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      Media blitz to VP duties: on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris

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      The View, America’s most popular daytime talkshow, was on commercial break. Kamala Harris sat writing absence notes for students who were missing class to attend the live broadcast. “Is it just today, right?” the vice-president laughed.She handed over the letters written on notepaper headed “The Vice President”. One said: “Dear teacher, please excuse Dani from class today. She was hanging out with us. Best and thank you for being an educator. Kamala.”It was an unscripted moment that the studio audience loved but TV viewers wouldn’t see. Harris, running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history after being unexpectedly plunged into the fight when Joe Biden dropped out, is exploring ways to reveal herself to a wary nation.Still a relatively unknown quantity, the former California attorney general and US senator is trying to make the electorate feel comfortable about the prospect of President Kamala Harris.In less than three months the vice-president has raised a record-breaking billion dollars. She has tried to put daylight between herself and the unpopular incumbent figure of Biden, and turn the election into a referendum on her opponent, former US president Donald Trump. She has sought to bring positive vibes to a country that seems to have anxiety in its bones. She has set out to persuade America to do something that it has never done before in its 248-year existence: elect a woman to the White House – and a woman of colour to boot.View image in fullscreenHarris has done it while carrying the burden of the hopes of millions in America and beyond who fear the return of Trump to the White House would herald a new dark age for American democracy and the planet. Opinion polls suggest the race is currently a dead heat.Last week the Guardian joined her for three days on the campaign trail, flying hundreds of miles across country on Air Force Two, trailing her motorcade as it halted traffic in Manhattan and putting questions to her in two off-the-record gatherings with reporters. The Democratic nominee was lawyerly on some topics and disarmingly open on others. She could display righteous anger, for example about Trump’s affinity with dictators, but also a light touch and homespun wit. She was comfortable in her skin.No presidential candidate has enjoyed the use of Air Force Two since Democrat Al Gore in 2000. At first glance it resembles the presidential plane, Air Force One, painted blue and white with the typeface for the legend “United States of America” similar to the one used in the Declaration of Independence.But inside it is a less glamorous affair: dated decor of dark brown chairs, white cabin walls, a blank TV screen. Inside a seat pocket was a tatty, dog-eared leaflet entitled: “C-32A. Boeing 757-22 safety”. There is no wifi or inflight entertainment. The main clues as to its special status is a vice-presidential seal on a wall and on phone handsets beside windows.Another clue: the frequent appearance of Harris, after boarding but before takeoff, to ask reporters “what you got?” on an off-the-record basis with aides keeping watch. The 59-year-old stands at 5ft 4in and a quarter, her makeup and clothing immaculate, her gaze fixed on each reporter as they ask and she answers. The mood is convivial. The charisma factor is high. The responses are enlightening rather than revelatory.Harris’s willingness to hold such interactions might explain a mismatch between her perceived media shyness and a more generous attitude among some journalists. She was long criticised for dodging interviews, a topic the Guardian raised with her in person. But a candidate’s willingness to engage with reporters behind the scenes can add a frisson of exclusivity; doing so off the record can give the impression of authenticity.Notably, in the days before she was a candidate, Harris would often struggle to attract media interest in her travels, sometimes flying with a solitary reporter. Some allies believe this explains why she was underreported and underappreciated for so long.This week, however, she launched an intense media blitz. Having told her story at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, and prosecuted the case against Trump at their only debate in Philadelphia, she was now on a kaleidoscopic interview tour designed, as CNN put it, to project “in four words, ‘I’m a normal person.’ (And that Trump is not.)”View image in fullscreenFrank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said: “The secret of this campaign is that Donald Trump needs to say less and Kamala Harris needs to say more. The more that Trump says, the worse he gets; the less that Harris says, the worse she gets. Just as their politics are exactly the opposite, so are their strategies.”Harris appeared on 60 Minutes, a heavyweight current affairs programme on the CBS network that has interviewed every major presidential candidate for more than half a century (Trump agreed but then backed out). She went on the podcast Call Her Daddy in an appeal to young women who follow host Alex Cooper’s frank conversations about sex and relationships (a recent episode was entitled “Heather McMahan: Blow jobs, hall passes, & frat daddies”).During the interview, Cooper asked about the Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s comments that the vice-president “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she does not have biological children of her own. Harris responded pointedly: “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble.”On Tuesday, as Harris’s motorcade wended its way, streets in midtown Manhattan were temporarily closed down. Hundreds of bustling New Yorkers stopped and stared, learning the art of patience or taking pictures or videos on their phones.The View is based in new studios in New York’s Hudson Square, with a fast-talking, microphone-wielding warm-up artist keeping the audience amped up. Harris entered to the strains of Beyoncé’s anthem Freedom (a striking contrast to Trump’s lineup of ageing white rockers) and was cheered to the rafters as she embraced Whoopi Goldberg and other co-hosts. She unveiled a policy plan to help the “sandwich generation” caught between caring for ageing parents and children.But history has shown that so-called softball interviews often lay the biggest traps. Harris, whose campaign is an awkward dance of trying to bask in Biden’s legislative accomplishments while shrugging off his perceived failures, was asked if she would have done anything differently from him over the past four years.“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact,” she replied. Trump scented blood. With characteristic misogyny, he called it Harris’s “dumbest answer so far” and complained: “The Lamestream Media doesn’t want to pick up the story, the dumb women on the show wish they never asked her the question that led to that Election Defying answer, but the Internet is going WILD.”A chorus of Trump allies joined in but they were not alone in detecting a gaffe. Steve Schmidt, a Trump critic who worked on Senator John McCain’s 2008 campaign and first floated the idea of Sarah Palin as his running mate, invoked misstatements by past presidential candidates who went on to lose.View image in fullscreenSchmidt wrote on Substack: “The question is whether this quote joins John Kerry’s ‘I voted for it before I voted against it.’ Or John McCain’s ‘the fundamentals of the economy are strong.’ Or Mitt Romney’s 47% quote: ‘There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.’”He called it the Harris campaign’s worst day by far since her entry into the race. “It follows a trend line of creeping incoherence and contradiction within the core message that could be politically fatal if not arrested – immediately.”Still, as Harris left the View studios, a group of students let out a noise that was half-cheer, half-shriek. She proceeded to an office block containing the satellite radio station SiriusXM and sat with Howard Stern, whose show has an audience that is 73% male and 85% white. It was her most personal interview of the campaign yet.Among the snippets: she ate a family-sized bag of Doritos after Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. She works out on an elliptical every day and liked Special K cereal. Her first job was cleaning test tubes at her mother’s laboratory and she got fired. Her favourite Formula One driver is Lewis Hamilton. She went to see the band U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas and recommends going with a “clear head” – meaning not high on drugs – because “there’s a lot of visual stimulation”.There was also a rare insight into the weight on her shoulders. Harris said: “I literally lose sleep, and have been, over what is at stake in this election. I mean, honestly, I end the day pretty much every day, these days, asking myself, what can I do more? Because the stakes are so high.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris has been reluctant to indulge identity politics and embrace her status as the first Black woman and first woman of south Asian heritage to be a major party nominee. Stern asked if there were people who will not vote for a woman because she is a woman. Harris replied: “Listen, I have been the first woman in almost every position I’ve had, so I believe that men and women support women in leadership and that’s been my life experience and that’s why I’m running for president.”It was a far cry from Hillary Clinton describing her own nomination as “a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union” and issuing a clarion call for women to break “the highest, hardest glass ceiling”. Kate Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post newspaper, wrote: “This time, we’re quiet – from superstition, maybe, or from knowing how hope can plant a land mine in your heart. Kamala Harris is keeping it quiet, too, campaigning in unisex Converse sneakers rather than in heels.”View image in fullscreenThe past two elections have been dominated by class and race. This one might be determined by gender A recent NBC poll found that men favour Trump over Harris by 12 points, 52% to 40%. Among women, Harris led Trump by 21 points: 58% to 37%. That adds up to a historic gap of 33 points.The day finished at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a comedian whose brand of political satire has had medicinal value in the toxic era of Trump. The late-night show with live band takes place before an audience in Broadway’s Ed Sullivan Theater, which opened in 1927 with a young Cary Grant and hosted the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.In an amusing 40-minute interview, Colbert gave Harris two implicit auditions. One was the perennial commander-in-chief test. She proved fiercely authoritative, reminiscent of her finest moments at the debate, in eviscerating Trump as a threat to democracy and national security.“He openly admires dictators and authoritarians,” she said, her voice rising in indignation. “He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one if he were elected again as president. He gets played by these guys. He admires so-called strongmen and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favour.”Reacting to an account by the journalist Bob Woodward that Trump sent Covid testing kits to Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as US citizens were in need, Harris urged the audience: “Think about what this means on top of him sending love letters to Kim Jong-un. He thinks, well, that’s his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”Colbert’s other test recalled a longtime staple of election campaigns: which candidate would you rather grab a beer with? The host made it literal by pulling out two cans of Miller High Life (chosen by Harris in advance). She took a sip of “the champagne of beers” and said the last time she drank beer was at a baseball game with husband Doug Emhoff.Soon after, Harris delivered a sharp jab at Trump’s expense: “When you lost millions of jobs, you lost manufacturing, you lost automotive plants, you lost the election, what does that make you? A loser. This is what somebody at my rallies said. I thought it was funny.”Colbert remarked: “It’s accurate. It’s accurate.”Harris confessed: “This is what happens when I drink beer!”View image in fullscreenGore’s defeat in 2000 is often attributed to the notion that, stiff and cerebral, he would have been less fun over a beer than his Republican rival George W Bush. Bill Galston, who worked on the Gore campaign, said: “Likability counts in politics everywhere but particularly when you’re dealing with someone who’s going to be a major presence in your life, for good or ill, for the next four years.“A fair number of people are asking themselves, do I want to spend the next four years with this person in my living room or on my computer? Will I dread or worry about each encounter? Or will it be relatively pleasant even if not always agreeable in substance? That does matter.”As a candidate, Harris has projected happy warrior, placing a bet that the politics of joy will elevate rather than clash with the national mood. As vice-president, she must still discharge solemn duties. On Wednesday, hunkered down at a New York hotel, she joined Biden on a call with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, (according to Woodward’s book, Biden has previously described Netanyahu as a “son of a bitch” and “bad fucking guy”). She remains under pressure from progressives to distance herself from Biden’s Gaza policy.Harris also took part in a briefing on preparations for Hurricane Milton and gave phone interviews to CNN and The Weather Channel. Part of her mission was to counter disinformation spread by Trump and his acolytes.View image in fullscreenIn the afternoon the vice-president flew on Air Force Two from New York to Las Vegas, disembarking in desert heat and beholding the kitsch delights of Sin City including replicas of the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty and Great Pyramid and Great Sphinx of Giza. Earlier that day the Tropicana hotel and casino, a relic of the mob era, had been reduced to rubble in a controlled implosion. Elsewhere, gamblers were still trying their luck at blackjack or in vast arcades of slot machines. It was a metaphor-rich environment for a candidate seeking to prove her authenticity, avoid campaign mishaps and counter accusations that she is risk averse.She is doing it all in competition with a man about whom little mystery remains. While some Americans are still asking, who is Kamala Harris?, no one, it seems, is asking who is Donald Trump? As the Atlantic magazine noted in an endorsement of Harris this week: “No voter could be ignorant by now of who he is. Opinions about Trump aren’t just hardened – they’re dried out and exhausted.”Kamala Harris, however, still has a story to tell in her quest to become the 47th president of the United States – even though it cuts against her instincts.“It feels immodest to me to talk about myself, which currently I’m doing right now,” she admitted to Stern on Tuesday. “A friend of mine actually said, look, this is not a time to worry about modesty because, obviously, you gotta let people know who you are.” More

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      Democrats on edge in critical Michigan amid fears of waning enthusiasm

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      Donald Trump’s supporters do not pitch up at his rallies expecting to hear policy speeches or even the truth. Mostly they go for the comfort of distractions from hard realities and the allure of false promises to revive the past.But some of the loudest cheers at Trump’s recent rally in Saginaw, Michigan, came in response to a claim the former US president’s supporters could believe, when he said election polls were swinging his way in the battleground state and that Kamala Harris’s “honeymoon period” was over.“We’re up in all of the polls. We’re up in every swing state. They had a honeymoon period,” he said before he was drowned out by the cheering crowd.With just three weeks left until the election, Democrats fear that Trump is right. Some complain that Harris has squandered an initial burst of enthusiasm after Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, which sparked a surge in fundraising and volunteering for her campaign.View image in fullscreenMichigan is one of the handful of key swing states that will decide the result of this most momentous of elections. While Harris has a slight lead in national polls, she is struggling in Michigan, a state she must win or face a more challenging path through the US’s electoral college to take the White House. Trump won the state by just 10,704 in 2016 and lost it by a narrow margin to Biden four years later.The stakes are enormous. Trump has campaigned in 2024 on an ever more extreme platform, threatening mass deportations of immigrants and promising to seek revenge on his political enemies if he returns to the White House. Last week, Trump even demanded one of America’s big television networks lose its licence because he sees its political coverage as unfair to him. In a country that prides itself on free speech, freedom of the press could ail quickly under a second Trump term. For many, US democracy itself feels on the line.The Harris campaign has long considered its easiest path to victory is by winning the Rust belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If the vice-president were to lose in Michigan, she would almost certainly need to win one of the other closely contested states of Georgia, Arizona or North Carolina.A Quinnipiac University poll released last Wednesday put the vice-president three points behind Trump in Michigan, while poll trackers offer a mixed picture.For those desperate to know which way Michigan might go, it is Saginaw that is the bellwether county of the state. Barack Obama won it twice before Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the county by a little more than 1,000 votes, just over 1% of the ballot, in 2016. Four years later, Biden took Saginaw county from Trump by an even narrower margin of just 303 votes.Both campaigns are piling resources into Michigan including a deluge of frantic television advertising, and a merry-go-round of candidates and prominent supporters wheeling through the state.Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, was in Detroit on Friday looking to win over blue-collar union voters. The vice-president is expected in Detroit on Tuesday in a bid to turn out Black voters who are key to a Democratic victory in Michigan.The Harris campaign has wheeled out Barack Obama in recent days and sent Bernie Sanders, the darling of the left of the Democratic party, to rally student support in Saginaw a week ago.Meanwhile Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, traversed Michigan promising to bring back the old and attacking the new. Vance joked to an audience in Detroit on Tuesday about the importance of the state: “I’m going to be in Michigan like 30 times” before the election.The pair have repeatedly pledged to make the American car industry great again, after so many jobs were lost to globalisation and automation, while attacking its future by scorning electric vehicles. Trump’s rally in Saginaw leaned heavily on promises to bring back the dozen or so auto factories in the county that have closed in recent years.Alongside the fantasy promises is a darker campaign aimed at those who do not fit the view of what many Trump supporters think an American should look like. Some of it is dressed up as opposition to illegal immigration but groups supporting Trump are running television ads with sinister overtones in Michigan, including one paid for by Duty to America that shows a series of photographs of white people who are said to have been “left behind”.“Even if we do everything right, Harris and the Democrats find new ways to make us pay. For what? No matter what we do, Democrats are against us. So this November, we’re against them,” it said.Across the key Rust belt states, Trump has a clear lead on two of the most important issues for many voters, the economy and immigration. He is even ahead by one point on which candidate would better preserve democracy, despite his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Quinnipiac poll.Behind the scenes, Democratic strategists are increasingly alarmed by the numbers. The party’s US Senate candidate in Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, warned last month that Harris was not polling as well as expected.View image in fullscreen“I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” she told a fundraiser. “We have her underwater in our polling.”Some Democratic campaigners blame the campaign.Carly Hammond is an organiser for the US’s largest trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, for the Saginaw region who is running for city council while also canvassing for Harris.“This is the most expensive election in American politics so far. There’s more money around, more ads, more signs, the volunteers are there. I really haven’t seen anything like this in terms of the mobilisation efforts,” she said.“What is missing is Harris’s policies. People ask: ‘What is she going to do?’ I’ve heard about 200 Harris ads in the past few weeks just because they’re inescapable. But I couldn’t tell you what her concrete plan is to tackle anything.”Some of the Democratic messaging in Michigan plays to Trump’s agenda, with repeated promises to “secure the border” even though Saginaw is 1,500 miles from the Mexican frontier and undocumented immigrants make up only about 1% of the state’s population. But it does not appear to be doing Harris much good while alienating some Democrats.Hammond said she feared that Harris had retreated into defensive messaging and a reliance on scaring voters over Trump’s ties to Project 2025, the authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government, that is costing her momentum.“When it switched over from Biden to Harris, there was an expectation that Harris would put out her own aggressive policy proposals and that hasn’t happened. There’s been a kind of walking back. Harris’s campaign said she’s going to take on the billionaires and corporate interest rates. A lot of that language fell off and now it’s just kind of ‘Project 2025, it really sucks’,” she said.Trump, on the other hand, has been hitting the state with hard promises even if they’re unlikely to be fulfilled. He told his audience in Saginaw he would make Michigan the “car capital of the world again” after General Motors closed a dozen factories in the county and moved some production to Mexico.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Under my plan American workers will no longer be worried about losing their jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America. We’re bringing them all back,” he said.View image in fullscreenLarge numbers of Trump voters don’t believe it will happen, not least because he made the same promise in 2016 and the factories didn’t return. But they apparently don’t care.Gary Ell, chair of Saginaw’s Republican party and a fervent Trump backer, said his supporters take the promise alone as evidence that the former president cares about them while the Democrats care about other people.“They don’t look at him as being a politician. They still look at him as being an experienced former president who still stands on the same policies that he stood for before with the exception that the economy has gotten so much worse and the migration of mass illegal aliens has gotten so much worse. Those are two things that he had in check when he was president before,” he said.Biden boasts of a booming economy, including record job growth, but statistics mean little to large numbers of Americans who feel much worse off after years of surging inflation. Saginaw’s largest food bank has just received a $1m grant to expand because so many families are buckling under high grocery prices.Still, the Harris campaign has been encouraged by data showing the vice-president gaining ground with white voters without college degrees in Michigan, a key part of Trump’s base.In a move to shore that up, Democratic heavyweights from out of state, including the former US senator from Indiana Joe Donnelly, descended on Saginaw last Wednesday to tell trade union members that Biden had been good for blue collar workers and Harris would be too.The area’s member of Congress, Dan Kildee, warned the workers that Trump’s false promises could cost them their jobs.“This is a union hall where everybody’s working because the Biden-Harris administration has invested in American manufacturing. When Donald Trump was president, we were losing these jobs. Sixty per cent of these people were unemployed. Under Biden-Harris, they’re back to work. So, the question is, are we going to continue on this path or are we going to go back to those days?” he said.The Harris camp also brought Sanders to Saginaw to get out the student vote with a rally at the local university. He said that Trump’s denial of the climate crisis threatened the future of the planet and warned that another Trump presidency could be a decisive blow to a democracy already undermined by a growing oligarchy.View image in fullscreenSanders also mocked Trump for losing the support of his own vice-president, Mike Pence.“Mike Pence is a very conservative guy. His views are nothing like mine. I disagree with him on every issue. But he worked with Trump every single day and he said Trump is not fit to be president of the United States,” Sanders told a standing-room-only crowd.Some Michigan Republicans are pushing a similar message. A former member of Congress from Detroit, Dave Trott, and other anti-Trump conservatives launched Michigan Republicans for Harris-Walz earlier this month, aimed at the more than 350,000 Republicans in Michigan who voted against the former president in their party’s primary in February. Trott accused Trump of “gutting Michigan’s economy” and called him “more dangerous than ever”.It’s not clear if any of this is changing anyone’s vote. Both camps are focused on turnout, knowing that it is likely to decide the election. Trump’s support in Michigan went up in 2020 but he was beaten because many of those Democrats who stayed home when Clinton was the candidate four years earlier came out to remove him from the White House.Trump has been restating his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen in urging supporters to vote in order to make the election “too big to rig”. Harris is counting on the enthusiasm initially generated by her campaign, particularly among young female voters.Ultimately, the election in Michigan may be decided by events half a world away.More than 100,000 people voted uncommitted in the state’s Democratic primaries in February in a protest against Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, as the Palestinian civilian death toll climbed into the tens of thousands. But the Uncommitted movement is now alarmed at the prospect of those supporters boycotting Harris if it delivers Michigan to Trump.On Tuesday, the group’s co-founder Lexi Zeidan pleaded in a video on social media to not let that happen.“As a Palestinian American, the current administration’s handling of this genocide has been beyond enraging and demoralising, but the reality is that it can get worse. Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than [the Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map,” she said.Zeidan’s warning fell well short of an endorsement of Harris but across Michigan, the vice-president’s campaign is counting on fear of Trump as much as enthusiasm for the vice-president to get her over the line. More

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      ‘He gives them the green light’: Trump’s rhetoric revives hate groups across US

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      For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past several weeks have been testing to say the least.Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants were distributed by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, in Black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.“I’m telling people: do nothing – don’t approach them. But it’s not easy for people to see this,” she said.“I think that is what a lot of folks cannot understand – why do we have so much hate?”About 22% of Springfield residents are African American, according to the US Census Bureau.“People are mad. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to take this for a minute. I know it’s hard.”Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington in July as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a PO box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a phone number.Ever since Donald Trump claimed during a 10 September televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets – a claim that has been found to be baseless – Springfield has seen a groundswell in far-right extremism.On a recent weekend, several people affiliated with Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group founded in 2020, stood in front of the home of the mayor of Springfield holding flags bearing swastikas. The same weekend, individuals holding signs that said: “Haitians Have No Home Here” in English and Haitian Creole were seen outside Springfield’s city hall offices.And in another incident, a volunteer with the Clark county Democratic party was verbally threatened by a group of Proud Boys members last month, according to a report by the Dayton Daily News.Proud Boys is a far-right group that, according to Reuters, has re-emerged in recent months as “unofficial protectors of ex-president Donald Trump”.That followed a group called the Israel United in Christ, a hate group as designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, holding a large public gathering in south Springfield on 21 September.Though Israel United in Christ says it does not “advocate or condone any acts of violence against any race, ethnicity or gender”, the Anti-Defamation League has accused it of antisemitism.During the vice-presidential debate, the Republican party candidate, JD Vance, repeated the false claim that Springfield’s Haitian community were “illegal immigrants”. The vast majority of Haitians in Springfield have legally entered the US through the temporary protected status program, a status that is provided to nationals of certain countries experiencing significant security challenges.“They feel emboldened by the former president. They feel like it’s OK to do this,” said Williams.“He gives them the green light. By him saying hateful things and falsehoods, they feel comfortable in speaking the way they are speaking [and] coming in here doing what they are doing.”But the rise in hate group activity in recent weeks hasn’t been confined to Springfield.In Charleroi, a town of about 4,000 people in western Pennsylvania, a digital flyer was this week distributed on Facebook by or on behalf of the Trinity White Knights.It read, in part: “Do not let the government destroy your town. These 3rd world immigrants are destroying every single city they arrive in. The government is pushing these 3rd world immigrants into every single town across America.”Joe Manning, the Charleroi town borough manager, said there were about 700 Haitian immigrants living in Charleroi, with many working at a local food processing plant.“They’ve been here for five, maybe six, years and nobody really paid attention to them,” he says.That was before 15 September, when Trump said at a rally in Tucson, Arizona, that Charleroi “isn’t so beautiful any more” and that the town had become “composed of lawless gangs”, comments aimed at the town’s growing immigrant population.“We’re a pretty small community here in western Pennsylvania, and to be identified by name [by Trump], that sort of set off this whole firestorm,” said Manning, who believed the appearance of the KKK-linked flyer after Trump’s comments wasn’t coincidental.“Before this, no one really paid attention to the immigrant community here but now, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re being invaded.’ They say it’s a crisis. Well if it is, it’s the slowest goddamn crisis I ever saw.”In Wyoming, graffiti in clear view of a major interstate supporting Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, appeared on a bridge last week, while a banner promoting the same group and calling for the “recaiming” (sic) of America was removed from a bridge in downtown Winston-Salem in North Carolina days after Trump’s debate comments. A student event held at the University of South Carolina featuring the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, on 18 September is believed to have attracted about 150 attendees.“Springfield is not happening in isolation. We have tracked four other incidents, such as targeting the Haitian community in Alabama,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks incidents of hate across the US.“We’ve also seen the sharing and pushing of the racist and antisemitic great replacement theory in various campaign and hate group messaging in the last few weeks.”For Williams, who finds herself managing growing community outrage at the rise in KKK and other hate group activity in Springfield, recent events have come at a personal cost.She said she had received text messages from someone claiming to represent Blood Tribe and had increased her security in recent weeks. Last weekend, when members of the same group appeared at the mayor of Springfield’s home, the chief of police sent a security detail to her home.“I’m looking over my shoulder,” she says.“You would think that this would be over – I don’t get it, in 2024.” More

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      US election briefing: Trump visits Coachella while Harris packs diapers in North Carolina

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      Donald Trump visited California on Saturday, a state he is almost certain to lose, in a bid to link Kamala Harris to her home state’s recent struggles with homelessness, water shortages and a lack of affordability.“We’re not going to let Kamala Harris do to America what she did to California,” the former president said in the city of Coachella, best known for its music festival of the same name, referring to the state as “Paradise Lost”.Vice-president Kamala Harris meanwhile helped pack diapers, bandages and pain relief pills among other items into care packages for victims of Hurricane Helene as she visited the swing state of North Carolina, which narrowly backed Trump in 2020.“You’re exactly right,” she said to Greg Hatem, owner of The Pit Authentic Barbecue restaurant where the aid event was taking place, as he commented that “it takes a village”. Harris also met with Black leaders at the restaurant. It was her second trip to North Carolina since Helene tore through the state last month.Here’s what else happened on Saturday:

      Kamala Harris on Saturday released a report on her health and medical history, which found that “she possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if voters elect her in November. A senior aide to Harris, 59, said the vice-president’s advisers viewed the publication of the health report and medical history as an opportunity to call attention to questions about Donald Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity.

      Tightening poll figures triggered nervousness and anxiety in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, with Donald Trump making gains in the states where it matters most as the election race enters its climactic final phase. Amid a dramatic news cycle that has seen the US hit by two destructive hurricanes and rising fears of all-out war in the Middle East, the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed the vice-president and Democratic nominee with a two-point nationwide lead, 48% to 46%, over her Republican opponent as of 10 October – tellingly, down from a 4% advantage she registered two weeks ago.

      The far-right website the Gateway Pundit acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that there had not been any fraud during ballot counting in Atlanta in 2020 when Donald Trump lost the presidency. It was a significant concession from one of the most influential conservative sites that plays a key role in spreading election misinformation.

      Tens of thousands of Christians poured on to the National Mall on Saturday in a pre-election event aimed at rescuing America from secularism. The rally was a collaboration organized by multiple far-right Christian leaders affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement on the political far right that seeks to establish long-term Christian dominion over government and society as well as get Trump a second presidency in November. More

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      Trump addresses Latino voters at Las Vegas event as Harris releases medical report – live

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      Speaking at a Pennsylvania rally earlier today, JD Vance again refused to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. The news came the same day The New York Times released an hourlong interview with Vance, wherein Vance refused five times to say the former president lost the election.“As I said in that interview, and I’m gonna say to you right now, I think the election of 2020 had serious problems,” Vance said.Trump’s roundtable in Las Vegas has concluded and he’s en route to a second event this evening in Coachella, California. Attendees waiting in near 100F temperatures are telling the Associated Press that they don’t expect Trump to win their state but were excited to see him all the same.The AP notes that while Trump may not win California, he’ll likely be able to drum up significant financial support in the state. Photos with the former president in Coachella were priced at $25,000, which comes with special seating for two. A “VIP Experience” was priced at $5,000.Kamala Harris is en route to North Carolina, where she’ll speak with Black churchgoers and aid in disaster relief efforts. Before her departure, she told reporters a bit about her decision to release her medical report this morning, saying it was in part to pressure Trump to do the same.“I think that it’s obvious that his team, at least, does not want the American people to see everything about who he is,” Harris told reporters before boarding a plane to North Carolina, says Reuters.The Hill reports much of the same:Speaking in Las Vegas this afternoon, Trump focused his remarks on immigration and inflation, arguing that the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration have disadvantaged Latino families. The former president attempted to strike a tone of respect with members of the Latino roundtable, emphasizing their contributions to the US economy, as compared with the non-citizens he’s denounced at length in recent speeches.“I’ve had such great support from the Hispanic community, and from the Black community. The highest level ever. And there are those that say, we’ll end up breaking the 50% mark,” Trump said.According to a September Pew Research Center report, a majority of Latino-registered voters (57%) say they would vote for Kamala Harris and 39% would vote for Trump. Meanwhile, a recent New York Times/Siena Poll and an August Pew Research Center survey showed that more than three-fourths of Black voters have said they would vote for Harris.The roundtable is ongoing, with Trump about to hear from local Latino business-owners.Trump’s roundtable in Las Vegas has begun, with what appears to be a fairly small crowd. His campaign is more widely touting its event in Coachella this evening with a series of music festival-inspired ads on social media.Former Texas representative Mayra Flores has begun the Las Vegas event by introducing the other guests in attendance, which include Bob Unanue, CEO of Goya Foods, and Sam Brown, a military officer currently running for one of Nevada’s senate seats. Trump has yet to begin speaking.Ex-president Barack Obama will campaign in Detroit later this month for Kamala Harris. The Detroit News reports that Obama will visit the state on 22 October. The announcement of his visit comes just days after Donald Trump insulted the manufacturing hub while campaining there.Obama has begun campaigning for Harris in the final weeks before the 2024 election, hoping to drum up support in swing states. He made his first appearance on behalf of the nominee in Pittsburgh this week.Donald Trump will appear at a roundtable with Latino voters in Las Vegas shortly. We’ll be following along and will share any major takeaways with you – according to his campaign, Trump is expected to focus on inflation and his ”no tax on tips” policy.Meanwhile, JD Vance has been campaigning in Pennsylvania, where Trump’s running mate answered questions from reporters in front of a crowd of supporters.The New York Times published an hour-long interview with JD Vance this morning, covering the vice-presidential nominee’s stance on abortion rights, immigration, the economy and the 2020 election. Vance spoke at length about his Catholic faith and views on reproductive rights, refused to say Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and committed to a peaceful transfer of power – were Donald Trump to win the 2024 election. He also walked back his criticism of “childless cat ladies” before saying he thought it was “bizarre” and “sociopathic” not to have children because of fears around climate change.Our latest polling shows Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck, with Trump gaining ground on Harris in crucial swing states.Robert Tait reports: “the Guardian’s 10-day polling average tracker showed the vice-president and Democratic nominee with a two-point nationwide lead, 48% to 46%, over her Republican opponent as of 10 October – tellingly, down from a 4% advantage she registered two weeks ago.”Harris enjoys just three, fractional leads in Nevada and Michigan, and a slim one-point advantage in Pennsylvania. Trump has wafer-thin leads in the five remaining swing states – Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.Despite Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs”, government data shows that immigrant labor has grown the economy and promoted new opportunities for native-born workers, the Associated Press reports. Mass deportations like those Trump has advocated for could cost taxpayers up to a trillion dollars, economists say.Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, told the AP that, because native-born workers and non-citizens often have different language and skill sets, immigrant workers take jobs that citizens are often unwilling to fill, like agriculture and food-production roles. He also added that “we have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor. In fact, we need many more of them to fill these roles.”Ethan Lewis, an economist at Dartmouth College, added: “There is a vast amount of research on the labor market impact of immigration in the US, most of which concludes the impact on less-skilled workers is fairly small and, if anything, jobs for US-born workers might by created rather than ‘taken’ by immigrants.”Since the non-citizen labor force makes up roughly 4% of US GDP annually, Peri estimates that mass deportation would result in a roughly $1tn loss.At a private dinner with several billionaire donors in September, Donald Trump expressed frustration that Republicans had not raised more money for his campaign, the New York Times reports.The likes of hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investment banker Warren Stephens, businessman Joe Ricketts and former education secretary Betsy DeVos were all in attendance at the Trump Tower soiree, where Trump conveyed his annoyance that his campaign had not drawn larger donations – despite tax policies he said were favorable to the wealthy.In the less than three months that she’s been in the presidential race, Kamala Harris has raised $1bn. That’s allowed her to focus on campaigning in the final weeks of the race, while Trump continues attending fundraisers. In July, August and September, the vice-president raised twice as much as Trump.Back in Washington, Christian nationalists are gathering on the National Mall today to fast and pray, and denounce gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth.The Guardian’s Alice Herman has the story:Less than a month before the presidential election, multilevel marketing professional-turned-Christian “apostle” Jenny Donnelly is summoning women to the National Mall to fast, pray and uphold “the Lord’s authority over the election process and our nation’s leadership”.It’s the first of a series of Christian nationalist gatherings in DC to rally believers to the Capitol ahead of the 2024 election.The pro-Trump influencer has billed the event as a rallying call for mothers concerned about changing gender norms in modern America, gathering women under pink and blue banners emblazoned with the anti-trans hashtag #DontMessWithOurKids. In her promotional materials, Donnelly casts the event at the Capitol as an opportunity for women to stand their ground and play a pivotal role in changing the cultural and political trajectory of the US.In the wake of recent reporting that Donald Trump sent Covid-19 tests to Russia at the height of the pandemic – and Kamala Harris’s criticism of that move – the Kremlin said today that Harris’s description of Vladimir Putin as a “murderous dictator” shows how politicians in Washington are seeking to impose their views on the world, Reuters reports.“The lofty political establishment of the United States of America, to all appearances, is infused with such a political culture,” Russian news agencies have quoted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov telling a television interviewer.“This is probably the quintessence of the very model of international relations that they are trying to foist on the entire world, a model that most in the world are beginning to like less and less.”Tensions with Russia have been high in recent years, between the war in Ukraine and Russian election interference in 2016.Kamala Harris will travel to North Carolina for campaign events in Raleigh and Greenville today and tomorrow, according to her campaign.This evening, she will visit with local Black elected faith and community leaders in Raleigh, while also participating in a volunteer hurricane relief supply drive. Tomorrow, she’ll attend a church service in Greenville, just days after launching her campaign’s “Souls to the Polls” effort to turn out Black churchgoers.After campaigning in Las Vegas this afternoon, Trump will make a stop in Coachella, California. An agricultural town in southern California, Coachella is best known for hosting an internationally acclaimed arts and music festival.It’s not the first place many people expected Trump to campaign, but the Coachella Valley’s large community of migrant farm workers make it ripe for the former president to continue the anti-immigrant message he ramped up in Aurora, Colorado yesterday. Although Trump is unlikely to flip long-blue California, the rally will present an opportunity for him to rail against the state’s Democratic leadership – as he did in Aurora, Colorado, yesterday.Tim Walz is trading the campaign trail for the prairies of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, this morning as he kicks off pheasant-hunting season there.The vice-presidential nominee and Minnesota governor has dramatically shifted his stance on gun rights over the years – going from garnering an A rating from the NRA to straight F’s as his children asked him to back gun-violence protections in the wake of several campus mass shootings.The Harris-Walz campaign has called for an assault weapons ban, while walking a fine line among gun owners in the United States. Both Harris and Walz have emphasized that they themselves are gun owners, with Harris saying on 60 Minutes this week that she owns a Glock.The biggest headline circulating this morning is Kamala Harris’s medical report, which declares her fit for the presidency. For a closer look, here’s the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas:A senior aide to Harris, 59, said the vice-president’s advisers viewed the publication of the health report and medical history as an opportunity to call attention to questions about the Republican White House nominee Donald Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity. The 78-year-old Trump has also not released any information about his health, though he would be the oldest president elected if Americans give him a second term in the Oval Office.The report – in the form of a two-page letter from the vice-president’s physician, Joshua Simmons – described Harris as being in “excellent health” and asserted that her medical history was notable for seasonal allergies and hives. Harris manages those conditions with over-the-counter medications such as Allegra, Atrovent nasal spray and Pataday eye drops, and she has also been on allergen immunotherapy for three years, the letter said.Otherwise, Harris is mildly nearsighted and wears corrective contact lenses as a result, had abdominal surgery when she was three years old and has a maternal history of colon cancer. “She has no personal history of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cardiac disease, pulmonary disease, neurological disorders, cancer or osteoporosis,” said the letter from Simmons, who added that the vice-president’s most recent physical examination in April was “unremarkable”.The statement on Harris’s health came on Saturday as Trump has become increasingly incoherent at campaign rallies, something the Guardian US reported on earlier in October. He has been slurring, stumbling over his words, hurling expletives – and showing signs of cognitive decline consistent with someone approaching his 80s, according to medical experts.Good morning and thanks for joining us this Saturday. With election day just over three weeks away, we’ll be covering the latest developments as they happen.Here’s a quick summary of the latest news from yesterday and where things stand today:

      At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, yesterday, former president Donald Trump announced “Operation Aurora”, a plan to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act if he is re-elected. The law allows the president to detain and deport non‑citizens in times of a declared war or presidentially proclaimed “invasion”.

      Meanwhile, speaking in Scottsdale, Arizona, Kamala Harris said she would create “a bipartisan council of advisers” if elected president. She’s drawn remarkable support over the past two and a half months from establishment Republicans, most notably Liz and Dick Cheney.

      Also yesterday, Vogue magazine released its newest issue, featuring Harris on the cover. The photograph of the vice-president stood in stark contrast to Harris’s first appearance on the magazine’s cover three years ago – an image that was widely criticized as unserious and disrespectful.

      This morning, Harris released a report on her medical history – in contrast to her opponent who has repeatedly promised and then refused to do the same. The report concludes that Harris “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency”.

      And Trump is scheduled to speak this afternoon at a Hispanic roundtable in Las Vegas. He’s expected to return to the anti-immigrant message that has defined his campaign.

      In a change of scenery, Tim Walz is taking a break from the campaign trail today to kick of Minnesota’s pheasant hunting season. He’s spending the day at the Governor’s Pheasant Opener – reiterating the Minnesota governor’s reputation as a hunter despite his firm stance on gun violence regulations.
      Let’s watch what happens. More

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      in US Politics

      Thousands rally at Christian nationalist event in DC to ‘turn hearts back to God’

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      Tens of thousands of Christians poured onto the National Mall on Saturday to atone, pray and take a stand for America – which, in their view, has been poisoned by secularism and must be ruled instead by a Christian god.Summoned to Washington DC by the multilevel marketing professional-turned-Christian “apostle” Jenny Donnelly and the anti-LGBTQ+ celebrity pastor Lou Engle, they streamed onto the lawn holding blue and pink banners emblazoned with the hashtag #DontMessWithOurKids – a nod to the myth that children are being indoctrinated into adopting gay and transgender identities.It was no coincidence that the event was held on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, or that many attendees carried shofars and Israeli flags: evangelicals and charismatic Christians find spiritual meaning in Old Testament scripture, Jewish rituals and support for Israel – where they believe the end times prophecy will take place.Although most of the day was spent in prayer and worship, November’s presidential election hung heavy over the crowd. A promotional newsletter for the event called on “the Lord’s authority over the election process and our nation’s leadership”, and organizers handed out flyers promoting a pre-election prayer event hosted by the Donald Trump-aligned organization Turning Point USA Faith.Lance Wallnau, a Maga evangelist who rose to prominence after prophesying Trump’s first term in office, delivered remarks at the gathering.“We have 31 million Christians, I just found out, they’ve just been so bombarded by woke preachers and apathetic Christians that they don’t think they’re gonna vote this year,” said Wallnau. “Folks, this meeting, on Yom Kippur, is our governmental moment to shift something in the spirit.” Wallnau called on pastors to urge their congregants to vote.“I was here at January 6,” said Tami Barthen, an attendee who traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally, and who described her experience of the Capitol riot as profoundly spiritual. “It’s not Democrat versus Republican,” she said. “It’s good versus evil.”It’s the first of a series of Christian nationalist gatherings in DC to rally believers to the Capitol ahead of the 2024 election.Donnelly billed the event as a rallying call for mothers concerned about changing gender norms in the modern US and casting the gathering at the Capitol as an opportunity for women to stand their ground and play a pivotal role in changing the country’s cultural and political trajectory.The rally is a collaboration organized by multiple far-right Christian leaders affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement on the political far right that seeks to establish long-term Christian dominion over government and society as well as get Trump a second presidency in November.Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, said the effort was aimed at “creating a network – a mass of people – who see it as their spiritual mission to take over Washington DC”Most prominent in the push to turn out women to the National Mall is Engle, a rightwing pastor and staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, whose tutelage of anti-gay Ugandan pastors and coordination of mass prayer mobilizations has earned him international notoriety and celebrity.The Southern Poverty Law Center, which characterizes Engle as an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist, notes that Engle has in the past compared the anti-LGBTQ+ push to the secessionist south during the American civil war, calling on opponents of gay rights to emulate the Confederate general Robert E Lee, who “was able to restrain Washington”.Donnelly’s vision – of a crowd of moms descending on the Capitol in pink and blue – is her own. Engle, whose mass prayer rallies have drawn hundreds of thousands to DC in the past, offers a platform to turn people out.View image in fullscreen“We are seeing a million women and their families coming together to see this great country turn their hearts back to God,” said Donnelly, on a 21 June podcast promoting the march. Donnelly, who lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family, described how during the Covid-19 lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests – twin forces she says shut down her church – she was called by God to go deeper into the political realm.“I said: ‘Lord, I’m just a mom of five, I have a great church – it’s not huge. I’ve done women’s retreats, I think I’ve been doing my part in the kingdom and I love Jesus so much, but I don’t even know where to begin, but would you put me in the fight?’” she said.Donnelly has sought to pass along that message to other Christian women through an organization called Her Voice Movement Action, which organizes women into decentralized, independently-run “prayer hubs” – a source of spiritual community for women that also functions as a political mobilization tool.“We’ve been praying for our nation for a couple years in small prayer hubs,” said Louette Madison, who traveled from Washington state to DC for the rally. Madison has teenagers in the public school system and described hoping for a day when prayer is embraced in schools, saying: “I think that the schools are kind of getting rid of the values, and also getting rid of the discipline, [and] when there’s no consequences, that can cause a lot more chaos in school.”The decentralized organizing model carries echoes of Donnelly’s previous life: before reinventing herself as a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, Donnelly earned millions through the multilevel marketing company AdvoCare, which collapsed after settling with the Federal Trade Commission for $150m in a lawsuit alleging the company was an illegal pyramid scheme.From Peru to PortlandYears before Donnelly flew the #DontMessWithOurKids flag, a movement under the same name took hold in Peru, promoted by Christian Rosas, a conservative Christian political strategist and consultant in the mining industry. The evangelical “No te metas con mis hijos” – “don’t mess with my kids” – coalition, which opposed LGBTQ+ inclusion and abortion, earned followers in 2016 during a wave of conservative backlash against governmental efforts to introduce themes of gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the school system.When the government issued lockdown orders to slow the spread of Covid-19, it issued travel restrictions by gender, allowing women and men to leave the house on different days of the week and affirming that trans people’s gender identities would be respected in enforcing the rule. Rosas took issue with the trans-inclusive policy, claiming that police officers were obligated to enforce the rule based on travelers’ identification cards, not their gender identities.During the lockdown orders, the Peruvian investigative reporting outlet OjoPúblico reported on 18 incidents of humiliating and abusive arrests of trans women by the police.What started as street protests has turned into an electoral strategy to elect ultra-conservative allies of the Christian right into office in Peru. These lawmakers have passed a slew of socially conservative laws, including one this year that classifies transgender identities as mental illnesses.Donnelly has taken up the mantle of this movement among Christian moms in the US, drawing directly from Rosas’s vision in Peru and consulting him on strategy.“We challenged the law, why? Because the law was unjust. We challenged the curriculum. Why? Because the curriculum was unjust,” said Rosas on a podcast interview with Donnelly on 6 November 2023. “TV, news [outlets], they mocked us every day, they mocked us, they ridiculed us, saying: ‘Look at them, they’re radical, religious, whatever,’ but they saw that we are not retreating.”Rosas spoke at the Capitol rally on Saturday, too, where he preached against LGBTQ+ acceptance and promised that his movement could be replicated in the US.“Obedience to the Lord also requires us to stand up strong against weakened structures,” Rosas said. “Against evil, against unjust laws.”Don’t Mess With Our Kids and No te metas con mis hijos have both attempted to cast their organizations as grassroots mobilizations. In a 2017 interview with Vice News, a spokesperson for the group spoke on the condition of anonymity, claiming to speak for “the collective”.Donnelly’s Her Voice Movement adopts a similar approach. In a recording of a Zoom call in August – which journalist Dominick Bonny obtained and shared with the Guardian – Her Voice Movement spokesperson Naomi Van Wyk said the group had teamed up with Moms for Liberty to launch a multi-state campaign called March for Kids, but cautioned members to keep the association private.“The parent company is Moms for Liberty, but they don’t wanna be recognized. They really want this movement to be grassroots, and to make a public statement that there are hundreds and thousands of people across the country that are coming together under one umbrella,” said Van Wyk.Elizabeth Salazar Vega, a reporter covering gender and politics in Peru, said she was not surprised that the push had taken hold in the US – or that it had found expression just weeks before a presidential election.“This is the ideal scenario to bind these voices together, that could normally appear siloed in civil society,” Salazar Vega told the Guardian in Spanish. “I don’t think it would be impossible for this to escalate rapidly in the United States.”Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist pastor who has organized “Kingdom to the Capitol” protests in swing states, is planning a similar march in DC later this month. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump wants the FCC to take CBS’s license away. This is a dark omen | Dennis Aftergut and Austin Sarat

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      Donald Trump’s 10 October attack on CBS for editing its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris – a normal television process – is pure distraction. It is designed to draw our attention away from the fact that he was afraid to give the news magazine its traditional interview with both political candidates. Trump’s statement that the Federal Communications Commission should “take away” CBS’s broadcast license betrays his ignorance of the fact that the FCC does not license networks and foreshadows a full-on assault on free speech and freedom of the press if he becomes president.History is clear that dictators move early to take control of the media in order to censor information unfavorable to their people. Our safety requires preventing that control, as Thomas Jefferson wrote two centuries ago: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.”Only Rumpelstiltskin would fail to grasp how much Trump cannot tolerate criticism from the press or anyone. Attacking mainstream media is his way of desensitizing us to the important role of the press in a free society.If you want a preview of how first amendment rights will disappear if Trump is elected president, look to his home state of Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis, his Maga copycat, runs that government in a way Trump would like to bring to the whole nation. On 9 October, we saw one of the governor’s lackeys try to carve away freedom of speech and the press, along with reproductive rights.John Wilson, the general counsel to the state’s department of health, threatened the state’s broadcast stations with prosecution unless they removed a campaign ad promoting amendment 4. It’s the ballot measure to add abortion rights to the state’s constitution.The amendment 4 ad featured Floridian Caroline Williams saying that she would be dead had the state’s six-week ban on abortion been in effect when her health required one in 2022. The irony of the Florida government trying to quash the ad is rich. Here we have a bare-knuckles attempt at censorship from the party that purports to oppose the “cancel culture”.That’s not the end of the irony. The health department’s letter alleged that the pro-amendment 4 ad violated the state’s “sanitation nuisance” statute. This ground for government censorship, based as it is on a statute designed to prohibit overflowing septic tanks or unclean slaughterhouses, fails the laugh test, much less the constitution.Still, don’t miss what’s going on here: people’s rights are not removed in one fell swoop but rather in steps. The first stage is eroding people’s expectations that freedoms are sacred and will be respected. By getting us thinking we can live with this or that little invasion of someone else’s rights, autocrats normalize those intrusions and then expand them to cover all of us. Diminishing the media’s and the public’s rights to criticize a leader is how dictatorships get started.That’s why American law – at least in its current state – forbids what Wilson was threatening. Campaign ads are core political speech, entitled to the highest level of first amendment protection. That means that content-based restrictions on such speech must promote a compelling government interest and be the least intrusive way to promote that interest. Specifically, even false statements in the context of abortion law campaigning – and Williams’ statements in the ad were not false – must survive such strict scrutiny.A Florida crocodile’s tears would be more compelling than Wilson’s description of Florida’s interest in protecting women from the ad’s purported “danger” – that it suggests that they need to go to other states or find unlicensed abortionists if they do not have access to an abortion in Florida. That danger arises from the statute, not the ad.If the department of public health is so concerned about women’s safety, why not issue a regulation clarifying that doctors will not be prosecuted if, in their professional judgment, they believe that a woman has “pregnancy complications posing a serious risk of death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment”?Without that assurance, a doctor’s decision to perform an emergency abortion is so chilled that, in effect, there is no exception to Florida’s six-week ban. Interviews with Florida doctors establish their understandable unwillingness to risk their liberty given the prospect of a district attorney second-guessing their judgment.But whatever the ban’s impact on the practice of medicine, Wilson and DeSantis’s effort to stop groups from promoting their point of view puts all of us in jeopardy.George Washington captured that danger at the beginning of the republic. As he put it: “The freedom of Speech may be taken away – and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, 250 years later, are sending us a clear message that our lives and our freedoms are on the ballot.

      Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy

      Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      in Elections

      Far-right website admits there was no fraud at 2020 vote-count in Atlanta

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      The far-right website The Gateway Pundit acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that there was not any fraud during ballot counting in Atlanta in 2020 when Donald Trump lost the presidency, a significant concession from one of the most influential conservative sites that plays a key role in spreading election misinformation.The statement, the first acknowledgment from the site that there was no proof of fraud in Atlanta, came days after the site settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, two local election workers who the site falsely accused of wrongdoing. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed publicly, but the site appears to have removed all mention of the two women.“Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020,” the site’s co-founder, Jim Hoft, said in a statement posted on Gateway Pundit on Saturday. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night. A legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”As Trump sought to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden, Gateway Pundit relentlessly amplified a misleading video it said showed poll workers fraudulently counting ballots on election night. Gateway Pundit was the first site to identify Freeman and Moss as the two women in the video and published dozens of articles falsely accusing them of wrongdoing.Moss and Freeman have publicly spoken out about the severe harassment they faced. They received many death threats. People showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home, and she feared they were going to kill her. Both women testified last year that they were still afraid to go out alone in public.Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, who is also a contributor to the site, refused to back down from their false claims. They held a press conference on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July insisting that the video showed wrongdoing.Freeman and Moss previously settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right conservative outlet, which subsequently broadcast a correction to its reporting and noted the two women had not engaged in fraud.A Washington DC jury also ordered Trump ally Rudy Giuliani to pay the two women nearly $150m in damages last year. Giuliani has appealed the verdict and undertaken legal maneuvers to avoid payment. Lawyers for Freeman and Moss have asked a federal judge in New York to give them control over his assets.Gateway Pundit still faces a defamation lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of Dominion voting systems, whom the outlet falsely accused of rigging the election. More