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      Harris’s home town is hopeful she will make history: ‘she is going to win big’

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      As the extremely divisive election over who will next lead the United States wrapped up, California’s Bay Area was enveloped in a quiet calm. Far from the massive political rallies and the rousing rhetoric that has overtaken battleground states many voters here are decided; the communities to the east of San Francisco were among the counties that voted most strongly for Joe Biden in 2020, and they will show up again hoping to defeat Donald Trump.Even so, some ballots in Oakland and Berkeley will be cast with an extra sense of pride. In the towns where Kamala Harris was born and raised, locals are hopeful their hometown hero will make history.“Words cannot express how excited I am for Kamala Harris to become the first woman president, the first Black woman president and the first south Asian woman president,” said Oakland resident Kim Thompson. “She will also be the first president from Oakland, California,” Thompson added.Not all voters in the mid-sized cities that hug the shores of the San Francisco Bay are aware that the Democratic nominee got her start there. But as the self-proclaimed “daughter of Oakland”, Harris staged her campaign around her connection to the area, claiming the diverse city that’s steeped in cultural and political history with pride.View image in fullscreenThose are also the attributes that drew Thompson to lay down roots and raise her family in Oakland after moving there in 1987. As a Black woman and a lawyer who is deeply connected to civic life in the city, she delights in its ties to a potentially historic moment should Harris be elected.“How great would it be for Oakland if the rest of the country looks to us and says, ‘Wow. That is not just the birthplace of the Black Panthers, not just a place that stood side by side with San Francisco and Berkeley where a lot of the civil rights movement started,’” she said. She’s looking ahead to a future where a presidential library is hosted in the town. “That will be such a positive mark on our city – we are the place where it all began for her.”Born in a Kaiser hospital near the heart of Oakland, Harris and her small family moved frequently in her early years, settling in the midwest and in Montreal in between spells in California. But Harris left a mark on the places where she grew up that still lingers today.A mural depicting her alongside the civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, female education activist Malala Yousafzai and other impactful women now stands in the tree-lined neighborhood where she attended elementary school in north Berkeley, bussed across town from her apartment as part of a 1967 plan to desegregate schools.View image in fullscreenBerkeley and Oakland each offer lists of important sites for Harris-themed tours, including where she launched her first bid for the presidency – one she ended before primaries began back in 2019 – in front of roughly 20,000 people near the steps of Oakland’s city hall.These towns left an indelible mark on her too. Those early years, which she chronicles in her memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, are filled with remembrances of joy but also the budding awareness about injustice, the fight for equality and rich cultural traditions of activism and art.Harris credits her upbringing, including trips to the Rainbow Sign, a once vibrant African American cultural center in Berkeley that she attended with her mother, Shyamala, and her sister, Maya, for seeding her political ambitions.View image in fullscreen“Being from a place that’s so diverse it helps shape our ideals and our morals and to accept people for their differences,” said Derreck Johnson, an Oakland resident and close childhood friend of Harris. And, he said, even if Harris hasn’t devoted a lot of campaign time to the area, understandably focusing resources and face time in areas where votes are harder-won, she hasn’t forgotten about her home town or the friends who still live there.When Johnson opened his restaurant, Home of Chicken and Waffles, she called to congratulate him. He returned the favor, driving to Nevada to join her in the crucial final days of campaigning. He’s also planning to add a temporary menu item that bears her name – chicken lasagne cooked with collard greens – for those back home.“I am overwhelmed with joy – I don’t even know how to describe it,” he said. “I feel she is going to win. I feel she is going to win big.”

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      In the Bay Area, whether voting with hometown pride, a desire to see history made or a dedication to progressive values – perhaps even all three – large numbers are expected to cast their support. Close to 80% of Alameda county, of which both Berkeley and Oakland are part, voted for Biden in 2020, the landmark election that made her the first female vice-president.View image in fullscreenStill, “everybody’s holding their collective breath and that’s all we can do”, said Joyce Gardner, who has owned a women’s clothing shop in Rockridge, one of Oakland’s lively shopping districts for more than two decades. She’s dedicated her storefront to depictions of the candidate, adding Harris’s face to mannequins clad in classy suits and adorning it with cardboard cutouts.For Gardner though, Harris’s hometown heritage isn’t the draw.“It’s not about her connections to here,” she said. “It’s about what she’s going to do to lift up people.” Gardner is one of many who is voting in this election with a specific purpose: to ensure Trump doesn’t get another shot at the White House.“We need this country to move forward with a decent human being who cares about people, and not just lining his pockets,” she said.“We will see,” she added. “I believe this country is going to do the right thing.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Democrats press for congressional seats in once-red Orange county: ‘If we sit on our asses, we lose’

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      In an industrial business park in Orange county – the affluent, largely suburban slice of southern California wedged between Los Angeles and San Diego – Dave Min was feeling the weight of the world last weekend.“If we sit on our asses for the next 10 days, we lose,” the Democratic candidate for California’s 47th congressional district told a roomful of Asian American supporters at his campaign headquarters. “We need to get out that vote.”Earlier in the day, with former president Bill Clinton standing next to him, Min spelled out the stakes to a noisy crowd of about 200 volunteers about to spread out and canvass for him. “America is under greater threat to our most cherished values than at any time in our lifetimes,” he told them gravely. “And control of Congress could depend on who wins this particular district.”That claim was no exaggeration. As Democrats vie to overturn the Republicans’ four-seat majority in the House of Representatives – a vital backstop, as they see it, if they should lose the White House to Donald Trump – their chances hinge on a number of highly competitive California districts, three of them in Orange county.View image in fullscreenOnce a bastion of Reagan Republicanism, the county has edged towards the centre-left as its population has grown more ethnically diverse and a crucial percentage of Republican voters – college-educated women, in particular – have grown disgusted with Trump and his Maga movement.Just how far, and how reliably, the county has moved will be put to the test on 5 November, following a campaign in which both parties have sunk tens of millions of dollars and bombarded the airwaves and people’s mailboxes with a toxic brew of attack ads invoking everything from the Chinese Communist party to pedophilia.Min, a Korean American law professor who has a solid legislative record in California’s state senate, is fighting to fill a seat being vacated by Katie Porter, the outspoken Democratic party populist and prolific fundraiser who ran for the US Senate but fell short in the March primary against her House colleague Adam Schiff.Inland from Porter’s coastal district, Derek Tran is hoping to become the first Vietnamese American member of Congress, in an area with the largest ethnic Vietnamese population outside Vietnam. To succeed, he will have to unseat Michelle Steel, a powerful, well-funded Republican incumbent with deep roots in county politics and who, as a Korean American, has her own Asian bona fides.To the south of both districts, the incumbent Democrat, Mike Levin, is facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from Matt Gunderson, a wealthy car dealer who previously ran for office in Wisconsin.Opinion polls in all three districts have been volatile. Levin’s campaign manager, Adam Berkowitz, described his race as a “pollercoaster” – recent surveys have put Levin anywhere from 12 points to just a single percentage point ahead – and he said he expected the determining factor not to be overall voting preferences so much as the ability of each party to turn out its supporters.View image in fullscreenFor the Democrats to succeed, they will need to depend on three key, overlapping groups: Asian Americans, who see an opportunity to flex their political muscles in two of the three districts; female voters alarmed at the prospect of a national abortion ban if Republicans take both chambers of Congress and the White House; and moderate Republicans (many of them now former Republicans) appalled by the fealty of all three GOP congressional candidates to Donald Trump and everything he stands for.The Republicans, meanwhile, have done their best to talk about anything but abortion – their candidates have twisted themselves into pretzels claiming to be more moderate on the issue than their past stances would suggest – and are betting that well-to-do Orange county residents will see more opportunities to increase their wealth if Republicans take charge in Washington.That bet is causing particular heartburn for politically engaged women who have abandoned the GOP and wish they could convince more of their wealthy suburban friends to do likewise. “It’s all about what Republican voters think he [Trump] will bring to the table so they can save a buck or two on their taxes,” former Republican turned Democratic party fundraiser Katherine Amoukhteh said. “They’ve decided that leaving millions to their kids is more important than climate change.”Not everyone, though, thinks the choice is quite so transactional, or so cut and dried. Liz Dorn Parker, another former Republican who supervises endorsements for Women for American Values and Ethics (Wave), a non-partisan Orange county political action committee, believes the threat to reproductive rights is a powerful motivator for female voters – whether or not they admit it publicly, or tell their husbands.“You’ve got to imagine some of these older Republican women, many of them divorced or widowed,” Parker said, painting with a deliberately broad brush. “All their money is tied to housing, and, yes, they’re worried about the Democrats being communists. But they’re also looking at their granddaughters and asking, what if they get raped? The issue is freaking people out in ways that the men just don’t understand.”An immigrant community eyes alternativesAs the races come into the home stretch, the Democrats are cautiously confident that Tran can unseat Steel, following a bruising campaign in which Steel’s team has tried to make political hay out of everything from the clients Tran took on as a consumer rights lawyer to his investments in cryptocurrencies which, they say, link him to Chinese Communist party, a reliable bogeyman in Orange county, especially among Vietnamese American voters.A Steel spokesperson described Tran as “a sleazy trial lawyer” and offered a statement to the Guardian, reflecting the overall tone, accusing him of making a fortune “working for sexual predators, filing frivolous lawsuits, discrediting the victims and blaming the women”.Tran has not shied away from calling Steel a “Trump lackey” and a “complete fraud” for withdrawing her support for the strict anti-abortion Life at Conception Act, a bill she previously co-sponsored.View image in fullscreenStill, Tran’s campaign says the relentless, often baseless attacks against him are a sign of Steel’s nervousness, in a district where Democrats hold a five-point registration edge and the most recent internal polling put him a few points ahead. Tran’s candidacy has generated genuine excitement in Little Saigon, a staunchly conservative area in northern Orange county at the centre of Steel’s C-shaped district, where Tran campaign signs are now prominent even among the names of other much more conservative candidates for local office.That alone is striking, since most Vietnamese immigrants to the United States fled during the fall of Saigon in 1975 and have translated their native anticommunism into staunchly Republican politics that they have passed down to their children and grandchildren.

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      “This all boils down to the fact that this community has never had representation from one of its own in the 49-plus years they’ve been in this country,” Tran said in an interview. “For many seniors, I’m the first Democrat they’ve ever voted for. They’re putting heritage over party lines, and that’s exactly what we want them to do.”The Democrats are further encouraged that Steel’s policy positions are too far to the right for her voters. One of her congressional allies is Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose support for Steel’s re-election proved so awkward that Steel opted not to cash a check the showboating congresswoman wrote. They also say Steel has a reputation for spending little time in her district and offering little in the way of constituent services. Her campaign did not respond to several invitations to comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome of Steel’s attacks on Tran have arguably pushed the bounds of believability, including one recent television appearance in which she said: “I think I am more Vietnamese than my opponent.”A bruising contest for a vacated seatMin almost certainly faces a tougher challenge than Tran, even though his Republican opponent, Scott Baugh, has run for Congress twice before and was embroiled in an election fraud scheme 28 years ago that resulted in a large civil fine.Several activists who might otherwise have offered full-throated support to Min were dismayed when Porter walked away from the seat, seeing the decision as close to a betrayal, and were dismayed all over again when Min ran a negative and highly personal primary campaign to defeat his leading challenger. That, local political operatives say, has significantly eaten into Min’s ability to mount an effective grassroots campaign.View image in fullscreenIn addition, Min was arrested for driving under the influence last year, prompting calls across the political spectrum for him to drop out of the race. The episode has left him with the unfortunate nickname “DUI Dave”, which the Republicans have gleefully propagated.Min has called the DUI his “biggest mistake”.He has plenty of strengths as a candidate – he appears smart and well-spoken on the stump, and centrist enough to have won the endorsement of law enforcement organisations that typically lean Republican. But Baugh has run a strong campaign of his own, coming across in television appearances as affable and relatively moderate by Trump-era Republican standards.Min appeared energised last weekend when Bill Clinton and a cohort of elected Democrats from around the country turned up in his district for the final campaign push, and the school gymnasium where he fired up his volunteers did not lack enthusiasm. “Min for the Win,” their T-shirts read, and they cheered on every one of his campaign lines.But Min himself acknowledged in an interview that he hadn’t talked to as many voters as he would have liked and had had to rely on TV ads and other forms of mass communication in the absence of a robust local media. “When I go on TV, a lot of people don’t know me,” he said.Parker, the Wave endorsement manager, acknowledged that bad blood among Democrats had hurt Min especially since he had a steep hill to climb to match Porter’s name recognition. “People are mad at Dave … People got personally hurt,” she said. “My answer to that is: ‘This is politics, people. Grow up.’ Whoever wins, you’ve got to work for. You gotta keep the seat blue.”A more liberal area, but also more polarisedWorking hard has not been a problem for Mike Levin, whose district straddles the most conservative areas of Orange county – including San Clemente, seat of Richard Nixon’s “western White House” – and more liberal beach cities north of San Diego.Levin has made re-election look relatively easy since he first won the seat in 2018, thanks to a ground operation that has grown with each passing election cycle. This year, an early canvassing operation over the spring and summer reached an unprecedented 80,000 voters. After two months of follow-up phone-banking work, his campaign is now sending canvassers back out to make sure people are filling out their ballots and returning them correctly. “We’re hitting 2,000 houses a day, seven days a week,” one of his field officers, Gene Larson, reported.In all three districts, Democrats are betting that this is no longer “your father’s Orange county”, as Min described it, meaning it is now more diverse and more liberal. But the area is also more polarised and, in some quarters, more extreme than it was a generation ago.Porter’s district includes Huntington Beach, a city so radical it has banned books in its libraries, refused to fly a Pride flag outside its city hall and adopted its own local anti-immigration agenda. Min said the city had “weaponised its school districts into bastions of hate”.Are the county’s ranks of Latinos, Asians and the well-educated – the “diploma divide”, as it is known – enough to offset such experiments in Maga Republicanism? Many of the Democrats who flooded into Orange county to support their candidates last weekend are counting on it, and are looking to Asian voters, in particular, to make the crucial difference.“We are going from being marginalised,” Representative Judy Chu of Los Angeles said, “to being the margin of victory.”Bill Clinton, for one, did not want to contemplate a world in which that prediction was wrong. “It’ll be almost impossible for us to win a House majority,” he said, “if we don’t win these … seats in southern California.” More

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      Early ballots burned in suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon

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

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      ‘A once-in-a-generation change’: Oregon’s biggest city prepares for monumental overhaul of government

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      When voters in Portland, Oregon, head to the polls next month, they will be tasked not only with selecting new leaders, but also the implementation of a monumental overhaul of the city’s government.Two years ago, residents moved to fundamentally alter their local government structure and adopted what experts have described as some of the most “expansive voting reforms” undertaken by a major US city in recent decades. Come November, the city will use ranked-choice voting to elect a mayor and a larger, more representative city council as Portland moves from a commission form of government to one overseen by a city administrator.The shake-up comes after challenging years for Portland in which the city of 630,000 grappled with a declining downtown, rising homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, growing public drug use and the continued economic impacts of the pandemic years.While some news coverage has portrayed the shift as Portlanders rejecting the city’s historically progressive values, those involved with the project counter that residents are embracing democratic reforms that will lead to a more equitable government better equipped to solve the city’s problems.“It was really clear that this system was, as operated, very inequitable,” said Jenny Lee, managing director of Building Power for Communities of Color, a non-profit that was a key proponent of the effort.“And the challenges in governing are going to be felt the most by those who already have been marginalized in our political system.”Now the city waits to see what the “once-in-a-generation” change will mean for its future.Since 1913, Portland has used a commission form of government. The commission consisted of five people elected citywide and who were responsible for passing policies and also acting as administrators in charge of city departments.The system was briefly popular in other major US cities, but then largely abandoned, said Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University.“Most cities who adopted that form of government realized there were problems with it,” he said. “Someone may be good as a legislator but it doesn’t make them good as an administrator.”View image in fullscreenAnd Portland’s system had long failed to adequately represent different demographics in the city, Lee said. The city’s elected officials historically have been white men from more affluent areas where residents are more likely to have a higher income and own their homes, according to the Sightline Institute. In 2017, only two people of color had ever been elected to the city council.Under the charter system, simple decisions – such as where to put a bike lane – were politicized, said Shoshanah Oppenheim, the charter transition project manager.“It was based on the political tide,” said Oppenheim, who is also a senior adviser in the city administrator’s office.For more than a century, Portlanders rejected attempts to reform the commission system, but that changed when the 10-year review of the city charter coincided with upheaval and challenges of the pandemic years.The pandemic exacerbated the existing limitations of the city’s form of government, according to a report from Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation chronicling Portland’s reforms.Meanwhile, Portland was the site of widespread racial justice protests and an ensuing federal crackdown, the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic was slow, and residents grew increasingly disillusioned with their leaders’ ability to make meaningful progress tackling homelessness and drug abuse.Those challenges created an opportunity to have meaningful conversations about elections and government, Lee said.Clucas echoed that sentiment: “I think the public was looking and happy to take on some sort of change.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCommunity leaders had spent years educating themselves about electoral reform, and saw an opportunity to create change in the city, the report stated.With support from community organizations and local activists, the commission brought a measure before voters that would make key changes to the city’s system, allowing voters to rank local candidates in order of preference, expand the city council from five to 12 representatives elected from four newly created districts, and move to a system of government overseen by a professional city administrator.Despite criticism about the complexity of the measure and opposition from political leaders and the business community, 58% of voters approved the package of reforms proposed by the commission.Although the timing coincided with major changes and social issues, Lee said the reforms were not reactionary and instead an example of Portland being willing to try new things, which ties into Oregon’s long history of democratic reforms aimed at making government more participatory.“It was a message about change, but it was definitely a hopeful one,” she said. “It was always about these changes will make our government more effective and equitable.”The city has spent the last two years preparing for a project unlike anything Portland has seen before,Oppenheim said. “We had a really short timeline … It’s been an all-hands-on-deck approach,” she said. “There is no playbook. We are making it up as we go along.”Next month, voters will decided among more than 100 candidates for 12 council seats and 19 candidates for mayor. A recent poll from the Oregonian suggested a once-longshot candidate, whose campaign has focused on ending homelessness, is well positioned to win.In a poll of roughly 300 voters from early October, before election packets were sent out, two-thirds responded that they understood how voting works very well or somewhat well. People tend to understand the system right away given that they rank things every day, Oppenheim said.The city has also developed a voter education program to inform residents about the changes and trained operators on its information line how to explain ranked-choice voting.The hope is that voters will feel the increased power of their vote, Lee said. “Every vote has a lot of power. Your constituents’ voices really matter. Their second- and third-choice rankings actually really matter.”After the election, the other major test comes next year when Portland’s new government takes the reins. “We want to be ready on day one so all the city business can continue,” Oppenheim said.“Portlanders have huge expectations for change and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things better,” Oppenheim said. “They want a more representative government. We have it in our power to deliver that.” More

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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