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    Are US women protesting Trump by ‘swearing off sex with men’? | Arwa Mahdawi

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    Have rumours of a US sex strike been greatly exaggerated?Sex sells. Sex strikes, meanwhile, make for an irresistible headline. Ever since Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the election, there have been endless headlines about how American women are emulating South Korea’s fringe 4B movement (which encourages heterosexual women not to date, procreate, marry or have sex with men) and “swearing off sex with men” in protest.“A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women,” a recent op-ed in the New York Times proclaimed, for example.“No sex. No dating. No marriage. No children. Interest grows in 4B movement to swear off men,” a PBS headline declared.“Ahead of Trump’s Second Term, Calls for a Sex Strike Grow Online,” the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) wrote.It’s certainly true that there has been a spike in US interest in the 4B movement. Voluntary celibacy was growing in popularity long before the election but Trump’s victory gave it a huge boost. There are more than 100,000 videos about 4B on TikTok and there has been a surge in Google searches relating to it. There have also been various viral calls for women to withhold sex in order to protest against Trump. (Just in case you’re wondering if you have a severe case of deja vu, there were also calls for a sex strike during Trump’s first term.)But is this online chatter actually translating to offline action? It doesn’t seem that way yet. There is zero evidence that there are large-scale sex strikes protesting against Trump happening in the US. All the hand-wringing by the likes of the New York Times seems to be over something that doesn’t actually exist. The headlines treating women as some sort of monolith also obscure the fact that, according to AP VoteCast, 53% of white women voted for Trump this year.Still, that doesn’t mean that growing interest in 4B should be written off as some sort of meaningless fad. On the contrary, engagement with the movement points to the fact that many women are not taking Trump’s victory lying down. While there may be no proof of widespread strikes in the sheets, there have been plenty of demonstrations on the streets. Meanwhile, online sales of emergency contraceptives and abortion pills are rocketing before the “reproductive apocalypse” that will be Trump’s second term. With rights being rolled back and pregnancy growing increasingly dangerous in the US, women are also reconsidering whether they want to have children.Let’s say that sex strikes did actually take off, however. Might they be effective? The most famous sex strike certainly was. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, women withhold sex in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian war and the ruse pays off: peace is declared. Since then, there have been plenty of other real-world sex strikes with varying results, waged everywhere from Belgium to Liberia. A small town in Colombia held a “crossed legs” protest in 2011, for example; women refused sex with their husbands until the government paved a road linking their town to the rest of the province. The protest is widely considered to have been successful.Less headline-worthy forms of protest, however, tend to be rather more effective. This, by the way, is the rather less talked-about message in Lysistrata itself. As the cultural critic and classicist Helen Morales told the Guardian back in 2022, the play isn’t just about sex strikes: “There are elder women seizing control of the treasury and the younger women withdraw their unpaid labour at home. They’re much more a model for effecting political change.”How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s women – photo essay“It was important for us to look beyond the traditional representations of Afghan women as passive victims of the Taliban and show them as active players in their own lives,” say journalist Mélissa Cornet and photographer Kiana Hayeri in this piece for the Guardian.Argentina votes alone against UN resolution combating misogynistic online violenceWhich is not a huge surprise as Argentina’s President Javier Milei is incredibly rightwing and a vocal critic of the UN.Gender-fluid Mary, Queen of Scots ballet to debut at Edinburgh festival 2025It’s the latest example of a trend of gender-neutral casting in artistic productions. You can guarantee that this will drive the usual suspects completely bonkers.Armie Hammer’s mother gifted him a vasectomy for his birthdayThe disgraced actor, who has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, has returned to public life via a podcast. He seems to be having trouble rustling up guests so recently had his mum on the podcast, where she shared this little snippet of info.What happened to Palestinian-Egyptian actor May Calamawy’s role in Gladiator II?When Calamawy was originally cast (long before 7 October 2023) it was reported that she’d have an “important” or leading role. Now it seems like she has been all but cut from the movie – relegated to a tiny non-speaking background part. There has been a lot of speculation that this is punishment for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. As we have seen, talking about a genocide and ethnic cleansing can be a real career-killer.Sydney Sweeney says female solidarity in Hollywood is ‘fake’Wait, you’re telling me that Hollywood – a place that fetishizes unrealistic beauty ideals and where women over 40 struggle to find roles – isn’t a utopia of intersectional feminism? You’re kidding me!Iran announces ‘treatment clinic’ for women who defy strict hijab laws“It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison,” one young woman from Iran told the Guardian.Sweden’s minister for gender equality is terrified of bananasAs someone who also hates bananas with a passion, I would like to extend my solidarity to Paulina Brandberg, whose banana-phobia has made international headlines. As one of her colleagues noted, we should be focusing on her work to help vulnerable women rather than her hatred for an alarmingly yellow fruit.The week in pawtriarchyJust in case you were wondering whether the US could get any more dystopian, it turns out that robot dogs are guarding Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Still, probably better to have robots rather than the real thing considering how close Trump is to Kristi Noem. The South Dakota governor, whom Trump has just picked for head of homeland security, famously wrote about shooting and killing her family dog, Cricket, and an unnamed goat. More

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      Today’s populism is informed by bigotry, but its roots lie in the promise of equality | Kenan Malik

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      ‘American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Not a comment on this year’s presidential campaign but an observation on another US presidential race, that of 1964. It is the opening line to one of the most influential political essays of the postwar era, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published 60 years ago this month.The very title of Richard Hofstadter’s essay is redolent of contemporary fears. As Donald Trump has, over the past decade, built a movement out of anger and disaffection, old copies of Hofstadter have been dusted off and op-eds written with titles such as “The paranoid style in American politics is back” and “Donald Trump’s style perfectly embodies the theories of renowned historian”.Not just Hofstadter’s analysis of the paranoid style but his evisceration of populism, too, has found a new generation of readers. Yet, as brilliant and influential as Hofstadter was, he was often wrong on both issues, and it is his wrongness that has shaped much subsequent debate.One of America’s most celebrated historians, Hofstadter moved from Marxist leanings in the 1930s into a cold war liberal who regarded social consensus rather than class conflict as the defining feature of American history. His 1964 essay, an abridged version of a lecture he had given in Oxford (the full version appearing later in book form), was an attempt to confront a new, belligerent form of rightwing reactionary politics that had emerged, displayed in Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt, in the creation of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, and in the success of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in routing the Republican establishment to secure the party’s 1964 presidential nomination.The mainstream response to Goldwater in the 1960s prefigured in many ways the hostility to Trump half a century later. Some saw Goldwater’s rise as portending fascism. Fact magazine published a special edition on “The Mind of Barry Goldwater” in which more than 1,100 psychiatrists, none of whom had ever met the would-be president, diagnosed him as “psychologically unfit” for office. If he consolidated his Republican “party coup” by winning the election, Hofstadter warned, he would “put the democratic process in this country in jeopardy”. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Baines Johnson by a landslide.For Hofstadter, the new right was a potent expression of the “paranoid style”, a way of thinking that cast conspiracy not as a singular occurrence, but as “the motive force” in history. “The paranoid spokesman”, Hofstadter wrote, “always speaks in apocalyptic terms”, and is “always manning the barricades of civilization” in the existential struggle between good and evil.Hofstadter insisted he was not using “paranoia” in a clinical sense, but “borrowing a clinical term for other purposes”. Yet, he also believed “the recurrence of the paranoid style” across history “suggests that a mentality disposed to see the world in the paranoid’s way may always be present in some considerable minority of the population”. In other words, it is an ineradicable pathology lying latent within the population, and activated by the emergence of particular social movements or political organisations.It is an argument that many find appealing because it gives licence to dismiss alternative viewpoints as a form of mental illness. It is also a perspective that wrenches political responses out of a historical frame. Even “millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century”, Hofstadter wrote, exhibited a “psychological complex that closely resembles” that of the reactionary right in postwar America. “The paranoid style as described by Hofstadter,” the historian Andrew McKenzie-McHarg wryly observes, “is present throughout history yet does not itself appear to have any real history of which to speak.” It is a perspective, too, that allows liberals to be oblivious to the presence of such traits within their own ranks. Rightwing populists certainly trade heavily on conspiracy theories, whether about immigration or the elites. Liberal panics about the coming of “fascism” and the “end of democracy” often exhibit, though, an equally apocalyptic view and present the fight against populism in black and white terms.This takes us to the second key theme in Hofstadter’s work in the 1950s and 60s – his critique of populism. As Hofstadter moved from early radicalism to midlife centrism, he became increasingly wary of the masses and their impact on culture and intellectual life. His growing distrust of working-class movements led him to be sceptical of democracy itself. “Intellect,” he wrote in his 1963 book Anti-intellectualism in American Life, “is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis political transformation shaped his reading of history. Until Hofstadter, most historians had viewed the rise of Populist movements in 1890s America in positive terms. These original populists were driven by a hatred of the inequalities and injustices of the so-called Gilded Age. They sought to forge cross-racial coalitions of farmers and workers to demand democratic reforms, progressive taxation and government ownership of utilities.Hofstadter, in his 1955 book The Age of Reform, questioned this narrative, portraying the movement as a racist insurgency with a conspiratorial view of the world that “seems very strongly to foreshadow” McCarthyism and postwar reactionary conservatism. Strands of bigotry were certainly on display, especially as the movement disintegrated in the face of a ferocious assault from the established order. But the Populists’ democratic and egalitarian promise cannot be gainsaid.A host of historians, including C Vann Woodward, Lawrence Goodwyn and Walter Nugent, challenged and largely rebutted Hofstadter’s revisionism. The political substance of his argument, however, became entrenched. After Hofstadter, Nugent wrote in a 2013 preface to his 1963 book The Tolerant Populists, “populism” began “to carry the connotation of demagogic, unreasoning, narrow-minded, conspiratorial, fearful attitudes toward society and politics”. It still does, shaping our view not just of the past but of the present, too.“Having come of age in a political culture that glorified ‘the people’ as the wellspring of democracy and decency in American life,” Eric Foner, perhaps the most distinguished living historian of the American tradition, observed of his mentor’s trajectory, “he came to portray politics as a realm of fears, symbols and nostalgia, and ordinary Americans as beset by bigotry, xenophobia and paranoid delusions”.The loss of hope, the sense of betrayal, disillusionment with fellow Americans – that might describe not just Hofstadter’s trajectory but America’s too. The tragedy is that whoever wins on Tuesday, that will not change. More

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      Donald Trump is a superspreader of a craziness that has split America in two | Simon Tisdall

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      Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to know. Democrats describe him as “weird” and “unhinged”. His rival, Kamala Harris, raised the “M” question again last week. “This is someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” she warned.Harris, to her credit, was being relatively polite, though goodness knows why, given the way he disses and demeans her. So let’s pose the question in more colloquial, idiomatic terms. Has stark raving Trump finally lost his marbles? Are there bats in the belfry? If he’s off his rocker, not playing with a full deck and away with the fairies, the world and the voters have a right to know.Harris’s assessment is obviously not an objective medical diagnosis of mental disorder. It’s a normal person’s reaction to the abnormal things Trump says and does. Crazy-strange campaign speeches by him and his supporters, notably at Madison Square Garden last weekend – a gathering akin to a Nazi Nuremberg rally – are reviving the debate about his sanity that began during his first term.In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals raised numerous red flags. One contributor suggested he was clearly off his chump: “Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving.”That professional opinion, made seven years ago, still rings true. Yet is the madness of “King” Trump, like the madness of King George (whose tyrannical rule Trump seeks to emulate), getting worse?By one measure – his wild, deranged language – the deterioration is marked. “His speeches have grown coarser and coarser,” wrote veteran White House watcher Peter Baker, who dubs him “the profanity president”.“Counting tamer four-letter words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell,’ he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024,” Baker wrote. His analysis shows Trump is using such language 69% more often than when he ran in 2016. It’s shocking, even by today’s tawdry standards. Trump calls Harris a “shit vice-president” who is “mentally impaired”. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks.Vulgarity, however gross, is not proof of madness. But it may be symptomatic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, America’s oldest, defines a mad person as one “completely unrestrained by reason and judgment; unable to think in a clear or sensible way”. Trump aces this definition every time he opens his mouth. It fits him to a tee. Exhibit A: his oddball musings about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.Bizarre Trump traits, such as compulsive, blatant lying, meet another dictionary definition of madness – behaviour that is “incapable of being explained or accounted for”.A third definition, rooted in US rather than British usage, suggests that Trump is indisputably bananas, in the sense that he is constantly “intensely angry or displeased”. Always feeling furious, feeling “mad as hell”, must be exhausting. It’s enough to drive anyone round the bend. Older people often get irritable, of course; and screw-loose Trump is 78. So is incipient senility, or cognitive decline, another cause of his exceptional looney-ness?Trump stumbles, mispronounces words, forgets where he is and loses his train of thought. Just like Joe Biden, in fact. But Biden is merely old. Trump is nuts.Trump has refused to take credible mental acuity tests or release his medical records. Last month, more than 230 healthcare specialists urged him to be more transparent. “As we all age, we lose sharpness and revert to base instincts,” they noted. “We are seeing that from Trump as he uses his rallies… to crudely lash out.”It may go back to childhood. One theory is that Trump, bullied and bullier, was driven up the wall by maternal love denied. Another theory is that he suffers from “disinhibition”. This is when people become less restrained, the older they get.But the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, who interviewed Trump 10 years ago, says he’s always been this way. His “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval” haven’t changed one bit, Coppins wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNarcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS).The poisonous effect of NDS was on show at Madison Square Garden, where “comedians” amplified Trump’s sexist, racist, hate-filled messages. This superspreader craziness destroys reasoned debate, splits the country into opposing camps (hence the dead-heat opinion polls) and sends blood pressure soaring. Many Americans fear civil violence. That’s bonkers.This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world – to hijack the title of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy classic – but it’s no laughing matter. It may be about to get madder still. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator More

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      When Trump says he’s going to ‘protect’ women, he means ‘control’ them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Could Republicans take away a woman’s right to a credit card?“Hello, I’d like a line of credit, please.”“Well, before we can even consider that, are you married? Are you taking a contraceptive pill? And can your husband co-sign all the paperwork so we know you have a man’s permission?”That may not be an exact rendition of an actual conversation between a woman and a US bank manager in 1970, but it’s close enough. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, it was considered good business practice for banks to discriminate against women. It didn’t matter how much money she had – a woman applying for a credit card or loan could expect to be asked invasive questions by a lender and told she needed a male co-signer before getting credit. All of which severely limited a woman’s ability to build a business, buy a house or leave an abusive relationship.Then came the ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago on Monday. Banking didn’t magically become egalitarian after that – discriminatory lending practices are still very much an issue – but important protections were enshrined in law. A woman finally had a right to get a credit card in her own name, without a man’s signature.When things feel bleak – and things feel incredibly bleak at the moment – it is important to remember how much social progress has been made in the last few decades. Many of us take having access to a credit card for granted, but it’s a right that women had to fight long and hard for. Indeed, the ECOA was passed five years after the Apollo 11 mission. “Women literally helped put a man on the moon before they could get their own credit cards,” the fashion mogul Tory Burch wrote for Time on the 50th anniversary of the ECOA being signed.If feels fitting that such an important anniversary is so close to such an important election. While we must celebrate how far we’ve come, it’s also important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. Rights that we have taken for granted for decades can, as we saw with the overturning of Roe v Wade, be suddenly yanked away.Is there any chance that, if Donald Trump gets into power again, we might see Republicans take away a woman’s right to her own credit card? It’s certainly not impossible. Trump’s entire campaign is, after all, about taking America back. The former president has also cast himself as a paternalistic protector of women.“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”Of course, we all know what “protect” really means in this context: it means “control”. Should he become president again, Trump and his allies seem intent on massively expanding the power of the president and eliminating hard-won freedoms. Conservative lawmakers and influencers want to control a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. They want to control the sorts of books that get read and the type of history that gets taught. They want to control how women vote. They want to control whether a woman can get a no-fault divorce. They might not take away women’s access to credit, but they will almost certainly try to chip away at a woman’s path to financial independence.Elon Musk denies offering sperm to random acquaintancesA recent report from the New York Times alleges that he wants to build a compound to house his many children and some of their mothers. “Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr Musk seems to want to make even bigger,” the Times notes. Apparently, in an effort to do this, he has been offering his sperm to friends and acquaintances. Musk has denied all this. This joins a growing list of sperm-based denials. Over the summer, he denied claims in the New York Times that he’d volunteered his sperm to help populate a colony on Mars.Martha Stewart criticises Netflix film that ‘makes me look like a lonely old lady’The businesswoman was also upset that director RJ Cutler didn’t put Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack: “He [got] some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”JD Vance thinks white kids are pretending to be trans so they can get into collegeLike pretty much everything the vice-presidential candidate says, this is insulting and nonsensical. Rather than having advantages conferred on them, trans people in the US are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and laws that want to outlaw their existence. Meanwhile, it is well-documented that there are plenty of privileged children whose parents spent a lot of money so their kids could pretend to be athletes to get into college.What happened to the young girl captured in a photograph of Gaza detainees?The BBC tells the story of a young girl photographed among a group of men rounded up by Israeli forces. In her short life, Julia Abu Warda, aged three, has endured more horror than most of us could imagine.Pregnant Texas teen died after three ER visits due to medical impact of abortion banNevaeh Crain, 18, is one of at least two Texas women who have died under the state’s abortion ban.Sudan militia accused of mass killings and sexual violence as attacks escalateThe war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 14 million people, is catastrophic – particularly for girls and women. In a new report, a UN agency said that paramilitaries are preying on women and sexual violence is “rampant”. And this violence is being enabled by outside interests: many experts believe that, if it weren’t for the United Arab Emirates’ alleged involvement in the war, the crisis would already be over. The UAE, you see, is interested in Sudan’s resources. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported back in June that UK government officials have attempted to suppress criticism of the UAE for months.The week in pawtriarchyYou’ve almost certainly heard of the infinite monkey theorem: the idea that, given all the time in the world, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, two Australian mathematicians have declared the notion im-paw-ssible. Indeed, they only found a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes that Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them “banana”. More

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      Incarcerated Californians can’t vote. A prison held an election anyway

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      An estimated 4 million US citizens are barred from voting because they have a felony conviction. That includes most Americans serving prison sentences.But last week at San Quentin, the 172-year-old prison in the San Francisco Bay Area, residents had a rare opportunity to weigh in on a US election where so much is on the line.As incarcerated residents jogged on the yard and played pickleball, dozens stopped by the prison’s education department and slid paper ballots into a locked metal box with an American flag and the word “vote” painted on it.The voters were participating in a mock election, organized by Juan Moreno Haines, a journalist incarcerated at San Quentin, and Mount Tamalpais College (MTC), a liberal arts institution based at the prison.“It’s important for me to have a voice, especially if it’s being heard on the outside,” said Michael Scott, 45, who is due to be released next year after having been incarcerated for more than two decades, before casting his vote.California, like most US states, prohibits incarcerated people with felonies from voting, affecting more than 90,000 people in state prisons. The US is a global leader in its incarceration rate and an outlier in its sweeping disenfranchisement; a recent report identified more than 70 countries with no or very few restrictions on voting based on criminal records. Roughly 1.7% of the US voting-age population can’t vote, with Black Americans disproportionately excluded and restrictions potentially affecting election results.For San Quentin’s election, MTC, which recently became the first US accredited college exclusively operating behind bars, directed incarcerated students in its American government class to design ballots, choosing which races and initiatives to poll.MTC sent all 3,247 residents a ballot. After a week of voting, 341 ballots had been returned, representing 10.5% of the population. Fifteen volunteers from MTC and the League of Women Voters tallied the results: Kamala Harris won 57.2% of votes, and Donald Trump won 28.2%. Claudia De la Cruz of the Peace and Freedom party, a socialist ticket, won 3.5% of votes; the Green party’s Jill Stein won 2.6%; Robert F Kennedy Jr won 2.1%; and Chase Oliver, a libertarian, won 0.3%.View image in fullscreenIn the California senate race, Adam Schiff, the Democratic candidate, defeated Republican Steve Garvey with 33.7% of votes, though nearly half of respondents left this question blank. Nearly 60% favored Prop 5, which would boost affordable housing funding; 78% favored Prop 32, which would increase the minimum wage; and 57.2% rejected Prop 36, which would increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes.Prop 6 would change the state constitution to abolish forced prison labor, making it a high-stakes measure for incarcerated people. Just more than 77% of respondents backed it.The state of California, like most others in the US, allows for incarcerated people to be forced to work against their will. California profits from this form of involuntary servitude, with residents providing vital services for negligible wages. Most people in prison currently make less than $0.75 (£0.58) an hour for their jobs.Prop 6 is meant to allow incarcerated people to choose their jobs and prohibit prisons from punishing those who refuse an assignment. Dante Jones, 41, said he wished he could vote for Prop 6 on 5 November: “We’ve got legalized plantations … They say they want us to be citizens, they want to rehabilitate us, but then they don’t do anything that allows that to happen. Technically, by the constitution, we’re slaves and they can whip our backs.”Jones said he hopes if Prop 6 passes, incarcerated people can earn better wages to afford commissary, including food.Jones’ assessment of the presidential race was grim: “I think we’re losing either way.” He reluctantly supported Harris despite her prosecutorial record and reputation for harshly punishing Black defendants: “She ain’t for her people. Do you know how many Black and brown people she put in prison? … She’s gonna be like a Bill Clinton, a conservative Democrat who is tough on crime.” Despite those misgivings, he couldn’t stomach supporting Trump: “Since he’s been in politics, he’s been courting racist white people who think that people who aren’t white are taking their country.”Jaime Joseph Jaramillo, 53, said he supported Trump, appreciating his promise of mass deportations to “get rid of the drug cartels” and favoring him on foreign policy: “I want him to bomb Iran and drill, drill, drill.” He expressed sympathy for Palestinians, but said: “I want him to take out Hamas.”Nate Venegas, 47, said he, too, favored Trump because “our system needs somebody who’s not a politician”. He thinks Trump could be more swayed on prison reform, citing the former president’s decision to pardon a woman’s drug offense after lobbying by Kim Kardashian while he was in office. But he also called Trump a “clown” and said he disliked his vigorous support of capital punishment: “I don’t believe there should be a death penalty. I don’t believe a man should kill another man.”Scott voted for Harris “because she gives me something to look forward to. Trump hasn’t given me anything that he plans to do, except lock down the borders. We have problems with homelessness, jobs and climate change.”Gabriel Moctezuma, 32, said he considered Harris “the lesser of two evils” and supported her on reproductive rights and immigration: “I think there would be a lot of progressive changes. There have been a lot of human rights taken away from people and she’ll bring some of those policies back.” But he worries about divisions in the country: “No matter who wins, this country is going to be split and I’m really hoping that there’s not the same amount of violence as January 6.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenOn their ballots, some offered handwritten notes about why they voted:“We have not always had the right to vote. So I would like to cast my vote for each of my [African American] ancestors that was denied access.”“I only ever voted once in my life and I want to do so again.”“Democracy is at stake.”“I want to feel like I am a part of history.”“[I’ve] been in prison for 29 years and never had an opportunity to vote.”Vermont, Maine and Washington DC are the only places in the US where all incarcerated people can vote.Amy Jamgochian, the chief academic officer at MTC, said the disenfranchisement of incarcerated people was a reminder that the US is “very confused as a society about what incarceration is for”.“Is it for depriving people of humanity and rights? Will that help them? Are we trying to help them? Or are we just trying to warehouse them? If [the goal] is rehabilitation, then I don’t think we want to dehumanize them. We want to actually deeply respect their humanity, including giving them the right to vote.”Venegas, who has been incarcerated for 25 years and is part of a civic engagement group at San Quentin, said he did feel society’s views on the purpose of the criminal justice system are shifting. He noted how, 20 years ago, the system was primarily focused on punishment, with little interest in getting people ready to come home.Last year, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, renamed San Quentin a “rehabilitation center”, pledging to turn the prison into a complex resembling a college campus focused on programming and re-entry.It’s just another reason why efforts like the mock election matter, Venegas argued. “People are starting to listen to us and care about having us as neighbors when we get out,” he said. “So our voices really matter … and I’d give anything to be able to vote and have a say.”

      Juan Moreno Haines is an incarcerated journalist at San Quentin and editor-in-chief of Solitary Watch. Sam Levin is a staff reporter at Guardian US More

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      Do Democrats have a ‘men’ problem? – podcast

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      The Harris campaign, which has been praised for how it has managed to reach out to women, is now having to balance their attention and pitch some policies that would appeal to men.
      But is it too little too late? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Gloria Oladipo, a breaking news reporter for Guardian US, about why men could decide this year’s election and why both campaigns might be taking them for granted

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      God knows we need an antidote to all the lousy men in the news – and I think I’ve found one | Emma Brockes

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      For the past month, every woman I know has been having versions of the same conversation, roughly opening with: for the love of God, how rapey is the news? No period of history has been free from accounts of male sex-offending. But the present roll call of alleged offenders – Diddy, Fayed, the French rapist and his endless accomplices, various scandals in broadcasting, and last week, new charges for the man who keeps giving on this subject, Harvey Weinstein – is particularly grim. For just one day, I would like to turn on the news without having to hear a presenter struggling to find a way to say “lube” in a BBC voice. So let’s talk about something else: Doug Emhoff.Doug Emhoff! Kamala Harris’s husband and consort, a man very possibly in line to be the first first gentleman of the United States and, as far as we can tell, an antidote to lousy men everywhere. This week, I heard Emhoff referred to as a “wife guy”, which made me smile – wife guy being simultaneously a nice term of affection for men who unreservedly support their wives, and also a reminder that no word for a female equivalent can exist. (What use the tautology of being a “husband chick” when, for straight women, embedded in the definition of the word “wife” is total, unwavering support of your husband).Anyway, Emhoff – what a rare beast. A former entertainment lawyer, a music person who named his kids after jazz legends, a man extremely adept at playing the lovable goofball, which doesn’t rule out the possibility he’s a lovable goofball, and a husband seemingly completely happy to promote, support and cheerlead his high-profile wife. To my eye, Emhoff, who is 59, has Dan Aykroyd, or maybe John Goodman, energy: the American every-dad who can rock a plaid shirt at the weekend, and on Monday whip up a quick lawsuit to vanquish your enemies.Exactly how Emhoff has nailed this vibe comes down to a mixture of things. The fact he’s called Doug definitely helps. Has there ever, in public life, been a bad “Doug”? (No.) Doug is easygoing. Doug is dependable – but not boring! Doug shows up. Doug quit his job when his wife became vice-president so he could give her his all. Doug is a mensch, although on the subject of his Jewishness, opponents of leftwing positions around Israel assert that Doug has overplayed his heritage for political gain. This sounds perilously close to Donald Trump’s observations about Harris’s background, but anyway, it’s all part of the 360 degrees of Doug Emhoff. After all, Doug isn’t perfect!I mean, he really isn’t. Earlier this year, Emhoff acknowledged that the end of his first marriage to Kerstin Mackin in 2008 was messy and that he had been unfaithful. It’s not ideal, I know. It is telling, however, that Emhoff’s first wife, who has kept his name, has been extremely active promoting Harris’s bid for the presidency. When JD Vance went after Harris for not having biological children – a sentence it still seems wild to have to type – Kerstin Emhoff popped up to defend the Democratic candidate, calling Vance’s remarks “baseless attacks”. She told CNN that, “for over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I”. She was, she said, grateful to have her as part of their blended family.Which brings us to the Emhoff kids. To anyone’s knowledge, has there ever been a hipster first son or daughter in the White House? Of course, go back enough years and who knows; maybe in 1798, Abigail Adams was riding around the West Wing on a penny farthing drinking mojitos out of a teacup. But in recent memory, ranging back over Trump’s children, the Obama kids, the Bush twins and Chelsea Clinton, every one of them looked perfectly primed for a postgrad internship at Goldman Sachs or a nepo arrangement in Hollywood. Ella Emhoff, by contrast, is a designer specialising in knitwear, who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She turned up at the Democratic convention earlier this year covered in tattoos and wearing pebble glasses and a vintage frock.There are other wife guys out there, although you have to search quite hard to find them. A friend suggests Alexis Ohanian, husband to Serena Williams and millionaire co-founder of Reddit. Ohanian has his own thing going on, which doesn’t guarantee that a man won’t resent his wife’s success. But in public, Mr Serena Williams always seems over the moon to be by her side. There’s an argument for Prince Harry as wife guy. You’ve probably got to rope Denis Thatcher into this conversation. I’m sure there are others.But this is about Doug Emhoff, who, to the extent that we can ever know anything about other people’s relationships, offers further proof of Harris’s good judgment. She could have had anyone, but she chose Doug, and there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Whoever they may be, find your Doug Emhoff – possibly on the second go-around, just to be safe – and run for the biggest job you can imagine.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      The American dream is dead for many. Social democracy can bring it back | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      I love the United States. My parents came here from Trinidad and Tobago the year before I was born, and they and my four siblings eventually became citizens. My parents struggled for many years to get established here, but it has offered us everything – security, belonging, opportunity.Yet for many Americans, particularly those who have been in this country for generations building the foundations of American prosperity, the American dream is not alive and well.This point can’t be debated with measures of the United States’ relative affluence; it’s what American workers are telling us, both through how they respond to polls directly on the question and through the political views they increasingly hold. The question isn’t if the American dream is dead, it’s how we go about reviving it.By the time the writer James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase “American dream” in the 1930s, it had already existed as an ethos for generations. Despite the country’s brutality towards Black and Native people, there is a reason why masses of workers saw the United States as a place without the leftovers of feudalism and aristocratic privilege holding people back. Even Karl Marx himself looked to the world’s “most progressive nation” to lead a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes after the triumph of Union forces in the civil war.Today, however, few at home or abroad hold such hopes for our country.Since it’s just a broad idea, we can’t measure the American dream in empirical terms. If it’s alive, it would be found in the minds of ordinary citizens who feel like they’re part of a project that is rooted in both their individual advancement and national advancement as a whole. And simply, the American dream is dead because ordinary Americans say it’s dead.Only 27% of people polled this year said “the American dream holds true.” Just 13 years ago, it was double that number. This doesn’t just reflect increasing cynicism in general: a majority of Americans say “the American dream once held true but doesn’t any more.” What’s happened to change so many of our minds?That polling isn’t uniform and correlates closely to both income and education, both proxies for social class. Among Americans who don’t have four-year college degrees only 22% say that American dream still holds true, half the mark of those with postgraduate degrees. Our national crisis of confidence is mostly a working-class problem.Americans as a whole, critics retort, are wealthier than ever. But, rather than argue with them, if we want to figure out why people don’t feel like they’re staying above water, we need to examine issues of income disparity and social wealth.The widening life expectancy gap between poor and rich Americans, which now averages more than 10 years, is perhaps the most dramatic example of a basic point that most of us take for granted: a kid growing up in a wealthy area is likely to have a wildly better life outcome compared to one growing up in a poor one.By most measures, the US has among the lowest rates of social mobility of any rich country. And our income disparity is even more stark when considering not just pre-tax wages, but the more expansive “social wage” provided in other countries. The Harvard economist Raj Chetty has shown the depth of the problem. By his measure, US absolute mobility – the chance a child will earn more than their parents – has fallen from 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The problem isn’t just that growth rates have declined. Chetty and his co-authors note that an economy that maintains our current income disparity but restores growth to booming 1940s and 50s levels would only increase absolute mobility to 62%.This problem of social mobility is compounded by issues of social welfare owing from our poorly designed entitlements, which are unable to deliver results as well as universal welfare states in Europe that offer things like childcare for new families, guaranteed national healthcare, and free vocation and trade schools.Another key difference between the US and northern Europe? The role of trade unions and other forms of working-class representation. In 1983, over 20% of Americans belonged to a union. That number is 10% now, compared with almost 70% in countries like Denmark and Sweden.The loss of good union jobs, particularly in manufacturing, persistent poverty and hopelessness have fueled social ills in communities across the country.To name just a few of their consequences: we face a serious problem with drug use and overdoses, with 107,543 people dying last year alone. Alcohol abuse has gone up dramatically, as have alcohol-related deaths. Between mass shootings and ordinary crime, people don’t feel safe, and our politicians seem to accept as natural fact that we’re destined to be a country with eight times the murder rate of Germany or where children need to pay attention during “active shooter” drills.Taken together, it’s obvious that you’d have a better chance of living the American dream in Europe than you would in America.Of course, some of the pessimism that people feel is inflamed by ideological actors. From parts of the left, earnest attempts to right historical wrongs might have fueled an excess of negativity about the progress we’ve made in recent decades. On the right, a much more dangerous tendency is built around the idea that immigration – a key component of the American dream and our economic progress – is a social ill that needs to be combated.Thankfully, the United States has a rich, dynamic economy. That’s a good thing and it allows us to support well-designed universal programs to improve the social mobility and material wellbeing of our poor and working classes. We can pursue taxation policies that better redistribute wealth and create greater state support for health care, childcare, housing and job training. We can shift the funding of K-12 education away from unequal property taxes and to a more equal base of federal support. We can also support worker unionization and expand policies to revitalize domestic manufacturing.As for concerns over immigration, a key part of Donald Trump’s appeal, we can support native-born workers feeling pressure in the job market from immigrants without elevating their situation to a zero-sum, existential battle in which either new Americans or established Americans will survive.We also, however, need to rally behind a vision of politics to go with these social-democratic policies. A vision of politics in which we assert the moral worth of every American and strive together to build a healthier and more optimistic society.We can’t pretend like things are going great in our country. But we also must reject the pessimism that says things must stay like this.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      in US Politics

      The forces of loneliness can cause political instability. And threaten democracy | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      I have been thinking about fascism long before I even knew I was thinking about it. I lived for years inside the mind, the home, the terror of my tyrannical father who used violence as the methodology to sustain his power over every aspect of our existence. In order to achieve that power he separated and divided us. He isolated us, used us against each other and made us lonely.Hannah Arendt wrote about loneliness in the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”In 2023, the US surgeon general declared that loneliness was the most serious mental health crisis facing Americans. This loneliness is a form of existential dislocation. It creates persistent anxiety, depression, depersonalization and distrust. It is not unlike an ongoing, low-level collective panic attack. A constant buzzing of unrest. Enemies are lurking everywhere. The ecosystem in which we live, the culture feels poisoned and uninviting. We no longer recognize the world as our world. We become withdrawn, estranged, feeling helpless and abandoned. Mainly all our time and energy is spent protecting ourselves, proving we have a right to be here, living defensively. It occupies our attention, our creativity. It’s exhausting.I think of what Toni Morrison wrote of racism: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”I wonder what is the specific psychological impact of Project 2025 – of knowing there are fascist forces who openly and proudly devised a 920-page “policy bible” meant to undo every hard-earned right, every safeguard that protects women, African Americans, workers, elderly, the infirm, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants, Muslims – essentially everyone.What happens to our hearts and our capacity for connection and trust when we are encased in a field of malevolence and hatred which daily threatens our stability and peace? To know people mean to harm us, that they have no shame putting that desire on paper. What does this do to our psyches? How do our bodies process such hate, violence and cruelty? Who do we have to become in order to survive?Indigenous people and Black people have lived for hundreds of years in this landscape of precarity, capture, terror and violence. Now we are in late-stage patriarchy, where autocrats are being born and bred at the speed of light; where workers’ rights are being dismantled and child labor laws are weakened; where diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs that protected civil rights are being annihilated; books banned and history erased; where genocide is an acceptable practice to maintain domination; where rape is celebrated and bragged about as a form of control; where women are being pushed back into the dark ages (the 50s) and all the regulations that protect the Earth, the air, the water are unraveled.Fascism is a society-wide mental affliction. It’s in the culture, on the streets with Nazi gangs and raging men wrapped in American flags, in the new draconian laws passed by a rightwing supreme court denying voting rights or giving the president extreme powers. It’s in the outright lies being told by Trump scapegoating Black and brown immigrants, accusing them of crimes they never committed. On college campuses where students are arrested for protesting against the slaughter of women and children in Gaza. It’s in in the 64,000 babies born of rape last year in America because their mothers were denied abortions by states demanding more and more control over their bodies.The antidote to fascism is consciousness and education, which is why they want to terminate the Department of Education. We must learn the nature of fascism, what it is, how it operates now in 2024. Then we must name and expose it, call out the oppression, the hate, the misogyny and racism as it is happening. This can be terrifying, which is why we cannot do it alone. For so long our movements have been siloed and divided by hunger for scant resources, a feeling of powerlessness and invisibility, a hierarchy of suffering and a lack of vision and understanding that everything is interrelated and interdependent.Community and solidarity are our most powerful tools to fight fascism. They create a safe context for us to share so we can know that what we are witnessing and experiencing is real. They catalyze our strength to refuse the forces unraveling our freedoms. They propel us to fight for another way where people are treated with dignity, justice, respect and care.We have a vision of what 2025 should be like, too – it will be when we finally come together, united to end these forces of loneliness and hatred that have been dividing us all along.

      V is a playwright, author and founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against all women and girls and the earth and One Billion Rising. Her latest book Reckoning is just out in paperback. She guest edited this series on fascism. More