit compliance experts expressed concerns to the outlet that “the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through” the 501(c)(4).Steve Lentz, an attorney acting as a spokesperson for both Border911 organizations, told Coda that this was due to errors in the filings, “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) [filing] that shouldn’t have been there,” he said, and said it would be amended.The Guardian’s review of the filings indicates that amendments were subsequently made.The Transparency non-profit Accountable.US, however, has raised concerns about what it says is a potential for conflicts of interest arising from the 501(c)(3) non-profit and its board in newly published research.Partly the worries arise from ambiguities in Homan’s public statements about his relationship with the foundation while he is in office.Accountable.US says that while Homan has said that he will take a “leave of absence” from Border911, he has also appeared to claim that the non-profit will continue to act as “data-mining site” that will provide “real up-to-date data on anything related to the border”, including “apprehensions”, “ICE arrests” and other information.And some of the foundation’s board members work for federal government contractors.Charles Sowell is chair of the Border911 Foundation’s board. He is also the founder and CEO of SE&M Solutions, a security and IT consulting firm that touts its “access to senior leaders in government” and “hopes to secure local and federal contracts using the best experts in the government consulting industry”.The Border911 Foundation’s director, Mark Hall, meanwhile, is currently the US security lead and chief security officer for Dragados USA, a construction contracting firm, where he claims to lead security for “a $6bn international border crossing construction project” whose cost indicates that it is likely the Gordie Howe international bridge between the US and Canada, which is budgeted for that figure.While there is no evidence of wrongdoing from these board members, a mass deportation effort on the scale promised by Trump, Homan and other administration immigration hawks such as Stephen Miller could be a bonanza for US government contractors.Accountable.US fears the worst. Its executive director, Tony Clark, said in a statement: “Homan appears to be using division, fear and chaos in a way to pad his friends’ pockets. Why should anyone believe Homan won’t steer lucrative government contracts to members of his ‘non-profit’ board?” More

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      Tom Cotton gingerly steps on Trump’s toes as he eviscerates TikTok in book

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      Tom Cotton stands a better chance of becoming Senate majority leader than a Republican presidential nominee. After all, with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Arkansas senator worked to undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election – an unforgivable sin in Trumpworld.Cotton branded those who stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” – a label he previously affixed to those who rioted amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd.In 2022, Cotton mulled a presidential run, taking multiple trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. He never announced and Trump again claimed the prize. Cotton’s dream may never die but for now he is chair of the Senate intelligence committee and the third-ranking Republican in the upper chamber – not a bad perch from which to publish his latest book.With Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton seeks to shine a light on a major threat to US interests. In the process, he gingerly steps on Trump’s toes; trashes Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk; and repeatedly dings TikTok, which is owned by China but also by Jeff Yass, a professional investor and a convert of convenience to Trump’s cause. Cotton may come to regret all three moves as missteps.He obliquely criticizes Trump regarding Chinese investment in US educational institutions. “A senior Chinese Communist purchased New York Military Academy, Donald Trump’s alma mater, and then appointed several of his Chinese associates to its board of trustees,” Cotton writes. That sale was finalized in 2015. “The Department of Defense has granted the academy hundreds of thousands of dollars since its Chinese takeover,” Cotton adds. Federal records show such grants made during Trump’s first term, between 2017 and 2021.Elsewhere, the senator slams Musk for “chasing Chinese dollars”. For 2024, Tesla reported revenues from China of $20.94bn.On top of being the driving force of Trump’s evisceration of the federal government, via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is chief executive of companies including Tesla and SpaceX, which in turn owns Starlink internet. In such roles, Cotton writes, “Musk told China’s state television, ‘I’m very confident that the future of China is going to be great and that China is headed towards being the biggest economy in the world and a lot of prosperity in the future.’” This hardly sounds like “America first” or “Make America great again”.Cotton groups Musk with American “tech titans” he views as putting profit ahead of the national interest, including the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta. Collectively, writes Cotton, they have “shamefully supplicated China’s Communist rulers”.But the senator reserves a special place in hell for TikTok.“No social-media app has harmed our kids more than TikTok,” he declares. “If your kid uses TikTok, I urge you to stop reading now and immediately delete the account.”Here, Trump and Cotton are no longer on the same page. In 2020, Trump branded TikTok a threat to national security and sought to force its divestment. But now money, votes and vengeance appear to have supplanted national interest.For starters, there is Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that holds a 15% stake in ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. Yass is also a key funder of the Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed and libertarian-minded tax-exempt organization. Trump met with him late last winter. His thinking on TikTok changed. As it happens, Yass hasn’t donated to Cotton since 2013.Now Trump looks to rescue TikTok and ByteDance, a move Cotton openly criticized. On taking office, Trump imposed a 75-day moratorium on the deadline, under US law, for ByteDance to find a US buyer. At the inauguration, Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, sat alongside Tulsi Gabbard, now director of national intelligence.Cotton has bitten his lip. “Our point in passing that law,” he told Fox News, was not to ban TikTok in the US. Rather, it was to compel ByteDance to divest, and ostensibly have a “TikTok that is not influenced by Chinese communists”. For the moment, TikTok remains in such control.In his book, Cotton urges Americans to shun “avoid other Chinese apps like Temu, Alibaba, Shein, WeChat, and Alipay. A few dollars savings or a little extra convenience isn’t worth the threat to your family’s privacy and data security or the indirect help these apps provide to the Chinese communists.” Talk about timing.Kash Patel, the new FBI director, is an investor in Elite Depot, Shein’s corporate parent. The Wall Street Journal blared: “Trump’s FBI Pick Stands to Make Millions From Fashion Brand Shein … Critics question potential conflicts of interest in owning shares of [a] foreign company with China ties.” Patel values his Elite Depot stock between $1m and $5m.Cotton voted to confirm. “Congratulations, FBI Director Patel!” he posted. “America will be safer and more secure with Kash leading the FBI.”Trump has helped Shein and Temu, mail-order retailers, stay great. Initially, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese imports and closed the “de minimis” loophole, which had enabled packages from China valued at less than $800 to be processed duty-free. Then Trump reversed himself. The loophole stood.As for data security and privacy, so close to Cotton’s heart? Musk and the boys of Doge are hoovering that stuff up as you read.Cotton remains a China hawk and an economic nationalist, but is no longer a darling of Trumpworld. In the run-up to the vote to confirm Gabbard as DNI, Cotton and John Thune, the Senate’s majority leader, received a stern warning from Matt Boyle of Breitbart, a Trump-adjacent media organ.“They will be heroes assuming they usher Tulsi to confirmation but if Tulsi is not confirmed then Cotton and Thune are in deep personal trouble with the base. I’m optimistic on this one at this point. The consequences of failure are too dire.”Love is conditional. Cotton lives to fight another day.

      Seven Things You Can’t Say About China is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      Elon Musk’s quest for power has a new target: Wisconsin’s supreme court

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      He is slashing US government agencies, building electric vehicles and space rockets and running one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. But Elon Musk has still found time – and money – to meddle in a relatively obscure election in a state of 6 million people.The close ally of Donald Trump is spending millions of dollars in an effort to tip the scales in favor of a Republican candidate running for a seat on the highest court in Wisconsin. Critics regard it as a statement of intent by Musk to expand his political power in America by playing an insidious role in key races across the country.“It’s one of the most significant threats to our democracy in the current moment,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got money and power in one person who’s been given access to the upper echelon of the federal government. He’s fused the power of the Oval Office with his almost unlimited amount of money to support Republicans, both at the state level and national level.”Musk has grabbed attention during Trump’s first month in office with his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, a team of mostly young male software engineers who have laid waste to the federal government and dismissed thousands of workers in ways that have been challenged in the courts.Musk’s startling ascent was on vivid display when he spoke to reporters alongside Trump in the Oval Office and wielded a chainsaw before a cheering crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Earlier this week, he held court at a cabinet meeting, where the president dared any of his officials to express discontent about Musk’s scorched-earth approach. No one did.But away from the TV cameras, Musk is also at work in Wisconsin, which holds an election for its state supreme court on 1 April. The vote will decide whether liberals maintain a 4-3 majority with major cases dealing with abortion, union rights, election law and congressional redistricting already under consideration by the court or expected to be argued before it soon.Such campaigns are now non-partisan in name only. Republicans are lining up behind Brad Schimel while Democrats are backing Susan Crawford. It could be the most significant US election since November, an early litmus test after Trump won every swing state, including Wisconsin.Crawford has received $3m from the state Democratic party, including $1m that the party received from the liberal philanthropist George Soros and $500,000 from the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker.Musk’s America political action committee is spending $1m to back Schimel, a former state attorney general who attended Trump’s inauguration last month. Another group Musk has funded, Building America’s Future, is spending $1.6m on TV ads attacking Crawford, a Dane county circuit judge. It reportedly had to withdraw one social media ad after it featured a photo of a different woman named Susan Crawford.Crawford told a recent meeting of the Wisconsin Counties Association: “Elon Musk is trying to buy a seat on our supreme court so Brad Schimel can rubber-stamp his extreme agenda.”Schimel denies that money would affect his independence on the court. He told reporters: “I don’t have any agenda that I’m working alongside anyone. I’m grateful for our supporters, but they’re getting nothing except me following the law.”But Musk has both business and political incentives to back him. Tesla, the electric car company owned by Musk, has a lawsuit pending in Wisconsin challenging the state’s decision blocking it from opening dealerships. The case could ultimately be decided by the Wisconsin supreme court and Schimel has not committed to stepping aside.Furthermore, in the event of a disputed election in the crucial swing state in 2028, the supreme court could be decisive. Musk tweeted last month: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” And as Doge lays siege to the administrative state, the courts have provided the strongest pushback. Tilting them to the right could neutralise that opposition and work to Musk’s advantage.Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin, said: “He is not the first far-right billionaire to pour money into a Wisconsin supreme court election but he is spending money hand over fist at the same time the whole world is wondering whether courts will ever be a check on the Musk/ Trump/GOP attack on the rule of law.“While he’s firing veterans with disabilities in Wisconsin from the veterans administration, he’s also working to buy a supreme court majority that could eliminate any possibility of accountability to state law.”Musk exploded onto the political stage last year, spending nearly $300m supporting Republican campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission filings. While most of his efforts went toward electing Trump, a super political action committee he founded also spent millions of dollars on House of Representatives races to keep Republicans in control.Musk also dabbled in state politics in Texas, where he had moved several of his businesses. In 2024, he gave $1m to a tort reform group supporting Republicans in state legislative races and $2m to a political action committee that campaigned to elect Republican judges in the state.Wikler believes there is more to come. “There’s been a question about whether Musk would follow Trump in only caring about elections when Trump is on the ballot. The answer is now clearly no. Musk wants control over every level of government at the same time as he takes control of people’s personal tax information and treasury payments that keep childcare centres open in Wisconsin,” he said.He added: “Musk is trying to execute a uniquely and profoundly grotesque perversion of justice by buying the court system while defying the constitution in order to rip off the poor and the middle class to enrich himself.”Not even Republicans are safe from the world’s richest man, whose fortune is estimated at $426bn. Musk threatened to fund primary election challengers to members of Congress who failed to back Trump’s cabinet picks and legislative priorities.Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator based in Wisconsin, said: “Elon Musk’s money is the bullets in the chamber aimed at wavering Republicans: ‘You don’t support us, Elon Musk will come into your state or your district [and] he will spend more money than God has to defeat you in a primary.’”Musk’s control of the X social media platform gives him profound influence over online discourse and the flow of information. His own feed, with 219 million followers, has become like a running commentary on the Trump administration.He has even sought to flex his muscles abroad, backing Germany’s far-right AfD party, calling for Nigel Farage to quit as leader of Britain’s Reform UK party and pushing false claims that white people are persecuted in South Africa.But while he currently appears omnipotent – a Time magazine cover depicted him sitting behind the Resolute desk like a president – there are signs of growing public discontent.In a Washington Post-Ipsos opinion poll, 34% of respondents said they approved of how Musk was handling his job, compared with 49% disapproving and 14% not sure. Protests against the tech oligarch have been held across the country and congressional Republicans have faced the backlash at raucous town halls.Sykes questions how long Musk’s political honeymoon can last: “He’s signalling that, at least for now, he’s going to be Trump’s enforcer and he’s going to be the force multiplier for the right wing. But as he does so, he’s also establishing himself as an independent force. The dilemma for Trump is that Musk is useful until he’s not but he’s not easy to get rid of.“In the end, there can only be one. The dilemma right now is it’s important to keep the focus on what Elon Musk is doing but not forget that the only reason he’s been empowered to do it is because of Donald Trump.” More