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      An unlikely Oakland mayor is fighting for political survival amid a billionaire-backed recall

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      The Oakland mayor, Sheng Thao’s political rise was precarious from the start.For progressives, her narrow victory in 2022 affirmed their city’s radical, leftist roots. By electing a daughter of Hmong refugees and a domestic violence survivor who promised to advocate for the city’s most vulnerable residents, it seemed Oakland had defied the tech billionaires and venture capitalists who were working to transform the political landscape in neighbouring San Francisco.Almost as soon as she was sworn in, her detractors were questioning the legitimacy of her leadership and called for a recount. Things only got messier from there.This summer, just 18 months into Thao’s tenure, a recall effort against her qualified for the ballot – the first in Oakland in more than a century. Bankrolled by wealthy tech and crypto executives and a hedge-fund manager, the recall gave voice to voters who were furious over what seemed like a decades-long failure by city hall to fix everything from potholes to crime and homelessness.“Since I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Pamela Drake, a longtime activist and political commentator who moved to Oakland in 1968. “This recall is a reaction during a time when the whole country is in somewhat of a state of reaction, when the whole world is sort of chaotic.”The town where Kamala Harris was born and launched a political career has been under a spotlight lately – or, perhaps, a microscope. National politicians on the right have all too eagerly cast it as a dysfunctional hellscape with runaway crime. But its struggles of late have been painfully real.View image in fullscreenA spiralling housing crisis has driven hundreds of people into sprawling encampments. Acclaimed restaurants have closed, blaming crime and rising costs. And the city’s last remaining major league sports team has left Oakland’s crumbling Coliseum.Many of the same groups backing the recall against Thao helped launch a recall effort against the county’s top prosecutor, the progressive Pamela Price.“People are fed up with crime and homelessness,” said Dan Lindheim, a former Oakland city administrator and now professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. “And they want to hold somebody accountable. It was like: ‘We don’t like what they’re doing, so – symbolically – it’s off with their heads.’”It didn’t matter that homicides had spiked under Thao’s predecessor, and that neither Thao nor Price had direct or total control over the police department or crime rates. Nor does Thao have broad authority to quickly fix a housing crisis that has plagued nearly every corner of California. “But I don’t think this movement was sort of the sum of rational decisions,” Lindheim said. “I think it’s sort of an emotional tidal wave.”Just one day after the effort to recall Thao qualified for the ballot, the city saw one of its worst mass shootings in years: 14 people were shot at a Juneteenth celebration, after a sideshow – an illegal street takeover – developed nearby and fighting broke out.As if to put a finer point on the city’s turmoil, the day after that, FBI agents descended on Thao’s home, carrying out boxes of evidence in an investigation that has neither implicated the mayor in any wrongdoing, nor absolved her of it. “It was just piling one thing on top of another,” Lindheim said. “That was the seal of death for her mayoral position.”Two years into office, Thao has argued she is just getting started. “We’re doing all this great work,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “The first year was about trying to figure out what our ills are, and finding solutions to our ailments. And now we’re seeing wins come in.”At recent rallies and town halls, the mayor and her supporters have pointed to statistics that in Oakland, as in cities across the US, crime, and especially violent crime, has been declining. This summer, a report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents the police chiefs of big cities, found a 17% decrease in the number of Oakland’s homicides from January through June, compared with the same time period last year. The local news outlet Oaklandside reported that the number of robberies, assaults and rapes had also dipped.They’ve questioned the extent to which the recallers’ grievances can be pinned to Thao, or any mayor. Crime was increasing before she took office, as was homelessness. The Oakland As – the town’s beloved major league baseball team – had been in talks to leave the city for years. Thao points out that she helped bring in the Ballers, an independent league team that began competing this summer in West Oakland.She has contradicted her critics’ characterizations of her as soft on crime by pointing out that she has expanded surveillance and policing, by calling in state funds and resources. And – much to the chagrin of some of her progressive backers – she recently ordered the city to take a more aggressive approach to removing homeless encampments.View image in fullscreenShe also has insisted on her innocence in the scandal that followed the FBI’s raid on her house. Thao had said she is not the target of the investigation, but the agency has not publicly commented on the case, nor has it confirmed her claim. It has also raided properties of the politically powerful Duong family, who hold the city’s curbside recycling contract and who had previously been under investigation by the city’s ethics commission. Thao has called out the agency for refusing to clarify the situation and timing the raid so close to the recall. “It shouldn’t look like they’re putting their finger on the scale when it comes to elections,” she said.Her arguments appear to have done little to quell broader anxieties about crime and calls for more policing. It hasn’t helped that even California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has jumped into the morass, publicly urging Oakland’s leaders to change a policy to allow more police vehicle chases, after observing “criminals often fleeing with impunity”.“Since taking office, Thao has shown herself incapable of handling the city’s most pressing challenges, while repeatedly deceiving the public about her actions and their consequences,” Seneca Scott, a recall organizer who also ran against Thao for mayor, said in a statement. “The effort to recall Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao isn’t about a single issue – it’s about a pattern of dishonesty, mismanagement and failure to provide effective leadership for the people of Oakland.”Scott and other recall supporters frequently point to reports by the San Francisco Chronicle that Oakland’s police department had been publishing misleading crime data for years. “Overall crime rates have worsened under Thao,” he said.But, at issue in the Chronicle report is the department’s weekly crime reports, which misstated some non-violent crimes. The Chronicle also found that the department had far overestimated violent crime.Longtime activists see the recall efforts against Thao and the county’s progressive district attorney as part of a broader backlash against calls for reforms following the George Floyd protests against police brutality.“I don’t know that there’s been any other time in Oakland besides that, where things had swung so far to the left,” said Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project.During the George Floyd protests, thousands were screaming in the streets in support of defunding the police – and briefly, it seemed that officials at the local and national levels were starting to pay heed. “And so I think what we’re seeing right now is a really big swing to the right,” Brooks said.Harping on the discontent are Thao’s longtime political detractors.Mere days after the election, the moderate councilmember Loren Taylor, whom Thao defeated in the mayoral race, said Oakland’s ranked-choice voting system was a form of “voter suppression” – even though the system has been in use for decades, and got him elected to his own seat.Taylor has continued his criticism of Thao, leading a group called Empower Oakland, which endorsed the recall, and vowing to run for election if Thao is removed. Thao’s predecessor, Libby Schaaf, who backed Taylor, has also endorsed the recall, telling KQED she believes Thao “is not capable of growing into the job”.Another major critic is LeRonne Armstrong, the former chief of Oakland’s troubled police department, which for decades has been under federal oversight. Thao fired Armstrong after an investigation implicated him in systemic failures within the department and after he publicly accused the federal watchdog of corruption, without evidence. But Armstrong – who is now running for a city council seat – had been well-liked in Oakland, and his dismissal triggered a fresh wave of animosity toward the mayor.Brenda Harbin-Forte, a former Alameda county superior court judge and police commissioner whom Thao removed after taking office, ended up leading the campaign against the mayor – focusing in large part on public safety and Thao’s dismissal of Armstrong.Leaders within the Oakland chapter of the NAACP have also backed the recall, with Cynthia Adams, the chapter president, calling Armstrong’s firing a “modern-day lynch”.“If you go down the streets of Oakland, it looks like a third-world country. Oakland never looked like this,” Adams told the Guardian.Meanwhile, several current and former members of the NAACP chapter have said the group has been “hijacked” by conservatives.Adding fuel to the recall effort’s momentum are hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy benefactors. Oaklandside revealed that the recall’s biggest funder was one man – Philip Dreyfuss, a hedge-fund manager who lives in the nearby wealthy enclave of Piedmont and was also top donor in the successful effort to oust San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. Ron Conway, a billionaire tech investor who was also involved in the San Francisco recall effort, is another major funder.In recent weeks, several prominent Democratic lawmakers have voiced their support for Thao – or, at least, their opposition to the recall. “The voters – through regular elections, not a few billionaires – are the ones with the power to ensure our democratic process remains strong and in place,” said Barbara Lee, a longtime ranking member of the US House, representing Oakland and neighbouring communities.“Except in rare circumstances of serious misconduct,” said Nancy Skinner, a state senator, “recalls are undemocratic and a waste of public funds.”Thao, too, has been on the offensive, holding public rallies and town halls.Whether it will be enough to fight off the challenge is unclear. At a public-safety town hall event in Oakland’s bustling Temescal neighbourhood earlier this month, Thao appeared alongside the city’s new police chief, fire chief and transportation director to reassure voters that things were getting better.The city had managed to hire dozens of new 911 operators and was in the process of hiring more, and crisis call response times had gone down since Thao took office. Also, Thao had overseen the revival of Operation Ceasefire, one of the city’s marquee gun violence prevention strategies that had been watered down under the previous administration.“We are seeing a decline in our crimes,” Thao told the crowd. “And we are seeing that we are intervening before crime actually gets started.”Attenders, many of them members of the spiritualist church that was hosting the event, seemed dubious. Were the city’s new license-plate readers making any difference? When did they expect to fill the vacancies in the police department, and hire more officers?There were stacks of notecards with questions about potholes, littered streets and illegal dumping. Thao and her team projected statistics showing that Oakland had fixed nearly as many potholes over the last fiscal year as it had during the entire 10-year period between 2008 and 2018.Linda St Julian, 75, remained unconvinced. “I’m just so upset with how nasty the city has gotten. I’m just hurt to see my city go down like this” she said. “But I’ll be dead before they fix things.”St Julian had already decided she was in favor of the recall; Thao hadn’t done enough to address crime or homelessness, she felt. Nor had Schaaf, a moderate who is now running for state treasurer. “I don’t like any of them,” St Julian said, shaking her head, referring to the city’s last several mayors.Laux Williams, 37, agreed. The last mayor they felt had done a good job was Ron Dellums, who served from 2007-2011. Williams didn’t want to say whether or not they would vote to recall Thao – but said Oakland had been suffering. “I’m just waiting on a change,” they said. More

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      ‘People don’t like to see poverty:’ inside San Francisco’s vicious race for mayor

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      When the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled this summer that cities could fine and jail unhoused people for sleeping on the streets, London Breed, the Democratic mayor of famously liberal San Francisco, greeted the decision as a victory.With more than 8,000 people in the city unhoused, Breed has increasingly embraced law-and-order policies. The supreme court’s ruling would “help cities like San Francisco manage our public spaces more effectively and efficiently”, she argued.Homelessness has been an enduring challenge for San Francisco’s leaders, including for Breed. The relentless emergency is one of the top issues in this year’s elections in the city, and Breed’s re-election is uncertain. She’s facing a host of Democratic challengers – the most prominent of whom are echoing her law-and-order rhetoric.Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist, former interim mayor and former member of the board of supervisors, has said he wants to call in armed national guard troops to deal with the city’s fentanyl crisis and would embrace “zero tolerance” and abstinence-focused responses to addiction as mayor. Daniel Lurie, a former non-profit executive and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, whose billionaire mother is backing his campaign, has proposed using ankle monitors and geolocation technology to ban people arrested for drug dealing from returning to certain city neighborhoods. “It’s basically Find My iPhone for drug dealers,” he explained. “It is time to end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco,” Lurie pledged on his campaign website.The only progressive in the mayor’s race, the longtime city supervisor Aaron Peskin, was polling so far behind over the summer that the Los Angeles Times ran a story on it. His ratings have increased slightly since then, but he is still expected to lose the race.The tough-on-crime mayoral rhetoric has fueled national headlines about San Francisco voters moving to the right. But local political experts point out that the city’s leadership has long been more centrist than its international reputation might suggest. Local residents and business owners have described a tension between wanting to fix the humanitarian crisis they see playing out around them, and worrying about the optics of the crisis for themselves and for the city, which has long been dependent on tourist dollars.“People in San Francisco don’t like to see poverty. They can be very liberal at a distance,” said Tony Sparks, an urban policy expert at San Francisco State University. The city is built on “a very boom and bust economy, and during the boom times, people don’t want to see the leftovers of the bust times”.What is new is the growing political engagement of a generation of tech executives and investors in the region, many of whom have come to believe that progressive policies that guided the city during the pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprising have set the city on the wrong track. They’re using their wealth and their public social media platforms – both sizable – in an effort to reshape the city’s politics, spending millions on local races.Money has always played a role in the city’s politics, but the mayor’s race is expected to be the most expensive in San Francisco history.Slow pandemic recovery and flexing of moneyBreed was elected in 2018 as the first Black woman to become mayor of San Francisco. She brought personal experience to many of the city’s struggles: she grew up in public housing, lost a younger sister to a drug overdose, and has a brother who is incarcerated.A longtime community activist, she was known as a centrist, one with significant support from the city’s business and tech elite. She has long argued that her approach to the homelessness and addiction crises is shaped not by rich donors, but by the views of San Francisco’s middle-class and working-class residents.View image in fullscreenSince the pandemic, those dual crises seem to only have grown, while yet others have appeared on the horizon. Most US cities bounced back quickly after the early pandemic: San Francisco did not.The transition to remote work turned its downtown business district into a shadow of itself. The much emptier streets made homelessness and public drug use – including more than 3,000 people living unsheltered on the streets or in tents – more visible and more unsettling, giving way to a national debate over whether the city was caught in a “doom loop”, in which the struggling downtown area would never be able to attract back the office workers, shoppers, and tourists it desperately needed to survive. The city’s public schools’ pandemic closures lasted much longer than in other parts of the country, sparking frustration among some parents. Accidental drug overdose deaths have claimed between 600 and 810 lives a year since 2020.Concerns about safety in the city were never supported by violent crime statistics, which have continued to show that San Francisco is relatively safe among large American cities. But they were confirmed by people’s visual experiences downtown, said Eric Jaye, a Democratic political consultant who has worked in San Francisco politics for decades. People are unlikely to feel safe when they see people injecting drugs on the street or living in tents in public spaces.San Francisco’s pandemic-related crisis were a regular laughingstock on Fox News, where Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson railed that California’s ultra-left politicians were reaping what they sowed.And while a caricature, the argument that progressive government was at least partly to blame for some of the problems resonated with many tech leaders and venture capitalists in the region, said Keally McBride, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.Funneling money through a network of locally-focused “grey money” groups, tech, real estate and venture capitalist leaders bankrolled the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s young, progressive district attorney. They backed the recall of several discredited members of the San Francisco school board. They threw their weight behind centrist candidates for board of supervisors seats. They weren’t always united in all their causes, but together, “they are spending insane amounts of money on local elections,” and they are “out to bring the hyper-progressive elements in San Francisco government down”, said McBride.View image in fullscreenSeveral challengers, similar policiesBreed, too, has embraced law-and-order policies as a way out of the emergency. She supported the recall of Boudin – replacing him with a political ally – as well as the recall of the school board members.This spring, she boosted ballot measures that gave the police department more power to use surveillance tools and that instituted drug tests for local welfare recipients. On her campaign website, she touts among her successes doubling drug arrests in 2023, and said she hopes to expand a program in which city officials buy homeless people bus tickets out of town, with a target of “1,000 people per year”.Many observers say that Breed’s leading mayoral challengers are not suggesting substantially different policies – with all of them promising to clear away the unhoused people sleeping in tents on streets and in public parks, expand the number of city police officers and put an end to public drug use.“The current mayor, and all of the prospective mayors, their aim right now is not to solve homelessness or fix homelessness or even shelter homeless people, it’s just to get them out of sight,” Sparks said. “We’re back in the 90s. Wide leg pants are in, Birkenstocks are in and so is law and order and mass incarceration.”View image in fullscreenThe number of people who are being evicted or losing access to shelter in San Francisco is constantly overwhelming the city’s ability to house them, Sparks said. An honest reckoning with California’s housing shortage, a massive problem that was decades in the making, would probably require both statewide and federal action, he argued.But it’s not just tech billionaires who want a quicker fix, he said. “At the end of the day, it’s the average San Francisco voter that is really demanding that they don’t want to see people living on the streets.”Asked about critics who said Breed’s law-and-order approach marked a return to 1990s policies, Joe Arellano, a Breed campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that “San Francisco is a city that believes in and offers second chances, but it is also a city of accountability”. He also noted that Breed had been endorsed by the San Francisco police union.The conservative media’s depiction of San Francisco as a bastion of far-left policies has always been a fiction, said Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University. Just look at the national politicians who have emerged from San Francisco: Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, people “pretty close to the center of the Democratic party”, he said.The city’s current debate is still “firmly liberal”, he argued. “San Francisco voters are still compassionate. They’re willing to spend a lot of money on government services,” McDaniel said. “It’s not a conservative approach, which is, ‘Let’s not “waste” money on people who don’t deserve it.’”But having invested public money in city services for addiction, mental health treatment and other issues, many liberal voters are upset to still see so much public disorder in the streets, McDaniel said. “Politicians are saying part of the problem is people are rejecting those services – not going to homeless shelters,” for instance. Critics point at a crippling bureaucracy, inefficient local government and several corruption scandals. Measured success and divided donorsBreed’s chances of re-election may have slightly improved over the past year, as she has appeared to make progress in some of her goals.A recent analysis from the Associated Press found that many streets in San Francisco were now empty of tents and other makeshift encampments. The number of people sleeping outdoors dropped to under 3,000 in January, the lowest the city has recorded in a decade, according to a federal count. The number has likely dropped even lower as a result of ramped up enforcement of anti-camping laws following the supreme court decision in August, the AP said.But even as tents have disappeared, the total number of unhoused people in San Francisco has grown by 7%, according to the same federal count.Steven Burcell, who is living in a tiny cabin provided by the city, told the AP that unhoused friends of his had all of their possessions taken by the city in one of the encampment “sweeps”.“Now they have nothing. They don’t have any shelter at all,” he said. “They just kind of wander around and take buses, like a lot of people do.”The increased enforcement and intense political rhetoric about homelessness are taking a toll on the people at the heart of the debate, Sparks said.“People living on the street are feeling embattled. They’re stressed. They’re having to constantly be on the move and on the lookout,” he said. “When sweeps go up, people hide.”The tech donors are divided over who they want to see as mayor. The Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen has donated hundreds of thousands to Breed’s re-election campaign. The billionaire William Oberndorf gave $500,000 to Farrell’s campaign, and the former supervisor has won the backing of several other figures from the real estate and finance sectors. Lurie, the Levi Strauss heir, has poured more than $8m of his own money into his mayoral campaign. His mother also spent $1m to back his campaign.View image in fullscreenAs the race for that role enters its final weeks, allegations of improper financial behavior are shadowing both Breed and Farrell. A city official who led Breed’s “Dream Keepers Initiative” initiative went on leave in September, after investigations by the San Francisco Chronicle and the SF Standard raised questions about the official’s spending, including $1.5m in contracts she approved for a non-profit run by a man with whom she shared an address. It wasn’t the first time that close associates of the mayor have run into ethics problems: Breed was for a time in a relationship with the city’s former director of public works, who later pleaded guilty to fraud and public corruption charges.Meanwhile, Farrell is facing accusations that his campaign is using a fund ostensibly dedicated to supporting a local ballot initiative to improperly funnel money to his mayoral campaign and dodge campaign finance limits.None of the three leading campaigns made their candidates available for a phone interview with the Guardian, and Farrell’s campaign did not respond to questions.Arellano, Breed’s campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the mayor had led “the biggest anti-corruption clean-up in our city’s history” and that “nearly all the recent examples in the news were identified because of the process she initiated to root out waste, fraud and abuse”.Breed had acted swiftly in response to the news about the “unfortunate events” at the Dream Keepers Initiative, including asking the director to resign, and “remains committed to the program”, he said.In the wake of the investigation into Farrell and the Dream Keepers Initiative, the Chronicle’s editorial board announced that though Breed was a “safe choice” for mayor, it was endorsing Lurie as someone who could bring much-needed change to the city government.The Chronicle’s endorsement was blunt: “Is Lurie’s inexperience concerning? Absolutely … We won’t sugarcoat the reality that supporting Lurie is a risk.”Though Lurie’s plans offered “a welcome balance of compassion and toughness”, some of his promises for addressing the homelessness crisis were “hyperbolic” or even, frankly, “a fantasy”, the paper noted.But the Chronicle argued that Lurie’s measured demeanour and extensive, if “unearned”, family connections, would likely enable him to hire and manage an impressive staff of city employees, who might be able to do a better job on day-to-day governance issues than Breed had done.Lurie has been running a “very outsider, populist campaign”, arguing that his lack of experience in city hall “is a good thing, from his point of view”, McDaniel, the political scientist, said. That kind of message, from a “very rich person” who has spent more on his own campaign than all the other candidates combined, is not one that McDaniel expected would resonate with San Francisco voters. But, he said, Lurie “has done better than I thought, and he could still win”.San Franciscans will use a ranked-choice voting process to select a mayor in November, meaning that candidates can pick up second and third-choice votes in the race from supporters of other candidates. Voters who support Peskin, the underdog progressive candidate, will probably be one of the key second choice vote swing groups. So far, influential local progressives have divided on who to endorse as their second choice, with some choosing Lurie, and others, Breed, McBride, the politics professor, said.“It’s all just messy,” she said. The Chronicle’s latest poll, from mid-October, showed Lurie surging to first place.Breed’s spokesperson accused Lurie and his family of trying to “buy the election”, and said: “Lurie would be at 1% if he wasn’t spending an unprecedented amount of money to cover up the fact that he has no experience to be mayor.”A spokesperson for Lurie’s campaign responded that Breed and Farrell also had billionaire backers: “Their attempts to cry foul about a resource disadvantage are the result of bad strategy and tactical blunders – not an actual lack of resources.”Jaye, the longtime Democratic consultant, said that he believed that some of the city’s ascendant tech donors are “well-meaning, but arrogant and naive”.“They are telling themselves because they are successful in technology that they know a lot about government or crime or housing or homelessness.”Their involvement has sometimes turned up the temperature of the campaign, with inflammatory late night tweets upping the ante. Elon Musk, whose political donations are playing an outsized role in the presidential race, has repeatedly tweeted that progressive city officials in San Francisco should be put in prison. Garry Tan, the CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator and a prominent political donor, sparked a police investigation after he tweeted the names of seven city supervisors, including Peskin, saying they should “die slow motherfuckers”.Local tech leaders have also been working for years to “remake” the city “so it’s their San Francisco, not the San Francisco of the people who live here now”, Jaye argued.While Musk announced this summer that he would be moving the headquarters of X, his struggling social media platform, out of San Francisco, new, more ascendant tech startups are moving in. OpenAI, a major player in artificial intelligence, reportedly leased a second office space in San Francisco in September, part of a reported boom in AI businesses renting office space in the city.You have to “follow the money”, Jaye said. “It’s probably five times more than has ever been spent in an election cycle in San Francisco, and we’re not done.” More

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      Man arrested with guns near California Trump rally sues sheriff for defamation

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      A Nevada man who was arrested over the weekend with guns at a security checkpoint outside a Donald Trump rally in the southern California desert has filed a lawsuit accusing the sheriff of falsely characterizing his arrest as a thwarted assassination attempt for his own personal gain.The man, identified as 49-year-old Vem Miller of Las Vegas, had been driving an unregistered black SUV with a “homemade” license plate when he was stopped by deputies assigned to the rally in Coachella, east of Los Angeles, Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said on Sunday at a news conference.Miller had a shotgun, loaded handgun, ammunition and several fake passports in his vehicle, Bianco said. Miller was released the same day on $5,000 bail.The lawsuit filed on Tuesday in US district court in Nevada said Bianco had lied about the fake passports, and that he “created a narrative so as to be viewed as a ‘heroic’ Sheriff who saved Presidential candidate Trump”. It named as defendants the sheriff, the Riverside county sheriff’s department and a sheriff’s deputy.A call to the sheriff’s executive office for comment on Wednesday was deferred to the department’s communications office, which did not respond to an email. The Associated Press also emailed Miller’s lawyer, Sigal Chattah, for comment.Security has been very tight at Trump rallies following two recent assassination attempts. Last month, a man was indicted on an attempted assassination charge after authorities said he staked out the former president for 12 hours and wrote of his desire to kill him. The Florida arrest came two months after Trump was shot and wounded in the ear during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.Bianco said that Miller also claimed to be a journalist, but that it was unclear if he had the proper credentials. Deputies noticed the interior of the vehicle was “in disarray” and a search uncovered the weapons and ammo, along with multiple passports and driver licenses with different names, Bianco said.Miller’s lawsuit accused the sheriff’s department of illegally searching the SUV. It also said that he had willingly disclosed to officers at the checkpoint that he had weapons but intended to leave them in the vehicle.Miller is scheduled to appear in court in January in the weapons case. He was arrested on suspicion of possessing a loaded firearm and possession of a high-capacity magazine, according to online records. More

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      Man arrested near Trump rally on gun charges ‘deeply admires’ ex-president

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      A man arrested on gun possession charges near a Donald Trump rally in California on Saturday, spurring significant safety concerns, said that he was a major supporter of the former US president and would never harm him.“Yes, I’m 100% a Trump supporter,” the man, Vem Miller, told Fox News Digital in an interview. Miller, 49, denied the local sheriff’s allegation that he was bringing weapons to Trump’s event to kill him.“This is a man that I deeply admire,” the Las Vegas resident also said. He claimed to be a registered Republican and “all-in” with the Republican presidential candidate since 2018.Miller was not able to get anywhere near Trump. Law enforcement agencies –including the Riverside, California, sheriff’s office, Secret Service and the Los Angeles US attorney – said that Trump was not in any danger.While authorities said that Trump had been safe, the incident came in the wake of two assassination attempts, fanning the flames of fear over his safety. During a presser on Sunday, the Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco claimed: “I truly do believe we prevented another assassination attempt,” stoking concerns still more.Miller was taken into custody at a checkpoint at approximately a half-mile from an entrance to Trump’s Coachella Valley campaign stop, shortly before it was scheduled to start. Authorities claimed that Miller was in possession of a loaded shotgun and handgun, as well as a high-capacity magazine.Miller was arrested before Trump arrived at the site, according to KTLA. He was released from jail on $5,000 bail shortly after his arrest, according to police records.Bianco said that Miller caught the attention of law enforcement after he managed to access the initial perimeter near Trump’s campaign stop. Bianco cited visual “irregularities”, noting that Miller’s SUV was not registered and had an “obviously” fake license plate.A sheriff’s deputy “eventually found multiple passports with multiple names and multiple driver’s licenses with different names”, Fox 5 News quoted Bianco as saying.Bianco claimed that Miller, who two years ago ran for Nevada’s state assembly, was a “sovereign citizen”. The sovereign citizens do not think they must abide any government laws without consent, and this movement is considered extremist and right wing.Miller told Fox News Digital that he had firearms due to death threats over his website America Happens Network. “I don’t know anything about guns. I am beyond a novice,” he said. The website claims it intends to fight censorship and “rage against the mainstream media”.“I always travel around with my firearms in the back of my truck,” Miller said, nonetheless insisting: “I’ve literally never even shot a gun in my life.”Miller also slammed Bianco’s claim that he was among the “sovereign citizen” movement, saying: “I don’t think there’s such a thing.”“Government is an inanimate object, it’s the individuals within government that matter, so no, I’m not a part of any of that,” he reportedly said.“These accusations are complete bullshit,” Miller told the Press-Enterprise. “I’m an artist, I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody.”Miller also released his own video, “because of the false information that is currently being released by the police department”, and said that his website was focused on protecting freedom of press and speech.“While we are currently, and we have been, for closely eight years staunch supporters of President Donald Trump, we don’t align ourselves with any political party except for one that supports our freedoms … and gets rid of the tyranny of corrupt politicians,” he said.“President Donald Trump has been near and dear to our hearts because he’s one of the only individuals that I’ve seen have the courage to actually stand up to the tyranny against we the people,” Miller continued, referring to the preamble to the US constitution. More

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      The California community caught between a powerful megachurch and far-right extremists

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      This is the third in a series of three stories on the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election in Shasta county, a region of 180,000 people in northern California that has emerged as a center of the election denial movement and hotbed for far-right politics. Read the first and second story.For years, an extremist far-right movement has worked to transform one of California’s most conservative regions. Since gaining a majority on Shasta county’s governing body, they have managed to spark an exodus of government workers, attempted to do away with the voting system and fought the state over policies pertaining to Covid-19 and the second amendment.Earlier this year, voters in the community of 180,000 – perhaps tired of Shasta’s national notoriety as a hotbed for extremist politics and election denialism – declared they had had enough. In a stunning rebuke, they voted out a far-right leader by an enormous margin, handing his seat to a political newcomer.Matt Plummer, a Yale-educated former college football player who owns a corporate training business, pledged to provide an alternative to the “hostility and division” tearing Shasta apart. Supporters view Plummer, with his focus on issues such as crime, roads and homelessness, as someone who can help the community chart a path out of the upheaval.But others are concerned about Plummer’s connection to another powerful and ultra-conservative force that has reshaped the region: Bethel church. The megachurch has more than 11,000 members, including Plummer, and a school of “supernatural ministry” that serves 2,000 students a year.View image in fullscreenBethel leaders once said that God wanted Donald Trump to have a second term and have claimed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by “fraud”. Church members have become major players in local government – three of the five members on the city council in Redding, the county seat, attend Bethel. The city’s vice-mayor is a church elder.The church is involved in nearly every part of Shasta county, and is a cornerstone of the local economy, said Doni Chamberlain, a longtime local journalist and chronicler of the area.Shasta’s extreme political landscape has forced residents to choose between a toxic rightwing movement and a church that also has deeply conservative and extreme beliefs, she said.“This is the bind we’re in,” she said. “Shasta county is in this weird extremist sandwich where we have the rightwing pushing for guns and splitting the state. And there is the other extreme side of the sandwich that is Bethel church. Then the middle where people are trying to figure out how to survive in this place.”Before Shasta county garnered national attention for its fierce opposition to Covid-19 restrictions and efforts to institute a hand-count voting system favored by those who believe lies about election fraud, it was Bethel church that raised the region’s profile.There are churches – of which Shasta county has plenty – and then there is Bethel, a behemoth institution without parallel in the area. First established in a private home in 1952, it now has more than 11,000 members – more than 10% of the population in the city of Redding – where the church is based.Bethel’s transformation came under the direction of Bill Johnson, the son of a long-serving pastor who began leading the church with Beni, his wife, in 1996. The church has grown significantly, opening a school, a youth outreach program and Bethel Music, a record label that produces popular worship music and reported $18m in revenue in 2023. Justin Bieber is a fan and has filmed himself covering a song from a Bethel artist. Today several of Johnson’s children work as senior leaders in the church.But it’s Bethel’s school of supernatural ministry, which has been called a “Christian Hogwarts”, that is often credited with its growth. The program was founded by Kris and Kathy Vallotton, the senior leaders of the church, and teaches students that they can perform miracles and heal through prayer. “Students will learn how to read, understand, and ‘do’ the Bible, how to practice His presence, to witness, heal the sick, prophesy, preach, pray, cast out demons and much more,” the school website states.People travel to Redding from around the world, more than 100 countries, to attend the vocational program. Students have been known to approach people in the city, particularly those in casts or with walkers, to offer prayers for healing. The focus on “supernatural power” is fundamental to the church, which in 2019 asked members to pray for the resurrection of a two-year-old girl.Bethel has long believed in the power of healing people through prayer. Chamberlain joined the church as a child after her mother died and her siblings were adopted by a local couple who were members. When they learned that Chamberlain and her twin sister had a neurological disorder that caused involuntary movements, church elders came to treat their “demons” and the children were made to throw away their medications, Chamberlain recalled.“When you have a bunch of adults circling around you and putting their hands on your heads and shaking you, it was pretty intimidating,” she said, adding that they coached her on how to speak in tongues.“It’s like being waterboarded, you just give up and give in so they leave you alone. Then you’re in the club.”Since its founding in 1998, Bethel’s supernatural school has brought thousands of people to Redding. They are a visible presence around the city, in its grocery stores and the hip cafes and bakeries operated by Bethel members. And as the church’s footprint has grown, so too has criticism of its role.Supporters say the church has been a positive force in Redding and that it’s natural for a large institution to attract scrutiny but that members want to be a part of the community in which they live. They often point to local volunteer work or when the church donated money to fund police positions in Redding and began leasing the local auditorium when it appeared the city would have to close it down.Bethel did not respond to multiple requests for comment.View image in fullscreenBut other Shasta county residents argue the church has changed the fabric of the community and worsened an existing housing shortage by drawing thousands of students to the area while driving up costs.“If you look from the outside in, there seems to be positives. They’ve done good things, but I don’t feel like on balance what they’ve done is for the good of the community in general,” said Robert Sid, a Shasta county resident who supported Plummer. “Their Hogwarts supernatural ministry has really played into flooding the market and artificially pricing things that the regular Redding person can’t afford.”Critics have expressed discomfort with church members who hold key positions in local government voting on proposals from Bethel to expand. Some residents have joined a Facebook group to identify businesses connected to the church.“[The owners] tithe to the church. If you patronize a Bethel-affiliated business then now some of those profits are being tithed to the church. You’re kind of indirectly supporting the church by doing that,” said Rachel Strickland, who started the group. “People don’t want to do that.”And for some in this deeply conservative region, where Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one, the church’s political ties have been cause for concern as well. Religious experts have described it as closely related to the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement built around the idea of modern-day prophets and apostles that aims to have Christians transform society and rule over key political and cultural institutions, referred to as the “Seven Mountain Mandate”.Johnson co-authored a book, Invading Babylon: the 7 Mountain Mandate, which advises Christians to exert influence in seven core areas: church, family, education, government, media, arts and commerce.Matthew D Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish studies who has studied Bethel, argued that the church appears to be trying to implement the Seven Mountain Mandate in its community.“I think they very much intend to enact this bigger vision of Christian supremacy and Christian dominance in the Redding area. It doesn’t mean they are always overt about that,” said Taylor, the author of a book on the New Apostolic Reformation for which he interviewed Johnson.Bethel leaders endorsed Donald Trump, and in 2021 one apologized for incorrectly prophesying that he would win a second term. The church has come out against efforts to restrict conversion therapy. In 2019, several figures associated with the church attended an Oval Office event with Trump to pray over the president. Bethel has sought to distance itself from January 6, however, Taylor said.“They are trying to tone down public rhetoric and make themselves [seem] less extreme than they are but as far as I can tell they haven’t moderated their extremism. They are just trying to package it in a better way,” he argued.The church has long emphasized that the beliefs of individual church members are not necessarily reflective of the church’s positions. Chamberlain, who left the church as a young adult, argues it is important to distinguish between the church leadership and its members.“You have to separate the leaders of the church, the people who are millionaires and drive expensive cars, cars that cost as much as somebody might pay for a house. They have vacation homes and eat at The French Laundry,” Chamberlain said.They live a life of the rich and famous, she added, while some Bethel members, and students, leave their homes abroad and live in extreme poverty to be close to the church.Members point out that they are not a monolith.Matt Plummer’s journey to Redding began the same way thousands of others have – with Bethel. He moved to the city in 2016 with his wife and daughters to attend the church, and remains a member, he said in an interview with the Guardian.Plummer, who grew up in rural New Jersey where his first job was on a horse farm, was drawn to the region’s access to nature from hiking to swimming holes, he said, and the family has developed deep ties to the area.He decided to run for the board of supervisors after working in several political campaigns and seeing the intense polarization and problems that have plagued Shasta county.“We have tied basically for the highest suicide rate in the state. You have one of the highest rates of childhood trauma and one of the highest rates of kids being born with drug withdrawal effects,” he said. “This is a pretty cool community that has a lot to offer but at the same time if you look at all these dimensions of what makes a community thrive, we’re trailing.”View image in fullscreenHe had a tough race ahead of him seeking to unseat Patrick Jones, who previously served on the Redding city council and had been a supervisor for three years as well as a leader of the anti-establishment movement that has come to define local politics.Jones, a gun store manager, led some of the county’s most controversial efforts, including attempting to upend the voting system and moving to allow people to carry firearms in public buildings in violation of state law. He also spread conspiracy theories, telling a conservative national news outlet: “Elections have been manipulated at the county level for decades.”He once responded to a reporter’s query by telling them to “drop dead”.While polarizing, Jones was well-known and had been in politics for years, Plummer said, and had the backing of a Connecticut magnate who has poured millions of dollars into local elections.Plummer made up for that by making personal contact, and personally knocked on about 9,000 doors, he said (there are about 23,000 registered voters in his district).“People care if you show up and meet them,” he said.He sought to stay out of ideological debates and focus on what residents were worried about, primarily public safety, roads and homelessness. The number of unhoused residents has grown significantly in recent years from 793 in 2022 to 1,013 people in 2023.“My opponent had been on the board almost four years and he had been on city council for eight years, which had some jurisdiction over the same things. And they had all gotten worse,” he said.His affiliation with Bethel was a concern, he acknowledged, one he tried to address and alleviate. “I’m not speaking on stage and not this type of celebrity at Bethel. I just go there on a Sunday morning.”View image in fullscreen“One of the things I said is: ‘I’m not running to represent Bethel and so my job is not to defend Bethel’ and so when people would attack Bethel for things, I’d say OK, that’s fine. That’s actually not my priority here,” he said.Strickland, who has described Bethel as a cult, said the choice put the community in a tough position, but that even in her Facebook group people seemed to be leaning toward Plummer. “For me Patrick Jones is much more dangerous.”Plummer received the endorsement of Chamberlain’s publication, A News Cafe, drawing backlash from some readers who started referring to the outlet as Bethel Cafe.“It was a tough call. I have a problem with Bethel on a lot of levels, but just kind of putting on your thinking cap sometimes the Bethel candidates were the best choice for the positions,” she said.“Do we vote for Patrick Jones who is pushing guns and open carry? Or do we vote for Matt Plummer who is a Bethel member? He’s also articulate, educated and smart.”And in the current political climate in the county, Chamberlain mused, few people would want to subject themselves to running for office. “The Bethel people are kind of impervious to it. It’s scriptural.” More

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      Man arrested near Donald Trump’s California rally with loaded guns, police say

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      A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended by authorities at a campaign rally in California on Saturday being held by Donald Trump.The suspect, identified as Las Vegas resident Vem Miller, was intercepted by police at a checkpoint about a half-mile from an entrance to the rally in Coachella Valley, California, soon before it began, police said Sunday.Police said Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization.Miller was booked for possessing a loaded firearm and a high capacity magazine – and was released after posting $5,000 bail, police records show.“The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the Riverside county sheriff’s office said in a press release.The Secret Service put out a statement saying it was apprised of the arrest: “The incident did not impact protective operations. The Secret Service extends its gratitude to the deputies and local partners who assisted in safeguarding last night’s events.”The US Attorney’s Los Angeles office, in a statement on Sunday, also said Trump was not in danger, citing the US Secret Service. The statement added that while no federal arrest had been made, an investigation was ongoing.Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said he believed at a press conference on Sunday that Miller was plotting to kill Trump, but acknowledged that was “speculation”. “What we do know is he showed up with multiple passports with different names, an unregistered vehicle with a fake license plate and loaded firearms,” the sheriff said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon.The suspect later told US media that he was a Trump supporter who bought the guns for his own safety and notified police at a checkpoint that they were in the trunk of his car. “These accusations are complete bullshit,” Miller said. “I’m an artist, I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody.”He said he was surprised by his arrest, and had been detained for about eight hours.Miller holds a UCLA master’s degree, and in 2022 ran for Nevada state assembly. Bianco said Miller considers himself a so-called sovereign citizen, a group of people who do not believe they are subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.Bianco said Miller’s identity card was enough to raise suspicion with local rally security. “They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” he said, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In September, another man was charged with trying to assassinate Trump after Secret Service agents discovered him hiding with a rifle near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. He has since pleaded not guilty.Bianco said US Secret Service officials said his department went “above and beyond” in their efforts to protect Trump and others who attended the rally.Bianco also said the FBI is questioning another man after bomb-detecting dogs “repeatedly” identified him as possibly dangerous. That man was not allowed in the rally, Bianco said.Miller is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson justice center on 2 January 2025, according to the Riverside county sheriff’s department inmate database.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Harris holds Las Vegas rally as Nevada becomes crucial swing state in election

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      Kamala Harris held a rally in Las Vegas on Sunday night as the state, with six electoral college votes, becomes increasingly important in a presidential race that polls show is barely moving to favour either candidate.Both the vice-president and Donald Trump have been making frequent trips to Nevada, but Harris’s rally takes place two days after she visited the US-Mexico border, a vulnerable issue for Democrats that Harris is looking to defuse.Before the raucous Las Vegas crowd estimated at 7,500, Harris renewed her jabs at Trump over refusing another debate, saying, “the American people have a right to hear us discuss the issues. And as you say here in Las Vegas, I’m all in. I’m all in.”Harris offered her condolences for those affected by Hurricane Helene, and her campaign said she would visit affected areas as soon as doing so would not disrupt the emergency response to the storm that has hit the country’s southeast.“We will stand with these communities for as long as it takes to make sure that they are able to recover and rebuild,” Harris said on Sunday.On Friday, Harris walked alongside a towering, rust-colored border wall fitted with barbed wire in Douglas, Arizona, and met with federal authorities to discuss illegal border crossing and fentanyl smuggling.At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on Sunday, the former president attempted to blame Harris for the opioid epidemic. “She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” he said.Six out of 10 Americans rate immigration as “very important”, according to the Pew Research Center, and other polling suggests voters trust Trump can handle the issue more effectively than Harris can.In contrast, fewer than half of voters (40%) said abortion, the key Republican vulnerability, was a very important issue to their vote.In a speech in San Francisco on Saturday, Harris said the “race is as close as it could possibly be” and described it “a margin-of-error race”. The Democrat candidate added that she felt she was running as the underdog.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats have also begun testing a new strategy to appeal to younger voters, including visitors to Las Vegas with its long-crafted reputation for inebriation, with posts about what it calls “Trump’s tequila tax” that its says could come as a result of proposed import tariffs.Harris’s campaign swing through Las Vegas comes as both candidates have said they plan to end taxes on tips. Trump presented his proposal in the city in June; Harris used her own rally in August to make the same pledge.The issue resonates in Las Vegas, where there are approximately 60,000 hospitality workers. Nevada’s Culinary Union has endorsed Harris.Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, told the Associated Press that the union favored Harris’s proposal because she pledged to tackle what his union calls “sub-minimum wage”.“That shows us she’s serious,” Pappageorge said.Trump was at the same Las Vegas venue that Harris is speaking at earlier this month. In that address, he called his opponent the “would-be the president of invasion”. More

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      Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case after day of back and forth

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      Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son.Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.”Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence.A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December.The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday morning as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial.After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi, the judge overseeing the case.“[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could air embarrassing details of the younger Biden’s life. A defense attorney for Biden, Abbe Lowell, told the judge that the evidence against his client is “overwhelming” and that he wanted to resolve the case.The son of the president stands accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.A guilty plea will head off a weeks-long trial that would mark the second time in three months that the younger Biden sits in a federal courtroom as a jury of his peers is assembled to assess whether he is guilty of a slew of criminal charges.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018 because he wrote on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. The new trial takes place in the city where Biden has lived for years and where, according to the prosecution, he spent extensively on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.The most serious charges relate to his 2018 return on which, according to the prosecution, he sought to claim his children’s college tuition fees and more than $27,000 in online pornography as business expenses.The tax charges and the gun charges carry maximum sentences of more than 20 years in prison, although legal experts say that, as a first-time offender, Biden is likely to be punished far less harshly even if he were to be found guilty a second time.It has been a whirlwind of a summer for Joe Biden’s son, one in which he was convicted of felonies, rushed to Washington as pressure mounted on his father not to run for re-election, raised eyebrows by dropping into White House meetings – and, according to one report, acting as his father’s “gatekeeper” – then appeared on stage at the Democratic national convention to bask in his father’s reflected glory.Now that Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election ambitions and thrown his support behind his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the political stakes of Hunter Biden’s latest trial will be lower. Still, his legal troubles will take some of the sting out of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that he is the target of a political witch-hunt and that the president has “weaponized” the justice system against him.After Hunter Biden’s June conviction, Joe and Jill Biden issued a statement saying they would respect the judicial process and not consider a pardon for their son. The first lady attended court in Delaware most days, but it is not clear whether she would do the same in California. More