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      Blowback review: Miles Taylor on the dangers of a second Trump term

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      Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security who catapulted himself to nameless fame in the fall of 2018, when he published an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times under this headline: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”Taylor described himself then as one of many senior officials “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations … To be clear, ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed … But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”The article set off a firestorm, Trump and his allies demanding to know the identity of this “traitor” while some on the left questioned the morality of continuing to work for an administration after you’ve realized it is a clear and present danger to the health of the country.In his new book, Taylor reveals that debate was as vivid inside him as it was within the rest of the body politic. He has now concluded that anonymity, which he carried into a first book, A Warning, was a mistake, “a gift to authoritarians. They thrive on fear and the suppression of dissent.”The subtitle of his new book is “A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump”, and there is certainly plenty of that in its 300-plus pages. But there is also lots about Taylor’s “mentally, emotionally and physically” painful “journey to the truth”, which included the break-up of his marriage, bouts of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse.Even after the scores of Trump books which have assaulted our bookshelves, Taylor still manages to reveal a few fresh moments of astonishing evil or narrow escapes from Armageddon. These include Trump’s musings to his then chief of staff, John Kelly, “that he badly wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon”; the president talking about his daughter Ivanka’s “breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her”; Steven Miller’s eagerness to eliminate the judiciary (“Yes sir, a country without judges would help”); and Miller’s equal affection for genocide, revealed when he interrogated the commandant of the US coast guard about why he couldn’t use a drone with a missile to “obliterate” a “boat full of immigrants” in “international waters”. International law would be a problem, the commandant explained.The substantive part of Taylor’s book is devoted to waking up Americans to the very real dangers of a second Trump presidency, including plans to “manipulate the justice system to cover up corruption, punish political enemies and reshape US courts”.Taylor reminds us once again of how completely the Republican party has been corrupted by Maga ideology, with powerful allies of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling for “defunding the FBI” while the Texas senator Ted Cruz wants “a complete house cleaning” at the same agency.“They will be unconstrained and untethered,” former homeland security general counsel John Mitnick says. “What little restraint was exercised in terms of respecting the rule of law will be gone.”Like many other George W Bush Republicans, Taylor is weakest when he argues that Trump is an outlier to “ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people”. This ignores the party’s historic affection for racism and homophobia, which dates at least to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, or Bush’s advocacy for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a cornerstone of his re-election campaign in 2004. When Taylor casually accuses Barack Obama of backing away “from America’s allies” and “bowing down to its adversaries”, we are reminded the author is indeed an old-fashioned Republican.But his book is still important because it rings alarm bells about the huge danger of fascism and authoritarianism that would come with Trump’s return to the White House, in a moment when many Washington reporters are silent. This journalistic impotence was evident in two recent stories co-authored by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.The first, published last month, described Trump’s promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden as part of “a larger movement on the right to gut the FBI, overhaul a justice department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’ against them and abandon the norm – which many Republicans view as a facade – that the department should operate independently from the president”.The second piece by the same trio described Maga plans to eliminate the independence of all federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve board, and laid out Trump’s “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the state department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country’”.These two articles totaled 4,800 words but included less than a hundred words from anyone questioning the morality or legality of these plans to politicize the justice department and destroy the federal civil service. This single quote, from Kelly, was the only significant balance provided in either piece: “It would be chaotic. It just simply would be chaotic, because [Trump would] continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a non-stop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”The Times reporters did not respond to an email asking why they thought a hundred words of opposition to the Maga agenda were sufficient to make their stories balanced.With that kind of laissez-faire attitude prevailing among too many journalists, books like Taylor’s, which focus on the imminent dangers from a Maga revival, are crucial to a broader effort to rescue American democracy.
      Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump is published in the US by Atria Books More

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      US third-party group mulls 2024 ticket – but would it merely help Trump?

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      On a small stage in New Hampshire this week, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Republican Governor Jon Huntsman sat together extolling the virtues of bipartisanship and talking very much like running mates. They were there on behalf of the centrist political advocacy organization No Labels, which is considering fielding a third-party ticket in the 2024 presidential election, and had enlisted the two men to debut its 67-page policy manifesto.Early on in the evening, the moderator asked the question looming over the event: were Manchin and Huntsman running for president? After a smattering of applause died down, Manchin deflected, saying they were simply there to “explain to you that we need options”. But Manchin’s refusal to announce whether he will seek re-election for the US Senate next year, and his presence at the town hall, has drawn speculation that he and No Labels may combine to upend the 2024 election.No Labels has been around since 2010, largely promoting centrist policies and occasionally working to elect moderate Democrats to Congress. Its recent ambitions are far grander, as it plans to raise $70m, get on the ballot in every state across the country, and build a third-party ticket for the presidency. The group has become a specter looming over the 2024 election for Democrats, with polls showing that a centrist third-party candidate would draw votes away from Joe Biden and tilt the race toward Donald Trump.The growing prominence of No Labels and its potential to run a third-party candidate has resulted in backlash from Democrats and more centrist Republicans as a result. Democratic representatives and political organizations such as MoveOn have mobilized to oppose the group, including holding briefings for congressional staffers on the risk of a third-party ticket. Democratic and Republican strategists additionally commissioned a poll that showed how an independent centrist candidate would act as a spoiler against Biden.But efforts to show that No Labels could take a significant portion of the vote and effectively hand Trump the presidency have only emboldened the group. No Labels’ chief pollster told Axios that the recent survey – which showed a moderate independent candidate would receive around 20% of the vote and shift the election to Trump – was proof that their strategy was sound and that they had a viable chance at the presidency.“The people who are spearheading this are not doing it cynically. They have convinced themselves that this is a unique historical moment and they intend to seize it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who co-founded No Labels in 2010 before leaving it earlier this year.Galston disagreed with the group’s decision in 2022 to focus on fielding a third-party candidate, he said, and after a year of offering arguments against the shift decided to quit the organization in April of this year. Although he still supports the group, he sees its current mission as misguided and has spoken out about how it’s likely to benefit Trump’s presidential hopes.“I could not go along with the formation of an independent ticket,” Galston said. “I saw no equivalence between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and feared that this ticket would, on net, draw support away from Biden’s candidacy.”No Labels, and its potential candidate Manchin, reject the notion that they will act as spoilers. The group has claimed it will not go ahead with its plans if it appears to shift the election to one party, though has been vague on its criteria for such a decision, and Manchin on Monday told the audience in New Hampshire that “if I get in a race I’m gonna win”.Undisclosed donorsAs No Labels moves forward with its fundraising and attempts to get on nationwide ballots, it has faced increased scrutiny over who exactly is backing their efforts. The group refuses to disclose its donors, which it is not obligated to do, but a Mother Jones investigation identified dozens of wealthy contributors affiliated with No Labels.Although it includes several major Democratic donors, many of the contributors favor conservative causes and Republican candidates. A separate investigation from The New Republic found that conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, most recently known for his close ties with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, donated $130,000 to the group between 2019 and 2021.No Labels officials have cited privacy concerns as the reason that the group will not release its donors, while chief executive Nancy Jacobson told NBC News this week that there is “nothing nefarious” about its fundraising. Galston brought up to Jacobson in the early days of the group’s operations that a lack of transparency might become an issue, he said, but she told him “in no uncertain terms” that was how things would be run.Jacobson and No Labels did not respond to a request for comment on this article.It is unclear just how much of its $70m goal No Labels has raised, although previous years and Jacobson’s status as veteran fundraiser show that it is able to draw large sums. No Labels’ 2021 tax forms, the most recent year publicly available, state that it took in just over $11.3m in revenue that year. The organization’s highest paid staffer was former political commentator Mark Halperin, according to the 2021 tax form, who made around $257,000 as No Labels chief strategist. The organization hired Halperin despite allegations from multiple women of sexual harassment and assault against the once-prominent journalist. Halperin, who has previously apologized for some of the harassment allegations against him while denying other allegations including physical assault, left No Labels in March of this year. He could not be reached for comment.The tax forms also show that No Labels paid top Democrat-run consulting firms for their advocacy and communications work. It gave around $946,000 in compensation to communications firm Rational 360 in 2021. Rational 360 did not respond to a request for comment on this article.The group has faced criticism from Democrats before, including when it endorsed an anti-LGBT, anti-abortion Illinois Congressman during the 2018 midterms. A Super PAC tied to No Labels spent aabout $1m backing the campaign, according to the Intercept. But previous backlash against the group is nothing compared to what it currently faces, with growing concern among Democrats that No Labels has the potential to lose them the White House.“It’s pretty clear that a No Labels candidate would help re-elect Donald Trump,” Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen told the Hill.No Labels has given itself until Super Tuesday – when a large number of states hold primaries in early March of next year – as a deadline for announcing whether or not it will run a third party. The group’s national co-chair Pat McRory stated on Monday that if Biden and Trump are the likely match-up by then and the group sees a path to victory, it will run a candidate. More

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      How would a possible third indictment affect Trump’s 2024 run? – podcast

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      On Tuesday, Donald Trump said he had received a letter suggesting he was about to be indicted by special counsel Jack Smith in connection with the criminal investigation into the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021. It would be his third criminal indictment.
      Jonathan Freedland asks Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, if the pile of indictments could grow too large even for Trump – and his voters. Plus: who is Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia? If Republicans do decide Trump is too badly damaged, might they turn to him?

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      ‘An evolution in propaganda’: a digital expert on AI influence in elections

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      Every election presents an opportunity for disinformation to find its way into the public discourse. But as the 2024 US presidential race begins to take shape, the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technology threatens to give propagandists powerful new tools to ply their trade.Generative AI models that are able to create unique content from simple prompts are already being deployed for political purposes, taking disinformation campaigns into strange new places. Campaigns have circulated fake images and audio targeting other candidates, including an AI-generated campaign ad attacking Joe Biden and deepfake videos mimicking real-life news footage.The Guardian spoke with Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a university program that researches the abuses of information technology, about how the latest developments in AI influence campaigns and how society is catching up to a new, artificially created reality.Concern around AI and its potential for disinformation has been around for a while. What has changed that makes this threat more urgent?When people became aware of deepfakes – which usually refers to machine-generated video of an event that did not happen – a few years ago there was concern that adversarial actors would use these types of video to disrupt elections. Perhaps they would make video of a candidate, perhaps they would make video of some sort of disaster. But it didn’t really happen. The technology captured public attention, but it wasn’t very widely democratized. And so it didn’t primarily manifest in the political conversation, but instead in the realm of much more mundane but really individually harmful things, like revenge porn.There’s been two major developments in the last six months. First is the rise of ChatGPT, which is generated text. It became available to a mass market and people began to realize how easy it was to use these types of text-based tools. At the same time, text-to-still image tools became globally available. Today, anybody can use Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to create photorealistic images of things that don’t really exist in the world. The combination of these two things, in addition to the concerns that a lot of people feel around the 2024 elections, has really captured public attention once again.Why did the political use of deepfakes not materialize?The challenge with using video in a political environment is that you really have to nail the substance of the content. There are a lot of tells in video, a lot of ways in which you can determine whether it’s generated. On top of that, when a video is truly sensational, a lot of people look at it and factcheck it and respond to it. You might call it a natural immune response.Text and images, however, have the potential for higher actual impact in an election scenario because they can be more subtle and longer lasting. Elections require months of campaigning during which people formulate an opinion. It’s not something where you’re going to change the entire public mind with a video and have that be the most impactful communication of the election.How do you think large language models can change political propaganda?I want to caveat that describing what is tactically possible is not the same thing as me saying the sky is falling. I’m not a doomer about this technology. But I do think that we should understand generative AI in the context of what it makes possible. It increases the number of people who can create political propaganda or content. It decreases the cost to do it. That’s not to say necessarily that they will, and so I think we want to maintain that differentiation between this is the tactic that a new technology enables versus that this is going to swing an election.As far as the question of what’s possible, in terms of behaviors, you’ll see things like automation. You might remember back in 2015 there were all these fears about bots. You had a lot of people using automation to try to make their point of view look more popular – making it look like a whole lot of people think this thing, when in reality it’s six guys and their 5,000 bots. For a while Twitter wasn’t doing anything to stop that, but it was fairly easy to detect. A lot of the accounts would be saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, because it was expensive and time consuming to generate a unique message for each of your fake accounts. But with generative AI it is now effortless to generate highly personalized content and to automate its dissemination.And then finally, in terms of content, it’s really just that the messages are more credible and persuasive.That seems tied to another aspect you’ve written about, that the sheer amount of content that can be generated, including misleading or inaccurate content, has a muddying effect on information and trust.It’s the scale that makes it really different. People have always been able to create propaganda, and I think it’s very important to emphasize that. There is an entire industry of people whose job it is to create messages for campaigns and then figure out how to get them out into the world. We’ve just changed the speed and the scale and the cost to do that. It’s just an evolution in propaganda.When we think about what’s new and what’s different here, the same thing goes for images. When Photoshop emerged, the public at first was very uncomfortable with Photoshopped images, and gradually became more comfortable with it. The public acclimated to the idea that Photoshop existed and that not everything that you see with your eyes is a thing that necessarily is as it seems – the idea that the woman that you see on the magazine cover probably does not actually look like that. Where we’ve gone with generative AI is the fabrication of a complete unreality, where nothing about the image is what it seems but it looks photorealistic.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNow anybody can make it look like the pope is wearing Balenciaga.Exactly.In the US, it seems like meaningful federal regulation is pretty far away if it’s going to come at all. Absent of that, what are some of the sort of short-term ways to mitigate these risks?First is the education piece. There was a very large education component when deepfakes became popular – media covered them and people began to get the sense that we were entering a world in which a video might not be what it seems.But it’s unreasonable to expect every person engaging with somebody on a social media platform to figure out if the person they’re talking to is real. Platforms will have to take steps to more carefully identify if automation is in play.On the image front, social media platforms, as well as generative AI companies, are starting to come together to try and determine what kind of watermarking might be useful so that platforms and others can determine computationally whether an image is generated.Some companies, like OpenAI, have policies around generating misinformation or the use of ChatGPT for political ends. How effective do you see those policies being?It’s a question of access. For any technology, you can try to put guardrails on your proprietary version of that technology and you can argue you’ve made a values-based decision to not allow your products to generate particular types of content. On the flip side, though, there are models that are open source and anyone can go and get access to them. Some of the things that are being done with some of the open source models and image generation are deeply harmful, but once the model is open sourced, the ability to control its use is much more limited.And it’s a very big debate right now in the field. You don’t want to necessarily create regulations that lock in and protect particular corporate actors. At the same time, there is a recognition that open-source models are out there in the world already. The question becomes how the platforms that are going to serve as the dissemination pathways for this stuff think about their role and their policies in what they amplify and curate.What’s the media or the public getting wrong about AI and disinformation?One of the real challenges is that people are going to believe what they see if it conforms to what they want to believe. In a world of unreality in which you can create that content that fulfills that need, one of the real challenges is whether media literacy efforts actually solve any of the problems. Or will we move further into divergent realities – where people are going to continue to hold the belief in something that they’ve seen on the internet as long as it tells them what they want. Larger offline challenges around partisanship and trust are reflected in, and exacerbated by, new technologies that enable this kind of content to propagate online. More

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      Judge rejects Trump bid to move hush money case to federal court as legal challenges gather pace – as it happened

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      From 2h agoA judge has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction.US district judge Alvin Hellerstein’s decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season, AP reported.Manhattan prosecutors charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to his then fixer, Michael Cohen, for his role in paying $130,000 to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.Trump’s lawyers had argued that the case should be moved from New York state court to federal court because he was being prosecuted for an act under the “color of his office” as president.Judge Hellerstein scoffed at the defense claims, finding that the allegations pertained to Trump’s personal life, not presidential duties that would have merited a move to federal court. He wrote in a 25-page ruling:
      The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President – a cover-up of an embarrassing event.
      Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.
      Here is a recap of today’s developments:
      The letter to Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith identifying him as a “target” in the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection reportedly listed the federal statutes under which the former president could be charged. The letter mentions three federal statutes: conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under color of law, and tampering with a witness, victim or an informant, according to several sources, citing sources familiar with the matter.
      Donald Trump sought to downplay his legal challenges while railing against special counsel Jack Smith and the justice department, after announcing he had received a letter naming him as the target of the DoJ’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “I didn’t know practically what a subpoena was and grand juries. Now I’m becoming an expert. I have no choice,” he said on Tuesday night. Trump could face a new indictment as early as the end of the week.
      A federal judge has rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E Jean Carroll, where a jury found that he sexually abused her and awarded her $5m in damages. US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled that the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result” and that the 9 May verdict was not a “miscarriage of justice”.
      A judge rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction. The decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season.
      Allies of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis are reportedly pressing for a shake-up of his campaign amid financial pressure and flagging poll numbers. His campaign manager, Generra Peck, is “hanging by a thread”, according to a DeSantis donor who is close to the campaign, after fewer than 10 staffers were laid off last week.
      Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.
      Half a dozen House Republicans would reportedly support a measure to censure George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.
      The Republican-led House in Alabama approved a new congressional map that would increase the percentage of Black voters – but not by enough, said Black lawmakers who called the map an insult to Black Alabamians and the supreme court.
      Wesleyan University announced it would end legacy admissions, after the supreme court struck down affirmative action in the college admission process last month. A small number of schools have ended the practice of legacy admissions, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst college.
      The department of justice said that it is assessing the situation by the Texas-Mexico border following “troubling reports” that have emerged over Texas troopers’ treatment of migrants.
      The Republican-led House in Alabama approved a new congressional map on Wednesday that would increase the percentage of Black voters – but not by enough, said Black lawmakers who called the map an insult to Black Alabamians and the supreme court.The House of Representatives voted 74-27 to approve the GOP plan, which came after a supreme court opinion last month found lawmakers previously drew districts that unlawfully dilute the political power of its Black residents in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The bill now moves to the Alabama Senate.While Black people make up about 27% of Alabama’s population, only one of the state’s seven districts is majority-Black.The GOP plan does not establish the second majority-Black district sought by plaintiffs who won the supreme court case, instead it increases the percentage of Black voters to 42% in the district, AP reported.Representative Barbara Drummond, speaking during the floor debate, said:
      This is really a slap in the face, not only to Black Alabamians, but to the supreme court.
      “Once again, the state decided to be on the wrong side of history,” Representative Prince Chestnut said.
      Once again the (Republican) super majority decided that the voting rights of Black people are nothing that this state is bound to respect. And it’s offensive. It’s wrong.
      Half a dozen House Republicans would reportedly support a measure to censure George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.House Democrats unveiled a resolution on Monday to formally reprimand Santos for blatantly lying to voters about his life story.Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Anthony D’Esposito, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy, and Max Miller have all said that they would support the Democrats’ resolution, according to an Axios report. With Republicans holding a 10-seat House majority, it could take as few as five GOP defections for the measure to pass.A banal dystopia where manipulative content is so cheap to make and so easy to produce on a massive scale that it becomes ubiquitous: that’s the political future digital experts are worried about in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI).In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, social media platforms were vectors for misinformation as far-right activists, foreign influence campaigns and fake news sites worked to spread false information and sharpen divisions.Four years later, the 2020 election was overrun with conspiracy theories and baseless claims about voter fraud that were amplified to millions, fueling an anti-democratic movement to overturn the election.Now, as the 2024 presidential election comes into view, experts warn that advances in AI have the potential to take the disinformation tactics of the past and breathe new life into them.AI-generated disinformation not only threatens to deceive audiences, but also erode an already embattled information ecosystem by flooding it with inaccuracies and deceptions, experts say.Read the full story here.A judge has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to move his hush money criminal case to federal court, ruling that the former president had failed to meet a high legal bar for changing jurisdiction.US district judge Alvin Hellerstein’s decision sets the stage for Trump to stand trial in state court in Manhattan as early as next spring, overlapping with the 2024 presidential primary season, AP reported.Manhattan prosecutors charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to his then fixer, Michael Cohen, for his role in paying $130,000 to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.Trump’s lawyers had argued that the case should be moved from New York state court to federal court because he was being prosecuted for an act under the “color of his office” as president.Judge Hellerstein scoffed at the defense claims, finding that the allegations pertained to Trump’s personal life, not presidential duties that would have merited a move to federal court. He wrote in a 25-page ruling:
      The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President – a cover-up of an embarrassing event.
      Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.
      The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to weigh in on whether Donald Trump should face charges over the January 6th insurrection.Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also reportedly developed a relationship with her former boss Donald Trump’s rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.Sanders attended a retreat with prominent DeSantis donors last year, and Axios reports that she has become close to DeSantis’s wife, Casey, since their experiences with cancer in recent years.One senior Republican told the news website:
      Sarah reached out to Casey during her treatments and the same thing happened when Sarah had her experience.
      Sanders, 40, is the country’s youngest governor and her allies believe she is positioning herself for a possible presidency run in 2028 or 2032, the report says.Tensions between Donald Trump and his former press secretary, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have grown over her neutrality in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, according to an Axios report.The report outlines how Sanders’s team told the Trump campaign that she wouldn’t make endorsement until after her first legislative session in Arkansas. That session ended in May.Sanders is among several Republicans who have so far stayed neutral in the presidential primary, but Trump sees her in a different category because he hired her to be his press secretary and endorsed her when she ran for governor in 2021, the report writes.Trump reportedly asked Sanders for her endorsement in a phone call earlier this year and she declined, according to the New York Times. Trump denied the report in March, writing:
      I never asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an endorsement. I give endorsements, I don’t generally ask for them. With that being said, nobody has done more for her than I have, with the possible exception of her great father, Mike!
      Three weeks after the NYT story was published, Mike Huckabee, Sanders’s father, publicly endorsed Trump on his TV show.Donald Trump has reportedly been seething about the potential new indictment, as he reached out to his top allies to strategize how they could help defend him against potential criminal charges over his effort to overturn the 2020 election.Trump spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik, according to sources, CNN reported.The former president’s call with Stefanik, who leads the House GOP’s messaging efforts, was described as a “long conversation” where the two went over plans to go on the offense on alleged weaponization of the federal government, the report says.Trump asked things like “Can you believe this?” and used vulgarities to vent his displeasure, Politico reported.Donald Trump’s rivals have largely shied away from criticizing his legal woes, with most of the Republican presidential candidates choosing instead to portray the former president’s pending prosecution as a perversion of justice.Besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, who have long made clear their view that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election should disqualify him from reelection, there was no discernible movement within the former president’s party against him, according to a NBC report.“This could be different,” said Terry Sullivan, who served as campaign manager for Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 GOP presidential bid.
      Now that being said, Mission Impossible 9 could be different than the first eight Mission Impossibles, but it’s unlikely. It’s likely to end the same way the first eight did.
      Trump’s rivals boxed themselves in on the former president, the January 6 insurrection and the criminal charges against him, the report continues.
      That won’t change unless there’s a massive shift in opinion among Republican primary voters, and Trump’s most prominent rivals are in no position to try to lead such a movement because they already have weighed in on the indictments and Jan. 6.
      A group of 200 lawmakers said they have agreed not to intervene if UPS workers go on strike, Reuters reports.The world’s biggest package delivery firm and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have until midnight on 31 July to reach a contract deal covering some 340,000 workers that sort, load and deliver packages in the United States.
      “We are hopeful that both sides can negotiate in good faith and reach a consensus agreement,” the lawmakers said, adding if no deal is reached they have committed to respect the rights of workers “to withhold their labor and initiate and participate in a strike.”
      UPS workers are currently calling for better pay, more full-time jobs and better workplace health and safety conditions.Despite UPS tentatively agreeing to make Martin Luther King Jr Day a holiday and to install ACs in more of its trucks as temperatures rise, the union for UPS workers said that the company had not agreed to all of its demands.Should a strike happen, Bloomberg estimates that the company could lose a staggering $170m a day.For further details on how likely a UPS workers strike is, click here:The department of justice said that it is assessing the situation by the Texas-Mexico border following “troubling reports” that have emerged over Texas troopers’ treatment of migrants.Speaking to CNN, DoJ spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said, “The department is aware of the troubling reports, and we are working with DHS and other relevant agencies to assess the situation.”Earlier this week, the Houston Chronicle reported email exchanges between a trooper and a superior over alleged mistreatment of migrants crossing the border.The emails alleged that officers working along the border have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have also told to not give water to migrants, despite scorching temperatures.
      “Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well,” the trooper wrote, adding, “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”
      A statement released by Abbott’s office on Tuesday pushed back against the allegations, saying:“No orders or directions have been given under Operation Lone Star that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.”Amid speculation about whether or not Rudy Giuliani has “flipped” on Donald Trump in the federal investigation of the former president’s election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, one former Trump White House insider had a somewhat…dry response.The former New York mayor turned Trump adviser and lawyer might have turned on his boss “Cause they don’t have happy hour up the river”, the former insider said in a message viewed by the Guardian.Reports of Giuliani’s fondness for alcohol are legion. “Up the river” is, according to Collins dictionary, an American idiom meaning to be sent “to or confined in a penitentiary”.Speculation about Giuliani flowered on Tuesday after Trump announced that he had received a letter naming him as a target in the investigation led by the special counsel Jack Smith.CNN said Giuliani “did a voluntary interview with special counsel investigators several weeks back” and “his lawyer does not expect him to be charged”.That lawyer, Ted Goodman, said: “Any speculation that Mayor Rudy Giuliani ‘flipped’ against President Donald Trump is as false as previous lies that America’s Mayor” – Giuliani’s post-9/11 nickname – “was somehow a Russian Agent.“In order to ‘flip’ on President Trump – as so many in the anti-Trump media are fantasising over – Mayor Giuliani would’ve had to commit perjury, because all the information he has regarding this case points to President Trump’s innocence.”Many observers pointed out that Giuliani, whose law licenses have come under review arising from his work for Trump, may not be out of the woods on the other investigation of Trump’s election subversion, in Fulton county, Georgia.Some further reading:The letter identifying Donald Trump as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection could mean that the former president face a new indictment as early as the end of the week.“A third indictment appears to be forthcoming,” Brookings Institution senior fellow Benjamin Wittes posted on the Lawfare blog, adding:
      It’s reasonable to expect the grand jury to act as early as the end of this week.
      The Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, has announced he will not be running for re-election next year.Wesleyan University announced it would end legacy admissions, after the supreme court struck down affirmative action in the college admission process last month.In a statement on Wednesday, university president Michael Roth said legacies – a practice that favors relatives of alumni – had played a “negligible role” in the school’s admission process for many years. He added:
      Nevertheless, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action, we believe it important to formally end admission preference for ‘legacy applicants’.
      Relatives of Wesleyan alumni will continue to be admitted to the school “on their own merits”, Roth said.Legacy admissions came under fire after the nation’s highest court ruled that schools could not give preferential treatment to applicants based on race or ethnicity.A small number of schools have ended the practice, including Johns Hopkins, MIT and Amherst college. More

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      The Guardian view on Robert F Kennedy Jr: from Camelot to conspiracy-mongering | Editorial

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency, likes to call himself a “Kennedy Democrat”. His own siblings disagree. His uncle’s presidency, like his namesake father’s career and presidential campaign, had an aura of hope and responsibility as well as glamour. RFK Jr talks vaguely of overcoming divisions, but in reality trades upon a peculiar blend of “cynicism and credulity”, as one commentator notes. Most recently he claimed that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” in comments reported by the New York Post.However jarring the remarks – he partially backtracked later – they sit comfortably with his long history of fomenting conspiracy theories and his nonsensical, anti-scientific views. He has falsely linked childhood immunisations to autism and wifi to cancer and “leaky brain”, claimed that HIV does not cause Aids, and suggested that chemicals in drinking water could make children transgender. One of his sisters warned that his latest comments put people’s lives in danger.So much for the Kennedy legacy. Nor does he look like much of a Democrat. He is being hyped by billionaires and rightwing broadcasters such as Sean Hannity, and has gained traction among Republicans rather than Democrats. Some see his campaign primarily as a vehicle for his ego and brand, which may be less damaging to President Biden’s chances than a possible third-party bid by Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Republican former governor Jon Huntsman’s No Labels group. A poll this month suggested that a “moderate, independent third-party candidate” could gain about 20% of the vote and result in a second term for Donald Trump. But talk up Mr Kennedy enough and he might have a marginal effect in denting President Biden. Others suspect that Mr Kennedy wants the Republican vice-presidential slot. Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have both floated the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket.None of this has prevented him finding up to 20% support among Democrats in polls. Camelot nostalgia and the celebrity factor have clearly played a large part in that. Mr Kennedy has never run for any public office, still less held it, but boasts that he’s “been around” politics since he was a little boy. The lack of enthusiasm for the sitting president is also potent: most Democrats do not want him to run again, although they indicate that they would vote for him over Mr Trump. Voters, including independents, are not giving Mr Biden credit for the improving the economy or other achievements. That may not be fair. But it’s a fact.Mr Kennedy’s appeal goes deeper, however. He has found a home in the world described by a new book, Conspirituality, where new age spirituality and the “wellness” industry overlap with the politics of paranoia, as well as alongside the Trumpian right. Distrust of institutions, suspicion at the marriage of state and corporate power, and fear and sadness at the despoliation of the environment are in themselves reasonable concerns. But the political ambition that feeds upon and mutates them into more poisonous beliefs is unpalatable.Mr Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracy-mongering has caused enough damage. His latest remarks show how easily conspiracy theories blur into bigotry and scapegoating. It may be farcical to hear a multimillionaire from the country’s most famous political dynasty railing against “elites”, but there is nothing funny about this campaign. More

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      Disinformation reimagined: how AI could erode democracy in the 2024 US elections

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      A banal dystopia where manipulative content is so cheap to make and so easy to produce on a massive scale that it becomes ubiquitous: that’s the political future digital experts are worried about in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI).In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, social media platforms were vectors for misinformation as far-right activists, foreign influence campaigns and fake news sites worked to spread false information and sharpen divisions. Four years later, the 2020 election was overrun with conspiracy theories and baseless claims about voter fraud that were amplified to millions, fueling an anti-democratic movement to overturn the election.Now, as the 2024 presidential election comes into view, experts warn that advances in AI have the potential to take the disinformation tactics of the past and breathe new life into them.AI-generated disinformation not only threatens to deceive audiences, but also erode an already embattled information ecosystem by flooding it with inaccuracies and deceptions, experts say.“Degrees of trust will go down, the job of journalists and others who are trying to disseminate actual information will become harder,” said Ben Winters, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy research non-profit. “It will have no positive effects on the information ecosystem.”New tools for old tacticsArtificial intelligence tools that can create photorealistic images, mimic voice audio and write convincingly human text have surged in use this year, as companies such as OpenAI have released their products on the mass market. The technology, which has already threatened to upend numerous industries and exacerbate existing inequalities, is increasingly being employed to create political content.In past months, an AI-generated image of an explosion at the Pentagon caused a brief dip in the stock market. AI audio parodies of US presidents playing video games became a viral trend. AI-generated images that appeared to show Donald Trump fighting off police officers trying to arrest him circulated widely on social media platforms. The Republican National Committee released an entirely AI-generated ad that showed images of various imagined disasters that would take place if Biden were re-elected, while the American Association of Political Consultants warned that video deepfakes present a “threat to democracy”.In some ways, these images and ads are not so different from the manipulated images and video, misleading messages and robocalls that have been a feature of society for years. But disinformation campaigns formerly faced a range of logistic hurdles – creating individualized messages for social media was incredibly time consuming, as was Photoshopping images and editing videos.Now, though, generative AI has made the creation of such content accessible to anyone with even basic digital skills, amid limited guardrails or effective regulation to curtail it. The potential effect, experts warn, is a sort of democratization and acceleration of propaganda right at a time when several countries enter major election years.AI lowers the bar for disinformationThe potential harms of AI on elections can read like a greatest hits of concerns from past decades of election interference. Social media bots that pretend to be real voters, manipulated videos or images, and even deceptive robocalls are all easier to produce and harder to detect with the help of AI tools.There are also new opportunities for foreign countries to attempt to influence US elections or undermine their integrity, as federal officials have long warned Russia and China are working to do. Language barriers to creating deceptive content are eroding, and telltale signs of scammers or disinformation campaigns using repetitive phrasing or strange word choices are being replaced with more believable texts.“If you’re sitting in a troll farm in a foreign country, you no longer need to be fluent to produce a fluent-sounding article in the language of your target audience,” said Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “You can just have a language model spit out an article with the grammar and vocabulary of a fluent speaker.”AI technology may also intensify voter suppression campaigns to target marginalized communities. Two far-right activists admitted last year to making more than 67,000 robocalls targeting Black voters in the midwest with election misinformation, and experts such as Winters note that AI could hypothetically be used to replicate such a campaign on a greater scale with more personalized information. Audio that mimics elected leaders or trusted personalities could tell select groups of voters misleading information about polls and voting, or cause general confusion.Generating letter-writing campaigns or fake engagement could also create a sort of false constituency, making it unclear how voters are actually responding to issues. As part of a research experiment published earlier this year, Cornell University professors Sarah Kreps and Doug Kriner sent tens of thousands of emails to more than 7,000 state legislators across the country. The emails purported to be from concerned voters, but were split between AI-generated letters and ones written by a human. The responses were virtually the same, with human-written emails receiving only a 2% higher rate of reply than the AI-generated ones.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCampaigns test the watersCampaigns have already begun dabbling in using AI-generated content for political purposes. After Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, announced his candidacy during a Twitter live stream in May, Donald Trump mocked his opponent with a parody video of the announcement that featured the AI-generated voices of DeSantis, Elon Musk and Adolf Hitler. Last month, the DeSantis campaign shared AI-generated images of Trump embracing and kissing Anthony Fauci.During the 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump’s campaign leaned heavily on memes and videos made by his supporters – including deceptively edited videos that made it seem like Biden was slurring his words or saying that he shouldn’t be president. The AI version of that strategy is creeping in, election observers warn, with Trump sharing a deepfake video in May of the CNN host Anderson Cooper telling viewers that they had just watched “Trump ripping us a new asshole here on CNN’s live presidential town hall”.With about 16 months to go until the presidential election and widespread generative AI use still in its early days, it’s an open question what role artificial intelligence will play in the vote. The creation of misleading AI-generated content alone doesn’t mean that it will have an effect on an election, researchers say, and measuring the impact of disinformation campaigns is a notoriously difficult task. It’s one thing to monitor the engagement of fake materials but another to gauge the secondary effects of polluting the information ecosystem to the point where people generally distrust any information they consume online.But there are concerning signs. Just as the use of generative AI is increasing, many of the social media platforms that bad actors rely on to spread disinformation have begun rolling back some of their content moderation measures – YouTube reversed its election integrity policy, Instagram allowed the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr back on its platform and Twitter’s head of content moderation left the company in June amid a general fall in standards under Elon Musk.It remains to be seen how effective media literacy and traditional means of factchecking can be in pushing back against a deluge of misleading text and images, researchers say, as the potential scale of generated content represents a new challenge.“AI-generated images and videos can be created much more quickly than factcheckers can review and debunk them,” Goldstein said, adding that hype over AI can also corrode trust by making the public believe anything could be artificially generated.Some generative AI services, including ChatGPT, do have policies and safeguards against generating misinformation and in certain cases are able to block the service from being used for that purpose. But it’s still unclear how effective those are, and several open-source models lack such policies and features.“There’s not really going to be sufficient control of dissemination,” Winters said. “There’s no shortage of robocallers, robo emailers or texters, and mass email platforms. There’s nothing limiting the use of those.” More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says

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      Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.Kennedy, who provoked anger last week when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, is due to testify at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday.The Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, called for Republicans to disinvite Kennedy after releasing a report that details his meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.“Kennedy embraces virtually every conspiracy theory in existence,” the report states. “His horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views are simply beyond the pale, and he has frequently met with and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracies go back decades and have had deadly real world consequences.”Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, is running against Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary and has drawn big and enthusiastic crowds and polled as high as 20%. But the Project’s document argues that Kennedy’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people, which were quickly hailed by neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers as “100% correct”, were not an aberration but fitted a long pattern.Earlier this summer Kennedy touted a meeting with Ice Cube, a rapper who issued bizarre antisemitic tweets, and publicly defended musician Roger Waters, who was embroiled in controversy after donning a costume intended to evoke Nazi attire at a concert in Germany.The report says Kennedy has also repeatedly promoted and praised fringe online broadcaster James Corbett, a Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that “Hitler and the Nazis were 100% completely and utterly set up”.Kennedy has often allied himself with the National of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, who regularly unleashed tirades about alleged Jewish control of media and government. Kennedy met Farrakhan at his Chicago home in 2015, with Farrakhan later tweeting that they discussed “a vaccine that is designed to affect Black males”.The Project details how Kennedy himself has frequently invoked Nazi Germany when pushing debunked theories about vaccines. He put out a video that showed the infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a moustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.Last year, at a Washington rally organized by his group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by Covid-19. He said: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” He later apologised.For years, the document says, Kennedy has targeted a particularly dangerous form of vaccine denial at Black people. In 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, he released Medical Racism, a film that promoted disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines and explicitly warned communities of color to be suspicious of “sinister” vaccination campaigns.Several doctors and experts who participated in the film later denounced it and said they felt used and misled about the message of the documentary. Richard Allen Williams, founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists, called Children’s Health Defense “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to the Black community.In 2017, as a measles outbreak devastated Minnesota’s Somali-American community due to low vaccination rates, Kennedy continued to push his false claims that “science and anecdotal evidence suggest that Africans and African Americans may be particularly vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism”.In a 2020 interview, Kennedy asserted without evidence that “People with African blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood. They’re much more sensitive.”The following year, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy recorded a webinar encouraging Black people to be skeptical of vaccines, claiming: “There has been abundant evidence … beyond any dispute that Blacks are disproportionately harmed by vaccine injury,” adding: “Blacks react completely differently to vaccines … we now know it’s just one huge experiment on Black Americans, and they know what is happening and they are doing nothing.”The report also argues that, from the earliest days of Operation Warp Speed, Kennedy has built “an anti-vaccine juggernaut” around opposition to Covid-19 vaccinations, which he has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has sought to frame Covid vaccines as an elaborate conspiracy to enrich the medical establishment and big pharmaceutical companies. In a YouTube video, Kennedy accused Bill Gates of developing an “injectable chip” to enable the tracking of human movements and attempting to “genetically modify” humanity to “the flow of global information”.Kennedy has even accused his former anti-vaccine ally, Donald Trump, of selling out to Pfizer by developing vaccines.Such anti-scientific views go way back. Kennedy has claimed that fluoridated water is “drugging” children, HIV does not cause Aids and chemicals in the water are making people gay or transgender as well as pushing nonsensical conspiracy theories about wifi and 5G cellular networks.As the son of former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and nephew of former president John F Kennedy, Kennedy has caused anguish to one of America’s most storied political dynasties with his toxic views.In 2019 three relatives wrote an opinion column for the Politico website condemning his anti-vaccine advocacy, which they held partially responsible for a measles outbreak.The Congressional Integrity Project contends that Kennedy is a “Republican stooge” who is being embraced by the far right in an attempt to damage Biden. He has become a regular guest on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing outlets. Far-right provocateurs Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn have praised him.Now Republicans have invited Kennedy to Congress. On Thursday he is due to address the House of Representatives’ select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government during a hearing to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans”. The panel is chaired by the Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, who has been criticised for launching bogus investigations into Biden.Kyle Herrig, executive director of Congressional Integrity Project, said: “Giving RFK Jr a platform to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric is a new low for Jim Jordan – and that says something.“Jim Jordan should stop the charade and disinvite RFK Jr immediately. Allowing this hearing to go forward is shameless and beyond the pale. Maga Republicans’ desperation is on full display this week, proving once again that they have no credibility to conduct legitimate investigations.” More