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      In Trump we trust: religious right on crusade to make their man president

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      God’s army is on the march. And many of its foot soldiers are wearing “Make America great again” regalia, sensing that their unlikely standard-bearer, former US president Donald Trump, is once again close to the promised land.“I do not believe that America can survive another four years of Joe Biden,” Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told a gathering of the religious right in Washington on Friday. “I haven’t felt this way since Jimmy Carter was president.” The audience burst into knowing laughter.Reed promised they would knock on 10m doors of Christian and conservative voters in every battleground state, make 10m phone calls, send 25m text messages and put 30m voter guides in 113,000 churches, producing “the biggest turnout of Christian voters in American history”.The election result will be clear, he added. “This time there aren’t gonna need to be any lawsuits. We’re not going to have to go to court and we’re not going to have to wait until 2.30 in the morning for Donald Trump to declare victory. He’s going to do it at 9 o’clock at night!”With Trump running ahead of Biden in many swing state polls, religious right voters scent a historic opportunity to impose a radical agenda that could ban abortion nationwide, curb LGBTQ+ rights and blur the separation of church and state. At Friday’s conference, speaker after speaker framed it as righteous crusade and the only way to resist a tide of liberal secularism sweeping America.Ben Carson, a former housing secretary in Trump’s first term, praised Republican-dominated Louisiana for becoming the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every government school classroom.“Aren’t you glad that yesterday the governor of Louisiana signed into law – put the Ten Commandments back in the schools?” he said to cheers and applause before warning of a 60-year communist project to change America by taking over schools, churches and Hollywood and removing God from the public square.Josh Hawley, a Republican senator for Missouri, warned of a “radical anti-faith agenda” gripping the country. He said: “Who’s dividing America is the radical left and that’s why I say to you we don’t need less Christian influence in our society, we don’t need less Christian witness in our society; we need more in every part of government, in every part of society.”To approving roars from the audience, Hawley added: “We ought to take the Pride flag out of schools and put the Bible back in. You know what? We ought to take the trans flag down from all of our federal buildings and over every federal building in America write the words: ‘In God we trust.’ In God we trust. Amen.”The couching of an Armageddon election, in which religious truth itself is at stake, with victory representing divine providence and defeat spelling total catastrophe, was crystallised by Monica Crowley, a rightwing political commentator and former assistant secretary of the treasury.She described the election as a “hinge moment” comparable to the American revolution, American civil war, second world war and September 11 terrorist attacks. She spoke of a “war” against “the enemy within” that has spent nearly half a century “infiltrating, undermining and destroying” America with “godless philosophies”.Crowley lamented that Hollywood no longer produces “patriotic films” like those of John Wayne and, extraordinarily, defended the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. “Senator Joe McCarthy was right, and he was trying to ring the bell in the 1950s about communist infiltration in our government and the same deep state that is now going after Donald Trump,” he said.“The same deep state that removed Richard Nixon, the same deep state that went after Ronald Reagan and anybody else who stood up to them. That deep state became very insidious and in the 1950s smeared and attacked Joe McCarthy for speaking the truth about godless communism in very halls of our government.”Notably, little was said by the dozen main stage speakers about abortion, a live political grenade for which Republicans have struggled find a coherent message since the supreme court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade precedent two years ago.Religious conservatives’ pact with Trump appears to be holding. Some were sceptical about the thrice-married reality TV star when he first ran for president in 2016 but the concerns were assuaged by his running mate, born-again evangelical Christian Mike Pence, and by a first term that saw him shift the judiciary to the right.Not even Trump’s conviction in New York last month on 34 felony counts in a trial involving hush-money payments to an adult film star has shaken his grip on this constituency. Many who complain that their faith is under siege regard him as a blunt instrument with which to fight back against the radical left.They often rationalise their vote by saying they are choosing a president, not a pastor. Some evangelicals have likened him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who, according to the Bible, enabled Jews to return to Israel from their exile in Babylon.View image in fullscreenRobert P Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, wrote on Substack recently: “The transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the Maga movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of a convicted felon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe presumptive Republican nominee has exploited this totemic status. Earlier this year, he launched his own brand of Bible, selling for $59.99 each. During the trial, he shared social media posts comparing himself to Jesus Christ.At Friday’s Road to Majority policy conference, it was not uncommon to hear of the Almighty and Trump spoken in the same breath. Crowley said: “We do have a fearless leader in Donald Trump, where they have thrown the kitchen sink at this man over nine years and they cannot believe that he is still standing. Hand of God!”Kari Lake, a senate candidate in Arizona, said: “We gotta bring Him back into our culture, into our lives, into our hearts and souls – and then also let’s work to bring Donald J Trump back on November 5.”Inside the upmarket Washington hotel hosting the conference, there were vendors selling Maga merchandise, lifesize cardboard cutouts of Trump and an area where attendees could pose with head shots of their choice for his running mate.Stephen Sandrelli, 60, posed with a picture of the US representative Elise Stefanik against an Oval Office backdrop. “First of all, we’ve got to deport millions – at least 15 million people,” he said of a second Trump term. “The Democrats are terrorists. They hate our nation. They hate humankind.“They’re trying to replace us – replacement theory, whatever you want to call it – and Trump cares about us. I believe he’s a man that God has touched and he’s doing the right thing. He’s only blessed our country. He’s only helped people.”Sandrelli, a former Democrat and federal government officer from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, added: “Anybody who supports abortion is supporting murder.”But sensing political danger, Trump has refused to endorse a national abortion ban. Some here felt let down. Wearing a red Maga cap, Thomas Dinkel, 16, who goes to a school in Morgantown, West Virginia, said: “I’m going to be honest with you: as a pro-life Christian, it hurts. I see why he and a lot of other national Republicans are doing it. They’re slowly backing away from the issue. It’s ruffled some feathers.“I do back an abortion ban. For right now, it’s at the state level, and I respect that, but if it ever went as a federal ban, I would back that. I understand why Trump is having a stance on that, just like some other stances he’s been taking lately. I pray that when he gets in, the least he can do for the pro-life communities is continue to back and appoint pro-life justices.”But Dinkel is supporting Trump and is willing to overlook his moral shortcomings, saying: “Listen, I’m a Christian. I mess up, you mess up. Everyone in this room messes up. We sin, we fall short, we turn away from God, and Trump has admitted to that. He’s not the best person. He’s not a perfect person. None of us are. He says that he’s repented of his sins, and I’m called to forgive Trump.”Dorothy Harpe, an African American woman who is retired from a church in Atlanta, Georgia, was wearing a Maga cap and badge that said: “Trump was right!” The 74-year-old said: “He tells the truth. People don’t want to believe him, they think he always doing something wrong, but he’s not. He’s innocent of all the bogus charges they brought against him. God knows every man’s heart, and I believe he is a Christian.” More

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      Both sides of gun issue seek to stir up US voters as NRA influence wanes

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      Anti-gun-control groups and gun-safety advocates are launching hefty voter-mobilization drives this year with the stakes high in the fall elections given the stark differences on gun violence policy between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.But the long-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been beset with financial and legal headaches for several years, is not expected to be nearly as active as in 2016, when it spent more than $31m to back Trump’s victorious campaign by boosting his political fortunes in key states, say gun experts and ex-NRA insiders.Now, though, other anti-gun-control groups are trying to take up the slack.For instance, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an influential firearms industry lobbying group, has begun an eight-figure voter-mobilization drive to help pro-gun interests defeat President Biden, whose strong support for gun-control measures it finds anathema.The NSSF’s general counsel, Larry Keane, said that the organization’s “GunVote” campaign will focus on seven to nine battleground states, where it will mount voter-registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Trump win the presidency again.On the other side of this year’s election brawl over gun control, Everytown for Gun Safety is planning a large effort to get its millions of supporters to help re-elect Biden and defeat Trump, who has a record of siding firmly with pro-gun priorities.“We’re going to knock on doors, make calls, rally and campaign for President Biden,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at Everytown, which claims nearly 10 million supporters including mayors, students, gun owners, teachers and others.The stakes seem higher than usual given Biden’s successes as president backing new gun-control measures such as the first new law in three decades boosting gun safety, and Biden’s talk of doing more if he’s re-elected, including fighting for an assault weapons ban, which would probably need Democratic control of Congress to enact.By contrast, Trump has often reiterated his fealty to the pro-gun lobby, which characterized his presidency. At last month’s NRA annual meeting, Trump earned a ringing endorsement and pledged that if he wins, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.But the once deep-pocketed and five-million-member NRA remains mired in internal and financial headaches: its annual revenues have dropped for several years while its legal expenses have risen.The NRA’s problems were underscored when its longtime top executive, Wayne LaPierre, resigned in January as he was about to go on trial in New York, where he was convicted of looting the organization to enjoy lavish personal perks including fancy vacations and expensive clothes.“The NRA is going to again be a peripheral player for lack of funding this election cycle, and that could hurt Trump in several battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” a former NRA board member said.“It’s a vacuum compared to 2016 when the NRA was robustly engaged,” the ex-board member added.Longtime observers of gun-control fights agree.Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus political science professor at Suny Cortland in New York, said the NRA was “as strongly behind [Trump] as they have been before”.“However, the organization simply does not possess the money or personnel to be as influential as they were in 2016, when they spent over $31m on his campaign, and over $70m on Republican efforts around the country. Still, the gun issue will continue to be salient to an important segment of the Trump base.”Spitzer added: “Other gun groups, such as the NSSF and state gun groups, will be working to supplant the NRA’s traditional dominance in national politics. They do not possess the degree of organization, experience and reach as the NRA of old, but they will ratchet up their efforts.”That’s what the NSSF, whose members include such gun giants as Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, plus other anti-gun-control groups say they intend to do. “There’s a stark difference between Trump and Biden,” Keane said in explaining the NSSF’s hefty effort this year. “It’s clear there are ongoing challenges at the NRA.”Some ex-NRA leaders credit NSSF with trying to fill the NRA’s vacuum. “NSSF has attempted, and continues, to fill the gap left by a weakened NRA,” Jim Baker, the NRA’s former top lobbyist, said.The NRA did not respond to a call seeking comments.Further, the Trump campaign in tandem with the Republican National Committee has launched Gun Owners for Trump including firearms makers and gun-rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation; Women for Gun Rights; and some NRA officials.To spur more pro-gun votes at the polls, Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events. At their May meeting, Trump employed some incendiary conspiracy-mongering, telling the crowd that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGun-control advocates and the Biden campaign are using Trump’s own pro-gun pledges and cavalier attitude towards gun violence to rev up their backers, including younger voters and women.After an Iowa school shooting in January, for instance, Trump callously opined that “we have to get over it”, a clip of which is being circulated by Democrats and pro-gun-control advocates.Likewise, another clip in circulation shows Trump boasting to NRA members in May that he “did nothing” as president on guns. Actually, Trump signed a “bump stock” ban after the country’s largest gun massacre ever in Las Vegas, but the supreme court overturned it this month.Biden cemented his gun-control credentials in 2022 when, after the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, he pushed hard for a gun-safety bill that passed on a bipartisan basis, becoming the first new gun-control law in almost three decades.To energize his supporters, Biden spoke to an Everytown training event for about 1,000 gun-safety volunteers including students on 12 June, where he cited several major achievements, including setting up a White House office focused on curbing gun violence and beefing up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms.Biden urged a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for purchases of firearms, both goals he has stressed before.“We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby,” Biden said.Suplina said Everytown’s plans for targeting states to help Biden and how much they intend to spend overall this election cycle were not ready to be announced, but he did reveal that Everytown intends to support 465 of its volunteers who are running for office this year. The majority of these races are state and local.Further, Everytown will be backing Senate and House candidates who support gun-safety measures, Suplina said.Overall, Everytown spent about $55m on 2020 election efforts.Other gun-control advocates have broad election plans“This cycle, GIiffords will use its unique identity as a gun owner and survivor-led organization to reach a broad gun safety coalition in battlegrounds – including Democrats, Republicans, young voters, gun owners, and people of color,” Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, said in a statementThe group plans on “supporting gun safety champions in key House and Senate races, [and] communicating the Biden-Harris administration’s historic gun safety accomplishments in states across the map,” she added.Looking ahead, Spitzer stressed that Biden “has continued to speak out on gun safety, and gun-safety groups will surely redouble their efforts on his behalf, not only to help him get re-elected, but to advance the cause of down-ballot Democrats running for Congress and state offices, where the fate of many gun laws lie”. 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      No props, no notes, no audience – but Trump-Biden debate will have ad breaks

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      “Will you shut up, man?” It was hardly oratory worthy of Abraham Lincoln, but Joe Biden’s primal plea in the face of relentless interruptions and heckling from Donald Trump provided a defining soundbite of the 2020 presidential debates.The two will face each other again on Thursday for the first of two head-to-head debates for the 2024 campaign, under new rules designed to prevent matters degenerating as they did four years ago. The US president and the former president will meet in a TV studio without the presence of a partisan audience, which some saw as an essential ingredient of Trump’s rabble-rousing approach. And to counteract the repeated butting-in that so irked Biden, the candidates will have their microphones muted when they are not speaking.But the debates are also the first in decades to be held entirely by commercial TV networks – including two advertising breaks – and without the oversight of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the long-established, independent, non-partisan body that has long governed the debate rules. Some critics say they fear that commercialising the process could lead to less substantive, shorter answers, geared more to generating conflict and soundbites than enlightening voters.The verbal volleys in 2020 between Biden and Trump, under the Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, became so vitriolic that the CNN presenter Dana Bash was prompted, live on air, to describe the event as “a shitshow”. Earlier this year, both campaigns chose to circumvent the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had overseen presidential debates since 1988, and on 27 June, Bash and her CNN co-presenter, Jake Tapper, will have a chance to improve on Fox’s effort when they preside over the first debate in Atlanta. A second debate will take place on 10 September, to be hosted by ABC.No props or prewritten notes will be allowed on stage. Candidates will be given a pen, a notepad and a bottle of water.The decisions to switch off a candidate’s microphone when it is the opponent’s turn to speak, and to exclude a partisan audience, have been taken in an effort to reduce the theatrical gladiatorial bloodsport element that has threatened to overwhelm recent debates.Some critics said the lack of oversight from the CPD, as well as the inclusion of two commercial breaks during the 90-minute event, undermined the nature of the debate.“The introduction of commercial breaks will fundamentally change what makes a debate a debate, since the candidates will constantly be able to stop and regroup,” Clea Conner, chief executive of Open to Debate, a research group that has tracked presidential debates over recent decades, told Politico.“Even though there will be only two commercial breaks this time, once we deem them acceptable it’s a classic slippery slope; how many will there be next time, and the time after that?“[Candidates’] arguments will have to be shorter, truncated for the commercial clock, and will result in more outrageous interactions to bump ratings.” Without the presence of an independent broker such as the CPD, she argued, it would lead to “pure political theatre”.Open to Debate’s report into the deterioration of debate quality attested to the need for drastic format changes from 2020, in order to arrest a decline in moderator control and candidate decorum.While there were just three interruptions across three debates in the 2004 election between George W Bush and John Kerry – administered by the CPD – the first 2020 Trump-Biden encounter witnessed 76, the group noted. However, the second debate saw just four interruptions, after non-speakers’ microphones were muted following criticism of the chaos three weeks earlier.Steven Fein, a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, who has studied the psychological dimension of presidential debates, said excluding a loudly cheering live audience was “rational” and “good for democracy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[It] will reduce significantly the chances that the focus of the debate will be not on what is actually said, but on all this stuff around it – the reaction of the audience and playing to the audience,” he said. “I think that changes what the candidates are likely to do.“It also changes what the audience at home takes away from the debate, what they remember, what plays the news the next day – all based on the audience reaction. Because the audience reaction may or may not be valid.”He warned, however, that the commercial TV networks may jettison the new approach “because it makes for less exciting television”.The candidate with more to lose in the controlled, low-key environment is probably Trump, according to Tammy Vigil, associate professor of communications at Boston University.“He tends to feed off of the energy of a crowd,” she said. “He’ll lose some of his energy by not having a crowd to feed off. The other part that’ll probably change is that the candidates will be more apt to speak to the cameras directly.“I think that will improve the overall feel of the debate for television viewers because it’ll feel like the candidates are speaking more directly to them.” More

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      Trump announces Teamsters union chief to speak at Republican convention

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      Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, will speak at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee next month, a move that could spell trouble for Joe Biden’s support among blue-collar workers ahead of the November election.Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, announced on Friday on his Truth Social platform that O’Brien had accepted his invitation to speak at the convention and that he was looking forward to seeing him represent the Teamsters.“Our GREAT convention will unify Americans and demonstrate to the nation’s working families they come first,” Trump wrote. “When I am back in the White House, the hard-working Teamsters, and all working Americans, will once again have a country they can afford to live in and be respected around the world.”A Teamsters spokesperson confirmed the news, saying it was “truly unprecedented since it will be the very first time a Teamsters general president has addressed the RNC”. The powerful union represents more than a million members across sectors such as trucking, packaging, manufacturing and logistics.“Our 1.3 million members represent every political background, and their message needs to be heard by as wide an audience as possible, and that includes all political candidates running for elected office,” the spokesperson said. “We appreciate former President Trump’s openness to inviting a labor leader to speak on behalf of working families.”The Republican national convention will kick off on 15 July, where Trump will once again be nominated as the GOP presidential candidate. The Teamsters spokesperson said O’Brien had made an identical request to appear at the Democratic national convention in Chicago the following month.The Teamsters endorsed Biden over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. But O’Brien, who took over in March 2022, has yet to publicly back a candidate in this election cycle.O’Brien has invited Biden, Trump and the independent presidential candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr and Cornel West to speak to his group. O’Brien drew anger from the union’s progressive members after he held a private meeting with Trump earlier this year. O’Brien later met Biden, who he described as having been “great” for workers. But he stressed there was “still a lot of work to be done” to bolster unions.O’Brien’s appearance at the Republican national convention would challenge Biden’s historic alliance with organized labor and threatens to undercut his claim that he is the most pro-union president in US history.Biden kicked off his re-election campaign last June at a union-backed rally, and has since been endorsed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) after he walked the picket line with union president Shawn Fain during its strike against America’s three biggest car manufacturers. More

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      Manhattan district attorney asks judge to extend gag order against Trump

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      Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted Donald Trump in his felony trial, has asked a judge to extend a gag order against the ex-president after an onslaught of threats and harassment against him and other officials since the guilty verdict.The gag order was placed on Trump before the start of the felony trial. It prevented the former president from attacking witnesses, court staff, jurors and relatives of Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the trial.Trump’s legal team has unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the gag order, arguing that it prevents voters from being able to hear from a presidential candidate.But Bragg and others have said that part of the order should remain for jurors, prosecutors, their staff and their families, given a high number of threats, the New York Times reported.Bragg specifically has faced an onslaught of death threats and harassment since Trump was found guilty. He has received more than 100 threatening emails via his campaign website, the New York Daily News reported, citing a source who asked to remain anonymous.Several of the abusive messages obtained by the Daily News use racial slurs including the N-word, “gorilla” and “primate”, it reported, adding that Bragg also faced death threats and racial abuse throughout the seven-week trial.In one instance, a package was sent to Bragg from Portland, Oregon, containing a picture of Bragg alongside a noose, with the caption: “I am past the point of just wanting them in prison.”The New York police department has logged 56 “actionable threats” since the start of April against Bragg, his employees, and his family, the Times reported.A representative for Bragg did not respond to a request for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has aimed his own ire at Bragg even before the hush-money trial began. Last April, he reportedly told a close circle of advisers that he planned to escalate political attacks against the DA after a grand jury voted to indict him.Trump also accused Bragg of being a psychopath, and alleged that the hush-money trial was a political move.But much of the hate towards Bragg came after Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the New York state hush-money trial – making the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election the first former president to be convicted of a criminal offense.Since the trial, supporters of Trump have urged the former president to jail Bragg if he wins back the White House in November. Steve Bannon, a former strategist in Trump’s White House, has led the charge.“Of course [Bragg] should be – and will be – jailed,” Bannon told Axios, arguing that Bragg would be prosecuted under the US constitution’s 14th and fourth amendment.Other Republican-led states have promised to prosecute Bragg for his role in the Trump hush-money trial. The Missouri attorney general, Andrew Bailey, declared on Thursday that he would be filing a lawsuit against the state of New York for its “direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump”. More

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      Race to unseat New York progressive ‘most expensive House primary ever’

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      The primary for New York’s 16th congressional district, which takes place on Tuesday, has drawn record-breaking spending, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and a crypto-currency Super Pac behind the lion’s share of the funding.AdImpact, a group tracking political advertisements, reported earlier this week that the race between the incumbent progressive representative Jamaal Bowman and his challenger, George Latimer, has become “the most expensive House primary ever”, with more than $23m spent on ads so far.The two are battling to represent a district that spans parts of the Bronx and Westchester county. Latimer is leading in polling, and if he wins, he will be the first challenger to successfully unseat a member of the progressive “Squad”.The huge haul of outside spending – most of it funding ads attacking Bowman and supporting Latimer – underscores Bowman’s precarious position as a high-profile “Squad” member whose criticism of Israel and outspoken support for Palestinian rights has drawn the ire of the pro-Israel lobby.But the race is more than a referendum on Israel-Palestine policy. It’s also a test of the fledgling progressive wing of the Democratic party, whose ranks Bowman joined after winning an upset primary victory in 2020 and defeating former representative Eliot Engel, an incumbent who had held the office since 1989.The New York race has brought that split – between a generation of left-leaning Democrats and their establishment colleagues – back to the fore.Among Bowman’s highest-profile supporters are the senator Bernie Sanders and the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as AOC), who will appear at a rally on Saturday to turn out voters for the incumbent. Meanwhile, Latimer has earned the support of the former secretary of state and Democratic party establishment stalwart Hillary Clinton.The race has turned ugly at times, with Latimer claiming during a debate that Bowman had earned more support from Dearborn, Michigan – the only majority-Arab city in the US – than his New York district.Since 7 October, Bowman has consistently voiced opposition to Israel’s military operations in Gaza – a critical point of difference between the incumbent and his challenger, who has said he supports a two-state solution in the region but has not called for a ceasefire. Latimer has accused Bowman of rabble-rousing in Congress and has said he would govern as a centrist – and he avoided taking a position on tax hikes for the wealthy during a debate.The proxy war between the left and right of the Democratic party has been bolstered by staggering outside spending. Super Pacs, which can spend unlimited amounts of money on ads advocating for or against candidates, had spent $20.3m as of 20 June, according to campaign finance records, which tend to slightly lag behind AdImpact’s numbers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA Guardian analysis of campaign finance records has found that three Super Pacs have spent nearly $18m to unseat Bowman. United Democracy Project (UDP), an Aipac-affiliated Super Pac, has spent more than $14.5m backing Latimer – the most the group has spent on any single race in its history. Latimer has also benefited from $1m from the group Democratic Majority for Israel and $2m from the crypto-backed group FairShake, according to Federal Election Commission records. Meanwhile, a coalition of 10 progressive outside groups have spent about $3m in support of Bowman.Both campaigns have also raised considerable cash in the form of direct campaign donations – in contrast with Super Pac spending, which doesn’t go directly to campaigns – with Bowman raising $5.9m and Latimer netting $5.7m.Of those contributions, a larger share of Bowman’s campaign cash has come from small donors than Latimer’s – with a total of about $1.4m in donations of less than $200, to Latimer’s approximately $320,000. More

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t meet requirements to take part in CNN debate

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is running as an independent presidential candidate, will not be included in CNN’s debate next week after failing to meet the network’s criteria.A Wednesday midnight deadline passed without Kennedy being able to demonstrate that he had met the conditions necessary to share the debate platform with Joe Biden and Donald Trump.CNN has stipulated that participants need to have secured ballot access in enough states to capture the 270 electoral college votes necessary to win the presidency, while recording 15% support in at least four national polls.Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has gained a reputation for engaging in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, has been confirmed on the ballot in only five states – Utah, Delaware, Oklahoma, Michigan and Tennessee – according to the Washington Post.Additionally, CNN credited him with being on the ballot in California and Hawaii, where he is the presumptive nominee for several smaller parties where the states have yet to certify him. In total, the states account for 100 electoral votes.As of Wednesday, Kennedy had reached the 15% polling threshold in just three national surveys.Kennedy’s campaign has threatened to sue CNN if it does not include him in the 27 June debate. The campaign has claimed that he is on the ballot for nine states and has collected enough signatures to be given ballot access in 14 more.Kennedy has also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that his exclusion is unfair.Analysts have speculated that his competing as a third-party candidate could have a potentially significant effect on the outcome of November’s election, with polls showing Biden and Trump running neck-and-neck, both nationally and in several battleground states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHowever, it is unclear which of the two main candidates’ prospects are more harmed by his presence. He initially attempted to run as a Democrat before withdrawing to stand independently.While his public profile from sharing the name of America’s most illustrious political families could attract many Democrats, his anti-Covid vaccine views have appeared popular among right-leaning voters who would normally favour Trump. More

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      Deluge of ‘pink slime’ websites threaten to drown out truth with fake news in US election

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      Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during the United States’ bitterly fought 2024 election.Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that “the odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”NewsGuard estimates that there are a staggering 1,265 such fake local news websites in the US – 4% more than the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left operating in the country.“Actors on both sides of the political spectrum” feel “that what they are doing isn’t bad because all media is really biased against their side or that that they know actors on the other side are using these tactics and so they feel they need to,” said Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, which determined that such sites now outnumber legitimate local news organizations. “It’s definitely contributed to partisanship and the erosion of trust in media; it’s also a symptom of those things.”Pink slime websites, named after a meat byproduct, started at least as early as 2004 when Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who described himself as a “biased guy” and a Republican, started funding websites featuring names of cities, towns and regions like the Philly Leader and the South Alabama Times.Timpone’s company, Metric Media, now operates more than 1,000 such websites and his private equity company receives funding from conservative political action committees, according to NewsGuard.The Leader recently ran a story with the headline, “Rep Evans votes to count illegal aliens towards seats in Congress.”In actuality, Representative Dwight Evans, a Democrat, did not vote to start counting undocumented immigrants in the 2030 census but rather against legislation that would have changed the way the country has conducted apportionment since 1790.That sort of story is “standard practice for these outlets”, according to Tim Franklin, who leads Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, which researches the industry.“They will take something that maybe has just a morsel of truth to it and then twist it with their own partisan or ideological spin,” Franklin said. “They also tend to do it on issues like immigration or hot-button topics that they think will elicit an emotional response.”A story published this month on the NW Arkansas News site had a headline on the front page that reported that the unemployment rate in 2021 in Madison county was 5.1% – even though there is much more recent data available. In April 2024, the local unemployment rate was 2.5%.“Another tactic that we have seen across many of this category of sites is taking a news story that happened at some point and presenting it as if it just happened now, in a way that is misleading,” Skibinski said.The left has also created websites designed to look like legitimate news organizations but actually shaped by Democratic supporters.The liberal Courier Newsroom network operates websites in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada, among other states, that – like the conservative pink slime sites – have innocuous sounding names like the Copper Courier and Up North News. The Courier has runs stories like “Gov Ducey Is Now the Most Unpopular Governor in America,” referring to Doug Ducy, the former Republican Arizona governor.“In contrast, coverage of Democrats, including US President Joe Biden, Democratic Arizona Gov Katie Hobbs, and US Sen Mark Kelly of Arizona, is nearly always laudatory,” NewsGuard stated in a report about Courier coverage.Tara McGowan, a Democratic strategist who founded the Courier Newsroom has received funding from liberal donors like Reid Hoffman and George Soros, as well as groups associated with political action committees, according to NewsGuard.“There are pink slime operations on both the right and the left. To me, the key is disclosure and transparency about ownership,” said Franklin.In a statement, a spokesperson for the Courier said comparisons between its operations and rightwing pink slime groups were unfair and criticized NewsGuard’s methodology in comparing the two.“Courier publishes award-winning, factual local news by talented journalists who live in the communities we cover, and our reporting is often cited by legacy media outlets. This is in stark contrast to the pink slime networks that pretend to have a local presence but crank out low-quality fake news with no bylines and no accountability. Courier is proudly transparent about our pro-democracy values, and we carry on the respected American tradition of advocacy journalism,” the spokesperson said.While both the left and the right have invested in the pink slime websites, there are differences in the owners’ approaches, according to Skibinski.The right-wing networks have created more sites “that are probably getting less attention per site, and on the left, there is a smaller number of sites, but they are more strategic about getting attention to those sites on Facebook and elsewhere”, Skibinski said. “I don’t know that we can quantify whether one is more impactful than the other.”Artificial intelligence could also help site operators quickly generate stories and create fake images.“The technology underlying artificial intelligence is now becoming more accessible to malign actors,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which publishes Factcheck.org. “The capacity to create false images is very high, but also there is a capacity to detect the images that is emerging very rapidly. The question is, will it emerge rapidly with enough capacity?”Still, it’s not clear whether these websites are effective. Stanford University reported in a 2023 study that engagement with pink slime websites was “relatively low” and little evidence that living “in a news desert made people more likely to consume pink slime”.The Philly Leader and the NW Arkansas News both only have links to Facebook accounts on their websites and have less than 450 followers on each. Meanwhile, the Copper Courier and Up North News have accounts on all the major platforms and a total of about 150,000 followers on Facebook.Franklin said he thinks that a lot of people don’t actually click links on social media posts to visit the website.“The goal of some of these operators is not to get traffic directly to their site, but it’s to go viral on social media,” he said.Republican lawmakers and leaders of the conservative news sites the Daily Wire and the Federalist have also filed a lawsuit and launched investigations accusing NewsGuard of helping the federal government censor right-leaning media. The defense department hired the company strictly to counter “disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies”, Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher who co-founded NewsGuard, told the Hill in response to a House oversight committee investigation. “We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department.”To counter the flood of misinformation, social media companies must take a more active role in monitoring such content, according to Franklin and Skibinski.“The biggest solution to this kind of site would be for the social media platforms to take more responsibility in terms of showing context to the user about sources that could be their own context. It could be data from third parties, like what we do,” said Skibinski.Franklin would like to see a national media literacy campaign. States around the country have passed laws requiring such education in schools.Franklin also hopes that legitimate local news could rebound. The MacArthur Foundation and other donors last year pledged $500m to help local outlets.“I actually have more optimism now than I had a few years ago,” Franklin said. “We’re in the midst of historic changes in how people consume news and how it’s produced and how it’s distributed and how it’s paid for, but I think there’s still demand for local news, and that’s kind of where it all starts.” More