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      Ousted Tennessee Democrat Justin Pearson reinstated by local commission

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      Local government officials in Memphis, Tennessee, voted on Wednesday to return the second of two Democratic state lawmakers expelled from the statehouse last week by Republicans over a gun safety protest following another school shooting.The Shelby county commission voted to nominate Justin Pearson, 29, as interim state representative to fill the vacancy created when he and fellow Democrat Justin Jones were ousted for taking part in a gun reform protest in the chamber following the murders of six people last month at a Nashville school.The two Black men had recently joined the legislature and condemned their expulsion as a racist action. Joe Biden had criticized the expulsion as unprecedented and Kamala Harris railed against the action on a hastily-arranged trip to Nashville last Friday less than 24 hours after the two lawmakers were ousted.Jones, 27, was returned to his seat on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Nashville council.On Wednesday afternoon, the Shelby county board of commissioners, where Democrats hold a supermajority, voted in favor of doing the same for Pearson at a special meeting in Memphis, where Pearson’s district is located.In announcing the meeting, Mickell Lowery, the board’s chairman and a Democrat, had called the expulsions “unfortunate”.The commission meeting was preceded by a protest rally at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in support of Pearson, who said in a powerful New York Times opinion essay on Wednesday that he “wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced”.A community organizer before entering politics, Pearson condemned what he saw as hypocrisy from Republican lawmakers.“There is something amiss in the decorum of the state house when GOP leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from ‘hanging by a tree’ as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr Sherrell later apologized for his comment), feel comfortable berating Mr Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience.“This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.”The Republican majority opted not to expel a third member of the so-called Tennessee Three, Democrat Gloria Johnson, 60, who is white.In his op-ed, Pearson also called out Republicans, in Tennessee and elsewhere, for promoting a swath of pro-gun legislation he said left the US “a nation in pain and peril”. Thousands were drawn to the statehouse in Nashville to protest the Covenant school shooting, he said, but were ignored by his Republican colleagues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Some have averted their eyes and hurried into the chamber, walking through hundreds of mourning protesters to discuss a bill to further expand gun rights by allowing teachers to carry weapons on campus,” he said.“But many of us did not. We stopped and embraced traumatized children, parents and elders. We prayed. We protested.”On Tuesday, Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, said he would sign an executive order to strengthen background checks for weapons purchases in the state, and called on lawmakers to pass a red flag law to keep guns away from those who pose a danger to themselves or others.“We should set aside politics and pride and accomplish something that the people of Tennessee want to see get accomplished,” Lee said. The governor and his wife, Maria, were friends with two teachers killed at the Covenant school.Pearson acknowledged Lee’s action in his essay as “a small victory for our people clamoring for change”. More

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      How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’

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      Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.There was jubilation when he was elected.“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.Lawson’s loss was nearly entirely attributable to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor went out of his way to redraw the boundaries of Lawson’s district to ensure that a Republican could win it. It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.“Governor DeSantis has really targeted Black folks in his efforts to strip, restrict and suppress our vote in the state of Florida. That has been his number one mission,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, the founder of Equal Ground, a nonprofit that works to register voters.As DeSantis prepares to launch a run for president, his war on voting rights is a dangerous omen for what he could do in the White House. Several states have already passed similar voting restrictions and implemented their own units dedicated to prosecuting election fraud, which is extremely rare. DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.“At the end of the day, this is all about his blind political ambition,” said Angie Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker who led a sit-in on the floor of the state legislature in protest of DeSantis’s attack on voting rights. “I fear for what’s to come.”A new Republican voting mapLawson’s election was a big deal in Gadsden county, the only majority-Black county in Florida. Near the stately old courthouse in Quincy, the county seat, Brenda Holt, a county commissioner, can quickly point out the tree that was used to lynch Black people.“We needed a Black congressman. We needed one simply because he would come to all these little places and help us with things. He understood about raising hogs and he understood about being out there in the tobacco fields,” said Holt, who has also served as the chair of the county Democratic party. “When he walked in the room, you didn’t have to say nothing. We didn’t have to explain ourselves so much to him. Because he lived it.”Lawson’s election was no accident. In 2015, the Florida supreme court ordered the state to draw a district that stretched across northern Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Such a district was legally required, the court said, to preserve the ability of Black voters in that part of the state to elect the candidate of their choosing.When it came time to redraw Florida’s congressional districts last year, the Republican-controlled legislature offered up a plan that kept Lawson’s district intact for at least another decade.Then DeSantis stepped in.On Martin Luther King weekend last year, the governor submitted his own proposal for Florida’s 28 congressional districts. His plan chopped Lawson’s district into four different ones, all of which favored Republicans. DeSantis took issue specifically with the idea that the state was required to draw an irregularly shaped district to benefit Black voters. Such an approach, he said, was unconstitutional.The legislature did not back down. It passed a map that kept Lawson’s district in place. But it also passed a backup map which broke up the majority of Lawson’s district, but kept Jacksonville contained in one congressional district. It was a compromise.DeSantis rejected that plan too, saying it was dead on arrival.Eventually, the legislature caved and invited DeSantis to draw a congressional map.“I served in the legislature for 17 years and never in the history of the legislative body have we turned over the redistricting to the governor. Never heard of that – never,” said Tony Hill, a former Lawson staffer who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year.Lawson was blindsided. Some top Republicans in the state, he said, including Senator Rick Scott and Ted Yoho, privately told him they were surprised by what DeSantis was doing.DeSantis, who had already been working with top Republican mapmakers, proposed a plan that sliced up Lawson’s district and heavily favored Republicans in 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats, a bump up from the 16 GOP seats that the legislature proposed. DeSantis’s map also cut the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.The legislature passed his map. Last November, white Republicans won all four seats in northern Florida.“This is a lynching,” Holt said. “You’re treating us like a dog. They treat dogs better than us. We’re pissed off.”It’s now harder for Jacksonville residents to access federal resources to address issues like housing affordability, food deserts and crime. Several residents said they have not yet seen any town halls or events from Aaron Bean, the new GOP congressman who represents the area. A Bean spokesperson did not say whether he had held any events in Jacksonville. “Congressman Bean has been enthusiastic about seeing all corners of this newly drawn congressional district. From town halls to chamber of commerce events, from groups of thousands to groups of one, he has made it his mission to engage with as many residents of north-east Florida as possible,” she said.Ben Frazier, an activist who leads a nonprofit called the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, emphasized the need for federal assistance as he drove around the city’s 33209 zip code – one of the most dangerous in the city – pointing out boarded-up businesses and houses.“It is unfortunate that [DeSantis] has chosen to operate like that because he’s not only a danger to Black people and people of color,” he said. “He’s a danger to democracy.”“It’s people of color that all of this redistricting is concerned about,” said Lee Harris, the senior pastor at Mt Olive Primitive Baptist church in Jacksonville. “If you notice, as long as they think they have control and the majority, they will push whatever law is beneficial to them.”DeSantis’s attack on Black representation appears to have aims far outside Lawson’s district.The governor has waged a legal battle over a 2010 constitutional amendment, overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, making it illegal to draw districts that reduce political access for racial minorities. Getting rid of Lawson’s district would seem to violate that provision.“It was a performing, crossover district where Black voters had long successfully elected their candidate of choice. And in dismantling it, it raises all kinds of indicia of discriminatory intent,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.If DeSantis succeeds in dismantling districts like Lawson’s, it could ultimately provide legal cover for other states to do the same, Li said. In the federal courts, DeSantis’s approach joins a long line of conservative cases that have been pushing to raise the bar for when race can be considered in redistricting.“It’s basically trying to divorce any consideration of race or racial impacts in a redistricting map from the actual drawing and construction of a redistricting map,” said Chris Shenton, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is challenging the Florida maps.“That’s a distinction that only makes sense on paper and only makes sense if what you’re trying to do is prevent the Voting Rights Act from working.”‘Fear’ and confusionBeyond redistricting, one of the key elements of DeSantis’s crackdown on voting has been his use of a law enforcement unit to pursue charges of voter fraud.One morning last August, Ronald Lee Miller, a Miami man in his late 50s, heard a knock on his door and answered, still in his underwear. When he opened the door, he saw that police had surrounded his home, some with their guns drawn and pointed at him. They put him in handcuffs and told him he was under arrest.A few hours later, DeSantis appeared at a press conference in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers, and announced Miller was among 19 people with prior criminal convictions being arrested for voter fraud and would “pay the price”. They were charged with multiple counts of third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The arrests were the first made under the office of election crimes and security, a new $1.2m office DeSantis had created a few months earlier.Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to keep Black people from voting (14 of those arrested were Black). And records showed that many of those charged believed they were eligible to vote. Even though they all had prior convictions that resulted in a lifetime voting ban in Florida, none of them had been warned they couldn’t vote. All of them, including Miller, had received voter registration cards before casting a ballot.Ahead of the arrests, DeSantis and Florida Republicans had also made the rules for voting with a felony conviction in Florida extremely confusing.In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved one of the largest expansions of the right to vote in the modern era. They approved a constitutional amendment that allowed people with most felony convictions to vote. Those convicted of murder and sex-related offenses – as the 19 people in the arrests had been – were excluded.DeSantis and the GOP legislature followed up by passing a law that required people with felony convictions to pay off outstanding fines and fees before casting a ballot. But Florida has no central mechanism for people to check how much they owe and state officials quickly became backlogged.“They want to put fear, the same type of spirit, fear into people so that you won’t vote,” said Rosemary McCoy, a Jacksonville activist who had her voting rights restored in 2019.Miller and his lawyer, Robert Farrar, eventually got his case dismissed on procedural grounds, successfully arguing that the statewide prosecutor didn’t have the authority to bring the case.But DeSantis did not let it go. In February, the legislature passed a law that expanded the power of the statewide prosecutor, bolstering their authority to go after cases like Miller’s. DeSantis has also requested increasing the office of election crimes and security’s budget to $3.15m and nearly doubling the number of personnel.Now the governor and the legislature could cause more confusion. An election bill unveiled last week would make it so that all voters receive a warning that they may not be eligible to vote when they receive their official voter registration card.“This has all become nothing more than political theater. It’s a waste of time, waste of money, waste of judicial assets,” Farrar said.The office of election crimes and security also targets groups that register voters.In Florida, Black and Hispanic voters are five times more likely than white voters in Florida to register through a third-party group. But in its first year, the office of election crimes and security levied $41,600 in fines against these voter registration groups. Those fines came after DeSantis and the legislature passed sweeping new voting restrictions and raised the maximum fine that could be levied from $1,000 to $50,000.Burney-Clark said her nonprofit Equal Ground registered 10,000 voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But since then, it has scaled back and only registered a handful of voters – the group can’t afford the risk of high fines.‘We’re going to silence you’Cecile Scoon, president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, sees a clear through-line in all of DeSantis’s efforts to attack voting rights.“It’s all connected to ‘we don’t care what you vote,’” she said. “‘We don’t care what you say. We know better and we’re going to silence you.’“We are not in the land of the free any more in the state of Florida.” More

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      Removing Black lawmakers is voter suppression – and the US has done it for centuries

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      When Tennessee lawmakers expelled two Black legislators from the state’s Republican-dominated house of representatives, pundits described the decision as “stunning” and “historic”. Joe Biden called it “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”. The New York Times characterized it as “an extraordinary act of political retribution”.Sorry, have you met America?This tragic comedy always has the same theme: Black voter suppression vs white power. In the comparatively short arc of this country’s political history, this display of unapologetic whiteness is as unusual as water being wet and fire being hot. It is the most preposterous narrative to say the partisanship that defines this political climate is new or even remarkable.In 1869, the Georgia supreme court ousted Chatham county’s Black superior court clerk Richard W White from office. The three-judge panel noted that White “received a majority of the votes” and was “eligible, and qualified by law for said office”. Nevertheless, White was removed. Theconstitution didn’t matter. Votes didn’t matter. All that mattered was whiteness. So, instead of naming their decision White v Clements, the Georgia supreme court rejected the usual naming conventions and opted instead for the more candid title Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia?On 10 January 1966, Georgia’s house of representatives refused to seat the civil rights activist-turned-legislator Julian Bond after he signed a statement opposing US involvement in the Vietnam war. Bonds’ majority district went without representation until the US supreme courtunanimouslydecided that the first amendment protected Bond’s right to speak out on public issues.The fact that Justin Jones has been reinstated by a vote of Nashville’s council and Justin Pearson probably will be by a similar vote doesn’t mean the opposition party will stop using tricks from which democracy, common decency and even the rule of law offer no shelter.The decision to subvert the will of the voters and evict state representatives is not unprecedented – it is a great American tradition. And when placed in the context of white history, the theme that emerges has more to do with America’s racial binary than it does two-party politics.All politics is about power and there can be no real conversation about American politics that ignores the single, most common characteristic of the people who wield it. The weaponization of white power is a poltergeist that has haunted every significant political decision ever made, from the drafting of the constitution to the picking of presidents. It defined American citizenship, catapulted a toddler country into an economic superpower and created the bloodiest war in the history of this continent. In fact, racism might be the most bipartisan part of politics.Republicans whose historical knowledge is limited to eighth-grade social studies books love to tout that they’re the party of abolition and Reconstruction. They therefore blame the totality of the post-civil war racial terrorism on “the Democrats”.Even though it would be more accurate to attribute this political and social violence to southern conservatives still wistful about the lost cause of the Confederacy, these history buffs conveniently forget how the success of Black Republican candidates outraged the party’s white members, sparking the “Lily White Republican movement” that lasted for half a century, until the 1930s. This anti-Black GOP movement began in Texas, but soon Republican committees in North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and nearly every southern state banned Black candidates from running for office. Lily White Republicans were willing to sacrifice their party’s political power to preserve the racial hierarchy.While Julian Bond, Black Republicans and the Tennessee Three may have lost their elected positions, there is a far longer list of Black officials who were murdered in order to remove their authority.Returning to 1868, Georgia’s Black voters had already registered to vote in droves. Buoyed by a turnout rate (74.8%) twice that of their white counterparts (38.4%), the newly freed electorate sent 30 Black state representatives and three African American state senators to the Georgia legislature in that year’s election.By 1869, every one of the duly elected Black lawmakers known as the “Original 33” had already been ousted from the state assembly and a quarter of them had already been killed, threatened, beaten, or jailed. Hundreds of African Americans had been massacred by terrorist groups. By the time the state’s highest judicial body determined, in the Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia? case, that state law “does not confer upon the colored citizens of this State the right to hold office”, white conservatives had already gained control of state politics and reasserted the government-sanctioned system of white supremacy.This story repeats and repeats.In 1898, a lynch mob unseated Lake City, South Carolina’s new postmaster, Frazier B Baker, by shooting Baker and his two-year-old daughter Julia dead. White vigilantes shot the South Carolina state representative Simon Coker in the head as he prayed – he was one of at least two dozen Black Republicans murdered in his state on that day. The civil rights attorney Robbie Robertson won his seat on the Savannah, Georgia, city council with 80% of the vote and lost it to a 1989 mail bomb.Murder of Black representatives is the purest form of voter suppression. It exposes the myth that there is a conservative “pro-life” movement that doesn’t believe in “cancel culture”.And to be clear, the historical effort to suppress Black political power has nothing to do with ensuring the supremacy of the white race. If the powerful white people in the Tennessee legislature were truly concerned about the collective wellbeing of white people, they would have protected white children by helping the legislators they ousted to pass gun control laws. If they truly wanted white kids to succeed, they wouldn’t condemn their constituents to perpetual ignorance with a whitewashed version of history.More than 160 years ago, the Tennessee state senator William H Barksdale, speaking from the same building Pearson and Jones were removed from, exposed the entirety of this strategy. “Our slaves are true and faithful, we fear not them,” he said, defending a bill “for the expulsion of Negroes from this state” in 1860, “but this free, combustible material, this fire brand, let us prepare for the future and hurl it out of the camp.”They do not care about white people; they care about white power, and anti-Blackness will continue to be the most reliable tool for maintaining their authority and control. More

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      Harvard to rename school after top Republican donor following $300m gift

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      Harvard University will rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire hedge fund executive and Republican megadonor Kenneth Griffin, the institution announced on Tuesday, after a new $300m contribution brought Griffin’s total support of his alma mater to more than half a billion dollars.Griffin, 54, is the founder and chief executive of Citadel, a $59bn hedge fund, and Citadel Securities, which trades securities. He is the 35th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $34.9bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.Griffin will be just the fourth individual to have a school at Harvard named after him in exchange for a donation, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. His name will carry controversy thanks to Griffin’s stature as a major political donor to rightwing politicians and his company’s investments in firearm and ammunition manufacturers.Griffin’s companies held investments in gun and ammunition manufacturers worth more than $139m as of March 2022, according to Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ. These included shares in US gun manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger, as well as US ammunition makers Olin Corp, Vista Outdoor, and Ammo Inc.The investments became a matter of public debate in 2022 when Griffin poured millions into a Republican candidate for the governorship of Illinois. Griffin accused sitting Democrat governor JB Pritzker of failing to combat crime in Chicago, where Griffin’s companies were based. He subsequently moved his companies’ headquarters to Miami.A WBEZ analysis of firearms recovered by Chicago police from violent crime incidents over five years found that nearly one in four were produced by companies in which Citadel invests.At the time, Citadel disputed the importance of the investments, telling WBEZ that they made up “less than .01% of our portfolio” and arguing that a connection to gun violence was “quite a stretch”.Griffin rejected a call by the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper for his companies to divest from gun and ammunition makers, writing in a letter to the editor that “40% of American households own a gun” and that “the violence destroying our city is not the result of … legal gun purchases, but rather a failure to prosecute criminals, a lack of support for police, and progressive left legislation that prioritizes criminals ahead of law-abiding citizens”.He added: “I will not embrace today’s cancel culture nor engage in amateurish virtue-signaling based on blind ideology.”Griffin is also a major political donor and one of the most prominent backers of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom he has urged to run for president in 2024. A one-time fundraiser for Barack Obama, Griffin gave nearly $60m to Republican candidates for federal positions in 2022, according to Politico.Griffin’s close association with DeSantis is another potential reputational issue for Harvard. The Florida governor has staked out extreme positions on education and LGBTQ rights, including by signing the so-called “don’t say gay” bill that restricts Florida teachers from discussing topics related to sexuality and gender identity and banning the state’s public high schools from teaching a new advanced placement course in African American studies.This year, DeSantis unveiled a legislative proposal to remake Florida’s public colleges and universities that included banning critical race theory – an academic theory developed by Black scholars at Harvard Law School – and diversity and inclusion programs and drastically reducing the protections afforded by academic tenure.Asked to comment about Griffin’s association with DeSantis and his policies, a spokesperson for Citadel said: “Ken respects and employs people of all backgrounds.”Griffin’s gift to Harvard was unrestricted, the school said, and will go to the faculty of arts and sciences, which includes the undergraduate college and PhD programs. In 2014, Griffin made a $150m donation to the elite private university, primarily to fund financial aid. At the time, it was the largest single donation in the institution’s history.“Ken’s exceptional generosity and steadfast devotion enable excellence and opportunity at Harvard,” said Harvard president Larry Bacow in a statement. “I am deeply and personally appreciative of the confidence he has placed in us – and in our mission – to do good in the world.”Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Got a tip on this story? Email Stephanie.Kirchgaessner@theguardian.com More

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      Manhattan DA who indicted Trump sues Republican Jim Jordan over interference in case

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      Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday sued Republican congressman Jim Jordan to stop what Bragg called an “unconstitutional attack” on the ongoing criminal prosecution of former US president Donald Trump in New York.The lawsuit aims to block a subpoena of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who had led the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Trump. The subpoena, issued last week by the House of Representatives judiciary committee, which Jordan chairs, seeks Pomerantz’s appearance before the committee for a deposition.Trump pleaded not guilty last week to charges brought by Bragg’s office of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment made ahead of the 2016 election. The funds allegedly were used to buy adult film star Stormy Daniels’s silence about an affair she said she had with Trump, which the former president denies.Bragg, a Democrat, accused congressional Republicans of an “incursion” into a state criminal case.“Members of Congress are not free to invade New York’s sovereign authority for their or Mr Trump’s political aims,” Bragg’s office wrote in the lawsuit, accusing Jordan of searching for a pretext for “hauling Mr Pomerantz to Washington for a retaliatory political circus”.Pomerantz left his job at the district attorney’s office shortly after Bragg took over in early 2022, when the new DA declined to pursue an indictment of Trump based on a sprawling probe of his business practices.Earlier this year, Pomerantz published a book criticizing Bragg’s decision not to pursue those charges. He also said prosecutors had previously examined potential charges against Trump over the hush money payments, but were concerned the case would rest on a novel legal theory that may not hold up in court.In announcing the subpoena of Pomerantz last week, Jordan said Pomerantz’s public statements showed that Bragg’s prosecution of Trump was politically motivated. Bragg has said Pomerantz’s case was not ready.“If he wishes to argue that his prosecution is ‘politically motivated,’ he is free to raise that concern to the New York state criminal court,” Bragg’s office wrote in the lawsuit.“Chairman Jordan is not, however, free to unconstitutionally deploy Congress’s limited subpoena power for raw political retaliation, intimidation, or obstruction,” it added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judiciary committee said on Monday it would hold a field hearing next week in New York about what it called “an increase in violent crime” caused by Bragg’s policies.Bragg said murder, shooting, burglary and robbery rates were all lower in Manhattan so far this year compared with last year.On Tuesday afternoon, Jordan, who represents Ohio, tweeted: “First, they indict a president for no crime. Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.” More

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      ‘Bigoted vitriol’: Florida Republican urged to resign over offensive trans remarks

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      A Republican Florida state lawmaker has made a partial apology for calling transgender people “demons”, “imps” and “mutants” during a hearing on a contentious bathroom bill.Webster Barnaby, a self-described “proud Christian conservative”, said his “indignation was stirred” by members of the transgender community who spoke out on Monday against the bill banning them from bathrooms not aligned to their gender at birth.The controversy comes just days after conservatives elsewhere in the state forced the removal of an illustrated novel about Anne Frank from a high school library, claiming it contained inappropriate sexual material that “minimized” the Holocaust.By Tuesday, Barnaby’s Twitter account appeared to have been removed from the platform after his outburst the previous day at a Florida state house commerce committee hearing in Tallahassee.“The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,” he told the speakers at the hearing. “That’s right, I called you demons and imps who come and parade before us and pretend you are part of this world.“We have people that live among us today on planet Earth that are happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet. This is the planet Earth where God created men male and women female.”The British-born Barnaby, 63, made a tempered apology from the floor soon after the House bill passed. “I referred to trans people as demons – I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons,” he said.But his expressed regret cut no ice with LGBTQ+ activists, who have been protesting against a slew of anti-trans proposals placed before the Republican-dominated Florida legislature this year, championed by the state’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis.The bills include banning pronouns, drag shows and pride flags; criminalizing certain medical care for trans youth; and expanding the “don’t say gay” law that outlaws discussion of sexual preference and gender identity to all Florida’s classrooms.“When Republican Webster Barnaby called trans people ‘demons’, ‘imps’, and ‘mutants it wasn’t a mistake or gaffe,” Democratic former state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith wrote in a tweet. “It was the hatred and bigotry that’s really motivating Florida’s 20+ anti-LGBTQ proposals finally being spoken into words. Now it’s exposed.”The advocacy group Equality Florida called on Webster to resign and on the Florida house speaker, Paul Renner, to condemn “this bigoted vitriol from his own caucus”.The Guardian has contacted Barnaby for comment.School officials in Florida’s Indian River county, meanwhile, are defending a principal’s decision to remove the book Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation from his school library last month at the behest of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty.Florida has become a stronghold of the conservative book banning movement in recent months, with a new law threatening educators with felony charges for exposing students to material deemed “inappropriate”.According to Moms for Liberty, the illustrated novel, based on Frank’s wartime memoir, contains sexual content that “minimizes the Holocaust” that involved the murders of 6 million Jews in Europe during the second world war.In one scene, it shows the teenager in a park looking at nude statues of females and later proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts.“Even her [own] version featured the editing out of the entries about sex,” said Jennifer Pippin, the chairperson of the group’s Indian River chapter.“The publisher of the book calls it a ‘biography’, meaning it writes its own interpretive spin. It quotes the work, but it’s not the diary in full. It chooses to offer a different view on the subject.”A spokesperson for the school district of Indian River county, Cristen Maddux, said the principal of Vero Beach high school, Shawn O’Keefe, followed protocol by removing the challenged book, a decision that can be reviewed by a district committee.“The feedback that the Holocaust is being removed from the curriculum and students aren’t knowledgable about what happened, that is not the case at all. It’s just a challenged book and the principal removed it,” she said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump thinks his arrest helped his presidential chances. He’s wrong | Robert Reich

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      In February, Ron DeSantis led Donald Trump 45% to 41% in the Yahoo/YouGov poll. But Trump’s indictment has reversed the race.Just after Trump said he would be arrested, he moved into the lead – 47% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters preferred him, compared with 39% for DeSantis. Now, after his arraignment, Trump’s lead has widened – 57% to 31%.What’s going on? Trump’s high-decibel howls of anger and grievance and his vitriolic charges of a “deep state” aligned against him are rallying Republicans to his side.He has raged against his indictment in language evoking racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. He has whipped up a fury of threats against the judge, the prosecutor and their families. And of course he continues to repeat his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.But the commotion isn’t increasing Trump’s odds of being elected president in November 2024. To the contrary, it’s reducing those odds.Only about 28% of American voters identify as Republican. And as Republicans move back to Trump, another group of voters that will probably determine the outcome of the 2024 election is turned off by his vitriol.I’m talking about independents.Those who describe themselves as independent compose over 40% of American voters – a larger percentage than either self-described Republicans or Democrats.This independent share of the voting population is on the rise, as young people decline to identify with either party.You wouldn’t know any of this from media coverage of politics, which focuses almost entirely on the deepening, bitter conflict between red and blue America. Hey, conflict sells.Not that independents are moderates. They simply dislike angry partisanship.Independents also oppose the Republican party’s stances on abortion, transgender rights, gun controls and the climate.In Wisconsin, where about the same number of voters have registered Democratic as have registered Republican, independents make all the difference.Last Tuesday’s victory of Judge Janet Protasiewicz – flipping control of the state’s supreme court to liberals for the first time in 15 years – was presumably due to independents who favor abortion rights and oppose the state’s radical gerrymandering.Nationally, independents helped stop the “red wave” in the 2022 midterms (albeit by a slim margin of 49% to 47%), breaking their tendency to vote against the party holding the White House in midterm elections.Why? Because most independents loathe Trump as much as Democrats do and they oppose everything Trump has inflicted on America – including an army of election deniers and an anti-abortion supreme court.In 2020, independents preferred Biden over Trump, 52% to 37%.True, independents haven’t been wildly enthusiastic about Biden. They’ve worried about the economy, and, like other voters, tend to blame or credit the occupant of the Oval Office for the economy’s performance.When Trump’s star was fading and DeSantis’s brightening, it seemed possible that some independents might be drawn back to the Republicans in 2024. But if Trump is the Republican candidate, as seems increasingly likely, most independents will support Biden, as they did in 2020.Trump’s indictment – presumably to be followed by other indictments – is reminding independents of Trump’s broader attack on democracy that culminated on 6 January 2021.In the four weeks following the attack, so many voters abandoned the Republican party that about 50% of Americans briefly identified as independents.Trump’s latest rounds of incendiary posts and speeches are reminding independents that he represents everything they most detest about American politics.So, as fast as Trump blasts his way to the Republican nomination, he’s turning off independent voters who will be crucial in the general election.The prospect of a 2024 contest between DeSantis and Biden might seem less terrifying than one pitting Trump against Biden, but the latter is more winnable by Americans – including independents – who favor democracy over autocracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More