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      The Minnesota shootings illuminate the character of the Trump era | Sidney Blumenthal

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      In the early morning of 14 June, according to authorities, Vance Luther Boelter, disguised as a police officer and wearing body armor and a face mask, drove his black Ford Explorer SUV, equipped with flashing lights, to the home of the Minnesota state senator John Hoffman. There, he shot Hoffman nine times, critically wounding him, and shot his wife eight times as, relatives say, she threw her body over her daughter to shield her. He next drove to the home of the former house speaker Melissa Hortman, forced his way in, and killed her and her husband, officials say.The police arrived and Boelter fled, abandoning his car. In it they allegedly discovered a “kill list” of dozens of federal and state Democratic officials, mostly from Minnesota but also prominent Democrats in other midwestern states, and the sites of women’s healthcare centers and Planned Parenthood donors. He left behind notebooks with detailed descriptions of his target locations. On the lam, Boelter sent a text message to his family: “Dad went to war last night.”As soon as the earliest reports of the murders were published, with the sketchy information that Boelter had been appointed by Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, to one of many state boards, on which there are currently more than 342 vacancies, the rightwing swarm began spreading the falsehood that he was Walz’s hitman. Mike Cernovich, a notorious conspiracy-monger with a large following on X, tweeted: “Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”Elon Musk jumped in, writing on X: “The far left is murderously violent.” The far-right activist Laura Loomer, who occasionally surfaces as an intimate of Donald Trump, tweeted that Boelter and Walz were “friends” and that Walz should be “detained” by the FBI.Within hours, Mike Lee, a Republican senator for Utah, used the platform of his office to push the disinformation. Over eerie night-time photos of Boelter in his mask and police outfit standing at Hortman’s door seconds before he opened fire, Lee tweeted, first at 9.50am on 15 June: “This is what happens. When Marxists don’t get their way.” At 10.15am, he tweeted, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” misspelling Walz’s name.Lee expressed no sympathy or shock over the assassinations. He assumed the distance of the online tormentor gave him license. Like the mask-wearer, both were disinhibited by their contrived personas. Anything goes. Lee was doing more than blaming Walz for carrying out a bloody vendetta that conspiracy theorists had conjured. Lee created a cartoon. The killer was enlisted by the evil liberal governor to rub out someone who was in reality one of his closest allies. Like Boelter, Lee felt a compulsion to push himself in. The clamor of the far right pre-empted the emergence of the facts for Lee and served as his incitement.But, of course, Lee is a learned man who knew that what he was doing was malicious. The facts were always irrelevant. He trivialized a tragedy in order to implicate Walz as the villain commissioning the hit. Lee’s tone was one of mocking derision to belittle and distort. The killer, Walz and the victims were all tiny, dehumanized figures he arranged to illustrate his tweets. His manipulation was more than a maneuver. It was a revelation of Lee’s own mentality and political imagination he believed would be embraced to his advantage. His depraved humor was designed to cement fellow feeling between the jokester and his intended audience. He was playing to the gallery that he knew how to own the libs. He would gain approval and acceptance. In the hothouse in which he operates, he thought his mindless cruelty passed as wit.Soon enough it was reported that Boelter was not a Marxist or for that matter a hitman hired by Marxists. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Walz “did not know him” and Walz was on his “kill list”. Boelter was reportedly an abortion opponent, an evangelical Christian and a registered Republican who attended Trump rallies.Mike Lee is also a man in a mask. He altered his identity, discarding the veneer of a statesman for the Maga mask. Both Boelter and Lee profess to be men of faith, draping themselves in the authority of the law as one allegedly committed murder and the other hooted at it. They have both posed as heroic avengers and truth-tellers as they target victims. While speaking of God, the law and a higher calling, they worship at the shrine of Trump. The alleged assassin and the character assassin embody parallel lives that have intersected at the tragedy under the influence of Trump.One grew up in a traditional middle-class family; the other is a privileged son. Each of their fathers were prominent in their communities – one a high school coach, the other solicitor general of the United States. One graduated from St Cloud State University, the other from Brigham Young and its law school. One appeared susceptible to the latest conspiracy theories; the other knows these are lies but amplifies them anyway for personal aggrandizement to win the approval of the mob and its boss. One is a true believer; the other is a cynical opportunist. One is a “loser” in the Trump parlance. The other is a winner in the Trump galaxy. Both put their enemies in their crosshairs. One has been booked for homicide; the other is disgraced as a moral reprobate. One is indicted for his alleged crimes; the other has indicted himself. Both spiraled under Trump and both became lost souls, though Boelter would believe that he was found at last.Vance Luther Boelter grew up in the town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, one of five siblings, living in a large house, the captain of the high school basketball team, voted “most courteous” and “most friendly”, according to the Washington Post, and his father acclaimed in the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. But when he was 17, the mainstream Lutheran young man became a born-again Christian, living in a tent in the local park and shouting sermons to passersby.After he received a degree from a state university, he wound up at the Christ for the Nations Institute, a Texas Bible school that emerged in 1970 from a faith healing group founded by Gordon Lindsay. On the lobby wall of the school is a Lindsay saying: “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”Lindsay was also an organizer for the Anglo-Saxon World Federation, an antisemitic organization in the 1930s and 1940s that spread the doctrine of what was called British Israelism, that Anglo-Saxons, not the Jews, were the chosen people of God. The group distributed Henry Ford’s antisemitic tract, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, as well as Nazi propaganda, and preached that God would punish Franklin D Roosevelt. Lindsay was a close associate of Gerald Winrod, a pro-Nazi demagogue, who ran a group called Defenders of the Faith and was indicted for seditious conspiracy in 1944. After the war, British Israelism was rebranded as Christian Identity, a theocratic doctrine based in part on racist distinctions between superior and inferior races. Lindsay preached “spiritual war” against the satanic demons of secular culture.Boelter graduated in 1990 from the Christ for the Nations Institute with a degree in practical theology. He wandered as a missionary spreading his gospel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In one sermon, he said: “There’s people, especially in America, they don’t know what sex they are. They don’t know their sexual orientation. They’re confused. The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”Boelter claimed he was the CEO of the Red Lion security group. He continued his soul-saving. “In the Middle East, I went to the West Bank, the Gaza strip, southern Lebanon, and I would give pamphlets to everybody I could,” he said in one sermon. He created a website for a religious group he called Revoformation. He managed a 7-Eleven store, a gas station, and after taking courses in mortuary science worked transporting bodies to a funeral home. He listened to Alex Jones’s stream of conspiracy-mongering, Infowars.Boelter created a website for a security firm called Praetorian Guard for which his wife was listed as the CEO and he was the head of security. He bought two cars that he fitted out to look like police cars, stockpiled weapons and uniforms, but had no known business. On 14 June, with his “kill list” in hand, he sent a message to a longtime friend: “I made some choices, and you guys don’t know anything about this, but I’m going to be gone for a while. May be dead shortly …”Boelter’s apparent disguise as a law enforcement officer was an expedient that tricked his victims into opening their doors. Pretending to be a police officer, he traduced the law to impose his idea of order.Christ for the Nations Institute issued a statement renouncing Boelter: “Christ For The Nations does not believe in, defend or support violence against human beings in any form.” It added that the school “continues Gordon Lindsay’s slogan of encouraging our students to incorporate passion in their prayers as they contend for what God has for them and push back against evil spiritual forces in our world”.Mike Lee took the news of the assassinations as the signal for him to tweet. Lee was born to Mormon royalty in Utah. His father, Rex Lee, was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, a principled conservative with an independent streak. He resisted pressure to argue cases on behalf of the administration against separation of church and state that would endorse government-sponsored prayer and religious symbols. He resigned in 1985, stating: “There has been a notion that my job is to press the Administration’s policies at every turn and announce true conservative principles through the pages of my briefs. It is not. I’m the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general.” Rex Lee became the president of Brigham Young University and dean of its law school, both of which his son attended.Lee was elected to the Senate in great part on the strength of the family name. In 2016, Lee endorsed Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination for president. When Trump wrapped up the nomination, Lee refused to endorse him. “I mean we can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” Lee said. “We can go through the fact that he has made some statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant.” Lee demanded: “I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the US constitution. That he is not going to be an autocrat. That he is not going to be an authoritarian.” Lee remained a holdout at the convention until the very end.By 2020, Lee touted Trump as a virtuous figure, comparing him to the self-sacrificing leader in the Book of Mormon. “To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” a hero in the Book of Mormon, Lee told a rally, with Trump standing beside him. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.”After Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Lee sent John Eastman, a law professor with a scheme to have the vice-president throw out the votes of the electoral college on January 6, to the Trump White House. While Trump focused on the insurrection, Lee strategized with the chief of staff, Mark Meadows – “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend”, Lee texted Meadows. Lee diligently worked to realize the coup plan using fraudulent electors. “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow,” Lee wrote Meadows.The journalist Tim Alberta, writing in the Atlantic, described a conversation Lee recounted with one of his staffers about Trump that went far to explain his motive for switching from a critic of Trump’s authoritarianism to a defender. “Donald Trump walks up to the bar,” said the staffer, “and he’s got a beer bottle in his hand, and he breaks the beer bottle in half over the counter and brandishes it.” Lee said he replied: “Immediately, a bunch of people in the room get behind him. Because he’s being assertive. And odds are lower, as they perceive it, that they’ll be hurt if they get behind him.”As Vance Boelter’s life unraveled, perhaps he imagined himself risen into a spirit warrior.Mike Lee knows better. To know better, but not to be better, is his peculiar disgrace. He lacks introspection into the source of his hateful behavior, except to offer the excuse that he won’t “be hurt” by Trump. Not to feel any ordinary emotion for the victims of a terrible and unprovoked crime and instead to engage in taunts betrays his father’s legacy and the shining figure of Captain Moroni, whom Lee has upheld. His fall from grace is one of the incidents that illuminates not only his but also the true character of the Trump era.

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast More

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      ‘This presidency is a brand-franchise’: Trump has taken the commercialization of politics to a new level

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      “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”Those were Donald Trump’s words to writer Tony Schwartz in the Art of the Deal. In his second term, Trump has been thinking big about making money. Since his reelection campaign began, Trump is estimated to have more than doubled his net worth to $5.4bn.A sizeable chunk of that cash has come from the launch of Trump-branded products. This week the Trump Organization entered the mobile phone business with a Trump-branded service that will include a “sleek gold” phone, which costs $499, that is “made in America”. Maybe?Never to miss a patriotic marketing moment, they launched Trump Mobile at Trump Tower in New York on the 10-year anniversary of their father’s announcement at the top of a gold escalator, to the sound of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, that he would run for president. The premium tier of service would be dubbed the 47 Plan, priced at $47.45 a month.Donald Trump Jr said the brothers had partnered with “some of the greatest people in the industry to make sure that real Americans get true value from their mobile carriers”.“Celebrity” phone launches are hardly new. The launch announcement came days after the actor-hosts of the popular SmartLess podcast – Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes – announced their own cut price phone plan, and more than two years since actor Ryan Reynolds profited from his stake in Mint Mobile, sold to T-Mobile for $1.35bn.So was Trump – or the Trumps – thinking big or just following a pattern of seemingly random licensing deals that renew concerns about the president’s business enterprises? After all, if Trump is really concerned about phone prices, he could – as president – push for legislative change.“There was a lot of dialog when Trump returned to power that we would see in this term a particularly interesting residency in the White House about how much money would be made,” says marketing-PR guru Mark Borkowski, “and this is a typical Trump side-hustle playing off Maga patriotism.”The blurred lines between business and politics, impacting how candidates are portrayed, policies are shaped and voters engage with the political process – commonly referred to as the commercialization of politics – may not be Trump’s to own exclusively, but he’s taken it to a new level.“It is troubling, and more than in jest, that this is now a political economy and he’s actually saying this presidency is a brand-franchise,” says Borkowski. “There is no separation between power and profit. He’s redrawn the boundaries between commerce and the office of the president, and he’s accelerated the notion of post-ethical politics.”The gold phone and patriotically-priced phone plan – “47” referring to Trump’s current term, and “45” referring to the previous – is only the latest ask of the Maga (Make America Great Again) faithful, otherwise known as ultra-Magas, to show their commitment in dollar terms.“The Trumps’ continued business expansion often serves to reinforce Trump’s political persona rather than distract from it. For Maga supporters, his business ventures are interpreted as proof of his self-made success and outsider status – both key pillars of his political brand,” says Zak Revskyi at the New York brand management consultancy Baden Bower.“These business moves don’t just coexist with his political identity – they actively feed into it. They help sustain the image of Trump as a results-oriented executive who blends capitalism with populism,” Revskyi adds.On Thursday, Bloomberg revealed that investment bank Dominari Holdings, where Donald Jr and Eric work as advisers, helped an obscure toymaker selling Smurf-branded tumblers, koala backpacks and plush sea turtles, pivot into crypto this week, sending its shares up more than 500%.The outlet noted that there was no sign in regulatory filings that Trump family members were involved in this or previous crypto-related transactions through the bank – which is based in Trump Tower – but noted that “the gain added to the windfalls of executives orbiting the president’s family”.Aside from the Trump’s well-publicized (and profitable) adventures in crypto – his ownership stake in World Liberty Financial produced $57,355,532 in income since it was launched last year – the family brand has upped by 20 its Trump-branded real-estate projects around the globe, calculated Citizens for Ethics, including an 80-storey skyscraper in Dubai, and plans for branded hotels in Riyadh and Jeddah, and a golf course in Qatar, to an estimated value of $10bn.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA 234-page financial disclosure form released by the Office of Government Ethics this month showed 145 pages of stock and bond investments. The disclosure showed that 2024 was a very good year for royalty payments from products featuring his name and likeness.Among them, calculated NBC News, was $3m from a Save America coffee table book; $2.5m from Trump sneakers and fragrances; $2.8m from Trump watches; $1.3m from a Trump-endorsed Bible; and just over $1m each from “45” guitars and non-fungible token (NFT) sales. Most have at least some aspect of gold-coloring, according to a review of the “Golden Age of America” Trump collection.Many of the assets are held in a revocable trust overseen by Donald Jr, including more than 100,000 shares, or 53%, of Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, valued at 5.15bn, or held in partnerships that do not require divestment under conflict of interest laws.The business of selling the family name hums along despite, or because of, the on-the-fly dramas that envelope the White House from week to week.The White House claims that the president “has been the most transparent president in history in all respects, including when it comes to his finances”, noting that Trump handed over “his multibillion-dollar empire in order to serve our country, and he has sacrificed greatly”.The Trump phone, which analysts doubt can be “made in America”, as promotional materials assert, is merely an add-on to a thriving political-business operation.Democrats have found it hard to find a footing in calling out the interplay, in part because Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, was similarly accused of allowing a family business of influence peddling to evolve around him and issued a pre-emptive pardon of family members before he left office.“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it,” Trump wrote in the opening lines of in the Art of the Deal, published in 1987. “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”But under Trump politics and business have become melded as never before.“It’s a new hyper-reality that exists in America,” says Borkowski. “It’s about turning political fandom into money, and he’s laughing all the way to the bank. He’s doing exactly what was expected. Nobody in Trump’s heartland sees this as damaging – it’s what they expect a deal-maker to do. The absurdity of everything Trump does is the point.” More

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      How does an Obama speechwriter befriend a Joe Rogan fan? Via surfing

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      What do men want? Democrats need to know after their election drubbing by Donald Trump and the “manosphere” last year. They have responded by commissioning “Speaking with American Men”, a strategic plan that will study “the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” in online spaces.News of the two-year $20m project reinforced critics’ view that Democrats have become the party of an aloof, college-educated liberal elite whose pursuit of working class men resembles a Victorian explorer wielding a butterfly net. Which makes the publication of David Litt’s book, It’s Only Drowning, a timely contribution to Democrats’ ongoing post-mortem.Litt is a former senior speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White House Correspondents’ Association dinner monologues. The 38-year-old has written speeches and jokes for athletes, chief executives and philanthropists and was head writer and producer in the Washington office of the comedy studio Funny or Die.It’s Only Drowning, his third book, centres on an improbable friendship that develops between Litt, a Yale-educated liberal with a fear of sharks, and his brother-in-law Matt Kappler, a tattooed truck-driving electrician who listens to podcaster Joe Rogan and never registered to vote.Their chasmic differences in background, education, ideology and lifestyle initially seem unbridgeable but, when Litt asks Kappler to help him learn how to surf, the shared experience provides neutral ground for connection.“What started as a surfing book became a story about basically a will-they won’t-they?, except it’s whether an Obama speechwriter and a Joe Rogan superfan can become friends,” Litt says in an interview at the Guardian’s office in Washington. “Like a lot of Democrats, my natural inclination is to be a little annoying and condescending. I certainly wasn’t doing that when I was the one who desperately needed to learn from him.”View image in fullscreenLitt, who divides his time between Washington and Asbury Park, New Jersey, describes himself as a high-functioning, high-anxiety person who experienced situational depression during the coronavirus pandemic. He had a feeling of overwhelming dread, difficulty getting out of bed and found himself endlessly doomscrolling.His wife Jacqui’s brother, by contrast, seemed to be thriving. Kappler is a guitar player, a motorcycle enthusiast and a daredevil surfer. Litt reflects: “I had always thought of him as a crazy person, and I still do, but he was able to deal with the ups and downs of life in a world that’s on fire in a way that I began to envy.“He did well during the pandemic and he seemed resilient in a way that, to be totally honest, I didn’t. I definitely was not about to get tattoos or try to drive a truck because I would bump into things, but I could see myself trying to surf and that’s what happened.”It would not be easy. At the age of 35, it required developing new muscles and confronting intense fear and humiliation. Still, Litt moved to the Jersey Shore and enlisted Kappler to help with surfing lessons. After months of struggle, he set the ambitious goal of riding a big wave in Hawaii.Surfing became a metaphor for confronting fear, both physical and existential, and an antidote to Litt’s habitual overthinking. He says: “Weirdly, the feeling I get, that sense of dread when a wave is about to crash down right on top of me, is actually somewhat analogous to the feeling I get when reading the news these days. It’s that sense of looming disaster and there’s nothing you can do about it.”And most importantly, Litt came to consider Kappler a friend. “One of the only things more difficult than learning to surf is making a new friend in your 30s, so I feel like I might be even more proud that I was able to accomplish that than riding an overhead wave on the North Shore.”As he tells this story, Litt reflects on America’s deep political and cultural divisions and how they were exacerbated by the pandemic. Differences in taste and lifestyle become “identifiers” declaring political allegiance. Litt admits that, had Kappler been a friend rather than family, he would probably have cut off contact after learning that Kappler refused the Covid shot.“He played electric guitar in a ska band that is a big deal on the Shore; I played ultimate frisbee. He was into death metal and I was into Stephen Sondheim. So we never had anything in common. In the run up to the pandemic all of these differences weren’t always political but then somehow they started to feel like they were telling us what team we were on. It felt like we’d been drafted into opposite sides of the culture war.”Litt does not pretend that there was a Hollywood ending in which he and Kappler found common ground and changed each other’s minds. But he does argue in favour of shared activities that allow for connection and understanding between individuals with differing views.“What we found was this neutral ground. Surfing is a space that is not politically coded and you can talk about something that isn’t one of the gazillion fault lines in our society right now. It’s hard to find those spaces but, for the exact same reason, it’s worth trying.“I heard from a lot of people in the run-up to this book coming out who said, ‘I have a friend or family member where politics is tearing us apart. We can’t talk about anything in the news and how do I convince them?’ What I would say now is talk about something else. Don’t talk about what’s in the news.“Start by looking for that neutral ground and forgetting about this idea of common ground, because the reason it feels like we have no common ground is that we don’t. We just disagree on a lot of important things as a society.”Litt knows that, had Kappler been registered to vote, he would certainly not have done so for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Back in 2016, Kappler said he would have backed either Trump or Bernie Sanders because they were the most entertaining.Litt says: “Truly the biggest divide between us politically is that I think about politics a lot and that’s part of how I define myself. Matt watches the news, he cares about what’s going on in the world, but that’s not his identity. He’s not a political person.“One of the problems that Democrats have right now is we’re very much the party of news junkies and most Americans are not news junkies.”Celebrity politics and cultural influence have moved towards Republicans and the likes of Rogan and Elon Musk, who appeal to anti-establishment sentiment and claim to prioritise common sense over political parties. A new generation of rightwing podcasters and influencers started out as entertainers and latched on to issues later.“Democrats are still lagging.” Litt says. ‘The new media voices that are developing, many of them are great, but they tend to be political first and entertainment second, or politics as entertainment, and so they don’t appeal as much to people who don’t find politics entertaining and those are the voters we’re going to need in ‘28.”Democrats also have a well documented class problem. It has come to be seen by many as the party of Hollywood celebrities and college-educated elites, with a whiff of contempt for blue collar workers in the heartland, summed up by Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”The party’s perceived shift toward identity politics and social justice issues alienated some working class voters who once formed its base. Ahead of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”It turned out to be bad maths. Last November Republicans swept the White House and both chambers of Congress. Trump won 56% of voters without a college degree, compared with 42% who favoured Harris, a shift from 2020 when Trump and Joe Biden were roughly even.Litt points out the homogeneity of Democratic circles and the lack of organic relationships with working-class people, particularly those without college degrees. This disconnect hinders their ability to understand their issues or effectively communicate.Recalling his time volunteering for Harris’s ill-starred election campaign, he says: “I would sometimes be on conference calls and people would talk about a policy or message and say, ‘Do we think this is going to work? Do we think this is going to be effective?’ I would basically say, well, let me go surfing and find out.“Nobody else said, ‘Oh, let me go talk to my working class friend,’ because Democrats often do not have working friends who don’t have college degrees. The people who are in office, and the people who work for those who are in office, almost all are college educated and almost all their friends are college educated.“You have Democrats sit in rooms where literally everyone has a college degree, and they say, how come people without college degrees don’t feel like we’re thinking about them or that we’re welcoming to them? Well, look around the room.”Litt acknowledges that he is writing about a friendship with one other white man, the smallest possible sample size, making it hard to draw sociological conclusions about working class people of colour.But he also notes that Republicans have sought to “repolarise” the country on educational and culture war lines while making race less important in determining how people vote. Polls show that Trump did make big inroads with Latino men and, to a lesser extent, with African American men.Litt says: “I don’t know that race stopped mattering but I do think there was a Democratic view that race mattered so much more than anything else, especially for people who are not white.“What we saw is very clearly no, that’s not true and was maybe not the most empirically based attitude to have. The base of the Democratic party is still Black women but I do think there was some some of that racial depolarisation.”Democrats do have a strong policy agenda for blue collar workers but have failed to communicate it, Litt argues. His friendship with Kappler will not explain everything. But he offers it as a start for a party that somehow allowed Trump – a millionaire businessman who cuts taxes for the rich – to steal its clothes.“If you had asked me three years ago, do you have a lot to learn from your brother-in-law, I would have said not really, and one of the things I had to learn was that’s a deeply obnoxious attitude. I’m still a professional Democrat – I can still be plenty annoying – but I think I am less self-righteous than I used to be. And it turns out life is more fun and you’re more persuasive that way. So why not?” More

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      Relief and a raised fist as Mahmoud Khalil goes free – but release ‘very long overdue’

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      Mahmoud Khalil squinted in the afternoon sun as he walked away from the fences topped with razor wire, through two tall gates and out into the thick humidity of central Louisiana.After more than three months detained in this remote and notorious immigration detention center in the small town of Jena, he described a bittersweet feeling of release, walking towards a handful of journalists with a raised fist, visibly relieved, but composed and softly spoken.“Although justice prevailed, it’s very long overdue and this shouldn’t have taken three months,” he said, after a federal judge in New Jersey compelled the Trump administration to let him leave detention as his immigration case proceeds.“I leave some incredible men behind me, over one thousand people behind me, in a place where they shouldn’t have been,” he said. “I hope the next time I will be in Jena is to actually visit.”Flanked by two lawyers, and speaking at a roadside framed by the detention center in the backdrop, he told the Guardian how his 104 days in detention had changed him and his politics.“The moment you enter this facility, your rights leave you behind,” he said.He pointed to the sprawling facility now behind him.“Once you enter there, you see a different reality,” he said. “Just a different reality about this country that supposedly champions human rights and liberty and justice. Once you cross, literally that door, you see the opposite side of what happens on this country.”Khalil is the most high profile of the students arrested and detained by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestinian activism. He was the final one left in detention, following an arrest that saw him snatched from his Columbia apartment building in New York.View image in fullscreenThe Trump administration has labelled Khalil a national security threat and invoked rarely used powers of the secretary of state under immigration law to seek his removal. The administration has fought vigorously to keep Khalil detained and continues to push for his removal from the US.Asked by the Guardian what his response to these allegations were, Khalil replied: “Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this. That doesn’t mean there is a right person for this. There is no right person who should be detained for actually protesting a genocide.”He spoke briefly of his excitement of seeing his newborn son for the first time away from the supervision of the Department of Homeland security. The baby was born while Khalil was held in detention. He looked forward to their first hug in private. He looked forward to seeing his wife, who had been present at the time of his arrest.He smiled briefly.And then he turned back towards a car, ready to take him on the first leg of a journey back home. More

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      Iran says diplomacy with US only possible if Israeli aggression stops

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      Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said that his country is ready for more diplomacy with the US only if Israel’s war on his country is brought to an end “and the aggressor is held accountable for the crimes he committed”.After several hours of talks with European foreign ministers in Geneva on Friday, there was no sign of a diplomatic breakthrough – or a resumption of negotiations with the US.Araghchi said: “Iran is ready to consider diplomacy once again and once the aggression is stopped and the aggressor is held accountable for the crimes committed. We support the continuation of discussion with [Britain, France, Germany and the EU] and express our readiness to meet again in the near future.”Late on Friday, Donald Trump said he was unlikely to press Israel to scale back its campaign to allow negotiations to continue.“I think it’s very hard to make that request right now. If somebody is winning, it’s a little bit harder to do than if somebody is losing, but we’re ready, willing and able, and we’ve been speaking to Iran, and we’ll see what happens,” he said.Araghchi said he was willing to continue talks with his European counterparts since they have not supported Israel’s attacks directly. But he said Iran was “seriously concerned over the failure of the three countries to condemn Israel’s act of aggression” and would continue to exercise its right to “legitimate defence”.He also said Iran’s capabilities, including its missile capabilities, are non-negotiable, and could not form part of the talks, a rebuff to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who in an earlier statement said they should be included in the talks.With Israeli diplomats and military commanders warning of a “prolonged war”, the route to direct talks between the US and Iran remains blocked, leaving the European countries as intermediaries.After Friday’s talks between Araghchi and his British, French and German counterparts, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “This is a perilous moment, and it is hugely important that we don’t see regional escalation of this conflict.”The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said there “can be no definitive solution through military means to the Iran nuclear problem. Military operations can delay it but they cannot eliminate it.”The talks are being held against the backdrop of Trump’s threat that the US could launch its own military assault on Iran within a fortnight – a step that would probably turn the already bloody war into a full-scale regional conflagration.European diplomats said they came to talks to deliver a tough message from the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and special envoy, Steve Witkoff: that the threat of US military action is real but that a “diplomatic pathway remains open”.But without direct talks between the US and Iran it is hard to see how an agreement can be reached to curtail Iran’s nuclear programme in a way that satisfies the US headline demand that Iran must never have a nuclear bomb.Trump suggested that European efforts would not be enough to bring any resolution. He said: “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this.”The European ministers said they had expressed their longstanding concerns about Iran’s expansion of its nuclear programme, “which has no credible civilian purpose and is in violation of almost all provisions in the nuclear deal agreed in 2015”.The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said: “Today the regional escalation benefits no one. We must keep the discussions open.”Earlier on Friday, Macron said the European offer to end Israel’s war would include an Iranian move to zero uranium enrichment, restrictions on its ballistic missile programme and an end to Tehran’s funding of terrorist groups.The proposals were surprisingly broad, spanning a range of complex issues beyond Iran’s disputed nuclear programme, and appeared likely to complicate any solution unless an interim agreement can be agreed.One proposal recently aired is for Iran to suspend uranium enrichment for the duration of Donald Trump’s presidency. The concept of uranium enrichment being overseen by a consortium of Middle East countries – including Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – remains on the table.Macron, already accused by Trump of publicity seeking this week, set out a daunting agenda. “It’s absolutely essential to prioritise a return to substantial negotiations, including nuclear negotiations to move towards zero [uranium] enrichment, ballistic negotiations to limit Iran’s activities and capabilities, and the financing of all terrorist groups and destabilisation of the region that Iran has been carrying out for several years,” he said.In the previous five rounds of talks, the US insisted that Iran end its entire domestic uranium enrichment programme, but said it would allow Iran to retain a civil nuclear programme, including by importing enriched uranium from a multinational consortium.Iran claims that as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, it has an absolute legal right to enrich uranium, a position neither the European nor American powers have endorsed. In the past, European negotiators have proved more adept than their US partners in finding compromises, including the temporary suspension of domestic enrichment, a principle Tehran reluctantly endorsed between 2003 and 2004. More

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      Trump administration almost totally dismantles Voice of America with latest terminations

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      The Trump administration has terminated 639 employees at Voice of America and its parent organization in the latest round of sweeping cuts that have reduced the international broadcasting service to a fraction of its former size.The mass terminations announced Friday rounds out the Trump-led elimination of 1,400 positions since March and represents the near-complete dismantling of an organization founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, whose first broadcast declared: “We bring you voices from America.”Just 250 employees now remain across the entire parent group the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), who operated what was America’s primary tool for projecting democratic values globally.“For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that’s been riddled with dysfunction, bias and waste. That ends now,” said Kari Lake, Trump’s senior advisor to USAGM, in Friday’s termination announcement.VOA once reached 360 million people weekly across dozens of languages, former USAGM CEO and director John Lansing told Congress in 2019. In March, the White House put out a statement calling the outlet “propaganda”, “leftist” and dubbed it “The Voice of Radical America”. One of the examples cited to justify that explanation was VOA’s refusal to use the term “terrorist” to describe members of Hamas unless in statements, which falls in line with common and basic journalistic practice.The cuts represent a major retreat from America’s Cold War strategy of using broadcasting to reach audiences behind the iron curtain. VOA had evolved from its wartime origins to become a lifeline for populations living under authoritarian rule, providing independent news and an American perspective in regions where press freedom is under assault.The layoffs also came just days after VOA recalled Farsi-speaking journalists from administrative leave to cover the war between Israel and Iran, after Israel shot missiles at Tehran less than a week ago in the dead of night.“It spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds US ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” said three VOA journalists, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, who are leading legal challenges against the demolition, in a statement.The agency’s folding began in March when Trump signed an executive order targeting federal agencies he branded as bloated bureaucracy, and VOA staff were placed on paid leave and broadcasts were suspended.Lake, Trump’s handpicked choice to run VOA, had previously floated plans to replace the service’s professional journalism with content from One America News Network (OANN), a rightwing pro-Trump network that would provide programming without charge.The sole survivor of the cull is the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which transmits into Cuba from Florida. All 33 employees there remain, according to the announcement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUSAGM offered voluntary departure packages through what it termed a “Fork in the Road” program, providing full pay through September plus benefits. Some 163 employees accepted the buyouts rather than face involuntary termination, the agency said in a press release.Federal courts have allowed the administration to proceed with the terminations while legal challenges continue for now.The VOA cuts form part of Trump’s broader assault on the federal workforce, with tens of thousands terminated across agencies including the IRS, Social Security Administration, USAID, and departments of education, health and agriculture. More

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      CDC vaccine panel to review ingredient RFK Jr has targeted for removal

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      A key vaccine advisory panel reconstituted by health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr is slated to discuss thimerosal-containing influenza vaccines in its first meeting – an ingredient which has been a fixation of anti-vaccine activists for decades.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will hold two separate votes later this month: one on “influenza vaccines” and one on influenza vaccines that contain thimerosal.Thimerosal is an ethylmercury preservative used in multi-dose vaccine vials to prevent fungi and bacteria growth. The preservative has been studied and deemed safe, but was nevertheless removed from all routine childhood vaccines in 2001 as a precaution.“I was there when we went through this the first time,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about debates over the preservative in the early 2000s.Offit served on the ACIP panel in question from 1998 to 2003. He said the issue of thimerosal was vigorously debated and found safe then, prompting him to ask: “What’s the point?”In a short history of the thimerosal controversy published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Offit described how some parents became convinced thimerosal gave their children autism, resulting in thousands of autistic children receiving heavy metal chelation treatments each year.Studies have found no link between thimerosal and autism, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has also denied claims of a thimerosal-autism link. Kennedy, however, has written a book arguing against the use of thimerosal.Offit said the discussion of thimerosal appeared to geared to, “accomplish [Kennedy’s] goals of making vaccines less affordable, less accessible and more feared”, he said.“Here’s what you do know – you do know RFK Jr is an anti-vaccine, science-denying conspiracy theorist. He is devoted to this, he is a zealot, there is no middle ground with him,” said Offit. “He believes we have merely substituted infectious diseases for chronic diseases.”The panel’s advisory recommendations are critical because they result in vaccine “schedules”. These schedules are relied on by health insurers to determine which vaccines to cover and by clinicians who use them as an evidence-based guide on immunization – effectively giving the American public access to the medicines.Although the CDC does not always take the panel’s advice, the CDC typically affirms the panel’s decisions. However, the agency is currently without a leader, as Senate hearings have not yet been held for nominee and CDC career official Susan Monarez. As a result, Kennedy has signed off on some previous ACIP recommendations.Kennedy wrote a book on the preservative thimerosal in 2014 called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, in which he argues that “there is a broad consensus among research scientists that thimerosal is a dangerous neurotoxin that should be immediately removed from medicines”. Kennedy said in the book he is “pro-vaccine”.Until 9 June, the ACIP was an independent panel of 17 experts who served staggered terms and were rigorously vetted by career CDC staff. Kennedy broke with tradition when he fired the entire panel, claiming in a Wall Street Journal editorial that he was working to “restore public trust in vaccines”.The same week, Kennedy appointed eight new members to the committee, including medical professionals with little vaccine expertise and known vaccine skeptics.A wide spectrum of groups criticized the decision, from MomsRising, who said they were “alarmed and disgusted”, to major doctors’ groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, to public health leaders who described Kennedy’s actions as “a coup,” to the former members of the committee, who warned the independent panel was at “a crossroads”.The group is scheduled to meet the last week of June. Prior to Kennedy’s changes, they had been expected to discuss reducing the number of shots needed for human papilloma virus (HPV) and a meningococcal vaccine.On Wednesday, the panel released a draft agenda for its upcoming meeting. A wide range of vaccines will be discussed – including those against influenza; the tropical disease chikungunya; the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) vaccine; anthrax; Covid and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).The agenda scheduled a vote on recommendations for flu vaccines, including the multidose versions that still contain thimerosal. These vaccines are used only in adolescents and adults. The panel is also scheduled to vote on recommendations for maternal and pediatric versions of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).Notably, despite Kennedy’s repeated pledges of “radical transparency”, the draft agenda does not include the names of many speakers, which are listed as “TBD” (to be determined) for instance on “Covid-19 safety update”.New ACIP members have not been added to a conflict of interest tracker for ACIP members developed by the Trump administration. A spokesperson for HHS said the new members ethics agreements “will be made public” before they start work with the committee.In addition to the new draft agenda, there have also been changes to the committee’s meeting times not reflected in the Federal Register, according to Politico. The group will meet for two days instead of three, and there does not appear to be a vote scheduled on Covid vaccines. More