Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares38 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court allows Trump trans military ban to take effect

      by

      The Trump administration can begin to enforce a ban on transgender troops serving in the military while a challenge to the policy plays out in the courts, the supreme court ruled on Tuesday, a significant decision that could lead to the discharge of thousands of military members.The court’s order was unsigned and gave no explanation for its reasoning, which is typical of decisions the justices reach on an emergency basis. The court’s three liberal members – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – all noted their dissent from the decision.Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which represented challengers in the case, called the decision “a devastating blow to transgender servicemembers”.“By allowing this discriminatory ban to take effect while our challenge continues, the Court has temporarily sanctioned a policy that has nothing to do with military readiness and everything to do with prejudice,” the groups said in a statement. “Transgender individuals meet the same standards and demonstrate the same values as all who serve. We remain steadfast in our belief that this ban violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and will ultimately be struck down.”Immediately after coming into office, Donald Trump rescinded an executive order from the Biden administration that allowed transgender people to serve openly in the military. On 27 January, the president issued a second executive order that said transgender people couldn’t serve in the military.“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the order said. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.” The defense department began implementing the ban at the end of February.A defense department estimate from earlier this year said there were 4,240 people in the military with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria – roughly 0.2 % of the 2 million people currently serving.Seven transgender servicemembers and one transgender person who would like to join the military challenged the ban. Lawyers for the lead platiniff, navy pilot Emily Shilling, said the military had spent $20m on her training, according to SCOTUSBlog.Several lower courts had halted the ban. The case before the supreme court involved a ruling from US district court judge Benjamin Settle, who blocked the ban in March.“The government’s arguments are not persuasive, and it is not an especially close question on this record,” Settle, an appointee of George W Bush, wrote at the time. “The government’s unrelenting reliance on deference to military judgment is unjustified in the absence of any evidence supporting ‘the military’s’ new judgment reflected in the Military Ban.”Another judge, Ana Reyes, of the US district court in Washington DC, also blocked the ban, saying it was “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration asked the supreme court to intervene last month. “The district court issued a universal injunction usurping the Executive Branch’s authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces,” John Sauer, the US solicitor general, wrote in a brief to the court.Trump’s ban is broader than a similar policy enacted during his first term. The previous policy allowed those who had come out before the ban to continue to serve in the military. The more recent policy affects nearly all active serving transgender members.Pausing the order, Shilling’s lawyers said, would “upend the status quo by allowing the government to immediately begin discharging thousands of transgender servicemembers … thereby ending distinguished careers and gouging holes in military units”.A majority of Americans support allowing transgender people to serve in the military, according to a February Gallup poll. However, there is a sharp partisan split. While 84% of Democrats favor such a policy, only 23% of Republicans do. More

    • 163 Shares18 Views

      in US Politics

      Handshakes, friendship and ‘never, never, never, never, never’: five takeaways from Carney-Trump meeting

      by

      Perhaps no world leader can ever be completely sure how an encounter with Donald Trump will play out, but Canada’s Mark Carney had grounds to be especially wary before heading to the White House for his first post-election meeting with the US president.For months now, Trump has waged a campaign of diplomatic and commercial intimidation against his northern neighbour, launching a trade war and belittling Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau.Shortly before the briefing, the US leader once again took to social media to post a debunked figure that the US is “subsidizing Canada by $200 Billion Dollars a year” and to complain the country was receiving “FREE Military Protection”.But from the moment the pair shook hands, it was clear the tone of the meeting would be remarkably cordial, with Trump praising Carney as “a very talented person” and Carney describing Trump as a “transformational” president.The mood grew less relaxed as Trump again falsely claimed that the US was “subsidizing” Canada and repeated his calls for Canada to become the 51st state.Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s meeting:1. Canada is not for saleCarney used the meeting to tell Trump to his face what he’s told Canadians ever since he became prime minister: the country isn’t for sale.When asked by reporters about his proposal for Canada to become the 51st state of the USA, Trump seemed to walk back the idea, conceding “it takes two to tango”. But he then said Canada would get a “massive tax cut” if it became an American state.Trump said it would be “beautiful” to merge the two countries, saying the prospect “would really be a wonderful marriage”.Carney, drawing on Trump’s pride in real estate dealings, reminded the president that in the industry, “there are some places that are never for sale”.“That’s true,” said Trump.“Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign … it’s not for sale,” said Carney. “Won’t be for sale, ever.”Later in the meeting, Trump brought up the idea again, telling Carney and the assembled media: “I say, never say never.”“Never, never, never, never, never,” Carney appeared to say quietly.2. Tariffs remain – for nowOne major task for Carney and his team is to better understand the rationale – if there is one – behind the tariffs on Canadian goods, and to find any possible off-ramps. Carney set the bar low before the meeting, suggesting he didn’t anticipate any big announcements from the first gathering of the two leaders.Near the end of the meeting, Trump was asked whether there was anything Carney or the Canadian delegation could offer for tariffs to be removed.“No,” he said, adding that it’s “just the way it is”.The prime minister was likely to use the working lunch to nonetheless chip away at the American position in search of common ground.In Canada, the tariffs have led to a broad boycott by consumers of US-made products.“Usually those things don’t last very long,” Trump said. “We have great things, great product. The kind of product we sell, nobody else can sell. Including military. We make the best military equipment in the world. And Canada buys our military equipment, which we appreciate.”3. Both sides predict a revised trade dealThe country’s trade relationship came up during the meeting, with Trump signalling he was interested in renegotiating key aspects of the free-trade US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), calling the prior deal, Nafta, the “worst in the history of the world”.The current pact governing free trade across the continent is due for renewal next year.“We’re going to be starting to possibly renegotiate that,” Trump said, “if it’s even necessary. I don’t know that it’s necessary any more.”Trump refused to answer questions on which specific provisions of the deal he wanted to renegotiate, telling reporters the leaders were “dealing more with concepts right now”. But later, he repeated claims that the United States didn’t need Canadian exporters, including for Canadian cars, steel or energy. “We want to do it ourselves,” he said.Carney pushed back on Trump’s characterization of the current deal, including the use of tariffs by American officials, but agreed the existing deal was a “framework” for future talks and a “bigger discussion”.“We are the largest client of the United States, in the totality of all the goods,” he said.In a nod to the importance of the trade relationship between the two nations, both sides brought their most senior officials. Attending for the Canadians were some of the country’s top trade and diplomatic officials, including international trade minister Dominic LeBlanc, foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly, public safety minister David McGuinty and Canada’s ambassador to the US, Kirsten Hillman.On the American side, Trump had JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick and US trade representative Jamieson Greer.4. Trump just wants to be lovedWhen asked by reporters what the biggest concession Canada could offer might be, Trump said “friendship”.The cordial and positive tone between the leaders likely comes as a relief to Canadian officials, who prepared for numerous scenarios – including a dressing-down akin to the treatment of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Instead, the initial minutes of the meeting involved a shower of mutual praise between the leaders.After the Liberal party’s federal election victory last week, Trump congratulated Carney for one of the “greatest political comebacks of all time”, and described the prime minister’s visit “an honour” for the White House. Trump added he had great “respect” for Carney.Carney returned the compliments, calling Trump a “transformational president” with a strong focus on the economy, security and American workers.It marked a sharp departure from the frosty and strained relationship with Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau, whom Trump once described as “two-faced” – and who in turn described the US trade war as “dumb”.Given that much of US foreign policy appears to depend on whether Trump favours a world leader, that change in tone may bode well for Canada.5. Bad blood lingersTrump used part of the meeting to attack various political actors, including Trudeau and the former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, who led the Canadian delegation in previous negotiations of the continental free-trade pact.“I didn’t like his predecessor,” Trump said to Carney, once again derisively calling Trudeau “governor”.He then singled out Freeland, saying: “She was terrible. Actually, she was a terrible person, and she really hurt that deal very badly because she tried to take advantage of the deal and she didn’t get away with it.”In late January, Freeland used Trump’s dislike of her as a key component of her failed bid for leadership of the Liberal party – a race she eventually lost to Carney. More

    • 138 Shares22 Views

      in US Politics

      Identity of second man illegally deported to El Salvador prison revealed

      by

      The identity of a second man illegally deported from the US by the Trump administration in defiance of a court order and now in detention in El Salvador has been revealed.Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a 20-year-old Venezuelan, was deported to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot terrorism confinement facility in March under the White House’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, Politico reported.His deportation came after authorities declared him, along with about 240 other men, to be a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the US government has defined as a terrorist organization. Lozano-Camargo’s family members deny that he has gang affiliations.Politico revealed Lozano-Camargo’s identity after a Maryland judge last month ruled that the Trump administration had improperly removed him in violation of a 2024 legal settlement that forbade immigration authorities from deporting him while his application for asylum was pending.The judge, Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, ordered officials to “facilitate” Lozano-Camargo’s return to the US. So far, the administration has not complied.He is reported to have entered the US in 2022 as an asylum seeker, initially spending time in a facility for underage migrants until he turned 18.According to Politico, he was subsequently twice arrested for possession of cocaine, most recently last November, and was sentenced in January to 120 days in prison. It was from there that he was transferred to the custody of the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement authority (Ice), which filed an application for his detention, claiming that he was in the country illegally.In her ruling, Gallagher agreed with immigrant rights advocates that Lozano-Camargo should not have been deported until his asylum application was resolved. While withholding his identity by referring to him only by a pseudonym, “Cristian”, she said he was “fleeing danger and threats in Venezuela”.Politico said Lozano-Camargo’s identity was disclosed in metadata embedded in government court filings.A justice department court filing released on Monday disputed the judge’s assessment, saying he belonged to “a violent terrorist gang”, thus disqualifying him from asylum in the US. Bringing him back to the US “would no longer serve any legal or practical purpose”, justice department lawyers wrote.Gallagher was due to further rule on the matter in a Baltimore court on Tuesday.Lozano-Camargo’s case resembles that of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador in March despite a previous court order issued in 2019 establishing that he had protected status because he was at risk of violence if he was returned to the country of his origin. Ábrego García is Salvadorian by birth. The US government, which has claimed that he is a member of the MS-13 gang – something Ábrego García denies – admitted that he had been deported by mistake but has defied court orders to return him to the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionÁbrego García was removed from the US on the same set of flights as Lozano-Camargo but has been transferred from Cecot to another facility because of the international publicity surrounding his case.Lozano-Camargo’s family has tried to draw attention to his plight in social media posts. His mother, Daniela, has proclaimed his innocence in a tearful Facebook video.Possessing a valid work permit, he is said to have been living in Houston and washing cars for a living before his detention.His deportation was among those highlighted by the Guardian in March, amid speculation that he was one of hundreds of Venezuelans singled out for removal on the basis of their tattoos, which authorities claimed identified them as members of Tren de Aragua.Lozano-Camargo is said to have several tattoos, including one bearing the name of his father – who died when he was a child. Critics say Tren de Aragua members do not use tattoos to advertise their membership of the gang. More

    • 100 Shares34 Views

      in US Politics

      How Trump’s walkaway diplomacy enabled Israel’s worst impulses

      by

      The Israeli plan to occupy and depopulate Gaza may not be identical to Donald Trump’s vision of a new riviera, but his inspiration and the US’s walkaway diplomacy have ushered Benjamin Netanyahu to the precipice of a dire new chapter in the Israel-Gaza war.The common perception in both Washington and Israel is that Trump has largely moved on, leaving an emboldened Netanyahu to his own devices, while his offhand proposals for turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” have provided cover for rightwing Israeli politicians to enthusiastically support the forced resettlement of the Palestinian population.“Part of the tragedy is that the only one who can actually save us, Trump, is not even seriously interested in that,” said Amos Harel, a prominent military and defense correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper. “Our only hope to get out of this crazy situation is that Trump would force Netanyahu to reach a hostage deal. But [Trump] seems disinterested. He was enthusiastic when the Riviera [idea] was proposed, but now he has moved on to Greenland, Canada and Mexico instead.”Trump’s interventions – specifically envoy Steve Witkoff’s threats to Netanyahu during a tense Shabbat meeting – were instrumental in achieving a temporary ceasefire to the conflict in January. His influence on Netanyahu appeared to be greater than that of previous US presidents, including his rival Joe Biden.But since then the ceasefire has broken down, a two-month Israeli blockade on aid has sparked an even worse humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and, with few opportunities for a quick peace, the White House now appears uninterested and overstretched as Israel signals an offensive and occupation that critics have said will amount to a state policy of ethnic cleansing.It is a trend that has repeated with this White House: broad designs for a grand deal followed by frustration when diplomacy fails to yield instant results. Recently, the White House announced that it was also ready to walk away from negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine conflict if a quick deal was not achieved. That has incentivized Russia to wait out the Trump administration, observers have said, and bank on a policy of US non-engagement in the longer term. Netanyahu similarly appears to have been unleashed by the White House’s growing disinterest.The Israeli ultimatum comes as Trump is scheduled to tour the Middle East next week, with Israeli officials briefing that they will begin the operation only after he returns from a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Trump’s talks there are expected to focus on investment and a likely quixotic quest to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not on achieving a resolution to the war. On Tuesday, Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, reported that a Trump visit to Israel was not out of the question, but White House officials have not yet signaled that Trump is ready to go meet Netanyahu.Witkoff, the Trump envoy, still appears personally invested in a resolution to the conflict, but he is overstretched by attempting to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and also negotiate an Iran nuclear deal simultaneously. The US has continued negotiations with Israel over an aid delivery scheme that would create a new mechanism for aid distribution to avoid Hamas, they have said. But the UN and all aid organizations working in Gaza have condemned the plan as an Israeli takeover. “It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy,” the heads of all UN agencies and NGOs that operate in Gaza said in a joint statement on Sunday.The Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts have also signaled a retreat from diplomacy. The state department was reportedly ready to cut the role of the security coordinator role for the West Bank and Gaza, a three-star general who was tasked with managing security crises between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, particularly with regards to growing tensions between settlers and local Palestinian communities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore importantly, Trump has given cover to Israeli officials who had sought more aggressive action in Gaza, including forced depopulations. Rightwingers in government have been particularly aggressive, with finance minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that within months Gaza would be “totally destroyed” and the Gazan population would be “concentrated” in a small strip of land. “The rest of the strip will be empty,” he said.But other ministers have also become more radical using Trump’s rhetoric for cover, said Harel.“Once Trump said that, you could see how not only the radicals, but also Likud ministers and so on, have an excuse,” said Harel. “‘It’s not us. It’s the world, the free world’s leader is saying that, so we have to play along.’” More

    • 188 Shares42 Views

      in US Politics

      How Ohio became a hotbed of white supremacism, spreading its tentacles globally | Stephen Starr

      by

      By many accounts, Hilliard, a leafy suburb west of downtown Columbus, is a midwestern success story: its progressive school district gives a vacation day for all students to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr – the first in Ohio to do so – and its homes are highly sought-after by a growing number of diverse families where locals enjoy shopping at the oldest Asian grocery in the state.But it is also where Christopher Brenner Cook, a convicted terrorist, grew up. In April 2023, Cook and two others were sentenced for conspiring to attack America’s electrical grid, and he was given a 92-month prison term.Cook, who was 21 at the time of his sentencing for conspiring to blow up electricity stations, was previously a devout white supremacist who tried to recruit people to the neo-Nazi cause. He focused specifically on children in an effort to avoid detection by law enforcement.More than 3,780 miles away in Derbyshire, England, 14-year-old Rhianan Rudd encountered Cook on WhatsApp and Discord, the online chat app. As of September 2020, the BBC noted she had been in contact with Cook “for some time”. By early 2021, Rudd – who was autistic and had a history of self-harm – was spending up to 15 hours a day speaking to Cook online.Cook had been grooming, sexually abusing and radicalizing Rudd. The last time she had contact with Cook, he told her he loved her, and she felt a “gaping hole” and “very sad for a long time”.In May 2022, aged 16, Rhianan killed herself.American extremists are going globalAs prominent supporters and members of the current administration such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have taken to Nazi-style salutes in front of large audiences, the tentacles of a resurgent American white supremacism are stretching around the globe, often with deadly consequences.Members of American white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front and the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM), have traveled across Europe to take part in public marches and distribute propaganda while the Base, a group of American neo-Nazis, reportedly has Russian links.A founding member of RAM was extradited from Romania in August 2023 to the US on charges of inciting violence. A Slovakian teenager who killed two people outside a bar popular with members of Bratislava’s LGBTQ+ community in October 2022 was radicalized in part by California- and Idaho-based leaders of the so-called “Terrorgram Collective”; those individuals last September were charged by the Department of Justice for soliciting hate crimes and other offences.View image in fullscreenBut not all of America’s far right’s global endeavors are confined to the dark corners of the internet or violent extremists. Trump’s closest allies have also courted a resurgent far-right across Europe where such parties are gaining mainstream support and power.Bannon, whose War Room podcast has more than 15,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts, has traveled to France, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere to meet with and advise far-right political leaders. Musk, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, was criticized for appearing online at a campaign event for Germany’s far-right AfD party in January.“The ideas that used to be fringe are much more mainstream,” says Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist leader and author of White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement and other books.“This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of white supremacists. They love that the president has their back.”Ohio’s fall into extremismFor decades, Ohio was a national political bellwether that reflected America’s wider socioeconomic milieu. Its three large cities – Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland – provided a solid backbone of support for progressive politics.In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won more votes in Ohio than any Democrat in history, repeating the feat four years later when he was elected to a second term in the White House. Until 2011, Democratic party governors were not uncommon.However, in recent years, Ohio has seen a marked shift to the right.The perpetrator of the 2017 Charlottesville car attack that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and the founder of the Daily Stormer, an influential neo-Nazi website, are both from Ohio. The plot to kill the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was formulated in Dublin, the same well-to-do Columbus suburb where Cook spent part of his childhood.Eighty-three Ohioans were charged for their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol that was prompted by President Trump. After Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania – all states geographically closer to the capital – Ohio had the highest per capita number of arrested rioters. The same year, Columbus experienced a higher per capita incidence of hate crimes than all but three other US cities.In 2023, a Nazi homeschooling effort with more than 3,000 online subscribers run by residents of Upper Sandusky in the state’s north-west was unearthed. Ohio’s department of education found that no law had been broken.Ku Klux Klan white supremacist flyers and marches by neo-Nazis are also now happening with growing frequency in places such as Springfield, Ohio, after Trump’s false claims in September that immigrants there were eating pets.Neo-Nazi publicity efforts in Cincinnati, Columbus and elsewhere in Ohio – a defined effort, experts say, to desensitize communities to their imagery and normalize their presence – are on the rise.View image in fullscreenAt the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, politics has been overrun by far-right Republicans. Increasingly, Ohio Republicans have voiced extremist views or passed laws that disproportionately affect minorities and immigrants – groups regularly targeted by white supremacists.“The far right has long been working to engage in local and state politics. They recognize that change is more likely when like-minded persons are designing policy and making decisions,” said Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University.“We have no mechanism to stop this radicalization when it is being reflected in the statehouse.”It was in this environment that Cook grew up. He and his co-conspirators “fanaticized” about “the opportunity for white leaders to take control of this country and its government”, according to his sentencing memorandum.Eight months after Cook was charged with conspiring to give material support to terrorists, the Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed calling out some Hilliard residents for spreading hate. Some have filed lawsuits against the local school district to force staff to stop wearing badges in support of LGBTQ+ communities.“Nothing is happening in the schools, and I think it really needs to because young men especially are being influenced by this culture wars stuff and the manosphere,” said Picciolini.“There really isn’t enough happening to counter that.”Picciolini was recruited by the Chicago-area SkinHeads when he was 14 years old and spent eight years as a member of white nationalist groups. Since leaving the movement, he has been involved in founding or co-founding many deradicalizing programs and has criticized the lack of government support for them.Picciolini said he had seen children as young as nine be recruited online.“The reason that anybody joins these groups is not the extremist ideology. It’s [for] the sense of identity, community and purpose,” he said.“For people who feel marginalized, they have a difficult time with what I call ‘potholes’ – trauma or challenges with mental health; a health issue; physical abuse. It pushes people to the fringes and to the internet. A lot of these kids are being targeted because of their ‘potholes’.”For Rhianan Rudd, who struggled to make friends, the internet proved to be both a release and a trap.Her deepening online relationship with Cook saw her further radicalized, prompting her to make verbal threats to blow up a synagogue and download information on bomb making, for which she was arrested in October 2020. That resulted in her being taken out of Prevent, the deradicalization program her mother had signed her into the month before. Six months later, she became the youngest person ever charged with terrorism in the UK, charges which were dropped when investigators concluded she had been groomed and abused by Cook.View image in fullscreenAn officer for Prevent referred to Rudd as the “most vulnerable individual she’s ever met”, after the teen admitted that Cook had been radicalizing her. She told her social worker that she felt she had “two competing individuals in her head”.Cook wasn’t the only American male with a white supremacist background in Rudd’s life.Rudd’s mother, Emily Carter, had been in contact with Dax Mallaburn, a convicted felon and known member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Arizona, through a prison pen pal program. They began a romantic relationship that saw Mallaburn move to the UK and live with Rudd and her mother. Mallaburn is alleged to have sexually groomed Rudd, and information gathered by police found that Cook was in contact with Mallaburn, telling him to teach the child “the right way”.The terrorism charges against Rudd were dropped in December 2021, but the damage had been done.Just weeks before her death, she asked her mother for help contacting a neo-Nazi group in the US and attempted to travel to London to acquire a visa to travel to Texas.“Her being groomed was huge and I saw Rhianan change,” Carter said at an inquest into Rudd’s death and the role antiterrorism and other agencies played. The inquest is ongoing until June.Missed opportunitiesWhile the internet may have facilitated Cook’s abuse of Rudd, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have come in for criticism.On two occasions in early 2020, Cook’s vehicle was stopped by law enforcement officials, in Ohio and Texas. Drugs, Nazi paraphernalia and weapons were found, and yet both times Cook was let go.The FBI shared information with British intelligence about Cook’s activities and grooming of Rudd five months before she took her own life, while several years before her death, an MI5 agent lamented to a senior colleague that Rudd couldn’t be referred to an anti-extremism program while she was under a police investigation.Although Cook’s sentencing memorandum recognized that his “singular” end goal was linked to “the propagation and fruition of white supremacist ideology”, he was not investigated for his exploitation of Rudd or faced potential charges related to her death.Legal experts say there is nothing precluding Cook from being charged for crimes related to the death of Rudd in the future, so long as no relevant statute of limitations has passed and there is probable cause to support specific crimes under US law. He could also be extradited to the UK to face charges, although that would be an unprecedented move.Ohio’s rising hateCook’s sentencing memorandum suggests he has embarrassment and remorse for his terrorism-related actions, pleading guilty to the crimes he was charged with. But given the opportunity to discuss details of his relationship with Rudd, Cook is more circumspect.When the Guardian sought to interview Cook through the federal correctional institute he is being held in South Carolina, he declined. In an interview with Columbus Monthly published last year, he also declined to discuss his interactions with Rudd.While Cook is set to be released well before his 30th birthday, there is little evidence to suggest that Ohio will have solved its problem of white supremacist extremism by then.In November 2023, a 20-year-old man entered a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, and shot four people before turning the gun on himself. Police found Nazi flags and a “SS history book” at his home. The Anti-Defamation League found that Ohio was second only to Texas for the number of white supremacist incidents in 2023.About a dozen neo-Nazis, some armed, unfurled flags and signs bearing extremist material in February 2025 over a highway close to a historically African American community in Cincinnati. In response, there’s been silence from the White House.“They love this administration,” said Picciolini of the extremists. “They love the environment they are in.” More

    • 200 Shares23 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The universities are the enemy’: why the right detests the American campus | Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

      by

      In 2021, JD Vance, then a candidate for Ohio senate, gave a provocative keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference. Vance’s lecture was an indictment of American higher education: a “hostile institution” that “gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in this country”. The aspiring politician did not mince words before his receptive rightwing audience: “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do … We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” The title of Vance’s keynote was inspired by a quote from Richard Nixon: “The universities are the enemy.”The Maga movement, of which Vance, the vice-president, is now at the forefront, has been unabashedly on the attack against campuses, professors and students. Donald Trump characterizes colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, and student protesters as “radicals”, “savages” and “jihadists” who have been indoctrinated by faculty “communists and terrorists”. He has already delivered swift vengeance against campus protesters and non-protesters alike with visa terminations and deportations. This administration has gleefully withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to force colleges to crack down on student dissent.While Vance paid homage to Nixon and other forebears on the right, he failed to acknowledge that his political lineage had been fighting the university as an enemy for more than 100 years. In fact, reactionary backlash is a feature of two main milestones in the academy’s history: the democratization of admissions and the diversification of curriculum. Trump and Vance’s attacks are part of a longer history of rightwing backlash that follows each time college becomes more democratic.Before the universities were the enemyFor the first 300 years of US higher education, starting with the founding of Harvard College in the 1630s, the academy was a realm exclusive to the Christian elite. Only an extreme few attended the colonial and antebellum colleges, which were meant as sectarian educational clubs for the sons of the landed gentry. Boys of the Protestant ruling class attended college to socialize, form lifelong friendships and business partnerships, and even link their families legally through intermarriage of their sisters. Young men were exposed to the liberal arts and Christian theology, to be sure, but college was just as much a place to meet other boys like themselves and to be steeped in the cultural norms of their religious denomination and social class. This three-century tradition has been slow to change, and when it has, colleges have met fierce opposition from those who have benefited from the status quo.Throughout this time, the only people of color or women who appeared on campus were the wives and daughters of the faculty, maids, cooks, laundry workers, servants and enslaved people. By the 1830s and through the end of the century, segregated colleges were established for white women, and free men of color (until the founding of Bennett College and Spelman College, women of color had to “pass” as white to attend women’s colleges), but these institutions were not meant to rival or even resemble the standard colleges. The curriculums were vastly different from the liberal arts instruction of Harvard and Princeton – for girls, lessons were about homemaking and Christian motherhood; for children and adults of color, the practical vocations. Still, college-going by anyone was a privilege. Even at the turn of the 20th century, less than 5% of Americans went to college, and many fewer completed a degree.Backlash against who gets inThe right’s first rumblings about the college as enemy occurred during the 20th century, as the nature of the campus began to change for the modern era. The right’s grievance at the time was focused on who was admitted. By the 1920s, European immigrant students were starting to matriculate in east coast campuses, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. The oldest and most prestigious colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, sought to severely limit enrollment of the “socially undesirable”, especially Jews, to preserve the campus for old-stock Protestants. A combination of antisemitism and reactionary backlash to the era’s progressivism led rightwingers to cast a suspicious eye on the campus, where all of the decade’s new social science seemed to be emanating. Christian fundamentalists, terrified by the science of evolution, also decried the sinister academic classroom.By the 1930s, wealthy industrialists joined the chorus of college skeptics. The Franklin Roosevelt administration had assembled its famous “brain trust” of academics whose calculus was needed to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. But industry titans who refused to tolerate Roosevelt’s planned economy responded by creating free-market thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that produced rival economic white papers in defense of capitalism. Academic departments, AEI’s existence proved, were not the only place where experts could create knowledge. In fact, the right’s thinktanks would become their signature tool for churning out partisan disinformation such as climate crisis denial and race pseudoscience throughout the 20th century.By the time the second world war ended, Congress needed a way to ensure a smooth economic transition as a mass of veterans returned to the job market. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, AKA the GI Bill, allowed more than 1 million returning soldiers to delay workforce re-entry by a few years as they entered the classroom. To the horror of many free-marketeers and social elites, the GI Bill in effect doubled the national population of college students, thus diversifying the campus by class, age and in the case of wounded veterans, physical ability (though not by race or gender).Backlash against what gets taughtOn the heels of the democratizing GI Bill, the McCarthyite purge of more than 100 academics for their prewar affiliations with the Communist party has become legend. At the same time, Joseph McCarthy’s young admirer William F Buckley Jr produced his 1951 opus, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, arguing that socialist professors had run roughshod over the campus, indoctrinating students in Keynesian economics and atheism. The academy, to McCarthy, Buckley and their followers, had transformed into a hotbed of anti-Americanism. The right’s understanding that higher education could not be trusted was now well developed: too many people were entering college and learning the wrong lessons.Following the McCarthy attacks came the storied 1960s, when the campus continued democratizing its admissions and curriculum. Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 allowed for greater access to student loans and work-study programs. This allowed additional generations of working-class students to matriculate, especially more people of color, who demanded to see themselves in their lessons. The creation of Black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies and similar disciplines throughout the 1970s followed militant strikes by student protesters. At the same time, anti-Vietnam war unrest challenged their institutions’ commitments to cold war weapons development. For the right, this was but more evidence of the college as a radicalizing institution.Increasingly, the liberal center began to agree with the notion that the campus had radicalizing potential. The 1980s and the 1990s marked the bipartisan obsession with culture wars, with the campus as its apparent locus. To the benefit of the right, popular debates about political correctness and identity politics in effect drew attention from austerity measures that had sucked resources away from higher education since the Reagan years. Through the 2000s and 2010, the right revved up its offensives against campus antiwar movements, attacking faculty and students who spoke out against the “war on terror” and protests to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. By the 2010s, in the aftermath of the Great Recession’s deep cuts to higher education, conservative attacks shifted back to campus social crusades as the right railed against the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and ginned up moral panics over safe spaces, trigger warnings and cancel culture.Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, conservative rhetoric cast colleges and universities as deeply politicized, inefficient and anti-American. From the 1920s to the 1980s, this generated popular notions that the college should be reformed back to its previous role as a selective space for class reproduction. Since the 1980s, the purpose has been to delegitimize the academy to get mass buy-in to defund, privatize and eventually abolish public higher education. The goal is to return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy (especially if it can be done for profit).This has not been an exclusively American process. Autocrats around the world have cracked down on the academy, journalism and venues of arts and culture for the last 100 years. These are places where ideas are shared and traditional conventions are challenged. Crushing them is central to consolidating authoritarian power. Today’s international rightwing leaders want to control higher education, just as they want dominion over all other social, cultural and political institutions. For the first time, a US president is finally willing to deliver the right’s century-old goal.

      Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, PhD, is a historian of US colleges and universities. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America and host of the weekly American Campus Podcast More

    • 225 Shares23 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump is dismantling a key worker safety group. It’s another betrayal of the working class | Devan Hawkins

      by

      As Donald Trump announced his tariffs in the White House Rose Garden last month, he proclaimed: “We’re standing up for the American worker.” While it remains to be seen what impact these tariffs will have on American workers, his words were belied by the fact that just a day before this announcement, hundreds of workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Niosh) – an organization that has stood up for US workers since 1970 – discovered that they had been laid off.Niosh was founded as part of the Occupational Health and Safety Act with the purpose of “developing and establishing recommended occupational safety and health standards”. The organization has been on the frontline of protecting worker health and safety ever since. Its work has focused on understanding the risks faced by millions of workers throughout the country who put their safety on the line every day to perform their jobs. For example, Niosh’s Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program investigates fatalities to understand their circumstances and make recommendations, ensuring that more of these workers, who risk their lives for others daily, can be safer in the line of duty.Far from being a caricature of a federal body firmly entrenched in the Beltway, Niosh’s work is spread across the country. One of Niosh’s most notable sites is its Morgantown, West Virginia, facility. Located in the heart of coal country for decades, it has focused on studying the health impacts of coalmining – particularly black lung disease – which has seen notable increases in recent years. Nearly 200 workers were fired from the Morgantown location, which will severely hamper this work. (Some were temporarily rehired.)Niosh also supports surveillance programs run out of 23 states. These state-based programs focus on the unique needs of the workforce in those areas. For several years, I was fortunate to have been an epidemiologist with such a program in Massachusetts, where my colleagues and I focused on understanding and preventing health challenges ranging from bloodborne pathogen exposure among healthcare workers, to asthma risk among cleaners, to fatalities in the construction industry.Since its founding, Niosh has been a nimble organization, adapting to and studying new and emerging threats. The World Trade Center Health Program, which is administered by Niosh, was created to study the health impacts of responding to those terrorist attacks – ranging from traumatic injuries and respiratory disease to cancer and mental health – while providing support for those responders.In a similar way to its response to the September 11 attacks, in the grip of the epidemic of opioids and suicides that have cost tens of thousands of lives over the past two decades, Niosh has sought to understand the workplace component of these challenges. These efforts have helped to shed light on the pathway linking occupational injuries to a high risk of drug overdoses among workers in certain occupations, particularly in the construction industry, and contribute to efforts to prevent these deaths.During the Covid-19 pandemic, Niosh studied the risks faced by frontline workers. The pandemic also highlighted one of Niosh’s most essential functions: air filtration ratings. Niosh tests, approves and certifies respirators to ensure that workers are protected from airborne risks ranging from silica dust to lead.Niosh also supports the future of occupational safety and health workers. Niosh traineeship programs across the country provide support to students studying occupational health and safety. I was fortunate to be supported by such a program when I was in graduate school. Throughout the country, hospital employee safety departments, union workplace safety committees, and community occupational health and safety advocacy organizations are staffed by others like myself who received this support.Now is the worst possible time for Niosh to be dismantled. Traditional workplace hazards still remain. In 2023, the last year with available data, there were 5,283 fatal occupational injuries – one every 99 minutes. Violent injuries at work are a growing concern, particularly among healthcare workers. Increasing temperatures caused by climate change place many vulnerable workers at high risk for illness, injury and death, while extreme weather events, such as the wildfires that devastated southern California earlier this year, threaten the health and safety of emergency workers. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence are changing the nature of work, presenting new dynamics and hazards.We need Niosh to study these emerging threats and safeguard workers.It remains to be seen what will happen to the remainder of the organization and the programs supported by Niosh throughout the country. Regardless of what occurs, we should support the current and former workers of the organization and carry forward its mission, just as Niosh workers have advocated for the health and safety of workers across this country since the organization’s inception.

      Devan Hawkins is a writer and researcher from Massachusetts. He is the author of the book Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes More

    • 138 Shares23 Views

      in US Politics

      Not just Alcatraz: the notorious US prisons Trump is already reopening

      by

      Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz, the infamous prison shuttered more than 60 years ago, sparked global headlines over the weekend. But it isn’t the only notorious closed-down jail or prison the administration has sought to repurpose for mass detentions.The US government has in recent months pushed to reopen at least five other shuttered detention facilities and prisons, some closed amid concerns over safety and mistreatment of detainees. While California lawmakers swiftly dismissed the Alcatraz announcement as “not serious” and a distraction, the Trump administration’s efforts to reopen other scandal-plagued facilities are well under way or already complete, in partnership with for-profit prison corporations.The shuttered prisons are being revived for immigration detainees, unlike the US president’s purported plan for Alcatraz, which he claimed on social media would imprison “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders”.US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has sought to reopen the California city correctional facility, a state prison in the southern California desert region that closed last year, according to government contract records. The facility is owned by CoreCivic, a longtime Ice detention partner, and previously housed more than 2,000 people.California Democrats have also warned that Ice was interested in reopening Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a US prison shuttered last year amid scandals surrounding systemic sexual abuse by staff, and concerns about mold and asbestos. The correctional officers’ union has reported that staff were recently forced to do maintenance work at Dublin in hazardous conditions, seemingly to prepare for a reopening, but Ice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), which runs Dublin, have not commented on plans.Communities in California, the country’s most populous state and home to nearly a quarter of immigrants in the US, have long opposed Ice detention centers, and there are currently no Ice jails in the state north of Bakersfield in the Central Valley, said Susan Beaty, senior attorney for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.View image in fullscreen“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.“They are following the pattern of the president … who believes that he can just do what he wants to do and obscure the laws,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Monday.Christopher Ferreira, a Geo Group spokesperson, said in an email that the firm had a “valid certificate of occupancy” and complied with health and safety requirements. The mayor’s opposition was “another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government”, he added.In a December 2024 earnings call, Geo Group said it was in “active discussions” with Ice and the US Marshals Service about their interest in six of its facilities that were idle.In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic is working to reopen an immigration detention center closed in 2021 under Joe Biden. The proposal for the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC) has sparked backlash from the city of Leavenworth, which sued CoreCivic in March, alleging the company has not followed the proper permitting protocols.View image in fullscreenIn 2021, the ACLU alleged that the Leavenworth facility was beset by problems, including frequent stabbings, suicides and contraband, and that “basic human needs [were] not being met”, with food restricted, contact with counsel and family denied or curtailed, limited medical care and infrequent showers. A federal judge called the facility a “hellhole”.Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the company’s decades of operations in Leavenworth in an email on Monday, saying understaffing amid the pandemic “was the main contributor to the challenges” and “the issues were concentrated in about an 18-month period”: “We’re grateful for a more stable labor market post-pandemic, and we’ve had a positive response with nearly 1,400 [applicants] expressing interest in one of the 300 positions the facility will create.“At any of our facilities, including MRRC, we don’t cut corners on care, staff or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards,” he said. He also pointed to a recent op-ed by the warden, who argued the facility “is and always has been properly zoned”.CoreCivic also reopened a family detention center in Texas last month.The use of shuttered prisons is just one way Ice is expanding detention for Trump’s mass deportations. He has also moved immigration detainees into BoP facilities currently housing criminal defendants, causing concerns about poor conditions, rights violations and a lack of basic resources as staff manage multiple populations under one roof. Trump has also pushed to expand local jail contracts and use military bases for Ice.Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which has obtained public records on Ice’s expanding detention, said Ice was ignoring safety concerns in previously shuttered facilities.“This is a continuing pattern of the Trump administration’s willingness to knowingly place immigrants in detention facilities already well-known for having dangerous conditions,” she said. “They’re putting people in facilities where the conditions are so dire … that people simply give up their valid claims of relief to stay in the United States.”There is growing local backlash to these facilities, Cho added: “When people realize what is happening in these facilities, it’s not something they want to see up close. People are becoming very aware that billions of dollars are being spent to enrich private prison companies to hold people in abysmal conditions … including their neighbors, co-workers and friends.”Ice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, did not answer questions about the reported reopening of Dublin for Ice. William K Marshall III, BoP director, said in a statement that the bureau would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the president’s agenda” and had ordered an “immediate assessment” to determine “our needs and the next steps” for Alcatraz: “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice.”Corene Kendrick, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director, dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz statement as a “stunt”, noting that the prison’s cellblock has no running water or sewage and limited electricity.“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” she said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.” More