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      State department official reportedly deleted abusive tweets about Rubio

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      A top official in the US state department deleted abusive tweets in which he said the then Florida senator Marco Rubio – who is now secretary of state – had a “low IQ” and spread unsubstantiated rumors about his sexuality, CNN reported.In tweets from 7 January 2021, Darren Beattie referred to scurrilous online rumors and added: “Forget the war promotion and the neocon sugar daddies, forget the low IQ, forget the 2016 primary, Rubio is TOUGH ON CHINA (and good for military industrial complex) So be a good DOG and vote for him!!!”The day before, Donald Trump had incited supporters to storm Congress in an attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, an attack Rubio condemned.On 7 January, after repeating baseless innuendo about Rubio, Beattie posted: “Does Marco Rubio have a future in politics?”Rubio served another four years in the Senate before becoming secretary of state under Trump, despite having run against Trump in 2016 and amid widespread criticism of his embrace of policy positions, particularly regarding rapprochement with Russia, that contradict views long held in the Senate.Beattie was a speechwriter in the first Trump administration, until CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, a specialist in unearthing old online content, reported that Beattie attended a white nationalist conference in 2016.After leaving the White House, Beattie founded Revolver News, a far-right website which spread January 6 conspiracy theories. Last month, Beattie was made acting under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, an appointment that stoked protests from Democrats and progressive commentators.Responding to remarks such as “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work”, the commentator Van Jones called Beattie’s appointment “shameless and despicable” and said the Trump administration was “bring[ing] in people out of the trash can … horrible people who you wouldn’t hire to run a bodega”.On Monday, Kaczynski and fellow CNN reporter Em Steck reported that while Beattie had left most of his offensive comments online, he appeared to have “purged” criticism of Rubio from X, the social media platform owned by the Trump ally Elon Musk.In other now-deleted posts, Beattie called Rubio “fake” and questioned his bona fides as a pro-Trump Republican.Beattie told CNN: “Secretary Rubio is 100% America First and it’s a tremendous honor to work for him in advancing President Trump’s world historical agenda.”Rubio has declined to comment on Beattie’s appointment.On 5 February, the former senator told reporters Beattie would focus on “not wanting this Department of State to be involved in censorship”, then dodged a question about criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against antisemitism.Asked if he had seen Beattie’s X account, Rubio said, “OK, thank you guys,” and ended the briefing. More

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      Rubio says 83% of USAid programs terminated after six-week purge

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      The Trump administration has taken an axe to US foreign aid, eliminating 83% of programs run by the US Agency for International Development (USAid) in a sweeping six-week purge that has done away with entire categories of development work that took decades to build up.Secretary of state Marco Rubio announced the massive cuts on Monday, posting that roughly 5,200 of USAid’s 6,200 global programs have been terminated. The surviving initiatives – less than a fifth of America’s previous aid portfolio – will be absorbed by the state department.“Our hard-working staff who worked very long hours” alongside Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) teams deserve credit for this “overdue and historic reform”, Rubio wrote on X, using his personal account.The mass terminations follow Donald Trump’s 20 January executive order freezing foreign assistance for review that he claimed pushed forward a liberal global agenda.This abrupt dismantling also overturns decades of bipartisan consensus that humanitarian and development assistance serves American security interests by stabilizing fragile regions, fostering economic growth, and building diplomatic goodwill – and were backed by Musk’s unofficial government efficiency unit.“Tough, but necessary. Good working with you. The important parts of USAID should always have been with Dept of State,” Musk responded on X following Rubio’s announcement.The New York Times reported last week that there had been serious cut-ups between Musk and Rubio at a recent cabinet meeting over proposed cuts to the state department.During that meeting, Trump reportedly defended Rubio for doing a “great job” and said that Musk’s team would be merely advising cabinet secretaries about future cuts. But Rubio’s apparent embrace of Musk’s objectives reveal the extent to which the billionaire Trump supporter wields power in the administration.Rubio’s social media post on Monday said that review was now “officially ending”, with about 5,200 of USAid’s 6,200 programs eliminated.Those programs “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States”, Rubio wrote.“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping … to be administered more effectively under the state department,” he said. Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress’s approval.The state department did not respond to a request for comment on the criteria being used to keep alive the remaining programs and to respond to claims that cutting programs without congressional approval is illegal.The Trump administration has given almost no details on which aid and development efforts abroad it spared as it mass-emailed contract terminations to aid groups and other USAid partners by the thousands within days earlier this month. The rapid pace, and the steps skipped in ending contracts, left USAid supporters challenging whether any actual program-by-program reviews had taken place.According to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica, top health officials at USAid had for weeks warned Rubio and other leaders about the potential death toll that would result from the cuts, along with one million children untreated for severe malnutrition, up to 166,000 malaria deaths, and 200,000 more children paralyzed by polio over the next decade if they carried out their plan.Aid groups say even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare got the termination notices, such as emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water serving sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan.Republicans broadly have made clear they want foreign assistance that would promote a far narrower interpretation of US national interests.The state department in one of multiple lawsuits it is battling over its rapid shutdown of USAid had said earlier this month it was killing more than 90% of USAid programs. Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower.Contractors and staffers running efforts ranging from epidemic control to famine prevention to job and democracy training stopped work. Aid groups and other USAid partners laid off tens of thousands of their workers in the US and abroad.Lawsuits say the sudden shutdown of USAid has stiffed aid groups and businesses that had contracts with it of billions of dollars.The shutdown has left many USAid staffers and contractors and their families still overseas, many of them awaiting US-paid back payments and travel expenses back home. More

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      The Guardian view on Nigel Farage: not even Donald Trump is as damaging to Reform as its own leader | Editorial

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      One constant of British political life is that Nigel Farage never stays out of the spotlight for long. Having built a political career on railing against the establishment – while, paradoxically, embedding himself within it – Mr Farage finds himself embroiled in yet another melodrama. This time, however, the threat comes not from the usual suspects – remainers, the BBC or “woke” elites – but from his own side.The affair revolves around Rupert Lowe, a little‑known businessman, elected as one of Reform UK’s five MPs in 2024 under Mr Farage’s leadership. That should have been the beginning of a forgettable contribution to British public life. Yet, thanks to the intervention of Elon Musk – the world’s richest man and Donald Trump’s “government efficiency” tsar – Mr Lowe has a starring role in Mr Farage’s latest soap opera.Earlier this year the tech billionaire was so annoyed by Mr Farage’s decision to distance himself from the imprisoned far-right agitator Tommy Robinson that he touted Mr Lowe as a possible replacement. Relations between Mr Farage and Mr Lowe have deteriorated since. Their feud burst out into the open this month, culminating this weekend with Reform UK alleging misconduct by Mr Lowe, which he denies. Mr Lowe, who has been suspended from the party and lost its whip in parliament, derides it as a vanity project driven by one man’s ego. He has threatened to sue Reform UK for libel.Mr Farage’s reaction, however, is telling. For all his bravado about free speech, the moment a rival emerges – however minor – his instinct seems to be to cut them down. This is not the first time. His political parties – Ukip, the Brexit party, Reform UK – have operated more like personality cults than democratic organs, and loyalty to the leader has eclipsed ideological purity. Challenging Mr Farage doesn’t end well for those who dare. The difference this time is that Mr Musk’s intervention gives the affair an absurdly transatlantic flavour.This illuminates a larger problem. If Mr Farage’s goal is to broaden his electoral appeal, association with Trumpism is a hindrance, not a help. While Mr Trump retains a firm grip on the Republican party, the US president remains deeply unpopular in Britain, where even Tories see him as a liability. The perception that Mr Farage is too close to Mr Trump and too sympathetic to Vladimir Putin is hurting him in the polls. The opportunist in Mr Farage knows this. His strategy has been to present himself as the plebeian face of rightwing populism – foregrounding his love of pints over his attendance at Mar-a-Lago banquets. Yet the contradictions are piling up.Mr Farage seeks to appear an insurgent, yet he operates like an autocrat. He wants to court the support of Trumpian figures, yet he knows their influence is more likely to repel than to attract British voters. He wants Reform UK to grow – but only under him. For all the bluster, this latest episode only highlights that Mr Farage, like Mr Trump, has always been far better at breaking things than building them. That ought to be a warning to mainstream parties seeking to emulate Trumpian talking points around cutting foreign aid or sacking bureaucrats – especially with an upcoming byelection in a Labour stronghold. If Reform UK eventually ends up on the scrapheap of history, it won’t be because of Mr Lowe or Mr Musk, or even Mr Trump. It will be because, in the end, Mr Farage is his own biggest problem.

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      Canada’s designated PM Mark Carney meets with Trudeau as Trump threat looms

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      Canada’s incoming prime minister, Mark Carney, has met with Justin Trudeau as the pair discuss a transfer of power after the former central banker’s landslide victory at the Liberal party’s leadership race.The meeting on Monday sets the stage for an imminent federal election and gives Canada a fresh leader to square off against the United States president, with the two countries locked in a bitter trade war provoked by Donald Trump.Briefly speaking to reporters, Carney said he was “honoured” to receive nearly 86% of the vote, one of the most decisive wins of a party leader in decades.But, the 59-year-old former banker said he had “a lot of wood to chop” as he prepares to assume the reins of a country tearing on the verge of economic calamity.Carney is widely expected to call an election within days, reflecting both the urgency of Canada’s trade war with the United States, and the awkward reality that as prime minister without a seat in parliament, he is unable to attend sessions of the House of Commons.First, however, Trudeau must visit the governor general – the largely ceremonial representative of King Charles – and officially tender his resignation. Carney will then swear oaths of office and allegiance and form a cabinet. This is expected to happen in the coming days.After his meeting with Trudeau, Carney said the transition “will be seamless and it will be quick.’Under Canadian law, an election period must be at least 37 days and no more than 51 days, with the vote falling on a Monday. Party insiders have indicated Canadians will probably vote on 28 April or 5 May.The former governor of the Bank of England and of Canada takes the job of prime minister as Ottawa finds itself at odds with its closest ally and largest trading partner. Last week Trump announced a 25% tax on all Canadian goods, with a carve-out for the automotive and energy sectors. The tariffs have the power to push Canada’s fragile economy into a recession.Carney spent much of his acceptance speech on Sunday evening foreshadowing the theme that will probably define his tenure as prime minister: conflict with the volatile and unpredictable president who has threatened repeatedly to annex Canada.“America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape or form,” Carney told supporters. “We didn’t ask for this fight. But Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” Carney said. “So the Americans, they should make no mistake, in trade as in hockey, Canada will win.While the Liberals trail slightly in the polls, Carney’s ascension within the party, and Trudeau’s exit, has dramatically revived their chances of eking out a victory in the next election – a result that was widely seen as unthinkable just weeks ago.Carney, a political novice who has never held elected office, also criticised his main political rival: the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre.“Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer. Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered,” Carney said. “Because a person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him.”Carney also suggested Poilievre’s partisan nature was a liability in the existential fight for Canada’s future. “His anger isn’t action. His division isn’t strength. Division won’t win a trade war,” he said.Earlier that evening, Poilievre accused Carney of being “sneaky” at a Sunday evening rally in London, Ontario.“And now our Liberal friends, after they’ve caused all this damage, are going to pull a sneaky trick. They’re going to try to get elected for a fourth term. A fourth term by replacing Justin Trudeau with his economic adviser, Mark Carney,” he said. “Carney’s advice drove up taxes, housing costs and food prices, while he personally profited from moving billions of dollars and thousands of jobs out of Canada to the United States.”Carney’s dominant win outshone most expectations and provides the leader with both a strong mandate and a unified party. He won in all 343 of the Liberal party districts. His closest rival, the former finance minister Chrystia Freeland finished a distant second with only 8% of the vote, and was unable to win the most votes in her own district. More

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      The Guardian view on Ursula von der Leyen’s first 100 days: the steepest of learning curves | Editorial

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      In a press conference on Sunday to mark 100 days since the beginning of her second term as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen erred on the side of understatement when asked whether she still considered the US to be an ally. The answer was yes, she replied, before adding that “we have our discussion points without question”.Hard to argue with that. Regarding the war in Ukraine, international trade and existential questions concerning the future of European defence and security, the geopolitical landscape bears no resemblance to the one that Ms von der Leyen looked out upon on 1 December. As Mr Trump and his “America first” outriders have confounded cherished assumptions about the transatlantic alliance, they have also sought to encourage authoritarian nationalism in EU member states.In France and Germany, the fabled engine of European integration, this has been uncomfortably akin to knocking at an open door. In Paris, days after Ms von der Leyen reassumed office, Michel Barnier’s shortlived government collapsed when Marine Le Pen pulled the rug from under it. In Germany, well before Elon Musk and JD Vance championed its cause, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party had reached historically high levels of support that would see it finish comfortably second in February’s snap German election.As Ms von der Leyen put it on Sunday: “Our European values, democracy, freedom, the rule of law are under threat.” The response, from Brussels and in national capitals, needs to be both robust and more expeditious than is often the case in the labyrinthine world of EU policymaking. Happily, the initial signs are positive.The move last week by EU leaders to disapply the bloc’s fiscal rules to military spending, potentially freeing up £670bn, is a significant step towards achieving greater strategic autonomy from Washington. It followed the unveiling of extraordinarily radical proposals in the same week by Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz. Bypassing a constitutional restriction on state borrowing, these are designed to facilitate not only far greater spending on defence, but also on the modernisation of a stagnating economy.After decades in which EU economic policy has been skewed by Berlin’s traditional debt aversion – shared with other “frugal” member states such as the Netherlands and Denmark – this is a very different direction of travel. As Europe exits an era defined by an uncritical commitment to free trade and dependency on the US security umbrella, it is also the right one. Recognising the desire of many member states to formalise common borrowing arrangements introduced following Covid, Ms von der Leyen said “nothing is off the table” in relation to defence. But, as the Draghi report argued last autumn, the same kind of fiscal firepower is required to meet the challenge of the green transition and compete with the US and China for the jobs and future industries of the 21st century.Last month in Brussels, a different kind of centenary was marked when a bust of a former commission president, Jacques Delors, was unveiled. Born in 1925, Mr Delors became the preeminent champion of a “social” vision, in which common EU institutions would deploy pooled resources in order to build a Europe where solidarity and growth were intertwined. That perspective faded from view following the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. As Ms von der Leyen navigates the rest of her five-year term, its time has come again.

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      Trump calls arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil ‘first of many to come’

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      Donald Trump said on Monday that the arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was the “first arrest of many to come”.“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” the US president wrote in a post on Truth Social.He added: “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”The White House amplified Trump’s comments in a post on X reading “Shalom, Mahmoud”, using a Hebrew word for goodbye.Trump’s remarks come as over the weekend federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card who is a recent Columbia graduate, and took him into custody, reportedly acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.In his statement on Monday, Trump said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) took Khalil into custody after his executive order and claimed, without evidence, that similar activists on college campuses are paid agitators, not students.Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators.Khalil’s attorney said this weekend that the arrest took place on Saturday night, when Khalil was in his university-owned apartment building, just a few blocks from Columbia’s main campus in New York. Several Ice agents entered the building and took him into custody.According to emails obtained by Zeteo, Khalil appealed in an email to Columbia for protection one day before Ice entered his apartment, telling the university’s interim president that he was being subjected to a “dehumanizing doxxing campaign” led by Columbia affiliates.“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that Ice or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” he wrote to Katrina Armstrong on 7 March, according to Zeteo. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”In a letter posted online Monday, Armstrong said that “rumors suggesting that any member of Columbia leadership requested the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on or near campus are false”.At first, it was reported that Khalil was taken to an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, but his wife said she could not locate him there.As of Monday morning, it appeared that he was now listed as being in Ice custody at La Salle detention facility in Louisiana.Free speech organizations, first amendment advocates and some New York City leaders expressed outrage in response to the unprecedented arrest and ongoing detainment of Khalil, calling it unconstitutional, “an egregious violation of the first amendment” and a “frightening weaponization of immigration law”.On Monday, a judge set a hearing for Wednesday in Manhattan federal court to consider Khalil’s challenge to his detention. More

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      The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?

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      With an imposing double-winged redbrick main building, and school songs lifted directly from Harrow’s songbook, Pretoria boys high school is every inch the South African mirror of the English private schools it was founded in 1901 to imitate.Elon Musk, who has rapidly become one of the most powerful people in US politics, spent his final school years in the 1980s as a day pupil on the lush, tree-filled campus in South Africa’s capital, close to his father’s large detached home in Waterkloof, a wealthy Pretoria suburb shaded by purple jacaranda blossoms in spring.View image in fullscreenSouth Africa was rocked by uprisings as apartheid entered its dying years. In 1984, black townships across the country revolted. By 1986, the white minority government had imposed a state of emergency. But in the segregated white enclaves, life was affluent and peaceful.“While the country as a whole was very much in flames and in turmoil, we were blissfully very safe in our little leafy suburbs, going about our very normal life,” said Jonathan Stewart, who was a year above Musk at Pretoria boys, which also counts the Labour politician Peter Hain, the Booker prize-winning novelist Damon Galgut and the murderer and Paralympian Oscar Pistorius among its former pupils.“You had this wealthy set, in relative terms, and everybody else was excluded.”View image in fullscreenMusk, who was born in Pretoria in 1971, railed on his social media platform X last month against the “openly racist laws” of the country of his birth and responded “yes” to the statement: “White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.”After the posts by the man now at the helm of Donald Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group Trump has created, the US president signed an executive order accusing South Africa’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners, citing a law allowing land to be expropriated in certain circumstances. The order cut aid to South Africa, which receives 17% of its HIV/Aids budget from the US, and offered asylum to Afrikaners.It was not clear the extent to which Musk, who left South Africa in 1989 for his mother’s country, Canada, and then went to the US, had a direct hand in encouraging Trump to issue the order.Trump has taken an interest in the alleged persecution of white South Africans since his first presidency, when an Afrikaner rights group travelled to the US to claim, falsely, that white farmers were being murdered for their land with the complicity of the government. Trump saw one of the group’s leaders interviewed on Fox News and tweeted his support.Trump has also been influenced by other interests, including US groups critical of South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, which he referred to in his executive order.View image in fullscreenBut with Musk now among Trump’s closest advisers, it is unlikely he has not made his views known to the president, given they are also tied up with his business interests in South Africa.Musk has claimed that land reform laws, in a country where the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still own more than 70% of agricultural land, are racist and amount to theft. He has endorsed claims that the killings of white farmers amount to genocide; research suggests the crimes are financially motivated.Musk’s attacks have ratcheted up at a time when he is in a dispute with the South African government about affirmative action laws, as he tries to sell his Starlink satellite network in the country. The world’s richest man objects to a law requiring that foreign investors in the telecoms sector provide 30% of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses.Trump’s executive order will add to the pressure on South Africa’s government to exempt Musk from the Black empowerment laws.X’s press team and Musk’s lawyer did not respond to interview requests or emailed questions.To what extent Musk’s years growing up under the collapsing apartheid regime influenced his positions today, from making what looked like a Nazi salute – a characterisation he rejects – at Trump’s inauguration celebrations last month to his embrace of far-right political parties such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, remains an open debate.View image in fullscreenWhite, English-speaking South Africans such as Musk’s family benefited from apartheid’s racial hierarchy but lived mostly separate lives from the ruling Afrikaners.Musk spent the first two years of South Africa’s five high school years at the all-white Bryanston high school in Johannesburg’s leafy northern suburbs. Founded in 1968, it is a mixed-sex, English-language, fee-paying state school, made up of rectangular mid-century buildings.Like South Africa then and now, Bryanston high was sports mad. “It was a little bit like when you think of American society,” said Lesley Burns, who finished at the school in 1984, Musk’s first year. “There were all the jocks and the popular guys in the football team.”Musk, who was on the school’s chess team in 1985, was viciously bullied. The hounding culminated with him being thrown down a set of stairs, beaten so badly that he was hospitalised. The school declined an interview.View image in fullscreenMusk’s father moved him and his brother, Kimbal, to Pretoria boys, where he was well liked, according to Gideon Fourie, who had computer science classes with Musk.“He was a very average personality,” Fourie said. “He wasn’t in any way like a super jock, or a super nerd, or a super punk … He had a group of friends.”South African media were subjected to strict government censorship. Newspapers would appear with censored sections blacked out, particularly reports of the growing unrest in the townships and mass arrests, until those were also banned.In contrast, the fee-paying Pretoria boys was liberal, for its time. In 1981 it became the first government school to admit a Black pupil. The then headteacher, Malcolm Armstrong, used a loophole that allowed it to let in the sons of diplomats from the “homelands” within South Africa that the apartheid system claimed were independent states.“Armstrong even defied the authorities by meeting with the ANC [African National Congress] in Dakar while it was still banned,” said Patrick Conroy, who was in Kimbal’s year, two years below Musk. “He frequently addressed our school assemblies, emphasising the importance of democracy, human rights and social justice.”The school’s current headteacher, Gregary Hassenkamp, was also in Kimbal’s year and has similar memories of his predecessor, although he noted that not all teachers shared Armstrong’s liberal views.View image in fullscreen“I remember him forcing boys to think about the country in which we lived and the attitudes we had,” Hassenkamp said in an interview in his wood-panelled office, wearing a flowing black gown and a tie and socks in the school’s red, white and green colours.Musk has previously described himself as “not a conservative” and backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, until he moved to the right. But Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces.In the 1930s, his grandfather headed an anti-democratic fringe political movement in Canada with fascist overtones, which campaigned for government by elite technocrats. He then moved to apartheid South Africa because the racist system appealed to him.Musk now appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler by backing Trump’s claim that the will of the president is paramount.Some of Musk’s school peers speculated that his current views of South Africa may be influenced by his missing out on the ups and downs of the negotiations to end apartheid and the “miracle” of Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first Black president in 1994.Since then, the governments led by Mandela’s ANC party have failed to address the world’s worst economic inequality. While its Black economic empowerment policies offer tax breaks and state contracts to Black-owned companies, Black people are five times likelier than white people to be unemployed. South Africa also has one of the world’s highest murder rates.It is not uncommon to hear white South Africans say they are being discriminated against, often citing affirmative action laws. In mid-February, hundreds gathered outside the US embassy in Pretoria carrying signs with slogans such as “Thank God for President Trump” and “Make South Africa Great Again”.View image in fullscreenWhile it is rare to hear white South Africans say they want a return to apartheid, it is also not uncommon to hear older people express nostalgia for that time.“It was a good time, because we had no crime. There were no problems. People, Blacks and whites, got on very well with each other,” Errol Musk said in a video interview from his spacious Cape Town home, when asked about his son Elon’s childhood. “Everything worked. That’s the reality. Of course people don’t want to hear that, but that’s the truth.”Musk and his two younger full siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, have had a tumultuous relationship with their father. Kimbal told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson that their father would scream at them for two to three hours, calling them worthless and pathetic. Their mother, Maye, has accused him of physical abuse.“It’s rubbish,” Errol said when asked about the allegations, which he has repeatedly denied.The brothers became estranged from their father in 2017, not for the first time, when he had a child with his 30-year-old stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, according to Isaacson. In Errol’s telling, they got angry with him when he expressed his support for Trump in 2016, at a party in Cape Town they threw for his 70th and Musk’s 45th birthdays.“Things changed when Biden came in and Elon realised they’re trying to destroy America,” Errol said. “Now we exchange messages about every day. Of course, he’s not always able to answer, so his PA will answer me.”Additional reporting by Chris McGreal More

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      As Wyoming slides further to the right, legislators double down on trans bills

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      When Wyoming legislators in 2022 passed a law banning trans girls from competing in middle and high school girls’ sports, the Cowboy State, by its governor’s own estimate, had a grand total of four transgender student athletes competing within its boundaries.Still, in this year’s legislative session, which wrapped up on Friday, trans athletes were again a focus of lawmakers. They introduced bills to extend the ban on trans women in athletics to intercollegiate sports and ban universities from competing against teams with trans women.Lawmakers also proposed legislation requiring public facilities from restrooms to sleeping quarters to correspond with assigned sex at birth, restrooms in public schools to have exclusive use designations by assigned sex at birth, prohibiting the state from requiring the use of preferred pronouns, and establishing legal definitions for “biological sex”, “man” and “woman”.Five of the seven bills made it through the legislature. The volume of proposals spotlights the new conservative vision of the role of government emerging in the state, as well as the Republican divisions on the issue.Debate on trans-focused bills isn’t new to this legislative session. In 2022, Mark Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, described the state’s trans sports bill as “draconian” but still let it pass into law. Last year, 10 bills were introduced on the topic, and the legislature enacted a ban on gender affirming care for minors.Wyoming politicians pushed controversy over the inclusion of a trans woman in a Wyoming sorority in 2022, and in 2024 over the University of Wyoming’s scheduled volleyball game against San Jose State University, whose team has a trans woman. Wyoming ultimately forfeited the game.But the intense focus on the issue comes as Wyoming, never exactly a liberal state, has slid further to the right in recent years, a trend evidenced by an escalation of social issue bills that wouldn’t be out of place in Washington DC or other red-state legislatures.For Santi Murillo, the first trans athlete at the University of Wyoming, the influx of bills has been dehumanizing.“I consider myself to be a good person who contributes back to my community. But because I’m trans, I’m being attacked,” Murillo, who is also the communications director for LGBTQ+ non-profit Wyoming Equality, said. “That’s what a lot of that fear comes from, is being labeled as Santi the trans person, not Santi the cheer coach, not Santi my neighbor.”Several Republican lawmakers who’ve introduced or sponsored trans bills this year said their proposals were aimed at protecting women and girls. “To protect safe spaces and to create level playing fields for women, biological women, that’s the sole intent of these types of bills,” said Republican representative Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, the chair of the state’s newly empowered Freedom caucus and the primary sponsor of “Biological Males in Women’s Sports”.It’s a topic legislators say they have found high on the minds of their constituents. “I have a very conservative rural district, and they just want to see these things addressed and some policies put out,” said Martha Lawley, a Republican representative who sponsored two related bills this session. She said that she heard more about the topic than any other from her constituents in the past year.That concern is new, said Murillo, now 27. Murillo said she didn’t see this level of fear in the Wyoming she grew up in. She transitioned while a cheerleader at the University of Wyoming, which put her squarely in the public eye.“I had a really positive transition experience for the most part. Especially doing so very publicly,” Murillo said. “UW games are huge, especially football games. There’s no hiding there.”Murillo views the current debate as driven by politicians, not people.So does Sara Burlingame, the director at Wyoming Equality. She believes that some see the spotlight on trans issues as an effective wedge issue to both motivate hardline voters to the polls, and split conservatives, much like efforts to ban gay marriage used to.“Far-right Republicans recognized that they used to be able to fundraise and campaign off of gay panic,” Burlingame said. “They’re looking at what hits that sweet spot of lighting up people’s amygdala and getting them all fired up. And they feel like, hey, if someone you know was carrying this message, I would go and vote for them. I would drive myself to the polls.”The focus on trans issues detracts from conversations about other major challenges ahead in the state, Burlingame said, like declining revenues in the gas and oil market that are leaving a gap in public funding. “I think they don’t have a solution for that,” Burlingame said of some Republican legislators. “So their solution is to attack trans kids.”Burlingame sees the hyper-focus on gender as a departure from decades of Wyoming politics that erred toward libertarianism and small government, a departure that sped up this year as Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus became the first chapter of the nationally-based Freedom Caucus to take control of a state house.“In the past, we had old, white, rancher Republican men who had no fondness for different gender identities or sexual orientation,” she said. “But they had a very specific belief in the role of government, and they wouldn’t vote to take anybody’s rights away because they just didn’t believe that was the role of government.”Senator Cale Case is one of those Republicans outspoken in his opposition to the trans bills. Case, in the legislature since 1993, questions what problem they aim to solve, and said their sponsors are driven by fear.“They don’t like to hear the word tolerance. They talk about freedom, and they have lots of bills with freedom in the title, but their bills restrict freedoms,” Case said.Within supporters of the bills, there are divisions, too.Jayme Lien, the representative who brought the What is a Woman Act, said she has not spoken with LGBTQ+ Wyomingites about the bill. Lien pointed towards testimony from the national group Gays Against Groomers, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a far-right extremist group of self-identified LGBTQ+ people engaged in anti-trans organizing, in support of her legislation and argued that the safety concerns of LGBTQ residents were misplaced.“I just want them to know that this is to protect them as well. And I think in the long run, once it’s implemented into law, they will see that this also protects them and their culture and community,” Lien argued.Republican senator Wendy Schuler brought the state’s 2022 bill limiting trans girls’ access to certain sports team, and she introduced “Fairness in Sports – Intercollegiate Athletics” in this year’s legislative session.Schuler, who competed in five varsity athletics at the University of Wyoming said that she “doesn’t know what the answer is” for transgender athletes in Wyoming, but that her priority is “making sure our biological girls were all taken care of in terms of their access to athletics”.“I understand the trans athletes here, she said. “I totally get where they’re coming from, because I had to sit on the sidelines while I was playing baseball with my brothers.”Schuler said that she consulted with teenagers and some transgender Wyomingites in writing her bills, which lead to exemptions for non-contact sports.While standing firm behind sports bills, Schuler derided the bills focused on bathroom usage and the legal definitions as an ineffective use of legislative time, and indicative of national theatrics meeting Wyoming politics.“In terms of the bathroom stuff, and you know what is a woman and some of these other bills that have come through the pipe this year, I just think we had lots more important things we should have been focusing on,” Schuler said. “But that’s what the social issues of the day seem to be.”In what she owned as a “contradiction”, Schuler voted yes on all three bills that came before her.Schuler said she “thinks the world” of Murillo, and Murillo and Burlingame also spoke kindly of Schuler.For Murillo, having friendships with people she views as infringing on her rights is complicated, but is a sort of necessity when advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in deep-red states.“It’s a totally different kind of ball game,” Murillo said. “Doing this work in a red state, you have to be willing to have those conversations. You have to be willing to set aside those things, find that common ground.”If current political trends continue, Burlingame and Murillo fear that there will be less legislators willing to work out compromises. Wyoming’s 2024 summer primary saw complete Republican upheaval and a glut of mailers, often accusing politicians of a “radical gender agenda”. Case said that there is pressure on elected officials in Wyoming to toe the line, or else.“Some of my colleagues who still have a longer career ahead of them, and also have aspirations, are in agony on every one of these votes. These are good people, friends of mine,” Case said. “I’m not doing that. I’m gonna get pounded for this. It might cost an election. But honestly, I don’t think it’s right and I feel so much better inside.”Murillo said in light of rhetoric surrounding the flood of legislation, she no longer considers Wyoming a safe place to be transgender.“I definitely used to feel safe here, but no, not any more. I feel like the air has just shifted here,” Murillo said. More