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      Florida wants to let a rightwing group teach history to children. This is appalling | Nancy Jo Sales

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      In July, the Florida department of education announced that it had approved the use of content by PragerU Kids for the coming school year. PragerU Kids was recently described by Time magazine as “a resource for schools”. But it is only a “resource” because the state of Florida has deemed it so. PragerU is not an actual university. It has no accreditation. It is a conservative media company whose goal since its founding in 2009 has been to spread rightwing ideology to adults and children.And it has been incredibly successful at doing that. PragerU’s latest annual report says that the company’s self-described “edutainment” videos racked up more than 1.2bn views in 2022, with more than 7bn since its founding. Its content has been mostly available online, particularly on Facebook and YouTube, but now it is making its way into US classrooms with the promise of fighting the so-called “woke agenda”.PragerU makes no secret of its agenda. Its co-founder, Dennis Prager – a conservative radio talkshow host and writer who has been attacking progressive causes since the 1980s – was recently glib in responding to claims that PragerU “indoctrinates kids”. “Which is true,” Prager said in a speech to the conservative “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty. “We bring doctrines to children. That is a very fair statement. I said, ‘But what is the bad of our indoctrination?’”PragerU Kids’ cartoon videos for children as young as kindergarten age not only soft-pedal the history of slavery, racism, colonialism and police brutality – they show sympathy for them. In one video, Leo and Layla Meet Christopher Columbus, Columbus tells young Leo and Layla: “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world … Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”Another PragerU Kids video describes George Floyd, who was murdered by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, as a “Black man who resisted arrest”. Another features a cartoon version of the Black American educator and author Booker T Washington comforting white children by saying, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.” To which his young listener responds: “OK, I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff.”Another video says that British colonialism transformed India “in many positive ways”.PragerU Kids’ videos for teens often focus on sexuality and gender, promoting traditional gender roles in ways that could be considered anti-feminist. In one, How to Embrace Your Femininity, a young blond woman with perfect hair and makeup tells viewers: “Most gender stereotypes exist because they reflect the way that men and women are naturally different. And those differences aren’t bad … So don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad to fit stereotypes. Those people are just trying too hard to be cool.”And climate change denial? A PragerU video for kids compares pushing back against the science of the climate crisis to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising who fought the Nazis. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the initial funding for PragerU came from the Wilks brothers, petroleum industry billionaires.It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this content rightwing propaganda, which the state of Florida has now all but legitimized as suitable learning materials for kids. This isn’t surprising in a state with a governor, Ron DeSantis, who has staked his political career on fighting “wokeness”. Alarmingly, however, Florida may be just the first of other states to follow in adopting PragerU’s anti-progressive materials. The company is now reportedly going through the process of being approved as an education “resource” in other states. Which is next? Texas? Oklahoma? And how many more after that?American education has never been perfect. I can remember, as a teenage girl growing up in Florida in the 1970s, being frustrated by the fact that my public high school curriculum included almost nothing on the history of women in the US – which hasn’t changed so very much since then. It was also appalling how little time we spent on the history of slavery, the history of Native people or the contributions of people of color to our society, which schools still fail to teach.But the adoption of PragerU Kids content by a state’s department of education is something on another level. This is admittedly indoctrination, propaganda full of lies and half-truths specifically designed to manipulate and mold young minds to serve a rightwing political agenda. You could argue that this has always been the problem – a problem that critical race theory and its proponents have been trying to combat and change.The reaction against this has been swift and severe, and the embrace of PragerU Kids could be just be one of the many unseemly moves we’ll be seeing in the continued fight to finally teach the truth in American schools.
      Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno More

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      Prosecutor suspended by DeSantis says he’s a ‘weak dictator’ seeking attention

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      Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, suspended the top prosecutor in Orlando on Wednesday, claiming “dereliction of duty” on crime. In return, the prosecutor said DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was a “weak dictator” acting undemocratically and for political reasons.Monique Worrell, the ninth judicial circuit state attorney, is the second Democratic prosecutor DeSantis has removed.Last year, the governor suspended Andrew Warren of Tampa over his supposedly “woke” agenda, including pledging not to enforce a 15-week abortion ban and supporting gender transition for minors. A legal battle over that decision continues.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Worrell said: “Elected officials are being taken out of office solely for political purposes … Under this tyranny, elected officials can be removed simply for political purposes and by a whim of the governor and no matter how you feel about me, you should not be OK with that.“This is simply a smoke screen for Ron DeSantis’ failing and disastrous presidential campaign. He needed to get back in the media in some positive way. That would be red meat for his base. And he will have accomplished that today.”Trailing Donald Trump in the Republican primary, and having recently replaced his campaign manager amid reports of a campaign in free-fall, DeSantis made his announcement about Worrell on a break from the presidential trail.“Worrell’s practices and policies have too often allowed violent criminals to escape the full consequences of their criminal conduct, thereby endangering the innocent civilians of Orange and Osceola counties,” DeSantis’s office said in a statement.In an executive order, DeSantis accused the second African American elected state attorney of “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction”.The 15-page order accused Worrell of allowing practices and policies that “systematically permitted violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious-juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade incarceration”.It alleged such practices and policies included “non-filing or dropping meritorious charges or declining to allege otherwise provable facts to avoid triggering applicable lengthy sentences, minimum mandatory sentences, or other sentencing enhancements, especially for offenders under 25 years old”.Worrell was also accused of overseeing low prison admission rates “for crimes involving lewd and lascivious behavior, which includes possession of child pornography and other sex crimes against children”.In his own news conference, DeSantis said that while prosecutors “do have a certain amount of discretion about which cases to bring and which not”, Worrell “abused that discretion”.DeSantis said he was nominating a former judge, Andrew Bain, to serve during Worrell’s suspension.Worrell told reporters: “If we are mourning anything this morning, it is the loss of democracy. I am your duly-elected state attorney for the ninth judicial circuit. Nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.“I am a fighter and I intend to fight. I will not be quiet. I will not sit down … I will continue to stand for democracy. I will continue to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. I am proud to tell you that this will not stop me from running for re-election. My re-election will continue.”Earlier this year, DeSantis and Worrell exchanged barbs over the case of Keith Moses, a 19-year-old believed responsible for the killings of three people, including a journalist and a nine-year old girl, in shootings in Orange county in March.According to reports, Moses’s criminal history includes eight felonies and 11 misdemeanor cases, all bar one having occurred while he was a juvenile. His only crime as an adult was possession of drug paraphernalia and cannabis, in 2021. Worrell’s office did not prosecute, due to the amount found.Following the shootings, DeSantis said Worrell’s office, which announced in May that it would seek the death penalty against Moses, “may have permitted this dangerous individual to remain on the street”.“You have to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said, adding: “[The] state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people and that’s the way that you somehow have better communities. That does not work.”Worrell fired back, saying: “For this tragedy to be politicized, it’s shameful and we should all feel that way about it.“Painting a narrative that there’s something that prosecutors could have done to keep this individual off the streets is just not true.” More

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      DeSantis claims agents can tell traffickers from migrants in call for deadly force

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      The rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has sparked controversy by outlining a hardline border policy of deadly force despite acknowledging that drug traffickers could be difficult to distinguish from migrants crossing into the US.DeSantis, whose ailing campaign has failed to cut into the lead of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, said that under his direction as president, US law enforcement on the lookout for drugs would not mistakenly use lethal force on migrants because US agents would have “rules of engagement” similar to police or US forces in war zones like Iraq.In an NBC interview broadcast on Monday night, the Republican Florida governor was asked about a campaign-trail promise: “If cartels are trying to run product into this country, they’re going to end up stone-cold dead.”“How do you know you’re using deadly force against the right people?” his interviewer, Dasha Burns, asked.“Same way a police officer would know,” DeSantis said. “Same way somebody operating in Iraq would know.“You know, these people in Iraq at the time, they all looked the same. You didn’t know who had a bomb strapped to them. So those guys have to make judgments.”Data analysis by Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit, shows police killed at least 1,201 people in the US in 2022.John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, called DeSantis’s proposal “terrifying”.“That ‘same way in Iraq’ line is terrifying,” Pfaff wrote. “It’s an open embrace of any sort of false positive rate and the large-scale murder of innocent people. DeSantis really is really being quite openly murderous. (And imputing that same murderous indifference to police, as a compliment.)”Pfaff also pointed to a 2020 ruling in which conservatives on the US supreme court said the family of a 15-year-old Mexican boy shot dead by a US border patrol agent could not sue, because the shooting was a matter of national security.In Iraq, between the invasion in 2003 and the large-scale US withdrawal in 2011, American forces were often attacked with bombs either vehicle-borne, remote-controlled or carried or propelled by suicide bombers.The US defense department puts the US military and civilian death toll between 2003 and 2010 at 4,431. Iraq Body Count, a British non-profit, says 15,162, or 13%, of documented civilian deaths in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 were caused by US-led coalition forces.As a US navy lawyer, DeSantis deployed to Iraq in 2007, advising special forces. He has touted his military service, also at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, saying it sets him aside from the rest of the Republican field.But he has struggled to make his mark on the primary, falling further behind Trump despite the former US president’s criminal indictments and other forms of legal jeopardy.Amid a widely reported campaign reset, the hard-right governor, who has targeted LGBTQ+ rights, the teaching of race in US history and other progressive priorities, also attempted to show a softer side. Joined by his wife, Casey, to discuss their children and life at home, DeSantis told NBC he was “really good” at making waffles, adding that his children “actually do like the eggs”, as well as macaroni and cheese from a box.With his children, he said, “I’m very even keeled, but if I do raise the voice a little bit, they do, they snap to attention.”On the campaign trail, DeSantis has faced fierce criticism after using violent imagery, including a promise to “start slitting throats” among federal workers once elected.Discussing his hardline border policy, DeSantis said his proposal to authorise lethal force against cartels would be “similar to like if you’re in the military.“You have rules of engagement. Anyone that’s hostile intent or a hostile act, which … cartels are, you know, you would then engage with lethal force.“I think these cartels are basically foreign terrorist organisations. They are responsible for killing more Americans on an annual basis than any other group or country throughout the entire world. And yet, this is just happening, and it’s happening in communities all across the United States.”Hardline rhetoric about the border and law enforcement is common among Republican candidates. In office, Trump reportedly wanted to bomb cartel facilities in Mexico but was blocked by aides.DeSantis continued: “It really hit me when I was down in Arizona. You know, most of the border doesn’t have a wall, of course, but there was parts where there was a wall. And these guys are working on the wall. I’m like, ‘What are you doin’?’ They’re like, ‘We’re repairing the hole the cartels cut through the steel beams.’“So if you see that happening, and they’ve got the satchel of fentanyl strapped to their back, you use deadly force against them, you lay them out, you will see a change of behaviour. You have to take the fight to the cartels; otherwise we’re going to continue to see Americans dying.” More

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      DeSantis says Trump ‘of course lost’ in 2020 when pressed in interview

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      “Of course” Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Ron DeSantis said in an interview broadcast Monday – after being pressed on the issue.Appearing on NBC, the Florida governor and nearest challenger to Trump for the nomination in 2024 was asked: “Yes or no – did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”DeSantis said: “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on 20 January every four years is the winner.”His interviewer, Dasha Burns, said: “If you can’t give a yes or no on whether or not Trump lost –”DeSantis said: “No, of course he lost!”Burns said: “Trump lost the 2020 election?”DeSantis said: “Of course! Joe Biden’s the president.”Trump continues to lie that the 2020 election was decided by voter fraud, even after the former president was last week indicted on four criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn the result.Despite those charges and 74 others over hush-money payments and retention of classified records, and despite the prospect of more election-related charges in Georgia, Trump leads DeSantis by more than 30 points in most polling averages and by healthy margins in early voting states.DeSantis’s campaign is widely seen to be tanking. He and the rest of the Republican field have struggled to find a way to attack Trump, given his hold on the party. Discomfort when asked to say Biden won in 2020 or to condemn Trump’s lie is widely seen to be a symptom of that malaise.DeSantis told NBC the 2024 election should be a “referendum on Joe Biden’s policies, and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future”.If it is, he said, “We will win the presidency, and we will have a chance to turn the country around.“If, on the other hand, the election is not about 20 January 2025 [inauguration day] but 6 January 2021 [the day of the deadly attack on Congress by Trump supporters] or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it is a referendum on that, we are going to lose, and that’s just the reality.”A Trump spokesperson, Steve Cheung, told NBC: “Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.”Another Trump aide, Liz Harrington, said: “If you think Joe Biden got 81 million votes, you’re an idiot. If you’re just saying that, you’re either a coward or corrupt. Either way it’s disqualifying.”In 2020, Biden received 81,282,916 votes to 74,223,369 for Trump. Biden won the presidency in the electoral college by 306-232, the result by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.DeSantis did offer Trump support, echoing his claim that his proliferating legal problems are the results of political persecution.DeSantis also said the 2020 election was not a “good-run election”.“But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back,” DeSantis added. “You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.“But here’s the issue that I think is important for Republican voters to think about: Why did we have all those mail votes? Because of Trump turned the government over to [former Covid task force leader Dr Anthony] Fauci.“They embraced lockdowns. They did the Cares Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country.”As NBC pointed out, Florida has long allowed voting by mail.In the interview, scheduled to air on NBC Nightly News on Monday night, DeSantis was also asked about new standards for teaching history in Florida schools, which have proved controversial for saying some Black people benefited from being enslaved.DeSantis said: “We’ve been involved in education, not indoctrination. Those standards were not political at all.”Kamala Harris, the vice-president, has attacked DeSantis on the issue.Asked about criticism from Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the US Senate and a rival for the presidential nomination, DeSantis said: “Don’t take that side of Kamala Harris against the state of Florida. Don’t indulge those lies.” More

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      Trump claims protective order against him would infringe his free speech rights – live

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      From 19m agoAhead of an afternoon deadline for his lawyers to respond to a request from special counsel Jack Smith for a protective order in the January 6 case, Donald Trump said such a ruling would infringe on his free speech rights.From his Truth social account:
      No, I shouldn’t have a protective order placed on me because it would impinge upon my right to FREE SPEECH. Deranged Jack Smith and the Department of Injustice should, however, because they are illegally “leaking” all over the place!
      The former president’s attorneys have until 5pm eastern time to respond to the request from Smith, who asked for the protective order after Trump on Friday wrote, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” on Truth.Smith wants Trump’s attorneys barred from publicly sharing “sensitive” materials including grand jury transcripts obtained during the January 6 case’s pre-trial motions.Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s trial on charges related to keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, appeared to disclose an ongoing grand jury investigation in a court filing today, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump, and faced scrutiny last year for a decision in an earlier stage of the Mar-a-Lago case that some legal experts viewed as favorable to the former president, and which was later overturned by an appeals court.Cannon’s is presiding over Trump’s trial in Florida on charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who alleges the former president illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and conspired to hide them from government officials sent to retrieve them.In response to the charges filed against him over January 6, Donald Trump’s lawyers have argued the former president did not know that he indeed lost the 2020 election. But as the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports, that defense may not be enough to stop prosecutors from winning a conviction:Included in the indictment last week against Donald Trump for his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election was a count of obstructing an official proceeding – the attempt to stop the vote certification in Congress on the day his supporters mounted the January 6 Capitol attack.The count is notable, because – based on a review of previous judicial rulings in other cases where the charge has been brought – it may be one where prosecutors will not need to prove Trump knew he lost the election, as the former president’s legal team has repeatedly claimed.The obstruction of an official proceeding statute has four parts, but in Trump’s case what is at issue is the final element: whether the defendant acted corruptly.The definition of “corruptly” is currently under review by the US court of appeals for the DC circuit in the case titled United States v Robertson. Yet previous rulings by district court judges and a different three-judge panel in the DC circuit in an earlier case suggest how it will apply to Trump.In short: even with the most conservative interpretation, prosecutors at trial may not need to show that Trump knew his lies about 2020 election fraud to be false, or that the ex-president knew he had lost to Joe Biden.“There’s no need to prove that Trump knew he lost the election to establish corrupt intent,” said Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House judiciary committee in the first Trump impeachment.“The benefit under the statute is the presidency itself – and Trump clearly knew that without his unlawful actions, Congress was going to certify Biden as the winner of the election. That’s all the corrupt intent you need,” Eisen said.Donald Trump’s team has clearly been paying attention to Ron DeSantis’s NBC News interview, with a spokeswoman attacking the Florida governor for his comments dismissing the ex-president’s false claims about his 2020 election loss:Speaking of Republican presidential candidates, NBC News scored a sit-down interview with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and got him to again say that his chief rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.DeSantis, whose campaign for the White House is in troubled waters, had been vague on the issue until last week, when he started saying publicly that he did not believe the former president’s false claims about his election loss.Here he is saying it again, on NBC:In his final days as vice-president, Mike Pence faced pressure from Donald Trump to go along with his plan to disrupt Joe Biden’s election victory. Pence refused his then-boss’s request, and the two running mates are now foes, but could Pence potentially be a witness in the trial on the federal charges brought against Trump over the election subversion plot?In an interview with CBS News broadcast over the weekend, Pence, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said he has “no plans to testify”, but added “people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth.”Far from being worried about what Trump’s former deputy might have to say about him, the former president’s attorney John Lauro said his legal team would welcome Pence’s testimony.“The vice-president will be our best witness,” Lauro said in a Sunday appearance on CBS, though he didn’t exactly say why he felt that way. “There was a constitutional disagreement between the vice-president [Pence] and president Trump, but the bottom line is never, never in our country’s history, as those kinds of disagreements have been prosecuted criminally. It’s unheard of.”Good morning, US politics blog readers. Mere days have passed since special counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump for his failed effort to reverse his 2020 election loss, but the two sides are already battling over what the former president can say and do. On Friday, Trump wrote “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”, prompting Smith’s prosecutors to request a protective order that would restrict what the former president’s legal team can share publicly, saying it is necessary to guard people involved in the case against retaliation.Trump’s lawyers have until 5pm eastern time today to respond. It’s an early salvo in what is expected to be the lengthy process Smith’s case is expected to take, and which will undoubtedly hang over the 2024 election, where Trump is currently the frontrunner. Either way, the former president has not been shy about sharing his thoughts regarding the unprecedented criminal charges leveled against him, and do not be surprised if today is no different.Here’s what else is happening:
      Voters in Ohio are gearing up to decide on Tuesday whether to approve a Republican-backed proposal that will raise the bar for changing the state’s constitution. What this is really about is a ballot initiative scheduled to be put to a vote in November that would enshrine abortion protections in the state’s laws, but which would face a much more difficult road to passage if tomorrow’s vote succeeds.
      Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose presidential campaign appears to be floundering, just sat down for an interview with NBC News, where, among other things, he reiterated that he believed Trump lost the 2020 election.
      Joe Biden is hosting World Series winners the Houston Astros at the White House today, before heading to the Grand Canyon. More

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      ‘These people are diehard’: Iowa Trump supporters shrug off indictments

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      From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.“Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t. It’s probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?”After pleading not guilty on Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as “a persecution of a political opponent”.“If you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him,” he said.There are plenty who buy that line in Iowa and the rest of Trump-sympathetic America.With Trump likely to spend a good part of the next year in one courtroom or another, after being indicted in New York, Florida and Washington on an array of charges and with more expected in Georgia before long, his supporters are more than willing to believe it is a plot to keep their man out of the White House.One of them is Tom Schatz, a Howard county farmer on Iowa’s border with Minnesota.“They’re bringing the charges against Trump so he can’t run against Biden. Biden is so damn crooked. We’ve never had this kind of shit in this United States, ever,” he said. “Democrats are gonna keep riding [Trump’s] ass and bringing shit up against him. They don’t quit. They just don’t like him because he’s draining the swamp, and they don’t like that.”Schatz, like many Trump supporters, sees the prosecutions as part of a pattern of establishment attacks, from Congress twice impeaching the then president to the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. The same message is hammered home on rightwing talk radio stations that are often the background to the working day in rural America.On the day of Trump’s arraignment, Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst on AM 600 WMT in Iowa, was energetically telling his listeners, without irony, that the prosecutions undermined confidence in the electoral system.“We are up against something we have never dealt with before,” he said. “They don’t care how reckless this is, the Democrats. It doesn’t bother them the disruption that they are doing to faith in the judicial system, faith in our elections, something that he’s talked about all the time. How can you have a fair election when one candidate has soon to be four criminal trials against him? Specifically timed to happen during the election.”Shaffer, who works for the state as a river conservationist as well as running a family farm, has watched Trump’s support rise, fall and then bounce back.Some support drained away to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, after several prominent candidates backed by the former president lost in the midterm elections last November. For a while, polls put DeSantis ahead of Trump in a primary matchup. Shaffer said his county party was split, although at the time he still thought Trump would win because his supporters had more energy and commitment.“Now I think it’s even more so. When I speak up for DeSantis at our Republican monthly meeting, these people wearing their Trump hats don’t want to hear it. It’s such a foregone conclusion. Trump is going to get the nomination easily, whether he’s in a jail cell or in the courtroom. These people are that diehard,” he said.Shaffer sensed the renewed vigor in Trump’s campaign when he met the former president days before the latest indictment, at the Iowa Republican party’s annual fundraising Lincoln Dinner. Trump was among 13 candidates there to argue their case before meeting party activists one on one. So was his former vice-president, Mike Pence.“I feel bad for Pence because there were 500 people in line to see Trump and there were literally five people in the room for Pence,” said Shaffer. “Trump has that connection. Most of our group was there just to meet him.”Shaffer said the line to see DeSantis was longer than for Pence but nothing like the one for Trump, which he took as further evidence that the rightwing Florida governor’s moment had passed and that the the prosecutions helped revive Trump’s candidacy.“I think DeSantis is awesome. I think he’ll make a great president someday. But as long as Trump is running, there’s no way he’s gonna get the nomination,” he said.The polls back Shaffer’s view. But among some Howard county voters, support for Trump is more ambivalent.Tom Schatz’s son, Aaron, was a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He voted for Obama but didn’t like Hillary Clinton. He was much more enthusiastic about Trump four years later but has cooled on him since.For all that, Schatz believes the former president is the victim of a political conspiracy.The dairy and corn farmer said he was more concerned about inflation, rising interest rates and falling prices for his milk than the details of the 45-page indictment laying out Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He preferred to see the charges as evidence of a double standard in which the Washington establishment failed to properly investigate Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden for alleged crimes.Asked about Trump’s part in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Schatz brushed it off as a bad thing but not very different from what he said were Democratic politicians encouraging the protests and riots that followed the killing of George Floyd three years ago.“They burned down Minneapolis. Were they prosecuted for that?“ he asked. “Trump acted poorly when he lost, I’ll give them that. But they’re just out to get anything they can on him. Part of me thinks that all they’re going to do is unite the Trump followers. I think they’re doing more harm than good.”Shaffer, too, is not persuaded by the detail of the indictment.“I still don’t like a lot of what Trump was doing, a lot of what he was saying. People know he didn’t handle himself very well from election day through January 6. But does it rise to the level where he should go to jail because he said something in a phone call? I think we’re more adult than that,” he said.Suspicions about the barrage of indictments even extends to the chair of Howard county’s Democratic party, Laura Hubka, a US navy veteran and ultrasound technologist at the city’s hospital who has no like of Trump.“I think that they’re going after him because he’s running,” she said. “Did he break laws and is he a bad guy? Yeah. But I think if he just went into the sunset, and blathered on Truth Social, maybe they would just have left him alone. But once he ran again, people thought he’s popular enough to win again and we need to do something to stop him. They had to do something, I guess.”The impact of Trump’s coming trials, and the evidence they lay bare, remains to be seen. But it might be expected that while diehard supporters will remain loyal through it all, those who voted for him once but then swung to Biden four years later have little reason to switch back.Trump was defeated by 7m popular votes and 74 electoral college ballots in 2020, and some Democrats are calculating that he will struggle to overcome that deficit with the additional baggage of indictments, trials and possibly even prison time.Yet the polls show the US’s two most recent presidents tied, including in key swing states such as Michigan.“Every time they indict him, he goes up in the polls,” said Shaffer. “I think the Democrats are so arrogant. Some of the liberals believe that, just like they did in 2016, he’ll never be elected, he’ll never get in again. Don’t be too sure about that.”For her part, Hubka cannot believe that the polls are that close even if the election is more than a year away.“I feel like he could be running from prison and it’ll still be a tight race with Joe Biden. That’s what scares me,” she said.Which raises a question about why the Democrats are not doing better in a former stronghold like Howard county.Shaffer says Howard county is doing well in many ways, and thanks to Biden. He said the presidents’s Inflation Reduction Act has pumped money into the county, paying to renew infrastructure, including bridges and roads. Shaffer’s conservation work for the state is well funded thanks to the federal government, and that brings financial benefits to farmers. In addition, the push for green energy has resulted in a proliferation of very profitable windmills.“We’ve got a lot of windmills around here and it’s a huge benefit. Each one of those is valued at a million dollars and we’re able to tax them and it puts money in our budget so we can build bridges and roads and have money for the schools,” said Shaffer.“I’ve got one of my farmers has four windmills and all the roads and lines. He gets $185,000 a year from it. He built a new home. He’s got new tractors. The whole northwest part of the county used to be a more depressed area. The windmills pumped in a lot of money “Shaffer is surprised that, with so many Republicans denouncing renewable energy, the Democratic party isn’t making more of an effort to claim credit for the benefits in Howard county.Hubka blames the Democratic national leadership, which has been accused of overly focusing on parts of the country where a majority of the residents have a college education, unlike rural Iowa.“They need to get some balls, be more bold. I also feel like they just are writing off the rural counties,” she said.But Hubka is still there, campaigning and waiting to see what happens if Trump goes to prison. She bought a gun before the last election because of so many threats from Trump supporters.“I was really very scared that I was going to get shot or hurt. It’s calmed down a bit in that sense. But who knows what happens if he gets thrown in jail,” she said.Around the corner from her hospital, a flag hanging outside a house might be read as a warning: “Trump 2024. The rules have changed.” More

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      in US Politics

      Outrage after DeSantis says he’d ‘start slitting throats’ if elected president

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      Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelley, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.On Friday a major poll by the New York Times and Siena College in the first state to vote, Iowa, put DeSantis 24 points behind.DeSantis is widely seen to be trying to reset his campaign, having fired staffers including a conservative writer who created a video ad containing a Nazi symbol.But the governor has not noticeably retooled his hard-right rhetoric.DeSantis made his comment about slitting throats at an event in the second state to vote, New Hampshire, last Sunday.“On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on day one and be ready to go,” DeSantis said. “You’re going to see a huge, huge outcry because Washington wants to protect its own.”Complaints about the so-called deep state – notionally an embedded government of officials and bureaucrats Republicans claim exists to thwart their agenda – is a common feature of far-right campaigns, from Trump down.Should he return to power, Trump is widely reported to be planning an administrative cull of the federal bureaucracy, seeking to instal loyalists as part of a process his close ally Steve Bannon has long called the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.DeSantis has used his “slitting throats” line before, last week telling the rightwing columnist John Solomon he wanted to appoint a defense secretary who would “slit some throats” and be “very firm, very strong”.Condemning DeSantis’s remarks, Kelley, the president of the AFGE, said: “Federal employees – over a third of whom are veterans now wearing their second uniform in service to their country – have dedicated their lives to serving their fellow Americans.“They support our military, provide healthcare to our nation’s veterans, enforce our laws, safeguard our communities, deliver benefits to America’s most vulnerable citizens, keep our skies safe for air travel, protect human health and our environment, and much more.“These public servants deserve respect and commendation from our nation’s leaders. No federal employee should face death threats from anyone, least of all from someone seeking to lead the US government. Governor DeSantis must retract his irresponsible statement.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere seemed little chance of that, from a candidate who has made harsh rhetoric and confrontational poses cornerstones of a campaign nonetheless failing to outflank Trump on the right.In Florida, Daniel Uhlfelder, a former Democratic candidate for state attorney general, pointed to controversies over DeSantis’s past when he said: “This guy started his legal career at Guantánamo Bay.”As a US navy lawyer, DeSantis was posted to the US facility on the coast of Cuba during the wars after 9/11. He has angrily denied being present at torture sessions, calling one former inmate’s claims “totally, totally BS”.In Congress on Thursday, the Virginia Democratic senator Mark Warner said “inflammatory, violent language” like that used by DeSantis in New Hampshire “can lead to very real, very dangerous consequences”.Kelley of the AFGE agreed, linking DeSantis’s violent imagery to deadly far-right violence.“We’ve seen too often in recent years – from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to the sacking of the [US] Capitol on January 6 2021 – that violent anti-government rhetoric from politicians has deadly consequences.”In Oklahoma City, 168 people including 19 children were killed when a bomb planted by the rightwing extremist Timothy McVeigh destroyed a federal building. More than 500 people were injured.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack on the Capitol, in which Trump supporters sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden. More than a thousand people have been charged in relation to the riot, Trump among them after being indicted by the special counsel Jack Smith this week.Everett said: “Any candidate who positions themselves within that shameful tradition has no place in public office.” More

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      Orlando Magic NBA team donated $50,000 to Ron DeSantis super PAC

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      The Orlando Magic NBA team has donated $50,000 to a super PAC supporting Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid.According to Federal Election Commission records, the Never Back Down super PAC received the donation made by the basketball team on 26 June. Further results showed the team making donations to other political causes in past years, with $500 going to Conservative Results in 2016, $2,000 to Maverick PAC USA in 2014 and another $500 to Linda Chapin for Congress in 2000.In an initial statement to Popular Information, a Magic spokesperson said: “We don’t comment publicly on political contributions.” However, in a later follow-up statement, a spokesperson clarified the donation, saying that the check was “dated/delivered on May 19”, five days before DeSantis declared his presidential bid.“This gift was given before governor DeSantis entered the presidential race. [It] was given as a Florida business in support of a Florida governor for the continued prosperity of Central Florida,” the spokesperson said.According to Never Back Down’s website, the super PAC describes itself as a “grassroots movement to elect governor Ron DeSantis for president in 2024”.The donation has drawn criticism online, particularly given the Magic’s claims of supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion all year long” and DeSantis’s culture wars in which he announced plans to block DEI programs in state colleges among other legislation targeting minority and marginalized groups including LGBTQ+ communities.The Orlando Magic team is under Amway North America, a multi-level marketing firm co-established by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos.Over the years, the DeVos family has made multiple donations to conservative organizations. In 2006, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation made a $540,000 donation to Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based organization that opposes same-sex marriage and abortions, HuffPost reports. In 2008, Richard DeVos donated $100,000 to Florida4Marriage, a group that campaigned to add a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s just a sacred issue of respecting marriage,” Richard DeVos said in a 2009 interview in reference to his donation. More