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      Why Ron DeSantis’s slavery curriculum is so dangerous | Saida Grundy

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      In the mid-20th century, a generation after the civil war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to rebrand the image of slavery. The group, composed of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, was fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy. It sought to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, and to glorify the “lost cause” of white southern insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government in slavery’s defense. The place that served as ground zero for the UDC’s revisionist-history effort? Schools.In one of its most successful campaigns, the UDC called for the widespread adoption of textbooks that trivialized the horrors of slavery. As a result, a 1954 middle school textbook titled History of Georgia claimed that a typical slave owner “often had a barbecue or picnic for his slaves. The [enslaved] often had a great frolic. Even while working in the cotton fields they sang songs.” (It is no coincidence that the book was published the same year the NAACP won the supreme court case to desegregate public schools.) And while most contemporary school texts have since moved towards acknowledging that slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era were reprehensible, organized efforts against teaching accurate racial history continue to occur.The UDC’s legacy of revision emerged again in Florida recently, when the Republican governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis introduced legislation that would de-emphasize racism in the state’s public education curricula. Last week, DeSantis announced that Florida texts will teach students that slavery benefited African Americans who “gained skills” that “eventually parlayed … into doing other things in life”. Civil-rights leaders, educators, and scholars were quick to criticize this minimization of slavery’s cruelty as ignorance at best and deliberate misrepresentation at worst. Vice-President Kamala Harris even reacted, calling the policy an attempt “to replace history with lies”.The backlash to DeSantis’s move is warranted and necessary, but most of the critiques miss the mark on identifying the Florida law’s deeper insidiousness. What the architects of this legislation are really attempting to do – as the UDC attempted a century before – is galvanize a political right and hold on to conservative white rule in a country with rapidly changing demographics. By denying the true ills of slavery, DeSantis is working to release the American government from the obligation of correcting for its present-day inequalities. The violence of slavery is not just limited to a series of heinous acts that happened in the past, it also includes a deliberate process of disinformation that enables future generations to maintain the power yielded by that violence.Though DeSantis’s career has relied heavily on making power gains by denying violence, the political strategy is not his invention. The practice of violence denial has long been a hallmark of the modern world’s most oppressive regimes. Take, for example, the British empire. During her 21st birthday address in 1947, the heir apparent Elizabeth II memorably declared that her life would be lived in “service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”. Her characterization of upholding Britain’s unrelenting and exploitative colonial system as “service”, and her assertion of an “imperial family” that included subjugated African, Asian and Caribbean people, are examples of the same whitewashing tactic employed by DeSantis. Even his efforts to ban “controversial” texts were cribbed – the British crown consistently prohibited books that challenged colonial rule in conquered territories.Another world power that has sought to subvert the historical record is Turkey, with regard to the government’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. To aid in its denial, Turkey spent millions of dollars to control the massacre’s narrative and enacted laws that criminalized anyone who accurately used the term “genocide” in reference to the killing, starvation and forced removal of an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in the country from 1915 to 1916. Even today, Turkish loyalists dismiss dissenters who speak up about the genocide as having an agenda or being backed by foreign agitators.Ultimately, regimes exploit disinformation about the past because the truth threatens their grip on power. But it should surprise no one when those tactics to win a political advantage also spill over into present-day issues. DeSantis’s war on reality doesn’t stop at slavery. During the pandemic, his administration also banned mandates on masks, quarantines and vaccines, and suppressed facts about the ballooning number of Covid cases, even as the death toll for Floridians soared ahead of other states.Calling out the information that DeSantis and his supporters are distorting in textbooks and other messaging is important. However, it is just as important to not lose sight of the larger threat that violence denial poses for societies. Organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation. More

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      ‘Stop’: Black Republican congressman attacks DeSantis over slavery curriculum

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      Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has “gone too far” in defending his state’s new educational standards which require public schools to teach that enslaved Black Americans benefited from their forced labor by learning useful skills, Republican congressman John James has said.James – who is Black – made his remarks in a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.“Nothing about that … evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” James, from Michigan, said in reference to DeSantis’s support of the recently approved Florida state education board curriculum teaching schoolchildren that enslaved Black Americans “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal” gain.James continued by saying that DeSantis’s education board “is re-writing history”, leaving him “so far from the party” of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who emancipated enslaved Black Americans before his 1865 assassination.“You’ve gone too far,” James wrote. “Stop.”The comments from James constituted an impassioned defense of his fellow Black Republican federal lawmakers Byron Donalds and Tim Scott. Donalds, a Florida congressman, and Scott – a South Carolina senator and declared 2024 presidential candidate – each criticized the curriculum in question and DeSantis’s support of it.Donalds had asserted that “the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong [and] needs to be adjusted”. Scott had said “slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”.DeSantis rebuked both men, suggesting they sounded too similar to Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who dismissed the curriculum as “propaganda”.During a 21 July speech in Jacksonville, Florida, Harris – the first woman and Black person to hold her office – had also said: “They want to replace history with lies.”James cautioned DeSantis against assailing Donalds and Scott, who make up 40% of the population of Black Republicans in Congress.“There are only five [B]lack Republicans in Congress, and you’re attacking two of them,” James’s X post said of DeSantis. “My brother in Christ … if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down.”DeSantis joins Scott and several others in a field of Republicans who for the moment are trailing former president Donald Trump in the polls for their party’s White House nomination next year. All are trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, who is running for re-election.James, meanwhile, has announced that he intends to seek a second term representing Michigan’s 10th congressional district. The businessman and former US army captain won his seat after a relatively close victory over Democratic candidate Carl Malinga during the November midterms. More

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      Trump, DeSantis and top Republican candidates to share stage at Iowa event

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      Nearly every major Republican presidential candidate will share a stage in the early voting state of Iowa on Friday night, as Donald Trump continues to dominate in the polls despite his numerous legal liabilities.Thirteen candidates will appear at the Iowa Republican party’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, giving them an opportunity to address donors and local party leaders with less than six months left before the state’s crucial caucuses.Trump has cemented his lead in Iowa, even as the former president braces for a third criminal indictment. According to a Fox Business poll taken this month, Trump has the support of 46% of likely Iowa caucus-goers, giving him a 30-point advantage over his closest rival, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.DeSantis will also deliver remarks at the Lincoln Dinner on Friday, offering the governor an opportunity to reset his faltering campaign. DeSantis recently cut a third of his campaign staff, and was forced to cancel two fundraising events last weekend due to lack of donor interest. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polls, DeSantis’s support among likely Republican primary voters has dipped by roughly 8 points since the beginning of the month.DeSantis’s recent stumbles appear to have emboldened some of his primary opponents to go on the attack against the governor. Speaking to reporters in Iowa on Thursday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina criticized DeSantis over his support for new educational standards in Florida requiring middle school teachers to tell students that enslaved people learned skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit”.“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives,” said Scott, who is the only Black Republican serving in the Senate. “It was just devastating. So I would hope that every person in our country – and certainly running for president – would appreciate that.”Scott’s primary prospects look to be on the rise, as polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, another early voting state, show him in third place behind Trump and DeSantis. But Trump remains the candidate to beat, as the former president leads DeSantis by 37 points in FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polls.Trump has maintained his frontrunner status even in the face of mounting legal threats. The former president was informed this month that he is a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of efforts to interfere in the 2020 election, suggesting an indictment could be on the horizon. On Thursday, Smith also filed a superseding indictment in Florida, expanding the scope of charges against Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Trump has already pleaded not guilty to a third set of criminal charges in New York, and prosecutors in Georgia may soon indict the former president for attempting to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the battleground state.Trump will probably address the charges against him on Friday, as he has taken any opportunity to denounce the four criminal investigations as “witch-hunts”. Trump’s primary opponents have struggled in their attempts to address the indictments, torn between supporting a former president who remains popular with the Republican base and highlighting a major vulnerability of the current frontrunner for the nomination.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked last week about the news that Trump is a target in Smith’s investigation of election interference efforts, DeSantis said the then-president “should have come out more forcefully” when a group of his supporters violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.“But to try to criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely,” DeSantis said. “We want to be in a situation where you don’t have one side just constantly trying to put the other side in jail, and that unfortunately is what we’re seeing now.” More

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      Ron DeSantis sued over bid to restrict voting rights for people with past convictions

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      A voting rights group in Florida filed a lawsuit against the rightwing governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, saying his administration created a maze of bureaucratic and sometimes violent obstacles to discourage formerly incarcerated citizens from exercising their right to vote.Florida voters in 2018 overwhelmingly passed a constitutional referendum, called amendment 4, that lifted the state’s lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions.Yet what ensued in the years since 2018 was an aggressive campaign, led by DeSantis, to sow confusion and fear among formerly incarcerated people. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which championed amendment 4, said state officials have continued to disenfranchise 1.4 million Florida residents – roughly a quarter of the state’s eligible Black voters.“Who is the public supposed to rely on to determine voter eligibility?” said the FRRC’s executive director, Desmond Meade. “We’re saying that it is the responsibility of the state. The law says it is the responsibility of the state.”DeSantis appears to disagree. The lawsuit, resubmitted on Friday by the FRRC, comes a year after the Florida governor ordered the arrests of dozens of people who participated in the 2020 election, including people who had been issued voter registration cards from the Florida department of state.“If the state dropped the ball by incorrectly verifying these people’s eligibility to vote, before you take someone’s liberty, they should fix their broken system,” Meade said.In 2019, Florida lawmakers passed a controversial bill requiring people with felony convictions to repay all outstanding debts before having their voting rights restored under amendment 4. But the state has no centralized database that records how much each individual person owes in court fines. Each county clerk’s office has a different method of calculating the amount of money that a formerly incarcerated person owes the state, complicating the process of paying off fines.“So you’re telling people that you have to pay your debt before you’re able to vote,” said Meade. “But there’s no guarantee that the state could even tell them exactly what they owe?”The lawsuit said this system, in which local and state election officials cannot be trusted to dole out accurate information about voter eligibility, is part of an intentional, state-sponsored campaign to dismantle amendment 4.“This is not simply the result of administrative failures or bureaucratic ineptitude,” the complaint reads.According to documents shared with the Guardian, the FRRC repeatedly contacted the state election officials between 2018 and today, offering potential solutions to streamline the process of registering voters.When the Florida department of state declined to hire additional staff to tackle a mounting backlog of voter registration applications from formerly incarcerated people, the FRRC offered to shoulder the costs. The advocacy group could identify and reach out to people whose court fines had been paid, easing the state officials’ workload.The state’s response has been lukewarm. Efforts to establish a public-private partnership have been slow to advance over five years.“We’ve had three different secretaries of state since the passage of amendment 4, each with different staff,“ said the FRRC deputy director, Neil Volz. “We still have not seen this become a priority.”Natalie Meiner, a spokeswoman for the Florida department of state, said: “The department does not comment on pending litigation.”The FRRC said it was still in talks with the state department.“We just want the state to do its job,” said Volz.The lawsuit is a last-ditch attempt to make accurate voter registration a priority for elected officials. But they worry that, without court intervention, state officials will keep amendment 4 in holding pattern, rejecting offers of assistance.Volz wants people who had their voting rights restored under amendment 4 vote in the 2024 presidential election without fear of prosecution. But the memory of last year’s arrests, announced by DeSantis just days before the 2022 primary elections in Florida, is still fresh in the minds of millions of Florida residents.Romona Oliver was driving home from work last August when she saw a group of Florida law enforcement officers in her driveway.“She was upset, and asked what she was being arrested for, and they’re telling her voting fraud,” said her attorney, Mark Rankin.Shortly after taking her case, Rankin learned that Oliver had submitted a voter registration application before the 2020 election. The state approved her application and sent her a voter registration card.“She even went to the DMV at a later date to change her driver’s license because she got married, and the state issued her a second voter registration card in her new name,” said Rankin “So now she’s been basically told twice that she’s eligible to vote.”The government had made a mistake. Oliver was ineligible to vote because she was convicted of second-degree murder in 2000 – amendment 4 does not restore the rights of people convicted of murder or felony sex offense.Prosecutors offered Oliver a plea deal of “no contest” to the charge of voter fraud.The other felony charge against Oliver was dismissed. She agreed to spend time in county jail on the day of her arrest. The court fines were waived.“So basically, you just let her walk away to make it go away,” Rankin said. “But because she pleaded no contest, they were able to have what they wanted, which was a newspaper headline that says, ‘local defendant accepts plea deal,’ which I think is the point of all this.”FRRC leaders said the highly publicized arrests were the final step in a complex scheme of voter intimidation designed by the DeSantis administration.Millions of Florida residents, including the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, watched as people like Oliver were taken away in handcuffs just days before the 2022 midterm elections in Florida. The videos of arrests were a grim warning of what might happen to individuals who misunderstand the parameters of amendment 4.“Those videos showed me that even if you honestly believe you are able to vote, they can arrest you anyway,” said Rhoshanda Bryant-Jones, one of the four individual plaintiffs in the case.Bryant-Jones was convicted over a decade ago for narcotics-related crimes. Since her release from prison, she recovered from substance abuse issues and created a small business that helps other people battle addiction.“I am not willing to risk my freedom, and all that I have accomplished,” she said. “Even though the day I thought I had my rights restored by amendment 4 was one of the great blessings of my life.”By raising the specter of arrest, DeSantis sent a message to Bryant-Jones and all other Florida residents who might have had their rights restored under amendment 4: don’t bother trying to understand if you’re eligible to vote, the risks are not worth it.Most of the August 2022 arrests follow a similar pattern: voters had assumed that they were eligible to vote because election officials had told them so.If Oliver had rejected the plea deal, prosecutors would need to prove that she somehow knew the government had erred by approving her voter registration application.“But it doesn’t really matter if you ultimately prove that you didn’t violate the law because you had no idea you were ineligible to vote,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions.Most of the people who DeSantis targeted, like Oliver, do not have the financial resources to fight a prolonged legal battle, so they opted for a plea deal.“And you have to remember that these are people who have already been through the wringer of the criminal legal system and really, really don’t want to go back to prison,” Bowie said.“This organized push to arrest people who seem to clearly have made good faith mistakes,” Bowie added. “It is something I don’t think we’ve seen at this scale since the end of the civil rights era.” More

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      Ron DeSantis slashes more than a third of staff as campaign flounders

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      On a day on which he emerged uninjured from an actual car crash in Tennessee, Ron DeSantis was reported to have made his most drastic attempt yet to turn round a presidential campaign seen as in danger of coming off the road itself, announcing a deep slashing of staff numbers.Politico said advisers to the Florida governor confirmed that more than a third of campaign staff were being cut, “a total of 38 jobs shed across an array of departments”, two senior advisers among them.DeSantis’s campaign manager, Generra Peck, said: “Following a top-to-bottom review of our organisation, we have taken additional, aggressive steps to streamline operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden.“Governor DeSantis is going to lead the Great American Comeback and we’re ready to hit the ground running as we head into an important month of the campaign.”With the first Republican debate a month away, DeSantis is still clearly the strongest challenger to Donald Trump.But the former president enjoys national and key-state polling leads of about 30 points, regardless of the 71 criminal charges against him and the prospect of more.No other candidate in the 13-strong field has made a significant move but DeSantis is widely held to be floundering, with donor sources maxed out and his policy proposals, often to the right even of Trump, falling flat with the public.Politico also reported new hires including a “top political adviser” to the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, a rising party figure who some Republican operatives have suggested could yet enter the primary.For Vanity Fair, the columnist Molly Jong-Fast gave voice to progressive glee over DeSantis’s struggles to connect with Republican voters.DeSantis, Jong-Fast wrote, “is a terrible politician with negative charisma, and the chances of him riding into the White House are looking less likely.“He is aggressively dull and wooden, making his interactions with voters border on painful to watch. His head bobs in a strange and unnatural way, and he wears high-heeled cowboy boots.”Referring to a previous high-profile Republican flop, the Wisconsin governor who wilted before Trump in 2016, Jong-Fast said DeSantis “makes Scott Walker look charming”.“Plus,” she added, “voters tend not to vote for people who seem like they’re screaming at them all the time. No amount of donor dollars can make DeSantis, a Maga marionette traipsing across Iowa and New Hampshire, seem like a real human boy.” More

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      Donald Trump’s popularity has fallen among Republican voters, poll suggests

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      Donald Trump’s appeal has sunk among Republicans, a new poll has found.The former president, who faces criminal indictments in two cases and possibly a third, announced earlier this year that he is once again running for president in the 2024 election.Pew research found that 63% of Americans of all political affiliations have an unfavorable opinion of Trump – an increase from 60% last year.At 66%, the majority of those who identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning still view the former president in a favorable light, but that is 9 percentage points lower than last July’s 75%.Last July, about a quarter of those on the right viewed him as very or mostly unfavorably, but that figure has risen to 32%.Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ opinion of Trump is also low, though consistent with recent years. Ninety-one percent of Democrats polled viewed Trump unfavorably. Of that, 78% viewed him as very unfavorable.A mere 8% of Democrats view him favorably.By contrast, Biden’s popularity among the general popularity slipped about 4% since last year. Positive opinions of Vice-President Kamala Harris were worse, dropping from 43% to 36% since last year.Trump still remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, ahead of the far-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, according to FiveThirtyEight.It is unclear how Trump’s legal troubles will affect his campaign, if at all. This year, he was indicted on 37 counts for mishandling classified documents at Mar-A-Lago in Florida and on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in New York. Trial dates in both cases have been set for during the 2024 primary season.He could also face the music for his role in inciting the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC in 2021.The poll does not address why Trump fell in the eyes of his own party, but many within the GOP have not shied away from sharing their distaste for him as their 2024 candidate.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told the Hill in May that she was “certainly” looking for an alternative to Trump and DeSantis.“If that is the face of the Republican party, if that’s the contest, Republicans are doomed,” she said.
      This article was amended on 25 July 2023 to correct a typo concerning 91% of Democrats polled. More

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      Ron DeSantis unharmed after car crash on way to campaign event

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      Ron DeSantis, the rightwing governor of Florida and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was involved in a car crash on the campaign trail on Tuesday.In a statement to media, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, said: “This morning, the governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and his team are uninjured.“We appreciate the prayers and well wishes of the nation for his continued protection while on the campaign trail.”DeSantis, 44, remains in second place in primary polling, albeit about 30 points behind Donald Trump, the multiply indicted former president, in most polling averages and in polls in early voting states.A month out from the first Republican debate, the governor has been reported to be seeking to reboot his campaign.On Tuesday, according to News Channel 9, a Chattanooga ABC affiliate station, the crash happened when “traffic slowed and four motorcade cars hit each other”.The outlet also said one DeSantis staff member “had minor injuries” but “went on to the campaign stop [to] be treated there”.DeSantis was in Tennessee for fundraising and other events. A spokesman told Florida media the governor would continue with his schedule. More

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      Texas governor Greg Abbott rejects demand to remove floating barriers targeting migrants – as it happened

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      From 5h agoA battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
      Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
      Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
      “They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers.
      Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president, Mike Pence, is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else happened today:
      Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that the state remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
      Mitt Romney says donors should cut off support to Republican presidential contenders who have no hope of winning the nomination, in an effort to winnow the race to two candidates and defeat Trump.
      House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
      Special counsel Jack Smith has obtained documents from Bernie Kerik, who advised the Trump campaign’s attempt to prove fraud in the 2020 election.
      Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
      Mitt Romney, the Utah senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 2012 but lost to Barack Obama, has proposed a strategy to unite the current crop of GOP contenders for the White House against Donald Trump.Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Romney, one of Trump’s most outspoken opponents in Congress, calls on donors backing Republican presidential candidates to withdraw their support once it becomes clear that their choice can’t win. The goal is to winnow the field to a two-person race, in hopes the other candidate can keep Trump from returning to office.Here’s more of what he has to say:
      Despite Donald Trump’s apparent inevitability, a baker’s dozen Republicans are hoping to become the party’s 2024 nominee for president. That is possible for any of them if the field narrows to a two-person race before Mr. Trump has the nomination sewn up. For that to happen, Republican megadonors and influencers – large and small – are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed. That decision day should be no later than, say, Feb 26, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
      There are incentives for no-hope candidates to overstay their prospects. Coming in behind first place may grease another run in four years or have market value of its own: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum got paying gigs. And as former New Hampshire Gov John H Sununu has observed, ‘It is fun running for president if you know you cannot win.’
      Left to their own inclinations, expect several of the contenders to stay in the race for a long time. They will split the non-Trump vote, giving him the prize. A plurality is all that is needed for winner-take-all primaries.
      …
      Our party and our country need a nominee with character, driven by something greater than revenge and ego, preferably from the next generation. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race. After Feb 26, they should start doing just that.
      CNN has reported new details of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2022 election loss, including that Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who worked with the Trump campaign to uncover fraud, has turned over a trove of documents to the prosecutor.The materials include research and witness statements produced by the team, which was led by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. CNN reports that Kerik will meet with Smith’s prosecutors next month for an interview.Here’s more from CNN’s story:
      Former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik was part of the team led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani trying to uncover fraud that would swing the election in favor of Trump.
      For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators, citing privilege.
      But in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to the Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who turned over the documents to Smith’s office on Sunday.
      “I have shared all of these documents, approximately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about 2 weeks to discuss.” Parlatore said.
      Kerik is scheduled to sit down for an interview with the special counsel’s office next month, CNN has learned.
      Among the materials now in Smith’s possession are witness statements, research and other documents produced by Giuliani’s team.
      When the January 6 congressional committee subpoenaed Kerik for documents, he provided a log of his communications that he said he was withholding due to privilege. Those communications have never been disclosed publicly, as the committee did not challenge Kerik’s privilege claims in court.
      The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax authority today announced it would end the practice of sending its employees on unannounced visits of the homes of people who owed taxes.The IRS received a major infusion of funds to modernize its systems under last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, but wound up in the crosshairs of Republicans, who claimed, without evidence, that the money would pay for armed agents.In a statement, IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said the decision to end the decades-old practice of dispatching unnamed agents to homes and businesses was part of its modernization plan.“We are taking a fresh look at how the IRS operates to better serve taxpayers and the nation, and making this change is a common-sense step. Changing this long-standing procedure will increase confidence in our tax administration work and improve overall safety for taxpayers and IRS employees,” Werfel said. The IRS added that the change in policy was supported by its employee union.In an interview with CNN, a top official with the NAACP civil rights group explains the problems with Alabama’s new congressional maps: Nonetheless, the GOP-led state has gone ahead with maps that appear to violate a supreme court ruling ordering lawmakers to draw a second majority African-American congressional district.Israel’s far-right government today won a battle in their case to reform the judiciary, but as the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports, American Jews opposed to the government’s policies against Palestinians say they are feeling optimistic about changing minds in the United States:Mike Levinson has been pushing back for 40 years and finally thinks he might be getting somewhere.“There’s a change and the politicians see it. I think it scares them,” said Levinson, holding a sign demanding “Stop Israeli settler violence” as he marched through New York on Thursday.“There’s a tremendous change going on in the American Jewish community. There are a lot of Jews, especially young people, who are not so quick to automatically and unconditionally support everything that Israel does. People are accepting the fact that it’s OK to be Jewish and criticise Israel.”Levinson, a Jewish New Yorker, began protesting against Israeli government policies during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s been a long and often lonely road since then as he has sought to get his fellow Americans to pay attention to decades of Israeli occupation, military assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, and the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was seen joining striking writers and actors on a picket line outside Netflix’s Manhattan offices today.An overwhelming majority of voters in Ohio support a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee access to abortion in the state, according to a new poll. A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed 58% of Ohio voters backed the amendment enshrining abortion rights. Among those who backed the amendment included a third of Republicans and 85% of independent women.The proposed amendment states that:
      Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.
      Under this proposal, abortion could still be banned after “fetal viability”, or whether it can live outside the womb.Republican congressman of Florida Matt Gaetz has been defending his decision to introduce legislation to defund investigations into Donald Trump led by special counsel Jack Smith.Gaetz made the announcement last week, just hours after the former president said he had received a letter identifying him as a target of the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, led by Smith.In an interview with Newsmax, Gaetz said he didn’t “need Jack Smith to tell me what happened on January 6”. He said:
      I was there. I saw President Trump encourage people to peacefully and patriotically go into places where permits had been reserved with city government for lawful protest activity.
      A key group of Senate Democrats have urged the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to pressure Senator Tommy Tuberville to end his “reckless, dangerous” hold on military nominations.The letter, led by armed services committee member Senator Mazie Hirono and obtained by NBC, calls on McConnell to “exercise your leadership to protect the readiness of our military”.Tuberville, who for months has been blocking military nominations in protest of the Pentagon’s policy to reimburse travel expenses for those seeking reproductive care, including abortions, across state lines, has been “threatening our national security”, the letter says. It continues:
      We know you share our concerns about the consequences of this hold on our Armed Services, and as the leader of your conference, we urge you to take stronger action to resolve this situation.
      The Democratic signatories to the letter all serve on the Senate armed services committee with Tuberville.Election day 2024 is still a long way off, but we’re getting closer to 23 August, when Republican presidential candidates will have their first debate. Most of the big names have qualified, but Donald Trump says he might not attend, while his former vice-president Mike Pence is struggling to qualify, as are Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson. We’ll see if these candidates can turn it around in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, the White House has expressed alarm at the latest news from Israel, where the far-right government has won passage of a key part its judicial overhaul. Opponents of the move say it could threaten the country’s democracy.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Texas’s Republican governor has rejected a justice department demand that it remove floating barriers intended to stop migrants entering from Mexico.
      House Republicans may decide to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt.
      Alabama Republicans are resisting a supreme court order to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
      Republicans have hammered Joe Biden over migration at the southern border ever since he took office, but over the weekend, one GOP lawmaker said he believed both state and federal authorities had mishandled the crisis, the Guardian’s Maya Yang reports:A Texas Republican representative, Tony Gonzales, has called the current tactics used to deter migrants at the US-Mexico border “not acceptable” and urged the Biden administration and Congress to focus more heavily on legal immigration.In an interview with CBS’s Face The Nation on Sunday, Gonzales, whose 23rd district in Texas includes 800 miles of the US-Mexico border, said that the border crisis “has been anything but humane” and called recent reports of Texas troopers allegedly pushing small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande “not acceptable”.“It’s not acceptable and it hasn’t been acceptable for two years … Everything that is happening along the border is just adding fuel to the fire,” Gonzales said. He went on to say that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who has come under fire from human rights groups over his controversial Operation Lone Star border security program, “is doing everything he can to secure the border”.A battle is brewing in Texas between its Republican governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration, which has demanded the state remove floating barriers placed in the Rio Grande to prevent people from crossing from Mexico.Today, Abbott vowed to defy the request from the justice department, potentially setting up a legal fight with the Democratic administration:As the Guardian’s Maya Yang reported last week, the deployment of the floating barriers comes amid reports that Texas authorities are mistreating migrants who cross into the state from Mexico:
      Two pregnant migrant women who were trying to turn themselves in to US immigration authorities have alleged that Texas national guard soldiers refused to provide them with water.
      Speaking to CNN at a shelter in Eagle Pass, Texas, the two women, identified as Carmen from Honduras and María from El Salvador, recounted their experiences at the border amid recent reports of “inhumane” behavior by American border authorities.
      “They told us it was a crime to cross into the US and that we should return to Mexico,” Carmen, who said she is six months pregnant, told CNN. She added that she and her husband had initially tried to cross the Rio Grande on 12 July but were stopped by Texas national guard soldiers. More