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      Joe Biden was a winner, once. It’s a huge risk to assume he can win again | Zoe Williams

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      I remember when people thought the free world was in peril because its self-appointed leader didn’t have a big enough vocabulary. There were also rumblings that, at 56, he was past his prime. This was George W Bush.There was detailed analysis of his favourite words (“folk”, “folksy”), the span and structure of his sentences and what grade it would put him in at school. A lot of this information was passed by word of mouth, one person in 100 being online and telling everyone else, and none of us in the UK were sure what US grades meant, but we knew it didn’t put him in one of the high ones. Did he have the intelligence of a nine-year-old? A 14-year-old?It didn’t sound good, but it also wasn’t true; there was nothing wrong with Bush’s IQ. It was just an early iteration of the rightwing manoeuvre where they pretend to be thick, to make liberals sneer at them, then turn to the voters they want, who they have assumed are stupid (well, why aren’t they rich?), and say: “Look, this is what liberals think of you.” It was bold and it broke with the conventional wisdom that leaders acted like smart people you could look up to (Ronald Reagan notwithstanding).You could lose a lot of time wondering if Donald Trump is simply rebooting this provocative stupidity play, with extra panache and some sharks, or whether he really is as unintelligent as he sounds. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s never been anything but clear about what he wants: all that matters is whether or not he wins.Ironically, that was the rationale for Joe Biden running again. His age didn’t matter, nor his qualities; even his polling numbers didn’t count. He was the only person who could beat Trump because he was the only person who had ever beaten Trump and therefore he was the only person anyone could imagine beating Trump.Win-at-all-costs logic isn’t great for politics at the best of times. It strips everyone’s enthusiasm down to the bone as they jettison what matters to them for some hand-me-down formula of what it takes to win. They lumber towards the finish, thinking: well, it must be working for some people; let’s hope there are enough of them. And, fair play, sometimes there are. There were in the US in 2000.But what we are looking at is win-at-all-costs logic spliced with “the only thing I can imagine is a thing that has already happened”, to give the elemental principle: only a winner can win. You can throw any suggestion you like into this mix – a new perspective, new blood, someone younger, someone from a different social demographic or a different wing of the party – and you will always be referred back to the people who know how to win. What do they think? Thank you for your interest, but they would prefer a winner on this occasion. Where no winner is available, perhaps you would consider a winner’s wife?Maybe it seems presumptuous to worry about US politics, particularly now, when the UK has its own show to open, and so much sooner. Does it seem too soon, too nosy, to worry about France? Can we not just mind our own business, this of all weeks? Loth as I am to learn from anything, least of all history, this pattern of a deliberately, flamboyantly coarse and stupid right wing, petrifying its opposition into a stance so defensive that the only thing it knows how to fight is itself, is eerily familiar.The creed of winning is irritating because it’s circular and unaccountable: those who preach it often don’t win and they seldom reflect on whether they might not know how to win, instead blaming the people who didn’t want victory enough. But it’s dangerous, because it’s risk averse. And watching that risk aversion play out in Biden versus Trump makes you realise it’s incredibly risky. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

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      Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back

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      Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals.But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost $5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property.During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the $20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the “longtermism”, “rationalism” and “effective altruism” (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future.At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism.Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.But recently filed federal court documents allege that in the months before the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto empire, he and other company insiders funnelled almost $5m to Lightcone, including $1m for a deposit to lock in the Rose Garden deal.FTX bankruptcy administrators say that money was commingled with funds looted from FTX customers. Now, they are asking a judge to give it back.The revelations cast new light on so-called “Tescreal” intellectual movements – an umbrella term for a cluster of movements including EA and rationalism that exercise broad influence in Silicon Valley, and have the ear of the likes of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk.It also raises questions about the extent to which people within that movement continue to benefit from Bankman-Fried’s fraud, the largest in US history.The Guardian contacted Habryka for comment on this reporting but received no response.Controversial conferencesLast weekend, Lighthaven was the venue for the Manifest 2024 conference, which, according to the website, is “hosted by Manifold and Manifund”.Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market – a forecasting method that was the ostensible topic of the conference.Prediction markets are a long-held enthusiasm in the EA and rationalism subcultures, and billed guests included personalities like Scott Siskind, AKA Scott Alexander, founder of Slate Star Codex; misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Miri).Billed speakers from the broader tech world included the Substack co-founder Chris Best and Ben Mann, co-founder of AI startup Anthropic.Alongside these guests, however, were advertised a range of more extreme figures.One, Jonathan Anomaly, published a paper in 2018 entitled Defending Eugenics, which called for a “non-coercive” or “liberal eugenics” to “increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare”. The publication triggered an open letter of protest by Australian academics to the journal that published the paper, and protests at the University of Pennsylvania when he commenced working there in 2019. (Anomaly now works at a private institution in Quito, Ecuador, and claims on his website that US universities have been “ideologically captured”.)Another, Razib Khan, saw his contract as a New York Times opinion writer abruptly withdrawn just one day after his appointment had been announced, following a Gawker report that highlighted his contributions to outlets including the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine and anti-immigrant website VDare.The Michigan State University professor Stephen Hsu, another billed guest, resigned as vice-president of research there in 2020 after protests by the MSU Graduate Employees Union and the MSU student association accusing Hsu of promoting scientific racism.Brian Chau, executive director of the “effective accelerationist” non-profit Alliance for the Future (AFF), was another billed guest. A report last month catalogued Chau’s long history of racist and sexist online commentary, including false claims about George Floyd, and the claim that the US is a “Black supremacist” country. “Effective accelerationists” argue that human problems are best solved by unrestricted technological development.Another advertised guest, Michael Lai, is emblematic of tech’s new willingness to intervene in Bay Area politics. Lai, an entrepreneur, was one of a slate of “Democrats for Change” candidates who seized control of the powerful Democratic County Central Committee from progressives, who had previously dominated the body that confers endorsements on candidates for local office.In a phone interview, Lai said he did not attend the Manifest conference in early June. “I wasn’t there, and I did not know about what these guys believed in,” Lai said. He also claimed to not know why he was advertised on the manifest.is website as a conference-goer, adding that he had been invited by Austin Chen of Manifold Markets. In an email, Chen, who organized the conference and is a co-founder of Manifund, wrote: “We’d scheduled Michael for a talk, but he had to back out last minute given his campaigning schedule.“This kind of thing happens often with speakers, who are busy people; we haven’t gotten around to removing Michael yet but will do so soon,” Chen added.On the other speakers, Chen wrote in an earlier email: “We were aware that some of these folks have expressed views considered controversial.”He went on: “Some of these folks we’re bringing in because of their past experience with prediction markets (eg [Richard] Hanania has used them extensively and partnered with many prediction market platforms). Others we’re bringing in for their particular expertise (eg Brian Chau is participating in a debate on AI safety, related to his work at Alliance for the Future).”Chen added: “We did not invite them to give talks about race and IQ” and concluded: “Manifest has no specific views on eugenics or race & IQ.”Democrats for Change received significant support from Bay Area tech industry heavyweights, and Lai is now running for the San Francisco board of supervisors, the city’s governing body. He is endorsed by a “grey money” influence network funded by rightwing tech figures like David Sacks and Garry Tan. The same network poured tens of thousands of dollars into his successful March campaign for the DCCC and ran online ads in support of him, according to campaign contribution data from the San Francisco Ethics Commission.Several controversial guests were also present at Manifest 2023, also held at Lighthaven, including rightwing writer Hanania, whose pseudonymous white-nationalist commentary from the early 2010s was catalogued last August in HuffPost, and Malcolm and Simone Collins, whose EA-inspired pro-natalism – the belief that having as many babies as possible will save the world – was detailed in the Guardian last month.The Collinses were, along with Razib Khan and Jonathan Anomaly, featured speakers at the eugenicist Natal Conference in Austin last December, as previously reported in the Guardian.Daniel HoSang, a professor of American studies at Yale University and a part of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, said: “The ties between a sector of Silicon Valley investors, effective altruism and a kind of neo-eugenics are subtle but unmistakable. They converge around a belief that nearly everything in society can be reduced to markets and all people can be regarded as bundles of human capital.”HoSang added: “From there, they anoint themselves the elite managers of these forces, investing in the ‘winners’ as they see fit.”“The presence of Stephen Hsu here is particularly alarming,” HoSang concluded. “He’s often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people like Ron Unz, Steven Sailer and Stefan Molyneux and more mainstream figures in tech, investment and scientific research, especially around human genetics.”FTX proceedingsAs Lighthaven develops as a hub for EA and rationalism, the new court filing alleges that the purchase of the property was partly secured with money funnelled by Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX insiders in the months leading up to the crypto empire’s collapse.Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for masterminding the $8bn fraud that led to FTX’s downfall in November 2022, in which customer money was illegally transferred from FTX to sister exchange Alameda Research to address a liquidity crisis.Since the collapse, FTX and Alameda have been in the hands of trustees, who in their efforts to pay back creditors are also pursuing money owed to FTX, including money they say was illegitimately transferred to others by Bankman-Fried and company insiders.On 13 May, those trustees filed a complaint with a bankruptcy court in Delaware – where FTX and Lightcone both were incorporated – alleging that Lightcone received more than $4.9m in fraudulent transfers from Alameda, via the non-profit FTX Foundation, over the course of 2022.State and federal filings indicate that Lightcone was incorporated on 13 October 2022 with Habryka acting in all executive roles. In an application to the IRS for 501(c)3 charitable status, Habryka aligned the organization with an influential intellectual current in Silicon Valley: “Combining the concepts of the Longtermism movement … and rationality … Lightcone Infrastructure Inc works to steer humanity towards a safer and better future.”California filings also state that from 2017 until the application, Lightcone and its predecessor project had been operating under the fiscal sponsorship of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), a rationalism non-profit established in 2012.The main building on the property now occupied by the Lighthaven campus was originally constructed in 1903 as a mansion, and between 1979 and Lightcone’s 2022 purchase of the property, the building was run as a hotel, the Rose Garden Inn.Alameda county property records indicate that the four properties encompassed by the campus remain under the ownership of an LLC, Lightcone Rose Garden (Lightcone RG), of which Lightcone is the sole member, according to the filings. California business filings identify Habryka as the registered agent of Lightcone Infrastructure and Lightcone RG.Lightcone and CFAR both give the campus as their principal place of business in their most recent tax filings.On 2 March 2022, according to the complaint, CFAR applied to the FTX Foundation asking that “$2,000,000 be given to the Center for Applied Rationality as an exclusive grant for its project, the Lightcone Infrastructure Team”. FTX Foundation wired the money the same day.Between then and October 2022, according to trustees, the FTX Foundation wired at least 14 more transfers worth $2,904,999.61. In total, FTX’s administrators say, almost $5m was transferred to CFAR from the FTX Foundation.On 13 July and 18 August 2022, according to the complaint, the FTX Foundation also wired two payments of $500,000 each to a title company as a deposit for Lightcone RG’s purchase of the Rose Garden Inn. The complaint says these were intended as a loan but there is no evidence that the $1m was repaid.Then, on 3 October, the FTX Foundation approved a $1.5m grant to Lightcone Infrastructure, according to FTX trusteesThe complaint alleges that Lightcone got another $20m loan to fund the Rose Garden Inn purchase from Slimrock Investments Pte Ltd, a Singapore-incorporated company owned by Estonian software billionaire, Skype inventor and EA/rationalism adherent Jaan Tallinn. This included the $16.5m purchase price and $3.5m for renovations and repairs.Slimrock investments has no apparent public-facing website or means of contact. The Guardian emailed Tallinn for comment via the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit whose self-assigned mission is: “Steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks.” Tallinn sits on that organization’s board. Neither Tallinn nor the Future of Life Institute responded to the request.The complaint also says that FTX trustees emailed CFAR four times between June and August 2023, and that on 31 August they hand-delivered a letter to CFAR’s Rose Garden Inn offices. All of these attempts at contact were ignored. Only after the debtors filed a discovery motion on 31 October 2023 did CFAR engage with them.The most recent filing on 17 May is a summons for CFAR and Lightcone to appear in court to answer the complaint.The suit is ongoing.The Guardian emailed CFAR president and co-founder Anna Salamon for comment on the allegations but received no response. More

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      Rightwing media decried Trump’s trial. What about Hunter Biden’s?

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      Two weeks, two big trials, two convictions. After Donald Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records at the end of last month, Hunter Biden, son of Joe, was convicted on Tuesday of buying and owning a gun while being a user of crack cocaine.The rightwing media had howled in anguish when a jury ruled that the former US president was guilty of 34 felony charges: commentators claiming that the justice system was rigged, that the conviction was political persecution, and that Joe Biden had wielded undue influence in Trump being prosecuted.Surely then, the Fox Newses and Breitbarts of the world would be similarly outraged by Hunter Biden’s conviction?Nope.“The facts were simple, the law was clear and the evidence of guilt can only be described as overwhelming,” Gregg Jarrett, an analyst and commentator for Fox News, wrote on the channel’s website, in a piece which championed the fairness and rigor of the American legal system.“As it turns out, even a privileged and coddled Biden must abide by the rule of law.”That was a far cry from Jarrett’s take on the judiciary 13 days earlier, when Trump was convicted in Manhattan.“Donald Trump did not lose on Thursday,” Jarrett wrote, incorrectly.“Our once venerated legal system did. And, by extension, all Americans lost something precious. Because the failure of justice is a failure of the people.”In a 1,000-word outpouring of woe, Jarrett repeated Trump’s – now provably false – claims that no crime was committed, adding “the ideals of a fair trial and an impartial jury faded into a figment of our Founders’ imaginations”.“The tragic coda to the Trump trial is that Americans can no longer trust our system of justice,” Jarrett wrote solemnly.Other Fox News personalities similarly revised their opinion of the US legal system.Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host, had been outraged after Trump was found guilty, decrying “smoke and mirrors” and claiming “we have gone over a cliff in America”.“This is a new era in America, and I think it goes against the ilk of who we are as Americans and our faith in the criminal justice system,” Pirro said of Trump’s conviction on 30 May.She was of a different mind on Tuesday.“In the end this jury of ordinary people from Delaware were not intimidated by [the Biden] family, and they recognize that this was a clearcut case and that clearly no one is above the law,” Pirro said.View image in fullscreenSpeaking to rightwing channel Newsmax, Alan Dershowitz, a prominent lawyer and commentator who was part of Trump’s legal team during the then president’s first impeachment trial, did a similar flip-flop.“Trump was convicted of a made-up charge; there’s nothing to the case,” Dershowitz said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I still can’t figure out what the actual conviction is based on. On the other hand, Hunter Biden was convicted of a real crime.”Away from the doublethink, a new narrative was developing: that the Biden guilty verdict was actually evidence of some sort of cover-up.Many on the right wing claimed that the conviction on gun offenses was an attempt to distract from Republicans’ years-long, unproven conspiracy theory of corruption by both Hunter and Joe Biden.Republicans in the House began an investigation into the Biden family in January 2023, with the idea being that Biden benefited from his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. After nearly 18 months of investigation, Republicans have not found any evidence that the president was involved in any wrongdoing.Republicans have accused Biden of weaponizing the justice system against Trump – an allegation the Hunter Biden guilty verdict would seem to contradict. But that didn’t stop conservative commentators from diving into the issue.“Hunter Biden guilty. Yawn,” Charlie Kirk, the rightwing radio host and founder of Turning Point USA, wrote on X.“The true crimes of the Biden Crime Family remain untouched. This is a fake trial trying to make the Justice system appear ‘balanced.’ Don’t fall for it.”Jack Posobiec, a far-right activist who hosts a video show on X, said in a post: “They went after Hunter on his gun stuff to make you overlook all his Ukraine stuff.”Posobiec did not elaborate on the “Ukraine stuff”. But Breitbart trod a similar line, claiming that Biden’s conviction “allows the left to claim ‘no one is above the law’, while distracting from the much more serious allegations against the first son – and his father”.It has been a whirlwind few days for the rightwing media: from howling at the injustice of the justice system, to celebrating the justice system. Now the claim is that, actually, the justice system might be bad after all: and the Hunter Biden verdict is just a cover-up.Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, perhaps put it best.“The new rightwing line that Joe Biden rigged the trial to put his son in prison,” Gertz wrote, “replaces the old rightwing line that Joe Biden was rigging the trial to keep his son out of prison.” More

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      ‘No way out without bloodshed’: the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing

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      The posts are ominous.“Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.The replies were even more so.“Dan, seriously now,” one user wrote in response to Bongino. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.”That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the ex-president’s verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to US democracy.Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.In this case, Trump was charged with falsifying documents related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film actor to keep an alleged affair out of the spotlight during the 2016 election – a form of election interference from a man whose platform lately consists largely of blaming others for election interference. The verdict has been followed by a backlash from his followers, those who for years chanted to lock up Trump’s political opponents, like Hillary Clinton.View image in fullscreenOn the left, the mood was downright celebratory, a brief interlude of joy that Trump might finally be held accountable for his actions. But there was an undercurrent of worry among some liberals, who saw the way these felonies could galvanize support for him.On the right, in the alternate reality created by and for Trump and his supporters, the convictions are a sign of both doom and dogma – evidence that a corrupt faction runs the Joe Biden government, but that it can be driven out by the Trump faithful like themselves.Trump’s allies in Congress want to use the federal government’s coffers to send a message to Biden that the verdict crosses a line, saying the jury’s decision “turned our judicial system into a political cudgel”. Some Senate Republicans vowed not to cooperate with Democratic priorities or nominees – effectively politicizing the government as recompense for what they claim is a politicization of the courts.They echoed a claim Trump himself has repeatedly driven home to his followers: that his political opponents, namely Biden, are a threat to democracy, a rebrand of how Biden and Democrats often cast Trump. For his most ardent followers, the stakes of the 2024 election are existential, the idea that he might lose a cause for intense rhetoric and threats.And, for some, the convictions provide another reason to take matters into their own hands during a time when support for using violence to achieve political goals is on the rise. Indictments against Trump fueled this support, surveys have shown.Some rightwing media and commentators, like Bongino and the Gateway Pundit, displayed upside-down flags on social media, a sign of distress and a symbol among Trump supporters that recently made the news because one flew at US supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s home after the insurrection.View image in fullscreenThe terms “banana republic” and “kangaroo court” flew around, as did memes comparing Biden to Nazi or fascist leaders. Telegram channels lit up with posts about how the end of the US was solidified – unless Trump wins again in November.“If we jail Trump, get rid of Maga, end the electoral college, ban voter ID, censor free speech, we’ll save democracy,” says one meme in a QAnon channel on Telegram that depicts Biden in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache.Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media heavyweight, waxed apocalyptic: “Import the third world, become the third world. That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”Trump’s supporters also opened their wallets, sending a “record-shattering” $34.8m in small-dollar donations to Trump’s campaign on Thursday, the Trump campaign claimed.The massive haul came after Trump declared himself a “political prisoner” (he is not in prison) and declared justice “dead” in the US in a dire fundraising pitch.“Their sick & twisted goal is simple: Pervert the justice system against me so much, that proud supporters like YOU will SPIT when you hear my name,” Trump’s campaign wrote. “BUT THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! NOW IT’S TIME FOR ME & YOU TO SHOVE IT BACK IN THEIR CORRUPT FACES!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe real verdict, Trump wrote on Truth Social, would come on 5 November. Posts calling 5 November a new “independence day” and comparing 2024 to 1776 – but a revolution not against the British, but among Americans for the control of the country – spread widely.Misinformation and rumors spread as well, with the potential that these rumors could lead to further action by Republicans to avenge Trump.View image in fullscreenIn one viral claim, people say it’s not clear what crimes Trump even committed (the charges for falsifying documents are listed in detail in the indictment, and have been broken down piece by piece by the media). In another, posts claim the judge gave incorrect instructions to the jury before deliberations, which an Associated Press fact check deemed false.Suggestions that the conviction was an “op” or a “psyop” – meaning a planned manipulation, a common refrain on the far right whenever something big happens – spread as well.Talk quickly went to what Maga should do to stand up for Trump, and about how the verdict’s fans, and Democrats in general, would come to regret seeking accountability in the courts.“This is going to be the biggest political backfire in US history,” the conservative account Catturd posted on Truth Social. “I’m feeling a tremendous seismic shift in the air.”Kash Patel, a former Trump administration staffer and ally, suggested one way forward: Congress should subpoena the bank records of Merchan’s daughter, he said. The daughter became a frequent target throughout the trial – she worked as a Democratic consultant and has fundraised for Democratic politicians. Ohio senator JD Vance called for a criminal investigation into Merchan, and potentially his daughter, whom Vance said was an “obvious beneficiary of Merchan’s biased rulings”.View image in fullscreenPatel also said prosecutor Alvin Bragg should be subpoenaed for any documents related to meetings with the Biden administration. “In case you need a jurisdictional hook- Bragg’s office receives federal funds from DOJ to ‘administer justice’- GET ON IT,” he wrote.Megyn Kelly said Bragg should be disbarred, without offering a reason for what would justify it.Some Trump allies sought to project calm amid the vitriol, saying they had known the verdict would come down as it did because the process had been rigged, and that people needed to keep focused on winning in November.Steve Bannon, who himself is awaiting some time in prison for criminal contempt, said immediately after the verdict was released that it was “not going to damage President Trump at all”.“It’s time to collect yourself and say, yes, we’ve seen what’s happened. We’ve seen how they run the tables in this crooked process. But you’ve got to say, hey, I’m more determined than ever to set things right.” More

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      Texas’s pardon of a man who killed a Black Lives Matter protester is chilling | Tayo Bero

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      This month, the Texas state parole board unanimously recommended the pardon and release of convicted killer and former US army sergeant Daniel Perry, along with the restoration of his firearm rights. Perry had been working as an Uber driver in July 2020 when he shot and killed Garrett Foster, a white man who was attending a Black Lives Matter protest with his Black fiancee. Perry was later indicted for murder, tried, convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison by an Austin jury.Almost a year from the date of his sentencing, Perry’s pardon was granted by Texas governor Greg Abbott, and he now walks free. As terrifying as the initial incident was, this pardon sends a chilling message: that politically motivated killing is OK, and that politicians are more focused on pandering to political pressure than protecting people’s lives.During Perry’s trial, it emerged that in the weeks before he killed Foster, he had shared white-supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating outside his house in 2020. He also compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit”. And days into nationwide protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Perry sent a text message saying: “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”Perry described shooting Foster as an act of self-defense. Yet according to trial testimony about the day Foster died, Perry had seen the predominantly Black group of protesters gathered across the street from him, ran a red light and drove his car right into the middle of the protest. When Foster – who was legally carrying a firearm but had not, according to some eyewitnesses, threatened Perry – approached Perry’s car, he shot him dead and sped away.In rehashing this horrendous incident, the question on my mind is: how do you justify “pardoning” a person like this? Condemning Perry’s release isn’t about believing in carcerality or wanting to keep people in prisons, mind you; it’s about how we get to this point as a society, whom we grant permission to kill, and how we treat the people involved in a tragedy like this in its aftermath.Abbott – who rarely issues pardons, and has generally only pardoned low-level, nonviolent offenders – had faced pressure from conservative media figures to grant Perry one. Rightwing pundits like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and even Texas GOP chair Matt Rinaldi squeezed him publicly about Perry’s conviction. It doesn’t seem like Abbott needed much convincing, though, seeing as he directed the parole board to review Perry’s case just one day after he was convicted.There’s also the question of how we got here. Foster’s death and his killer’s subsequent pardon are the direct result of a government that’s more beholden to wealthy gun lobbyists than concerned with commonsense legislation that literally saves lives. Foster’s death was, in part, the result of a tragic meeting of Texas’s notoriously loose stand-your-ground self-defense laws, which Perry’s supporters claim he was upholding when he shot Foster, and the state’s “open carry” laws, which Foster was legally exercising when he had his rifle slung over his shoulder during the protest.Alan Bean, the executive director of the Texas-based civil rights advocacy group Friends of Justice, summed up the implications of Perry’s case succinctly.“If one guy with a gun feels threatened by another guy with a gun, murder is permissible. If both men felt threatened, the resulting tragedy would technically be ruled a no-fault double-homicide,” he wrote after news of the pardon went public.Even Texas police aren’t blind to the ways that open-carry laws are exceptionally dangerous and nonsensical. “We were completely opposed to ‘license to carry’ because anytime there’s more guns, there’s a problem,” Ray Hunt, executive director of the Houston police officers’ union, said back in 2021.If there was any doubt that Abbott doesn’t care how problematic these laws are, even after what happened to Foster, consider that he used his pardon announcement to reaffirm that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney”.These are scary words to hear from your elected official after a tragedy that could have been avoided with better gun laws. Abbott continues to signal to gun-toting rightwingers that they can go around murdering people they don’t agree with, and that they will have the full force of the law to back them up.Foster’s mother, Sheila, spoke to the New York Times after the pardon, and her words are haunting in their truth. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said over the phone. “It seems like this is some kind of a political circus and it’s costing me my life.”
      Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Another provocative flag flown at Samuel Alito residence, report says

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      Another type of provocative flag that was flown during the breach of the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021 was reportedly flown outside a summer residence of US supreme court justice Samuel Alito – following a similar, prior incident outside his main residence.Last summer, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which originates from the Revolutionary war and has in recent years become a symbol of far-right Christian extremism, was flown outside Alito’s summer home in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.According to photographs obtained by the outlet and interviews with multiple neighbors and passersby, the flag was flown last July and September. The newspaper reported that the flag was visible in a Google Street View image from late August. It remains unclear whether the flag was flown consistently throughout last summer.The New York Times report comes just days after it reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside Alito’s Virginia home just days after the January 6 Capitol riots.The Appeal to Heaven flag, also commonly known as the Pine Tree flag, was spotted among other controversial flags waved in Washington on 6 January 2021 when rioters and insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, encouraged by Trump, then the president, over the false belief that the 2020 election had been won by him and not the actual victor, Joe Biden.The Capitol attack was aimed at stopping the official certification by Congress of Biden’s victory, which was delayed by the violence but finally happened in the early hours of the following morning.The Pine Tree flag was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the Revolutionary war. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.The first report of the Stars and Stripes being flown upside-down outside an Alito residence provoked outrage about the further politicization of the supreme court, but Alito simply said his wife had done it and it was displayed only briefly.The Guardian contacted the supreme court for comment on the latest report but did not receive an immediate response. More

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      Trump falsely claims US justice department was ready to kill him

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      On social media and in a Tuesday fundraising email, Donald Trump raised an alarming concern. The Department of Justice, he said, was ready to kill him.The wild distortion came against the backdrop of Trump’s hush-money trial in New York and amid fears of rising political violence around the coming presidential election, predominantly from the far right. The comments cement an inverted picture Trump and his allies have painted, in which a patriotic Trump is pitted against anti-democratic deep-state foes.The outlandish claims could ratchet up anger among his supporters and stoke conspiracy theories. “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable,” read the Trump campaign fundraising email, signed with the former president’s name. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”On his social media website, Truth Social, Trump echoed the claim. “Crooked Joe Biden’s DoJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE,” he alleged.Trump was apparently referencing the order for a search warrant executed in August 2022, when plainclothes agents of the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in search of classified documents Trump had allegedly refused to turn over to the government.A May court filing by Trump’s legal team, under a section titled “The Illegal Raid”, quotes from a line in the search warrant.“The Order contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use Of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary,’” attorneys representing Trump wrote.The language cited in the filing was apparently taken from DoJ policy outlining the use of force in executing search warrants. The unabridged text of the policy reads: “Law enforcement officers and correctional officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, that is, when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”The agency executed the warrant to search Trump’s Florida home while Trump was in New York and reportedly communicated with the Secret Service agents present to ensure a smooth operation.In a statement, the FBI described the language as “a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”The Washington Post has previously reported that FBI agents picked a day for the raid when Trump would not be at Mar-a-Lago and told the Secret Service ahead of time.But Trump’s statements about the filing have unleashed a frenzy. Christina Bobb, an attorney for the former president who signed documents before the search claiming Trump had complied with the subpoena for documents, reacted with similar hyperbole.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“WTF?!! They were prepared to kill me?! A few dozen FBI agents v. me and they were ready to kill me?!!! What in the world happened to the United States of America?!” wrote Bobb, on X.“These people are sick,” wrote Paul Gosar, an Arizona congressman and staunch Trump ally, also on X. “Biden ordered the hit on Trump at Mar-A-Lago,” he added in a subsequent post.The rhetorical redirection – from the content of Trump’s legal battles, which range from alleged financial improprieties to the mishandling of classified documents to his brazen attempt to overturn the 2020 election – form part of a strategy Trump and his allies are embracing before the 2024 presidential election.The public relations strategy turns Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies back at his critics – “enemies”, in the former president’s parlance – as allegations. In communications shared widely with his followers, it is the Department of Justice, the media, the Democrats and Rinos – Republican in name only – who dare to criticize him who threaten democracy.Trump, who has warned of “death and destruction” if charged with crimes and who defended supporters calling for the assassination of former vice-president Mike Pence for refusing to join the plot to overturn the election, urges his supporters to see him as the victim.“NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE,” Trump added in his post accusing the D0J of preparing to use lethal force, “THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.” More

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      Trump allies push bill to bar non-citizen voting, even though it’s already illegal

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      Dozens of Donald Trump’s allies and election denialists, including extremists like lawyer Cleta Mitchell and ex-adviser Stephen Miller, are promoting a bill to bar non-citizens from voting in federal elections, even though it’s already illegal and evidence that non-citizens have voted in federal races is almost nil.The push for the bill is seen as further evidence of extremist tactics used by ex-president Trump and his Maga movement to rev up his base of supporters for the 2024 election with outlandish claims designed to scaremonger over election fraud and far-right rhetoric detached from reality.It also fits a pattern, that many Trump allies appear to be laying the groundwork for false complaints of election fraud should Trump suffer electoral defeat again in 2024 – raising fears that the US could see a civic crisis similar to what followed the 2020 contest when his allies attacked the Capitol in Washington DC.The legislation’s rationale, which Trump touted at a Mar-a-Lago event with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, last month, has drawn sharp criticism from voting experts and even some Republicans.At the bill’s formal unveiling on 8 May, Johnson was joined by Mitchell, Miller and leaders of rightwing groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Arizona Freedom Caucus, who have formed the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which boasts some 70 members pushing the measure.Johnson hyped the Save act – or Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act – framing illegal citizen voting as a more serious threat than Trump’s false charges that Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 due to voting fraud.Johnson – whose 8 May press conference drew the bill’s lead sponsors, the senator Mike Lee of Utah and the representative Chip Roy of Texas – allowed that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”View image in fullscreenA lawyer and key Trump ally, Johnson was a central player in Trump’s baseless drive to overturn his 2020 defeat. Johnson led an amicus brief that more than 100 House GOP members signed backing a Texas lawsuit that tried to block the results in four key states that Biden won.“Even if you weren’t concerned about the drop boxes and the ballot harvesting and the mail-in ballots in 2020,” Johnson said on 8 May, referring to some of the phoney fraud claims Trump and his allies made about Biden’s win, “you definitely should be concerned that illegal aliens might be voting in 2024.”Actually, studies have shown that non-citizens are extremely unlikely to vote in federal elections, and that the minuscule number who attempt to vote have no impact on the outcome.One Brennan Center for Justice study that focused on the 2016 election revealed that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with a total of 23.5m votes, were suspected to include non-citizens voting, or 30 incidents altogether.A more recent Arizona study showed that less than 1% of non-citizens try to register to vote, but the large majority of those are believed to be errors, as the Washington Post initially reported.“These lies about widespread non-citizens voting fuel xenophobic fears and unwarranted doubts about the integrity of our elections. They appear intended to lay the groundwork to baselessly challenge any election results. Americans should be confident that our elections are safe and secure,” said Andrew Garber, an elections counsel at the Brennan Center.Even some Republican stalwarts say the bill is aimed at spurring more votes for Trump and his allies in Congress by raising the specter of a phoney election-fraud issue.“This is all political,” the veteran Republican consultant Charlie Black said. “The people who are promoting it know it is already illegal. But they hope by promoting the issue to convince voters that illegal immigrants are voting.”Other Republicans concur. “This is a messaging bill,” said former representative Charlie Dent, who noted it was “already illegal” for non-citizens to vote. “They’re trying to tie this to the border issue. It’s completely campaign-driven by challenging Democrats to vote against it.”Critics warn that the Save Act, which is seen as unlikely to pass the Senate if the House approves the bill, would make it harder to register people to vote since it would require citizenship proof such as a birth certificate or passport, which many Americans lack.Federal law now just requires voters to fill out a form swearing they are a US citizen.View image in fullscreenLittle wonder that the legislation is fueling hefty support from many well-funded, Trump-allied election-denialist groups and their leaders.Rightwing lawyer Mitchell, who runs the election-integrity network at the Conservative Partnership Institute where she is a senior legal fellow, has been in the vanguard of promoting conspiracies about non-citizen voting.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitchell raised the specter of non-citizen voting in February on a conservative Illinois talk radio show where she said: “I absolutely believe this is intentional, and one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country. They’re taking them into counties across the country, so that they can get those people registered, they can vote them.”A little-known group that Mitchell quietly set up last year, dubbed the Fair Elections Fund, which she is president of, is listed as a member of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition.A longtime election conspiracist, Mitchell was on Trump’s call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on 2 January 2021 when Trump exhorted him to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn Biden’s win there.Similarly, Stephen Miller, who runs the rightwing litigation outfit America First Legal and served as Trump’s hardine immigration adviser, has been working zealously to promote fears of illegal voting by non-citizens.“Democracy in America is under attack,” Miller said at the 8 May press event. Miller decried the “wide-open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections”.View image in fullscreenNotwithstanding the dearth of evidence that non-citizen voting is a real threat, Miller has repeated bogus conspiracy theories that Democrats are bringing voters into the US to boost Biden winning in November.The Maga world’s obsession with non-citizen voting was palpable at a Las Vegas event last month hosted by the former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which drew a number of sheriffs and other elected officials from several states. Mack, an ex-board member of the extremist Oath Keepers, said in April that “election fraud and the border go hand in hand”, a claim that lacks any evidence.Voting experts are alarmed at the growing efforts of Trump allies to highlight a virtually nonexistent threat and promote legislation that would require voters to show documents to register that millions of Americans do not have.“Millions of eligible American citizens lack easy access to a passport or birth certificate, so requiring eligible voters to show either one to register to vote would impose a significant hurdle with no real benefits for election security,” said Garber of the Brennan Center.Other voting specialists voice similar concerns.“Instead of taking meaningful action to strengthen our critical election infrastructure, Speaker Johnson is adding fuel to the fire by linking immigration policy to election security,” said Carah Ong Whaley, director of election protection at Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.Instead, Whaley urged Johnson and his allies to work in a bipartisan way “to increase federal funding to ensure that officials have the resources they need to guard against growing foreign interference concerns and cybersecurity threats”.Republican figures also express strong misgivings about what is driving the bill’s backers.“Since Trump has surrounded himself with the losing general election narrative about fraud in 2020, he needs to change the narrative,” said Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin. “These types of proposals pushed by his allies are critical to him duping American voters to vote for him again.” More