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How memes, gaming and internet culture all relate to the Charlie Kirk shooting

by Evelyn Reynolds 16 September 2025, 17:58

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Dara Kerr here, filling in for Blake Montgomery, who promises he’ll come back from vacation. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the memes, gaming and internet culture behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk.The bullet that killed conservative activist was inscribed with a message: “Notices bulge OwO whats this?” The online world quickly recognized the reference. It’s a phrase used in internet culture to troll people in online role-play communities, specifically furries (a subculture that cosplays as anthropomorphic animal characters).“The phrase has been popularized not only as a way of making fun of furries and related communities for being cringe, but has also been embraced by furries as a way of owning the meme,” writes Know Your Meme, a website that documents viral phenomena. “Ultimately, the phrase is portrayed in memes as being one of the most cringeworthy things someone could possibly write to another person.”Other bullet casings recovered by law enforcement in Utah also had etched inscriptions that appeared to nod to online gaming and insider memes, which have become part of the intense social media speculation on a possible motive for the killing. One said: “O Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao”, another said: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO.” The first message refers to an Italian anti-fascist folk song that has become a gamer reference that’s big in Twitch and Discord circles. The second message is what web culture writer Ryan Broderick calls “just boilerplate edgelord speak” in his newsletter last week titled “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme”.The final inscribed casing that law enforcement released said: “Hey fascist! Catch!” and was followed by an up arrow, right arrow and three down arrow symbols. The arrow sequence appears to reference the video game Helldivers 2, and is a set of commands used by players to release a 500kg bomb in the game.The alleged shooter, Tyler James Robinson, is a 22-year-old from a small town in Utah near the Arizona border. He is accused of killing Kirk at a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Kirk was struck by a single bullet fired with a “high-powered bolt action rifle” from a distant rooftop.As the suspect was steeped in online culture, so was Charlie Kirk, who was 31. He was at the school on behalf of his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA. He’d become known worldwide speaking about and debating others, often on his extremist views on race, immigration, gender identity and gun rights. Kirk’s rise to fame was also largely bolstered by being extremely online.As my colleague Alaina Demopoulos wrote:A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Read the full story here.Whistleblowers against Meta stack upView image in fullscreenMeta was hit by two separate whistleblower claims last week. One by a group of six former and current employees, who allege the social media company has covered up harm to children on its Metaverse virtual reality devices and apps. And another by Meta’s former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who alleges the company brushed aside major security and privacy flaws in its messaging app, according to the New York Times.In response to my reporting about VR devices, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever said the company has approved 180 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022, which include research on youth safety and wellbeing. “These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative,” she said, adding that Meta has introduced features to its VR products to limit unwanted contact and supervision tools for parents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne of the first whistleblowers was Sophie Zhang, who brought her findings to the Guardian in 2021. Zhang documented how Facebook allowed political manipulation in more than 25 countries, which led to disastrous circumstances in several places including Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Honduras. Later that same year, Frances Haugen turned over to the Wall Street Journal reams of documentation verifying much of Zhang’s allegations and also bringing to light Facebook’s knowledge of how its social media apps harmed teens.In 2023, Arturo Bejar also went to the Wall Street Journal with evidence that Meta knew its algorithms for Facebook and Instagram were pushing content to teens that promoted bullying, drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm.This year alone, eight more whistleblowers have come forward. Baig and the group of six former and current employees went public last week.US lawmakers are taking the allegations seriously. Politicians as disparate as Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, the democrat from Connecticut, have said they see eye-to-eye when it comes to regulating Meta and other social media companies.“The details in these disclosures are hard to stomach – because they reveal such major risks to kids’ safety, and because they are so painfully familiar. Yet again, Meta is revealed to be willfully misrepresenting abuses on its platforms,” Blumenthal said of the whistleblower claims last week. “‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil’ is simply not an acceptable business philosophy.”Blumenthal added that he and other senators were looking forward to pushing ahead with “long overdue reform”.The wider TechScape

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by Evelyn Reynolds 16 September 2025, 17:00
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A young man in a suit made of union jacks held up a framed photograph of their hero above his head. The crowd loudly chanted the name. The focus of this acclamation was not Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, the organiser of the so-called “free speech” march in central London last Saturday.They were instead shouting themselves hoarse for Charlie Kirk, the murdered political activist from Cook County in the US state of Illinois.It is unlikely that many of the 110,000 to 150,000 protesters estimated to have been on the streets last weekend, at what turned out to be the largest rally of its type in British history, knew much about Kirk before his death at the hands of a gunman at Utah Valley University.The UK version of Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which claims to be the “largest Conservative student movement” in the US, has never really taken off in Britain.But they were moved to cheer him on Saturday. Clips of an almost entirely white and predominantly male crowd of Britons chanting the first name of the murdered 31-year-old were lapped up on social media accounts said to be US-based, as was the minute’s silence afterwards.View image in fullscreen“Thousands of British patriots just fell silent in honor of Charlie Kirk in London,” tweeted Eric Daugherty, an assistant news director at the conservative Florida’s Voice website (“Honest political reporting to Florida, minus the mainstream talking points.”)It is said that when America coughs, Britain catches a cold.The reality with this strain of politics is that there is something of a feedback loop between the US and the UK that is proving mutually beneficial to both sides, said Prof Paul Jackson, author of Pride in Prejudice: Understanding Britain’s Extreme Right.Kirk may not have been a household name in the UK but his murder offered validation for a view that a certain outlook on life is under threat. In turn, the scenes on Saturday provided evidence of the righteousness of the cause back in the US.There is history to this mutually enforcing exchange of ideas on the extreme right, said Jackson.A certain type of US political thought has never travelled well across the Atlantic, notably the Ku Klux Klan, which grew after the civil war in the late 1860s, said Jackson.But other ideas have thrived in the past as they do today, including those contained in Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, which influenced some European white supremacists, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew.It has not all been one way. The Blood & Honour movement, founded by British neo-Nazi and white power music pioneer Ian Stuart Donaldson in 1987, led to the birth of Blood & Honour American Division and Blood & Honour Council US.That was the analogue age, though.In the digital era, particularly in the so-called “counter-jihad” space that now dominates what is loosely termed the far right, the mutual reinforcement of messages is done in real time. Stories of social conflict or moral panic in one country are used to boost a political claim in another.Kirk himself was one of those who picked up on the case of Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old English woman –married to a Conservative councillor – who was sentenced to 31 months in prison for calling for hotels that were housing asylum seekers to be burned down during last summer’s riots. (She was released in August after serving less than half her sentence.)View image in fullscreen“Every day people say: ‘Well someone should go kill Charlie Kirk.’ I don’t like it, but that is protected speech,” he told GB News. “In America, we care what you do and not what you say.”It was of a piece with the general claim that free speech is under threat in the UK, confirmed in the mind of the likes of JD Vance by the UK’s Online Safety Act, aimed at preventing young people from encountering harmful content, which the US vice-president claims has put Britain on a “very dark path”.The amplification of certain causes, the repetition of choice phrases, cannot be said to be highly organised, but it is nonetheless powerful.The Infowars website, founded by the prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, promoted Robinson’s content about the rally on Saturday, but also that of a series of obscure accounts on X, said to be based in both the UK and the US.“Breaking: London falls silent for fallen hero Charlie Kirk,” said one such account with 335,700 followers that described itself as a defender of western values and culture. “The British media hated him. The British people certainly didn’t.”View image in fullscreenAnother account promoted by Jones’s site was that of Naomi Seibt, a US-based German political influencer linked to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, who is known for her climate change denial and promotion of “great replacement theory” tropes.She tweeted images from the rally to her 436,700 followers that included the words: “White children will grow up as patriots from now on. White guilt is over.”Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the anti-Muslim movement Act for America, which claims to have 1,000 local chapters across the US, posted on X: “Don’t let the media downplay how massive this is. Millions of patriots in the UK are standing up for free speech.”Then there is Elon Musk, who appeared via videolink at Saturday’s rally. It would be difficult to overplay the importance to Robinson of the support of one of the world’s richest men, according to analysts including the Hope Not Hate anti-extremist organisation.View image in fullscreenIn lifting the ban on Robinson’s content on X and through his own misleading posts framing him as a free speech warrior persecuted by the state, Musk gave the activist a vital leg-up, it is argued.Robinson, a former member of the racist British National party, who has a string of convictions to his name including for assault, using a fake passport, mortgage fraud and contempt of court, is said to have been able to build upon his profile in the US, stir up protests outside hotels accommodating asylum seekers while pushing anti-immigrant messages that circle around a supposed threat of Islamisation to the UK.“When you hear people talk about the special relationship between America and Great Britain, this is the special relationship that you’re seeing here,” Robinson said at the rally.“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” Musk told the crowd, in turn.Musk is not yet believed to have directly funded anyone in the UK, although he reportedly flirted with offering money to Reform, the rising political party on the right that is led by Nigel Farage. But such transatlantic relationships do exist, albeit they tend to remain below the radar. It is a murky soup – but some of the chunkier players can be made out.One is the US tech billionaire Robert Shillman, known as Dr Bob, who in 2018 financed a fellowship that helped pay for Robinson to be employed by the rightwing Canadian media website, Rebel Media, now called Rebel News, on a salary of about £5,000 a month.View image in fullscreenOther Shillman fellows have included Katie Hopkins, the English former reality TV star who compared migrants to cockroaches, and Laura Loomer, the American conspiracy theorist referred to by some as the president’s “de facto national security adviser”.The rightwing Middle East Forum thinktank, led by the neoconservative academic Daniel Pipes, has paid for foreign speakers to attend Robinson rallies in the past, in addition to funding the activist’s legal defence.There are laws against foreign donations in both the US and the UK but the far-right echo chamber is also clearly a useful tool for those seeking electoral success on both sides of the Atlantic.Trump has had no qualms about bouncing off certain British causes, sometimes unadvisedly. He said he was prepared to apologise in 2018 when he retweeted posts from Britain First, an offshoot of the BNP. But he is notably cautious about certain characters.Trump, who will be in the UK for a state visit this week, did not comment on social media about Saturday’s rally. He appears to prefer his outriders to do the work at times, including his son.When the rightwing activist Kurt Schlichter claimed – falsely – on X that Robinson had been arrested for reporting on a court case in May 2018, Donald Trump Jr retweeted it, writing: “Reason #1776 for the original #brexit. Don’t let America follow in those footsteps.”In the UK, Farage, who successfully fought for decades for the UK to leave the European Union and is today riding high in the polls with his anti-immigration populism, has sought to keep a sterile gap between himself and Robinson, who he fears is beyond the pale for much of the British public.He steps carefully in the digital space, seeking support but without getting too close to the most strident actors, including those in the US. He is notably quite loth to associate himself too much with Trump these days when he is at home in the UK, given the US president’s poor approval ratings among the British public.View image in fullscreenBut his long-standing ties to the Make America Great Again movement remain financially advantageous. This week, Farage apologised for breaching parliamentary rules by failing to register a trip to Florida to headline a fundraising event for Trump. He had been the main speaker at the $500-a-head Republican party dinner in Tallahassee in March.Farage hopes to benefit from the promotion of anti-immigrant themes in the digital world, including from US commentators, without putting off those with more mainstream outlooks, say insiders. It will be a difficult trick to get away with – as Musk’s criticism of Farage at the start of the year over his lack of support for Robinson illustrated.“British people are kind of looking for an international source of inspiration,” said Jackson. “[Then] some of the reason why somebody like Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson might be of particular interest in the US is because they’ve had a lot of success in their own terms.“Tommy Robinson’s social media profile of the last few years has been highly impactful, even more so since [Musk] reversing his ban from Twitter. Nigel Farage’s impact on Britain shortly before Trump’s first presidency can be seen as perhaps providing some blueprints about how to have impact.”Gawain Towler, who was Farage’s long-standing press adviser until he left Reform earlier this year, said he believed the American interest in shaping British politics was also instinctive.“Trump sees the UK as the spiritual home of the US,” he said. “He sees our traditional political and legal traditions as the spiritual background to America’s right.“Musk certainly feels that way. He sees the UK as the spiritual homeland of the concepts of the American Declaration of Independence and its bill of rights and all the rest of it. This is where freedom was born, right? It’s like losing a great-uncle if it falls.” More
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Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right
by Evelyn Reynolds 12 September 2025, 09:00
After clinching the title of top conservative podcast in America (and second overall news podcast, according to Apple’s ranking) in March, Charlie Kirk said: “We’re not just talking. We’re activating a revolution.”In the hours after his killing at age 31 on the first stop of a buzzy college campus tour, the rightwing activist’s words echoed through young conservative circles. Social media eulogies rolled in, with users reposting clips of Kirk with his wife and children. Parents of teens wrote on X of learning about Kirk’s death through their children. “My 17 year old is bumming. Told me he plays Charlie in the background on his computer when he’s on it,” the conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on X. Another X user wrote about speaking to teens at a church youth group: “Everyone I talked to is so distraught and heartbroken at his passing.”A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Kirk’s ideology was caustic; he espoused openly homophobic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and Christian nationalist views while uplifting misinformation and conspiracy theories. He also campaigned on issues that mattered to young Americans, engaging directly with them – no matter how virulently – on hot-button topics such as abortion, transgender rights, race and Palestinian solidarity.View image in fullscreenAmy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who studies politics and education, describes Kirk’s values as “insurgency conservatism” that was “designed to get attention”.It worked: TikTok users under 30 who voted for Trump in 2024 said they trusted Kirk more than any other individual, according to a New York Times profile, despite the fact that he never held office or a role in the White House. That election saw male voters ages 18 to 29 swing hard to the right; Trump also made inroads with gen Z women. Earlier this year, Trump praised Kirk for “what he’s done with the young people”.As a millennial growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kirk was obsessed with Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement. His fans also felt like outsiders within the American political system.“After Trump was elected in 2016, I was really surprised to see just how many students who were conservative were no longer identifying with the Republican party or with college Republicans, and had instead pivoted over to being really intrigued with what Turning Point was doing on campus,” Binder said. “They were doing much more exciting programming. It was less electorally focused, less about campaigning, and more about having events that were really confrontational.”Kirk appeared equally at ease chumming it up with high-powered donors as he did debating 20-year-olds in sweatpants. Kirk sparred directly with young people through video templates such as “prove me wrong” (a one-on-one debate, where students could wait in line to ask him a question), and he was an early guest on the YouTube series Surrounded, where he sat in a room with 25 liberals and goaded them with statements such as “abortion is murder and should be illegal” and “trans women are not women.”Turning Point USA raked in funding – the New York Times estimated a $92.4m revenue in 2023 – while advancing campus culture wars. Kirk’s content brought classic and extreme rightwing ideals to young people’s media feeds; he looked like both an old-school, suited conservative in the style of a Fox News host, and a social media-savvy man of the times. His video titles usually bent toward hyperbole (“Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State,” was posted less than a week before the shooting). There were gonzo premises, such as when Kirk and the YouTube prank team Nelk Boys showed up at a Wisconsin frat party to get out the vote in 2024. His meme literacy showed when he handed out hats that read: “White Boy Summer”, a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” catchphrase.With his wife, Erika, owner of a faith-based fashion brand and a former Miss Arizona USA, Kirk softened his image, presenting himself as devoted husband, father and a bit of a lifestyle influencer. He talked to tweens in Maga hats about his preferred Starbucks order and promoted “cuteservatives” like Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster who branded her show on Maha culture as a rightwing Call Her Daddy. After Kirk’s death, Brett Cooper, a 23-year-old conservative influencer in the “womanosphere” with more than 1 million Instagram followers, reposted a video homage that depicted him as a champion for girls and young women. (Yet this was a man who compared abortion to the Holocaust and claimed that women over 30 “aren’t attractive in the dating pool”.)View image in fullscreenFor 10 years, Turning Point USA hosted a “women’s summit”, where Kirk and others like Clark and Cooper encouraged attenders to focus on finding husbands. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, published an obituary that called Kirk a “loving father, patriot, and husband”.Even young people who were disgusted by Kirk’s rhetoric could not deny his impact. Hasan Piker, the hugely popular leftwing Twitch streamer whose ideology stands in direct contrast to Kirk, was scheduled to debate with Kirk at the end of September at Dartmouth University. Both Piker and the gun control activist David Hogg spoke against political violence in the wake of the shooting (as did many Democratic figures such as Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani). Piker told his followers not to make jokes about Kirk’s shooting. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. Hogg called the news “horrifying” on X.“I think it’s undeniable to say that Kirk was one of the first and most prominent people to shape what it means to be young and on the right in the US,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies extremism.After Kirk’s death, Braddock said he had seen “individuals calling this an inflection point, or a turning point where the left can no longer be tolerated”. Rightwing pundits have been eager to blame the left for the shooting.Adam Pennings, 25, is the executive director of Run Gen Z, a non-profit that supports young Republican candidates. “He’s always just been such an important part” of the young conservative party, Pennings said of Kirk. “He was everywhere.”Pennings knew Kirk through his work, but the two were not close. Still, Pennings said, due to Kirk’s omnipresence: “I feel like I lost a friend.” More
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Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 June 2025, 04:00
She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.View image in fullscreen“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the “neo-totalitarianism” exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We speak as Shore is trying to do her day job, having touched down in Warsaw en route to Kyiv, with Poland and Ukraine long a focus of her studies. Via Zoom from a hotel lobby, she peppers our conversation with terms drawn from a Russian political lexicon that suddenly fits a US president.“The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’.” It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. “And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.”She fears that the sheer shamelessness of Trump has “really disempowered the opposition, because our impulse is to keep looking for the thing that’s hidden and expose it, and we think that’s going to be what makes the system unravel.” But the problem is not what’s hidden, it’s “what we’ve normalised – because the whole strategy is to throw it all in your face.”None of this has been an overnight realisation for Shore. It had been building for years, with origins that predate Trump. Now 53, she had spent most of her 20s focused on eastern Europe, barely paying attention to US politics, when the deadlocked presidential election of 2000 and the aborted Florida recount fiasco made her realise that “we didn’t really know how to count votes”. Next she was wondering: “Why exactly were we going to war in Iraq?” But the moment her academic work began to shed an uncomfortable light on the American present came in the presidential race of 2008.View image in fullscreen“When John McCain chose Sarah Palin, I felt like she was a character right out of the 1930s.” The Republican vice-presidential candidate lived, Shore thought, “in a totally fictitious world … not constrained by empirical reality.” Someone like that, Shore believed, could really rile up a mob.And then came Trump.Once again, it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,” she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast “eschatological vision”, the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is “advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.”When Trump was elected in 2016, Shore found herself “lying on the floor of my office, throwing up into a plastic bag. I felt like this was the end of the world. I felt like something had happened that was just catastrophic on a world historical scale, that was never going to be OK.”Did she consider leaving the US then? She did, not least because both she and her husband had received offers to teach in Geneva. “We tore our hair out debating it.” Snyder’s instinct was to stay and fight: he’s a “committed patriot”, she says. Besides, their children were younger; there was their schooling to think about. So they stayed at Yale. “These things are so contingent; you can’t do a control study on real life.”But when Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. “So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.”View image in fullscreenEvents so far have vindicated those fears. The deportations; students disappeared off the streets, one famously caught on video as she was bundled into an unmarked car by masked immigration agents; the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as Trump and JD Vance ordered the Ukrainian president to express his gratitude to them, even as they were “abusing” him, an episode, says Shore, “right out of Stalinism” – to say nothing of Trump’s regular attacks on “USA-hating judges” who rule against the executive branch. It adds up to a playbook that is all too familiar. “Dark fantasies are coming true.”She readily admits that her reaction to these events is not wholly or coldly analytical. It’s more personal than that. “I’m a neurotic catastrophist,” she says. “I feel like we could just subtitle [this period] ‘the vindication of the neurotic catastrophist’. I mean, I’ve been anxious and neurotic since birth.” She draws the contrast with her husband: “Tim is not an anxious person by nature, and that is just hardwired.”She’s referring in part to their different backgrounds. Snyder is a child of Quakers; Shore is Jewish, raised in Allentown, eastern Pennsylvania. Her father was a doctor and her mother “a doctor’s wife” who was later a preschool teacher. Shore grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. “I do think there’s something about having heard stories of the Holocaust at a young age that was formative. If you hear these stories – people narrating what they went through in Auschwitz, even if they’re narrating it for eight, nine or 10-year-olds – it impresses itself on your consciousness. Once you know it’s possible, you just can’t unknow that.”How bad does she think it could get? Matter-of-factly, she says: “My fear is we’re headed to civil war.” She restates a basic truth about the US. “There’s a lot of guns. There’s a lot of gun violence. There’s a habituation to violence that’s very American, that Europeans don’t understand.” Her worry is that the guns are accompanied by a new “permissiveness” that comes from the top, that was typified by Trump’s indulgence of the January 6 rioters, even those who wanted to murder his vice-president. As she puts it: “You can feel that brewing.”She also worries that instead of fighting back, “people become atomised. The arbitrariness of terror atomises people. You know, people put their heads down, they go quiet, they get in line, if only for the very reasonable, rational reason that any individual acting rationally has a reason to think that the personal cost of refusing to make a compromise is going to be greater than the social benefit of their one act of resistance. So you get a classic collective action problem.”View image in fullscreenLater she speaks of the beauty of solidarity, those fleeting moments when societies come together, often to expel a tyrant. She recalls the trade union Solidarity in communist-era Poland and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. By leaving America – and Americans – in their hour of need, is she not betraying the very solidarity she reveres?“I feel incredibly guilty about that,” she sighs. All the more so when she sees the criticism directed at her husband. They were on sabbatical together in Canada when Trump won the 2024 election, but “had he been alone, he would have gone back to fight … That’s his personality. But he wouldn’t have done that to me and the kids.” To those minded to hurl accusations of betrayal and cowardice, she says: “Direct them all to me. I’m the coward. I take full blame for that.” It was she, not Snyder, who decided that “no, I’m not bringing my kids back to this”.I linger on that word “coward”. It goes to one of the fears that led to Shore’s decision. She does not doubt her own intellectual courage, her willingness to say or write what she believes, regardless of the consequences. But, she says, “I’ve never trusted myself to be physically courageous.” She worries that she is, in fact, “a physical coward”.She began to wonder: what would I do if someone came to take my students away? “If you’re in a classroom, you know your job is to look out for your students.” But could she do it? Many of her students are from overseas. “What am I going to do if masked guys in balaclavas come and try to take this person away? Would I be brave? Would I try to pull them away? Would I try to pull the mask off? Would I scream? Would I cry? Would I run away?” She didn’t trust herself to do what would need to be done.So now she is in what she calls “a luxurious position”: at a university across the border, safely out of reach of both Trump’s threats to cut funding and the ICE officials currently striking terror into the hearts of international students and others. As a result, she feels “more obligated to speak out … on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of other Americans who are at risk”.At one point in our conversation, we talk about those US citizens who put Trump back in the White House, even though, as she puts it, they knew who he was. “Nothing was hidden. People had plenty of time to think about it, and they chose this. And that disgust, I couldn’t shake that. I thought: ‘People wanted this – and I don’t want to have anything to do with this.’”Does that mean she will never return to the US? “I would never say, ‘I would never go back.’ I always feel that what history teaches you is not what will happen, but what can happen. The possibilities are generally much more capacious than anyone is expecting at that moment.”Contained in that remark is, if not optimism, then at least the possibility of it. And, right now, that might be as much as we can ask for. More
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The Guardian view on Romania’s presidential election upset: a vote for stability and the west | Editorial
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 May 2025, 17:59
As Romanians voted on Sunday in arguably the most consequential election in the country’s post-communist history, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, will have been preparing to welcome a fellow disruptor to the European stage. The first round of a controversially re-run presidential contest had been handsomely won by George Simion, a Eurosceptic ultranationalist who views Donald Trump as a “natural ally” and opposes military aid to Ukraine. On the back of a 20-point lead, Mr Simion, a 38-year-old former football ultra with a taste for violent rhetoric, was so confident of winning that he made a confrontational visit to Brussels in the last days of his campaign.Those expectations were confounded in remarkable fashion at the weekend. In a dramatic reversal of fortunes, Nicușor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest, benefited from the highest voter turnout in 30 years to triumph comfortably. One of the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mr Dan was a relieved Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who, in Hungary and Slovakia, already has to contend with two Putin-friendly governments on Ukraine’s western border.First and foremost, the stability promised by Mr Dan’s victory is good news for Romania, which has been in political turmoil since the original presidential election was cancelled amid allegations of Russian interference. Having made his name as a politically independent anti-corruption campaigner, he must now attempt to unite a deeply polarised country in which inequality, graft and poor public services have proved to be, as elsewhere, a launchpad for far-right populist insurgents.More broadly, the size of the second-round turnout – which included a huge diaspora vote – suggests that hitching a ride on the Trump bandwagon is as liable to motivate a mainstream backlash in Europe as generate Maga-style momentum. Given the global volatility unleashed by Mr Trump’s reckless, bullying style, and the dark shadow cast over eastern Europe by Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical ambitions, the strategic attractions of hugging the EU and Nato close are more readily apparent than they used to be. Handed the opportunity to turn east, a substantial majority of Romanian voters looked west.Elsewhere though, on a “super Sunday” of three European elections, outcomes were more ambivalent and less uplifting from a progressive perspective. The centre also held in Poland, where the liberal mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, narrowly won the first round of another crucial presidential election, ahead of the nationalist historian Karol Nawrocki. But the high combined vote for hard- and far-right candidates suggests that result may be reversed in two weeks’ time. One and a half years after Donald Tusk was given a prime ministerial mandate to bring Poland back into the European mainstream, Eurosceptic ultranationalism remains a force to be reckoned with.In Portugal, a snap election triggered by the centre-right governing party saw it retain power, but was notable mainly for the record number of votes cast for the far-right Chega party. Postal ballots could yet propel Chega to second place, ahead of the Socialist party, after a dismal night for the Portuguese left.Mr Dan’s famous victory was undoubtedly the story of the night, confounding a narrative of an inexorable rightwards shift in central and eastern Europe. But amid an ongoing cost of living crisis, and as mainstream parties echo far-right agendas on migration, the politics of Europe continue to feel anxious, polarised and alarmingly unpredictable.
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Germany hits back at Marco Rubio after he panned labeling of AfD as ‘extremist’
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 May 2025, 17:24
Germany’s foreign ministry has hit back at the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, following his criticism of Germany’s decision to label the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party as a “confirmed rightwing extremist group”.On Thursday, Rubio took to X and wrote: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy – it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD – which took second in the recent election – but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”Rubio went on to say: “Germany should reverse course.”In a response on X, the German foreign ministry pushed back against the US secretary of state, saying: “This is democracy. This decision is the result of a thorough & independent investigation to protect our Constitution & the rule of law. It is independent courts that will have the final say. We have learnt from our history that rightwing extremism needs to be stopped.”Germany’s response to Rubio comes after its domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), designated the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” force on Friday.The BfV’s decision marks a step up from its previous designation of the country’s anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin and largest opposition party as a “suspected” threat to Germany’s democratic order. According to the BfV, the AfD’s xenophobic stances based on an “ethnic-ancestry-based understanding” of German identity are “incompatible with the free democratic basic order” as indicated by the country’s constitution.The spy agency added that the AfD “aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and thus to assign them a legally devalued status”.It also said: “This exclusionary understanding of the people is the starting point and ideological basis for ongoing agitation against certain individuals or groups of people, through which they are defamed and despised indiscriminately and irrational fears and rejection are stirred up.”During February’s general election in Germany which was rocked by extensive US interference including public votes of confidence by staunch AfD supporters such as Elon Musk and JD Vance, the AfD amassed approximately 21% of the vote, finishing second.The far-right party’s rise to popularity in Germany has come as a result of a broader wave of growing rightwing extremism across Europe.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the same time, public figures in the US have openly made remarks or gestures that are sympathetic to nazism, despite the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on antisemitism across the country – a move which has been called into question by higher education institutions and Jewish senators who accuse Trump of targeting free speech.Musk, who had been given the designation of a “special government employee” by the Trump administration, made back-to-back apparent fascist salutes during the president’s inauguration rally earlier this year.Last month, during a Capitol Hill hearing that sought to explore supposed government censorship under Joe Biden, Republican representative Keith Self quoted Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister under Adolf Hitler.“A direct quote from Joseph Goebbels: ‘It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,’ and I think that may be what we’re discussing here,” he said. More
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Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 April 2025, 10:00
‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.The motivation of the pronatalists is that birthrates are in decline, in some places (such as South Korea) so precipitously that the nation will soon cease to meaningfully exist. It has been a bugbear of the right, particularly the alt-tech right, for almost a decade. In 2017, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” That was before he owned the platform, so few people noticed or cared. It has also been a thematic staple of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric in Hungary, reinforced in 2019 by a large-family tax-break policy that in February became an income tax exemption for mothers of two or three children.The ideas factories pushing birthrates have always been much more opaque about their politics; often, they frame their ideas to suit whomever they are talking to. When I interviewed Simone and Malcolm Collins, venture capitalists turned pronatal advocates, a couple of years ago, their line was that progressive politics needed higher birthrates. Political persuasion was “40% to 70% heritable”, Malcolm told me. “If you systematically delete everyone who cares about the environment from the gene pool, that means, within a couple of generations, you’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of people who care about the climate, even as the collapse becomes more intense.”At the last count, the Collinses had four children, plus a number of frozen embryos, which Simone intends to incubate at 18-month intervals. “We’re going to keep going until physically I can no longer have kids – and that will be when they forcibly remove my uterus,” she said. It was a dystopian image with a number of obvious follow-ups, the first of which was: who are “they”? But I didn’t ask any of them, because her perception of force, authority, uteruses, children and the world seemed dark and personal, like a subconscious gaping open.Nor did I pursue whether Malcolm could possibly believe that you could sell to people who care about the environment the idea that only their biological children would be genetically capable of caring about the environment. It could be the child of someone who arrives on a small boat that solves our political malaise. What about the heritability of staunch determination? Did they ever think about that?But, all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.In the intervening years, Musk has had a bunch more children, often boasting of the example he is setting. Trump started saying: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” to his followers. Last week, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, floated the idea that “if you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times”, which medics rebutted because it’s not true. But we should all fear its drumbeat: good stock is different; anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease wasn’t “healthy” to begin with.These connections are often intellectually baggy – Musk’s desire to populate Mars with his own seed doesn’t map neatly on to RFK’s anti-vax agenda, while Orbán’s pronatalism sounds like socially conservative gender oppression, yet pronatalist forums tie themselves in knots trying to sound “woke”. But if this isn’t about ethnonationalism, then why aren’t the pronatalists crying out for countries with low birthrates to receive refugees with open arms? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More
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in US Politics
In these dark times, Americans must harness the power of the civil rights movement again | Al Sharpton
by Evelyn Reynolds 22 March 2025, 08:00
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It can often be challenging to keep track of everything in Donald Trump’s US; the executive orders, the changes to decades-long protocols, the draconian legislation, the abandonment of established policies – and just the utter chaos.That in itself is part of the Trump administration’s strategy – throw everything at us all at once to see what sticks and what they can get away with. There is, in fact, so much happening simultaneously that it is virtually impossible to tackle it all.That is why efforts on the ground, in our communities and in our neighbourhoods are as vital as they ever were. Just like the grassroots civil rights movement of the 1960s forced change at the top, now too is a moment when our work can and must push back against Trump and a far right that is strategically dismantling every measure of progress. We must resist in order to exist.View image in fullscreenWhen Trump was being sworn into office on 20 January, my organisation, National Action Network, held a massive rally at the historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Washington DC. It was important for us to gather at this church, at a location that has long served as a place of refuge and comfort during dark times. As we once again find ourselves caught in the winds of uncertainty, chaos and injustice, we must organise, strategise and execute our own plan of action in order to save any measure of advancement and our hard-won civil rights.Despite the cruelty emanating from the Oval Office, there is a lot that can be done at the state and local level, and in our communities. In fact, state laws and policies often affect people more directly than federal policies at times. Therefore engaging state- and locally elected officials is vital – let them hear from you. After all, they are in office to serve the people and serve our interests, so our interests must be known. Whether it’s women’s reproductive rights, voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights, protecting immigrants, or any other issue, our concerns must be addressed. This is not a time for sitting back and watching helplessly; there is a lot that we can and must do to peacefully fight back.Here’s how we can push backOne of the first executive orders that Trump signed in office was to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in federal agencies. Many corporations, such as Target, McDonald’s, Walmart and others, unfortunately have fallen in line and capitulated to pressure from the right to either scale back significantly their DEI policies, or eliminate them altogether. It is why I announced on Martin Luther King Day that National Action Network will lead a strategic boycott of two companies that have dropped their DEI commitments.We’ve put together a group that is engaged in a 90-day study of which corporations have abandoned their DEI initiatives the most – and how much of their consumer base is in the Black community and how much of our wealth they receive. We will announce which companies we’re strategically boycotting at National Action Network’s upcoming annual conference, held from 2 to 5 April at the Sheraton Times Square hotel in New York City.Not only will we boycott specific entities that don’t respect us, but we are also simultaneously supporting those who stand with us. After retail giant Costco announced that it will remain firm in its DEI policies, I led hundreds of people in a “buy-cott” at a Costco in East Harlem. That was followed by similar buy-cotts at Costco locations in New Jersey, Los Angeles and all over the south. It is vital to proactively support those who support us. We must remember why we have DEI in the first place – in order to rectify institutional policies that purposefully excluded us. Trump and other businesses may attack DEI, but they cannot dictate where we spend our hard-earned dollars. Our actions will speak for us even as they try to silence us.This is just one example of how we can push back individually and collectively during these challenging and dark times. There is much that we can do at the local community level to protect ourselves and our neighbours, and speak out where needed. When they cut social services, help those less fortunate and help people understand how they can navigate an increasingly confusing system. When they continue to eliminate DEI and voting protections, make sure people are empowered to know how to weather the storms – and how to still participate in the electoral process.When they go after reproductive rights, help women know where and how they can seek the care they may need and stay safe. When they target undocumented immigrants, make sure they know their rights. When they target the LGBTQ+ community, stand with them and continue to push for greater equality and inclusion. Over these next four years, it will be incumbent upon all of us to unite as one because the vile attacks against us are resting on a theory of divide and conquer.During the great civil rights movement, Black Americans and our allies organised, marched, boycotted and put enough pressure on the White House to bring about substantive change that was then codified into law. People didn’t just give us our rights out of the kindness of their hearts; we demanded them. It was pressure from the grassroots that then forced elected officials to act. We once again find ourselves living in an era where our work, our voices and our actions can and must speak volumes and bring about a nation where all of us are valued, protected and afforded the same rights and liberties.Trump and the right are counting on us to be defeated or deflated; we must strategise and push back because there are more of us than them. Those of us who care about diversity, inclusion, equality and justice far outweigh those working to destroy it. We just need to use our power effectively – and as one.
The Rev Al Sharpton is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and radio talkshow host More
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The ‘Iron Mountain’ hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today’s conspiracy theories
by Evelyn Reynolds 16 March 2025, 09:00
We live in a blizzard of fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.View image in fullscreenIn reality, as the White House eventually realised, Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. It was the brainchild of leftwing satirists: Victor Navasky, editor of a magazine called Monocle, his colleagues, and a fellow satirist, Leonard Lewin, who wrote it with the help of luminaries like the famous economist and former US ambassador to India, JK Galbraith. Their goal was to expose what they saw as the insanity driving the intervention in Vietnam, and the whole of the cold war. By presenting their fake report as a real leak, they aimed to make people ask if this insane document might be real – and what that said about the people running the US government.And it worked. To young Americans living under the shadow of conscription, Report seemed all too plausible. Officials whispered to journalists that some of their colleagues really did think like this. Once the hoax had its satirical impact, Lewin came clean. But his work was so convincing it began to take on a life of its own.In the late 1980s, Report from Iron Mountain was discovered by the extreme right, which was convinced it was real. It was republished by a company called the Noontide Press, part of a network of fringe organisations that were among America’s primary promoters of Holocaust denial. These people were convinced they had found the smoking gun, confirming their darkest suspicions about the government’s secret plots to start wars and control the public. A horrified Lewin embarked on a long legal battle to take back control of his work and its true, meaning.But meanwhile, the militia movement spreading across the US seized on Report from Iron Mountain, as fuel for its paranoid visions of imminent oppression at the hands of the one-world government and its black helicopters. And Lewin’s creation found its way to Hollywood. In JFK, Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie about the Kennedy assassination, the great revelation about why the president was assassinated hinges on a character repeating the hoax’s claims in the belief that they were disturbing truths.View image in fullscreenReport even spawned a secondary hoax: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This purported to be the operations manual that helped the elite control its sheeple-civilians. This strange text was first popularised by the pioneering conspiracist Milton William Cooper, who published it in Behold a Pale Horse, his influential compendium of conspiracy theories. Cooper also included extracts from Report from Iron Mountain itself (and, horrifyingly, another hoax: that notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Silent Weapons has often been cited by arch conspiracist Alex Jones and has been invoked by “Q”, the ostensible government insider revered by the QAnon movement.Lewin and his colleagues had contrived their hoax so expertly that they inadvertently created “evidence” for a host of conspiracy theories. It could be used to explain everything from why wars end to the real reasons behind lockdown, from environmental regulations and terrorist attacks to the fiery end of a cult in Waco, Texas.The reasoning at work here is revealing. If something in Report chimes with what is really happening in the world, the conspiracist’s logic runs, that cannot be a coincidence. Rather, it exposes the secret motives that caused that reality. The principle here – a consistent fallacy of conspiracy theory – is that “nothing is accidental”. One online analysis of Report from Iron Mountain in 2014 even decided the fact Lewin later wrote a novel was an attempt to retrospectively create a cover identity so he could pretend Report was fiction too.And yet the fate of this all-too-successful hoax also suggests what we might need to do to counter this kind of thinking. In a political climate roiled by conspiracy theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true.Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy, which will be published by Head of Zeus on 27 March. More

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