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      Confusing language on gerrymandering proposal will stay on Ohio’s ballot

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      Ohio voters will see misleading language when they go to vote on an anti-gerrymandering proposal this fall after the state supreme court greenlit the deceptive wording written by Republicans.The Republican-controlled Ohio ballot board approved the language on Wednesday in a 3-2 party-line vote, two days after the Republican-led state supreme court voted 4-3 to correct various defects the justices found in what the board had already passed. The court’s ruling, however, did not require the ballot board to rewrite some of the most significant portions of the amendment.If enacted, the proposal – Issue 1 – would strip lawmakers of their power to draw the boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts and hand it to a 15-person bipartisan independent commission composed of regular citizens. The panel would be constitutionally prohibited from distorting district lines to give one party an unfair advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering.But the language the Ohio ballot board approved for the ballot says that the panel would be “required to gerrymander”. Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the 5 November amendment, sued last month, asserting the language “may be the most biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional” the state has ever seen.In an unsigned opinion, the state supreme court said the language was acceptable. Because the panel would be required to draw districts that roughly represented the partisan results in recent statewide Ohio elections, it was not misleading to say that the panel would be required to gerrymander, the court majority said. “They mandate the new commission draw district boundaries that give a political advantage to an identifiable group – Republicans in some districts and Democrats in others,” the court said.The high court ordered two of eight disputed sections of the ballot description to be rewritten while upholding the other six the issue’s backers had contested. The court’s three Democratic justices dissented. “What the ballot board has done here is tantamount to performing a virtual chewing of food before the voters can taste it for themselves to decide whether they like it or not,” Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote for the dissent.Republicans, who currently control the mapmaking process, drew districts that gave them a distorted advantage and repeatedly ignored prior rulings from the state supreme court to redraw the lines.State senator Paula Hicks-Hudson, one of the two Democrats who sit on the ballot board, told reporters after it met: “This was done and it was created for the main purpose of hoodwinking voters.” The Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, who chairs the board, did not take questions from the press after the vote.In Monday’s opinion, the high court’s majority noted that it can only invalidate language approved by the ballot board if it finds the wording would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters”. The majority found most of the language included in the approved summary and title did not do that but merely described the extensive amendment in detail.The two sections that justices said were mischaracterized involve when a lawsuit would be able to be filed challenging the new commission’s redistricting plan and the ability of the public to provide input on the mapmaking process.The exact language of the constitutional amendment will be posted at polling locations. More

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      Pelosi criticises McConnell for failing to hold Trump accountable over January 6

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      Nancy Pelosi has criticised Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate minority leader, for failing to hold Donald Trump accountable for inspiring the violent January 6 mob to attack the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives whose office was vandalised in the attack, also told Semafor she felt sorry for McConnell, who has endorsed Trump’s current campaign for the White House despite being repeatedly insulted by the former president.McConnell “knew what had happened on January 6”, Pelosi said.“He said the president was responsible and then did not hold him accountable.”She added that she and other congressional leaders unsuccessfully begged Trump to send in the national guard while the mob besieged the building.In the days after the riot – which resulted in five deaths at the time, with four police officers killing themselves in the following seven months – McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events”.However, he voted to acquit Trump in a Senate trial after the House had impeached Trump for a second time. A Senate conviction, which needs a two-thirds majority to pass, could have barred Trump from holding elective office again. In the event, 57 senators – including just seven Republicans – voted to convict, 10 short of the numbers needed.McConnell’s vote contradicted his belief that Trump was guilty, according to the book This Will Not Pass, by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” the book quotes McConnell as saying, adding that he also said holding Trump to account should be left to the Democrats. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” the book says he told two associates.Explaining the contradiction, McConnell apparently told a friend: “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference.”In 2022, McConnell criticised the Republican National Committee for censuring Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, GOP House members at the time, over their role in a Democrat-led congressional investigation into January 6. Kinzinger and Cheney have since left Congress and are among several prominent Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy.“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said in response to the censure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked if she had any advice for McConnell – who will step down as the GOP leader in November but will remain in the Senate – Pelosi said: “I feel sorry for Mitch McConnell.”Pelosi has not always been so scathing. She issued a generous tribute when McConnell announced his decision to step down from the Senate leadership, saying: “Mitch McConnell is to be recognized for his patriotism and decades of service to Kentucky, to the Congress and to our country. He and I have worked together since we were appropriators … While we often disagreed, we shared our responsibility to the American people to find common ground whenever possible.”Trump has frequently targeted McConnell for abuse and has aimed racial slurs at his wife, Elaine Chao, who served as transportation secretary in his administration.The former president has variously described McConnell as a “broken-down crow”, a “stone-cold loser” and a “dumb son of a bitch”. More

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      JD Vance is factually challenged – and morally deficient | Margaret Sullivan

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      There was a moment when JD Vance could have turned back from the story.After the vice-presidential candidate posted on social media about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets – based on the flimsiest of supposed evidence – a Vance staffer checked it out.“His staff member asked Springfield’s city manager if the claim was true,” according to new Wall Street Journal reporting. The city manager responded clearly: “I told him no … I told him these claims were baseless.”Then and there, Vance could have deleted the post, which had already done damage. He could have disavowed it and tried to limit the harm.Nothing doing. He left the post up and Donald Trump immediately took it from there. As nearly 70 million people watched, the former president blasted the lie out to the world at the presidential debate.We know what followed: not just viral memes and hip-hop songs that feature the words: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”It was far worse. Bomb threats plagued Springfield’s hospitals, and officials closed schools. Racist rhetoric circulated, harming the lives of Vance’s own constituents – he is, after all, an Ohio senator.Innocent people were portrayed as villains. Despite all the Trump campaign’s trashing of “illegals”, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are largely there legally, through a temporary protected status, as the Guardian recently reported. Local business owners say they have been a welcome addition to the city’s workforce.But Vance is fine – more than fine – with having turned rumors into real damage.He told CNN that he is willing “to create stories” to focus the media’s attention on his and Trump’s relentless, though often false, message about the harm that immigrants are doing to American society – and of course to blame Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, at every turn.Vance’s rejection of the chance to take down his original post speaks volumes about how he and Trump operate. And his doubling down by asserting that making up lies is acceptable should be a red-alarm warning – yet another – about a second Trump term. There are so many.The ugly episode reminds me of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway’s remark to NBC News’s Chuck Todd soon after the 2016 election. As Trump spread ego-driven nonsense about the unprecedented size of his inaugural crowd – and insisted that his press secretary Sean Spicer do the same – Conway offered a blithe defense.Spicer, she said, was merely providing “alternative facts”.“Look, alternative facts are not facts,” Todd pointed out. “They’re falsehoods.” Or, as the mainstream media has finally brought itself to say: they are lies.Nearly eight years later, the Trump team is even bolder about lying, expressing that practice not just as defensible but a necessity. It spreads hatred so efficiently.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis chapter is sad – even tragic – for many reasons. The continual rejection of truth by some of the most prominent people in public life does real damage, not only to innocent people’s lives and to a community’s safety, but more broadly to our society and democracy.One bit of heartening news emerged amid all this ugliness. As the Wall Street Journal reporters explored the original rumor about pets in Springfield, a Vance spokesperson came up with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by her Haitian neighbors.But when a reporter checked it out by going to Anna Kilgore’s house, she told him that her cat, Miss Sassy, had returned a few days after having gone missing.Imagine that: not stolen, not eaten, Miss Sassy was found safe – in Kilgore’s own basement.Afterwards, with the help of a translation app, Kilgore did the right thing: she apologized to her Haitian neighbor. That apology was a touch of human decency amid the ugliness.Don’t look for any such thing from Vance or Trump. They have no regrets, and – on the contrary – take all of this as proof that their methods are working very well indeed.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      With their lies about Haitian immigrants, Trump and Vance have reached a new low | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      During his debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September, Donald Trump proffered the outrageous lie that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating residents’ pets. He wasn’t alone in promoting this little bigoted nugget, either. Earlier that day on X, formerly known as Twitter, JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, had already pushed the idea that Springfield’s residents “have had their pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants”.Vance subsequently tripled down on the falsehood, even later admitting to CNN: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”Behold, the political lie. We’re not talking about spin, which bends the truth to something usable. We’re dealing with an outright fabrication. None of what Trump and Vance are saying about the Haitian community is true. Not a single bit of it. The Haitian community of Springfield is there because its members have been granted temporary protected status, a US government program that allows them to live and work legally in the United States for a defined period of time. And none of them have been known to eat your pets.But there is something almost refreshing in Vance’s moment of honesty about his own dishonesty. In an era where cynicism prevails, it feels almost naive to believe in something, and Vance and Trump are showing us they do believe! But what they believe in is the power of spreading the most shocking, contemptible and brazen lies possible to secure their political victory.What’s a little lie, after all, if it helps their cause? Or, as Vance put it on X: “don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.”The luxury of the political lie, however, is that the tellers of the lie never have to live directly with the consequences of their actions. But others do.On 12 September, Springfield’s city hall was forced to close because of a bomb threat, and all Clark county buildings, including the offices of the department of job and family services, the common pleas court, and the board of elections, were similarly closed “out of an abundance of caution”.By Friday, four other schools had been evacuated due to bomb threats, which similarly emptied the bureau of motor vehicles and the Ohio Southside license bureau. Then, on Saturday, two hospitals, the Springfield regional medical center and the Kettering Health Springfield medical center, were also forced into lockdown. By Sunday, Springfield’s Clark State College received emailed threats of violence and subsequently moved all its classes online for a week due. The local Wittenberg University was also threatened with a mass shooting, forcing it to cancel all its events on Sunday and move classes online for Monday.When Monday rolled around, two more of Springfield’s elementary schools, the Simon Kenton elementary school and Kenwood elementary school, also had to be evacuated “based on information received from the Springfield Police Division”, the Springfield city school district announced. The city of Springfield also axed its CultureFest, the city’s annual celebration of diversity. At a press conference, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, announced that he is deploying the Ohio state highway patrol to schools in Springfield after they received nearly three dozen bomb threats since late last week.Fox News and Trump’s partisans on the media responded to this harrowing turn of events by emphasizing something that DeWine said during his press conference. The bomb threats had thus far (thankfully) been hoaxes, and many of them seemed to originate abroad. “We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions,” the governor said.What Trump’s supporters fail to mention is that Trump and Vance created the conditions for these hoaxes to happen in the first place. But, true to form, it seems they would rather blame shadowy foreigners instead.You can’t blame foreigners for the arrival of armed neo-Nazi members of the Blood Tribe, an extremist North American white supremacist group that marched through Springfield in August while carrying swastika-emblazoned flags. You can’t blame foreigners for a member of the Blood Tribe addressing a Springfield city commission meeting days later, telling Rob Rue, Springfield’s mayor: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” You can’t blame folks overseas for the fact that Springfield’s Haitian church has been vandalized twice in one month. You can’t blame foreigners for the increased racism that many Haitians are reporting.Springfield’s already vulnerable Haitian community (particularly after a tragic traffic accident in August that left an 11-year-old boy dead) is now living on a razor’s edge. Fleeing Haiti for their lives, members of his community currently live as if their “temporary protected status” has been summarily taken away from them while they live in the United States, where they are supposed to be safe.Meanwhile, the work they perform sustains the Springfield’s businesses and can be felt far beyond. Springfield’s Haitians are legally employed in local microchip manufacturing and Amazon fulfillment centers. Your Toyota may have an axle fabricated at the hands of a member of this community, and that salad you’re eating may have been packaged by them at a Dole Fresh Vegetables in Springfield.Springfield has seen a substantial increase in Haitian immigration in recent years. A city of 58,000 is hosting 12,000 to 15,000 newcomers. That puts pressure on city services while also adding to the city’s tax revenue. Time and proper planning can pave a path of prosperity forward for everyone.On the other hand, a new Black population moving into a largely white town is a huge temptation to those who want to stoke division. It looks like a windfall. Spin a lie about immigrants and their barbarism and you get to hate on Democrats, the media and immigrants, simultaneously.But at the heart of it is a lie, a cowardly invention that you knowingly want others to promote. That basic fact ought to reveal the salient truth of today’s political lie. If Trump and Vance can’t take responsibility for their actions now, why would anyone think they could take responsibility for the country later?

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US House will vote on funding bill as shutdown deadline nears

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      The US House will vote Wednesday on a government funding bill that appears doomed to fail, with less than two weeks left to prevent a partial shutdown starting 1 October.The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced Tuesday that the chamber would move forward with the vote, despite vocal opposition from members of his own conference. The announcement came one week after that opposition forced Johnson to delay a planned vote on his bill, and the speaker has only faced more resistance in the days since.Donald Trump has increased pressure on Johnson to reject any funding measure unless it includes “election security” provisions, a stance that the former president doubled down on hours before the vote.Johnson’s proposed bill combines a six-month stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote.“It’s very, very serious stuff, and that’s why we’re going to do the right thing,” Johnson said Wednesday. “We’re going to responsibly fund the government and we’re going to stop non-citizens voting in elections.”Critics of the Save Act note that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, and they fear such a law would hinder legitimate voters’ efforts to cast their ballots. House Democrats remain overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal, and only a few of them are expected to support Johnson’s bill on Wednesday.“Speaker Johnson must reject the most extreme voices in his party and quick move toward a four corners agreement so we can avoid a costly Republican-led shutdown,” said Pete Aguilar, the House Democratic caucus chair, on Wednesday. “The American people want to see an end to the chaos and division.”Given Republicans’ narrow House majority and Democrats’ widespread opposition to the bill, Johnson can only afford a handful of defections within his conference on Wednesday. But a number of hard-right Republicans have already indicated they will vote against the bill, as many of them have rejected any kind of continuing resolution amid demands for more budget cuts.Hard-right Republicans worry that, once the vote fails on Wednesday, Johnson will turn his attention to passing a more straightforward continuing resolution without the Save Act attached, although the speaker has dismissed those concerns. Asked on Wednesday about his next steps if the bill failed, Johnson deflected.“Let’s see what happens with the bill,” Johnson told reporters. “We’re on the field in the middle of the game. The quarterback is calling the play. We’re going to run the play.”Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-right Republican congresswoman from Georgia, attacked Johnson’s strategy as a “classic bait and switch that will enrage the base.“Johnson is leading a fake fight that he has no intention of actually fighting,” Greene said Tuesday on X. “I refuse to lie to anyone that this plan will work and it’s already [dead on arrival] this week. Speaker Johnson needs to go to the Democrats, who he has worked with the entire time, to get the votes he needs to do what he is already planning to do.”Trump, who has championed baseless claims of widespread non-citizen voting, has has similarly insisted that the SAVE Act must be congressional Republicans’ top priority before election day.He said Wednesday on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form.”But even if Johnson could get his bill across the finish line in the House, the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has made clear that the proposal faces no chance of passage in the upper chamber. In a floor speech delivered Wednesday, Schumer reiterated that only “bipartisan, bicameral cooperation” would prevent a shutdown next month.“For the last two weeks, Speaker Johnson and House Republican leaders have wasted precious time on a proposal that everyone knows can’t become law. His own Republican Conference cannot unite around his proposal,” Schumer said. “I hope that, once the speaker’s [continuing resolution] fails, he moves on to a strategy that will actually work: bipartisan cooperation. It’s the only thing that has kept the government open every time we have faced a funding deadline.”At a press conference on Tuesday, McConnell issued a severe warning to House Republicans that a shutdown so close to election day could jeopardize the party’s standing with voters and thus cost them seats in Congress.“The one thing you cannot have is a government shutdown,” McConnell said. “It would be, politically, beyond stupid for us to do that.” More

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      More than 100 ex-Republican officials call Trump ‘unfit to serve’ and endorse Harris

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      More than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials on Wednesday endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a joint letter, calling Donald Trump “unfit to serve” another term in the White House.Former officials from the presidential administrations of Republicans Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, George W Bush and Donald Trump, as well as Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voiced their support for Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election. They were joined by some former GOP members of Congress.The letter said: “We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious, and steady leader.”It went on: “We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be president.”Among the signees were former defense secretaries William Cohen and Chuck Hagel, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, respectively. Others include William Webster, a former CIA and FBI director under the Reagan and first Bush administrations, as well as Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director under the younger Bush and the Obama administrations.“We firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump. As president, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding document,” the letter added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPointing to Trump’s involvement in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, his “susceptibility to flattery and manipulation” by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, and “chaotic national security decision-making”, the former officials called Trump unfit to serve again as president or in “any office of public trust”.The former officials also pointed to Harris’s support for Nato and Israel, as well as her commitment to signing the bipartisan border security package that Republicans blocked, and her pledge to appoint a Republican to her administration as reasons for their endorsement.Several former Trump officials who signed the letter include Mark Harvey, a former special assistant to the president, and Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security.In recent weeks, a handful of Republicans have crossed party lines to endorse Harris, including the former Virginia representative Barbara Comstock. In an interview with CNN, Comstock explained her decision, saying: “After January 6, after Donald Trump has refused for four years to acknowledge that he lost [the 2020 election], and his threats against democracy, I think it’s important to turn the page.”Other Republicans who have endorsed Harris include Alberto Gonzales, a Republican attorney general who served under the W Bush administration, the former Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, as well as Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham and communications director Anthony Scaramucci. More

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      ‘Racism is embedded in our society’: how attacks on immigrants in Ohio highlight US disinformation crisis

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      In recent weeks, racist conspiracy theories about immigrants have dominated the election cycle. High-ranking Republicans have doubled down on unsubstantiated rumors about Black and brown migrants, tapping into anxieties that immigrants are responsible for increased crime in US cities.During last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump echoed a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” the Republican nominee said.And in response to a question about high costs of living, Trump alluded to viral rumors that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were taking over a Colorado apartment complex. “You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently.”Both claims are completely untrue.Experts argue that the spread of such disinformation amplifies existing xenophobic beliefs within the American psyche as a means of political gain. “It’s so dangerous when people with a platform are repeating these very fabricated rumors,” said Gladis Ibarra, co-executive director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “These are very much part of a large coordinated strategy to continue to demonize our immigrant neighbors. It’s undermining the values of our nation and historically what people have said this nation stands for.”Misinformation (inaccurate information that is spread unknowingly) and disinformation (false information that is meant to mislead) are widely shared via social media platforms, despite a push for fact checking and accuracy since the 2016 presidential election. The phenomenon of inaccurate news still occurs at alarming rates as people’s online algorithms are largely driven by their political biases, according to Jeffrey Layne Blevins, a journalism professor at the University of Cincinnati.“[The algorithm] is merely designed to keep users engaged,” Blevins said, referring to metrics such as how long a person looks at content or shares it in their feed. “And what tends to engage most people? Things that outrage them or piss them off.”Blevins added that rightwing figures share disinformation in hopes of “outraging people on the political right”, especially during an election cycle. Such content is accepted as truth by those online who already share rightwing beliefs themselves. “It creates an echo chamber of sorts,” he said. “When public figures who share your political beliefs post content like this – people are more likely to accept it at face value.”Republicans at all levels of government have linked immigrants to instances of violent crime, including drug smuggling and assault. During his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, Trump claimed Mexicans crossing the US southern border were “rapists”, “bringing drugs, bringing crime”. He began the construction of a wall along the border – among other anti-immigrant policies – to deter “large sacks of drugs [from being thrown] over”. During this election cycle, Trump has said that undocumented people are “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”, despite immigrants being significantly less likely to commit crimes than US-born citizens.The demonization of immigrants is a repeated move by lawmakers to secure votes, said Germán Cadenas, an associate professor at Rutgers University who specializes in the psychology of immigration. “Immigration is really not as divisive as some politicians are trying to make it out to be,” he said, as 64% of Americans believe immigration is beneficial for the country. “It’s a tactic that has been used historically to mobilize voters who feel threatened.”For centuries, Cadenas said, politicians built policy around the stereotype that immigrants are a “threat” to US identity and safety. Anti-immigration laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Immigration Act were among the first to curtail US immigration based on nationality. The Chinese Exclusion Act came largely after high-ranking union members warned of a “Chinese invasion” that would steal white, American jobs. Similarly, US senators advised their fellow legislators to “shut the door” on immigrants as a migrating population would “encroach upon the reserve and virgin resources” of the US, before the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act.Fast forward to the early 2000s, as states such as Arizona passed laws allowing local law enforcement to target anyone they believed was in the country without documentation. Arizona Republicans called arriving undocumented people an “invasion that must be stopped” and a “national security threat”, a political tactic to encourage support of the controversial bill.Politicians also attempt to etch out a voting bloc by passing anti-immigrant policies. “Historically, these stereotypes, these falsehoods, have [then] been used to mobilize voters to elect policymakers who are going to make anti-immigrant laws and policies.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven as most Americans have a positive view of immigration, Cadenas said: “Racism and xenophobia are deeply embedded in our society and our psychology.” A study by Cadenas and Elizabeth Kiehne found that white US adults are most susceptible to the core stereotype of Latino immigrants being a threat.“The anti-immigrant rhetoric is less about convincing than about amplifying and strengthening beliefs that are already held,” Cadenas said. “It takes large efforts to unlearn these problematic beliefs and biases.”Disinformation about immigrants has consequences, Cadenas and Ibarra said. “Across the nation, a number of states have an ‘anti-immigrant policy climate’,” Cadenas said, meaning those states pass laws that make the lives of immigrants harder.“A small minority of folks who are threatened by immigration are electing policymakers who are crafting policies that are negative towards immigrants,” he added “These policies trickle down to housing. They trickle down to the way that authorities deal with immigration at the local level. These policies trickle down to healthcare and the kinds of access to health and mental health that immigrants have.”In Aurora, Venezuelan residents of the aforementioned apartment complex have said they feel unsafe after the rumors of a gang takeover and they fear being stereotyped as criminals.Springfield has received more than 33 bomb threats since Trump’s statements at the debate. Its city hall was evacuated, along with some local schools. Springfield hospitals are also on alert, and Haitian immigrants say they have received several threats. “People that are hardworking, contributing to our communities, are not the danger, Ibarra said. “The danger is all of these violent ideologies that are being fueled by the people that repeat these lies, by the people that go on social media and on TV and continue to repeat them.” More

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      AOC calls the US Green party ‘not serious’ – can it be more than a ‘spoiler’ in the election?

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      American politics often has wild deviations from the norms of other major democracies and one of the most striking differences is set to be on display in this year’s election – the performance of its domestic Green party.There are elected Greens at the national level in the UK, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and Australia, sometimes helping form governments, and yet the US Green party has only ever had a handful of state-level representatives (it currently has none) and has never had a federal election winner.Of about 500,000 elected positions in the US, from school boards and township supervisors to the presidency, the Green party holds just 149. There’s little indication there will be an influx of left-leaning Greens in November’s elections, which will include local and state polls, as well as the headline presidential race in which Jill Stein is the party’s nominee for a third time.“It’s been a story of complete failure,” said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who argued the most consequential Green party impact has been as “spoilers” helping Republicans in close elections, such as Ralph Nader’s campaign in 2000 and Stein’s in 2016. There’s a small chance such a scenario could play out again in this year’s tight contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. One poll this month had Stein leading Harris among Muslim-American voters in three key swing states of Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, Middle East Eye reported.“Normally the Greens aren’t important but they were in 2016, they cost Hillary Clinton a couple of blue wall states, and they were in 2000,” Sabato said. “Why vote for them when Democrats are also concerned about climate change? All you’re doing is helping Republicans. Without them we might not have had the Iraq invasion, we might not have had Donald Trump.”Others are more sympathetic, pointing to the winner-takes-all nature of US politics and the well-funded machinery of the two-party system that makes it hard for third parties, including the Green party and the Libertarian party, to break through. Notably, however, the UK’s Green party did win four seats in first-past-the-post Westminster elections in July.“It is difficult for small parties to make way in the United States because of the undemocratic electoral system,” said Christine Milne, former leader of the Australian Greens, which was in coalition with the ruling center-left Labor party between 2010 and 2013.“Proportional representation systems provide opportunities for small parties to be elected which has been key to the growth of the Greens around the world.”Under Stein, the US Green party has complained of a duopoly but aimed most of its attacks at Democrats, accusing the party of supporting a genocide in Gaza and holding rallies with signs reading “Abandon Harris”.“The simple fact is there is very little policy daylight between these two candidates,” Stein said following last week’s debate between Trump and Harris. Stein added that Harris “chooses the softer approach to fascism of capitulating to endless war and corporate rule in exchange for half a billion in campaign contributions.“What we saw on Tuesday [last week] were two candidates striving to outbid the other’s promises to push us towards a new world war and accelerate the climate emergency.”Such a stance has dismayed some who sought to build the Green party as an alternative to the two major parties. “To me this election is the choice between fascism and keeping democracy alive so it’s almost unfathomable to me that people can think the parties are the same,” said Ted Glick, a progressive activist who was a long-standing Green party member and ran as a Senate candidate for the party in New Jersey.“It’s scary to see so many people support Donald Trump and it’s hard to understand how someone as smart as Jill Stein can think this guy is the same as Kamala Harris.”Glick said he left the Green party in 2017 after becoming convinced the party needed to grow its base between presidential elections by focusing on states that are ‘safe’ for either of the two major parties, rather than battleground states. He said he was “shocked” when Stein said those who sought alliances with other progressives and independents, such as Bernie Sanders, were “sheepdogs for the duopoly”.“Bernie Sanders’s campaign more than anything else points the way to how we get strong, progressive alternatives in the US,” Glick said.“But the Green party became very narrow and rigid, a tiny party of true believers focused on ideological purity above all else. Back in 2004 there were 225 Green party members in elected office, now it’s 143 (the Green party has said it is 149). It’s a pretty dismal record for 20 years of existence.”Rather than ally with the Democratic left wing, Stein has instead been involved in a recent battle with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman from New York. “All you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram last month. “To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStein has responded by accusing Ocasio-Cortez of supporting genocide in Gaza and for “taking” a Green party policy in the Green New Deal, a resolution supported by some Democrats, formerly including Harris, for a massive investment in clean energy, jobs and healthcare. “Maybe it’s time to watch these parties die,” Stein, a doctor who has run for president in 2012, 2016 and now 2024, posted on X.This approach, as well as a comparative lack of focus on environmental issues – the US Green party has attacked the Inflation Reduction Act, a huge climate bill with elements of the Green New Deal that was passed by Democrats in 2022, as “relatively small” and a “tradeoff” with fossil fuel interests – and opposition to Nato is unusual among overseas counterparts.“The US Green party is attempting to go after the subset of voters on the left who don’t like the Democrats,” said Carl Roberts, a spokesperson at the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, affiliated with a German Green party that has been in the German federal parliament consistently since 1983 and currently supplies the country’s vice-chancellor and foreign minister.“I think this is quite out of step with other Green parties, who always center environmental concerns in their messaging and campaigns as one of their highest priorities,” Roberts said, adding, however, that “systemic” issues with the US political landscape are largely the cause of this difference.A US Green party spokesperson said the party had been “dismayed” by European Green parties’ “silence and complicity” over Israel and Gaza and that these parties have “relied too much on US corporate news media and seem to have swallowed falsehoods like the belief that Republicans are right and Democrats are left”.Democrats and Republicans do differ on climate, he said, but the Biden administration has taken “modest and inadequate measures” to deal with the crisis and it is “reckless and irresponsible to allow an expansion of drilling in the midst of a worsening global climate emergency”.“When Greens get elected to Congress some day, they’ll work with progressives like AOC and others on shared legislative agenda,” the spokesperson said. “The Green party didn’t pick an election-year fight with AOC, the reverse is what happened.”He added the solution to “spoiler” allegations would be ranked-choice voting, which has been mostly opposed by the main two parties.So, will Stein prove a factor in this November’s election? The Green party candidate, running with Butch Ware, is not on the ballot in around a dozen states and is polling at around 1% of the vote, a small but potentially significant total should certain swing states have razor-thin margins.“I doubt they will have an impact but nobody expected Jill Stein to do what she did in 2016, or for Trump to win,” said Sabato. “It was a perfect storm, and the storm is still raging.”Glick hopes his former party isn’t decisive in November. “Hopefully there will be a major drop off in their support when it comes to pulling the lever and preventing Trump getting back into office,” he said. “I hope they see the error of their ways. We need progressive alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, but this isn’t the way you do it.” More