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      Court strikes down Louisiana law requiring display of Ten Commandments in schools

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      A panel of three federal appellate judges has ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in each of the state’s public school classrooms is unconstitutional.The ruling on Friday marked a major win for civil liberties groups who say the mandate violates the separation of church and state – and that the poster-sized displays would isolate students, especially those who are not Christian.The mandate has been touted by Republicans, including Donald Trump, and marks one of the latest pushes by conservatives to incorporate religion into classrooms. Backers of the law argue the Ten Commandments belong in classrooms because they are historical and part of the foundation of US law.Heather L Weaver, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said Friday’s ruling “held Louisiana accountable to a core constitutional promise: public schools are not Sunday schools, and they must welcome all students, regardless of faith”.The plaintiffs’ attorneys and Louisiana disagreed on whether the appeals court’s decision applied to every public school district in the state or only the districts party to the lawsuit.“All school districts in the state are bound to comply with the US constitution,” said Liz Hayes, a spokesperson for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs.The appeals court’s rulings “interpret the law for all of Louisiana”, Hayes added. “Thus, all school districts must abide by this decision and should not post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.”Louisiana’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, said she disagreed and believed the ruling only applied to school districts in the five parishes that were party to the lawsuit. Murrill added that she would appeal the ruling, including taking it to the US supreme court if necessary.The panel of judges reviewing the case was unusually liberal for the fifth US circuit court of appeals. In a court with more than twice as many Republican-appointed judges, two of the three judges involved in the ruling were appointed by Democratic presidents.The court’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana schoolchildren from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates language in the US constitution’s first amendment guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.The ruling also backs an order issued last fall by US district judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.The state’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, signed the mandate into law last June.Landry said in a statement on Friday that he supports the attorney general’s plans to appeal.“The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws – serving both an educational and historical purpose in our classrooms,” Landry said.Law experts have long said they expect the Louisiana case to make its way to the US supreme court, testing the court on the issue of religion and government.Similar laws have been challenged in court.A group of Arkansas families filed a federal lawsuit recently challenging a near-identical law passed in their state. And comparable legislation in Texas currently awaits Governor Greg Abbott’s signature.In 1980, the supreme court ruled that a Kentucky law violated the establishment clause of the US constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. The court found that the law had no secular purpose but served a plainly religious purpose.And in 2005, the supreme court held that such displays in a pair of Kentucky courthouses violated the US constitution. At the same time, the court upheld a Ten Commandments marker on the grounds of the Texas state capitol in Austin. More

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      Thousands of Afghans face expulsion from US as Trump removes protections

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      Thousands of Afghans who fled to the US as the Taliban grabbed power again in Afghanistan are in mortal dread of being deported back to danger in the coming weeks amid the Trump administration’s anti-immigration crackdown.Many, including some who assisted US forces in Afghanistan before the botched withdrawal by the military in 2021, are contending with threats to their legal status in the US on several fronts.Donald Trump revoked safeguards from deportation for those in the US covered under temporary protected status (TPS), by taking Afghanistan off the list of eligible countries then, not long after, put Afghanistan on the list of countries affected by the revamped travel ban.Afghans are also affected by Trump’s refugee ban and that all comes amid almost daily news of stepped-up arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) affecting undocumented immigrants and also many with a legal status, from Central and South America, parts of Africa and Asia and other regions, caught in the dragnet and sending terror rippling through other communities.Shir Agha Safi, the executive director of Afghan Partners in Des Moines, a non-profit in Iowa where there are 500 families who evacuated from Afghanistan to escape the re-empowered Taliban, said members of his community are “traumatized because they have seen what happened to Venezuelan immigrants in other states”.The loss of TPS for Afghans, which also provides employment authorization, goes into effect on 14 July.With the government’s announcement, Safi said some in his community are too afraid to speak openly but had told him “they would choose suicide over being tortured and killed by the Taliban”.Asked to elaborate, he said: “They have said this because the Taliban is still there and if you send an Afghan back to Afghanistan that would mean a death penalty.”The US government initially granted Afghans in the US TPS in 2022, because the Biden administration agreed that it was too risky for them to return to Afghanistan due to the armed conflict and political turmoil that has forced millions to flee the country. Even before Trump returned to the White House their foothold in US society was uncertain.Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argues that Afghanistan is safe to go back to.“Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country,” homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said in a recent statement.The department cited rising tourism as a factor, with the Federal Register’s item about revoking TPS for Afghans saying “tourism to Afghanistan has increased, as the rates of kidnappings have reduced”. It quotes that from a US Institute of Peace report that assessed conditions three years after the Taliban took back control and does include that sentence – but the majority of the report describes negative conditions in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, where “the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of force, where justice is not administered in courts but meted out through fear and violence”.The US state department website, meanwhile, puts the country in the highest-risk advice category for US citizens, warning: “Do not travel to Afghanistan due to civil unrest, crime, terrorism, risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping, and limited health facilities.”But immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers say Taliban-controlled Afghanistan remains a dangerous country for many, especially minorities, women and those who assisted the foreign war effort, including humanitarian work. Some foreigners living in Afghanistan have been arrested by the Taliban this year and detained for weeks.California state senator Aisha Wahab, the first Afghan American woman elected to US public office, challenged the Trump administration’s decision.“Pushing these individuals to Afghanistan again – Afghanistan being a country that lacks basic human rights, basic women’s rights, basic humanitarian support, a legal and justice system – is problematic,” said Wahab, who represents some of the largest Afghan immigrant communities in northern California.“Afghanistan is a country that is landlocked, that struggles with trade, that more than 50% of their population are not allowed to get an education beyond sixth grade. It’s a fact that it is led by a deeply religious regime that has a lot of problems,” she added.Hundreds of Afghans have been publicly flogged by the authorities since the Taliban took over in 2021, the Guardian reported last month.In a bipartisan approach, US Senators Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, have written jointly to secretary of state Marco Rubio.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We are writing to express profound concern over the recent decision to terminate temporary protected status (TPS) for over 8,000 Afghan nationals currently residing in the United States. This decision endangers thousands of lives, including Afghans who stood by the United States. This decision represents a historic betrayal of promises made and undermines the values we fought for far more than 20 years in Afghanistan,” the letter reads.It added that revoking TPS, especially for women and minority groups, “exposes these individuals to the very real threat of persecution, violence and even death under Taliban rule”.While the US government hasn’t laid out a deportation plan, it has encouraged Afghans who lose their TPS status to leave the country.However, a DHS official said: “Any Afghan who fears persecution is able to request asylum. All aliens who have had their TPS or parole terminated or are otherwise in the country unlawfully should take advantage of the CBP Home self-deportation process to receive a free one-way plane ticket and $1,000 financial assistance to help them resettle elsewhere.”Bipartisan efforts to give Afghans permanent legal status in the US previously stalled for three years, with the Biden administration creating temporary avenues for those in limbo.Many Afghan families in the US still depend on the future of TPS, said Jill Marie Bussey, the director for legal affairs at Global Refuge, an immigrant rights group that has helped thousands of Afghans settle in the US.“Protection from deportation is the center, but the work authorization associated with the status is the only thing that is allowing them to send money to their loved ones right now and keeping them safe,” said Bussey.“I have a client, whom I message with almost on a daily basis, who is absolutely distraught, at a very high level of anxiety, because he fears that his spouse and children, including his four-year-old daughter, whom he’s never met in person, will suffer greatly if he loses his work authorization.”According to government data, since July of 2021, US Citizenship and Immigration Services has received nearly 22,000 asylum applications by Afghan nationals. Nearly 20,000 of them were granted.But given the immigration court backlog, which totals 3.5 million active cases and an average wait time between five to 636 days, many Afghans still haven’t heard any news on their applications on other status available to them, Bussey added.In a similar scenario are those who worked for the US government in Afghanistan and arrived on American soil. Many are still waiting for an approval from the US Department of State that would validate their eligibility for a special immigration visa (SIV), Bussey added. “Some were hesitant to apply for asylum because they were eligible for SIV and were waiting for their approval in order to apply for their green card,” she said. But things are badly held up in the backlog.“They were promised that green card based on their allyship to our country and then applying for asylum felt like a betrayal, an imperfect fit for them,” said Bussey.The Guardian requested information on how many Afghans currently protected by TPS have also been granted other legal status, but DHS did not respond. More

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      ‘New Yorkers have been betrayed’: can Zohran Mamdani become the most progressive mayor in the city’s history?

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      Zohran Kwame Mamdani is huddling with advisers surrounded by agitated protesters, New York police department (NYPD) officers and lines of metal barriers penning us in. An hour ago Brad Lander, the elected comptroller of New York who is running against Mamdani in the race to become the city’s next mayor, was arrested by masked agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as he accompanied an individual out of immigration court. Video shows the agents shoving Lander against a wall, handcuffing him, and scuffling him away.The incident has clearly rattled Mamdani. He looks tense, and when greeted by supporters his trademark beaming smile is replaced by a tight grin.Days earlier Mamdani cross-endorsed with fellow progressive Lander ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, which makes this personal. “This is horrifying,” he says.Behind us looms the brutalist tower of the Federal Building, its tombstone-grey granite and glass exterior wrapped in fine mist. It is a setting out of a dystopian Gotham City.“No peace, no justice,” the protesters chant. “Ice out of the court, Ice out of the city.”View image in fullscreen“This is an authoritarian regime that has dispatched masked men in unmarked cars to detain and disappear as many immigrants as they can find, and anyone standing in their way,” Mamdani says. “Ice agents attempted to rough up Comptroller Lander and make an example of him – if that’s what they are willing to do to an elected official, what will they do to an unknown immigrant?”There is a potent family link too. “That’s the very court I took my father to a few months ago for his citizenship interview,” he explains.“I hugged him tightly, not knowing if I would see him at the end or if he too would be detained, as so many immigrants have been. I waited in a coffee shop for four and a half hours hoping he would come downstairs, and he did.”It is not impossible, given the state of the race, that in three days’ time Mamdani, until recently a virtual unknown, will prevail in the primary ballot and take a giant leap towards becoming the next occupant of Gracie Mansion. Should he go on to win the general election in November, he would be propelled onto the front lines of the battle to protect New Yorkers from Donald Trump’s mass deportations and other legally-dubious incursions.Could he handle it?“I do believe that I could. I will unabashedly stand up for our sanctuary city policies which have kept New Yorkers safe, and use every tool at the city’s disposal to protect our immigrants.”And then he adds: “There is no option of surrender.”That Mamdani should be a serious contender for the leadership of America’s largest city is both a sign of the times and of his individual capabilities. Polls show him within striking distance of the frontrunner Andrew Cuomo in what is now essentially a two-horse race, with Lander trailing a distant third.Mamdani came to the US aged seven from Uganda where he was born to parents of Indian descent. His father is a political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, is the Oscar-nominated director of Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding.He is a democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has been outspoken on the Gaza war, which he views as a genocide, and is unrestrained in his criticism of Trump, whom he calls an authoritarian. He denounced Lander’s arrest as “fascism”.He is equally scathing about the establishment of the Democratic party, which he tells me has “betrayed” the people of New York. And yet here he is, an unashamed progressive Muslim immigrant, snapping at the heels of the ultimate Democratic machine politician, the thrice-elected former governor of New York, Cuomo.The outcome of the ranked-choice vote could illuminate so much more than the future of New York, important though that is.There’s age. Mamdani, if elected, would become at 33 the youngest mayor in a century; Cuomo, 67, would be its oldest in a first term. Could this election deliver a blow to what Ocasio-Cortez has called the “gerontocracy” of American politics?There’s Trump. Lander’s arrest could be just the start – only a day before the comptroller was apprehended, the president announced he was prioritizing deportations from New York and other Democratic-run cities, putting whoever wins the mayoral race in the line of fire.And there’s the Democratic party itself. Mamdani calls the election a referendum on the future of the party – and given the parlous state in which it currently finds itself, trapped in the headlights of a president who appears hell-bent on destroying American democracy as we know it, he may not be wrong.This is gearing up to be a seismic clash at a turning point for the country. No wonder Mamdani looks tense.View image in fullscreenOur interview was not meant to be like this. The plan was for us to meet in Mamdani’s campaign office near Madison Square Park, but the shock of the Lander arrest sends him scrambling down to Federal Plaza, the Guardian in hot pursuit.It’s a bit like a game of cat and mouse. We follow the candidate as he moves away from Federal Building, and takes off with his posse of campaign managers to find a quiet place to talk. He says we’ll regroup at a sandwich bar nearby then abruptly changes the location, but amid the confusion he’s always impeccably polite. “Thank you for your understanding,” he says to me.We finally get to sit down in a Le Pain Quotidien around the corner from where Lander is being detained. Mamdani asks if I mind that he eats while we talk – it’s mid-afternoon by now and it’s his first meal of the day. When I express sympathy, he gives a maudlin smile and says: “I chose this.”We begin by discussing his explosive rise, from a barely known member of the state assembly representing Queens into a political phenomenon. The previous Saturday, at a rally at Terminal 5, a music venue in Hell’s Kitchen, Mamdani was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez, who likened how he has burst onto the scene to her own unlikely eruption as Bronx bartender turned congresswoman in 2018.Did Mamdani expect to be where he is now when he launched his run last October?From the start he believed in the possibility of his campaign, he says, but did not expect his numbers to surge until the end. “Instead we’ve been firmly in second place for the last few months, and we’ve narrowed a 40-point gap with Cuomo down to single digits despite Republican billionaires spending close to $20m in attack ads against me.”That Mamdani has caught the imagination of young New Yorkers is self-evident at the Saturday night rally. The venue is packed with over 3,000 supporters, most in their 20s and 30s, waving placards saying “A City We Can Afford”.Comedian the Kid Mero hosts, a marching band performs Empire State of Mind, and the DJ plays hope and change-themed tracks (the rally closes with Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’). It all has the razzmatazz of a premature victory party.View image in fullscreenMamdani commands the stage, displaying an ease with TikTokable soundbites and a beguiling charisma which are essential qualifications for high office these days. He echoes the lyrical rhetoric of Barack Obama: when he wins on 24 June, he orates, “it will feel like the dawn of a new day, and when the sun finally climbs above the horizon that light will seem brighter than ever”.A key to his success among young voters – and in turn, the amassing of a vast army of 46,000 volunteers who have knocked on more than a million doors – has been his savvy use of social media. He has posted a stream of viral videos, shot on gritty New York streets, infused with the humor and pace that he first honed during his younger years when he was an aspiring rapper going by the name of Mr Cardamom.To publicise his plan to freeze the rents of all rent-stabilised apartments, Mamdani posted a TikTok video in which he dives fully clothed into the frigid waters off Coney Island. It was titled: “I’m freezing … your rent.”When Cuomo entered the mayoral race, Mamdani filmed in front of Trump Tower to visually connect the two men as bullies accused of sexual misconduct – Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, Cuomo was forced to resign as governor in 2021 following reports that he sexually harassed female staff, which he denies.Such grabby stuff has spawned a whole cluster of fan-based Instagram groups. Among them: Hot Girls for Zohran and, not to be outdone, Hot Boys for Zohran.Fun this may be. But it’s also serious politics. It’s earned him the adoration of countless young voters at a time when social media is increasingly critical to winning elections – just ask Trump who, with his 106 million X followers and his Truth Social platform, literally owns political social media, leaving most Democratic leaders languishing in the wilderness.“New Yorkers of all ages are engaging with the world around them through their phones,” Mamdani says. “One reason we’ve been able to get so many to engage with us is that they’ve heard about our politics in places they typically would not.”He calls his social media strategy the “politics of no translation”. What is that?“It’s when you speak directly to the crises that people are facing, with no intermediaries in between. We need a politics that is direct, that speaks to people’s own lives. If I tell you that I’m going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I mean.”View image in fullscreenMamdani puts his spectacular popularity with young New Yorkers down to a hunger for a “new kind of politics, one that puts working people at the heart of it and showcases a new generation of leadership”. There’s maybe something else also at play: he has a magnetism that just seems to draw people towards him.The young waiter who takes his order of grilled chicken salad appears starstruck, and after we finish talking the waiter comes back to the table and engages Mamdani in intense conversation. The candidate obliges, despite his frantic schedule that will see him dashing between boroughs late into the night.I get flashes of that magnetism as we sit at our table. Like any politician, Mamdani has his talking points, but he drops his guard when I ask him what he remembers about arriving in New York as a kid. He leans towards me, and his face opens, and he seems transported.“I remember going to Tower Records around 66th Street or so, and browsing all the different CDS, then stepping outside and buying my first bootleg copy of Eiffel 65, the euro pop group with the song Blue (Da Ba Dee). I remember playing soccer in Riverside Park, I remember falling in love with chess.”Reverie over, Mamdani the mayoral candidate is back, shoveling down food in between espousing political strategy. And this is when we get down to it, and the real challenge he faces. Because his appeal to young New Yorkers is not enough to win.To defeat Cuomo on Tuesday he has to reach beyond young voters. He has to get to the older African Americans and Hispanics in the outer boroughs who dependably turn out to vote, and thus often decide the outcome of New York Democratic primaries.Polls suggest that such voters are still favouring Cuomo as a safe pair of hands, though there has been a recent uptick among older Latinos. Mamdani is candid about how hard this has been.“It was very difficult for us to get into these spaces to make our case,” he admits. “Especially as we began with 1% name recognition. But things are shifting, now we’re finding that we are double-booked for churches on a Sunday morning.”Paradoxically, the outer borough communities that he has to convert are home to the very same voters with whom Trump made astonishing inroads last November. It’s the guilty secret of New York, which is so proud of its status as a liberal bastion: Trump enjoyed his biggest swing of any state in the country here – about 11.5% – and increased his vote by double digits in both the Bronx and Queens.“It wasn’t just the scale of the swing,” Mamdani says. “It was that it took place far from the caricature of Trump voters, and into the heart of immigrant New York.”After Trump’s victory, Mamdani had to turn the political impulse of lecturing into listening and went on a listening tour to the outer boroughs. “I went to Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, and asked these New Yorkers, most of whom are Democrats, who they voted for and why. I learned that many did not vote, and many voted for Trump, and they did so because they remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago.”The plea he heard over and over again was for an economic agenda that would make people’s tough lives easier. “And that is how we have run this race,” he says.That’s where his affordability ticket kicks in. Rents will be frozen in rent-stabilised apartments that house 2 million New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom are people of colour. Childcare will be provided at no cost, the minimum wage will be raised, city-run groceries will be opened offering cheaper healthy food, buses will be made fast and free.To pay for all that, taxes will be raised for corporations and for the top 1% of earners with incomes above $1m. When I ask him to imagine how he imagines New York would look after he had been in Gracie Mansion for two terms, he replies: “It is a city that is more affordable, that works better, and where we have restored public excellence into public service.”Mamdani’s affordability manifesto is a conscious blueprint for reconnecting working-class Americans, of all races, back to the Democratic party in the fight against Trump. It’s also a damning indictment of where he believes the Democratic leadership has gone wrong.He goes so far as to use that word “betrayal”. “New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city,” he says.As evidence he points to Trump’s deportations. We’re still sitting in Le Pain Quotidien, Mamdani’s salad now half-eaten and his tie off, and we are both painfully, though unspokenly, aware that Lander remains in custody as we speak (he was released a few hours later without charge).Up to 400,000 New Yorkers are at risk of Trump’s deportations, he says, yet under the current Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, whose corruption charges were dropped by Trump in what was widely seen as a quid pro quo, the city has assisted fewer than 200 people facing imminent removal.Mamdani pledges that under his leadership, the city would provide legal representation for all immigrants in detention proceedings. That would boost their chances of going home to their families some elevenfold.His critique of the Democratic party doesn’t end there. For him, Cuomo is the epitome of where the established party has gone off the rails.“I believe we lost the presidential election because we had left the working class behind a long time ago. They were told time and time again that their leaders would fight for them, and those leaders, like Andrew Cuomo, sold them out.”He’s in his flow now, his arms flapping in grand gestures of the sort that his staff have worked hard to get him to tone down. There’s animation in his portrayal of Cuomo, containing a hefty dose of venom, and even disgust.“We are considering electing a former governor who resigned in disgrace, one who cut Medicaid, stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA [which runs the subway], hounded the more than a dozen women who credibly accused him of sexual harassment even suing them for their gynecological records. It begs the question: what high ground do we have in the Democratic party when we critique Donald Trump?”View image in fullscreenTowards the end of his Terminal 5 rally speech, Mamdani warned his supporters to expect a barrage of negative attack ads from Cuomo and his billionaire backers in the closing stage of the race.But it’s not just the barrage of TV ads that are attacking Zohran. The most withering criticism has come from the New York Times editorial board, which went so far as to opine that he didn’t deserve a spot on the ballot. Mamdani swats that one away with the curt remark: “These are the opinions of about a dozen New Yorkers. They’re entitled to them.”The paper described his proposals as unrealistic. That’s paradoxical, he says. Working-class Americans are losing faith in the Democratic party, yet anyone who comes up with policies that address their daily struggles is castigated for being pie in the sky.“If you want to fight for working people priced out of their own city, then you are told you are out of touch.”The Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Museum, and several Jewish leaders have also blast out to scorch him in the final stretch. Shortly after we meet, a podcast is posted by the Bulwark in which Mamdani was asked whether he felt uncomfortable about the use by some pro-Palestinians of the phrase “globalize the intifada”, which has been condemned by some Jews as a call to violence.He would not denounce the expression, saying it spoke to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights”. The comment led to rapid backlash from some Jewish groups.That was just the latest in a pattern in which, stepping outside a campaign tightly focused on affordability, he has been prepared to speak out about the highly contentious issue of the Middle East.He has decried the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and championed the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University who was released on Friday after more than three months detention on the orders of a federal judge.Given the nature of his economically-focused campaign, wouldn’t it have been expedient to skirt around the issue of Gaza? .“I have always been honest,” he says. “I am honest because I believe it is incumbent upon us to have a new kind of politics, consistent with international law, and I believe there are far more New Yorkers looking for that consistency than one would imagine.”Mamdani has clearly been riled by the attacks made on him, which he calls Islamophobic. “I have been smeared and slandered in clear racist language,” he says, pointing to mailers from a Cuomo-supporting super PAC which altered his face to be darker and his beard to be thicker (the super PAC denied any intentional manipulation).In the days after our interview, the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force announced they are investigating threats made against Mamdani, by an unidentified man who said he was a “terrorist” who is “not welcome in America”.None of this is new for him. He’s had to deal with Islamophobia since 9/11, when he was nine and had been living in the city for just two years. He was spared the worst of the anti-Muslim fallout of the attacks, he says, partly thanks to a kind teacher who pulled him aside and told him to let her know if he was ever bullied.But 9/11 left its mark. “Living in the shadows of that moment, it politicized my identity. It forced a nine-year-old boy to see himself the way the world was seeing him.”That young boy is now three days away from a vote in which he seeks to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City.As he finishes up his salad and downs a cup of hot water with honey and lemon, before rushing off to his next engagement, he looks a strange mix of bone tired and fired-up for the battle ahead. More

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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