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      Trump loses third bid for judge to step aside in hush-money case

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      A New York judge declined for a third time to step aside from the case in which Donald Trump was convicted of charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star, dismissing the former US president’s claim of conflict of interest related to political consultancy work by the judge’s daughter.As he did last April and in August 2023, Juan Merchan in a decision released on Wednesday denied a request by Trump’s lawyers that the acting justice of the New York supreme court recuse himself from the first case involving criminal charges against a former US president. Merchan is scheduled to sentence Trump on 18 September.“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” and were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims”, Merchan wrote in the ruling dated 13 August.Trump was found guilty by a jury on 30 May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for having covered up his former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 US election.Two months later, his lawyers made their third request that Merchan step aside, arguing that his daughter’s work for a political consultancy that has counted Democratic campaigns among its clients – including the unsuccessful bid by Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination – posed a conflict of interest.Harris, now vice-president, is the Democratic presidential candidate facing the Republican nominee Trump in the 5 November US election.Falsifying business records is a crime punishable by up to four years in prison, though sentences such as fines or probation have been more common for others convicted of that crime.Prosecutors with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the charges, had called Trump’s recusal request a “frivolous” attempt to relitigate an issue that was resolved twice before.“No amount of overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric can cure the fatal defects in defendant’s ongoing effort to impugn the fairness of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote in an 1 August court filing.The payment to Daniels was made in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump a decade earlier, which the former president denied. Trump went on to win the presidency by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMerchan rejected a recusal request in April before jury selection in the trial and last year after an ethics panel found that his daughter’s work did not pose reasonable questions about the judge’s impartiality.During the trial, Trump took to his social media platform to deride Merchan as a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court”. Ahead of the trial, Trump wrote on social media that Merchan’s daughter “makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’” comments that in part contributed to Merchan’s decision to expand a gag order to bar the former president from commenting publicly about family members of court staff or prosecutors.Trump’s lawyers separately have asked the judge to throw out his conviction in light of the US supreme court’s July ruling giving former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken in office. Merchan has said he will decide on Trump’s arguments by 16 September. More

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      Kamala’s tech ties: what is Harris’s relationship with Silicon Valley?

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      About 700 wealthy Democratic supporters packed into San Francisco’s Fairmont hotel on Sunday to see Kamala Harris in her first return to the city since launching her campaign for president. Among the crowd at the fundraiser, where the cheapest tickets cost $3,300 and went up to $500,000, was a mixture of tech billionaires, executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have quickly embraced the vice-president in her bid for the White House.The event, which raised more than $12m, was the latest in the Harris campaign’s outreach to tech Democrats and an extension of a relationship with Silicon Valley elites that goes back more than a decade.Harris has extensive ties to some of the tech industry’s most influential players and prolific donors, in part due to her time as California’s attorney general and later, senator. While her campaign has yet to release detailed policy positions on issues such as tech regulation, Harris’s track record has led tech executives to speculate whether she could take a friendlier approach to the industry than Joe Biden has.Among the tech industry Democrats who have promoted or contributed to the Harris campaign are former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who attended the fundraiser in San Francisco, as well as philanthropist Melinda French Gates, IAC chair Barry Diller and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway. Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire philanthropist and former wife of Apple’s Steve Jobs, is a longtime friend and in 2013 held a fundraiser at her home for Harris. Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, who publicly called on the president to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, donated $7m to a pro-Harris Super PACac within days of her becoming the presumptive nominee.Some of these donors have arrived to Harris’s campaign with their own policies to promote, most notably Hoffman and Diller’s demands to fire Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan. The FTC under Khan has taken an aggressive stance toward regulating big tech, pursuing cases against Microsoft and Amazon, which has rankled the industry. (Hoffman is a board member of Microsoft, which has been the target of FTC antitrust litigation.)Hoffman and Diller’s demands to remove Khan while donating heavily to Harris give the appearance of billionaire donors trying to sway policy for their personal benefit, despite denials from Hoffman that his contribution is in exchange for influence. Harris has yet to comment on Khan or the donations from her critics, meanwhile her campaign held an organizing event featuring Hoffman in early August following his attacks on the FTC chair.In addition to big-name donors, Harris has also received public pledges of support from hundreds of other venture capitalists and tech workers. A “VCs For Kamala” site featured more than 800 signatures from a variety of firms, while Bloomberg reported that a Tech4Kamala open letter received more than 1,200 signatures. The two groups are planning to host an event later this month.As he fights Harris, Trump forges new ties in Silicon ValleyAlthough Harris may have more vocal tech backers than Biden, the industry has also undergone a conservative shift and embrace of far-right beliefs that gives her a number of prominent opponents. A San Francisco fundraiser for Donald Trump held last month by venture capitalists David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya raised about $12m, while Silicon Valley power players Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced they plan to make substantial donations to the former president.JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, also ran his campaign for Ohio senator with the help of approximately $15m in contributions from tech billionaire Peter Thiel, whose venture firm briefly employed Vance in 2015. Prior to becoming a senator, Vance worked in Silicon Valley, where he plugged in to a broader network of wealthy conservatives in tech.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionElon Musk, the world’s richest man, has openly backed Trump while promoting attacks against Harris and Democrats on his social media platform X. Musk shared a deepfake parody video on the platform last month which featured manipulated footage of Harris, in which she was made to say “I am the ultimate diversity hire.” Musk’s Grok chatbot also spread false information suggesting that Harris was ineligible to appear on the ballot in some states, prompting condemnation from Democratic lawmakers.On Monday, Musk held a more than two-hour interview with Trump in which the Tesla CEO lauded Trump and gave no pushback as Trump rehashed a variety of falsehoods and baseless election conspiracies.“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself – self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,” Joseph Costello, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in a statement following the interview.California connections to big techAs state attorney general and then senator for California between 2010 and 2020, Harris was in office during a crucial period in the ascendance of Silicon Valley’s biggest social networks such as Facebook. Her record on legislation and litigation around tech has over the years alternatingly drawn applause from some regulation and privacy advocates and at times criticism from others that Harris didn’t attempt to rein in companies as they amassed monopolies.Harris enjoyed a fairly cozy relationship with the industry as attorney general, including developing a friendship with then Facebook COO Sandberg and participating in the PR campaign for Sandberg’s memoir Lean In. Sandberg gave the maximum legal individual contribution to her 2016 senate campaign and, according to emails acquired by HuffPost, sent Harris a message two days after that election that read “CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! We need you now more than ever.” Harris did not respond.During Harris’s time as attorney general, Facebook acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp in moves that helped it expand its dominance over social media. Antitrust advocates have since criticized federal regulators and state officials for failing to more intensely investigate or block those deals, with the FTC citing the acquisitions as evidence of anticompetitive practices in its antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. Harris has tended to stay away from taking a firm stance on antitrust actions, and in 2019 gave a vague answer to a direct question from the New York Times on whether big tech companies should be broken up.View image in fullscreenAreas where Harris took a more aggressive approach toward the tech industry were online privacy and sexual abuse, choosing what’s often called “revenge porn” as her marquee issue to fight. As a senator, Harris has introduced legislation and backed initiatives to criminalize sharing nonconsensual sexual images online, an issue that has become more pertinent in recent years with the rise of sexualized deepfakes of celebrities, politicians and average citizens. Her strategy with big tech companies on the issue, Politico reported in 2019, was to take a less publicly adversarial stance and instead forge relationships with executives who could change platform policies.When Harris chose to take legal action that involved tech companies, she instead tended to focus on smaller platforms or individual incidents of cybercrime. One of Harris’s most prominent prosecutions as attorney general was against the CEO and controlling shareholders of Backpage, an adult classifieds site that Harris accused of enabling illegal sex work, abuse and human trafficking. The prosecution, which Harris has touted in campaign ads, remains controversial and was heavily opposed by sex worker activists who viewed Backpage as a means to safely vet clients and avoid working on the streets. The founder of Backpage and two executives were convicted of prostitution and money laundering charges; a federal judge acquitted them on appeal.Harris’s record as a prosecutor shows other examples she could claim show that she’s tough on tech even as she maintains close relationships with the industry’s power brokers. She threatened to sue Uber as attorney general in 2016 after the company vowed to break state laws and put driverless cars on San Francisco streets without regulatory approval. Uber ultimately relented and ended its driverless tests days later. Meanwhile, Tony West, who became Uber’s chief legal officer a year after Harris threatened legal action, is now one of her campaign’s best-connected fundraisers. He’s also her brother-in-law. More

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      ‘We know who built this country’: Walz courts union workers in first solo event

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      Tim Walz held his first solo campaign event since being selected as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee on Tuesday, rallying union members in Los Angeles and denouncing Donald Trump’s record on labor rights.The Minnesota governor’s appearance, at an event hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was the first in a five-state fundraising campaign as Walz ramps up support for the still-young Democratic ticket.Speaking to thousands of union members in a darkened auditorium, Walz said he and Harris will support workers by bringing collective bargaining and other protections to “every state in the union”. The 1.4-million-member union has endorsed Harris.“We know exactly who built this country,” Walz said. “People in this room built the middle class.”He emphasized his and Harris’s history of supporting worker protections, including appearances that both candidates have made on picket lines and the ban Minnesota passed on captive audience meetings during his tenure as governor. Walz said that he was the “first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Regan”, but promised: “I won’t lose my way.” (Trump was a member of the Screen Actors Guild before resigning in 2021.)Walz then pivoted to warn them of what the future might look like for workers if the former president and his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, are elected, saying: “They see the world very differently then we do.”“The only thing those two guys know about working people is how to work to take advantage of them,” Walz said. “Every single chance they’ve gotten they’ve waged war on workers.”He described a future where bargaining rights, overtime pay and other protections would be cut, referencing steps that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines for restricting worker rights under a second Trump presidency.The Trump campaign has also courted union support. When Trump accepted the Republican nomination last month, he said he would rescue the auto industry from “complete obliteration”.However, this morning the United Auto Workers union also filed federal unfair labor practice charges against Trump and Elon Musk over comments the two made during a live stream on X, which included threats to fire workers for going on strike.“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump said. “You walk in, you say, you want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”Walz concluded by referencing his own record of service, and attacks Republicans have made on his military service. “I’m proud to have served my country and I always will be,” he said.On Tuesday Walz also addressed a fundraiser in Newport Beach, and plans to speak in Denver and Boston tomorrow, before heading to Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, on Thursday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt a fundraiser at the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach on Tuesday, the Orange County Register reported, Walz peppered his 30-minute appearance “with Midwest jokes and self-deprecating quips”.“I couldn’t be more surprised if I woke up with my head stapled to the carpet,” he told an attendee who asked whether he was surprised to be selected as the vice-presidential nominee, before refocusing on his running mate.“You know better than anybody in this state what we’ve got in the vice-president. She’s found her voice,” Walz saidWalz also noted that his daughter, Hope, was in attendance at the Orange county event, before sharing his family’s story of conceiving Hope through IVF treatments.Also in attendance were multiple California Democratic house members, including representatives Nanette Barragán of South Gate, Mike Levin of San Juan Capistrano and Katie Porter of Irvine. Levin, who had been one of the first to call on President Joe Biden to abandon his re-election campaign, told the Register: “I want to win the election in November and defeat Donald Trump. Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz give us a great chance to do just that.”Donors in Newport Beach, one of California’s wealthier and more conservative regions, have contributed $770,000 to Trump’s campaign this election cycle; compared with $145,000 for the Democratic campaigns, the Register reports, citing Federal Election Commission reports.Walz’s fundraising tour will continue in Denver and Boston tomorrow, before heading to Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, on Thursday. More

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      FBI told Harris campaign it was targeted by foreign hackers; Walz defends military service in first solo campaign event – live

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      Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:In the further annals of Republicans who broke with Donald Trump returning to the fold, former North Carolina senator Richard Burr said he will vote for the ex-president in November.Burr, who declined to seek re-election and left the Senate in 2022, was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House of Representatives in response to the January 6 insurrection.The conviction ultimately failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate required to be approved, and North Carolina’s GOP censured Burr for his vote.In an interview with Spectrum News, Burr said:
      Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it. I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And l like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.
      Donald Trump’s campaign is facing accusations of racism over this post on Twitter/X earlier today:It appears to be in line with the former president’s messaging around undocumented people, who he has baselessly blamed for causing crime, and sparked a wave of condemnation from users of X:Tim Walz is set to become one of the most prominent Democrats in the country – at least for the next three months, as he campaigns alongside Kamala Harris. Here’s a look at his record in Minnesota, from the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang:Tim Walz must be having the wildest month of his life.After the Minnesota governor was announced as Kamala Harris’s pick for running mate, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent senator Joe Manchin both put out statements praising him, an indication of his appeal across Democratic constituencies.“Dems in disconcerting levels of array,” Ocasio-Cortez joked on X.In the week since his name catapulted from relative obscurity – Walz flew up the shortlist of second-in-command possibles in a matter of two weeks, buoyed by clips of his TV appearances and memes about his dadliness – camo caps with orange writing have flown off the campaign merch shelves, a nod to Walz’s dressed-down midwestern attire.But beyond the appearances, his record in politics shows an evolution – a shift from a moderate Democrat winning over a Republican-leaning district to a governor who delivered a laundry list of progressive policy wins that has his critics fuming.Is he a progressive darling? Is he a moderate in progressive clothing? A centrist? Is this a bait-and-switch?Well, he’s Tim Walz.When you talk to people who know Walz, they all call him real, genuine, authentic, an everyman. There’s no reason to believe he’s putting on an act.Speaking of the Harris campaign, the vice-president’s newly minted running mate, Tim Walz, today made his first solo campaign appearance at a convention of union members.The Minnesota governor gave a wide-ranging speech in which he attacked Donald Trump and cheered the power of organized labor, while also taking time to respond to attacks from the former president and his supporters, who say Walz has exaggerated his military service.Here’s what he said in response, at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’s annual convention:The attacks on Walz’s military service, from Trump allies including his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, have centered on the timing of his decision to retire after 24 years of army national guard service. Here’s more on that:Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:Democrats in Arizona received some good news yesterday, when the secretary of state approved a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports. The party hopes the initiative will bring out voters who will also cast ballots for Kamala Harris in a state that could prove decisive to her hopes to winning the White House:Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.Arizona’s Republican former governor Doug Ducey has endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election bid, after he was censured by the state GOP near the end of his term for not being sufficiently loyal to the former president.Ducey cited his support for tougher immigration policies and a continuation of Trump-era tax cuts in his endorsement:Three years ago, the state Republican party reprimanded Ducey after it was taken over by rightwing officials who retaliated against politicians from the state that had clashed with Trump:Donald Trump’s campaign is out with a new statement claiming that the former president’s interview with Elon Musk last night “breaks the internet”.It says 25 million users on X have listened to the entire two-hour-plus interview as of noon today, and that the conversation generated 9.6m posts, among other statistics. It also hit out at Kamala Harris for not having done any interviews since launching her campaign.“While weak, failed, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has avoided answering questions for 23 days, President Trump delivered his message directly to the people in a historic, two-hour interview that generated millions of posts and impressions related to President Trump and Elon Musk’s unfiltered conversation,” the statement reads.Here’s more, from the Trump campaign communications director, Steven Cheung:
      President Trump will do everything he can to bring his unscripted message directly to the people, something the fake news media refuses to do. While Kamala Harris enjoys the luxury of hiding from the press, President Trump accepted Elon’s invitation to have an unfiltered conversation about his America First policies with voters and people around the world. The media can lie, but the numbers don’t: Americans are eager to hear from President Trump and his momentum is only growing as we get closer to November 5.
      The prominent progressive senator Bernie Sanders has warned that Donald Trump is preparing to once again dispute the results of the 2024 election, should he lose.Trump has never publicly conceded his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, and engaged in a months-long effort to prevent the Democrat from taking office that culminated in the violent January 6 insurrection.In a just-released statement, Sanders cites the former president’s recent language to argue that he is preparing to do the same this year:
      Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000-person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness. Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses. If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent”.
      This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.
      The former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges last night.Peters, a one-time hero to those denying that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with the My Pillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, access to the Mesa county election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity, the Associated Press reports.Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to “steal” the election from Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial. Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state. She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and one count of criminal impersonation.She will be sentenced on 3 October.Sea level rise will help create “more oceanfront property”, carbon pollution is only a problem once it starts causing “headaches and nausea” and we should be more worried about “nuclear warming” than global warming.Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s conversation on X, which Musk owns, last night featured several incoherent and baseless statements on the climate crisis, prompting both confusion and derision among environmental advocates.Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate group 350.org, labeled it the “dumbest climate conversation of all time.”Trump, the Republican presidential nominee in this election, said that rising seas will help create “more oceanfront property” and complained that “people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” in reference to potential nuclear war.During the often disjointed exchange, Trump also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration hadn’t opened up the Arctic to oil drilling and baselessly claimed that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle” because of climate edicts.Musk, meanwhile, said that he is “helping the environment” by making electric cars via Tesla but said that he didn’t want people to “vilify” the oil and gas industry that is driving the climate crisis and that the real dangers were, he felt, an increase in CO2 that will cause “headaches and nausea” and the world potentially running out of oil.“We don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that,” Musk said about the urgency of climate change. “Like leave the farmers alone.”Scientists are clear that the world needs to rapidly move away from fossil fuels to avoid worsening and disastrous climate impacts such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts.The exchange did little to assuage concerns that a second Trump term will only help accelerate dangerous global heating. More

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      FBI told Harris campaign it was target of ‘foreign actor influence operation’ – report

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign said it was notified by the FBI last month that it was “targeted by a foreign actor influence operation”, a NBC News reporter said on Tuesday.“We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts,” the campaign said, according to the reporter.The FBI said on Monday that it was investigating after Harris’s Republican rival Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said it was hacked.More details soon … More

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      Exonerated Central Park Five councillor to speak at Democratic convention – report

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      Yusef Salaam, a New York City councillor who was wrongly jailed for a notorious rape in the city’s Central Park, has reportedly been invited to address next week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago in a move that could highlight Donald Trump’s key role in the case and history of racially charged rhetoric.Salaam was one of the “Central Park Five”, a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers who were convicted of attacking and raping Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker, while she was jogging in April 1989.He could be joined at the convention by other members of the group, according to Semafor, which broke the story but said Salaam’s appearance had yet to be confirmed.Salaam served seven years but was later exonerated and released along with the other four after a convicted serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime, a confession confirmed by DNA evidence.The case became a major cause célèbre, largely due to an intervention by Trump, then an up-and-coming property magnate, who took out full-page adverts in four New York papers calling for the return of the death penalty at a time when the crime had captured media attention.The five defendants, who were all minors, had already been arrested, paraded in public and had their names and addresses published when Trump took out the advert.In a style that was to become familiar in his social media posts of a later era, the advert – carrying Trump’s signature – blared in block capitals: “Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!”Trump, who did not specifically call for the execution of the five defendants, wrote: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”In a 2016 interview with the Guardian, Salaam said Trump’s high-profile intervention had been a major factor in the teens’ wrongful convictions.“He was the fire starter,” Salaam said. “Common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.”Trump has declined to apologise for his perceived role in the wrongful convictions. After the men were awarded $41m in damages in a civil case in 2014, Trump wrote an article for the New York Daily News calling the award “the heist of the century”.He took a similarly hard line while he was president, telling journalists at the White House in 2019 that “you have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.”He added: “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case, so we’ll leave it at that.”His comments were triggered by the release of a four-part Netflix dramatisation of the case, When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay, which Kamala Harris – then a Democratic senator and presidential hopeful, and now vice-president and Trump’s opponent in the forthcoming presidential election – urged him to watch.Salaam won election as a Democrat representing New York’s Harlem district in November last year.Months before, Salaam trolled Trump after the former president was indicted by a Manhattan court on 34 felony charges – on which he was subsequently convicted – for document falsification relating to the payment of hush money to an adult film actor.“For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump – who never said sorry for calling for my execution – here it is: Karma,” Salaam posted on X, then known as Twitter, in February 2023.Salaam’s proposed convention appearance follows attempts by Trump to focus on Harris’s racial identity. Two weeks ago, Trump falsely told the National Association of Black Journalists that the vice-president, who has mixed heritage, had only recently identified as Black after previously emphasising her Indian ethnicity.It also comes after the Republican nominee has been making efforts to woo Black voters. Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight boxing champion and a prominent Trump supporter, told Semafor that the Central Park Five case played to an image of the former president as racist among Black celebrities.“The only thing they can say is that he’s a racist. Central Park Five,” he said. “Other than that, they can’t bring up anything else.” More

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      ‘The dumbest climate conversation of all time’: experts on the Musk-Trump interview

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      Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event labeled “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by one prominent activist.Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee, and Musk, the world’s richest person, dwelled on the problem of the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk, on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all.“You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”.Trump, who famously once called the climate crisis a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war.“The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” Trump pondered during the exchange.Musk, meanwhile, said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, the key driver of planet-heating pollution, and that the only imperative to ditch fossil fuels was that they will one day run dry.“If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.“We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people. This would occur with CO2 at about 1,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere, more than double the current record-breaking concentrations.Scientists have been clear that current global temperatures are hotter than at any point in human civilization, and probably long before this time too, which is causing mounting disastrous impacts in terms of heatwaves, droughts, floods and the destruction of the natural world.Governments have agreed to restrain the global temperatures rise to 1.5C above the preindustrial era, with researchers warning of cascading catastrophes beyond this point. The world faces the steep task of rapidly cutting emissions in half this decade, and then to net zero by 2050, to avoid these worst impacts.Despite Trump’s claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1ft of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years – an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found.Instances of significant flooding have risen by 50% since the 1990s, with millions of Americans set to be affected as homes, highways and other infrastructure are inundated. In Florida, where Trump has his own coastal property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to exit the state due to the increasing costs of flooding from the rising seas and fiercer storms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and Musk’s discussion on the climate crisis, therefore, “spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.“The damaging impacts of climate change, and in particular from more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many respects exceeding the predictions made just a decade ago,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and author. “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.”Mann said that if CO2 levels get so high breathing becomes difficult, then the impacts of the climate crisis “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse. It’s actually Elon’s ill-informed and ill-premised statements that are causing headaches and nausea.”Mann added that Trump’s statement that sea level rise will lead to more oceanfront property “does not betray a lack of understanding of climate physics. It betrays a lack of understanding of grade school geometry.”During his election campaigning, Trump has routinely denigrated electric vehicles but has recently changed his stance towards them after an endorsement from Musk, who previously described himself as a moderate Democrat.Trump, the former president convicted of 34 felonies, has vowed to undo the “lunacy” of Biden’s climate policies should he return to the White House, with his presidency expected to unleash a glut of new oil and gas drilling, accelerate gas exports and remove the US, once again, from the Paris climate agreement. More

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      View image in fullscreenThe elected officials, party functionaries, staffers and donors descending on Chicago for the most rollicking Democratic national convention in more than half a century will welcome an unlikely guest. Daniel Denvir, who as host of the socialist podcast The Dig regularly criticizes the Democratic party from its left, will attend as an alternate Rhode Island delegate for the uncommitted movement, a nationwide effort to pressure the Democrats to change course on the war in Gaza.The movement has shifted its focus to Kamala Harris after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Denvir is a forceful voice on the topic, having spent the last 10 months honing and broadcasting a leftist perspective on the US role in the Middle East. The pivot to focus on Palestine has culminated in Thawra, a 16-part, 40-hour conversation with the historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti on Arab radical movements that has spanned five months of programming.The link between on-the-ground organizing and historical analysis is at the heart of The Dig’s political education project. “I had long thought that the academic left was far too cloistered from the activist left in the United States,” Denvir recalls of the show’s founding impetus, “and that activists and organizers outside of academia would greatly benefit from understanding the world better in their efforts to change it.”View image in fullscreenIn the show’s near-decade of life, it has become a crucial hub of the left media ecosystem, with political guests including Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joined by Marxist academics such as David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Silvia Federici.In the aftermath of 7 October, listenership has leapt, with October downloads up about 150% from the month prior. That bump came thanks to episodes like one on the history of Hamas, Germany’s bizarre relationship with Israel, and historical tensions between Zionism and anti-Zionism within the Jewish diaspora, which together have been downloaded a quarter of a million times.The Dig was born into a moment of growth of the American left: the Democratic Socialists of America were expanding, American attitudes toward capitalism were cooling, and Trump’s presidency was propelling protests and resistance movements. It has matured alongside surging nationwide support for unions, rising labor militancy on campuses and youthful demonstrations against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.The Dig’s listeners are “overwhelmingly sharp, interesting people, committed to doing important work to transform the world, all over the world. What do they need to know?” Denvir says, in explaining how he chooses his subjects. “I’m trying to map out the terrain.”Denvir’s visit to Chicago for the DNC will bring his intensive study of the history of the Middle East to bear on the current political moment. “We continue to witness constant massacres of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military with American weapons. It’s clear that the administration’s policy is not only morally abhorrent, but also driving away large numbers of voters who Kamala Harris needs to defeat Donald Trump,” Denvir says. “Our uncommitted delegation will be inviting Harris delegates from across the nation to join us in calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We speak for the majority of Democratic voters who have long supported a ceasefire.”As he reminds listeners at the end of each episode, in a cheeky nod to Marx: while other podcasts aim to understand the world, The Dig aims to change it.‘It’s empowering to people’The Dig has been focusing primarily on the war in Gaza since last October – specifically on, as Denvir describes it, undoing the “reactionary, colonialist propaganda” fueling US support for the unfolding catastrophe.“This sense that the Arab world is full of backward fundamentalists who irrationally want to do violence unto us in the US is only possible if the actual history showing that things are precisely otherwise is thoroughly mystified,” Denvir says. “Thawra is a project aimed at the very heart of the mystifications that have sustained a century-plus of colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and that has led to the current genocide in Gaza.”Early experience attuned Denvir to narratives emerging from outside Washington. He cut his teeth in media freelancing in Ecuador, where he lived in 2008 with his partner, the political scientist Thea Riofrancos. When they returned to the US, he worked as a staff reporter for the Philadelphia City Paper, and – after moving in 2015 to Providence for Riofrancos’s job – cobbled together piecemeal writing work in a hollowing-out digital news ecosystem. As an experiment, he made a scuffling effort to kick the podcast off in September of that year, without finding much direction: one of the guests on his first episode was an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason.During that election season, Denvir campaigned for Bernie Sanders and joined the growing Democratic Socialists of America. The podcast found its footing, Denvir recalls, amid “Trump’s election in the context of my own unemployment and lack of a clear path as a journalist”. It was soon picked up by Jacobin magazine, where it is still hosted.Denvir’s aim was to “translate the intellectual and academic left to a broader audience”, he says, addressing its persistent gap with activists and organizers – a gap he found less pronounced in Latin America. “There shouldn’t be a hard divide between organizing and analysis or theorization,” Denvir says. “Organizing is a way to test those theories and see what works and what doesn’t.”Initially, Denvir invited journalists, scholars and organizers to discuss “American class warfare” in the form of its punitive immigration system, mass incarceration, and social and labor movements. In the years since, Denvir began doing more interviews with book authors, becoming something of a socialist Terry Gross.The show has also become more international: even before the turn to Palestine, Denvir conducted multipart interviews on the history of Iran, China, and the relationship between Cuba and southern Africa. Though he lacks formal graduate education, he evinces a professor’s comfort with critical theory and its vocabulary. His voice is schoolboyish and bright, his delivery considered, and he occasionally breaks out in small fits of laughter in reaction to his interlocutors’ – and his own – just-so points.View image in fullscreenIf its themes seem at first blush seem disparate, the show coheres by finding the connectedness of sundry struggles for liberation. “Labor or housing or immigrant rights or anti-carceral or anti-cop organizing, all of that is at its best when it’s systemically aligned with a broader struggle for socialist transformation, and a broader understanding of the capitalist order,” Denvir says.“Everything he does he brings the same care to. That itself is part of his political analysis that everything matters,” says Riofrancos of Denvir. “Every person’s important, every issue is important, everything requires care and attention, everything has a history. Everything has a struggle behind it.”His urge toward comprehensiveness means that episodes often run above the two-hour mark, occasionally approaching three. “I’m pushing the boundaries of what people think is possible, or reasonable, on a podcast,” he says. But anything less would mean for a fundamentally different podcast. I pointed out to Denvir that this length puts him in league with Joe Rogan. The difference, he says, is that “I don’t smoke weed until after I get off air”.The show’s great success is in achieving a scholarly rigor that’s accessible to the masses. Riofrancos, who as senior adviser to The Dig consults with Denvir on question lists and the show’s direction, says guests regularly thank Denvir for his especially close reads, often comparing the experience to their dissertation defenses.Yet “you can be someone that does not have academic formation and listen to his podcast and become more intellectual and knowledgeable. I think that’s empowering to people,” says Riofrancos. “When you listen, you feel like you’re getting smarter, you feel like you’re touching something that’s new to you.‘I’ve learned something I can use’Astra Taylor, a film-maker, writer and co-founder of the Debt Collective debtors’ union, first appeared on The Dig in 2018 to discuss a book she’d co-authored on Hannah Arendt. She was won over by Denvir’s close attention to the art of interviewing, they became friends, and she has since come to guest-host the show, including interviewing Denvir about his own book All-American Nativism in 2020. Like Riofrancos, she sees the show as being “not just smart” but also “empowering”.“You exit a Dig interview and you’re like: ‘I’ve learned something I can use to be a part of this bigger socialist movement, that over the course of history has changed the world,’” Taylor says. “We might be losing right now, we might be in an electoral morass, but when I take this long perspective I see that people have made it through similarly complicated, fraught periods, that people have transcended their circumstances, that people have been unrelenting in their quest to build power.”The Dig’s backlog of episodes reads as an index of how the left interpreted crucial political events over the last eight years. A two-part episode on higher education in crisis and university unionism closely followed my own graduate workers’ union’s six-week strike in the winter of 2022, helping me to contextualize that charged experience. The late Mike Davis, whose The Monster at Our Door analyzed the threat of a global virus outbreak, came on for an episode at the outset of the Covid pandemic to situate the moment; when the George Floyd protests broke out three months later, he came back to discuss Prisoners of the American Dream, his treatment of the destructive effect of racism on US socialist and labor politics. Adjacent episodes more directly spoke to demands to defund police and the context of the uprising.As the show has become more popular, Denvir has himself turned more directly toward building power. In 2020, after throwing himself into the Sanders campaign, Denvir argued for retooling that campaign’s infrastructure to fight more lastingly for social and economic justice. At the state level, he and other veterans of the campaign co-founded Reclaim RI, which has become a vehicle for tenant organizing and pursuing housing justice in Rhode Island.Joe Shekarchi, speaker of the Rhode Island house of representatives, credits Reclaim RI with playing an important role in addressing the state’s housing woes, including authorizing $10m toward launching a first-of-its-kind public housing developer at the state level. “Dan is a gentleman. He’s polite,” says Shekarchi. “I consider myself a moderate; I’m sure he would consider himself a progressive, but he’s someone I can sit down and have a productive conversation with, come to an agreement and work collaboratively to get whatever the issue is over the goal line.”View image in fullscreenThis summer, Denvir is taking his productive conversations on the road. On 26 July, he co-hosted a live episode in London interviewing the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the political scientist Laleh Khalili, on Palestine and international politics. This month, he will travel to the DNC; two weeks later, he will tape a live episode at the Socialism 2024 conference, also in Chicago, on the geopolitics of energy transition.Each of these disparate geographies and themes is of a larger piece. The world as interpreted by The Dig is deeply interrelated, comprehensible through close study and changeable insofar as it can be understood. The convention is the next opportunity to put that framework into action.“We can’t win social democratic reforms on the domestic front without challenging US power abroad,” Denvir says. “We are confronting climate change, the genocide in Gaza and increasingly violent great power rivalries: we need a global program that acts in concert with progressive forces around the world.” More