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Hazel Dukes, lifelong civil rights leader, dies aged 92
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 12:33
Hazel Dukes, the president of the New York state chapter of the NAACP and lifelong civil rights advocate, died Saturday at the age of 92.Dukes peacefully passed away in her New York City home surrounded by family, her son, Ronald Dukes, said in a statement.Dukes, who led the New York state NAACP for nearly five decades, fought tirelessly for voting rights, economic development, fair housing and education through her career. Even in her 90s, she spoke out against police brutality and for adequate health care in underserved neighborhoods, the NAACP’s New York state chapter said in a statement.In 2023, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton presented Dukes with the NAACP’s highest honor – the Spingarn Medal.“I’m not tired yet,” Dukes said in her acceptance speech for the award. She added that she would continue her advocacy and empower the next generation of NAACP leaders.Dukes helped lay the foundation for Black women to ascend to the nation’s highest offices. In 1972, she took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to second the presidential candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for the party’s nomination.Dukes was instrumental in former president Joe Biden’s decision to choose a Black woman as his 2020 running mate, she noted in an interview with CBS last year. Her career-long fight was bookended by former vice-president Kamala Harris’s 2024 bid for the presidency.In a post in X Saturday, Harris called Dukes one of the heroes “upon whose broad shoulders we stand”.Dukes said in the CBS interview: “I’m just proud of Kamala. I’m just excited if I can live to see this happen. It would be the joy of my life.”Dukes was the president of her own consulting firm. She also served as the member of the NAACP national board of directors. Leaders of the NAACP said in a statement Saturday that Dukes was a “living embodiment” of the NAACP and that her legacy has touched every aspect of the movement.The New York City mayor, Eric Adams, ordered flags to be lowered at half-staff as a tribute to Dukes. More
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‘I’m selling the Nazi mobile’: Tesla owners offload cars after Musk’s fascist-style salutes
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 12:00
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View image in fullscreenWhen Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s “truck of the future” in 2019, Filipos could barely contain his excitement. He quickly paid $100 to get on the waitlist. Filipos described himself as a “true Tesla fanboy”, and the Cybertruck would be the third vehicle he’d buy from the company.“When the Cybertruck came out, I watched the live event that night, and my wife was sitting there going, ‘No. No. No,’” said Filipos, who lives in a suburb of Philadelphia and whose last name is being withheld for fear of online retribution. Despite his wife’s disapproval, Filipos loved the bulky trapezoidal truck. “I was truly geeking out on it,” he said.Now things have changed. Filipos bought a Ford F-150 Lightning instead of the Cybertruck. And even though his other car, a Model 3 Performance Tesla, had just 30,000 miles on it, he traded it in for an Acura in February. Frustration had been building for Filipos over the last few months, but the turning point was when Musk did back-to-back Nazi-style salutes during an inauguration day celebration for Donald Trump in January.“I didn’t want to be saddled with a vehicle that was associated with something so awful,” Filipos said. “When you own a vehicle like that, you are advertising for that company.”Filipos is part of a growing movement of Tesla enthusiasts who are now turning their backs on the company – selling their cars, dropping their leases and getting rid of Tesla stock. Many say that, while they still love the cars, they can’t square the CEO’s politics and behavior with their own. Musk is synonymous with Tesla; his vehicles, the Cybertruck in particular, are his calling cards.The Guardian spoke with three people who offloaded their Teslas in protest of Musk over the last month alone. All said they did so explicitly because of Musk’s salutes during the inauguration. Another person who spoke with the Guardian on the condition of anonymity started the process of dropping her lease on the day of the salute with an email to Tesla reading: “Your boss is a Nazi.”Across Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, dozens of posts are popping up with people saying they are also getting rid of their Teslas. Some have added photos of themselves flipping the bird as a goodbye gesture to their cars. 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When you own a vehicle like that, you are advertising for that company
One celebrity Tesla owner has even taken part. Singer Sheryl Crow posted a video of herself to Instagram waving goodbye to her vehicle as it was hauled off in a flatbed truck on Valentine’s Day. Her caption read: “There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla.” She said she was donating the sale proceeds to National Public Radio because it was under threat by “President Musk”.Musk, the world’s richest man, has wholeheartedly thrown his weight behind Trump. He donated $288m to his presidential campaign and uses X, the social media platform he owns, as a megaphone to tout the new administration’s policies and goad anyone who disagrees. This support has earned Musk a coveted position heading the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge), which is tasked with cutting federal spending. His government overhaul has been so sweeping that Democrats such as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer have called Doge an “unelected shadow government”.Musk and Tesla did not return requests for comment. The CEO responded to backlash over his fascist-style salute with jokes and memes on X.‘No Swastikars’: protesters across the US lambast MuskThe Tesla selloffs come amid nationwide US protests against Musk and his actions. Protesters have gathered outside Tesla showrooms in cities including New York, Seattle and Kansas City, and in towns as small as West Chester, Pennsylvania.In San Francisco, roughly 100 people descended on the city’s Tesla showroom in late February chanting: “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go”. They unfurled a banner reading “Musk must GO” showing a boot kicking a swastika and carried signs saying “No Swastikars”, an apparent new nickname for Teslas. Passing cars drove by honking enthusiastically.Several anti-Musk websites and social media accounts have also popped up. Tesla Takedown encourages people to protest. One of the organizers is actor and activist Alex Winter, the titular Bill from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A TikTok account called Cybertruck hunters has also surfaced. It’s filled with posts of people projecting anti-Musk videos onto the massive rear bumpers of Cybertrucks.The Instagram account Everyone Hates Elon is distributing stickers that say, “Don’t buy a Swasticar” and sending out posters for people to plaster around their cities that say “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds” with a picture of Musk doing the Nazi salute. Tesla showrooms and individual cars are also being vandalized, according to Wired. One Cybertruck in downtown Manhattan was spraypainted with a swastika last week.This anti-Musk protest movement started to percolate over the summer, when Tesla owners began to put bumper stickers on their own cars that said: “I bought this before Elon went crazy”.Rebekkah, who lives in the Tampa area and is only going by her first name for fear of retribution, said she started looking for one of those bumper stickers to put on her Model 3 after Musk endorsed Trump for president in July.“It was just the shame of driving it around and getting out of it,” she said. “The potential optics that we were supporting him.”Rebekkah bought the car in 2020 because she was passionate about the climate crisis and wanted an electric vehicle, she said. She was initially thrilled with her Tesla, but like Filipos, things started to sour as she watched the Musk-Trump alliance grow. Then came Musk’s two-time inauguration day salute.“I was dead set on selling the car after that,” Rebekkah said, adding that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. Rebekkah said she called her mom and told her: “I’m selling the Nazi mobile.”The car was gone within days. “We haven’t looked back since,” Rebekkah said. She put down a deposit for a Rivian.Tesla owners sell at a loss: ‘I happily paid $4,000 to get rid of that car’Ron likewise decided to sell his Tesla after Musk’s salute, even though he knew he would lose money. He bought his first Tesla in 2020, a gray Model 3 Performance, and loved it from the minute he test drove it. In 2023, he upgraded to a Model Y. Ron said he hadn’t really followed Musk at the time, but last summer, he began to pay attention to the billionaire’s increasing involvement in politics.“I started looking back at some of the things he said, and I started to feel guilty that I didn’t do more research beforehand,” said Ron, who lives in Los Angeles and is only going by his first name for fear of retribution. “I always just assumed he was a quirky, nerdy, you know, space-first exploration technology type of guy.”As time progressed and Musk became more outspoken, Ron said he grew increasingly embarrassed to drive the Tesla. “I felt like I was driving a billboard that supported his endeavors and his thoughts and ideologies,” he said.In the beginning of February, Ron swapped out his Model Y, which only had 15,000 miles, for another electric vehicle, a Hyundai Ioniq. He still owed thousands of dollars on his Tesla. 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I felt like I was driving a billboard that supported his endeavors and his thoughts and ideologies
“I guess you could say I happily paid $4,000 to get rid of that car,” Ron said. “That’s how much I disagree with his politics.”Tesla sales have plummeted over the last year. In California, the biggest US market for electric vehicles, they fell by 12%. And registrations for new Tesla vehicles fell by 11.6%, according to the California New Car Dealers Association, even as overall registrations for electric vehicles have grown in the state. Nationwide, the slump in Tesla sales marked the company’s first decline in how many cars it delivered to buyers annually. It’s unclear if the decrease can be fully attributed to Musk, since the electric vehicle market has seen increased competition over the past couple of years, especially out of China.In Europe, Tesla has taken an even more severe hit. In January, sales fell by 12% in Britain, 38% in Norway and 63% in France, according to the New York Times. Sales in Germany fell by 59% that month, coinciding with Musk’s outspoken support for the far-right alternative party AfD and with scolding Germans for focusing too much on “past guilt” for the Holocaust.Tesla stock flies, then plummetsIn spite of its poor sales and weak earnings reports, Tesla’s stock price soared in 2024 – likely boosted by Musk’s proximity to Trump and a regulatory outlook that’s friendlier than ever to the car maker. The day after the election alone, shares jumped 14%. But, as Musk has become increasingly involved in the day-to-day of the new administration, that has changed, too. Since mid-December, Tesla’s stock has plunged 25%.On social media, people are encouraging others to sell their Tesla stock. Reddit has threads of people posting their share sales with headlines like, “Never normalize Nazis” and “This is my way of fighting Nazis and I’m damn proud.” Since inauguration day, there’s been a 21% selloff of Tesla stock, according to ABC. Musk has lost more than $100bn from his personal fortune and the company’s valuation has now dipped below $1tn.Filipos is one of the people who sold his stock. He first bought 40 shares in 2020, not long after he joined the Cybertruck waitlist. Over the years, that number grew to 717 shares. He planned to keep holding, but when Musk endorsed Trump last summer, Filipos changed his mind.“I had to come to a reckoning,” he said. Filipos didn’t see Trump as standing up for the environment, and Musk’s endorsement “was against what I perceived as the original vision for Tesla”.In late July, Filipos sold all of his shares – even though he knew he probably would have made more money if he held. Now, he and his wife have gotten rid of their Model 3 too and are free of all things Tesla.“We feel lighter not being saddled with a symbol of hate,” he said. More
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The daylight savings debate misses the point: let’s make work hours flexible | Lynne Peeples
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 12:00
In a week, we will spring forward to daylight saving time. Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy all recently shared their desires to end the biannual flip-flopping of our clocks. The Republican senator Rick Scott recently reintroduced the Sunshine Protection Act, which would lock our clocks on daylight saving time. Scientists, meanwhile, urge us to adopt the opposite: permanent standard time.The DST debate is heating back up. But all this chatter is, once again, largely missing the point–an omission particularly glaring for an administration that claims to be seeking greater efficiency.The time displayed on our walls and wrists carries only the meaning we attach. If we want to rein in our nation’s spending, if we want to make America healthy again, then we should turn attention to our inner clocks. For starters, we should nudge companies and schools to relax or revise rigid schedules – rather than, for example, reverting to pre-pandemic in-office requirements.We are all born with inner clocks, better known as our circadian rhythms. These biological drumbeats sync with our planet’s patterns to drive our bodies to do the right things at the right times: fall asleep, digest food, and fight pathogens, to name a few vital functions. But our internal timekeepers don’t all tick the same. Your 7am might be my 2pm.The upshot: a lot of money could be saved, and illness avoided, if we dropped the traditional one-schedule-fits-all that gives the clock-on-the-wall so much sway.More circadian-friendly schedules mean more people can wake, work, and learn in closer alignment with their inner clocks. They get more sleep. They take fewer sick days. This is especially true for night owls, whose circadian rhythms are most incongruous with the long-established early bird-biased schedules. Sleep loss alone is estimated to cost the US economy upwards of $400bn a year due to absenteeism, accidents, and reduced productivity. That’s around 1.5% of the country’s GDP – and far more than the approximately 1% of the GDP that pays the salaries of all federal civilian employees, whose jobs have been under attack.Impacts on sleep and sickness aside, it also pays to allow people to work or study during their peak hours of productivity and performance. Alertness, cognition, and learning fluctuate across the day. So does our ability to think critically, communicate effectively, and act morally. Risks of costly lapses of attention and reaction ride these waves, too. And, again, the ebbs and flows are unique for every person.A business’s market value is now about 90 percent intangible – tied to assets like IP, relationships and reputation. In other words, companies are investing primarily in employees’ brainpower. A few have begun optimizing those investments by taking advantage of our biological diversity.Magne Skram Hegerberg, secretary general for the Norwegian Association of Lawyers, told me he uses a curious tool to utilize peak brainpower: an army of plush frogs. During their personal power hours, employees will place one of these brightly colored plush animals on their desk or the door to their office. This signals others to “frog off”. Starting times among his workers also now range from 6.30am to 2.30pm. Meetings are held midday, when early birds and night owls overlap. After making these changes, he said, productivity in some areas doubled and, more broadly, innovation, creativity, and problem-solving improved.View image in fullscreenCamilla Kring, founder of the Copenhagen-based B-Society, has advised Hegerberg and other companies including medical giants Medtronic and AbbVie. She has watched job satisfaction rise and sick days plummet. Her end goal, she said, is to create a “new time architecture” that helps everyone better live by their inner clocks. And that includes B-persons, her term for night owls, an often-stigmatized club to which Trump and Musk belong. “You are born with this rhythm,” said Kring. “It’s not something you choose.”Among the few good things to come out of the Covid pandemic was a glimpse into a more sun-synced life. Some studies found that people, especially night owls, tended to get more sleep and maintain healthier circadian rhythms as school and work schedules were relaxed. But much of that greater flexibility is now being reversed. The Trump administration has issued an executive order to end remote work for federal workers, a mandate pushed by Musk, who enforces strict in-office policies at Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Amazon, too, made the move in January. JP Morgan and Dell plan to do the same in March. Emerging policies that restrict where an employee works also tend to define when. And that can result in wasted resources.Sure, there are benefits to having employees in the office. It can reduce loneliness, encourage teamwork, and inspire creativity. But workplaces can still foster flexibility. Business leaders can spread out work hours and schedule meetings, lunches, and other events for the middle of the day. Those gatherings would probably be more pleasant and productive, anyway, with fewer sleep-deprived and circadian-disrupted participants. And who wouldn’t also appreciate a means to stem the recent rebound in traffic congestion?Some secondary schools in Europe similarly offer students the choice of earlier or later electives while concentrating core subjects to midday periods. And a growing number of middle and high schools in the US have delayed their first bell, acknowledging that traditionally early start times are biologically backwards. Rhythms don’t just vary between us; they also change within us, drifting significantly later during adolescence. But overall progress remains slow.The consequences of permanent DST would disproportionately impact teens and other night owls. When required to arrive at a strict time for work or school, DST effectively forces them up an hour earlier than their already-late preference. The later sunrise also means they get less of the morning light that their rhythms rely on to avoid drifting even later. Some early birds, on the other hand, might appreciate the additional evening light with DST. It can nudge their bodies to postpone pumping out melatonin and let them enjoy a night out with friends.But rather than arguing over whether or how to lock the clock, a more efficient use of regulatory resources is to steer society away from strict schedules, as well as non-essential shift work and illogically drawn time zones. (For the record, there is still one wrong answer: Permanent DST would steal an hour of morning light and tack it onto the evening, further blurring the day-night contrast our inner clocks crave.)Neither Trump nor Musk appear conscious of the value and vulnerability of their inner clocks. Trump regularly posts on social media in the early hours of the morning; Musk wore sunglasses throughout last week’s CPAC conference. Still, it is in their power to help themselves and the American people better live and work with–rather than against–their inner clocks, regardless of whether the clock on the wall reads DST or standard time. It is a matter of efficiency that they would be foolish not to embrace.
Lynne Peeples is a science journalist and author of the new book The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms More
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Read the signs of Trump’s federal firings: AI is coming for private sector jobs too
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 12:00
The Trump administration recently announced that it would be laying off approximately 6,700 workers at the Internal Revenue Service, about 8% of the people employed by the agency. Tens of thousands of federal employees at other agencies are also losing their jobs.The timing could not be worse. We’re in the middle of the tax season with corporations and individuals facing filing deadlines in March and April. Millions of returns will need to be processed. Refunds will be due. Questions will need to be answered. But that’s not all.In just a few short months, Congress will be debating – and probably passing – new rules that will significantly change our tax laws. Republicans are pushing to either extend or make permanent many of the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, most of which expire at the end of this year. There are proposals to eliminate taxes on tips, social security income and overtime wages. The Democrats will be fighting some of these provisions, arguing their effect on future deficits. Regardless, there will be an enormous amount of change to rules, forms and guidance that will need to be made by the IRS.The remaining employees at the agency, already demoralized and now seriously short-staffed, will now be asked to handle this looming workload. Taxpayers and their accountants will need to be patient. I can already foresee my profession’s future frustration as they wait for guidance on a myriad of tax changes that will affect their clients. After barely recovering from all the disruptions caused by the pandemic, these layoffs are sure to set things back.But let’s not pretend this isn’t part of a wider trend.We all know the technology already exists to do much of the work that many IRS employees do now. My clients already use tech platforms to automate their accounts payment and payments. These systems – which leverage AI and optical character recognition – can very accurately (and affordably) scan, read and extract data from any document and ensure that the information is integrated into their accounting systems, where payments are automatically scheduled for review and disbursement. Considering that most of the tax returns filed are done in a similar fashion – and are mostly routine – it seems obvious that similar systems could be doing the same functions, which would probably eliminate a much greater percentage of workers who have already been chopped by the current administration.Look what technology is doing elsewhere. The financing platform Klarna announced last summer it was laying off about 2,000 workers – half of its workforce – as a result of its new AI customer service system that did their work instead. Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and other Wall Street firms are building AI-based systems that are eliminating the need for investment analysts, wealth managers and other human workers. Google, Ikea, Salesforce and a number of other firms are rapidly replacing their workers with AI systems. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said that AI applications will be doing the work of mid-level engineers at Meta this year.About $80bn was allocated to the IRS under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to “modernize” tax collection. Government being the government, I’m sure that progress has so far been slower than it should be. But if you’re working at the IRS, or any federal agency, do you not see the writing on the wall? And if you’re working in customer service, marketing, accounting or any of these jobs in the private sector do you also not see what’s happening?The firing of federal workers is a preview of what’s about to happen in the corporate world. CEOs at numerous companies have already demonstrated that technology can do the work of people and replace them. And they’re just getting started. The tech companies like to say that AI will “work alongside” humans or “increase employees’ productivity” but that’s nonsense. Like the federal workers, many in the private sector are about to be replaced too. More
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‘They worship death’: Trump ‘border czar’ reveals extremist views in interview
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 11:00
Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, and far-right media personality Tucker Carlson talked about a bizarre range of extremist and racist conspiracy theories in an interview just weeks before Homan took office and was trusted with implementing a wide-ranging crackdown on migrants.The conversation included Carlson’s claim that Mexican cartels come “from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years”, connected the racist “great replacement” theory to Biden’s immigration policy, and advocated the arrest of elected US leaders who opposed Donald Trump’s policies on migrants.On immigration policy, Homan expressed a desire to get the Department of Defense to assist with “intelligence” and “targeting” domestically and took the view that Immigration and Border Enforcement (Ice) should arrest “a mayor or a governor” that “harbored” immigrants in sanctuary cities.Meanwhile, Homan faces questions over the network of associations he built up in his non-profit work during the interval between his appointment in the first Trump administration and his new White House role.While the interview has been fleetingly reported previously, the details of Homan’s conspiracy theory-laden conversation with Carlson have not.With Trump’s deportation efforts seeing Ice agents attempting to take enforcement actions in schools, colleges and workplaces around the US, Homan’s business dealings and extremist political views have come under scrutiny as the public face of the nationwide crackdown.UN ‘pulling’ Biden’s ‘strings’In the podcast interview, recorded for Carlson’s online show and published to X, YouTube and other platforms on 18 December, Homan painted Biden’s border policy as a “great replacement”-style effort to flood the country with potential Democratic voters, and both men characterized the previous administration’s immigration policy as the outcome of a conspiracy involving NGOs, religious charities and the UN.At one point, Homan accused the Biden administration of having deliberately worked to “unsecure the border”.Carlson asked: “What do you think the goal was?”Homan responded: “I think they see a future political benefit. I think they think these people will be future Democratic voters.“But we don’t even have to get there, Tucker,” added Homan, saying that Biden’s census rules allowed “all these illegal aliens to be counted in sanctuary cities, which is going to result in more seats in the house for the Dems”.While the idea that an elite was conspiring to orchestrate mass immigration for political gain at the ballot box was mostly confined to the white supremacist racist far right for decades, in recent years “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories such as this have increasingly been voiced by mainstream conservatives and Republicans.Later in their conversation, Homan and Carlson sought to extend the purported conspiracy theory well beyond the Biden administration. Carlson suggested a wide-ranging plot involving international bodies such as the UN and NGOs and Homan responded by calling for an investigation.Homan said: “I think under the Trump administration there needs to be an investigation.”He revealed that “I’ve had numerous conversations with Mark Green, who is the head of homeland oversight.” Green is a Tennessee Republican who chairs the House’s homeland security committee and is an ex-officio member of the oversight, investigations and accountability committee, which has oversight over the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.Homan said Green “plans on having some oversight hearings on this when it comes to the NGOs. I think they were complicit.”He then asserted without evidence that “certainly the United Nations were south of our border, working on this global illegal immigration to the United States”.Homan rounded out the conspiracy theory, saying: “This was by design. Do I think Joe Biden had the expertise to do it? No, I think someone’s pulling his strings.“This is something that needs to be investigated, people need to be held accountable,” he added.Cartels ‘have operational control of the south-west border’The two returned obsessively throughout their conversation to the issue of drug cartels, which they claimed had deprived the US of sovereignty over parts of perhaps five US states and the entire south-west border.Early in the conversation, Homan stated his basic position on the cartels: they should be “designated terrorist organizations and wiped off the face of the earth”.Later, Carlson asked Homan about what he said “informed people” had told him: “In parts of New Mexico, Arizona, California, even Florida, Texas, there is real control, in the way they control Mexico.”In those locations, purportedly, “they’re basically a state within a state, they have their own armored personnel carriers, tanks, you know”. He then asked Homan: “Do you think that’s real, do you think they have that kind of beachhead here?”“Absolutely,” Homan answered, continuing that “I’ve seen the intelligence reports, they have military-grade weapons. It’s not just my opinion, they have control, operational control of the south-west border.”‘They worship death’Later in the conversation, Homan and Carlson attributed the cartels’ motivations in part to their worship of “satanic” ideas or “death”, seeking to tie that to their “cultures” which “practice human sacrifice”.Carlson began by claiming to “know that in El Salvador when MS-13 ran the country, before Bukele, there was a religious component of voodoo witchcraft to MS-13 where they were worshipping the devil openly.”Nayib Bukele is the authoritarian, populist president of El Salvador, whose promotion of cryptocurrency and brutal crackdown on gangs in the country have won him fans on the “new right” in the US and beyond.Earlier this month, Marco Rubio met with Bukele in El Salvador, and the latter offered to hold deportees and US citizens alike in its vast network of prisons. That network includes the largest prison in the Americas, built to accommodate 40,000 people, which is around half the number Bukele has locked up since his war on the gangs commenced.Later in the podcast conversation, Carlson claimed that devil worship was a “component of the cartels, you see it in Mexico as well”, and asked Homan: “Have you come across that?”“Yeah,” Homan answered. “They worship death.”“Formally worship it?” Carlson shot back.“Yeah,” Homan answered. “I won’t call it religious, but even Texas [department of public safety] have found some of these places where the cartels are operating, they got statues there and memorabilia worshipping death as a consequence of not letting them do their business.”Homan may have been referring to Santa Muerte, a Mexican “folk saint” whose currency among cartel members has been an intermittent focus of US conservative media coverage of crime at the border, and enforcement actions in Mexico, where “the Mexican army, under orders from the Mexican state, has obliterated thousands of shrines dedicated to the folk saint across the country”.Researchers have found, however, that Santa Muerte devotion is not confined to criminals, and is also found “increasingly [among] police and others involved in law enforcement”.Carlson appeared to assert that there was a connection between cartels and the historical practice of human sacrifice in some pre-colonial Meso-American cultures, saying: “And these are from cultures that have practiced human sacrifice for thousands of years.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoman answered: “I got a video on my phone showing a member of the cartel skinning a man alive.”He added: “Skinning him alive on video to send a message that if you snitch on the cartels they’re not gonna just kill you, they’re gonna make you suffer immensely.”‘Why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor?’Homan also asserted Ice’s right to arrest elected officials responsible for so-called “sanctuary cities”, which do not cooperate with Ice operations within their boundaries.He said: “I as an agent … have arrested United States citizens for knowingly harboring an illegal alien in their home.”He continued: “If I can arrest a US citizen for violating those crimes, why can’t I arrest a mayor or a governor who has given their staff explicit instructions to impede us and to hide from us?”Homan added: “We need to prosecute these people and send a message that this is unacceptable.”That is a message Homan has continued to assert since taking office. Last week, Homan warned that the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may “be in trouble” over a webinar about Ice that was hosted by her office.The congresswoman on Wednesday aired a “Know Your Rights With ICE” webinar on her Facebook page which advised attendees of “trends” of arrests by Ice in New York and explained what rights they have. Ocasio-Cortez did not attend it.But Homan told Fox News: “So maybe AOC’s gonna be in trouble now, but I need the [office of the attorney general] to opine on that … Impediment is impediment, in my opinion.”On Friday, Homan and the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, appeared in a joint interview on Fox News, where Adams endorsed a Trump executive order which would allow Ice agents to operate at the city’s Rikers Island jail.In the Fox and Friends studio, Homan said of Adams and his promises of cooperation: “If he doesn’t come through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, Where the hell is the agreement we came to?”Adams is at the center of a political firestorm after top justice department attorneys in New York and Washington DC resigned in the face of orders to drop their prosecution of the New York mayor over corruption allegations.Financial entanglementsLike every senior administration appointee to date, Homan is an unstinting supporter of Trump, and a full-throated 2020 election denialist. This, and his espousal of anti-immigrant rhetoric, have led to controversy but also to associations with far-right extremists, and sprawling business relationships that some say present conflicts of interest.Between his departure from the first Trump administration and his appointment as border czar, a White House role, Homan had stints as a Fox News contributor, was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and was credited as a contributor in “Mandate for Leadership”, the central document of Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for the second Trump administration.Apart from these blue ribbon conservative appointments, Homan has involved himself in several interrelated non-profit organizations.The Border911 Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, was founded in 2023 in Virginia, Homan’s state of residence. At the same time, he also founded Border911 Inc, a 501(c)(4) organization. (501(c)(4)s differ from 501(c)(3)s in that donations to them are not tax-deductible, but they are permitted to engage in electoral advocacy.)Both the Border911 Foundation and Border911 Inc were spin-offs from the America Project (TAP), a Michael Flynn-founded election-denial non-profit that was reportedly funded to the tune of $27m by rightwing overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.Homan was reportedly TAP CEO for part of 2023. His appointment to that role occasioned a fundraising gala at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that year.From early 2024, Homan was out at TAP and focused on the Border911 Foundation and Border Inc, as well as a Trump-endorsed for-profit consultancy Homeland Strategic Consulting LLC, which, Homan boasted, secured “tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts” for his clients.Throughout the campaign season, the Border911 Foundation was a virtual speaker’s agency for a stable of rightwing anti-immigration activists, many of them former law enforcement officials who appeared at rallies organized by the non-profit or by political candidates, such as Arizona’s Kari Lake, throughout south-western border states.Previous reporting has highlighted seeming irregularities in tax filings by the non-profits. Coda reported that in 2023, “both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue”. Non-profit compliance experts expressed concerns to the outlet that “the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through” the 501(c)(4).Steve Lentz, an attorney acting as a spokesperson for both Border911 organizations, told Coda that this was due to errors in the filings, “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) [filing] that shouldn’t have been there,” he said, and said it would be amended.The Guardian’s review of the filings indicates that amendments were subsequently made.The Transparency non-profit Accountable.US, however, has raised concerns about what it says is a potential for conflicts of interest arising from the 501(c)(3) non-profit and its board in newly published research.Partly the worries arise from ambiguities in Homan’s public statements about his relationship with the foundation while he is in office.Accountable.US says that while Homan has said that he will take a “leave of absence” from Border911, he has also appeared to claim that the non-profit will continue to act as “data-mining site” that will provide “real up-to-date data on anything related to the border”, including “apprehensions”, “ICE arrests” and other information.And some of the foundation’s board members work for federal government contractors.Charles Sowell is chair of the Border911 Foundation’s board. He is also the founder and CEO of SE&M Solutions, a security and IT consulting firm that touts its “access to senior leaders in government” and “hopes to secure local and federal contracts using the best experts in the government consulting industry”.The Border911 Foundation’s director, Mark Hall, meanwhile, is currently the US security lead and chief security officer for Dragados USA, a construction contracting firm, where he claims to lead security for “a $6bn international border crossing construction project” whose cost indicates that it is likely the Gordie Howe international bridge between the US and Canada, which is budgeted for that figure.While there is no evidence of wrongdoing from these board members, a mass deportation effort on the scale promised by Trump, Homan and other administration immigration hawks such as Stephen Miller could be a bonanza for US government contractors.Accountable.US fears the worst. Its executive director, Tony Clark, said in a statement: “Homan appears to be using division, fear and chaos in a way to pad his friends’ pockets. Why should anyone believe Homan won’t steer lucrative government contracts to members of his ‘non-profit’ board?” More
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Tom Cotton gingerly steps on Trump’s toes as he eviscerates TikTok in book
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 11:00
Tom Cotton stands a better chance of becoming Senate majority leader than a Republican presidential nominee. After all, with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Arkansas senator worked to undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election – an unforgivable sin in Trumpworld.Cotton branded those who stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” – a label he previously affixed to those who rioted amid protests over the police murder of George Floyd.In 2022, Cotton mulled a presidential run, taking multiple trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. He never announced and Trump again claimed the prize. Cotton’s dream may never die but for now he is chair of the Senate intelligence committee and the third-ranking Republican in the upper chamber – not a bad perch from which to publish his latest book.With Seven Things You Can’t Say About China, Cotton seeks to shine a light on a major threat to US interests. In the process, he gingerly steps on Trump’s toes; trashes Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk; and repeatedly dings TikTok, which is owned by China but also by Jeff Yass, a professional investor and a convert of convenience to Trump’s cause. Cotton may come to regret all three moves as missteps.He obliquely criticizes Trump regarding Chinese investment in US educational institutions. “A senior Chinese Communist purchased New York Military Academy, Donald Trump’s alma mater, and then appointed several of his Chinese associates to its board of trustees,” Cotton writes. That sale was finalized in 2015. “The Department of Defense has granted the academy hundreds of thousands of dollars since its Chinese takeover,” Cotton adds. Federal records show such grants made during Trump’s first term, between 2017 and 2021.Elsewhere, the senator slams Musk for “chasing Chinese dollars”. For 2024, Tesla reported revenues from China of $20.94bn.On top of being the driving force of Trump’s evisceration of the federal government, via the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is chief executive of companies including Tesla and SpaceX, which in turn owns Starlink internet. In such roles, Cotton writes, “Musk told China’s state television, ‘I’m very confident that the future of China is going to be great and that China is headed towards being the biggest economy in the world and a lot of prosperity in the future.’” This hardly sounds like “America first” or “Make America great again”.Cotton groups Musk with American “tech titans” he views as putting profit ahead of the national interest, including the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta. Collectively, writes Cotton, they have “shamefully supplicated China’s Communist rulers”.But the senator reserves a special place in hell for TikTok.“No social-media app has harmed our kids more than TikTok,” he declares. “If your kid uses TikTok, I urge you to stop reading now and immediately delete the account.”Here, Trump and Cotton are no longer on the same page. In 2020, Trump branded TikTok a threat to national security and sought to force its divestment. But now money, votes and vengeance appear to have supplanted national interest.For starters, there is Yass, co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that holds a 15% stake in ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. Yass is also a key funder of the Club for Growth, a deep-pocketed and libertarian-minded tax-exempt organization. Trump met with him late last winter. His thinking on TikTok changed. As it happens, Yass hasn’t donated to Cotton since 2013.Now Trump looks to rescue TikTok and ByteDance, a move Cotton openly criticized. On taking office, Trump imposed a 75-day moratorium on the deadline, under US law, for ByteDance to find a US buyer. At the inauguration, Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, sat alongside Tulsi Gabbard, now director of national intelligence.Cotton has bitten his lip. “Our point in passing that law,” he told Fox News, was not to ban TikTok in the US. Rather, it was to compel ByteDance to divest, and ostensibly have a “TikTok that is not influenced by Chinese communists”. For the moment, TikTok remains in such control.In his book, Cotton urges Americans to shun “avoid other Chinese apps like Temu, Alibaba, Shein, WeChat, and Alipay. A few dollars savings or a little extra convenience isn’t worth the threat to your family’s privacy and data security or the indirect help these apps provide to the Chinese communists.” Talk about timing.Kash Patel, the new FBI director, is an investor in Elite Depot, Shein’s corporate parent. The Wall Street Journal blared: “Trump’s FBI Pick Stands to Make Millions From Fashion Brand Shein … Critics question potential conflicts of interest in owning shares of [a] foreign company with China ties.” Patel values his Elite Depot stock between $1m and $5m.Cotton voted to confirm. “Congratulations, FBI Director Patel!” he posted. “America will be safer and more secure with Kash leading the FBI.”Trump has helped Shein and Temu, mail-order retailers, stay great. Initially, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese imports and closed the “de minimis” loophole, which had enabled packages from China valued at less than $800 to be processed duty-free. Then Trump reversed himself. The loophole stood.As for data security and privacy, so close to Cotton’s heart? Musk and the boys of Doge are hoovering that stuff up as you read.Cotton remains a China hawk and an economic nationalist, but is no longer a darling of Trumpworld. In the run-up to the vote to confirm Gabbard as DNI, Cotton and John Thune, the Senate’s majority leader, received a stern warning from Matt Boyle of Breitbart, a Trump-adjacent media organ.“They will be heroes assuming they usher Tulsi to confirmation but if Tulsi is not confirmed then Cotton and Thune are in deep personal trouble with the base. I’m optimistic on this one at this point. The consequences of failure are too dire.”Love is conditional. Cotton lives to fight another day.
Seven Things You Can’t Say About China is published in the US by HarperCollins More
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Elon Musk’s quest for power has a new target: Wisconsin’s supreme court
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 10:00
He is slashing US government agencies, building electric vehicles and space rockets and running one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. But Elon Musk has still found time – and money – to meddle in a relatively obscure election in a state of 6 million people.The close ally of Donald Trump is spending millions of dollars in an effort to tip the scales in favor of a Republican candidate running for a seat on the highest court in Wisconsin. Critics regard it as a statement of intent by Musk to expand his political power in America by playing an insidious role in key races across the country.“It’s one of the most significant threats to our democracy in the current moment,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “You’ve got money and power in one person who’s been given access to the upper echelon of the federal government. He’s fused the power of the Oval Office with his almost unlimited amount of money to support Republicans, both at the state level and national level.”Musk has grabbed attention during Trump’s first month in office with his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, a team of mostly young male software engineers who have laid waste to the federal government and dismissed thousands of workers in ways that have been challenged in the courts.Musk’s startling ascent was on vivid display when he spoke to reporters alongside Trump in the Oval Office and wielded a chainsaw before a cheering crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Earlier this week, he held court at a cabinet meeting, where the president dared any of his officials to express discontent about Musk’s scorched-earth approach. No one did.But away from the TV cameras, Musk is also at work in Wisconsin, which holds an election for its state supreme court on 1 April. The vote will decide whether liberals maintain a 4-3 majority with major cases dealing with abortion, union rights, election law and congressional redistricting already under consideration by the court or expected to be argued before it soon.Such campaigns are now non-partisan in name only. Republicans are lining up behind Brad Schimel while Democrats are backing Susan Crawford. It could be the most significant US election since November, an early litmus test after Trump won every swing state, including Wisconsin.Crawford has received $3m from the state Democratic party, including $1m that the party received from the liberal philanthropist George Soros and $500,000 from the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker.Musk’s America political action committee is spending $1m to back Schimel, a former state attorney general who attended Trump’s inauguration last month. Another group Musk has funded, Building America’s Future, is spending $1.6m on TV ads attacking Crawford, a Dane county circuit judge. It reportedly had to withdraw one social media ad after it featured a photo of a different woman named Susan Crawford.Crawford told a recent meeting of the Wisconsin Counties Association: “Elon Musk is trying to buy a seat on our supreme court so Brad Schimel can rubber-stamp his extreme agenda.”Schimel denies that money would affect his independence on the court. He told reporters: “I don’t have any agenda that I’m working alongside anyone. I’m grateful for our supporters, but they’re getting nothing except me following the law.”But Musk has both business and political incentives to back him. Tesla, the electric car company owned by Musk, has a lawsuit pending in Wisconsin challenging the state’s decision blocking it from opening dealerships. The case could ultimately be decided by the Wisconsin supreme court and Schimel has not committed to stepping aside.Furthermore, in the event of a disputed election in the crucial swing state in 2028, the supreme court could be decisive. Musk tweeted last month: “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” And as Doge lays siege to the administrative state, the courts have provided the strongest pushback. Tilting them to the right could neutralise that opposition and work to Musk’s advantage.Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin, said: “He is not the first far-right billionaire to pour money into a Wisconsin supreme court election but he is spending money hand over fist at the same time the whole world is wondering whether courts will ever be a check on the Musk/ Trump/GOP attack on the rule of law.“While he’s firing veterans with disabilities in Wisconsin from the veterans administration, he’s also working to buy a supreme court majority that could eliminate any possibility of accountability to state law.”Musk exploded onto the political stage last year, spending nearly $300m supporting Republican campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission filings. While most of his efforts went toward electing Trump, a super political action committee he founded also spent millions of dollars on House of Representatives races to keep Republicans in control.Musk also dabbled in state politics in Texas, where he had moved several of his businesses. In 2024, he gave $1m to a tort reform group supporting Republicans in state legislative races and $2m to a political action committee that campaigned to elect Republican judges in the state.Wikler believes there is more to come. “There’s been a question about whether Musk would follow Trump in only caring about elections when Trump is on the ballot. The answer is now clearly no. Musk wants control over every level of government at the same time as he takes control of people’s personal tax information and treasury payments that keep childcare centres open in Wisconsin,” he said.He added: “Musk is trying to execute a uniquely and profoundly grotesque perversion of justice by buying the court system while defying the constitution in order to rip off the poor and the middle class to enrich himself.”Not even Republicans are safe from the world’s richest man, whose fortune is estimated at $426bn. Musk threatened to fund primary election challengers to members of Congress who failed to back Trump’s cabinet picks and legislative priorities.Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator based in Wisconsin, said: “Elon Musk’s money is the bullets in the chamber aimed at wavering Republicans: ‘You don’t support us, Elon Musk will come into your state or your district [and] he will spend more money than God has to defeat you in a primary.’”Musk’s control of the X social media platform gives him profound influence over online discourse and the flow of information. His own feed, with 219 million followers, has become like a running commentary on the Trump administration.He has even sought to flex his muscles abroad, backing Germany’s far-right AfD party, calling for Nigel Farage to quit as leader of Britain’s Reform UK party and pushing false claims that white people are persecuted in South Africa.But while he currently appears omnipotent – a Time magazine cover depicted him sitting behind the Resolute desk like a president – there are signs of growing public discontent.In a Washington Post-Ipsos opinion poll, 34% of respondents said they approved of how Musk was handling his job, compared with 49% disapproving and 14% not sure. Protests against the tech oligarch have been held across the country and congressional Republicans have faced the backlash at raucous town halls.Sykes questions how long Musk’s political honeymoon can last: “He’s signalling that, at least for now, he’s going to be Trump’s enforcer and he’s going to be the force multiplier for the right wing. But as he does so, he’s also establishing himself as an independent force. The dilemma for Trump is that Musk is useful until he’s not but he’s not easy to get rid of.“In the end, there can only be one. The dilemma right now is it’s important to keep the focus on what Elon Musk is doing but not forget that the only reason he’s been empowered to do it is because of Donald Trump.” More
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In this dangerous age, Britain needs to exert soft power as well as the hard stuff | Andrew Rawnsley
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 March 2025, 06:30
Shortly before he flew to Washington, Sir Keir Starmer turned up in the Commons, put on his sombre voice and declared: “Everything has changed.” One of the more startling transformations has been to Sir Keir himself. The Labour leader came to office thinking, as did most of those who voted for him, that he was going to be a domestically orientated prime minister with primary ambitions to improve living standards, build lots of homes and rejuvenate public services. That’s what “change”, his one-word election slogan, was supposed to be about. When he originally selected his overriding “five missions”, the defence of the realm didn’t make the cut.His central definition today is as a geopolitically focused prime minister who is promising to spend more on guns, missiles and warplanes and less on international aid. More British bullets will be purchased at the expense of succour to the impoverished and desperate of the world. This shift gives a flintier profile to his leadership, but not in a way that either supporters or opponents anticipated during last summer’s election. Most Labour people don’t quarrel with the argument that Britain has to put up its guard, but a lot of them, including queasy members of the Starmer cabinet, are wriggling uncomfortably about taking the hatchet to the international development budget. In the days since the decision was announced, they have taken to wondering what manner of Labour government is this?The short explanation for this transmogrification is two words and an initial: Donald J Trump. The upheaval in the international order unleashed by the US president has shattered decades-old assumptions about the western alliance. This has had a more profound impact on Sir Keir than any other event. A prime minister who used to earn his living as a human rights lawyer has had a crash course in realpolitik from the nakedly transactional practitioner of great power games who resides on Pennsylvania Avenue.Sir Keir came away from his encounter at the White House on Thursday empty-handed when it came to securing a bankable guarantee that there will be US military cover for any British and French peacekeepers deployed to Ukraine. What the prime minister did win was an apparent blessing for the Chagos Islands deal, puncturing Nigel Farage’s repeated claims that the White House is opposed to it. There were encouraging noises that the UK may swerve US tariffs and pats on the head for Sir Keir from his host for being a “special man” and a “very tough negotiator”. The price was paid in the currency of ingratiation. This was at its most toe-curling when the prime minister delved into his jacket pocket to flourish an invite from the king for the US president to make an “unprecedented”, “truly historic” second state visit to the UK. Excuse me while I find something to retch into. The other tribute to the Maga King was setting a 2027 deadline for lifting British defence spending to 2.5% of GDP with 3% as the ultimate target.Boosting defence spending is both a response to Trump’s demands that Europe pulls its weight and an insurance policy against the withdrawal of American security guarantees. Downing Street reeled at the callous and chilling monstering of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a democratically elected leader fighting for his country’s freedom against tyranny, at the White House on Friday. The shocking ugliness of the televised scene amplified Number 10’s unspoken fears that the Trump regime poses an existential challenge to European security.I’ve been among those anticipating this pivot. Given how menacing the world looked even before Trump’s return to the Oval Office, it was not sustainable to leave Britain’s armed forces in such a parlous condition that our own defence secretary describes them as “hollowed out”. The intelligence chiefs and the top brass have become increasingly clamourous about the growing scale and intensity of threats from a spectrum of malevolent adversaries.The issue then becomes whether the money will be spent well or wastefully. The Ministry of Defence has a rotten record when it comes to equipping the armed forces in a timely and cost-effective way. The onus is now on John Healey and the service chiefs to prove that they can get the maximum bang from the taxpayers’ extra bucks.The pain inflicted on the international aid budget will be brutal. Sir Keir was all crocodile tears when he intoned that regrettably “hard choices” had to be made, as if more money for defence could only be found by stealing it from aid programmes. There were many other options for a government that spends in excess of £1tn a year. These included being less generous towards other demands for spending, bearing down on escalating costs in areas of welfare or raising more from taxation. Though the prime minister claims he did not take this decision “lightly”, the international development budget was targeted because Downing Street and the Treasury reckoned it was the politically least painful option.This is the superficially clever and unashamedly cynical choice when it comes to electoral calculations. Polling suggests that cutting aid is a popular option with around two-thirds of voters. There’s an assumption among Labour strategists that aid is particularly resented by the kind of voter who supported Labour at the election and is now flirting with Reform or has already switched to it. There’s some truth in this analysis, but it is not the whole truth. There’s danger for Labour among the significant wedge of voters who chose the party at the election partly on the basis that it was more compassionate, enlightened and internationalist than the Tories. They didn’t expect Labour to outdo the last Conservative government in slashing the development budget.The case for spending on aid is easily made. On top of the humanitarian good it does, there’s the mitigation against instability, conflict and extremism. It also helps win friends and influence people in other countries who can be useful to the UK in the projection and protection of our national interests. These arguments will be highly familiar to Sir Keir and his cabinet because it was precisely the case they used to make themselves when they berated the Conservatives for raiding the budget. As Labour’s election manifesto put it, international aid helps make “the world a safer, more prosperous place”.The UK used to be able to make the claim that its record on helping the poorer parts of the planet made us a soft power superpower. As recently as 2020, the UK was one of only seven wealthy countries that met the UN target to spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid. The Conservatives cut that to 0.5% under Boris Johnson and it will now be slashed down to just 0.3%. Since a hefty chunk of the budget is being spent on asylum-seekers within Britain, the net amount supporting international development will be even more miserly. Programmes threatened include those alleviating poverty, tackling disease, improving the education of young people and addressing the climate crisis.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was a humiliation for Annaliese Dodds who was presented with a fait accompli just 24 hours before the cuts were announced. Number 10 clearly reckoned there was a slight risk that she would resign as international development minister, or decided it wasn’t terribly bothered even if she did. She has quit with the warning that denuding the international development budget will only encourage Russia’s aggressive effort to increase its presence worldwide. Blood must be rushing to the head of David Lammy. Justifying the cut has obliged the foreign secretary to stand on his head. It is only very recently that he was wagging a finger at the Americans by telling them it was a “big strategic mistake” to let Elon Musk eviscerate the US development budget. He accompanied that with the warning that China would exploit the vacuum to further its influence.I am being generous when I say that it is disingenuous of Sir Keir and his loyalists to suggest that they were faced with an either/or choice between defence spending in the name of national security and non-defence spending in troubled and distressed places abroad. The UK is an affluent country that likes to think it can punch above its weight. Even when money is tight, this nation is wealthy enough to wield both hard power and soft power.The face of Britain that the Starmer government is now presenting to the world is one that aspires to be more muscular while also looking meaner. Muscular is necessary in the scary new world order. Meaner is a myopic mistake that will render Britain less safe. More

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