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      North Carolina Republicans advance map to secure another seat in Congress

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      North Carolina Republicans in the state senate passed a new congressional map on Tuesday, intent on contributing more Republicans to the US Congress as the national redistricting battlefield widens.Currently, North Carolina has a 10-4 partisan split in favor of Republicans in Congress. The new map would result in an 11-3 split, replacing congressman Don Davis, a Democrat, with a Republican.State law does not give North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, a veto of redistricting legislation. The state house, controlled by a large majority of Republicans, will receive the redistricting legislation, and is expected to pass it quickly – likely on Wednesday, said Matt Mercer, communications director for the North Carolina GOP.The recourse for critics of partisan gerrymandering is to replace state representatives by winning elections, Mercer said. The maps are a product of the time, and the shoe has been on the other foot for North Carolina Democrats, he added.“I think Democrats are just kind of setting up this loser mentality where ‘we’re never gonna win’,” Mercer said. “Well, Republicans won in 2010, with maps that the Democrats specifically drew to give themselves more power. It’s about the moment, good candidates and good campaigns, and also convincing the voters of your choice.”Davis’s seat in the north-east corner of the state had already been precarious. Shifting as few as 3,152 votes in the state’s first congressional district would have given his Republican opponent, Laurie Buckhout, the victory in 2024, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.Davis’s term has been marked by bipartisanship, said state congressman Rodney Pierce, a Democrat representing counties in the district. Redrawing a map to force Davis out is an attack on bipartisanship, Pierce said. “What does it say to the public at large?” he asked. “What does it say to Republicans who may want to work across the aisle with Democrats? What does it say to Democrats?”Donald Trump won 50.9% of votes in North Carolina in 2024. Democrats hold half of its statewide elected offices, including the governor, secretary of state and attorney general. In 2024, 46% of votes for Congress went to Democratic candidates.State law – and a state supreme court controlled by Democrats – had prevented extreme gerrymanders in the past. But Republicans elected a majority of North Carolina supreme court justices in 2022.Buoyed by Rucho v Common Cause – a 2019 US supreme court case from North Carolina that ruled partisan gerrymandering was effectively legal – North Carolina immediately replaced a court-mandated congressional map. That move split the state’s delegation 7-7, with one drawn by Republican legislators that elected 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats in 2024.The loss of those three seats represents the entire margin of partisan control of Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans left the first congressional district in competitive territory, hoping to avoid a legal challenge on the basis of racial gerrymandering. The first district holds all eight of North Carolina’s majority-Black counties and has long been represented by a Black Democrat.But the US supreme court is considering a challenge to the Voting Rights Act that could effectively end protections from gerrymandering for Black voters.Much of the district is impoverished. About 45% of Halifax county residents receive Medicaid benefits, Pierce said. He would not expect a Republican to approach the problems of rural healthcare in poor, Black counties the way a Democrat might, Pierce said, quoting former North Carolina congresswoman Eva Clayton.“I’ll say what she says. It’s not that I don’t think that they’re capable of it. They certainly are. Will they do it is another question.” More

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      Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t block House vote to release Epstein files

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      The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Tuesday said he would not prevent a vote on legislation to make the Jeffrey Epstein files public, even as the chamber remained out of session for a fourth straight week.Johnson has kept the House of Representatives in recess ever since the shutdown began at the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September.That has had the knock-on effect of delaying the success of a legislative maneuver known as a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would make public documents from the federal investigation into Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking and died while awaiting trial in 2019. The justice department this year said he died by suicide, but Donald Trump and his officials have previously restated conspiracy theories that Epstein was at the center of a larger plot.The president opposes the release of the documents and called the controversy over them a “Democrat hoax”, but all House Democrats along with three Republicans have signed the petition, bringing it one signature away from reaching the 218-member threshold to trigger a vote.“If it hits 218, it comes to the floor,” Johnson told Politico in an interview. “That’s how it works: If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote.”It was speculated that the speaker could look for ways to undermine the petition. Earlier this year, Johnson backed efforts to block a discharge petition on legislation allowing proxy voting for new parents in the House.The final signature on the petition is expected to be Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat elected last month to fill her late father’s seat representing a district along the state’s border with Mexico. However, Johnson has refused to swear her in until the House reconvenes, which he says he will not allow until the government reopens.Grijalva has told the Guardian she believes that Johnson, a close ally of Trump, is attempting to delay the vote on the legislation concerning the Epstein files. But even if the bill is approved by the House, it will have to clear the Republican-controlled Senate and be signed by Trump to take effect.At a press conference earlier in the day, Johnson argued that the discharge petition was unnecessary because a House committee is conducting its own investigation into Epstein.“The bipartisan House oversight committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought, and much more,” he said. That investigation has resulted in the release of tens of thousands of pages related to the government’s handling of the case, including a salacious drawing Trump apparently sent Epstein for his birthday.In a statement, Democrat Ro Khanna, a co-sponsor of the discharge petition, called Johnson’s comments “a big deal”.“I appreciate Speaker Johnson making it clear we will get a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie and my bill to release the Epstein files. The advocacy of the survivors is working. Now let’s get Adelita Grijalva sworn in and Congress back to work,” Khanna said.The government shutdown entered its 21st day on Tuesday with no signs of ending. The Senate’s Republican leaders have held 11 votes on a continuing resolution (CR) that would approve federal funding through 21 November, but Democrats have refused to provide the support necessary for it to clear the 60-vote threshold to advance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe minority party has countered by demanding an extension of subsidies for Affordable Care Act healthcare plans, which will otherwise expire at the end of the year. They also want curbs on Trump’s ability to slash congressionally approved funding through rescissions, and the undoing of cuts to Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, that Republicans approved unilaterally early this year.The Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he is willing to negotiate over the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but only once the government reopens.Trump held a lunch at the White House with Republican senators in the afternoon, during which he delivered a rambling speech thanking them for their cooperation in which the shutdown was mentioned only occasionally.“From the beginning, our message has been very simple: we will not be extorted on this crazy plot of theirs,” Trump said. “Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats need to vote for the clean, bipartisan CR and reopen our government. It’s got to be reopened right now.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, dismissed the White House event as a “a mini pep rally” and pressed Republicans to negotiate.“Democrats were ready to work with the other side to get it done. But Republicans continue to act like these ACA premiums are not their problem,” he said. More

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      Biden’s ex-press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: ‘Why are Democrats not fighting back?’

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      When CJ Cregg exits the White House for the last time, a passing tourist asks her if she works there. “No,” she replies in the final episode of The West Wing, “No, I’m sorry I don’t.” The former press secretary casts a wistful glance back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, knowing life will never be the same.The evanescence of power is now familiar to Karine Jean-Pierre, who in real life served as White House press secretary for two and a half years under the presidency of Joe Biden. She was the first Black person, first out gay person and – born in the Caribbean to Haitian parents – first immigrant to hold the title.But the old saying that all political lives end in failure applies to their spokespeople too. Jean-Pierre spent her final months in the West Wing parrying questions about Biden’s mental acuity, an exercise that increasingly came to be seen as defending the indefensible. She watched as her boss’s legacy was undone, his numerous accomplishments eclipsed by his failure to prevent the return of Donald Trump.That the whole experience ended on a sour note is made clear by the publication of Jean-Pierre’s memoir Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. Its front cover offers an image of the White House, seen not through Cregg’s rose-tinted gaze but rather a cracked lens.The book explains Jean-Pierre’s decision to leave the Democratic party after two decades and declare herself a political independent. It was driven by profound disillusionment with a party leadership that she argues betrayed Biden, failed to strategically support Vice-President Kamala Harris and has responded in a “shockingly weak manner” to the authoritarian threat posed by Trump.In an interview at the Guardian’s office in Washington, Jean-Pierre explains that she was spurred to write by conversations with strangers unnerved by Trump’s power grab. “Some were Democrats, some Republicans, some I don’t even know what their party affiliation was and they would say to me, ‘What are we going to do? Why are Democrats not fighting back? Where’s their soul? We’re losing here. I’m scared, I’m worried.’“It was a constant me trying to reassure people or trying to give some words of encouragement or listening to what I was hearing and it made me think, oh wait, maybe there’s a way that I can have a voice in this moment.”View image in fullscreenThe fallout from the June 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Trump in Atlanta was the catalyst for Jean-Pierre’s political evolution. She writes that Biden’s “faint and hoarse” voice and bumbling performance were due to a cold. Within minutes her phone began “to blow up” with texts from reporters asking if the president had Covid-19 or was sick.That soon morphed into a narrative about his age and mental fitness, which Jean-Pierre argues the media had been building for a year while failing to apply the same standard to Trump. She ardently rejects what has now become almost conventional wisdom in Washington: that Biden was in inexorable decline and, by accident or design, White House aides tried to cover up his condition.“That night completely took me by surprise,” she insists. “Everything that I’ve said at the podium was true then and it continues to be true now. This is someone – President Joe Biden – that I saw day in and day out. Now, did he age? Yes. He aged. People saw what they saw and I saw what I saw.“Of course he aged. I’ve aged, we’ve all aged. We never denied that he was older and he was in his 80s. That’s something that we actually tried to own up to and did. His mental acuity for me never, ever came into question. I always thought this man was more than fit to serve.”View image in fullscreenIn Jean-Pierre’s view, the Democratic party, which had nominated Biden for re-election, lost its nerve on the basis of one debate and went into full panic mode. She describes a three-week “wrenching” ordeal where she witnessed the party “tear itself apart”. She felt “enraged” and “heartbroken” by the way in which a man who had given 50 years of public service was now being hung out to dry.She says: “When I saw the way Democratic leadership was behaving and treating him, it stuck out. I thought to myself, you have a whole different party – the Republican party – who are standing behind their guy 200%. It doesn’t matter what record he may have. They are saying to themselves, this is our guy – Project 2025, authoritarianism, the way they’re going to treat vulnerable communities – we’ll take that, we’re fine with it and we’re going to hold him up.”Jean-Pierre asserts that the former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom Biden considered a friend, led the charge against him. She learned from members of Congress that Pelosi was on group texts claiming that Biden needed to step aside. She writes that this was a significant “about-face” from Pelosi’s public praise for Biden’s record just months earlier.Jean-Pierre adds in the interview: “She wasn’t quiet about it; she was very vocal about it and she’s a force in the party. Look: 2023, coming out of the midterms, there was no red wave. It wasn’t as bloody or as horrible as people had thought it was going to be. No one publicly or privately said for him not to run. They gave him the space to make that decision.“If anything, leadership like Nancy Pelosi said he should run. There was support for him and so to do what was done to him, I thought, what’s going on? He had the right to make that decision. Every incumbent president has an opportunity to make that decision, especially coming from a successful presidency and a successful – in historical terms – midterm elections.”View image in fullscreenBut opinion polls showed widespread public concerns about the mental and physical fitness of Biden, the oldest president in US history, who in May this year was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer. Only diehard loyalists still think he could and should have served a second term, which he would have completed at the age of 86. Is Jean-Pierre among them?The ex-press secretary sidesteps the question and turns the focus on Trump. “I’m not going to go back in time. What happened, happened. He made his decision. We are where we are and my focus is truly on how do we move forward, what is the roadmap for getting out of this very much authoritarian regime that we seem to find ourselves in?“Looking at Project 2025, everything that they said very loudly and clearly that they’re going to do is now happening. Families are in danger, individuals are in danger, vulnerable people are in danger. I’m not brilliant for saying this because it’s been said in history: if they come after one group of people, they’re going to come after everybody. Everyone’s lives now and everyone’s livelihood is at stake.”Jean-Pierre does not watch her successor at the podium, Maga evangelist Karoline Leavitt, but is aware that her briefings contain a new battalion of rightwing influencers and Trump cheerleaders. “It’s not supposed to be ‘Dear Leader’ and only who he wants in the press briefing. If we did that, my goodness!”She is scathing about Democrats’ failure to meet the moment. She points, for example, to the disorganised Democratic response during Trump’s joint address to Congress, where members wore different colours and used different slogans, as evidence of a party that cannot even unite on messaging.Jean-Pierre urges: “Democrats need to do more. Democrats need to behave as the opposition party in this time. It has been seen and shown in history, when you are the opposition party, there are things that could happen that could benefit the country. There’s a reimagining that they could lean into and try to think about: OK, how do we do this different and better? In 2024 millions of people who came out and voted in 2020 for Joe Biden didn’t come out. There’s a problem.”Jean-Pierre accepts that, as the spokesperson for the leader of the Democratic party, she too should be held accountable. But she warns against taking the wrong lessons from the election. She argues that Democrats take Black women’s votes for granted while chasing “moderate white Republicans” and contends that, after elections, Black women’s concerns are often dismissed as “identity politics”.Democrats such as Rahm Emmanuel are taken to task for labelling the party’s brand as “toxic” and “weak and woke”. By using Republican talking points, she argues, Democrats betray their base and appear to lack the courage of their convictions.“One of the problems the Democratic party has is that we take whatever Republicans give us and we go down a rabbit hole,” she says. “So what they’re talking about woke? Don’t take the bait. You say, look, this is a big tent party, we care about everybody, everybody has a voice here. Don’t even say the word ‘woke’.View image in fullscreenJean-Pierre succeeded Jen Psaki as press secretary in May 2022 after previously serving as deputy press secretary and also working as a senior adviser during Biden’s victorious 2020 campaign. During Barack Obama’s first term, she was a regional political director.Independent also reflects on the barrier-breaking nature of her appointment. She states that she could not respond to critics with the same force as her predecessors for fear of being labelled an “angry Black woman”. She had to consciously “keep it cool” in the face of what she perceived as disrespect and undermining of her credibility.She also recounts being the target of negative stories planted in the press by her own colleagues. She claims a senior female White House official who “should have been my mentor” orchestrated a campaign in outlets such as Politico and the New York Post to push her out of her job because she asserted her autonomy. This hostility, she writes, was worse than anything she faced from the press corps.View image in fullscreenShe says in the interview: “To come after you in that way is sad and heartbreaking and disappointing. I focused on the job. I didn’t fight back in any stories. I didn’t even defend myself and so I thought it was an opportunity to lay out what I was experiencing and what it was like in my role as a first.”Jean-Pierre is making up for lost time with her young daughter and has no plans to run for elected office herself. But she hopes that her declaration of independence will help spur an essential conversation about the future course of the Democratic party and the country.“How do we move forward in a way that everybody feels like they’re being engaged, they’re being heard and they’re understanding that elections have consequences?” she asks rhetorically. “You have to come out and vote. You lose your voice if you don’t come out to vote. One of the problems that’s happening right now is people are fearful and that’s how dictatorship begins. That’s how authoritarian regimes start. They create this chaos and then this fear and we cannot be fearful in this moment.” More

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      Senate vote fails again as shutdown becomes one of the longest in US history

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      One of the longest government shutdowns in US history just got longer after the Senate again failed to pass a funding resolution after a majority of Democrats continued their pressure campaign after the No Kings nationwide weekend protests.The Senate vote fell for the 11th time with a vote of 50 to 43, with no new defectors from the Democratic side.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, has for weeks kept the House shuttered on an extended recess, and defended his strategy as necessary to push Senate Democrats into passing the House’s continuing resolution without policy additions. But Democrats have refused to support the measure without provisions addressing healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which are set to expire at the end of the year.Johnson, in a Monday morning press conference flanked by other Republican congressional leaders including Andy Harris, the House freedom caucus chair, said the reason for the shutdown was to appease Democratic voters, particularly putting blame on the No Kings rallies.“It is exactly why Chuck Schumer is pandering, in this whole charade. We’ve explained from the very beginning, the shutdown is about one thing and one thing alone: Chuck Schumer’s political survival,” Johnson said.The stuffed vote also came after a prominent Republican lawmaker, representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Monday morning criticized Johnson’s strategy, calling on the House to return to session immediately.“The House should be in session working,” Greene wrote on X. “We should be finishing appropriations. Our committees should be working. We should be passing bills that make President Trump’s executive orders permanent. I have no respect for the decision to refuse to work.”The criticism from Greene, who is aligned with the right flank of her party, is a noticeable crack in support for Johnson’s hardline approach from the GOP over an extended congressional recess. Since 19 September, when members last cast votes, the chamber has not been conducting legislative business, although members have staged press conferences.The shutdown, which began on 1 October, has become the longest full government shutdown in US history, and the third-longest when including partial shutdowns. If it extends past Tuesday, it will surpass the 21-day shutdown of 1995-96 to claim second place. Only the 35-day partial shutdown during Donald Trump’s first term, from December 2018 to January 2019, has lasted longer.The shutdown’s impact grew more severe on Monday as the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration began furloughing approximately 1,400 federal employees responsible for maintaining and modernizing the US nuclear weapons arsenal. Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, is scheduled to address the furloughs at a press conference in Las Vegas later on Monday, a spokesperson told the Guardian.Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, speculated on Monday, citing “friends in the Senate”, that the impasse might soon break.“I think the [Senate minority leader Chuck] Schumer shutdown is likely to end some time this week,” Hassett said in a CNBC interview. He reasoned that some Democrats had been reluctant to reopen the government ahead of last Saturday’s No Kings protests against Trump, which drew millions of demonstrators nationwide to rebuke corruption and authoritarianism. More

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      Trump nominee reportedly boasted of ‘Nazi streak’ in group chats

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      A Donald Trump nominee who is scheduled for a confirmation hearing this week told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and that holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated,” according to a report based on a private group chat.Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to serve as special counsel of the United States, a role charged in part with safeguarding federal whistleblowers from retaliation. His confirmation hearing is set for Thursday.Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans in a group chat that the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, which celebrates the civil rights icon, should be ended.“MLK Jr was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in the messages from early 2024, Politico reports. He also wrote that holidays commemorating Black people, such as Black history month or Juneteenth, should all be “eviscerated”, though he used an Italian slur for Black people.His comment about a “Nazi streak” came amid a discussion of a Trump campaign staffer who wasn’t being deferential enough to the founding fathers being white, Politico reported. Another participant said Ingrassia “belongs in the Hitler Youth”, to which Ingrassia responded: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”Ingrassia’s attorney, Edward Andrew Paltzik, told the outlet that the texts could have been manipulated or lacking context, though that if they were real, they “clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call Maga supporters ‘Nazis’”.Ingrassia, 30, has had several roles in the second Trump administration. He was a White House liaison to the justice department, then moved to the Department of Homeland Security. He was nominated in May to lead the office of special counsel, but his appointment was postponed. His critics have drawn on his public comments and inexperience for the role, as well as his support of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.Ingrassia was also accused of sexual harassment earlier this year, Politico reported. He has called the report about the alleged harassment a “vexatious political attack” and said it should be retracted.Politico reported last week on a trove of 2,900 pages of leaked chats from a Telegram group with young Republicans, in which the participants made racist comments, praised Hitler and celebrated rape.“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” said Bobby Walker, who was recently made chair of the New York division.The New York Republican state committee suspended the authorization of their young Republicans chapter after its members were implicated in the chat. More

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      The massive No Kings protests may mark a new American political posture | Moira Donegan

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      Over the past week or so, it seemed as if some Republican leaders were hoping that Saturday’s No Kings demonstrations – the marches and rallies hosted by a coalition of liberal groups across the country and worldwide – would turn violent. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, called them “Hate America” rallies, a moniker that was quickly picked up by other Republicans, and described the No Kings protests as a crucible of potential riots, representing “all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the antifa people”. “You’re gonna bring together the Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party,” he said. Tom Emmer, a representative for Minnesota, described the rallies as a product of the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic party. And Roger Marshall, a senator from Kansas, fantasized that the protests would require action by the national guard. Others, such as the attorney general, Pam Bondi, mused about who might be paying the protesters to show up – an idea that seemed to dismiss the notion that anyone might oppose Donald Trump’s agenda for principled, rather than cynical, reasons.At times they sounded almost wistful. Republicans, the president himself chief among them, have been fervently endeavoring to cast those who oppose their authoritarian consolidation of power as enemies – contemptible un-Americans who lack virtue, common values, or the protection of the law. In a world where it was once considered the height of inappropriate partisanship for Hillary Clinton to refer to a “basket of deplorables” among Trump voters or Barack Obama to mourn the conservatives who “cling to guns or religion”, it barely registered as news on Thursday when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News: “The Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”But no matter how fervently and how deeply the Trump regime appears to hate the American people, the No Kings protests that brought millions to the streets on Saturday suggests that the American people hate them even more. In the densely packed streets of cities from New York to Austin to Oakland to St Augustine, Florida, the massive protests took on a tone of jubilant contempt, with Trump and his various lackeys derided on signs and in effigies, with jokes that ranged from the high-minded to the vulgar. At a protest in San Francisco, I saw one man holding a sign that quoted Walt Whitman, walking near a woman making a vulgar reference to Trump’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. A number of people donned inflatable character costumes – I saw a starfish, a teddy bear, two unicorns, a rooster and a pickle. They originated from Portland’s protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and national guard deployments as cheeky ways to mock the Trump administration’s claims that the city was “war-torn” and in need of armed invasion. If the anti-Trump resistance movements of his first administration were characterized by a kind of self-serious righteousness, those of the No Kings era have devolved into irreverence and humor. At times I was reminded of a peculiar feeling I have sometimes had, in the desperate hours after funerals or bad breakups, when I have been crying for so long that I find I’ve started laughing.The No Kings protests have been criticized for their capaciousness and indefinite agenda, and it is true that the demonstrations are the product of several large liberal groups and bring together people whose politics and inclinations would not ordinarily mix. At San Francisco’s protest, I saw the signature red rose of the democratic socialists, the Aztec eagle of the United Farm Workers, and a gold lamé sign held aloft by a largely unclothed man who declared himself a libertarian – in addition to a motley mix of men wearing the powdered wigs and tricorn hats of the founding fathers, women with white feathered sleeves and hoods posing as bald eagles, and a staggering number of people who wrapped themselves in the American flag.The hodgepodge of symbolism might reflect the chaotic and disorganized nature of the anti-Trump coalition – which, containing as it does the majority of the US’s 340 million people, is rife with contradictions. This has long been a problem for the Democrats: the party fears that their tent is too big, their base is too far from swing voters, and the coalitions of Obama and Joe Biden are too fractured and fragile to ever be maintained. But Trump has perhaps created a new kind of glue that can hold together a different kind of political movement: something that vast swaths of the American people hate even more than they hate each other.Amid the density of references and imagery, No Kings might also indicate a new political posture being born: a left-liberal popular front that mixes principle with irreverence. The aspiration of No Kings, in a way, is to abolish itself – to rebuild, perhaps a little sturdier and more honest this time, the kind of constitutional system in which law and persuasion replace Trump’s model of violence and domination. To put it another way: the people at the No Kings rallies all agree that they want to restore the kinds of liberal-democratic conditions that will enable them to disagree with one another.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt any rate, the violence that the Trump regime seemed to long for did not materialize. In San Francisco, an organizer speaking into a megaphone urged attenders to ignore any pro-Trump agitators they might encounter, and to not engage with any federal agents. “If you see uniformed feds outside a building,” he warned the crowd, “it’s bait.” Before the marches, some seemed frightened of what might happen – whether Trump-aligned federal forces might crack down with mass arrests, or whether pro-Trump militias might instigate a fight. But the demonstrations seem to have been remarkably peaceful, even cheerful, avoiding provocations and meeting virtually no violence from Trump-aligned forces. In New York, an estimated 100,000 marchers participated in No Kings events across the five boroughs, and an official Twitter account associated with the New York police department reported that there had been no arrests of protesters.Trump appeared disappointed. On Saturday evening, after the marches had largely disbanded and the millions who had turned out to oppose him went home, he took to Truth Social, his proprietary social media platform, to post an AI-generated video of himself. In the cartoon, Trump – wearing a crown – flies a fighter jet over the No Kings protests, and dumps feces on the protesting citizens. It was a peevish, petulant little display of contempt – the kind of behavior that you would punish in a child but which has become bog standard for the president of the United States. He evidently wanted Americans to know that he hates them. The feeling is mutual.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?

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      Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More

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      No Kings protesters on their hopes for resistance movement against Trump: ‘If we lose momentum, we lose the fight’

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      Saturday’s No Kings protests brought millions to the streets across all 50 states in the latest demonstration against Donald Trump’s administration amid a government shutdown. But many protesters are already strategizing about what to do next.Some said continuing protests were a sign of vibrant civil resistance against the administration’s heavy-handed policies, which have challenged legal and constitutional norms in the US. They also discussed economic boycotts and strikes.Others were concerned it would take more Americans feeling direct impact to catalyze change. “I think we have to see the demise before it can turn around, sadly, but we’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Eric Stone, a 35-year-old from Oklahoma who attended the protest in Washington DC.Guardian reporters covered protests in Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago and Los Angeles and asked attendees why they showed up, what they are hoping to see from the resistance movement, and whether the Democratic party was an effective opposition party. Here is what they said:Washington DCMary PhillipsA Native American originally from the Omaha tribe in Nebraska and Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico who now lives in Washington DCView image in fullscreen“I think there are brilliant minds who are here today who know what bad legislation, bad policies, can do to our entire country, and what the future looks like if we continue down, not able to stop what’s happening and proceeding. These are all people from different walks of life, different skills and and levels of masteries in their own disciplines.“I believe the [leaders] who are vocal are definitely making waves and doing what they’re supposed to do, but I think there are others who are still on the fence. [There are] key issues that we need them to be 100% towards democracy, and it feels like they’re not. It feels like they are sticking to the old rules. But we have all set a set of new rules right now and they need to look at what those rules are to make up their decisions in their backrooms. And then speak on the floor what those are, what we are fighting on the streets.“So No Kings, I think, is the pinnacle of what we’re so close to right now, having a king. Once martial law goes into place, we would be under that threat, and we don’t know what the end of it looks like really, other than changing the constitution, which I think is easier done than we thought ever could be. This movement may turn into more than No Kings. It may turn into saving lives, period – saving our life, saving our freedom to be United States citizens because anybody right now can be told you’re not a citizen any more.”Laura BuckwaldNo Kings protesterView image in fullscreen“People are waking up because right now, it’s affecting people immediately in their day-to-day lives. It’s affecting our health insurance. It’s affecting our ability to just live our lives as we choose to live them. The government is trying to tell us how to run our lives, and that’s just not acceptable in the United States. As far as leadership is concerned, we’ve been disappointed on the leaders that we should have, particularly in Congress, and we’re hoping that this gives them the courage to stand up. We’re proud of what they’re doing now right now, not opening up the government until we have proper healthcare covered. But they need to do a lot more doing that, so I hope they do.“Just yesterday, I got a notice from my health insurance company about my premiums going up – they’re almost doubling. They put straight out that they are not going to cover any healthcare that is for transition purposes, so our transgender Americans will not have coverage under the plan that I have. That is totally unacceptable. I teach young people and I’ve encountered trans youth, and they have told me that without this healthcare, it makes some of them want to commit suicide.“I think [what Republicans have done has] been despicable. They have cut so many programs just so that they can give tax breaks to rich people, make billionaires trillionaires … Our taxes aren’t going to go down. We’re not going to see any benefit from it and we’re going to have the same taxes, if not more, and we’re going to have less in benefits that we have paid for. This is a tyrannical regime in office right now and they need to resign. They can’t handle the job. They’re incompetent and they’re mean. They’re cruel to people in the United States and that is anti-American. It is un-Christian and it’s unacceptable.”Mike ReidA former Republican from Maryland who switched parties during Bill Clinton’s administration. He said he hasn’t voted for Trump in any electionsView image in fullscreenReid was holding up a sign of the founding fathers with “No Kings” on it.“It’s actually my wife’s idea, but these were the original No Kings gang and they’re the ones who first had said ‘no kings in America.’ And then on the back we have the original Bill of Rights, which has the part about freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion and the right of people to peaceably assemble. So we and the people here are standing up for what America is supposed to be … We’re the ones who represent what real America is. Those rightwingers and the White House and Congress – they are betraying everything this country was supposed to be about, and that’s why people, common people, have to stand up.“I think that some Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom [in] California and JB Pritzker in Illinois are doing very well. They’re standing up. And I mean, there is a limit to what they can do with the bloc, they’re totally out of power right now. But state government, Democratic state governors, some of them are standing up – not all unfortunately, but some of them.“I grew up in a Republican family. I was Republican up until about 20-some years ago, back when the party was about limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual rights. They have betrayed all of that. And the party that today calls themselves Republicans – they’re not Republicans, they’re fascists, and they’re betraying my great-great-grandfather who served in the Union army in the civil war.”Eric Stone, 35Identifies as an independent and said most of his family are Republican Trump supportersView image in fullscreen“My family is Maga; my family is Trump supporters. I grew up in a small town where they didn’t want a dictatorship. They didn’t want people who were disrespectful to women. They didn’t want people who were racist and all these hateful things. And yet here they are supporting and cheering on this man like they want him to be the second coming of God. And now that I’m out here protesting this, it’s like … everybody in that circle drank the Kool-Aid. “I got people losing their jobs [around me because of the shutdown]. They’re scared that they can’t pay their bills. They’re stressing … and they’re everyday people who work their jobs and work for this country to keep it running. And we’re going to tell them they shouldn’t be paid for, what for? “I support what they stand for. For the most part, you’re not going to agree with everybody on everything. However, I feel like Democrats, they don’t have, for a lack of better terms, the balls – they’re too weak, because we always end up in this situation. The Democrats just want to talk for long hours and go on TV and do these events, which is beautiful … It’s powerful. However, you have access to that building right there. We’re standing right next to the Capitol building. Go do something about it.”Shawn SkellyFormer assistant secretary of defense for readiness in the Biden-Harris administration (only the second-ever out trans person to hold a Senate-confirmed position) and the co-founder of Out in National Security. She was a speaker at the rallyView image in fullscreen“The United States military is made up of people from every background, from every part of the country, to include immigrants and to include LGBTQ people. [Trump officials have] decided that you can’t allow transgender service members to serve. [These members have] been in command of units flying aircraft. They are high-end engineers. They are small unit leaders. None of them have blown up or failed or been drummed out of service because of the fact that they’re transgender. Each and every one of our 2.1 million service members are American heroes in their own way. You can’t have people in that institution while you’re trying to make trans people the enemy and the reason for oppression in that way.“There should never be a shutdown, frankly, and that it’s lasted this long is the fault of the [Republican] party, the political party that has all the levers of power right now … and a very willing supreme court to let them do pretty much what they want to do, pending appeal. This is democracy in action right here. This is our constitution and our civil rights in action. It’s about ‘we the people’. As Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, it’s government of the people, by the people, for the people. This is America at its best.” Los Angeles, CaliforniaGinny Eschbach, 72Turned out on Saturday for her 42nd protest since Trump’s inauguration. She wore a SpongeBob SquarePants costume to be ‘whimsical’View image in fullscreen“I have felt that the movement needed a face for a long time, someone to rally the troops, who we respect and admire. But who is that? I do not know.” She suggested it might possibly be a figure like Barack Obama. “There’s all these groups and these protests all coalesce, but I’m afraid it’s too fragmented. There needs to be one movement.”“This is not a joke,” she said of Republicans’ resistance to negotiate with Democrats over the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. “If they defund people’s health insurance by not continuing the subsidies, it’s gonna be a mess. Even if they got that through, our healthcare is being so eroded by cutting science funding. There’s already reports of rural hospitals closing down. This is just going to spread through the country. It’s going to be a nightmare.”Eschbach said she will definitely continue to protest – sometimes she will attend two to three a weekend. She is currently canvassing to help pass Proposition 50 in California, part of the plan to counter Texas’s gerrymandered maps. “I’ll just carry on,” she said. “I write postcards, I go to protests, I talk to people.  I’ll do whatever I can.”Talia Guppy, 46Social worker in Los AngelesView image in fullscreenGuppy comes from a long tradition of social justice activism – her parents marched with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. “The least I can do is be out here,” she said.Among the leaders stepping forward, Guppy mentioned her state’s governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, who is widely expected to run for president in 2028. She credited the governor with going “head to head and toe to toe” with the president. “Sometimes we have to fight fire with fire,” she said. “We can’t always take the easy road.”Guppy said she has many friends who are federal workers and have told her they want Democrats to keep fighting to preserve access to affordable healthcare and to constrain the Trump administration. “I’ve been protesting since the first big raid on June 6,” she said, and vowed to continue. “We’ve been doing as much as we can anytime that we can because it has to continue. If we lose the momentum, then we lose the fight.”Taylor G, 55 No Kings protesterHe said some people have stepped up to try to check Trump – the unions, certain universities and among Los Angeles’s entertainment industry, including Jane Fonda.  But he said he has been disappointed so far by the lack of response from the “dotcom” companies, such as Facebook and other tech giants. “All of those companies just seem to be going along with it because it’s good for their business,” he said. “People have to get way out of their comfort zones,” he added, suggesting the left-leaning movement needed more leaders willing to venture into less friendly territory and try to persuade people who may not be ideologically aligned with Democrats. “Even though we might not agree on everything, we could agree that what’s going on in the country is not good,” he said.  He added that he has friends who have left the country because of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He approved of the Democrats’ hardball approach to the government shutdown and would absolutely be willing to walk off the job. “I think that we need to do a lot more like what they do in Europe, a general strike, meaning everybody walks out, not just Democrats,” he said. Chicago, IllinoisOscar Gonzalez, 28From the west side of the cityView image in fullscreen“My parents are immigrants. I love them to death. 
I want Chicago to be a safe city. I want America to be a great nation for everybody. No human’s illegal, so I’m here to embody that and show everybody that we have all the power to make change.“We need a Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Martin Luther [King], we need somebody to embody. Fred Hampton, you know, we’re in Chicago.”Abel Mebratu, 43From Rogers Park, a neighborhood in ChicagoView image in fullscreenMebratu was carrying a sign depicting Silverio Villegas-González, who was killed by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) last month. “[I’m here] giving a voice to a voiceless man that has been taken from us – unfairly and unlawfully – and his kids need justice. “I’m originally from Ethiopia and I consider myself a Chicagoan. We have values that we share and when our values are attacked, we come together. We’re led by our values and what we stand for and what we want to pass on for our next generation.” Lindsay Weinberg, 43No Kings protesterView image in fullscreenWeinberg held a sign referencing her great-grandmother, who died in the Holocaust.“It’s really personal to me when I hear people getting grabbed off the streets and taken away … I mean, many, many victims of the Holocaust don’t know what happened to their relatives, but I happen to know that [my great-grandmother’s] bones are in a mass grave … that’s important history for people to remember.“People are getting disappeared. 
People are hiding. People are being murdered. People are being wounded. 
People are experiencing trauma. It’s escalating.”Atlanta, GeorgiaGeoff Sumner, 68A retired military veteran from Stone Mountain, GeorgiaView image in fullscreen“There don’t seem to be any [leaders of the resistance] at the moment, so we’re it. Right now we got nobody. Where are they? [Chuck] Schumer-crats? Hakeem [Jeffries]? We got nobody.”Sumner doesn’t agree with what the Democrats are doing regarding the shutdown. “We don’t need to negotiate with fascists … You want our votes? Stop all this fascism. Stop all this arresting people in the street … It’s a hell of a lot more than healthcare, ain’t it?”“We gotta get the Trump regime out – all of them out. We gotta do it fast before they consolidate whatever they’re doing … How far should we go? That’s up to every individual. But I think people in America are in denial or they don’t know how bad it’s fixing to get.”Jake Riley, 44Project manager from AtlantaView image in fullscreen“I would say AOC, first of all, she would be a leader if I had to pick somebody. She would probably be up there. But as far as the protesters and on-the-ground people? I think it’s better if it’s more of a loose alliance of people. I don’t really think we have a leader structure.“After the rally, we have to get [everyone] running for every office imaginable. There’s lots of contests that go unchallenged.”Joshua Wilson, 22Multimedia producer from Lawrenceville, GeorgiaView image in fullscreen“I work with a lot of government officials at my job as clients. With the shutdown happening, I’ve been getting less work … and less work. Recently my boss politely told me, ‘Hey, you know, if you don’t want to come to work’ … I can just stay home on certain days because of it. I do think Democrats are doing the right thing, but granted it does affect me and affect me in a big way. So I’m willing to risk my paycheck for doing what’s right.“I feel like this [protest] is actually something. We should be joining organisations, reading up, getting educated and knowledgeable about the situation, or at least listening to outlets. You know, at least trying to join the community.” More