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      Tina Smith on confronting colleague over his posts: ‘Joking about an assassin killing people is beyond the pale’

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      The Minnesota senator Tina Smith said she was so “appalled” by her colleague Mike Lee’s social media posts spreading misinformation about the assassination of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband on Saturday that “I felt that he needed to hear directly from me.”The Democratic senator told the Guardian that she lost a friend and colleague this weekend when a shooter killed Hortman and her husband, Mark. Lee, a Republican senator from Utah, posted erroneously that the assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for the killings. Although he deleted the posts on Tuesday, he has not apologized.Lee needed to know he had disrespected not only Hortman, but all those who grieved her, Smith said. Rather than take it up with him online and get into a back-and-forth social media spat, she told him to his face.Photos of Smith confronting Lee went viral, perhaps because person-to-person accountability is rare in Washington. Smith, who is retiring from the Senate after finishing her current term, previously grabbed headlines for colorfully calling out Elon Musk and Donald Trump.She knew if she talked to Lee in person, he and others watching would be reminded that his words had an impact on real people.“I’ve gotten a flow of messages from people in Minnesota and around the country that have said, I’m so glad you said that to him, because that’s what I wanted to say to him,” she said.She said she had not talked to Lee much in the past. She wasn’t aggressive or angry when she approached him, but said they needed to have a conversation. She told him he had posted photos of the man who killed her friend, potentially seconds before he started shooting.“I want you to know how painful that was for me and for thousands and thousands of Minnesotans, and you have a responsibility to think about the impact of your words,” she recounted telling Lee.Lee’s post about Walz has more than 15m views, while the one about Marxism has more than 8m. He needed to take responsibility for that, she said.Smith’s deputy chief of staff, Ed Shelleby, also reached out to Lee, sending an email to Lee’s office, which was obtained by media, that questioned how the senator could post such things after a tragedy. Shelleby wrote that he knew Hortman, as did many in Smith’s office, and he wanted Lee to know that his posts caused “additional pain” on an “unspeakably horrific weekend”.“You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats,” Shelleby wrote. “Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet[s]? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”He wrote that he prayed Lee would not go through anything like this, but that if he did, he would find himself “on the receiving end of the kind of grace and compassion that Senator Mike Lee could not muster”.The suspect had a hit list of Democrats and abortion providers, and Smith’s name was among them. Lee didn’t say anything to her about that element. He didn’t really say much of anything, she said. He seemed surprised to be confronted for something he said on social media, where his feed is full of conspiracy theories.When reporters asked Lee about his conversation with Smith and about his social media posts, he refused to answer questions. Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.“I mean, literally joking about an assassin killing people is beyond the pale,” Smith said. “I think he listened to what I had to say. He didn’t have much to say about it, and he certainly didn’t do anything that I would have hoped he would have done. For example, he should apologize. He should take those posts down. He should clarify that the man who did the shooting is not a Marxist, that that is not what was happening here, and he hasn’t done any of those things.”Smith described Hortman as both a skilled lawmaker and a person who found joy in the job. She always had a glint in her eye, a smile on her face, Smith said. She was ready to work, but appreciated the absurdity and hilarity that can come alongside that work. She wasn’t afraid to call people out, but she was never cruel. “She, regardless of which side of the political line you lived on, she was so respected,” Smith said.Local Republican elected officials in Minnesota have pushed back on Lee’s posts, too. Harry Niska, the Republican floor leader in the Minnesota house and a colleague of Hortman’s, wrote on X that Lee’s post was “a very bad take on so many levels” and said Lee should reconsider it. “Sen. Lee’s post was classless, baseless, and counterproductive,” Niska said in another post.Smith said the responses from state Republican officials have given her hope. “They are showing the respect and not spreading misinformation about what happened here, which is what’s happening in Washington.” More

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      What SJP’s selfie trick tells us about the terrifying rise of conspiracy theories | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Sarah Jessica Parker, the Sex and the City star and Booker prize judge, has a nifty trick for getting out of taking selfies with her fans. “I did this for a really, really long time and it worked for ever,” Parker said in an interview with Howard Stern. “I used to say, ‘I can’t, because of the government,’ and I’d do this,” Parker said, pointing up to the sky. “It really confused people. This was through different administrations, so it wasn’t political.”It is not entirely clear why Parker – who has said she refuses to take selfies and would rather “have a conversation” instead because “it’s much more meaningful” – stopped using this brilliant excuse. But one does have to wonder whether it is because the US has become a nation of conspiracy theorists. Rather than backing away from the weird “the government is watching” woman, perhaps fans started to excitedly engage her with theories about how Bill Gates has implanted us all with mind-controlling microchips. Or maybe she just got tired of the joke. I don’t know. But I’m sure someone out there (the government) does.Conspiracy theories have become so mainstream that they are even prompting nonsensical legislation. Earlier this month, Louisiana lawmakers sent a bill to the state’s governor seeking to ban “chemtrails” – which don’t actually exist. They are a longstanding conspiracy which posits that the white lines sometimes left behind by aircraft aren’t just due to condensed water vapour but are far more sinister. Some people believe that the government is spraying toxic metals to reduce populations; others believe they are evidence that dark forces are trying to control the weather or people’s minds.Lawmakers in at least 11 other states are trying to advance similar “chemtrail” bans. “Every bill like this is kind of symbolic, or is introduced to appease a very vocal group, but it can still cause real harm by signalling that these conspiracies deserve this level of legal attention,” a member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education told the Associated Press.Also causing real harm in the US with his obsession with imaginary problems is health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. The vaccine sceptic recently fired every single member of a critical advisory committee on immunisation practices. He has replaced them with people who reportedly have very little vaccine expertise and are accused of spreading misinformation. The ousted members of the vaccine committee have said that the shake-up may “impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put US families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses.”RFK Jr is also fixated on conspiracy theories about fluoride, which he calls “a dangerous neurotoxin”. There are, to be clear, valid concerns about ingesting too much fluoride, including its effects on IQ as well as potential tooth discoloration. But experts are pretty unanimous that fluoride in drinking water is a great public health achievement that has done wonders for preventing tooth decay. There are worries that RFK Jr’s meddling will cause a significant increase in dental cavities, especially among children in lower-income groups.Anyway, I’ve got a good idea for Parker. Since acting like a conspiracy theorist no longer seems to ward off unwanted attention, why not try engaging selfie-seeking fans with a rational fact-based discussion? Increasingly large numbers of Americans seem allergic to that; some fans will immediately run a mile. I have some other thoughts too but I’m afraid I can’t elaborate any more on this issue for top secret reasons. But here’s a hint: it’s because of the government. More

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      How the right spread ‘brutal and cruel’ misinformation after Minnesota lawmaker killings

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      Tina Smith, a Minnesota senator, confronted Mike Lee, a Utah senator, on Monday to tell him directly that his social media posts fueled ongoing misinformation about a shooting that killed her friend.Lee’s posts, which advanced conspiracies that a Minnesota assassin was a “Marxist” and blamed the state’s governor for Melissa Hortman’s death, were among many threads of false or speculative claims swirling online after the killings.Smith told Lee his posts were “brutal and cruel”, according to CNN. “He should think about the implications of what he’s saying and doing. It just further fuels this hatred and misinformation,” she said. She wanted him to hear from her directly how painful it was to see his words after the brutality her state endured. Lee didn’t say much, according to Smith, and seemed surprised to be confronted.Within hours of the shootings, rightwing social media accounts with millions of followers manufactured false conspiracy theories about the suspect and his motives, falsely portraying the man whose friends say he is an evangelical Christian Trump supporter as a radical leftwing assassin and attempting to paint him as a political ally of Tim Walz, the Democratic governor and former vice-presidential candidate.It was the latest example of a rightwing media ecosystem that swiftly spins up narratives that serve their political agendas after tragic events, regardless of accuracy, and does not correct them after further information shows them to be untrue or incomplete. Elected officials such as Lee and others often share in the spreading rumors, lending legitimacy to these claims.Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured on Sunday after he allegedly killed Hortman, a Democratic house speaker, and her husband, and wounded John Hoffman, a state senator, and his wife.Collin Rugg, an engagement farmer on X, advanced a debunkable theory to his followers on X that Hortman was killed over healthcare policy for undocumented immigrants, implying the violence came from the left. He shared a video that ping-ponged around the rightwing internet of Hortman, emotional, describing a vote to repeal healthcare eligibility for undocumented adults.Missing from the post was the context: Hortman supported this care, only voting for its repeal to pass a state budget deal in an evenly split state House. Hoffman, the state senator, had not voted to repeal the provision.Rightwing social media personality Mike Cernovich, with 1.5 million followers, escalated the lie by suggesting Walz ordered the assassination. He hasn’t taken the post down and has continued to advance the claims, posting on Monday that “Democrats know they are now seen as the party of political violence so their propaganda agents are trying to shift the blame. It won’t work.”Laura Loomer, the far-right conspiracy theorist and Trump whisperer, posted that “Walz’s goons are now assassinating lawmakers who support legislation Walz opposes” and called the Democratic party “a terrorist organization”. Loomer and others on the right also tried to tie Boelter to the “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration. Officials found rudimentary signs in the suspect’s vehicle that said “No Kings”, an indication he knew of the event, not that he would attend it as a protester.Elon Musk, a frequent poster of unverified rightwing claims, amplified the narrative to his 200 million followers, quote-tweeting claims that “the left” killed Hortman and saying “the far left is murderously violent”.The lies ignore overwhelming evidence of Boelter’s actual politics: his roommate David Carlson told reporters that Boelter voted for Trump and “was a strong supporter” of the president. Other longtime friends told local media Boelter was right-leaning. While Minnesota voters don’t list party affiliation, he was registered as a Republican in Oklahoma in 2004.Boelter’s own recorded sermons expose his extremist views. Preaching in Congo in 2023, he is recorded as saying: “The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong.” He ranted against LGBTQ+ people as “confused”, claiming “the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul”. His alleged hit list included abortion providers and pro-choice advocates.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionInfluencers seized on Boelter’s appointment to a state board, branding him a “Walz appointee” to misleadingly suggest a personal relationship. In reality, Boelter was first appointed by Walz’s predecessor, who was a Democrat, in 2016 to a 60-member volunteer advisory board. Walz did, however, renew the appointment in 2019, considered a routine administrative decision for one of hundreds of such positions. Walz did not know Boelter.“It was the equivalent of calling a Sunday school volunteer an ‘appointee of the bishop’,” a local reporter wrote.Rightwing X user Viva Frei, with more than 700,000 followers, posted a thread casting doubt on Boelter being a Trump supporter. The account has continued to post about the shootings, attempting to tie Walz to Boelter and his wife, Jennifer. A different Jennifer Boelter interned in Walz’s congressional office, though Frei has not accepted that fact.“Do you believe @GovTimWalz spokesperson when they claim that the Jennifer Boelter who interned for Tim Walz in 2010 is not the same Jennifer Boelter who is married to suspected assassin/domestic terrorist Vance Boelter?” the account asked in a poll.On Monday, posts showing a man at a protest with a shirt with a gun that says “resist” falsely claimed the man was Boelter. “Yea Libs sorry. He’s one of you. Keep saying he’s not. No one believes you,” said one post that got more than 2m views. The actual man in the picture debunked it, saying he was at a “No Kings” rally in Texas in the photo, making clear it was not Boelter.Local Republican officials have largely not contributed to the rumors, in some cases pushing back on the narratives.Harry Niska, the Republican floor leader in the Minnesota House, said on X that he often has and will continue to criticize Walz’s policies and rhetoric. “But there is no responsible basis to attribute to him any of the evil acts committed by Vance Boelter,” he said. More

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      ‘They got us into this’: Indiana Democrat says party leaders cannot lead fightback

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      When George Hornedo, 34, was still deciding whether to run in the Democratic primary for Indiana’s seventh congressional district against longtime incumbent André Carson, a party elder looked him in the eyes and said: “You are gonna get hurt.”Hornedo went home that day and posted a TikTok video recounting the encounter. According to him, it highlighted the reality of the Democratic party.“The people in charge don’t just fight Republicans, they fight anybody who challenges them,” Hornedo said. “That’s not democracy, that’s machine politics.”Hornedo is one of many young insurgents challenging the party’s status quo across the country. With months to go before primaries take place for the 2026 midterms, even some within the party hierarchy have backed efforts to disrupt the political lineup after Democrats lost the presidency and both chambers in Congress in November.In February 2025, the Democratic National Committee, the party’s executive leadership board, elected David Hogg, 25, as one of its vice-chairs. Hogg pledged to use his position to unseat incumbents in safe districts. On Real Time with Bill Maher, he said: “I do not care if you have been there for decades or for one term: that seat is not yours, it is your constituents.” (Hogg has since left the committee after months of internal debate.)In Indianapolis, at the end of April, Hornedo was busy trying to appeal to constituents and show them he can be an alternative to the party’s old-guard. Dressed in sweatpants and a black hoodie, he had just finished cutting weeds at a community event by Fall Creek in Indianapolis when he spoke about the challenges facing the Democratic party.View image in fullscreen“We’re just trying to go where people are civically engaged, because they’re probably voters,” Hornedo said. And if they’re not, they can be. But right now, most voters aren’t active in Democratic politics anywhere. So how do we help people see themselves in our party? I think that’s important.”Raised in Laredo and San Antonio, Texas, before moving to Indianapolis because of his dad’s job, Hornedo calls himself a “Hoosier by way of Texas”. His candidacy, Hornedo said, is not about him or about Carson, but about “whether the government can work for people that need it the most.”.“The real divide in the party is not left versus center and not even young versus old,” Hornedo said. “The reality is that, with Trump and Musk dismantling things day in and day out, when Democrats come back in power, we are not walking back into a government that resembles that of which we knew. And I just don’t think that the leaders that got us into this are the ones that are going to get us out of it.”Hornedo criticizes Carson as one of the least effective lawmakers in Congress, pointing to the ranking of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University’s Center for Effective Lawmaking, that sees Carson ranked 197th out of 220 Democrats in the 118th Congress for effectiveness. The center defines that using 15 metrics, including the number of bills sponsored, their progress, and their substantive significance.Carson, 50, has held his seat for 17 years. He never had a competitive primary since he took over the seat of his grandmother, Julia Carson, in 2008. He has a strong base of support and has already held a town hall with House Democratic Whip, Katherine Clark on 2 May.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarson responded to Hornedo’s criticism that Clark showing up to the event was a sign that the party worried about Carson’s race. At a press conference after the event, Carson scoffed at Hornedo’s comments. “I have to remind folks that we had Speaker Pelosi in town, President Barack Obama, President Biden,” Carson said. “These were official events, not campaigning events. He probably does not remember because he was not living here.”Before launching his grassroots campaign, Hornedo, a lawyer, spent years inside the Democratic party machine. He worked on Obama’s 2012 inaugural committee, handled press for Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch and advised Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.“I came up with this idea of radical proportionality. In one phrase: how do we align the scale of our solutions to the scale of our challenges?” Hornedo said. “I don’t care if a solution is up into the left, up into the center, up into the right. I just care that we’re moving up and actually doing a better job of trying to meet people’s needs in solving these challenges.”When asked if the party has an internal ideological struggle and which side he’s eventually on, Hornedo dismissed the framing.“I’ve been called a dem socialist, I’ve been called a moderate. My answer to that is: ‘Call me whatever you want, just call me effective.’” More

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      ‘I have never seen such open corruption’: Trump’s crypto deals and loosening of rules shock observers

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      Cryptocurrency multibillionaire Justin Sun could barely contain his glee.Last month, Sun publicly flaunted a $100,000 Donald Trump-branded watch that he was awarded at a private dinner at Trump’s Virginia golf club. Sun had earned the recognition for buying $20m of the crypto memecoin $Trump, ranking him first among 220 purchasers of the token who received dinner invitations.Trump’s much-hyped 22 May dinner and a White House tour the next day for 25 leading memecoin buyers were devised to spur sales of $Trump and wound up raking in about $148m, much of it courtesy of anonymous and foreign buyers, for Trump and his partners.Memecoins are crypto tokens that are often based on online jokes but have no inherent value. They often prove risky investments as their prices can fluctuate wildly. The $Trump memecoin was launched days before Trump’s presidential inauguration, spurring a surge of buyers and yielding tens of millions of dollars for Trump and some partners.Trump’s private events on 22 May to reward the top purchasers of $Trump have sparked strong criticism of the president from ethics watchdogs, ex-prosecutors and scholars for exploiting his office for personal gain in unprecedented ways. But they fit in a broader pattern of how Trump has exploited the power and lure of his office to enrich himself and some top allies via cryptocurrencies.“Self-enrichment is exactly what the founders feared most in a leader – that’s why they put two separate prohibitions on self-benefit into the constitution,” said former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Trump’s profiting from his presidential memecoin is a textbook example of what the framers wanted to avoid.”Scholars, too, offer a harsh analysis of Trump’s crypto dealings.“I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and an expert on authoritarian regimes who co-authored the book How Democracies Die.Such ethical and legal qualms don’t seem to have fazed Trump or Sun. The pair forged their ties well before the dinner as Sun invested $75m in another Trump crypto enterprise, World Liberty Financial (WLF), that Trump and his two older sons launched last fall and in which they boast a 60% stake.The Chinese-born Sun’s political and financial fortunes, as well as those of other crypto tycoons, have improved markedly since Trump took office and moved fast to loosen regulations of cryptocurrency ventures at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the justice department and other agencies to upend Joe Biden’s policies.As the SEC has eased regulations and paused or ended 12 cases involving cryptocurrency fraud, three Sun crypto companies that were charged with fraud by an SEC lawsuit in 2023 had their cases paused in February by the agency, which cited the “public interest” and reportedly has held settlement talks.Trump’s and Sun’s mutually beneficial crypto dealings symbolize how the US president has boosted his paper wealth by an estimated billions of dollars since he returned to office, and worked diligently to slash regulations fulfilling his pledges to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet” and end the “war on crypto”.After the 22 May dinner, Sun posted: “Thank you @POTUS for your unwavering support of our industry!”Although Trump’s crypto ventures are less than a year old, the State Democracy Defenders Fund watchdog group has estimated that as of mid-March they are worth about $2.9bn.In late March, Reuters revealed that WLF had raised more than $500m in recent months and that the Trump family receives about 75% of crypto token sales.Trump’s pursuit of crypto riches and deregulation represents a big shift from his comments to Fox News in 2021, when he said that bitcoin, a very popular crypto currency, “seems like a scam”.View image in fullscreenIn July 2019, Trump posted that “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade”, and noted that their value was “highly volatile and based on thin air”.Now, Trump’s new pro-crypto policies have benefited big campaign donors who lead crypto firms as well as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent almost $300m to help elect Trump, and who boasts sizable crypto investments in bitcoin through his electric car firm Tesla and his other ventures. Though Trump and Musk have since fallen out, the mogul’s crypto fortunes seem to have improved due to the president’s deregulatory agenda.Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is a real estate billionaire who helped found WLF, in which he has a stake; Trump’s two oldest sons, Eric and Don Jr, and Witkoff’s son Zach have played key roles promoting WLF in the Middle East and other places.Trump’s use of his Oval Office perch to increase his wealth through his burgeoning crypto businesses while his administration rapidly eases regulations is unprecedented and smacks of corruption, say scholars, many congressional Democrats and some Republicans.“To me, Trump’s crypto dealings seem pretty explicit,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University professor who focuses on political history, told the Guardian. “Policy decisions are being made regarding parts of the financial industry that are being done not to benefit the nation, but his own financial interests … It’s hard to imagine what he’s doing benefits the nation.”Rosenzweig stressed that “not only do Trump’s extravagant crypto ventures benefit him personally as his administration slashes crypto regulations and takes pro-crypto steps at the SEC; they also benefit his tech bro backers who will take full advantage of the end of regulatory enforcement”.In Congress, leading Democrats, including Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, and Jamie Raskin, a representative from Maryland, in May announced separate inquiries by key panels in which they are ranking members into Trump’s crypto dealings, and attacked Trump for using his office to enrich himself via his crypto operations.“With his pay-for-access dinner, Trump put presidential access and influence on the auction block,” Blumenthal told the Guardian. “The scope and scale of Trump’s corruption is staggering – I’ll continue to demand answers.”Last month, too, the Democratic senator Jeff Merkley, from Oregon, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced the “end crypto corruption” bill, which 22 other Democrats have endorsed.“Trump’s crypto schemes are the Mount Everest of corruption,” Merkley told the Guardian. “We must ban Trump-style crypto corruption so all elected federal officials – including the president, vice-president and members of Congress – cannot profit from shady crypto practices,” which his bill would curtail.Some former congressional Republicans are also incensed by Trump’s blatant use of his presidency to peddle $Trump. “Nobody should be allowed to use their public positions while in office to enrich themselves,” said ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who once chaired the House ethics panel. “A member of Congress would not be permitted to engage in the kind of memecoin activities which the president has been doing.”Trump and his family have dismissed critics concerns about the 22 May events and his other crypto ventures.Before the 22 May dinner, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the president would attend his crypto gala in his “personal time” and it was not a White House event, but declined to release names of the many anonymous and foreign attendees.To allay criticism, the Trump Organization said in January that Trump’s business interests, including his assets and investments, would be placed in a trust his children would manage and that the president wouldn’t be involved in decision-making or daily operations. Trump’s family also hired a lawyer as an ethics adviser.But those commitments have been dwarfed by Trump’s public embrace of his crypto ventures and strong deregulatory agenda. In March, for instance, Trump hosted the first-ever “crypto summit” at the White House, which drew a couple dozen industry bigwigs who heard Trump promise to end Biden’s “war on crypto”.Trump’s crypto critics worry that the president’s strong push for less industry regulation may create big problems: the crypto industry has been battered by some major scandals including ones involving North Korean hackers and has been plagued by concerns about industry’s lack of transparency and risks.For instance, a report last December by leading research firm Chainalysis found that North Korean hackers had stolen $1.34bn of cryptocurrency in 2024, a record total and double what they stole the year before.The report concluded that US and foreign analysts believe the stolen funds were diverted in North Korea to “finance its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs”.Other crypto fraud schemes in the US have spurred loud alarms.In an annual report last September, the FBI revealed that fraud related to crypto businesses soared in 2023 with Americans suffering $5.6bn in losses, a 45% jump from the previous year.Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024 by a New York judge for bilking customers out of $8bn.Nonetheless, a justice department memo in April announced it was closing a national cryptocurrency enforcement team that was established in 2022, which had brought major crypto cases against North Korean hackers and other crypto criminals.The memo stressed that the justice department was not a “digital assets regulator” and tried to tar the Biden administration for a “reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution”. The memo stated that a pro-crypto Trump executive order in January spurred the justice department’s policy shift.Ex-prosecutors and ethics watchdogs worry increasingly that crypto scandals and conflicts of interest will worsen as the Trump administration moves fast to ease crypto oversight at the justice department, the SEC and other agencies.Some of WLF’s high-profile crypto deals have involved overseas crypto firms which have had recent regulatory and legal problems in the US, fueling new concerns, watchdogs and ex-prosecutors say.View image in fullscreenOne lucrative deal raised eyebrows when WLF was tapped to play a central role in a $2bn investment by Abu Dhabi financial fund MGX that is backed by the United Arab Emirates in the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance.As part of the deal, the Abu Dhabi fund bought $2bn of a WLF stablecoin, dubbed USD1, to invest in Binance. Stablecoins are a popular type of cryptocurrency that are often pegged to the dollar.The WLF deal comes after Binance in 2023 pleaded guilty to violating US money-laundering laws and other violations and the justice department fined it a whopping $4bn.Furthermore, Binance’s ex-CEO and founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty in the US to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program.Zhao, who still owns 90% of Binance, served a four-month jail term last year.WLF’s $2bn deal was announced at an Abu Dhabi crypto conference on 1 May that drew Eric Trump two weeks before Trump’s visit to the UAE capital, sparking concerns of foreign influence and ethics issues.Increasing WLF’s ties further with Binance, the crypto exchange announced on 22 May that it had begun listing the stablecoin for trading purposes. Binance got some good news at the end of May, too, when the SEC announced the dismissal of a civil lawsuit it filed in 2023 against the exchange for misleading investors about surveillance controls and trading irregularities.Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the justice department’s fraud section, noted that SEC moves back in February “to emasculate its crypto enforcement efforts sent crypto fraudsters a welcome mat of impunity”.He added: “The recent dismissal of the SEC’s lawsuit against Binance for mishandling customer funds, days after it began listing the Trump family’s cryptocurrency on its exchange, seemed to be the natural consequence of such enforcement laxity. Victims be damned.”Other agency deregulatory moves that favor crypto interests can boost Trump’s own enterprises and his allies, but pose potential risks for ordinary investors, say legal scholars.Columbia law professor Richard Briffault noted that as part of the Trump administration’s wide-ranging and risky crypto deregulatory agenda which can benefit Trump’s own crypto ventures, the Department of Labor in late May nixed a Biden-era “extreme care” warning about 401K plans investing in crypto.“[The labor department] has rescinded the red light from the Biden years for 401K retirement plans, which is another sign of the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto,” Briffault said.Briffault, an expert on government ethics, has told the Guardian more broadly that Trump’s crypto ventures and his 22 May memecoin bash are “unprecedented”.“I don’t think there’s been anything like this in American history,” he said. “Trump is marketing access to himself as a way to profit his memecoin. People are paying to meet Trump and he’s the regulator-in-chief. It’s doubly corrupt.”In late May, in a new crypto business twist, the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, said it had sealed a deal to raise $2.5bn to be used to buy bitcoin, creating a reserve of the cryptocurrency.Meanwhile, Trump’s stablecoin fortunes and those of many industry allies could get boosts soon from a Senate stablecoin bill, dubbed the “genius act”, that’s poised to pass the Senate on Tuesday but which critics have said loosens regulatory controls in dangerous ways unless amended with consumer protections and other safeguards.Senators Merkley and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, led unsuccessful efforts to amend the bill to thwart potential criminal abuses, protect consumers and prevent Trump from using his office to profit his crypto businesses.“The ‘genius act’ fails to prevent sanctions evasion and other illicit activity and lets big tech giants like Elon Musk’s X issue their own private money – all without the guardrails needed to keep Americans safe from scams, junk fees or another financial crash,” Warren told the Guardian.“Donald Trump has turned the presidency into a crypto cash machine,” Warren said. The Genius act, Warren stressed, should have “prohibited the President AND his family from profiting from any stablecoin project.”More broadly, Kedric Payne, the general counsel and ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center, said: “President Trump’s financial stakes in the crypto industry at the same time that he is determining how the government will regulate the industry is unprecedented in modern history. This is precisely the type of conflict of interest that ethics laws and norms are designed to stop.” More

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      Will the public side with the protesters in LA? Here are some lessons from history | Musa al-Gharbi

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      On 6 June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) conducted aggressive raids in Los Angeles, sweeping up gainfully employed workers with no criminal record. This led to demonstrations outside the Los Angeles federal building. During these protests, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, was arrested alongside more than 100 others – leading to even larger demonstrations the next day.Donald Trump responded on 7 June by sending federal troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests without consulting Gavin Newsom, and, in fact, in defiance of the California governor’s wishes. This dramatic federal response, paired with increasingly aggressive tactics by local police, led to the protests growing larger and escalating in their intensity. They’ve begun spreading to other major cities, too.Cue the culture war.On the right, the response was predictable: the federal clampdown was largely praised. Hyperbolic narratives about the protests and the protesters were uncritically amplified and affirmed. On the left, the response was no less predictable. There is a constellation of academic and media personalities who breathlessly root for all protests to escalate into violent revolution while another faction claims to support all the causes in principle but somehow never encounters an actual protest movement that they outright support.For my part, as I watched Waymo cars burning as Mexican flags fluttered behind them, I couldn’t help but be reminded of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the documentary Sociology Is a Martial Art, he emphasized: “I don’t think it’s a problem that young people are burning cars. I want them to be able to burn cars for a purpose.”It is, indeed, possible for burning cars to serve a purpose. However, it matters immensely who is perceived to have lit the fuse.It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but all major successful social movements realized their goals with and through direct conflict. There’s never been a case where people just held hands and sang Kumbaya, provoking those in power to nod and declare, “I never thought of it that way,” and then voluntarily make difficult concessions without any threats or coercion needed. Attempts at persuasion are typically necessary for a movement’s success, but they’re rarely sufficient. Actual or anticipated violence, destruction and chaos also have their role to play.Civil rights leaders in the 1950s, for instance, went out of their way to provoke high-profile, violent and disproportionate responses from those who supported segregation. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr had an intuitive understanding of what empirical social science now affirms: what matters isn’t the presence or absence of violence but, rather, who gets blamed for any escalations that occur.The current anti-Ice protests have included clashes with police and occasional property damage. Melees, looting and destruction are perennially unpopular. Then again, so were civil rights-era bus boycotts, diner sit-ins and marches. In truth, the public rarely supports any form of social protest.Something similar holds for elite opinion-makers. In the civil rights era, as now, many who claimed to support social justice causes also described virtually any disruptive action taken in the service of those causes as counterproductive, whether it was violent or not. As I describe in my book, civil rights leaders across the board described these “supporters” as the primary stumbling block for achieving equality.The simple truth is that most stakeholders in society – elites and normies alike, and across ideological lines – would prefer to stick with a suboptimal status quo than to embrace disruption in the service of an uncertain future state. Due to this widespread impulse, most successful social movements are deeply unpopular until after their victory is apparent. Insofar as they notch successes, it is often in defiance of public opinion.For instance, protests on US campuses against Israel’s campaign of destruction in Gaza were deeply unpopular. However, for all their flaws and limitations, the demonstrations, and the broader cultural discussion around the protests, did get more people paying attention to what was happening in the Middle East. And as more people looked into Israel’s disastrous campaign in Gaza, American support plummeted. Among Democrats, independents and Republicans alike, sympathy for Israelis over Palestinians is significantly lower today than before 7 October 2023. These patterns are not just evident in the US but also across western Europe and beyond.The Palestinian author Omar el-Akkad notes that when atrocities become widely recognized, everyone belatedly claims to have always been against them – even if they actively facilitated or denied the crimes while they were being carried out. Successful social movements function the opposite way: once they succeed, everyone paints themselves as having always been for them, even if the movements in question were deeply unpopular at the time.Martin Luther King Jr, for instance, was widely vilified towards the end of his life. Today, he has a federal holiday named after him. The lesson? Contemporaneous public polls about demonstrations tell us very little about the impact they’ll ultimately have.So, how can we predict the likely impact of social movements?The best picture we have from empirical social science research is that conflict can help shift public opinion in favor of political causes, but it can also lead to blowback against those causes. The rule seems to be that whoever is perceived to have initiated violence loses: if the protesters are seen as sparking violence, citizens sour on the cause and support state crackdowns. If the government is seen as having provoked chaos through inept or overly aggressive action, the public grows more sympathetic to the protesters’ cause (even if they continue to hold negative opinions about the protesters and the protests themselves).The 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles are an instructive example. They arose after King was unjustly beaten by law enforcement and the state failed to hold the perpetrators to account. In public opinion, the government was held liable for these legitimate grievances and outrage. As a result, the subsequent unrest seemed to generate further sympathy for police reform (even though most Americans frowned on the unrest itself).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStonewall was a literal riot. However, it was also widely understood that the conflict was, itself, a response to law enforcement raids on gay bars. Gay and trans people were being aggressively surveilled and harassed by the state, and began pushing back more forcefully for respect, privacy and autonomy. The government was the perceived aggressor, and this worked to the benefit of the cause. Hence, today, the Stonewall uprising is celebrated as a pivotal moment in civil rights history despite being characterized in a uniformly negative fashion at the time.This is not the way social movements always play out. If the protests come to be seen as being motivated primarily by animus, resentment or revenge (rather than positive or noble ideals), the public tends to grow more supportive of a crackdown against the movement. Likewise, if demonstrators seem pre-committed to violence, destruction and chaos, people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause tend to rapidly disassociate with the protesters and their stated objectives.The 6 January 2021 raid on the Capitol building, for instance, led to lower levels of affiliation with the GOP. Politicians who subsequently justified the insurrection performed especially poorly in the 2022 midterms (with negative spillover effects to Republican peers).The protests that followed George Floyd’s murder were a mixed bag: in areas where demonstrations did not spiral into chaos or violence, the protests increased support for many police reforms and, incidentally, the Democratic party. In contexts where violence, looting, crime increases and extremist claims were more prevalent – where protesters seemed more focused on condemning, punishing or razing society rather than fixing it – trends moved in the opposite direction.Yet, although the Floyd-era protests themselves had an ambivalent effect on public support for criminal justice reform, the outcome of Trump’s clampdown on the demonstrations was unambiguous: it led to a rapid erosion in GOP support among white Americans – likely costing Trump the 2020 election. Why? Because the president came off as an aggressor.Trump did not push for a crackdown reluctantly, after all other options were exhausted. He appeared to be hungry for conflict and eager to see the situation escalate. He seemed to relish norm violations and inflicting harm on his opponents. These perceptions were politically disastrous for him in 2020. They appear to be just as disastrous today.Right now, the public is split on whether the ongoing demonstrations in support of immigrants’ rights are peaceful. Yet, broadly, Americans disapprove of these protests, just as they disapprove of most others. Critically, however, most also disapprove of Trump’s decisions to deploy the national guard and the marines to Los Angeles. The federal agency at the heart of these protests, Ice, is not popular either. Americans broadly reject the agency’s tactics of conducting arrests in plain clothes, stuffing people in unmarked vehicles and wearing masks to shield their identities. The public also disagrees with deporting undocumented immigrants who were brought over as children, alongside policies that separate families, or actions that deny due process.Employers, meanwhile, have lobbied the White House to revise its policies, which seem to primarily target longstanding and gainfully employed workers rather than criminals or people free-riding on government benefits – to the detriment of core US industries.Even before the protests began, there were signs that Americans were souring on Trump’s draconian approach to immigration, and public support has declined rapidly since the protests started on 6 June.Whether the demonstrations ultimately lead to still more erosion of public support for Trump or continued declines in public support for immigration will likely depend less on whether the demonstrations continue to escalate than on whom the public ultimately blames for any escalation that occurs.At present, it’s not looking good for the White House.

      Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, is out now with Princeton University Press. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      America had open borders until 1924. Racism and corporate greed changed that | Daniel Mendiola

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      The US immigration system is a scam that dehumanizes people for profit. Communities across the country have had enough.The protests in Los Angeles have invited a long overdue conversation about the true nature of the US immigration system. While the immediate catalysts for the protests were ramped up Ice raids attempting to meet Donald Trump’s arbitrary deportation quotas, the protests spring from a deeper history.In reality, the protests reflect decades-long frustrations with an abusive immigration system designed to dehumanize immigrants, weaken workers and keep wealth flowing upward. Ice’s recent tactics were only the last straw.Excellent articles have shed light on why Los Angeles in particular, with generations of immigrant communities and a history of immigrant rights movements, has emerged as an epicenter of resistance. Whether immigrants themselves, or families, neighbors, coworkers, or friends of immigrants, people in these communities have long experienced the trauma of a system that renders people “illegal” just for doing basic things like getting a job. Similar statements could be made for other major sites of protest such as New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Denver and Houston.While much of the news coverage has turned toward the US president’s mobilization of the military and what that means for his growing authoritarian tendencies, this is only half the story. To fully understand what is at stake in the protests, we can’t lose sight of the thing that drove people to protest in the first place: a violently unfair immigration system that is an affront to us all.It is worth noting that this immigration system is not an original component of US governance. Whereas the first government under the US constitution formed in 1789, there were no federal immigration laws until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and even this law was limited in the sense that it banned a specific class of immigrants. The US did not have closed borders until the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national origins quotas across the board.The primary justifications for these early immigration laws were xenophobia, eugenics, and overt racism. By the 1990s, however, multinational corporations understood that closed borders – especially combined with free trade agreements freeing multinational companies to shop around for “cheap” workers, while at the same time constraining the options of workers to move around and look for better jobs – were a powerful weapon in their arsenal to squeeze ever more profit out of global supply chains. While cleverly hidden behind discourses of “security” and “sovereignty,” our immigration system is actually a scam rigged to guarantee an upward flow of wealth at the cost of human rights.The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) illustrates this dynamic. Signed in 1992, Nafta created a free trade zone among Mexico, Canada and the US, specifically making it easier for goods, capital and corporations to move freely while conspicuously ignoring the movement of workers. Far from an oversight, as the scholar Bill Ong Hing has written, this was the whole point of the agreement.While no US labor unions or other human rights representatives had a seat at the table, the US advisory committee for trade and negotiations – composed almost entirely of representatives of multinational corporations – led the negotiations, ensuring that the agreement followed corporate interests. The drafters wanted easier access to cheaper Mexican labor, but they understood that if Mexicans had the same rights as companies to cross borders in search of better opportunities, then the “invisible hand” of supply and demand might make this labor less cheap. Accordingly, immigration restrictions helped to rig the game. In line with these interests, the Clinton administration, in power when the agreement took effect in 1994, not only went along with the plan to leave immigrants out of the deal, but also doubled down on closed borders with harsh new measures to restrict immigration through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.Ultimately, Nafta and the IIRIRA worked hand-in-hand to trap Mexican workers and give artificial negotiating advantages to multinational corporations. The mechanism made sure that Mexicans would have to either stay put on their side of the border and tolerate whatever working conditions were available, or live without legal status if they did “vote with their feet” to seek better opportunities in the US. In either case, they were far more vulnerable to exploitation. Unsurprisingly, this harmed workers all around, especially Mexicans, leading to stagnant wages, harsh working conditions, and irregular migration that forced people into an exploitative informal economy, even as productivity and corporate profits soared.Significantly, Nafta was not an isolated case, but rather an embodiment of how the US immigration system enshrines this major power imbalance between labor and capital. In fact, the same Clinton administration and private sector advisory committee that oversaw the implementation Nafta also played a key role in creating the World Trade Organization in 1995 following similar principles. Today, multinational corporations continue to move freely around the world, while people seeking a better life continue to face restrictive borders enforced by state violence.At the same time, we as taxpayers pay increasingly absurd sums of money for the violent border security measures that keep this system in place. The American Immigration Council has calculated that since 1994, the annual budget for the US Border Patrol has risen from $400m dollars to more than $7bn in 2024 – an increase of over 700% even when factoring in inflation. They further estimate that since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent more than $400bn dollars on the various agencies that carry out immigration enforcement.Under the current Trump administration, these numbers are set to soar even further. In the same “big, beautiful” spending bill that is already facing backlash for slashing public programs while offering enormous tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, a massive increase in spending for Trump’s signature deportation plan is included. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that this will add $168bn to the deficit over the next five years – already an extreme amount – though the Cato Institute has noted that the CBO calculation left out key variables. In fact, Cato finds that the number could actually be closer to $1tn.In short, our immigration system is a massive grift. It divides communities, separates families, hurts workers, and subjects people to state violence for doing normal things like working at an Italian restaurant or going to church on Mother’s Day. And we as taxpayers subsidize the companies profiting on this abusive system.As I have previously written, the Trump administration has distinguished itself from previous governments by intentionally targeting legal immigrants. However, as protesters flood the streets with signs saying “No One is Illegal,” the deeper significance of this protest movement becomes clear. The message is that someone’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shouldn’t depend on their immigration status. And it certainly shouldn’t depend on the whims of multinational corporations who have essentially coopted violent border enforcement for their own profits.As a final thought, I think people are also tired of all the gaslighting. Despite the barrage of official rhetoric claiming that tough immigration measures are for our own good – that they make our communities safer, that they protect jobs, that we shouldn’t feel bad because immigrants don’t deserve to be treated as we would want to be treated ourselves – we know from both academic analysis and our lived experiences that these are all vicious lies, and the policies that spring from these lies have deadly consequences for real human beings. For me, the recent protests demonstrate that communities across the country are standing up to reject these lies.As I think about the significance of this movement, I am reminded of a passage from Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s 2020 book The Undocumented Americans. Reflecting on the power of storytelling as a counterweight to the deluge of dehumanizing assaults immigrants face on a daily basis, she concludes: “What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander, we reclaim our dead?”People are protesting because they are fed up. And they are right to be.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More