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      Musk-linked group offered $5m for proof of voter fraud – and came up with nothing

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      In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics.Close ties to world’s richest manThe Fair Election Fund is a fictitious name for another 501(c)(4) non-profit, Documented can reveal, and operates within a network run by Musk’s top political advisers. The group received funding from the same dark-money vehicle Musk has used to channel his political spending, and also routed funds to another Musk-backed non-profit.The group is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as the For Which It Stands Fund. Formed on 3 January 2023, the non-profit raised $8,226,000 from a single donation in 2023.The group is led by Victoria “Tori” Sachs, a Republican operative who was also executive director of And to the Republic, a group also formed in January 2023 that supported Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, including by funding DeSantis’s private jets and hosting quasi-campaign events.The naming of the two Sachs-led groups – And to the Republic and the For Which It Stands Fund – and the timing of their creation in January 2023 suggests that the group that now houses the Fair Election Fund was originally intended to support DeSantis’s run, which Musk initially supported.Sachs’s involvement continued through 2024, with her name appearing on records that accompanied the Fair Election Fund’s broadcast purchases.Since 2022, Musk has been secretly channeling his political spending through a dark-money non-profit called Building America’s Future. That group is run by Generra Peck and Phil Cox, two Republican operatives who were involved in DeSantis’s failed presidential bid and now advise Musk. Building America’s Future reportedly backed the Fair Election Fund in 2024. It also provided half of And to the Republic’s overall fundraising in 2023.View image in fullscreenThe Fair Election Fund has other ties to the Musk advisers who lead Building America’s Future. Cox’s digital marketing firm IMGE LLC, which provides services to several groups in the Musk-backed, Building America Future-tied universe, manages the Fair Election Fund’s Facebook page, and an IMGE employee appears to be responsible for articles on the Fair Election Fund’s website.The Fair Election Fund/Interstate Priorities also acted as a conduit to support other Musk-backed groups. The group’s 2023 tax return shows that it made a $1,550,000 grant to Citizens for Sanity, which Musk funded in 2022 through Building America’s Future, and which aired racist and transphobic ads that election cycle. That grant made up almost the entirety of Citizens for Sanity’s funding in 2023.In the 2024 election cycle, Musk publicly disclosed at least $277m in political contributions to Super Pacs that worked to elect President Trump and other Republicans. It is not known how much he may have given to other politically active groups that disguise their donors.A detour into third-party ballot accessThe Fair Election Fund’s goal of exposing election fraud seemingly turned up nothing of significance.Out of its $5m fund, the group announced $75,000 in “bounty” payments, releasing $50,000 in July 2024 and $25,000 in September 2024. The Fair Election Fund promised that it would “highlight” the election fraud stories it gathered through these payments via “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns”, but it never did so, which suggests that none of the evidence generated was consequential or credible.Instead, the group took a detour in July 2024: it launched a $175,000 ad “blitz” targeting North Carolina state board of election (NCSBE) members who delayed placing third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Robert F Kennedy Jr on the ballot. At the time, Republicans and their allies believed that West and Kennedy would act as spoilers to help Trump, by siphoning left-leaning votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee.Ironically, the NCSBE had delayed a decision on West’s and Kennedy’s ballot eligibility based on evidence that petitions were obtained through fraudulent means – concerns that would seem to align with the Fair Election Fund’s stated mission of exposing election fraud.The Fair Election Fund ads declared that the Democratic members of the NCSBE were “blocking your voting rights”, and offered a reward for evidence of the members’ “shady backroom deal”. The group also projected images on the side of the NCSBE’s building, and drove mobile billboards around the agency’s headquarters.The Fair Election Fund also ran digital ads in North Carolina featuring Black voters, some of which asserted that “African American voices are not being heard”, while others declared “Support Equality, Support Inclusion, Support [Cornel West’s] Justice for All Party”. The group pushed similar efforts in states such as Michigan.Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who sought to keep West off of ballots in North Carolina and elsewhere, was a frequent target of the group. In October 2024, the group announced that it would be running a six-figure ad buy to “troll” Elias. The ads included mobile billboards around the Elias Law Group office as well as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, which declared: “We beat Marc Elias and his racist voter suppression lawsuits … He tried to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters who support Cornel West, but the Fair Election Fund stopped him.”The Fair Election Fund then veered into a series of efforts to chase other trending rightwing conspiracy theories.For example, over the summer, the Fair Election Fund seized on to a far-fetched conspiracy theory about the online fundraising platform ActBlue, claiming to have found “60,000 potential discrepancies” in ActBlue-facilitated contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign, based on an investigation conducted “from late July to early August”. The group claimed to have “spent $250,000 on these initial findings” – a jaw-dropping sum to spend on a brief review of campaign finance records.The group then announced a $50,000 ad buy in several swing states soliciting evidence from people who claim to have been “defrauded by ActBlue”. No evidence from this “investigation” has been made public.In fall 2024, as conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting gained momentum, the Fair Election Fund announced that it would be launching a “six-figure investigation into noncitizen voting in seven key swing states”. The results of this “six-figure investigation” were never made public.

      This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is deputy executive director and Emma Steiner is a researcher with Documented More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr sworn in as health secretary after Senate confirmation

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has taken control of America’s vast healthcare apparatus, after the Senate voted on Thursday to confirm the controversial anti-vaccine campaigner’s nomination as health secretary.The Senate voted 52 to 48, with all Republicans other than the veteran Kentucky senator and former majority leader, Mitch McConnell, backing the former environmental lawyer.Kennedy was sworn in later on Thursday by US supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch.Kennedy abandoned his independent presidential bid last year after a weak campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.The vote installs one of America’s most prominent vaccine skeptics to run its federal health infrastructure, granting oversight of the very agencies – including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration – that he has spent years battling through lawsuits and public campaigns. Kennedy will wield sweeping authority over the nation’s $2tn health system, including drug approvals for Medicare, the government health insurance scheme for older Americans.His path to the top crystallized after securing backing from the Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who extracted what he called “unprecedented” commitments for collaboration from both Kennedy and the Trump campaign. The key moderate Senate Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski also fell in line this week, having previously expressed doubts over Trump’s nomination.McConnell, the lone Republican defection, cited his own experience battling childhood polio as a primary reason for his vote against Kennedy.“I’m a survivor of childhood polio,” McConnell said. “In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures.”At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy equivocated and said he just wanted to ensure vaccine safety and would not stop vaccines from being available. But he has long peddled conspiracy theories and debunked claims, including that vaccinating babies against measles, mumps and rubella is linked to autism, and had previously said that “no vaccine is safe and effective”.He also tried to persuade the US government to rescind authorization for the newly developed coronavirus vaccine in 2021, despite the world having desperately waited for the shots to be developed while millions died during the pandemic. At the hearing he said “I don’t think anybody can say that” the Covid-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.McConnell said: “Individuals, parents, and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness. But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr Kennedy to lead these important efforts.”This was the second time in as many days that McConnell has opposed one of Trump’s nominees. On Wednesday, he voted against confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, again the sole Republican to do so.Democrats – the party historically aligned with the Kennedy family legacy – have, on the other hand, totally disavowed RFK Jr as a nominee, chiefly based on his lack of subject area expertise.“Robert F Kennedy Jr is not remotely qualified to become the next secretary of health and human services,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on the floor on Wednesday. “In fact, I might go further. Robert F Kennedy Jr might be one of the least qualified people the president could have chosen for the job.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMost of the wider Kennedy political clan disowned RFK Jr, the son of the former US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of US president John F Kennedy, during his presidential campaign last year.JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, the former US ambassador to Australia, wrote to lawmakers ahead of the confirmation process and called her cousin a predator, saying he had enriched himself through his anti-vaccine “crusade”, while making victims of sick children and their families. She also noted that he had vaccinated his own children, something Kennedy says he now regrets having done.Kennedy has been at the center of numerous other controversies, including being accused of sexual misconduct, staging pranks with roadkill, including a dead bear cub, and claiming a previous illness was caused by having a worm in his brain, which prompted some opponents to call him a laughing stock. Kennedy has talked about his own recovery from heroin addiction. Through it all, Trump stuck with his nomination and on Thursday the Republican-controlled Senate acquiesced.Kennedy has in the past, however, been admired by Democratic leaders for his environmental advocacy. He has pledged to take on the big food manufacturers to try to loosen their grip on America’s over-processed diet and has become the face of the Trump administration’s offshoot motto “Maha”, or Make American Healthy Again.During the Senate finance committee hearing, Elizabeth Warren had raised alarm over Kennedy’s financial ties to anti-vaccine litigation, including a fee-sharing arrangement with the law firm Wisner Baum that earned him $2.5m over three years – an arrangement he initially planned to maintain while serving as secretary before amending his ethics agreement under pressure.Post-confirmation, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who had her own run for president in 2020, reiterated her dismay, calling the vote in favor of the incoming secretary of health and human services “a huge mistake”.“When dangerous diseases resurface and people can’t access lifesaving vaccines, all Americans will suffer,” Warren said in a statement. “And thanks to his serious, unresolved conflicts of interest, RFK Jr’s family could continue getting richer from his anti-vaccine crusade while he’s in office.”The Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, defended his vote for Kennedy. “Every president deserves their team,” Graham said, adding: “I look forward to working with RFK Jr to improve our quality of life and health in America.” More

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      The #Resistance is no more. But a quieter fightback to Trump 2.0 is growing | Jon Allsop

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      In January 2017, the day after Donald Trump was first inaugurated as US president, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington for a “Women’s March” that was actually a broader-based vessel for popular rage. Not that the atmosphere was uniformly angry: I covered the march for a US radio network and found pockets of joy among the crowd. “It’s really exciting,” a teenager from New York told me. “It’s democracy in action.”The march, and parallel events around the country, was emblematic of what came to be known as the #Resistance, a loud liberal movement in opposition to Trump that took the form not only of mass protests, but court fights, adversarial media coverage (and increased consumption thereof) and grassroots organising. The movement made cult figures (not to mention merchandise) of figures seen as standing up for institutions, from the Trump-probing special counsel Robert Mueller to the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.Now though, as Trump’s second term is under way, a consensus has formed that the #Resistance is dead. Almost as soon as Trump won in November, media leaders swore off the term, and liberal news consumers appeared to tune out. Titans of tech and culture who criticised Trump last time around either openly backed him or grovelled at his feet; even staunch Democrats suggested that they would find areas of common ground with his new administration. Protests around the inauguration were much smaller. Ross Barkan argued recently in the New York Times Magazine that the era of “hyperpolitics” – or politics as an all-consuming social battleground – is now over.Why? The principal answer might simply be fatigue. Trump is an exhausting figure, and American politics has now revolved around him for nearly a decade. And hopes that the burst of first-term energy against him would exile him from public life proved forlorn.The opposition to Trump also appears rudderless. The institutional Democratic party might technically have a new leader – Ken Martin, a little-known apparatchik – but for now, it lacks towering political talents. Many supporters doubtless feel disillusioned after watching Joe Biden cast the last election in existential terms, then fail to do everything in his power to ensure that the Democrats won it, before welcoming Trump back with warm words and a cuppa.And, if the Democrats are palpably diminished, there is a sense that Trump stands astride the political landscape as a colossus. In 2016, he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, making room for the conclusion that his win was a fluke or somehow illegitimate. This time, the country knew the threat he posed, and he won decisively anyway. Trump and his allies have seized on that fact to claim a huge mandate.As the influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, Trump’s victory has percolated down into US culture. Big tech firms and other industries may have submitted to Trump’s will this time out of fear that he would otherwise use the power of the state against them. But it seems equally likely that they are using the clarity of his victory as a permission slip to distance themselves from pesky liberal imperatives (diversity! Workers’ rights!) that they never liked, while seizing on areas of interest alignment and ideological affinity. For all his populist rhetoric, Trump has always been a slasher of tax and red tape at heart.The vibes, as the saying goes, have shifted since 2017. Trump has proved to be a lasting reflection of deep currents in American public opinion, not an accident. Peppy Obama-era liberalism is discredited. The #Resistance really does appear to be dead.Get rid of the hashtag and capital letter, however, and a small “r” resistance to Trump is still visible, as the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr and New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister have argued. In-person protests are kicking back into gear – albeit still on a smaller scale – as are Democratic blocking moves in Congress. There’s evidence that liberals are tuning back into the news.None of this matches the mass energy and ubiquitous liberal iconography of 2017. But the less flashy work that undergirded the #Resistance – civil society groups suing to block Trump’s policies; local-level organising – is very much in evidence again this time. The Women’s March was a headline-grabbing show of force, but the courts were the most important brake on Trump in the early days of his first term. That’s already been the case again.And Trump is more vulnerable than he might appear to be, for two main reasons. First, if it was an overreaction to think that his 2017 win was an aberration, it’s also an overreaction to see him as an electoral Goliath now; he won the popular vote last year only narrowly and with a plurality, not a majority. Second, he might be enjoying a honeymoon, but his radical and chaotic early moves in office are already likely eating up his political and cultural capital.In part, this is by design. Trump and his allies want to overwhelm their opponents, as has been well documented. But I think they also want to provoke them. Trumpism as a political project is about conquest, yes, but it’s also about conflict – it needs resistance in order to thrive. It is a politics that will keep on pushing until opponents can’t not fight back.The past few weeks might have heralded the death of a specific brand or aesthetic of oppositional politics. But the underpinning idea is alive. It might not feel exciting any more, but democracy is still in action.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today More

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      The Orbánisation of America: inside the 14 February Guardian Weekly

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      We’re just over three weeks into the second Donald Trump administration, and the pace of events both inside and outside the US has been dizzying and unprecedented.Many of us have been alarmed by Trump’s shocking pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war, trade tariffs and territorial claims on Greenland and Panama. But inside America, an equally startling transformation has been taking place.Aided by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has moved swiftly to fire critics, reward allies, punish media, gut the federal government and exploit presidential immunity. Yet much of the blueprint comes not from Trump’s own policy team, but from a power-consolidation playbook established over the past decade by the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.For the Guardian Weekly’s big story this week, our Washington bureau chief David Smith sets out the parallels between Orbán’s self-styled “petri dish for illiberalism” and Trump’s vision for America. Then columnist Moira Donegan argues that it is not the president but Musk who is actually running the US now.Get the Guardian Weekly delivered to your home addressFive essential reads in this week’s editionView image in fullscreenSpotlight | The families vowing to stay in GazaMalak A Tantesh and Emma Graham-Harrison speak to defiant Palestinians who reject Donald Trump’s resettlement plan after enduring 15 months of conflictScience | Why silence is goldenOur increasingly noisy world has been linked to numerous health complaints. But that’s not the only reason we need more peace and quiet in our lives, explains Sam PyrahFeature | An amazing/terrifying brain implantAn accident left Noland Arbaugh paralysed, but Elon Musk’s Neuralink chip allows him to control computers with his thoughts. Is it a life-changing innovation – or the start of a dystopia where a billionaire can access our thoughts? Jenny Kleeman reportsOpinion | The right are wrong on climate – why is the UK following their lead?Promoting green growth does not make you an ‘eco-nutter’. It’s the only way forward, argues Will HuttonCulture | The rise and fall of Emilia PérezLess than three weeks ago, the movie was flying high, with 13 Academy Award nods. Then came a social media scandal and a serious backlash. Steve Rose finds out whyWhat else we’ve been reading I enjoyed this picture essay about 1990s British nightlife in the hours after the clubs had shut. I particularly liked the photographer’s dedication to going to bed at 10pm to be up at 4.30am the next morning to shoot. I imagine he must have some excellent stories from tagging along with some of the groups captured in the images. Eimhin Behan, marketing executive I’m always looking for film recommendations so I was drawn to Rebecca Liu’s piece about the review site Rotten Tomatoes. While the “fresh” or “rotten” critics’ verdicts do lend themselves to a polarisation of opinion, Liu decided to explore the 40 worst-rated films to find if their hype (or tripe) was justified. Neil Willis, production editorOther highlights from the Guardian websiteView image in fullscreen Audio | Going bald in an increasingly hairy world – podcast Video | Artificial news: How to create an AI anchor Gallery | ‘A place with its own rules’: images of London’s Square MileGet in touchWe’d love to hear your thoughts on the magazine: for submissions to our letters page, please email weekly.letters@theguardian.com. For anything else, it’s editorial.feedback@theguardian.comFollow us Facebook InstagramGet the Guardian Weekly magazine delivered to your home address More

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      Evangelical education nearly ruined me. Now the Christian right is coming for public schools

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      When I got the chance to attend a conservative, evangelical high school in rural Iowa, I was ecstatic. My early education had been in a similar school – where creationism was the one true science, and evolution was satanic propaganda – and I’d spent the interim as a frightened pilgrim in the unholy land of public school. I was a teenage zealot and longed to be among my people.Throughout those years, my church leaders urged me to proselytize to the public school students, to debate teachers about the age of Earth or the founding of our Christian nation, to be a spiritual exhibitionist, praying loudly at my locker or the flagpole. The apocalypse was at hand, so who had time for algebra?I viewed my enrollment at Forest City Christian school in my junior year as being honorably discharged from my duty of “reclaiming our schools for Christ”. But what I envisioned as a sanctuary of faith, community and “true” education not only left me more disillusioned and bullied but also robbed me of a high school diploma and set me on a path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.View image in fullscreenTwenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.These efforts test the boundaries of the constitution’s establishment clause, reversing a century of civil rights victories in public schools, and have the potential to fundamentally alter the way American children learn – and what they learn about.The push comes in two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and for the first time in history, using tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools, generally via vouchers that cover student tuition. Each has the potential to bolster the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, the state representative James Talarico has been fighting against a new elementary school curriculum that infuses Bible stories into language arts programs, as well as a bill that could allow students to use public funds to attend private schools, including Christian schools, a move he says will harm low-income students while bolstering the most privileged.“Attempting to indoctrinate public school students into Christianity is not only unconstitutional and un-American, it’s deeply un-Christian,” says the former public school teacher, who is also studying to be a preacher.And this wave of Christianizing is not limited to the south.In 2023, my home state of Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded scholarships to families who enroll their children in private schools, including Christian ones. And last fall, a wildly successful Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), announced the drafting of a new bill that would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools.“By bringing back school-sponsored Bible reading, we are bringing God back into public education,” says Morgan MaGill, communications director for IFPC, which has drafted successful state measures restricting rights to abortion and transgender healthcare in Idaho.Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has characterized the growth of US Christian schools as an “educational insurgency” collecting “recruits” to build an underground army “with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way”, Hegseth said in a podcast appearance. Such militaristic language is reminiscent of the evangelical rallies, camps, youth services and Christian rock concerts I attended as a boy, where we were indoctrinated to be “soldiers in God’s army”, fighting to “take back our schools for Christ”.That, said Hegseth, is “what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation”.View image in fullscreenTalarico views Texas’s efforts to create a voucher program for private Christian schools as not only bad for Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ+ students, but also as stealing from the poor to serve the rich.“If you gave my students on the west side of San Antonio an $8,000 or $10,000 voucher, there’s still no way they can afford a $20,000 a year private school,” Talarico says. “But because the voucher program is universal, the wealthy family that is sending their kid to that private school will now get an $8,000 or $10,000 discount on their tuition, at the expense of the working-class kids on the west side.”Talarico adds that the voucher program includes funding for home-school students, up to 90% of whom are Christian and whose curriculum is often poorly regulated. “So we taxpayers will be funding homeschool programs that teach students the earth is flat,” he says.The battle for schoolsTrump’s promise to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice” fulfills an evangelical wishlist I’d heard about throughout my childhood. The belief that our government seeks to brainwash children into liberal atheists, close churches and outlaw prayer – threats that Trump promised to eradicate throughout the last election – were at the heart of the formation of the Christian right in the late 70s. But the clash over Christian education in America began long before.Protestant education was the norm in the US for nearly two centuries. MaGill points out that Benjamin Rush – a founding father who helped build the US public school system – was a strong advocate for Bible reading in US schools.And while opponents emphasize the idea of “separation of church and state”, those pushing to re-Christianize US public schools are correct when arguing that the phrase is not in the constitution. But it is misleading to claim that this was ever a settled – or simple – issue.In 1797, John Adams signed the treaty of Tripoli, which stated: “The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”View image in fullscreenThe first amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson later said the amendment created “a wall of separation between church and state”.When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was often explained to me that this phrase was intended to keep the government out of religion and not the other way around. The issue of religion in public education muddies this divide.Throughout the 19th century Catholics fought for their unique prayers and scripture to be taught in public schools. When Tennessee passed a law in 1925 banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the trial of a jailed science teacher captivated the nation, leading to a media circus that portrayed biblical literalists as “yokels”, accelerating the fundamentalist movement in America, as well as a deep distrust of both the media and intellectuals among evangelicals.In 1962, the supreme court ruled that teacher-led prayer in school violated the first amendment’s establishment clause, essentially banning the practice. Many evangelicals – particularly in the south – felt that their religious rights had been violated years earlier when the court mandated that all US schools be racially integrated, as many white, southern Christians at the time interpreted scripture as mandating segregation.In response, there was an explosion of what would come to be known as “segregationist academies”, private Christian K-12 schools and universities that believed they could continue to racially discriminate – while enjoying tax-free status – due to protections to their “religious liberties”. In time, they would create their own textbooks and accreditation systems, a whole bubble of education independent from public schools or conventional higher education.View image in fullscreenIn the late 1970s, the heavily segregated Bob Jones University had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS, a move that was interpreted by many evangelical pastors as the government shutting down a church. The ruling was blamed on Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education (which would become a whipping boy for evangelicals in the years to come) despite the IRS acting on a court ruling from several years earlier.The perceived attack on segregated Christian schools by the US government helped galvanize evangelicals into voting Republican.Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.Escaping the bubbleI was born in 1982, and my education began in this isolated world of alternative facts. In my Christian kindergarten, I learned to read using the Bible and did math equations from scriptures on tithing. We were taught a great deal about the dangers of communism, while our working-class parents fell victim to predatory capitalism, manipulated into paying a tuition they couldn’t afford, convinced public schools were unsafe.View image in fullscreenThe collapse of my parents’ small business, a farm crisis tanking the Iowa economy, and years of tithing and additional “seed faith” donations to our church had left them broke.When I was in first grade, my mom and I performed janitorial work after hours for a reduction on my tuition. My dad borrowed money from family members to keep us enrolled and away from the dangers of public school. But following a divorce and bankruptcy, they, like many other working families, could no longer afford tuition.I was terrified of public school, which I imagined to be a cesspool of adolescent sin.I developed a hypervigilant paranoia when it came to the lessons of my public school teachers, particularly when it came to science and history. I was not only tasked with rescuing my classmates from hell; I had to avoid it myself, mainly through maintaining my belief in (a very specific definition of) God, which the “secular humanist” curriculum was a threat to. This required me to keep a heavy filter on the information I allowed into my mind and censor the thoughts that information inspired.Consequently, I flunked half of my classes.At the Christian school I attended my junior year of high school, things were different. We were taught from the lectures of creationists such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that our planet is only 6,000 years old, along with a detailed meteorological explanation for Noah’s flood. Hovind often blended conspiracy theories, such as evolution being a communist plot, into his lectures. Ham and Jessica DeFord’s book Climate Change for Kids explains to homeschooled and Christian school students: “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that.”In “Logic” class, we learned about gay rights rallies in San Francisco that were attempting, according to my teacher, to “indoctrinate children into that lifestyle”. It was not uncommon to hear leaders in the Christian school movement, like the “Christian economics” textbook author Gary North, argue for capital punishment for all homosexuals. North believed this should occur through the biblical practice of “stoning”. As a thin, effeminate young man with little interest in sports or hunting (yet perked up if the conversation turned to musicals or Alloy magazine), I was a relentless target for the rural boys at the Christian school, who saw it as their religious duty to shout “fag” in my ear as they tussled my hair and knocked books from my hands.The longer I stayed at the school, the deeper I fell into a malaise of depression and self-harm. In addition to the stress of bullies, I had trouble getting my mind around the logic of these classes, and knew that if I didn’t understand it, and believe it, eternal torture awaited me. Meanwhile, costs remained difficult. I was working part-time at Subway and Bennigan’s to pay for my Christian education, but it still wasn’t enough.I headed back to public school for my senior year. I’d been there a semester before it was explained to me that my credits from Forest City Christian school didn’t transfer, because they weren’t “accredited” by the government. (The school has since closed.)Instead, I was directed toward the GED testing center, where my education came to an unceremonious end with a generic certificate. Colleges and universities, I was told, were even worse than public schools in their liberal indoctrination, so I drifted through a decade of low-wage jobs in factories, restaurants and construction sites, as my fellow students who’d graduated from public school, then college, ascended the socioeconomic ladder.In time, I developed my own education at libraries and bookstores. But first, I had to, in the words of Yoda, “unlearn what you have learned”. In fundamentalist education, all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters. The itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.It was only through breaking out of the Christian education bubble – defecting from my duty to “reclaim America for Christ” – that I was able to cultivate strong learning faculties, eventually clawing my way into a career in journalism.Perhaps my financial prospects would have been much brighter if I had stayed in my Christian high school, attended a Christian college like Liberty University (which accepts students from non-accredited Christian schools) and gone on to work at a megachurch like Joel Osteen’s Lakewood church or in a Maga political organization like Turning Point USA. But my inability to get my head around the 2+2=5 logic of creationist science, or the claim that our founding fathers intended to create a Christian theocracy, prevented me from being an effective soldier in the fight for Christian nationalism, despite how eager I was to join the fight.Instead, I eventually traveled in the opposite direction, reporting extensively on the modern machinations of the Christian right. In the course of that work, I have often felt a deep sorrow for students enduring the bubble of private Christian education – particularly the poor and queer ones. Now it seems that compassion must extend to those in public schools as well.

      This story was co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project’s James Ledbetter Fund. More

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      Musk defends Doge role and rejects conflict of interest claims as he joins Trump for Oval Office ceremony – live

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      Speaking from the Oval Office, where he stood behind the Resolute Desk, but to the right of a seated Donald Trump, Elon Musk just defended his outsized role in the gutting of federal agencies, under the auspices of his “department of government efficiency”.Asked about critics who call his effective control over multiple federal agencies, and the cutting of funding for congressionally approved programs federal judges have ordered to halt, Musk said: “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get”.“That’s what democracy is all about”.He also dismissed concerns about his own clear conflicts of interest, since six of his businesses are dealing with investigations, complaints or regulatory actions from 11 of the federal agencies he has taken a leading role in drastically cutting back or reshaping.Musk told reporters he is trying to be as transparent as possible, even though his own financial disclosures will not be made public. “Transparency is what builds trust” he said.Trump backed Musk’s claim there was no problem with his role. Trump also claimed that he saw a lot of “kickbacks” with government contracts. The president said that he hoped the courts would allow him to pursue his agenda.Trump claimed that his administration, with Musk’s help, had already found billions in “fraud and abuse”, despite the fact that multiple examples they have previously offered to the public have been false or misleading. Trump cited no new evidence, but told reporters “and you know what we’re talking about”. This appears to be his new shorthand for the debunked claim that Musk’s team had uncovered $50 million in funding to send condoms to the besieged Gaza Strip.Here is photograph of the press availability in the Oval Office posted on Musk’s platform X by Katie Miller, the spokesperson for his “department of government efficiency”, which shows that Miller’s spouse, Stephen, was just out of the frame of wire photographs, to Trump and Musk’s right.The Associated Press was not allowed in to the Oval office to report on the Musk-Trump news conference, the not-for-profit news cooperative says, because it has declined to abide by a White House directive to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.The AP’s executive editor, Julie Pace, said in a statement:
      As a global news organization, The Associated Press informs billions of people around the world every day with factual, nonpartisan journalism.
      Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.
      It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.
      The AP issued this style guidance note on 23 January on the renaming:
      President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The body of water has shared borders between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump’s order only carries authority within the United States. Mexico, as well as other countries and international bodies, do not have to recognize the name change.
      The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.
      Speaking from the Oval Office, where he stood behind the Resolute Desk, but to the right of a seated Donald Trump, Elon Musk just defended his outsized role in the gutting of federal agencies, under the auspices of his “department of government efficiency”.Asked about critics who call his effective control over multiple federal agencies, and the cutting of funding for congressionally approved programs federal judges have ordered to halt, Musk said: “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get”.“That’s what democracy is all about”.He also dismissed concerns about his own clear conflicts of interest, since six of his businesses are dealing with investigations, complaints or regulatory actions from 11 of the federal agencies he has taken a leading role in drastically cutting back or reshaping.Musk told reporters he is trying to be as transparent as possible, even though his own financial disclosures will not be made public. “Transparency is what builds trust” he said.Trump backed Musk’s claim there was no problem with his role. Trump also claimed that he saw a lot of “kickbacks” with government contracts. The president said that he hoped the courts would allow him to pursue his agenda.Trump claimed that his administration, with Musk’s help, had already found billions in “fraud and abuse”, despite the fact that multiple examples they have previously offered to the public have been false or misleading. Trump cited no new evidence, but told reporters “and you know what we’re talking about”. This appears to be his new shorthand for the debunked claim that Musk’s team had uncovered $50 million in funding to send condoms to the besieged Gaza Strip.Here is photograph of the press availability in the Oval Office posted on Musk’s platform X by Katie Miller, the spokesperson for his “department of government efficiency”, which shows that Miller’s spouse, Stephen, was just out of the frame of wire photographs, to Trump and Musk’s right.Elon Musk has joined Donald Trump in the Oval Office, as the president put his signature on an executive order that requires federal agencies to coordinate with the billionaire Tesla chief’s “department of government efficiency”.In comments to the press, Musk called the federal bureaucracy an “unelected” fourth branch of government, and also said the US budget deficit must be addressed. Trump, meanwhile, talked about the need to root out “corruption”.A coalition of labor unions yesterday filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) violated federal law by accessing secure systems in three government departments.“Elon Musk and his minions are stealing Americans’ private personal and financial data in one of the biggest data hacks in U.S. history,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.“I suspect no one who voted for Donald Trump thought he would allow Musk permission to invade their privacy. This is a breach of our fundamental freedoms. Right now, inside the Department of Education, the world’s richest man is rifling through 45 million people’s private student loan accounts and feeding the data into artificial intelligence.”The suit singles out Doge’s access of secure systems in the departments of Treasury and education, and the office of personnel management. Last week, a judge temporarily stopped Musk’s officials from accessing the Treasury’s payment system:Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director Kash Patel coordinated with the White House and justice department on the firing of top bureau officials, then lied about it at his confirmation hearing, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee said.Dick Durbin made the allegation in a letter to justice department inspector general Michael Horowitz, and requested an investigation.“It is unacceptable for a nominee with no legal or current role in government to personally direct the unjustified and potentially illegal firings of dedicated, nonpartisan professionals at the FBI. If these allegations are true, then Mr. Patel may have committed perjury before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Patel said.The Senate judiciary committee is expected to on Thursday vote on advancing Patel, who Democrats consider a concerning pick to lead the bureau because of his vows to use its powers to retaliate against Trump’s enemies.Shortly after Trump took office, a former personal lawyer to the president who is now a senior justice department official ordered the firing of several veteran FBI agents, and asked for the names of everyone at the bureau who worked on January 6-related cases. Here’s more on that:Officials from Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” are “actively dismantling” the department of education, a Democratic congresswoman told HuffPost.Donald Trump recently signaled that he would like to see the department abolished, and congresswoman Melanie Stansbury said Musk’s employees “are in the building, on the sixth floor, canceling grants and contracts.”She expects the department “to potentially be dissolved in the coming days.”“It’s not legal. They know it’s not legal. But they’re doing it anyway,” said Stansbury. “The only recourse we have right now is to … go the courts.”Here’s more on the Trump administration’s plans for the department:Donald Trump plans to today sign an executive order that will require heads of US government departments and agencies to cooperate with the Elon Musk-chaired “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Reuters reports.Citing a White House official, the president will also order agency heads to limit hiring to only essential staff. The order comes as Democrats warn that Trump is defying the law by allowing Musk and his staff to enter federal agencies and access secure systems, or shut them down altogether.The White House says Trump will signs executive orders at 3pm. Here’s more about the concerns surrounding Doge:Republican congressman Guy Reschenthaler has been an advocate for Marc Fogel during his detention, and had this to say about the news that he had been released:
      Our prayers have been answered. Thanks to President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, Marc Fogel has been freed from Russia! Marc spent 1,255 days locked away in a Russian penal colony under the Biden Administration. President Trump freed Marc in just 22 days.
      Notice the reference to the Biden administration. Donald Trump and his allies have sought to cast themselves as more effective than his Democratic predecessor at every turn, and do have some diplomatic successes to promote, such as when Venezuela earlier this month agreed to release six detained Americans.Marc Fogel, an American teacher who was serving a 14 year prison sentence in Russia after getting caught with medically-prescribed marijuana “will be on American soil” by tonight, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday.“Today, President Donald J. Trump and his Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are able to announce that Mr. Witkoff is leaving Russian airspace with Marc Fogel, an American who was detained by Russia,” National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said in a statement. “President Trump, Steve Witkoff and the President’s advisors negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine. Since President Trump’s swearing-in, he has successfully secured the release of Americans detained around the world, and President Trump will continue until all Americans being held are returned to the United States.”Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on Friday.The Trump administration is pushing for the war with Russia to end, while Zelensky is hoping for more US military commitments, as well as NATO membership, the deployment of peacekeeping troops.Trump said in a Fox interview on Monday that Ukraine “may be part of Russia someday.”After Pope Francis rebuked mass deportation of migrants plan, US border czar Tom Homan has pushed back, saying Francis should leave border enforcement to his office.“I’ve got harsh words for the Pope: Pope ought to fix the Catholic Church,” Homan, a Catholic, told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.“I’m saying this as a lifelong Catholic — I was baptized Catholic, my first Communion as a Catholic, confirmation as a Catholic. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”The criticism was in response to the pope’s public letter condemning the Trump administration’s efforts sent earlier on Tuesday.“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” Francis wrote in a letter sent on Tuesday. “The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”Francis urged people “not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”Homan compared the wall surrounding the Vatican City to the US border wall.Federal judge John Bates on Tuesday ordered US health agencies to restore websites that were suddenly and unexpectedly taken offline after Trump signed an executive order to scrub websites of “gender ideology extremism.”The legal saga began after medical advocacy group Doctors for America sued US health agencies for taking down their websites.”Prior to the sudden, unannounced removal, these Defendants had maintained these or similar webpages and datasets on their websites for years,” the lawsuit says. “The removal of the webpages and datasets creates a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, deprives physicians of resources that guide clinical practice, and takes away key resources for communicating and engaging with patients.”Donald Trump hit out at federal judges who have frustrated his efforts to transform the government, calling them “highly political” and arguing he is merely fighting fraud and waste. The president received an assist from his ally, House speaker Mike Johnson, who said he had met with Elon Musk and was “excited” about his work in the “department of government efficiency”. But the American Bar Association warned that the administration was flying in the face of the constitution, and that it “cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore”, while a Democratic senator said that if the White House begins ignoring court orders it does not like, it would be “maybe the greatest challenge to democracy in our lifetimes.” Meanwhile, an appeals court granted prosecutors’ request to drop charges against two of Trump’s co-defendants in the classified documents case, marking the end of the aborted federal effort to convict the president prior to his re-election.Here’s what else has been going on today:

      Steve Bannon pleaded guilty to a fraud charge connected to a fundraiser falsely billed as paying for a border wall, but will serve no jail time.

      Two senior officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have resigned, after a top White House official who also played a major role in Project 2025 ordered the watchdog to stop work.

      Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, will go to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced Trump, who also predicted the war with Russia would end “soon”.
      King Abdullah of Jordan has arrived at the White House to meet with Donald Trump, and the fate of the ceasefire in Gaza is expected to be high on their agenda.The two leaders may also discuss Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over the territory and for its population to be displaced to countries neighboring Israel – such as Jordan.We have a separate live blog covering the meeting, and you can follow it here: More

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      ‘I became collateral damage’: the trans pilot falsely targeted over Washington DC crash

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      Jo Ellis is alive.It was a non-controversial, irrefutable fact – until she was accused of piloting the military helicopter that collided with a commercial airplane in Washington DC on 29 January, killing all involved.After the crash, before valid explanations began to surface, Donald Trump blamed diversity. There is no evidence that diversity initiatives played any role in the crash, but that didn’t matter.Ellis, 34, wasn’t involved in the crash in any way. But she is a Black Hawk pilot in the Virginia national guard. And she’s transgender.In the immediate aftermath of the crash, two of the helicopter pilots killed were named, but the family of the third pilot initially elected to keep her name private, though she was later identified. Ellis was misidentified as the pilot in the in-between.On Friday morning, Ellis got a text from a close friend at about 4.30am telling her a random account was commenting on all of his public Facebook posts asking if he was friends with Ellis, “the one that killed those people in the crash”. She thought it was maybe a bot and discounted it.Ellis, who has been in the Virginia national guard since 2009 and has deployed to Iraq and Kuwait, had written for the news website Smerconish.com about being trans in the military on 28 January and then spoken to the commentator Michael Smerconish for an interview. She thought the attention was because of her article.In the article, she wrote that she grew up in a religious and conservative home with a history of military service, but that she knew she had gender dysphoria since she was five years old. She tried to be “more religious, more successful, more manly” in hopes it would “cure” her.“I got married, bought a house, helped raise a stepdaughter, played drums in the church band, and adopted a dog,” she wrote. “All the things I believed a good man should do. And I really wanted to do those things, but I also secretly hoped it would fix me. It didn’t work.”She realized during the pandemic that she was at a point where she could begin to address her gender dysphoria. She notified her command in 2023 that she would begin transitioning and came out to her unit in 2024 and got “overwhelming support”, she wrote. She paid for all of her trans-related care out of pocket.Ellis said she believed she was targeted because she’s a trans woman.“Once I put that article out, I became collateral damage, just like so many other trans people that are being unnecessarily targeted.”Later, on the Friday morning after the crash, another friend sent her screenshots of an article on a Pakistani website that included Ellis’s photo and claimed she was the third pilot. (This article, which says Ellis was “rumored to be” the unnamed pilot, is still uncorrected.)“Then the Daily Mail called my personal cellphone and asked if I was alive,” Ellis said. “And that’s when it kind of sunk in. And I was like, oh, this is big. This is not some corner of the internet saying something ridiculous.”She discovered that her name was trending on X, with some posts getting hundreds of thousands of views. “Why is this only on Twitter?” rightwing commentator Ann Coulter wrote on X, sharing a post about Ellis being the pilot. One account said the crash could be “another trans terror attack”.People opined that she hated Trump and was motivated by that hatred to act, killing herself and dozens of others to make a point. Trump issued an executive order banning trans people from joining or serving openly in the military, though it did not immediately kick trans people out. A group of trans military members have sued over the order.Ellis says she’s a political moderate and has voted red more than blue. “I didn’t say anything negative about Trump. I just said I want to keep serving.”Ellis posted on Facebook on Friday morning to try to quash the rumors, asking people to report any posts naming her as the pilot. But she soon realized that wouldn’t suffice, so she made a video. Proof of life.“Interesting morning,” she starts in the video. “It is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some sort of political agenda. They don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve this. And I hope that you all know that I am alive and well, and this should be sufficient for you all to end all the rumors.”She went quiet from there, packed some bags, and left her home for the night after arranging armed security and arming herself. She worried someone might use public records to find her home and try to hurt her family.The response to her video was overwhelmingly, though not uniformly, positive. Some people messaged her to say said she should have been on the helicopter instead, or that it’s nice she was alive but she shouldn’t be in the military because she’s mentally ill. Others shared anti-trans and antisemitic (she had said in the Smerconish interview that she was exploring the faith) comments on social media.But she said the video ultimately worked, due in large part to the misinformation being easy to debunk. “All I had to do was say I’m alive, and that kind of broke the whole rumor,” she said.She watched as people started correcting the rumor. She saw some veteran, pro-Trump accounts telling others they shouldn’t be going after a member of the military like this. Two days after the rumors reached a fever pitch, it appeared, she said, as if the misinformation was stopped in its tracks.She has tried unsuccessfully to report some remaining social media posts that falsely claim she was a pilot. “Calling me a murderer is apparently not a violation of X rules,” she said.She said she was not deterred from speaking out again, though. Her guard supported her throughout the ordeal, and it affirmed she wants to continue serving in the military.“I know not everyone loves me back, and that’s OK, but I want to serve everyone,” she said. “I want to use this incident somehow as a form of good. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I really want to turn this into something that does good for the world.“I don’t want to make it about me,” she added. “I don’t want to be the victim or the martyr. I want to show people that being strong and standing up to this hate, that hopefully something good can come from it.” More

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      What Republicans really mean when they blame ‘DEI’ | Mehdi Hasan

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      In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis. At the time, Atwater was a junior member of the Reagan administration, but he would later go on to run George HW Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 and then become chair of the Republican National Committee in 1989.In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, the hard-charging Republican operative explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms.
      You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘[N-word, N-word, N-word]’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘[N-word]’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘[N-word, N-word]’.
      Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it.Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life.Don’t believe me? In a recent interview on Fox News, the White House counselor and former Trump lawyer Alina Habba declared that the administration’s 27-year-old press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “is overqualified, brilliant and was well-versed and ready … she didn’t need a thick binder … unlike our last press secretary who was put in there for … DEI reasons”.For the record, the “last press secretary”, Karine Jean-Pierre, is the Black daughter of Haitian immigrants. Is she less qualified than her successor? Well, let’s compare résumés, shall we?Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, are Ivy League grads.Jean-Pierre is.Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, worked in two different administrations before securing their top White House positions.Jean-Pierre did.Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, has served on three different election-winning presidential campaigns across three different decades.Jean-Pierre has.So when Habba says Jean-Pierre was appointed White House press secretary for “DEI reasons”, what else could she be alluding to other than that she is a Black woman?When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a “DEI hire” within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?When a viral tweet (26m views and counting) from a popular far-right account (that is also amplified by Elon Musk) referred to Brandon Scott – the mayor of Baltimore who was elected with 70% of the vote and previously served eight years on the city council, including a stint as city council president – as the city’s “DEI mayor”, what else could it have been trying to point to other than that he is a Black man?DEI is the new N-word. In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now “worse than the N-word” and has become “the worst slur in American history”. The term “DEI hire”, he explains, “is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.”Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI.DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.You now cannot turn on the television or log on to social media without coming across a prominent conservative blathering on about the evils of DEI. To quote the loathsome Fox host Greg Gutfeld, DEI “can be used to explain everything … except, unlike racism and climate change, which the left found under every rock, every issue, DEI is, indeed, under every rock because the Democrats put it there.”This isn’t a good-faith critique of diversity programs or policies – whether they actually work or not; whether they restrict free speech; whether they are corporate box-ticking exercises. No, this is the weaponization of a three-letter term to denigrate Black people and pretend the political and economic advancement of minority communities over the past 60 years was a mistake. (“If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he is qualified,” the rightwing activist and top Trump ally Charlie Kirk casually remarked last year.)So why on earth is our “liberal” media credulously giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this? Treating their obsession with DEI as anything other than what it is? Anti-Black racism. The new N-word. A three-letter slur that seeks to, once again, mainstream bigotry and discrimination in the United States. (“DEI halftime show,” tweeted the far-right influencer Jack Posobiec during the Super Bowl on Sunday night.)For years, Donald Trump has been plagued by allegations that he used the N-word while filming The Apprentice. In 2024, a former producer on the NBC reality show claimed Trump used the racial epithet in 2004 to describe Kwame Jackson, a Black finalist on the first season of The Apprentice. In 2018, the former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed in her book Unhinged that Trump was caught on tape during the making of The Apprentice saying the N-word “multiple times”, according to three of her sources.At the time, Trump vociferously denied that he had ever used the N-word: “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.”But the awful truth is that, these days, he doesn’t even need to have such a word in his vocabulary. He and his acolytes have another, more insidious one that serves a similar racist purpose: DEI.

      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the new media company Zeteo More