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      in World Politics

      Modi’s BJP Lost to Mamata’s TMC Because of Bengali DNA

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      In early May, the eastern Indian state of West Bengal went to the polls. The state elections attracted global attention. The BBC’s analysis of the election was headlined, “West Bengal Election: Modi Loses a Battle in the ‘War for Indian Democracy.’”

      Such attention to a state election is surprising. West Bengal is not the richest, the largest or the most populous state in India. Yet it has always been an important part of the country. The British started the colonization of the Indian subcontinent by winning the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Calcutta, or Kolkata as it is now called, was the capital of British India for more than a century. Of course, West Bengal did not exist then. Bengal was the name of the British province and included modern-day Bangladesh, Bihar and Orissa then.

      History Matters

      It was Bengali intellectuals such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore who led the first Indian cultural renaissance. The founder of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the forerunner of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was Syama Prasad Mukherjee, a Bengali. Manabendra Nath Roy, the founding father of Indian communism and the founder of the Mexican Communist Party, was Bengali too. So was Subhas Chandra Bose, India’s iconic freedom fighter who defeated Mahatma Gandhi’s candidate, in the party elections of the Indian National Congress.

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      Suffice to say, Bengal has played a larger than life role in the political and cultural life in modern India. Yet it is important to remember that this region has always sung to its own tune. Whenever a Delhi-based empire weakened, Bengal was the first province to sound the bugle of independence. Since independence, West Bengal has continued this timeworn tradition. Iconic chief ministers of West Bengal, such as Bidhan Chandra Roy and Siddhartha Shankar Ray, dealt with powerful Indian prime ministers such as Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi as equals.

      The first sustained challenge to the Congress party came from West Bengal. It was here that the communists won a historic electoral victory in 1977 and remained in power until 2011. Bengal has thrived on an us-versus-them mindset vis-à-vis the national capital, New Delhi. Bengalis believe they have been wronged by New Delhi and have to retain their independence from India’s overbearing capital. In this narrative, West Bengal is the last bastion standing against the invaders from the north, and this is the essence of Bengali pride.

      Mamata Banerjee overthrew the longstanding communist government in 2011 and has been in power since. She is a feisty leader whom her admirers call “Didi,” a Bangla word for elder sister. This spinster in Kolkata has taken on the bachelor in New Delhi and won. Fittingly, a meme doing the rounds on social media adapts Asterix to Indian political lore: “One small state of Ben-Gaul still holds out against the invaders. And life is not easy for the Gow-Man believers who make the camps of Fascism, Hindutvam and Religious Extrememum…” Other variants spoke about Ben-Gaul holding out against the all-conquering North Indian invaders and their emperor, “Modius.”

      How Ben-Gaul Knocked out the BJP?

      Before the election, many deemed Banerjee’s victory in West Bengal unlikely. Two BJP members of parliament confidently told one of these authors that their party was headed to a victory. Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress, abbreviated as TMC, was facing local anger. Many accused the TMC of “misgovernance — including corruption, nepotism and high-handedness— seemed” to have put the party in peril. The BJP was promising Bengalis rapid industrialization and high growth after years of economic stagnation.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Banerjee’s right-hand man, Suvendu Adhikari, decamped to the BJP, as did many other key party members. In fact, Adhikari went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram, her own constituency. When the dust settles, it is clear that the BJP had reasons to be confident. Yet India’s ruling party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was stung by Didi’s ferocious counterpunching and was eventually knocked out. What happened?

      First, the BJP did not announce a local chief ministerial candidate. It did not promote any “son-of-the-soil Bengali leader” and even mighty Adhikari was left to play a supporting role to Modi. In India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), this strategy had worked. In West Bengal, the strategy backfired. The mother of one of the authors grew up in Kolkata and presciently remarked that Modi’s speeches in Hindi would not go down well among a people with immense linguistic pride. Modi did not even use an interpreter to translate his speeches into Bangla. Banerjee portrayed herself as the local Didi and slammed the BJP as outsiders insulting Bengali pride and even identity. It turns out that her narrative resonated with the voters.

      Second, the local BJP leaders acted sycophantically. This was not in keeping with the Bengali traditions of local leaders acting as equals of leaders in New Delhi. Bengalis feared that the BJP would reduce West Bengal into vassal status. The historic suspicion of Gujaratis and Marwaris, the trading castes who once collaborated with the British, also kicked in. Modi and his chief aide, Amit Shah, are both Gujaratis. When local leaders invoked the two national leaders repeatedly as Modiji and Amitji, they offended Bengali sensibilities and triggered old suspicions.

      Third, the BJP failed to take into account the legacy of India’s first cultural renaissance. This intellectual, social and cultural movement that began in the late 18th century and continued till the early 20th century continues to shape the Bengali ethos. It challenged pernicious customs such as caste, dowry and sati, the burning of wives on their husband’s pyres. Inspired by secularist, modernist and humanist ideals, Bengali intellectuals set out to modernize not only Bengali but also Indian society. Middle-class Bengalis have long seen themselves as “bhadralok,” well-mannered persons. Modi himself constantly pays homage to Swami Vivekananda, a charismatic Bengali spiritual figure. Yet he was unable to appeal to the bhadralok legacy of West Bengal. Too many Bengalis saw Modi as peddling a revanchist version of Hinduism that they had fought hard to reform.

      A case in point is the BJP’s crusade against the consumption of beef. Unlike much of India, meat eating has never been taboo in the Bengali tradition. Even saints have not ordained against eating meat or fish. West Bengal remains one of the few states where beef is freely sold. The BJP used strategies that worked elsewhere in states like UP and Bihar. The party failed to keep its finger on the unique Bengali pulse that beats to a more self-proclaimed liberal rhythm. The caste-based politics by the BJP had limited success, as did the specter of moral policing as under UP’s hardline Hindu chief minister, Yogi Adityanath.

      Fourth, the BJP’s narrative of local Hindus getting subsumed by Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants failed against the TMC’s narrative of New Delhi reducing Kolkata to feudatory status. Under Banerjee, Bangladeshi immigration has increased and caused unease among many voters. Yet there is a strong linguistic and regional identity in West Bengal. The partition of 1947 has not cast such a bitter memory as in Punjab. Bangladesh itself broke away from Pakistan in 1971 on linguistic grounds. Bengali pride trumped Hindu identity at least this time around.

      Fifth, Banerjee deserves much credit for campaigning with great energy and a clear message. West Bengal has done well in reducing poverty and achieving higher agricultural growth than in the rest of the country even if overall economic growth has been low. Also, Banerjee’s schemes for the rural poor and women have won her much support. Modi has won a majority of the women’s vote because of his last-mile welfare programs. Here, Banerjee won most of the women’s votes in a fundamentally matriarchal society that worships the goddesses Durga and Kali. 

      Finally, there is a politically incorrect point that analysts often overlook. One of the authors is Bengali and can attest that bhadralok culture has prized learning over wealth. In part, this might have been a defense mechanism to cope with the poverty the British inflicted on this part of the world. In part, this might be a reaction to the Marwari pursuit of wealth by collaborating with the British. To this day, many Bengalis distrust Gujaratis and Marwaris, whom they see as money-grubbing soulless creatures. The older generation still professes wistful love for the old multinational firms that dominated Kolkata till the 1970s such as Burn Standard, Andrew Yule and Balmer Lawrie. 

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      Arguably, the Bengali distrust of money has led to low growth in the state. The Bengali diaspora around the world wax lyrical about the preservation of their distinctive “Bangaliyana” and how they are culturally different from the rest of India. Yet, unlike Gujaratis, very few Bengalis invest in their home state. They invest in West Bengal only when they return to retirement in Kolkata. Like many cities in Italy, Kolkata is becoming a city of geriatrics with the young leaving in droves for jobs elsewhere.

      Even in 2021, Bengalis tend to be employees, not entrepreneurs. They flock to all parts of India and indeed much of the world to work as doctors, lawyers, accountants, academics, administrators and more. In the last few years, startups have taken off in India, including economic backwaters like Kerala and Odisha. Yet West Bengal still lacks any meaningful startup culture.

      The BJP’s constant championing of development, industrialization and growth might have rubbed off this deep-seated suspicion of entrepreneurship, business and wealth in the Bengali psyche. It did not help that Modiji and Amitji were Gujaratis spouting Hindi in a state that is proud of its distinctness from India. As mentioned earlier, the province of Ben-Gaul has historically been the first to secede from pan-North Indian empires. No wonder Didi beat Modi.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Saudi Seeks to Replace UAE and Qatar

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      Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to outflank the United Arab Emirates and Qatar as the commercial, cultural and/or geostrategic hub in the Gulf. The Saudis recently expanded their challenge to the smaller Gulf states by seeking to position Saudi Arabia as the region’s foremost sports destination, once Qatar has had its moment in the sun with the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The kingdom seeks to secure a stake in the management of regional ports and terminals, which have so far been dominated by the UAE and, to a lesser extent, Qatar.

      The kingdom kicked off its effort to cement its position as the Middle East’s behemoth earlier this year. In February, Saudi Arabia announced it would cease doing business by 2024 with international companies whose regional headquarters were not based in the country. 

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      The UAE ranks 16th on the World Bank’s 2020 Ease of Doing Business Index as opposed to Saudi Arabia at number 62. As a result, freewheeling Dubai has long been the preferred regional headquarters of international firms. The Saudi move “clearly targets the” United Arab Emirates and “challenges the status of Dubai,” said a UAE-based banker.

      Saudi Arabia is a latecomer to the port control game, which is dominated by Dubai’s DP World. That company operates 82 marine and inland terminals in more than 40 countries, including Djibouti, Somaliland, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and Cyprus. The kingdom’s expansion into port and terminal management appears to be less driven by geostrategic considerations. Instead, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Gateway Terminal (RSGT), backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, said it was targeting ports that would service vital Saudi imports, such as those related to food security.

      In January, PIF and China’s Cosco Shipping Ports each bought a 20% stake in RSGT. The Chinese investment fits into Beijing’s larger Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves the acquisition of stakes in ports and terminals in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman and Djibouti, where China has a military base.

      Jens Floe, the chief executive officer of RSGT, said the company planned to invest in at least three international ports in the next five years. He said each investment would be up to $500 million. “We have a focus on ports in Sudan and Egypt. They weren’t picked for that reason, but they happen to be significant countries for Saudi Arabia’s food security strategy,” Floe said.

      Saudi Sports

      Saudi Arabia’s increased focus on sports, including a possible bid to host the 2030 World Cup, serves multiple goals. First, it offers Saudi youth, who account for more than half of the kingdom’s population, a leisure and entertainment opportunity. Second, it boosts Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s burgeoning development of a leisure and entertainment industry. The Saudis believe this could allow the kingdom to polish its image tarnished by human rights abuse, including the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, and challenge Qatar’s position as the face of Middle Eastern sports.

      Embed from Getty Images

      A recent report by Grant Liberty, a London-based human rights group that focuses on Saudi Arabia and China, estimated that Riyadh has invested $1.5 billion in the hosting of multiple sporting events. These include the final games of Italy and Spain’s top football leagues, Formula 1 races, boxing, wrestling and snooker matches, and golf tournaments. So far, Qatar is the Middle East’s leader in the hosting of sporting events, followed by the UAE.

      According to Grant Liberty, further bids for events worth $800 million have failed. This did not include an unsuccessful $600-million offer to replace Qatar’s beIN Sports as the Middle Eastern broadcaster of the UEFA Champions League. Saudi Arabia reportedly continues to ban beIN from airing in the kingdom, despite the lifting of the Saudi-Emirati-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in January.

      Oil Exports

      Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan to diversify and streamline the Saudi economy and ween it off dependency on oil exports “has set the creation of professional sports and a sports industry as one of its goals,” said Fahad Nazer, spokesperson for the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington. “The kingdom is proud to host and support various athletic and sporting events which not only introduce Saudis to new sports and renowned international athletes but also showcase the kingdom’s landmarks and the welcoming nature of its people to the world.”

      The increased focus on sports comes as Saudi Arabia appears to be backing away from its intention to reduce the centrality of energy exports for its economy. Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the crown prince’s brother, recently ridiculed an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, saying “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply” as “the sequel of the La La Land movie.” He went on to ask, “Why should I take [the report] seriously?”

      Putting its money where its mouth is, Saudi Arabia intends to increase its oil production capacity from 12 million to more than 13 million barrels a day. This is based on the assumption that global efforts to replace fossil fuel with cleaner energy sources will spark sharp reductions in American and Russian production. The Saudis believe that demand in Asia for fossil fuels will continue to rise even if it drops in the West. Other Gulf producers, including the UAE and Qatar, are following a similar strategy.

      “Saudi Arabia is no longer an oil country, it’s an energy-producing country … a very competitive energy country. We are low cost in producing oil, low cost in producing gas, and low cost in producing renewables and will definitely be the least-cost producer of hydrogen,” Prince Abdulaziz said. He appeared to be suggesting that the kingdom’s doubling down on oil was part of a strategy that aims to ensure that Saudi Arabia is a player in all conventional and non-conventional aspects of energy. By implication, he was saying that diversification was likely to broaden Saudi Arabia’s energy offering, rather than significantly reduce its dependence on energy exports.

      “Sports, entertainment, tourism and mining alongside other industries envisioned in Vision 2030 are valuable expansions of the Saudi economy that serve multiple economic and non-economic purposes,” said a Saudi analyst. “It’s becoming evident, however, that energy is likely to remain the real name of the game.”

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      Birx hinted she wanted Trump to lose election, new book says

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      Dr Deborah Birx, then the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, hinted to an Obama-era official shortly before the 2020 election she wanted Donald Trump to lose to Joe Biden.Andy Slavitt, a former acting chief of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, writes in a new book, according to CNN, that he spoke to Birx “to get a sense for whether, in the event of a strained transition of government, she would help give Biden and his team the best chance to be effective.“At one point, after a brief pause, she looked me in the eye and said, ‘I hope the election turns out a certain way.’ I had the most important information I needed.”Slavitt stepped down last week as senior adviser to the Biden pandemic response. His book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response, is published on Tuesday.The book draws on conversations with Trump insiders. Slavitt, who also worked to fix the Affordable Care Act website, spoke to such figures in an informal role.“Her early optimism was long gone,” Slavitt writes of his meeting with Birx, according to CNN, adding: “At the end of October 2020, she was beyond all of that; she was downright scared.”Slavitt also writes of conversations with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who led the federal response. Slavitt says Kushner told him some governors “clearly don’t want to succeed” and had “bad incentives to keep blaming us”.Kushner’s view that governors should take the blame for US failures has been reported elsewhere. He is reportedly working on a book of his own.Speaking to the Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast, Slavitt said he had “kind of a front-row seat” to the chaos of the US response, prominently including Scott Atlas, a Stanford medic but not an epidemiologist or infectious diseases specialist and an aggressive champion for Trump in the press.“I contacted the White House,” he said, “I contacted Jared Kushner, every one of my conversations with Jared Kushner and Deborah Birx, they’re in the book. And you know the job that they had to do was, essentially, at a bare minimum, acknowledge that we have a more serious situation than we have ever had.“Show a little bit of empathy, lead the country by asking for even a small amount of sacrifice. They didn’t do any of those things and they didn’t plan and put together a competent response and it largely it had to do with the person they all worked for.”Slavitt told the Daily Beast Birx “did some good things”. He called Atlas “a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster that Donald Trump created”.Deaths from Covid-19 have slowed dramatically as more Americans are vaccinated and society reopens. But under the shadow of Covid variants, vaccination rates are also slowing and the US is on track to pass 600,000 deaths this week.Slavitt reportedly writes that Birx, a respected public health official with a history in the fight against Aids before she joined the Trump taskforce, told him she had “no illusions” about the effect on her government career.Another official who came to mass media prominence as part of the Trump response, Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has continued to serve under Biden. Birx has not. More

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      in World Politics

      How the Tech Giants Work for the Security State

      by

      The United States proudly believes in its uniqueness as the one nation in this corrupt world that remains dedicated to the freedom of its citizens. That belief is part of the nation’s founding myth. Americans see their nation as representing an ideal, a model for all other nations to emulate. They continue to believe that their government is committed to their own unassailable freedom, even after the increasingly visible stranglehold over all of its institutions by the military-industrial complex, a process already well underway when President Dwight Eisenhower denounced it 60 years ago. 

      The takeover has been confirmed by numerous events, including a series of costly and futile wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Despite the obvious lessons of recent history, Washington’s political class consistently demonstrates its inability to oppose policies that lead to more failed wars or to rein in an ever-expanding military budget. It would be more accurate to call the USA the UCA, the United Complex of America. Militarism in body and spirit defines its unity.

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      As a corollary of their conviction that their system of government represents an ideal the rest of the world should emulate, Americans believe that all other nations, even their Western allies, have less freedom. The populations of these nations willingly accept being ruled over by invasive governments that exercise unjustified control over their citizens’ lives, limiting their right to the pursuit of happiness.

      After all, every one of them boasts one form or another of the tyrannical practice known as “socialized medicine.” Most of them even have national identity cards, symbols of all-seeing, all-controlling administrations. Those two horrors — socialized medicine and identity cards — define cowardly peoples who have renounced their basic rights (including the right to arm oneself for rebellion), something Americans will always refuse to do.

      In an article detailing the complex relations between tech giants and law enforcement, three New York Times reporters reveal how, in the home of the brave and the land of the free, the citizens deemed to be brave have ended up accepting a truly invasive system they naively believe makes them free. Without having to invent a visibly centralized system of control, their government has perfected its strategies for spying on, managing and when necessary, directly controlling the lives of its citizens.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Thanks to the culture of the consumer society, the methods devised turned out to be simple to put in place. It begins with an immediately acceptable ideological principle that already applies to practically everything in the American way of life. The most powerful government in the world delegates an important part of the task of control to private enterprises. Just as American foreign wars, once prosecuted by a national, conscripted army, have veered toward the logic of mercenary armies, the US government’s surveillance — though clearly present in its vast, centralized intelligence community and security state — relies on private tech companies to provide the direct interface with its citizens. Distracted by the glitz, glamor and freebies offered by successful tech enterprises, the American people fail to recognize how they are being monitored and manipulated. 

      The hyperreal illusion is facilitated by Americans’ belief that because private companies are focused on profit, they, as the customers who enable the firms’ profitability, are in good hands. Profit, they have been taught, is the secret weapon that preserves apolitical virtue. Americans feel they can entrust every aspect of their life to companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, who have no political agenda other than expanding the boundaries of citizens’ freedom by offering them access to platforms that, in turn, offer them more and more free or discounted goods and services.

      Focusing on the example of Apple, the Times article highlights the kind of ambiguity that exists when politically motivated persons of authority use that authority to subpoena not people, but the data collected by the admittedly greedy but supposedly politically neutral tech companies. Users have nothing to fear because the companies all have policies designed to protect the confidentiality of their customers’ data. It is written into their contracts.

      But in a world where the population has been told terrorism is always lurking in the shadows, law enforcement and national security sometimes need to access that data. They use the law to accomplish their goal. The companies, to respect their contract with users, have the right to refuse. “But more frequently than not,” the article tells us, “the companies comply with law enforcement demands. And that underlines an awkward truth: As their products become more central to people’s lives, the world’s largest tech companies have become surveillance intermediaries and crucial partners to authorities, with the power to arbitrate which requests to honor and which to reject.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Surveillance intermediaries:

      Supposedly uninvolved, neutral bystanders who have been given the task of hoarding the data that can be used, when needed, to restore order or achieve any other ends deemed essential to the security of those in power.

      Contextual Note

      These practices are now being exposed in the courts. According to the understanding Americans have of a democratic system based on the subtle play of “checks and balances,” freedom and justice, even when challenged, will always prevail. Or will they? It is one thing to know how the system was designed. Another is to understand how it works.

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      The Times reporters reveal that “more frequently than not, the companies comply with law enforcement demands.” The number of those requests “has soared in recent years to thousands a week.” Analyzing the statistics, they note that over a six-month period in 2020, for example, Apple challenged 238 demands. That corresponds to 4% of the total. Blind compliance with the government thus occurs 96% of the time. That translates as the same figure for non-compliance with the terms of their own contract with their customers.

      President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, justifies this arrangement, not because it is founded in law but because it is the result of “a set of policies that have existed for decades.” Blame it on tradition. Or rather don’t blame it at all. That is the ransom people pay to their need for security. The article describes the use of “gag orders that authorities placed on the subpoenas.” Apple and Microsoft agreed, under constraint, not to inform those whose information was targeted. “In Apple’s case, a yearlong gag order was renewed three separate times.”

      Historical Note

      In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed to the world that the US spies on its own citizens. The shock of 9/11 put in place a state of permanent paranoia that allowed Americans to accept any measure proposed to protect them from terrorists. All the data that exists about the citizens themselves, most of it now generated and stored by private companies, may play a role in controlling their behavior. It helps the government detect sedition and terrorism. For the companies, it is merely the key to generating profits by understanding and influencing the behavior of consumers.

      In recent years, the media have reported extensively on the social credit system China is currently putting in place. It appears to use invasive technology to produce the equivalent of George Orwell’s Big Brother in “1984.” For that reason, it is anathema to freedom-loving Americans. What the Times article reveals is that, contrary to China, whose government exclusively defines and operates the system, Americans get two surveillance operators for the price of one.

      If an intrusive government is the enemy of the people’s freedom, the Chinese at least have the advantage of knowing who the enemy is. In the US, where the government has set up a central system of what we might call “control of acceptable values” (i.e., values that do not lead toward terrorism), there is a second set of operators: the platforms that organize all the data that may prove useful to the needs of the central surveillance system. The people trust the companies, who are only interested in the cash advantages produced by citizens’ data. But the government is interested in everything else, from basic security to partisan political exploitation.

      Americans traditionally fear “big government,” a Godzilla-like monster that may be surveilling them. That fear is so deeply instilled, they will never notice, let alone fear surveillance intermediaries.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany says she ‘never lied’ as Trump press secretary

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      The White House press secretary turned Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany has claimed she “never lied” while speaking for Donald Trump.Addressing a conservative group on Sunday, McEnany said of her first steps in the role: “And then there was the question, ‘Will you ever lie to us?’, and I said without hesitation, ‘No’, and I never did, as a woman of faith.“As a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world’s hardest institutions, I never lied. I sourced my information, but that will never stop the press from calling you a liar.”The press has questioned the veracity of McEnany’s claims. So have political factchecking sites. For instance, Politifact gave McEnany a “pants on fire” rating last September after she told reporters: “The president never downplayed the virus.”She was responding to questions about reporting by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, to whom Trump said in March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”Politifact said: “The record shows she’s wrong.”McEnany restarted White House briefings after more than 400 days without one under Stephanie Grisham. Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders also presided over a deterioration in relations between the press and the White House and, critics said, the relationship between the White House and truth.Reporting McEnany’s first appearance, on 1 May 2020, the Guardian said that “even on an assured debut, McEnany skated close to peddling dodgy information about Trump’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic (‘This president has always sided on the side of data’) and allegations of sexual misconduct (‘He has always told the truth’).”The Washington Post’s factcheckers put Trump’s final tally of false or misleading claims at 30,573.At the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, McEnany said she came up with a motto for her press operation: “Offense only.”“Because I knew what we were up against. Republicans always get the bad headlines, always get the false stories, always get the lies, if I can use that word, told by the press. There is one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans, and we must be on offense, confident, bold and willing to call it out. We cannot be silent.”Regarding supposed lying by the press, McEnany cited coverage of the clearing of Lafayette Square, intelligence on Russian bounties on US troops and the theory the coronavirus escaped a laboratory in China – all stories subject to evolving reporting.McEnany is one of a number of veterans of the Trump White House to have found roles at Fox News, where she is a commentator and co-hosts Outnumbered.But when she was press secretary, even Fox News cut away from her remarks when she advanced Trump’s lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud.In March, responding to news of McEnany’s new job, an anonymous Fox News staffer quoted by the Daily Beast referred to the 6 January attack on the US Capitol in calling McEnany “a mini-Goebbels” who “helped incite an insurrection on our democracy”.On Sunday, amid uproar over her claim never to have lied in service of Trump, she tweeted: “Haters will hate!” More

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      Joe Biden to use Nato summit to atone for damage of Trump years

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      Three years ago it was Donald Trump who stunned Nato members at a summit in Brussels, warning that he may be prepared to pull the US out of the western military alliance if its other members did not increase their defence spending.At a summit in the same city on Monday, it falls to Joe Biden to repair the damage from four years of his predecessor’s freewheeling theatrics, although experts caution that the Trump era will have lasting consequences.Rhetorically, at least, the omens are favourable. The US president declared Nato’s article 5, under which an armed attack against one member is deemed an attack against them all, a “sacred commitment” last week.Similar language and a respectful tone, long a Biden trademark, are expected in the Belgian capital, not least because the US wants Nato, along with the G7, to take a more robust line against Russia, particularly on cyberwarfare, and even China, not traditionally seen as an opponent.US officials were confidently briefing before the summit that “this will be the first time that the Nato countries will be addressing the security challenge from China”.The alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has promised a new cybersecurity policy and has said relations with Russia, from where most hacking emanates, were at their lowest point since the end of the cold war.Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “Biden is arguably the United States’ most experienced foreign policy president. He really does value alliances and knows they are needed to tackle problems like China.“But Nato allies also know that four years can go by pretty quickly in world affairs. They know that Trump, or a politician like him, could return to the presidency soon. They have to imagine a world where the US is not there all the time.”Until Biden’s election, Nato had been paralysed or in retreat. Three years ago, Trump arrived late to a morning session and bulldozed into a discussion about Ukraine’s application for membership and the situation in Afghanistan with a theme of his own.The president accused the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, of refusing to spend more on defence and went on to declare that Nato allies would have to raise their spending by January 2019 or Washington would go it alone.No firm commitments were extracted in the emergency discussion that ensued and most leaders left hastily, but Trump held a press conference and declared, in a parallel universe, that the summit had been a great success. “I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius,” he said, repeating an already familiar phrase.Nato officials pared back the 2019 summit in London but Trump ensured it was even shorter anyway, storming out after a group of leaders were caught on video ridiculing his lengthy press conferences. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was two-faced, Trump said, accusing Ottawa of not spending enough on defence.It was almost something of a relief that the coronavirus pandemic intervened in 2020, although Trump ordered the withdrawal of 12,000 US troops from Germany, a decision Biden has reversed. The idea that other Nato members should increase their defence spending and share more of the burden has, however, united a string of US presidents.At the Nato summit in Cardiff in 2014, when Barack Obama was president and Biden his deputy, members agreed to reverse cuts in defence spending and lift it above 2% of GDP. Helped somewhat by falls in GDP related to the pandemic, the UK will hit 2.29% in 2021 and France 2.01%, but Germany’s spending stands at 1.53%.Nor is Biden’s commitment to US militarism absolute. He followed through with Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though other Nato allies such as the UK would have preferred to continue the long-running peacekeeping mission.Stoltenberg was asked at a press conference on Friday whether Trump’s absence would allow other alliance members to go easy on defence spending. During his reply, he argued that the “transatlantic bond in Nato goes beyond individual political leaders”.Von Hippel, however, cautioned against over-confident talk at what is likely to be an upbeat gathering. “The threat of another Trump should make the Europeans less complacent,” she said. More

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      Joe Manchin: the Democrat who holds the fate of Biden’s agenda in his hands

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      Five months after taking office, Joe Biden’s legislative agenda from infrastructure to voting rights is essentially hanging in the balance of one Democratic senator: Joe Manchin of West Virginia.The Democrat-controlled Senate passed a flurry of measures in the early days of the administration, including the $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus package and a nearly quarter-trillion-dollar bill to improve American competitiveness with China.But that burst of legislating dramatically slowed last week as the Senate prepared to consider a series of Democratic priorities crucial to Biden’s vision and the White House’s hopes for meaningful policy achievements before the 2022 midterm elections.The faltering efforts stem from Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the 50-50 Senate, which, in allowing any senator to hold up legislation, has thrust Manchin, the most conservative Senate Democrat, into the center of relevance in the nation’s capital and a position of almost unique power.The political dynamics mean Manchin now commands huge influence over Biden’s agenda, setting the stage for a collision between Democrats eager to use their majority to pass sweeping legislation, and his determination to restore bipartisanship to a divided Senate.“Senator Manchin’s influence there is shaping the agenda for the Democrats,” said Sarah Binder, professor of political science at George Washington University. “He’s the crux – he’s everything around which the majority depends.”The hand-wringing over Manchin’s power will only intensify in the coming weeks as Senate Democrats turn their attention to an infrastructure package and an expansive voting rights bill, known as For the People Act, opposed by Manchin for being too partisan.Manchin, a rarity as a pro-coal and anti-abortion Democrat, has already warned Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, that he would oppose any legislation if they did not first work to compromise with Republicans.“Senate Democrats must avoid the temptation to abandon our Republican colleagues on important national issues,” Manchin wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, in a throwback to a bygone era of collegiality in the Senate.Manchin often describes himself as having learned to legislate with “common sense” from watching small-town officials navigate local politics, even before he was twice elected governor of West Virginia first in 2004, and then in 2008 with nearly 70% of the vote.He is considered to most take after his uncle, Antonio James Manchin, an entertaining politician who became something of an icon in West Virginia politics after he rid the state’s countryside of thousands of rusting junked cars and old tyres.But the younger Manchin, who grew up in the small mining town of Farmington, built his own bonds with constituents when he cut short a 2006 trip to cheer on the West Virginia University Mountaineers at the Sugar Bowl in Atlanta, when a mine disaster struck back home.Now Manchin is the only Democrat who holds statewide office in West Virginia, a notable anomaly in a state where its rural working-class voters, who once backed Democrats for their strong trade union ties, have shifted sharply to the right.And after he held on to his Senate seat in 2018 in the steepest re-election challenge of his career, Manchin credited his survival to the strength of trust he built with voters through his compromise-seeking approach in the Senate.But in a hyper-partisan Washington, especially with Republicans committed to blocking Biden’s agenda, the chances of compromise materializing are slim.The bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure between Biden and the Senate Republican Shelley Moore Capito, for instance, collapsed on Tuesday after four weeks of talks failed to reconcile wide differences on size, scope and financing of the package.Meanwhile, on the voting rights bill, even moderate Republicans are united with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, in refusing to engage in discussions on a measure they describe as a partisan power grab by Democrats but which many voting rights advocates describe as a vital defense of American democracy.The political landscape in the Senate means Democrats are likely to have little choice but to try to ram through legislation by destroying the filibuster rule – essentially a supermajority requirement – and pass them on a simple majority, party-line vote.Yet, here again there is a roadblock in the way: Manchin.Manchin believes that ending the filibuster would destroy the Senate and has repeatedly vowed to protect the procedural rule, invoking how his predecessor, Senator Robert Byrd, told him the chamber was supposed to force consensus.The Manchin-shaped hurdle for Biden’s agenda is delighting Republicans but exasperating Democrats, who say they can’t understand what he wants. “Can’t we just give West Virginia a new airport?” one Democratic leadership source said, illustrating the frustration.Manchin’s approach to moderating Democrats’ legislative ambitions is motivated in some part by the increasingly Republican nature of the state he represents, according to a source close to the senator.Trump won West Virginia in the 2020 election, and white voters without a college degree, the main demographic of Trump’s base, made up 69% of registered voters, according to census data – the highest anywhere in the country.“It’s among the deepest, reddest states in the country,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “So when Senator Manchin says, ‘If I can’t go home to West Virginia and explain it to my folks, I can’t be for it,’ he means that.”Democrats have mostly taken a hands-off approach with Manchin, mindful that his vote remains the only bulwark between a Democratic-controlled Senate, and a Republican-controlled one.But mostly, they just know that even if their patience is about ready to expire, there is ultimately little they can do. 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      How Republicans came to embrace the big lie of a stolen election

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterJust a few days after the polls closed in Florida’s 2018 general election, Rick Scott, then the state’s governor, held a press conference outside the governor’s mansion and made a stunning accusation.Scott was running for a US Senate seat, and as more votes were counted, his lead was dwindling. Targeting two of the state’s most Democratic-leaning counties, Scott said there was “rampant fraud”.“Every person in Florida knows exactly what is happening. Their goal is to mysteriously keep finding more votes until the election turns out the way they want,” he said, directing the state’s law enforcement agency to investigate. “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida.”Scott eventually won the election, and his comments eventually faded. But the episode offered an alarming glimpse of the direction the Republican party was turning.A little over two years later, fanned repeatedly by Donald Trump throughout 2020, the myth of a stolen American election has shifted from a fringe idea to one being embraced by the Republican party. The so-called big lie – the idea that the election was stolen from Trump – has transformed from a tactical strategy to a guiding ideology.For years, civil rights groups and academics have raised alarm at the way Republican officials have deployed false claims of voter fraud as a political strategy to justify laws that restrict access to the ballot. But the way Republicans have embraced the myth of a stolen election since Trump’s loss in November, is new, they say, marking a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections.Supporting the idea of a stolen election has become a new kind of litmus test for Republican officeholders.Republican election officials in Georgia and Nevada who have stood up for the integrity of the 2020 election results have been denounced by fellow Republicans. Republican lawmakers across the US have made pilgrimages to visit and champion an unprecedented inquiry into ballots in Arizona, which experts see as a thinly veiled effort to undermine confidence in the election. One hundred and forty-seven Republicans in the US House voted to overturn the results of the November election absent any evidence of voter fraud and after government officials said the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history”.“Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies election rules.The willingness to deny election results comes amid heightened concern that Republicans are maneuvering to take over offices that would empower them to block the winners of elections from being seated. Several Republicans who have embraced the idea that the election was stolen are running to serve as secretaries of state, the chief election official in many places, a perch from which they would exert enormous power over elections, including the power to hold up certifying races.We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes“I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who has written extensively about the history of contested elections in the US. “We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”The effort to undermine the election results appears to be working. A majority of Republicans, and a quarter of all Americans, believe Trump is the “true president”, according to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll. Sixty-one per cent of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump, the same poll showed.Rohn Bishop, the chairman of the local Republican party in Fond du Lac county in Wisconsin, said it was damaging to have such widespread uncertainty about the results of elections and was generally supportive of efforts to restore confidence. But he noted his dismay that Republicans continued to push lies about the election. He noted that the Republican party of Waukesha county, a bastion of GOP voters, recently hosted a screening of a film backed by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and prominent election conspiracist, that pushed false claims of fraud.“We need to win back those suburban Republican voters that Waukesha county used to turn out, not keep poking them in the eye by forcing down their throat more of this election stuff, Trump stuff they don’t want to hear,” he said. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for Republican elected officials to tell the base the truth. That would help.”Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian who studies elections, noted that there was a long history in America of using fraud as an excuse to push back on gains in enfranchisement among Black and other minority voters. White voters are becoming a smaller share of the US electorate, data shows. “There are definitely echoes of this now,” he said. “There has always been an inclination to see new voters of different ethnicities or appearance as agents, or unwitting agents of fraud.”Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican operative in Florida who is now retired, said the lies about the election provided a kind of cover for those unable to concede they were a shrinking minority in the population.“In the past, party elders, party leaders … exploited the crazies in order to win elections and then largely ignored them after the elections,” he said. “What has happened since then is that Trump opened Pandora’s box and let them out. He not only let them out, he affirmed them and provoked them. And so now they’re running wild and they are legitimatizing these delusions.”While there have been other nastily contested elections in US history – President Rutherford B Hayes was labeled “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulency” after the contested election in 1876 – both Keyssar and Foley said it was difficult to find a comparison to what was happening now.“We’ve never had that. We’ve never had McCarthyism-style fabrication of a conspiracy theory applied to the process of counting votes … I would say it’s especially dangerous when it’s the electoral process,” Foley said. “Because it’s the electoral process that ultimately allows for self-government. When the mechanisms of self-government kind of get taken over by a kind of McCarthyism, that’s very troubling.” More