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      US election live: Harris says Puerto Ricans ‘deserve better’ as outcry grows over ‘hateful’ Trump rally remarks

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      The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has released a statement condemning the “shameful rhetoric” displayed at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Monday, where speakers made racist remarks about immigrants, and one speaker described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”.In the statement, the caucus called the language and rhetoric at the rally as “not only divisive but dangerous”.
      Hateful rhetoric has real-world consequences. When political leaders, influencers, and those with a large social platform choose language that dehumanizes communities, families get hurt, and hate crimes rise.
      The statement continues:
      This type of language emboldens prejudice, encourages violence, and undermines the values of unity and respect that our country is built on. It’s deeply troubling to see Republican leaders celebrate this rhetoric instead of promoting unity and truth.
      Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.However, some observers and Democratic politicians believed the most telling remark of the night came from the Republican nominee himself after he introduced Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, on stage and alluded to a shared secret.“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections at stake next week.“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret – we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”Read more:Kamala Harris’s campaign has seized on the racist remarks about Puerto Rico at Donald Trump’s New York rally on Sunday in a new campaign ad in which the vice-president argues “Puerto Ricans deserve better.”In the ad released on Monday, Harris also criticized Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island and killed thousands of people in 2017. “He abandoned the island and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults,” she said.A report from 2021 found that the Trump administration delayed $20bn in aid to Puerto Rico after the hurricane.Donald Trump has pledged to gut the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate law, even though some of his closest allies have benefitted from it.At least seven of Trump’s associates and fundraisers – or the companies they run – have obtained incentives thanks to the climate law, Reuters first reported.The IRA increased consumer interest in clean energy loans from California-based financial technology company Mosaic, which counts Trump’s son-in-law and former White House senior advisor Jared Kushner’s private equity fund Affinity Partners as an investor. Another IRA beneficiary was carbon capture and sequestration project Summit Carbon Solutions, in which Trump ally Harold Hamm’s fossil fuel company Continental Resources invested $250m in 2022.Though its founder Elon Musk has attacked the IRA, Tesla has also received gargantuan subsidies from the IRA. Musk is one of Trump’s most consequential boosters.Vicki Hollub, the Occidental Petroleum CEO and a major Trump donor and fundraiser, has also benefited from the IRA’s carbon capture tax credit and other subsidies. And pipeline company Energy Transfer – headed by longtime Trump supporter Kelcy Warren – participates in carbon capture and hydrogen projects boosted by IRA tax credits.The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act represented the biggest green downpayment in American history. Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the law.Kamala Harris took another swipe at her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, during her visit to a semiconductor plant in Michigan.She attacked the former president again for the tone and content of his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, and defended the Chips and Science Act she said he wanted to abandon:
      We are eight days out from an election, so I’ve got to also talk about the contrast, because my opponent spends full time talking about, just kind of diminishing who we are as America, and talking down at people, talking about that we’re the garbage can of the world. We’re not.
      He just recently did a radio talk show and talked about how he’d get rid of the Chips act. That was billions of dollars investing in just the kind of work that’s happening here. And you know how we did it? We created tax credits to create the incentive for the private sector to do this work. That’s good work.
      When he was president, he sold advanced chips to China that helped them with their agenda to modernize their military. That’s not about what’s in the best interest of America’s security and prosperity, which should be two of the highest priorities for president of the US.
      There is a very serious choice presented in the next eight days. And as much as anything it is a question about what is the direction of the future that we want for our country.
      As Donald Trump’s campaign faces intense criticism over racist remarks from a speaker at the Republican candidate’s New York rally on Sunday, JD Vance has responded by saying that Americans need to “stop getting offended”.Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster and comedian who spoke ahead of Trump at Madison Square Garden, described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”. His comments have drawn widespread condemnation and outrage.Trump’s running mate said he had “heard about” the joke, and argued that Kamala Harris is painting the former president’s supporters as “Nazis”.“I think that it’s telling that Kamala Harris’s closing message is essentially that all of Donald Trump’s voters are Nazis and you should get really pissed off about a comedian telling a joke. That is not the message of a winning campaign.“I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m so over it.”The Puerto Rican singer Marc Anthony has just posted a stinging attack on Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, reminding voters how the then president “blocked billions in relief while thousands died” on the island after 2017’s Hurricane Maria.“I’m here to tell you that even though some have forgotten … I remember. I remember what it was like when Trump was president. I remember what he did and said, about Puerto Rico … About our people,” he posted on X to his 11m followers:
      I remember after Hurricane Maria devastated our island… Trump blocked billions in relief … while thousands died. I remember that when our families lacked clean water and electricity, Trump threw paper towels and called Puerto Rico ‘dirty’ and ‘poor.’

      But I was not surprised … because I ALSO remember … he launched his campaign by calling Latinos criminals and rapists. He’s told us what he’ll do. He’ll separate children from their families and threatened to use the ARMY to do it.
      This election goes way beyond political parties. Now let’s remember what the United States represents and stands for. It’s our name – United. Regardless of where we’re from. I’m Marc Anthony … I remember.
      Police say they have identified “a suspect vehicle” connected to incendiary devices that set fire to separate ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington state early on Monday, the Associated Press reports.Surveillance images captured a Volvo stopping at a drop box in Portland, Oregon, just before security personnel nearby discovered a fire inside the box, officials said.That fire damaged three ballots inside. Around the same time, a fire was set at a drop box in nearby Vancouver, Washington, on early Monday, and hundreds of ballots were destroyed.Authorities said at a news conference in Portland that enough material from the incendiary devices was recovered to show that the two fires Monday were connected, and were also linked to an incident on 8 October when an incendiary device was placed at a different ballot drop box in Vancouver.Read more:The Nevada supreme court on Monday upheld the state’s post-election deadline for mail ballots lacking a postmark, CNN reported. The ruling is a rejection of a lawsuit brought by Republicans and the Trump campaign.The lawsuit challenged Nevada’s acceptance of mail ballots that are missing postmarks up to three days after an election. The supreme court, however, said the plaintiffs had failed to make a convincing case.“Notably, the RNC [Republican national committee] presented no evidence or allegations that counting mail ballots without postmarks … would be subject to voter fraud, or that the election security measures currently in place are inadequate to address its concerns regarding these ballots,” the ruling said.According to CNN, a similar case was filed by Republicans in federal court, but the US ninth circuit court of appeals is unlikely to resolve that case before next Tuesday’s election.Kamala Harris has been touring a semiconductor plant in Saginaw county, Michigan, on Monday afternoon, and talking up the Chips and Science Act.The Democratic presidential nominee said that if she wins next week’s election she will be reassessing “on day one” which federal jobs require a college degree and which ones do not.The comment, at the Hemlock Semiconductor facility in Hemlock, is both a policy proposal and a political bridge, the Associated Press news agency said, reporting her visit.One of the clearest political divides in the nation over the past few presidential cycles has been between college-educated and non-college-educated voters, with Democrats acknowledging they need to cut into Donald Trump’s support among the latter group, it said.“One of the things immediately is to reassess federal jobs, and I have already started looking at it, to look at which ones don’t require a college degree,” Harris said. “Because here is the thing: that’s not the only qualification for a qualified worker.”Earlier in her speech, Harris said: “We need to get in front of this idea that only high-skilled jobs require college degrees.”Moms for Liberty, a rightwing activist group focusing on education, launched a video ad in four battleground states on Monday targeting a Biden administration rule protecting LGBTQ+ students from gender bias.The ad, titled That’s Not Fair, features a father comforting his athlete daughter after she lost a race. “Dad, it’s not fair! I had to run against a boy! It’s not right,” the girl tells her father, who replies: “I know.”The ad will air in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.In June, a federal judge in Louisiana appointed by Donald Trump blocked the Biden administration from enforcing an education department rule extending sex discrimination protections under Title IX to LGBTQ+ students in Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho. More

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      in US Politics

      Outcry over Trump’s hint at ‘little secret’ with House Republicans

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      Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.However, some observers and Democratic politicians believed the most telling remark of the night came from the Republican nominee himself after he introduced Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, on stage and alluded to a shared secret.“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections at stake next week.“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret – we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”Trump embellished the tease with no further clues. But commentators and some Democrats drew their own conclusions.In its Playbook column, Politico described the aside as “potentially … sinister comments that could be a reference to the House settling a contested election”.Dan Goldman, a Democratic representative from New York, was more explicit, telling CNN that Trump’s motivation for staging the rally – in a state he has no chance of winning – was boosting Republican candidates in an effort to ensure a Republican majority in Congress at a time when it will have the role of certifying the presidential election result.“Why did Donald Trump come to New York nine days before the election? The state is going to go to Kamala Harris,” Goldman said.“The answer is that the House really runs through New York. There are seven races that could go either way in the house, and that will likely determine the majority.“On January 6, the certification of the electoral college will happen again, and as we know from 2021, whoever is in control of the House of Congress will have a lot of say on what happens on January 6. I suspect Donald Trump’s little secret plan with Mike Johnson is a backup plan for when he loses and he tries to go to the House of Representatives to throw out the electoral college.”The situation under a Republican-controlled Congress would be a reverse of the certification process that followed the 2020 election, Goldman said. Then, Trump tried to deploy the then vice-president, Mike Pence – presiding over affairs in his constitutional role – to block the procedure at a time when the Senate and the House were controlled by the Democrats.The gambit failed when Pence refused to play along, precipitating the attack on the US Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob, some of whom called for Pence to be hanged.“If it’s the reverse, the Republicans have a lot more opportunity and a lot more possibilities for overturning this election,” Goldman said. “That I believe is what Donald Trump’s secret with Mike Johnson was.”Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, played a key role in Trump’s attempt to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, supporting a Texas lawsuit that attempted to overturn the results in four swing states. He also voted with 146 other Republicans in Congress in favour of overturning the results.

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      On Monday, he responded obliquely to accusations that he and Trump were planning a repeat scenario but did not deny it – instead switching the focus to supposed “secrets” the Democrats had withheld.“Speaking of secrets, Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret,” he wrote, referring to unproven accusations that the White House had covered up an age-related decline in the president’s cognitive abilities.“They also knew that Russia collusion was a fake and kept that secret too. It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump and now they care?“By definition, a secret is not to be shared – and I don’t intend to share this one.” More

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      Anita Hill empathizes with ‘irritatingly familiar’ insults against Harris in op-ed

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      Anita Hill, former clerk to US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has said “racist, misogynist and sexist insults” aimed at Kamala Harris “must sting”.In a New York Times opinion piece published Monday, the Brandeis University professor who was famously brought before Thomas’s confirmation hearings only to have her sexual harassment allegations against him picked apart by sitting senators, wrote that she sympathizes with the US vice-president.“Maintaining integrity in politics can be a hard needle to thread,” Hill acknowledged, and advised Harris to “defend herself against the assaults and also vigorously prosecute the case against Mr Trump”.But she said it is “not easy to remain calm and collected in the glare of intense public scrutiny, especially when the opposition is set on denying your integrity, competence and accomplishments”.“No presidential nominees in modern history have faced such a direct challenge to the authenticity of their identity and by extension their qualifications to be the president,” she added.Hill said that interruptions by Fox News’s anchor Bret Baier during his recent interview with Harris was “irritatingly familiar”, though Baier later explained these were efforts to “redirect” the Democrat presidential candidate because otherwise her “long answers” would “eat up all the time of this interview that was live-to-tape”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDonald Trump has viciously attacked Harris repeatedly, including questioning her racial identity. Harris is the daughter of an Indian American mother and a Jamaican American father and has embraced both her Black and south Asian heritage.Thomas’s former clerk went on to advise Harris to “never let the people who despise you define you” and wrote that Harris should not allow herself to be influenced by other people’s perceptions of her.“Her refusal to be thrown on the defensive by personal attacks – Ms Harris is showing people how to protect and nurture their own self-worth,” she wrote, noting that “hubris, dissembling, anger, fear mongering and personal grievances are brandished and accepted as proof of power, confidence and competence” in politics.But her central call was for Harris to restore respect for the US legal system in a way that makes clear “we have moved beyond the historical understandings that freedom, rights and liberty are limited to the powerful and rich”.Irrespective of the result of next week’s election, Hill said, the vice-president “has already introduced an American political future that promises a recognition of human dignity as its bedrock”. More

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      in US Politics

      Early ballots burned in suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon

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      Hundreds of early ballots cast for the US presidential election have been burned in two suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon, exacerbating tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s knife-edge contest.Police said Monday that the fires in the two states were believed to be connected and that a vehicle involved had been identified, according to the Associated Press.Firefighters went to the scene after smoke was reported coming from a ballot drop box in the city of Vancouver in Washington state at 6.30am on Monday, according to local media.KATU, a local television channel, reported capturing footage of responders releasing a pile of burning ballots to the grounds. The ballots continued to smolder after the flames had been doused.Hundreds of ballots were believed to have been inside when smoke was reported billowing from the box, which had last been emptied at 8am on Sunday. KATU reported that only a few of the ballots deposited there after that had been saved.The elections auditor for Clark county, the local authority administering the boxes, said voters who had cast their ballots into it after 11am could seek new voting documents at a link on the county’s election web page.“There is absolutely zero place in our democracy for political violence or interference against our fellow citizens, election workers, or voting infrastructure … Our right to vote needs to be protected under all circumstances. We can’t yield to intimidation, and we must continue to stand up against unpatriotic acts such as this one,” said local congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.She requested law enforcement officers be in place overnight at all ballot drop boxes in the county until election day, saying: “South-west Washington cannot risk a single vote being lost to arson and political violence.”The fire was reported after a similar incident in nearby Portland in Oregon, where police say an incendiary device was set off inside a ballot drop box close to a building hosting the Multnomah county elections division.Security staff extinguished the fire before police arrived. The device was deactivated and removed by the local bomb squad.The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned of ballot drop box destruction in a September memo obtained by Property of the People, a public records watchdog group. The agency said in an intelligence brief that election infrastructure will be seen as an “attractive target for some domestic violent extremists”, with drop boxes as a “soft target” because they are more accessible.Social media posters in forums frequented by extremists have shared ideas for attacked drop boxes, the agency said, including “road flares, fireworks, petroleum fuel, linseed oil and white phosphorus, cement or expanding foam, bleach or other chemicals, and farm machinery”. Other methods could include putting up fake signs to claim a drop box is out of order, putting up decoy drop boxes or putting “timed explosives” into drop boxes. They have also discussed ways to avoid law enforcement detection.“Damaged ballot drop boxes could temporarily decrease voting opportunities and accessibility and intimidate voters from casting votes if safety concerns arise in the vicinity of a targeted or damaged ballot drop box,” the DHS wrote in the intelligence brief. “Successful ballot drop box destruction could inspire others with related grievances to conduct similar actions.”The incidents came days after a US Postal Service mail box containing a small number of ballots was set on fire in Phoenix, Arizona, last Thursday.Police arrested a 35-year-old man who they said admitted to the crime while he was in custody. They also said he had told them his actions had not been politically motivated and he had committed the offense with the purpose of getting himself arrested.The Guardian has reported that far-right election denial groups supporting Donald Trump have been monitoring election drop boxes as part of their activity in the run-up to next week’s poll, when officials are bracing themselves for disruption and challenges to the vote tallies. More

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      Therapy-speak and 80s hairstyles: will Harris’s Brené Brown sit-down swing white female voters?

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      In the quest to win over white female voters – 53% of whom showed up for Donald Trump in 2020 – Kamala Harris made her case on a podcast hosted by one of their beloved avatars, the vulnerability researcher Brené Brown. The episode, released on Monday, was a mostly fluffy discussion about leadership, trauma and the notion of voting as agency in an uncontrollable news cycle.Brown, a University of Houston professor and bestselling author who has spent two decades studying social sciences, became an overnight celebrity after giving a 2010 Ted Talk called “the power of vulnerability”. One could argue the talk, which birthed Brown’s Oprah-approved speaking empire, also spawned our culture’s current obsession with therapy-speak.Brown’s mottos, such as “courage over comfort” and “what we know matters, but who we are matters more”, align with Harris’s oft-maligned tendency toward a self-help speaking style and vibes-only posturing. Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us, leads the relationship genre on Apple Podcasts. The vice-president’s campaign might have also hoped that an endorsement from Brown, a 58-year-old church-going Texan, will swing undecided white female voters – a crucial demographic that would help shore up Harris’s record support among women and counterbalance Trump’s popularity with men.That’s not to say Brown’s own politics are inscrutable: she reportedly donated to the White Women for Kamala Harris fundraiser, and she kicked off the episode by declaring herself an “unapologetic Harris/Walz supporter”. Thus began an hour-long chat about “courageous leadership”.Harris spoke about the importance of family and friends as a support system for leaders. She spoke lovingly of her mother, a late cancer researcher, and of her lifelong girlfriends whom she considers just as valuable, if not more so, than romantic partners – a line that probably resonated with gen Z women, who increasingly prioritize platonic relationships, and the many older women who are learning to live alone. When asked about her two biggest values in a leader, Harris called out “fairness and justice”. “That’s so powerful,” Brown cooed back.With just a week to go before election day, as she struggles to communicate policy issues with voters, Harris cycled through her greatest hits. While speaking on reproductive rights, she said she was the first sitting vice-president to have visited an abortion clinic. She imagined Trump in the Oval Office on the first day of his second presidency drafting an “enemies list”, unlike the “to-do list” she would be looking at – he’ll stew while she gets to work. In this vein, much of the conversation focused on fear of another Trump presidency. Using a favorite therapy buzzword, Harris said Americans were “traumatized” by the “cruelty” of Trump’s Maga movement. “Trauma blunts our senses,” and voting blue was a way to take back some of the power, she said.Harris seems to genuinely enjoy speaking to people in these lower-stakes, conversational formats, and some of her standout bits with Brown appeared off the cuff. We learned that her college nickname was “C Cubed”, which stood for “cool, calm and collected”. And despite having what Brown described as a “Depeche Mode haircut” in her 20s (a closely cropped, asymmetrical look), Harris said she was never big on the goth sound – though her husband, Doug Emhoff, loves the group.Except for the two women’s emphatic support of abortion rights, the chat came off as cozy and largely apolitical. That tactic could play well with Unlocking Us listeners, who probably come to Brown’s lovey-dovey podcast as an escape from the hyper-partisan news cycle. Harris seemed, if not the candidate you want to have a beer with, then the pleasant-enough person sitting next to you at an airport bar sipping on a glass of chardonnay.Positioned against Trump’s macho posturing, which reached an apex this weekend with an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast and the racist Madison Square Garden bonanza, Brown’s interview with Harris was like a cardigan on the first day of fall. And we know how much white women love fall. More

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      Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement

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      The furore over the Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement continued on Monday, with writers for the newspaper pleading with subscribers not to cancel as it would only hurt journalists who did not make the call.The newspaper owned by the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos was thrown into a pre-election inferno on Friday when it announced that it would abandon a five-decade convention of making a formal presidential endorsement.Reaction was swift, with the famed Watergate investigative duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slamming the decision as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process” ahead of the 5 November election.But there are developing signs of a pushback to calls to cancel Washington Post subscriptions, with writers for the newspaper pointing out that doing so was ultimately counterproductive.Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said he could not endorse the calls to cancel. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77m on the Post in 2023, because the paper is just “pocket change” to the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.“But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.”But he added that if the non-endorsement was “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity … my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse”.Milbank pointed out that Bezos had typically not interfered with the Post before the newspaper’s brass refused to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. The non-endorsement policy was announced shortly before executives of Blue Origin met with Donald Trump as the Republican White House nominee campaigns for a second presidency.From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”By mid-Monday, reports indicated that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, according to NPR. The publication noted that the number was “about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well”.But some argue it would be better to cancel subscriptions to Bezos’s Amazon Prime service.The mood in the Washington Post was still “pretty furious”, an employee there told the Guardian on Monday. And there were moves toward greater union involvement.The employee confirmed that workers were worried that subscription cancellations could ultimately boomerang on them with further job losses.The Post’s non-endorsement decision was made public by Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer since January. He said that Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of the spiked Harris endorsement.“I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” Lewis – who previously rose through the ranks of British newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – wrote in a statement on Sunday. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”Nonetheless, under Lewis’s leadership, the Post has issued endorsements this election cycle, including in a US Senate seat race in Maryland.Within hours of the announcement on Friday, 11 Post opinion columnists co-signed a column condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive senator Bernie Sanders alluded to multibillion contracts Amazon holds with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, to explain the decision. Sanders said Bezos “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts” if the former president returns to power. “Pathetic,” Sanders said.On Monday, Michelle Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post, said she would resign, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.Norris follows Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, who left the paper after the non-endorsement announcement.David Hoffman, an editorial board member who recently accepted a Pulitzer for a series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, is also said to be resigning.Among those to cancel Post subscriptions since Friday is the former Republican congresswoman turned Trump critic Liz Cheney. She accused Bezos – who owns the paper through a for-profit subsidiary of an investment fund Nash Holdings LLC – of being “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump”.The Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford also posted that they had canceled.The Post’s controversy erupted days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Harris. The LA newspaper also faced a wave of subscription cancellations.But the LA outlet has sought to cast its non-endorsement decision as more straightforward, with its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framing the matter as an attempt at neutrality.On Saturday, his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza.“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she said in a statement. More

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      Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: ‘We want to make America hate again’

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      The founder of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that played a major role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and was memorably instructed by Donald Trump to “stand back and stand by”, has told the makers of a Trump documentary: “We want to make America hate again.”Gavin McInnes, the UK-born British Canadian citizen who co-founded Vice magazine and was influential in the New York hipster scene of the early 2000s before becoming a far-right militia figure, also claimed to the BBC that his group wasn’t responsible for what happened that day.“It was you,” he told the makers of the documentary, which has aired on the BBC’s Panorama strand. “If anyone should apologise … it should be the corrupt leftwing media, and I’ll accept your apology now if you want to do it.”The program – Trump: A Second Chance? – talks to ardent Trump supporters about their enduring support for the New York property developer and reality TV show figure who faced two impeachment inquiries during four years in office and has been indicted in four separate criminal cases since, including being found guilty of 34 felony counts.Polls suggest an exceptionally tight US presidential race, with the final few days of campaigning before next week’s vote characterized by Democrats’ claims that a second Trump term would plunge the US into a period of neo-fascism.At a packed Trump rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, the speakers rotated between patriotism and grievance, including a podcaster who called the unincorporated US territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, made lewd comments about Latinos, depicted Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers.McInnes, designated a “terrorist entity” by the Canadian government and described by Vanity Fair as “one of our era’s most troubling extremists”, was not at the January 6 protest. But about 50 members of the Proud Boy group faced charges for their part in the insurrection, which was staged to prevent the certification of the 2020 election.The Proud Boys chair, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, 39, of Miami, Florida, was sentenced to 22 years in prison last year after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the sentences that the Proud Boy members received reflected “the danger their crimes pose to our democracy” and Tarrio had “learned that the consequence of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power”.McInnes resigned from the Proud Boys in November 2018 after 10 members were charged in connection with a brawl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But in 2022, he was pictured in a black hoodie embroidered with the gold Proud Boy logo.McInnes said on his Get Off My Lawn podcast that he was wearing the Proud Boy regalia “as an homage to our brothers behind bars”.Last month, McInnes was scheduled to speak at dinner hosted by Uncensored America, a student organization at the University of South Carolina. The invitation misspelled Kamala Harris’s first name in a sexually suggestive way, the news station WIS 10 reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcInnes’s planned appearance at the event sparked controversy over free speech on campus. A petition protesting against the event argued it contributed to “overall negative environment that the university continues to allow”.In response, McInnes said he would not be the one bringing hate to the event, and repeated the sentiment he offered to Panorama.“If you’re looking for violence you’re looking on the wrong side of the political spectrum. The left are the violent ones. They burnt down this country for two years straight. We had one riot on January 6,” he said.He said the dinner, a “roast” in colloquial terms, was set to “make fun of what could be the worst president in American history”, referring to Harris’s candidacy.The impending election is predicted in polls to fall along gender lines. Polls show men are more likely to say efforts to promote gender equality have gone too far and plan to vote for Trump. Women are more apt to say those efforts haven’t gone far enough, and plan to vote for Harris. The margins for each are split roughly 60-40. More

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      It’s easy for the British to insult Donald Trump – but here’s why it’s a very bad idea | Simon Jenkins

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      Is it wise for Britons to heap abuse on Donald Trump? At present he is the marginal favourite to win next week’s US presidential election – with Britons strongly behind his opponent Kamala Harris. But is overt hostility sensible?Most recent polls show two out of three Britons want Harris to win, including a majority even of Conservatives. The Labour party sent about 100 activists to aid Harris in some swing states. The UK media is almost universally hostile, calling Trump crass, illiterate, vulgar, coarse and fascist. He is identified with the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian Project 2025, which he has disowned. Only Reform UK is for Trump. Surely dignity would counsel respect for an ally’s internal democracy, and caution in alienating the leader of Britain’s most powerful ally.First, what’s new? Britain’s Labour and the US’s Democratic party have bonded for decades, including canvassing and attending each other’s conferences. As a student I once campaigned for Mayor Lindsay in New York, and I have a free tie to prove it. The US has itself interfered in Latin American elections since time began. Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf in 2016, with Operation Lakhta, though Trump denied it. Moscow blatantly interfered in elections this month in Moldova and Georgia.A different question is whether it is wise. Americans can refer to Trump as a fascist, but such facile parallels do little beyond enraging their subjects. More to the point, British opinions on the matter are more likely to evoke the reaction of “mind your own business”. Trump’s first term of office might have had its alarming moments, but the US constitution saw him off – just – and may yet do so again.In 2017, Trump welcomed the British prime minister, Theresa May, to the White House, and rather endearingly held her hand. The British press sniggered. When the BBC asked him a viciously biased question, claiming to represent “our viewers”, he was able to laugh it off. In the same outgoing spirit, he invited Keir Starmer to dine with him for two hours last month and congratulated him on his election success. These may be merely the courtesies expected of public figures, but Trump adhered to them.American presidents are complicated. They are political leaders, but they are also heads of state. Diplomatic custom accords them a certain dignity. In Trump’s case, diplomacy must tilt in the same direction. Britons were annoyed when Barack Obama expressed a strong opinion on the side of remain in the Brexit referendum. But when Boris Johnson sought a trade deal in Washington to compensate for withdrawing from the EU single market, he got short shrift. Trump is threatening to go a step further and impose a punishing 10% tariff on all British exports to the US.This is something Starmer could well do without. He is proposing to penalise American non-doms in Britain in the budget. He may also need to react to a Trump withdrawal of US aid to Ukraine, and his demand for a step-change in British defence spending. Other things being equal, personally insulting the president in such circumstances seems plain stupid.Trump represents a periodic surge in US rightwing populism. It is a turning against the supposedly liberal east- and west-coast governing elites. Its politics is proletarian, xenophobic, protectionist and conservative. This may not be to every Briton’s taste, though Britain saw a similar surge in Reform UK’s vote at this year’s election, disguised by it splitting a Conservative majority vote.Such results are the privilege of the franchise. Liberal democrats can bewail them, but they must respect the winners – even if the losers sometimes do not. They must also treat with the winners in the rough and tumble of international politics. Ostracism is never the answer. Disrespecting the outcome of democracy is the shortcut to disaster.

      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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