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      ‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

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      Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times, despite the negative impact that they have on trans people’s safety and wellbeing, and scant evidence of its effectiveness in swaying voters. And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people. “I have a belief that when you see the same thing happening in different parts of the country at the same time, that that’s something to look into,” Jones said. “I think that coincidence is always great as a fertile ground for journalism and for looking under the hood about what’s going on.”In the first episode of this year’s season, Jones looks at how the paramilitary group Proud Boys uses anti-trans rhetoric to stoke political upheaval. Far-right militia groups have grown at unprecedented numbers in recent years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), while political violence in general has also increased.For trans people, such rhetoric can lead to increased violence against them, as well as suicidal ideation. A recent report from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project found that suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth increased by up to 72% in states that enacted anti-trans laws.“We know that trans people overall have been facing more violence since there’s been an uptick in anti-trans rhetoric in terms of hate crimes,” Jones said. “So we know that there is an impact on people’s safety and wellbeing solely because of the [public] conversation.”Jones hopes that through her work, that the press and political leaders will begin to see anti-trans rhetoric as a serious threat to democracy and community safety.“The biggest solution is to take these attacks seriously,” Jones said, “to understand the way in which they are being deployed for paramilitary violence, for political violence, to destabilize communities, to undermine democratic conversations politically, to take votes away”.A ‘trans moral panic’Anti-trans ads are being deployed by the Republican party now due to the tightness of the presidential election, according to Jones. During their September debate, for instance, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments about her support of gender-affirming surgery for imcarcerated trans people. “Anti-trans issues work the best in really tight elections where the margins are really close and you’re just trying to convert one or two votes per precinct, and that’s enough to help you win,” Jones said.Another reason why anti-trans ads are particularly salient now is because the GOP is using them to court voters who supported the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who ran on an anti-trans platform, she added. Many of those voters are suburban women who lean Republican, but sometimes vote Democrat in local elections. Both parties are now vying for their votes. “Harris is making a play for the Nikki Haley voter, and there’s some indication that she is gaining enough ground to maybe get her over the top,” said Jones. “That’s exactly the type of population that would be receptive to anti-trans messages.”Christian nationalists and rightwing politicians view trans people as collateral damage as they strive for political wins, according to Jones. And bundled in with anti-trans rhetoric is opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. A “trans moral panic” among the far-right has led to an uptick in legislation that bans both DEI policies and trans protections, said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the intelligence project at the SPLC. At the Intelligence Project, Hodges tracks hate and extremism through in-person and online monitoring.“Anti-LGBT groups that are in alliances with trans-exclusionary groups also push what they call ‘viewpoint diversity’ to roll back DEI protections in state houses and in corporations,” said Hodges. Billed as the inclusion of various perspectives in an argument, viewpoint diversity is problematic because it promotes this false narrative that DEI is a threat to white Christian men,” he said, “and they utilize that to push these anti-trans, anti-LGBT bills”.Along with an increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary people, anti-trans legislation can lead to violence against trans people of color, said Hodges. Twenty-seven trans people have been killed this year, according to HRC, with 74% of them being people of color and 48% being Black. “When we look at these trends of violence towards trans people,” Hodges said, “it’s important to remember that those trends of violence are affected by legislation and the politicization of trans affirmation.”While Jones began her podcast in 2019 to highlight the dangers of anti-trans legislation, she hopes to one day celebrate the lives of trans people. But first, political leaders must work toward creating a society where trans and gender nonconforming people can live without the fear of violence.“We would love to focus on telling all of the good news and the positive stories that surround trans people from all walks of life and all backgrounds,” Jones said. “But the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.” More

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      US election live: Trump repeats attack on Liz Cheney as campaign enters final days

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      The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Top Republicans have called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding president Joe Biden’s statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden’s statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.The Republican lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.Representative James Comer, Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican conference chair Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records.They also called on the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of its stenography office.Comer and Stefanik said:
      The White House cannot simply rewrite president Biden’s rhetoric.
      We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.
      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”The office of Arizona Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes is “looking into” whether Donald Trump broke state law when he said on Thursday that Liz Cheney should face rifles “shooting at her” to see how she feels about sending troops to fight.“The Arizona attorney general’s office is looking into whether Donald Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney violated Arizona law,” Richie Taylor, communications director for the AG’s office, said in a statement on Friday. “The office has no additional comments to make at this time.”Trump made the comments about Cheney, one of the former president’s biggest Republican critics and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, to former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Glendale on Thursday, AP reported.“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it.”He repeated his aggressive attack at his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon.“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. She wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.In an interview on Friday with 12News, a local television station in Arizona, Mayes said Trump’s comments were “deeply troubling.”“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes told 12News.“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she continued.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest from the campaign trail throughout this morning.We start with news that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris battled to woo voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin on Friday, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch.Harris made several appearances in Wisconsin on Friday, including one that featured the musician Cardi B, while Trump visited both Michigan and Wisconsin.At his rally in Warren, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, Trump tried to energize his voters, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.He repeated his aggressive attack on Liz Cheney, one day after he first said the former Republican US representative should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.Harris meanwhile sought to draw a contrast, emphasizing at a rally in Wisconsin in the afternoon that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”During his appearance in Warren in the afternoon and in Milwaukee in the evening, Trump repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants. In Warren, he said: “every state is a border state” and falsely claim immigrants were being flown into the south-west.He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”For more on last night’s events, see our full report here:In other news:

      Harris told her crowd at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center that with four days to go, there was still work to do, but “we like hard work”. Minutes beforehand, during a raucous warmup, the rapper Cardi B referred to Trump as “Donnie Dunk” and told the crowd: “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not. Well, if his definition of protection is not the freedom of choice, if his definition of protection is making sure our daughters have fewer rights than our mothers, then I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”

      Earlier, Harris said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” as far as his suitability for the presidency is concerned. “Representative Cheney is a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.” Cheney for her part warned the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.

      Republicans’ latest offensive and misogynistic comments have boosted Democratic hopes of turning out women on election day in a contest where the rights of women have been a central issue for the Harris campaign.

      At his Milwaukee rally on Friday, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5-hour-long meandering speech that touched on the economy and foreign policy but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style. “I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump, promising to usher in a new “golden age”. “Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929-style depression.”

      Trump’s supporters are laying the ground for rejecting the result of the election if he loses, according to warnings from Democrats as well as anti-Maga Republicans. As well as baseless and/or failed lawsuits, suspicions have been voiced over partisan polls run by groups with Republican links in battleground states that mainly show Trump leading – the idea being that if Trump loses, the polls can be proferred as “evidence” that he was cheated out of the win.

      The New York author and journalist Michael Wolff has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied. Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Trump’s campaign said the claims, made on Wolff’s podcast Fire and Fury, amounted to “outlandish false smears”.

      A federal judge rejected an attempt by Elon Musk’s America Pac to have charges of running an illegal lottery heard in federal court, instead of the courts of Pennsylvania, where Musk is running the sweepstakes to help Trump get re-elected. The case has been sent back to the Pennsylvania state court for a further hearing on Monday.

      Racism and misogyny; a firing squad death threat to a former congresswoman; the Republican candidate for president dressing up as a sanitation worker in the cab of a garbage truck. Donald Trump’s final full week on the campaign trail was as unedifying as it was bizarre – Richard Luscombe sums it up.

      A valuable Republican voting bloc in Arizona is seeing a shift of its members towards Harris in numbers that Democrats believe could make the difference for them in an election where the latest polls have Trump slightly ahead. That bloc is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormons. More

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      Ukrainians ask what I’m hearing about our country on the US campaign trail. The truth? We’re all but forgotten | Nataliya Gumenyuk

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      Around a month before the US elections, in the Kharkiv region, I sat down with a group of Ukrainian infantry soldiers together with the American historian Timothy Snyder. I suggested they ask questions of him not only as an American historian, but also as an American citizen.The servicemen were curious about the upcoming election, but mainly the chances of receiving significant military aid any time soon. They expressed pity that many Americans still don’t understand that the Ukrainian fight is not just about us. It’s in the world’s interests to support the fight against blatant breaches of the international order.The anxiety of the American elections is felt more strongly in Kyiv among Ukrainian officials and civil society leaders because Ukraine has become a partisan issue, and part of US domestic politics. These groups have been trying for years to be on good terms with both Democrats and Republicans in the US. This was especially true during the long delays in Congress over the vote for security assistance to Ukraine. But engaging with the Maga camp has become difficult. This only got worse when it was revealed what Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said in 2022: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” During the race, Vance has characterised Vladimir Putin as an “adversary” and “competitor”, rather than an enemy, and has generally argued that the US should be focusing on China, not Russia.Then there are the claims from Trump that he could end the war in “24 hours”, presumably with a phone call to Putin. To be honest, these sort of statements don’t worry Ukrainians that much since they don’t sound remotely realistic. There are no signs the Russian president is changing his goal to destroy Ukraine as a state. What people are really worried about is the slowing down, or even stopping, of US military assistance.In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, one of the most important battleground states, I had a chance to talk to various Ukrainian Americans, including those from the older, more conservative diaspora, who have traditionally voted Republican. They shared strong anti-communist sentiment in the past but today are more united around ideas of faith and family values. Some of them told me they were worried by Vance’s remarks. Still, their arguments would alight elsewhere: it was the Democrat Barack Obama who didn’t firmly react to the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 and refused to provide military aid. Some of those narratives can be heard among conservative Ukrainians back home, too.Ukrainians often ask me what exactly the candidates are saying about our country on the campaign trail. I had to reply that, honestly, Ukraine wasn’t being explicitly mentioned at the rallies, at least the ones I attended. In Saginaw, Michigan, a manufacturing town, Vance didn’t mention Ukraine even once, mainly warning about the risks of local workers losing their jobs because of Chinese electric vehicles. Kamala Harris, at a campaign rally in the university town of Ann Arbor, spoke of Trump’s fascination with authoritarian leaders like Putin.Trump himself, speaking in Pennsylvania, did say at least three times that he wouldn’t spend taxpayers’ money on wars “in countries you have never heard of and don’t want to hear of”. The audience loudly cheered.After Joe Biden dropped out of the race, some people in Kyiv hoped that he could now afford to be less cautious and use his remaining time in office to accelerate support for Ukraine. The speculation was that he would want a positive foreign policy legacy to leave behind, amid the retreat from Afghanistan and tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. By October, it became clear that the current US administration wasn’t planning on doing anything big before the election.Some measures were taken. On 23 October, Washington finalised its $20bn portion of a $50bn loan to Ukraine backed by frozen Russian assets. This will be placed alongside a separate $20bn EU commitment and $10bn split between Britain, Japan and Canada. It is supposed to be repaid with the earnings from the more than $300bn in sovereign Russian assets that were immobilised in February 2022 and are mostly held in Europe.But in the long run, the lives of Ukrainian soldiers depend not just on the funds for military aid but on specific types of weapons. President Zelenskyy has spent recent months lobbying in the west for his “victory plan”, which would involve the US providing long-range missiles to Ukraine, which could strike deep inside Russia – something western powers have been reluctant to approve. His argument is that this may not just turn the tide on the battlefield, but take away the burden from those suffering the most – Ukrainian infantry. Without that, the Ukrainian army is left to rely on exhausted footsoldiers. Whether or not this plan has any chance of progressing will depend in large part on who wins next week.Right after landing in New York, a US colleague asked me if “it was all over for Ukraine if it didn’t receive US assistance after the elections”. I was puzzled by the way the question was asked. I explained that it might be extremely difficult to preserve the lives of Ukrainians if, say, Trump is elected, but it wouldn’t mean the Ukrainian army will stop trying to defend its fellow citizens or simply give up.Travelling from one swing state to another, I detected an extreme sense of anxiety among many Americans. It was so palpable, I felt the need to comfort them. Whatever happens, on the morning of 6 November, life in Ukraine will go on. The same will be true in the US. But it doesn’t mean things will be easy. Ukrainians have learned in recent years that worrying can be a luxury; the best option is to commit yourself to working hard to avoid the worst-case scenario, and fighting for what’s right.

      Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Donald Trump repeats anti-immigrant threads at Milwaukee rally

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      At a Wisconsin rally on Friday, Donald Trump called Kamala Harris a “low-IQ person” and vowed to save the economy “from total obliteration” in a 1.5 hour-long meandering speech that touched on top campaign issues including the economy and foreign policy – but also featured threats to curb press freedoms and a lengthy discussion of his own rhetorical style.“I will stop the criminal invasion of this country,” said Trump during his opening remarks, promising to usher in a new “golden age”.“Can you imagine if Kamala won? You would go down to a 1929 style depression,” said Trump.On immigration, Trump’s message was characteristically dark. The campaign played a painful video of a mother describing her daughter’s murder and blaming Harris for allowing the accused to enter the US without authorization. Studies overwhelmingly refute Trump’s claim that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime in the US, but such claims are a feature of his campaign.“The day I take office, the migrant invasion ends,” said Trump. He vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history” and said cities and towns had been “conquered” by immigrants, whom he referred to as “animals”.Since his Madison Square Garden rally – which showcased racist and misogynistic comments from a lineup of speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” – Trump and his allies have sought to recast the former president and his Maga base as unfairly maligned.“Kamala has spent the final week of her campaign comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history,” said Trump at the Wisconsin rally.“Vice-president Harris thinks you are Nazis, fascists,” said the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who spoke at the rally.Johnson praised Trump for bringing into his campaign Robert F Kennedy Jr, who ended his presidential bid as a third party candidate in August; and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who announced she had left the party in 2022. Johnson accused Democrats of “destroying America” and credited Trump with making “the Republican Party the party of the working men and women of America.”Drawing applause and chants of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby”, Kennedy addressed the crowd, reminding them that although he has left the race, he will still appear on the ballot and urging them to vote for Trump. “I said a prayer to God that he would put me in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic,” said Kennedy. “God sent me Donald J Trump.”During his remarks, the Republican congressman Bryan Steil urged the audience to support a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in Wisconsin that would ban non-US citizens from voting in Wisconsin elections – a proposal that seeks to pre-empt municipalities from opening their local elections to non-citizens and comes as Republicans elevate unfounded anxieties about non-US citizens committing voter fraud in federal elections.“We have an opportunity on Tuesday to vote ‘yes’ on an amendment to say that Wisconsin’s elections and American’s elections are for US citizens only, do you agree?” said Steil. The idea that immigrants threaten US elections has caught fire among Trump’s supporters.Jason Tyler, a Republican activist who attended the Milwaukee rally, said he was worried about non-citizens voting illegally in the presidential election. Tyler plans to volunteer as a poll observer in Rock county on election day, where he said he will be looking for non-US citizens casting ballots. “My biggest thing I would be looking for is if somebody can’t speak English and start there,” said Tyler, who acknowledged that the bar for challenging a ballot is high enough in Wisconsin that he would not likely succeed in preventing a voter from casting a ballot.“It’s very difficult – the only thing that I can really do is I can ask for their information, you know, find out who they are, and I can report that, if I felt that there was something weird about it,” said Tyler. “I can’t really tell that person not to vote.”Tyler added that he’s frustrated with the idea that Trump’s inflammatory comments about immigrants are racist. “It’s ridiculous,” said Tyler, adding that his wife came to the US from the Philippines. “She loves Donald Trump.” More

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      US election live: Harris says Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney ‘must be disqualifying’

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      Kamala Harris spoke of Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric about Liz Cheney in which he suggested Cheney be shot with “guns trained on her face”.Harris said:
      “He has increased his violent rhetoric, Donald Trump has, about political opponents and in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former representative Liz Cheney. This must be disqualifying.”
      Hailing Cheney as a “courageous” and “incredible American”, Harris added:
      “I will tell you, I know Liz Cheney well enough to know that she is tough, she is incredibly courageous, and has shown herself to be a true patriot at a very difficult time in our country …
      We see this kind of rhetoric that is violent in nature, where we see this kind of spirit coming from Donald Trump that is so laden with the desire for revenge and retribution … I think that Liz Cheney is courageous and that we will always make sure that we are all fighting against and speaking out against any form of political violence.”
      Trump is now criticizing “Shawn Fain or whatever the hell his name is,” the president of the United Auto Workers, who is campaigning or Kamala Harris. The crowd boos.Trump says he can’t sleep easily and that he’s “always tossing and turning” thinking about China and the “Russia hoax” and how to make money for the American people.“I don’t feel like a senior. Does anybody feel like a senior?” Trump, 78, says, to some cheers. “I feel better – I think I’m sharper and better now than I was 25, 30 years ago. I do, I swear. I’ll let you know when I don’t.”Trump gives an update on sales of “Dark Maga” merchandise: Trump was talking about Elon Musk, and what role the billionaire will play in cutting government spending in a Trump administration. “You know where he is right now? He’s campaigning in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. How cool is that,” Trump said.At one rally, Musk appeared and wore a “Dark Maga” black hat, Trump said, that the Republican candidate hadn’t even been aware his campaign made. That hat hadn’t sold well, maybe two hats, Trump said, until Musk wore it. Then the campaign sales of those hats took off.“They sold 71,000 black hats, can you believe it?” Trump says. “You make money with money, that’s how it is.”“But now that very low-IQ person who wants to be – have we ever had a low-IQ president before?” Trump asks of Kamala Harris.“It’s like your high school football team playing … what’s a good team today … oh, the Detroit Lions,” Trump tells his Michigan audience. He tells them Kamala Harris wouldn’t have been able to figure out which local sports team to reference.In a post on Truth Social, Trump appeared to be trying to walk back his comments about how Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should face having rifles “shooting at her”.His comments yesterday have been widely condemned, including by Cheney and Kamala Harris, and are also under investigation by Arizona’s attorney general.“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Liz Cheney at an event in Arizona. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”“We love everybody right?” Trump says. He drops his voice. “No, we don’t.”Then Trump launches into an attack on Kamala Harris’s message of unity, a central part of her approach.“What about her, she’s always talking about, ‘You know I want to bring the country together, Trump is Hitler, ah, excuse me I shouldn’t have said that,’” Trump says, in a voice imitating Harris.He goes on with the imitation. “‘We want to get together as a country,’ ‘They’re all racists, they’re all this, they’re all that, but we want to have peace, and we want to get along.’”Trump tells his supporters that “the fake news” won’t even report on the bad jobs numbers. If you’re curious how just how false that claim is, you can Google it:Trump is now discussing the underwhelming economic numbers for last month.“This is not good news for them,” he says, of Harris and the Democrats. “How would you like to have an election in four days?”Some experts agree with Trump on this one:“You know, there are those that say that if we don’t win this election you may never have another election in this country … with these radical left lunatics that we’re dealing with,” Trump says.As you recall, Trump himself actually sparked this conversation over whether there might not be elections in the future, because of what he said to Christian voters earlier this year:Trump is now talking about the 2020 Democratic primary, talking about how early Kamala Harris dropped out and revisiting his rude nicknames for various Democratic presidential candidates from the previous election cycle, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.“This will be America’s new golden age,” Trump pledges. “Every problem facing us can be solved, and it’s going to be solved quickly.”Abortion rights advocates are mourning the loss of Nevaeh Crain, an 18-year-old pregnant teenager from Texas who died in October 2023 after three emergency room visits as she sought care for intense abdominal pain.ProPublica’s reporting on Crain, who would have turned 20 today, underscored the potentially fatal threat posed by abortion bans, argued Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All.“Pregnancy should not be a death sentence. Nevaeh Crain should be here, celebrating her 20th birthday today,” Timmaraju said in a statement.Timmaraju placed the blame for abortion bans on the shoulders of Republican politicians like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the incumbent senator who is facing a tough re-election fight against Democrat Collin Allred in Texas.“This has to stop,” she said. “And our best chance to do that is to vote for reproductive freedom, from vice-president Harris to Colin Allred and all the way down the ticket, so we can restore the right to abortion and end these bans.”“It seems so poignant,” Trump says, of the question he keeps asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The crowd roars: “No!”“We’re going to miss these rallies aren’t we?” Trump says onstage in Michigan, but promises his supporters that when he is back in the White House, the spirit of the rallies will continue in a different form.His supporters will someday look back and realize, “there was something very, very, special about what we all did together,” Trump says, speaking of his rallies. He also speculates about few people future presidential candidates will draw to their rallies.“This has been the thrill of a lifetime for me, and for you, and for everybody,” Trump says.The White House pool report has an amusing detail from Janesville for the punctuation nerds: Someone behind Harris on the stage was holding a “,la” sign (comma “la”), which is the proper pronunciation of her name. More

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      What to know about early voting and mail-in ballots

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      The US election is under way across the country, and so far more than 68.3 million people have voted early, according to the University of Florida’s election lab.In numerous states, the push to vote before election day, whether by mail or in-person, has amounted to an unprecedented wave of early voting.More than 97,000 voted on Wisconsin’s first day of early, in-person voting – an “unheard of” level of turnout, wrote the state elections commissioner, Ann Jacobs, on Twitter/X. On 15 October, Georgia’s first day of early voting, the state “shattered records”, according to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. By 23 October, more than 1.9 million people had cast a ballot there in-person or by mail. And in North Carolina, which had been devastated by Hurricane Helene just weeks earlier, more than 353,000 voters turned out to cast a ballot early on 18 October – another state record. By 23 October, more than 1.7 million had voted in the election.Voting early in-person or absentee allows voters some flexibility in their schedule – by casting a ballot early, they can avoid contending with bad weather, long lines or unexpected scheduling conflicts on election day.What is early voting?States – with the exception of Mississippi, New Hampshire and Alabama – offer all voters the opportunity to cast a ballot in person at a polling place ahead of election day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In those places, registered voters can head to their polling location within the early voting time frame and cast a ballot early. Most states begin counting those ballots on election day, and some require officials to wait until polls are closed to begin counting. Some states offer a version of early voting called “in-person absentee” voting, in which a voter can obtain and submit an absentee ballot in person at a polling place before election day.What about absentee voting?Most states allow for some form of absentee voting, in which a voter requests a ballot ahead of time, which officials then send to them in the mail to fill out and return by mail. Some jurisdictions offer voters the option of returning absentee ballots to a secured dropbox. Fourteen states require an excuse for voters to cast a ballot by mail, such as an illness or work scheduling conflict. Eight states practice “all-mail” elections – in those places, all registered voters receive a ballot in the mail, whether or not they plan to use it.Federal law requires states to send absentee ballots to military voters and voters overseas.States regulate the “processing” and counting of absentee ballots; most states allow officials to immediately process ballots, which typically entails verifying the signature on the ballot with the voter’s signature from when they registered to vote. Other states require officials to wait until election day to begin processing ballots – which can slow the release of election results.When does early and absentee voting start this year, and how do I do it?The first ballots of the general election have already been sent to voters in states including Wisconsin and Maryland, and to some eligible voters in Alabama. Mail voting has stalled in North Carolina, where a legal battle over whether or not Robert F Kennedy Jr can appear on the ballot has slowed the process. By 21 September, election officials in many states will have begun sending out absentee ballots. The specific dates, locations and rules surrounding early and absentee voting vary by state, county and even municipality. First confirm that you are registered to vote and then contact your local election office or check their website for details about early and absentee voting.Who votes early and by mail, and does it benefit one party over the other?Research suggests that before 2020, implementing voting by mail did not benefit one party more than another. But in 2020, with the pandemic raging, Democrats urged people to vote by mail to avoid exposure to Covid, and fought legal battles to expand absentee voting in states where the practice had not already been widely adopted. Meanwhile, in the months ahead of the election, Donald Trump claimed falsely that the process was rife with fraud, probably scaring Republican voters away from the remote option. In the end, Democrats saw gains during the 2020 general election in counties that used mail-in voting, according to data from the Guardian and ProPublica. In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats outperformed expectations and maintained control of the Senate, Republicans began to reverse course on voting early – and have continued to advocate for voters to embrace the process since then. The reversal appears to have had an impact: in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, Republicans had outpaced Democrats slightly in early voting turnout by 23 October, according to data collected by the Associated Press.Is it safe to vote by mail?Mail voting is considered extremely secure in the US, and instances of fraud in mail voting are vanishingly rare. In a 2020 column, the elections expert Rick Hasen noted that between 2000 and 2012, there were fewer than 500 examples of vote-by-mail fraud, out of billions of votes cast. (As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, this makes mail-in voting fraud less likely than being struck by lightning). While mail-in voting fraud is extremely rare, election officials across the country have raised concerns about postal delays that could result in eligible voters’ ballots reaching election clerks after the deadline to count their ballots. More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump would-be tyrant as he imagines ‘guns trained on her face’

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      Donald Trump has called former congresswoman Liz Cheney a radical war hawk and said she should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her” – prompting the anti-Trump Republican to warn the public against dictatorship and a presidential candidate who “wants to be a tyrant”.Cheney recently endorsed Kamala Harris and has campaigned with her, trying to persuade Republicans who don’t want Trump to win another term in the White House in this election to vote for the Democratic ticket of the US vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz.Harris on Friday said Trump’s violent rhetoric about Cheney “must be disqualifying” ahead of the 5 November presidential election. Meanwhile, the Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, on Friday said her office had opened a “death threat investigation” surrounding Trump’s comments about Cheney.While still in office, Cheney co-chaired the bipartisan special House committee that investigated Trump’s conduct on January 6, when extremist supporters of his stormed the US Capitol to try, in vain, to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory over him. She lost her Wyoming seat in 2022 as Trump supporters turned against her. Trump has called for her to be jailed for investigating him.Trump was in Arizona on Thursday evening, doing a sit-down talk with the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson, and he brought up Cheney in the context of her father, Dick Cheney, the former vice-president who was a hawkish architect of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 during the George W Bush administration. Trump has been critical of that war and has also criticized the current US president, Joe Biden, for becoming involved in Ukraine’s struggling defense against the invasion by Russia.“She’s a radical war hawk,” he said of Liz Cheney. Then said: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”Early on Friday, Cheney issued a stinging response on X.“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant. #Womenwillnotbesilenced #VoteKamala,” she posted.Trump made his comments on Thursday about Cheney after complaining that Democratic criticism of his campaign had fueled what according to authorities were two failed assassination attempts against him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMayes told Arizona’s 12News it was not yet clear whether Trump’s comment amounted to protected free speech or a criminal threat.“That’s the question, whether it did cross the line. It’s deeply troubling,” Mayes said, according to Reuters. “It is the kind of thing that riles people up and that makes our situation in Arizona and other states more dangerous.”Cheney has said she has never voted for a Democrat before but will do so “proudly” for Harris in this election to ensure Trump never holds a position of public trust again. Her father will join her in casting his ballot for Harris. More