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2024-11-15 13:09:42

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When a storm is named, it can take on an unearthly humanity of its own, become an object of hatred and dread like a person can. Like Hurricane Helene, who tore through the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Appalachia in late September, after coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. She left particular devastation across western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, as 40 trillion gallons of rain fell in the course of a few nights. Behind her, the rivers came up, and the mountains came down.The flash flooding and landslides caused by Helene claimed 102 lives in North Carolina alone, and a total of more than 230 throughout a six-state region. Governor Roy Cooper’s administration estimated at one point that 126,000 homes may have been damaged. Because of the rugged geography, hundreds found themselves isolated by washouts and debris. Many were without power, clean water, and the internet for weeks. A month later, some were still without at least one of the three, and the city of Asheville is unlikely to see drinkable water until December.Western North Carolina was sometimes marketed as a “climate haven,” but Asheville has flooded before, though not for over a hundred years.Was it unprecedented? Not exactly. Western North Carolina was sometimes marketed as a “climate haven,” but Asheville has flooded before, though not for over a hundred years. Previous disasters throughout Appalachia, like the West Virginia floods of 2016 or the devastating eastern Kentucky floods of 2022, proved that mountains are susceptible to deadly flash flooding and landslides. The region is also infrastructurally precarious, with aging water lines and a vulnerable grid. And the communities are socially vulnerable as well: Hospitals have shuttered, economies are reliant on low-wage service work, income inequality and the cost of living are increasing. Inadequate zoning regulations and building standards have compounded environmental risks. Meanwhile, just 0.5 percent of single-family homes in western North Carolina have flood insurance, and the maximum award in housing assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is only $42,500.Residents of the river towns of Marshall, Swannanoa, and many others are coming to grips with the scale of loss and digging themselves out of the muck at the same time. Though public officials and FEMA are present, there’s still a pervasive question: If not for neighbors, who would have mucked out the houses or cleaned the streets? Volunteer groups like Marshall-based Rural Organizing and Resilience, or ROAR, and tiny home company Nanostead have become information hubs, tool libraries, and volunteer dispatch centers. As uncertainties about the public health consequences of the cleanup have continued to swirl, and some involved have shown signs of respiratory and skin ailments, community members have done their best to keep one another safe and informed.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188415/hurricane-helene-photos-north-carolina-no-safe-haven

2024-11-15 13:09:42

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In the scramble to understand the numerous cultural currents that are constantly running through the United States, one of the most instructive ideas to emerge in recent years has come from political science professor Ryan Burge. His project, Graphs About Religion, provides interesting details on the growing number of Americans who identify as evangelical while rarely attending church—if they do so at all. In 2008, a mere 3 percent of self-identified evangelicals reported never attending religious services. By 2023, that number had grown to 10 percent, with an additional 17 percent saying that they seldom attended. This means that more than a quarter of America’s evangelical devout actually show little devotion, attending church once per year or less—a startling idea when we consider the outsize role that evangelicals have played in America’s postwar political life. It points to a wider trend that we’re seeing in elite (though they would reject that term) influencers who have lurched dramatically to the political right in recent years, under the guise of “cultural Christianity.”While not all cultural Christians identify as evangelical, they embrace a secular vision of Christian values—tradition, conventional families, and small government—all without the spiritual commitment or conviction. Cultural Christianity’s true believers tend to be drawn to the idea that the faith exists strictly as a rejection of liberal cultural hegemony; that whenever they turn on the television, a Taylor Swift or LeBron James is telling them how to vote or a transgender influencer like Dylan Mulvaney is advertising their all-American beer. Pop culture represents deeper political grievances, such as liberal gender and identity expression; the corporate drum of diversity, equity and inclusion; the intervening state of the pandemic; and overt multiculturalism.And while it might be tempting to view this movement as the domain of conservative old white guys, last week’s election highlighted that it is home to an increasingly potent coalition. Ironically, cultural Christianity’s St. Paul is Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist whose 2006 book, The God Delusion, was one of the canonical texts of the “new atheist” movement that took shape after 9/11. Only a year after his book denouncing all faith was released, Dawkins described himself as a “cultural Christian,” lamenting that there was an “increasing feeling” that festivals such as Christmas were being marginalized. “I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history,” he said. “If there’s any threat to these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists.”Those skeptical about cultural Christianity might note that it bears the hallmarks of some of the more robust reactionary strains of secular politics without any of the Christ-like obligations—such as communal rituals, an emphasis on humility and forgiveness, and a dedication to serving others—that might conflict with the practitioner’s simultaneous adherence to a reactionary and antisocial brand of conservatism. In order to fill the void where religious faith might otherwise reside, cultural Christians are inculcated in a stew of sermons without questions about their own behaviors, beliefs shorn of moral foundations, and moralizing without scriptures. At its crudest interpretation, it could be argued that cultural Christianity is a home for those who don’t necessarily believe that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins, but rather, that they are heirs to his victimhood. Persecution didn’t only happen to Jesus—it’s happening to me.It’s of little surprise, then, that the towering cultural—and financial—figure of the 2024 election, Elon Musk, came out as a cultural Christian in July. Musk, who used to be a liberal of sorts, took his first steps on the road to Damascus during the pandemic. It was the time when, in addition to publicly railing against lockdown orders, he was “tricked,” he claims, into signing papers for gender-affirming care for one of his children. Following the gender transition of the child, now an adult called Vivian, he told Canadian pop psychologist (and fellow cultural Christian) Jordan Peterson that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian,” for his estranged daughter had been “killed by the woke mind virus.”Others in Musk’s milieu appear to be attracted to this nonpracticing version of  Christianity for its disciplining effect on wider society. Joe Rogan, host of America’s most popular podcast, said earlier this year in a conversation with NFL player Aaron Rodgers, “We need Jesus,” adding that now’s a good time for Him to come back, because “we’re kind of fucked.” There might be a point, he added, where society is “so unmanageable and so chaotic that something comes down and gives us a guideline.”On closer inspection, other prominent cultural Christians appear to be motivated more by Western cultural chauvinism than their own personal circumstances, a route similar to the one the new atheists followed out of the smoke plumes of the September 11 attacks. Bellicose British commentator and new atheist Douglas Murray, who has been outspoken about the righteousness of the destruction of Gaza, now describes himself as a “Christian atheist.” Last November, his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch American writer and fellow former new atheist, wrote an essay on her outright conversion to Christianity, citing reasons such as wokeness and Islam—while not once mentioning Jesus.Ali, along with many others in the cultural Christian movement, cite historian and popular podcaster Tom Holland’s 2019 book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, as their Bible. Holland argues, with solid historical foundations, that the tenets of Western liberalism, from human rights to secularity, are deeply rooted in Christian thought and assumptions. (Following the election, Democratic Party consultant David Axelrod spoke to Holland’s thesis from another angle, arguing that the party has become “a metropolitan, college-educated party,” which approaches the working class in the “spirit of a missionary—that we’re here to help you become more like us.”)Holland is, however, more of a gospel-curious, reluctant agnostic than a chest-thumping, anti-woke culture warrior. The same cannot be said for the most antagonistic of those who have adopted his argument. In their kind-of coming to Jesus, Musk, Dawkins, and Ali have all rejected today’s liberal values, as they see them, and promotion of Western civilization—as they see it. Unspoken is the fact that 85 percent of the world’s Christians live in the developing world. That’s some distance from Richard Dawkins’s notion of “listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals,” which he claimed in a 2018 tweet was “much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar.’” It’s not hard to imagine a Dawkins or Musk feeling as alien in an exuberant West African deliverance ministry as they would in a mosque.Yet while many of cultural Christianity’s public figures are tub-thumping Western supremacists, there’s a quietly growing number of Americans who describe themselves as non-Christian evangelicals. Using data from the Cooperative Election Study in 2022, Ryan Burge highlights a group of people—including 14 percent of Muslims and Catholics, 12 percent of Hindus, 9 percent of Buddhists, and 5 percent of Jews—who would also describe themselves as “born again” or evangelical Christians.Breaking it down further, he found that Republican Muslims self-identify as evangelical at a rate of 32 percent, compared to 11 percent of Democratic-leaning Muslims. Republican Jews identify the same way three times as much as Democratic Jews. Republican Buddhists and Hindus also identify as evangelical much more than their left-leaning co-religionists, while 19 percent of Republican “Nones” call themselves evangelical and only 9 percent of Democrats do the same.This trend is best encapsulated in the brief Republican presidential primary candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy. Seeking to court Iowa’s powerful evangelical block, he closed his stump speeches with the hyper-online invocation that “God is real.” Finding common ground between Hindu faith and evangelical Christianity, he declared that faith is under attack by “new secular religions: wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, Covidism.” More persuasively, a 2021 essay for The American Conservative by authors of faith, “In Defence of Cultural Christianity,” argued that “liberal consumerism” is leading to “ever greater cultural absurdities” that do not sincerely reflect modern society.False nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but this taps into a wider dissatisfaction with economic life that is critiqued by paleoconservatives and fourth-wave feminists alike. Young families are being squeezed at every turn by cost-of-living pressures. Breaking glass ceilings has obvious appeal, but for a lot of women, that can mean placing 6-week-old babies in childcare. In some spheres, particularly a certain strain of the newly culturally Christian online right, it tends to be accompanied by a desire for an AI -image-generated ersatz past, where men sired large families and their wives happily stayed at home.Either way, the great American marketplace of faith, which for so long saw American Protestantism thrive free from the constraints of the state, is welcoming new customers, with their souls as an added extra. Spiritual converts usually arrive in the evangelical movement seeking personal salvation, but cultural Christians are flooding in thanks to a profound shift in a modern evangelical movement: Trump’s prophets, who are less interested in saving your soul than radically transforming society.Cultural Christians are joining spiritual Christians in feeling besieged by the liberal culture around them—from everyman Hollywood hero Robert De Niro yelling, “Fuck Trump” at a 2018 awards ceremony to evolving ideas about diversity and inclusion—a culture that is strongly backed by our corporate overlords. Suffering and sin become less important than finding a sense of order in a changing world and the ideas of a real and imagined past that underpin them.After all, if there’s one lesson from two millennia of Christianity, it’s that true believers have been called to reject the prevailing secular culture when it does not conform to their hearts. It instructs us, instead, to heed the lessons of the good book. For cultural Christians, which book that is is another question.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188337/cultural-christianity-taking-conservative-movement

2024-11-15 13:09:42

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No position in President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet is as important as the attorney general. During his first term, Trump chafed against the post-Watergate tradition of independence for the Justice Department; he has promised to demolish it his second time around. The president-elect openly desired to use federal law enforcement to shield his friends from legal consequences and to target his political foes with vengeful punishments.On Wednesday night, Trump announced he’d chosen someone for the position who rather fittingly embodied both of these principles: former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who resigned from the House shortly after the decision became public. Even with a supine Republican majority in the Senate, it is hard to imagine that Gaetz will have an easy road to confirmation. His nomination instead suggests that Trump may actually attempt a constitutionally dubious maneuver to install Gaetz as the nation’s top lawyer and law enforcement official.The news stunned even the most inured public figures in Washington this week. Republican senators and representatives alike expressed shock, horror, and dismay at the selection. Gaetz is intensely unpopular on Capitol Hill for multiple reasons. But the ones that stand out are his leading role in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year and the chaos that followed, his belligerent and childish interactions with other members, and the various scandals that have surrounded him in recent years.Mostly notably, the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee have each investigated Gaetz for allegations of child sex trafficking, the statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl, and illegal drug use. (The former lawmaker has denied any wrongdoing.) Federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against him in 2023, reportedly because of concerns about witness credibility. The Ethics Committee was set to vote on the release of a report about the allegations on Friday, but its release is now questionable after Gaetz’s sudden (and convenient) resignation from the House on Wednesday night.Then there is the question of his qualifications. Gaetz graduated from law school at the College of William and Mary in 2007 and was admitted to the Florida state bar in 2008. But there is no evidence that he ever practiced law in any meaningful way. After working at a North Florida law firm for just over a year, he ran for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives in 2009 and served there until he was elected to Congress in 2016. This is not the résumé of your typical attorney general, to say the least.Of the 13 lawyers to serve as attorney general in Gaetz’s lifetime, all but one previously served as a state or federal prosecutor, as a state or federal judge, or as a high-ranking member of the Justice Department itself. The sole exception, Reagan appointee William French Stewart, spent more than 20 years in private practice at one of the nation’s top law firms. Gaetz, on the other hand, has no significant experience as a lawyer in any form. He would undoubtedly be the least qualified attorney general in the history of the republic.So why did Trump pick him? The obvious reason is loyalty. Gaetz spent his congressional career as a die-hard MAGA loyalist and as one of Trump’s closest allies. As attorney general, he would almost certainly transform the Justice Department into a vehicle for the president’s own whims and grievances, throwing aside its ethical obligations and lashing out at whichever political adversary frustrates Trump at any moment. Confirming Gaetz would be a dark day for the rule of law.The only thing standing in Trump’s and Gaetz’s way is the Senate. The Constitution allows the president to install top officials in the executive branch only with the “advice and consent” of the upper body. In practical terms, this means any presidential nominee must receive an up-or-down vote from senators before taking up their post. There is only one way around the Senate’s approval: When the Senate is in recess, the Constitution says that presidents “shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen” during that recess “by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.”The recess-appointments clause is best understood as a product of the times in which the Constitution’s Framers lived. In the early republic, Congress did not sit continuously all year as it effectively does today. Senators and representatives journeyed to the capital for monthslong sessions, then returned home for monthslong breaks. Recess appointments allowed presidents to temporarily fill vacancies when the Senate could not speedily or readily gather, thus ensuring that the federal government could continue to function even when lawmakers were out of town.Presidents continued to make some recess appointments until the 2010s. Starting in 2007, Senate Democrats stopped regularly adjourning the chamber even when they left town and instead held pro forma sessions every three days to ensure that George W. Bush couldn’t make further recess appointments. No business was conducted during these sessions; a senator simply gaveled the chamber open and then immediately adjourned it. Senators from both parties largely continued that practice even when the White House and Senate were held by the same party.In January 2012, Barack Obama tried to bypass this hurdle by announcing recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while the Senate was in a three-day pro forma session. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that those appointments were invalid two years later in NLRB v. Noel Canning. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for five of the justices, left open the possibility that presidents could make appointments if a recess was 10 days or longer. Justice Antonin Scalia and the court’s other three conservatives at the time argued for a much stricter limit.Scalia scathingly criticized his colleagues in the majority for leaving the door open to future mischief by presidents and described the recess appointment power as an “anachronism” in general. “The need it was designed to fill no longer exists, and its only remaining use is the ignoble one of enabling the President to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process,” he wrote in an opinion that concurred only with the outcome, not the reasoning used by his five colleagues to get there.Installing Gaetz through a traditional recess appointment would not make much sense on a practical level. Adjourning the Senate to create the opportunity for a recess appointment would still require a majority vote. If 50 senators (plus Vice President JD Vance, the tie-breaking vote) are already willing to vote for a recess, then Gaetz would already have the votes necessary to be confirmed the normal way. Recess appointees only serve on a temporary basis and are generally barred by federal law from earning a salary from their position until the Senate confirms them.But Trump reportedly has an even more dubious option in mind. The Constitution states that if the House and Senate cannot agree on a time to adjourn, the president “may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.” This is the only mechanism by which a president can force Congress out of session. This stands in sharp contrast to the British kings who previously ruled the Thirteen Colonies, who could dismiss Parliament at will. The Framers did not discuss this power any further in the Federalist Papers or other contemporary sources, except to draw that distinction.What would this look like in practical terms? Nobody knows, because not once in the nearly 250-year history of the American republic has a president forcibly adjourned Congress under this power. When two Heritage Foundation lawyers wrote about this option in 2020 in response to the Senate’s inaction on some of Trump’s nominees at the time, even they admitted that they had no idea what it would look like in practice or when a president could do it. Instead, they assumed that Trump would just do it and it would all be sorted out by the Supreme Court.It’s worth noting that their scenario imagined that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be the one who refused to adjourn and Senate Republicans would be instigating the conflict. (At the time, Democrats held the House and Republicans held the Senate.) Proroguing Congress this time would likely only happen if Speaker Mike Johnson filed a motion of adjournment and the Senate didn’t act on it. In other words, the president and the House would be conspiring to deprive the Senate of its constitutional duty to confirm presidential nominees—a despotic and unprecedented move that would nullify the Constitution’s checks and balances.Whether the Supreme Court would validate such a move is an open question. During Trump’s presidency, the justices ruled against him in multiple high-profile cases, including on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, a citizenship question on the census, and whether New York prosecutors could obtain his financial records. But this is also the same Supreme Court that gutted the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause so that Trump could run again and handed down a heretical ruling on “presidential immunity” to save him from prosecution earlier this year. After those decisions, one could hardly blame Trump for thinking the Supreme Court’s conservative justices would sign off on another step toward dictatorship.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188451/trump-break-congress-matt-gaetz

2024-11-15 13:09:42

@nprofile…pyzj
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It’s become something of a glum tradition in the Democratic Party. After an electoral beating, opinion makers and political elites—along with everyone with a social media account—offer their takes as to why Democrats blew it. For many, it is that the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden didn’t do more to help protect innocent lives in Gaza. For others, it is that Vice President Kamala Harris dared to campaign with Liz Cheney. Senator Bernie Sanders and many others point to the Democratic Party having moved away from its roots as the party of working and blue-collar folks.The one self-evident answer that no high-minded pundit wants to admit is that people simply bought what Donald Trump was selling. Specifically, that Trump manages to appeal to voters who believe the system sucks and respond to what he says, over and over again, he’s going to do about it: crush it, shove obstacles out of the way, and get immediate results. It’s obviously authoritarianism and a terrible way to actually run a country. But I sympathize with many of the people who pinned their hopes on a radical transformation of a status quo that’s left people behind, including many in traditional Democratic constituencies.Donald Trump tapped into something that everyone feels—that our current system of checks and balances and polite political norms doesn’t allow the country to move either nimbly or boldly enough, resulting in a consistent failure to deliver relief and results that people tangibly feel and desperately want.A survey of Americans in 2024 from the Partnership for Public Service showed that trust and confidence in government was at an all-time low. A whopping 63 percent of Americans said they do not trust the government—up from the mid-40s in 2022. There is not a single demographic where the majority believes the government can be trusted—not Democrats, not Republicans, not men, not women, not Latinos, not Black Americans. No one.Only 23 percent of Americans said they trust the government, far below the 35 percent who said that in 2022. Sixty-six percent say the government is incompetent. A full 68 percent of Americans say democracy is not working in the United States today, versus only 23 percent who say it is. Read that last part again. Nearly seven in 10 Americans say democracy is not working.In this environment, Donald Trump’s promise to “crush the system” is a winning message. The Democratic Party could have all put on hard hats, joined laborers in building infrastructure projects, flown out to Gaza to personally disarm Israeli munitions, and told Liz Cheney to take a hike, and it wouldn’t have made the difference for a straightforward reason. Democrats defended the system, and all its dreary norms, and hoary traditions—the very ones most Americans say are broken, can’t be trusted, and don’t work for them. Not only did it make Donald Trump an attractive candidate to many, but it also was likely a factor in the decision of millions of voters to just stay at home, stewing over their feelings that the choice was to keep the system that they feel is broken and not working at all for them or vote for a fascist.This is not to say that Democrats have to embrace authoritarianism; far from it. But no issue, no outreach to any constituency, and no return to the party of labor is going to matter until Democrats fully embrace the idea that Americans across the board see our government as a stale, stodgy, ineffective, and corrupt 250-year-old relic and believe that every promise you make to them will be broken. To these voters, Washington is where all the pretty promises are forced through a sausage grinder, only to come out the other side an unpalatable mess, if they come out at all.Here, Democrats might take a cue from one of their own: Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, the senator from Massachusetts had a boomlet in the Democratic primary with two simple messages:  “We need big, structural change,” and “I have a plan for that.” Senator Warren may have arrived on the scene too early to be broadly accepted. Maybe Democrats, understandably terrorized by the Trump administration and reeling from horrific pandemic losses, were of the mind to play it safe, to endorse normalcy as a cardinal virtue. Joe Biden was best positioned as this sort of nominee, and by Super Tuesday, voters were inclined to follow the Democratic Party’s post–South Carolina primary signaling and fall in line behind the former vice president. However, Donald Trump reportedly feared Warren as the nominee the most; more than Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, or anyone else.What Donald Trump understood, what Senator Warren got, and what Democrats should start to grasp now is that people don’t want to hear promises and don’t want politicians to just reach out to them. Voters and nonvoters alike want candidates to acknowledge their belief that the current system is horribly broken. Long before a candidate talks about their policy solutions, they just want some acknowledgment that voters are right to feel about the status quo in the way they do—and that they want their leaders to address the systemic issues that keep bold action from making it out of Washington alive.None of this forces anyone to embrace authoritarianism or ditch democracy. The good news is that in the same survey from the Partnership for Public Service, most Americans think civil service workers do a good job, and their interactions with the government have been positive. Almost unanimously, Americans believe that having a competent federal government is key to having a strong democracy. In the survey, 90 percent backed that notion.Democrats don’t have to abandon democracy or even checks and balances. But they do have to present a vision for a radical remaking of how our government works and how it legislates to meet the needs of people swiftly and boldly in the twenty-first century. And the story of how this change is wrought must be easy for people to understand, because Donald Trump’s message is two words: “Smash it.”The Democratic vision for big, structural change can range from ditching the filibuster (assuming Republicans don’t do it first) to national referenda for the purpose of introducing more direct democracy into government, to adding more judicial circuits and, thus, more seats to the high court—the better to break the stranglehold that corrupting influences have on the judiciary. It could include term limits for Congress and full public financing of elections for all federal offices so that politicians can’t be bought off. These reforms would move quickly with no filibuster and a more favorable Supreme Court.It may include a remaking of the Department of Labor to ensure unions have a permanent seat inside government to advocate and represent workers, and more independent watchdogs to report to the public on the activities of the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies that engender so much distrust.Some of the above may be good ideas, and some may stink. But here, we get to the kinds of structural changes that might help voters trust our governing institutions again—a trust that must be cemented before anyone chats about specific policies.In the end, there was nothing Democrats could have done to win the 2024 election—not with any issue or any candidate—as long as they were put in the position of having to defend a status quo system that had fallen out of public favor, in the mistaken belief that the American people hold it dear to their hearts and would choose to keep it over Trump’s promise of smashing it all to pieces.If there are to be elections in the future that are free and fair (a prospect that is sadly now less than certain), then Democrats must start developing a bold, clear, easy-to-understand set of structural changes to how government is organized and how it works. They must meet most voters—and nonvoters—where they live. Before anything else, Democrats must tell voters: “We hear you. The system sucks. And here’s what we’re going to do about it.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/188333/democrats-break-status-quo-system

2024-10-28 14:35:01

Trump Team Desperately Tries to Erase Wildly Racist Puerto Rico “Joke”
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Donald Trump’s campaign is desperately trying to backtrack after a comedian at Trump’s New York rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday made a very racist joke about Puerto Rico. Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at the rally, immediately drawing backlash from across the political spectrum, even including Republicans like Senator Rick Scott and Representative Maria Elvira Salazar.On Sunday night, the Trump campaign immediately went into damage control mode, with spokesperson Danielle Alvarez telling CNN, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Then, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt went on Fox & Friends early Monday morning before sunrise, and initially tried to spin the rally as “amazing” and diverse. “The energy last night was palpable in the room, the spirit. It was happiness and joy. And it was such a diverse group of people in that stadium packed to the house. There wasn’t an empty seat. You had black Americans, Latino Americans, Jewish Americans, men, women of all ages coming in support of President Trump and unafraid to show it,” Leavitt said. Steve Doocy then addressed the elephant in the room. “You know, this morning, the mainstream media has picked up on the comic’s comments, which were offensive, have been denounced by the campaign and everybody else. What went on with that?” Doocy asked Leavitt. Leavitt tried in vain to distance the campaign from Hinchcliffe’s language. “Look, it was a comedian who made a joke in poor taste,” she replied. “Obviously, that joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or our campaign. And I think it is sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”But, none of the following speakers at the rally Sunday, including Trump himself, condemned or tried to distance the Trump campaign from Hinchcliffe. The comedian himself doubled down, accusing his critics, including Walz, of “having no sense of humor.” It also was a reminder of Trump’s poor record regarding Puerto Rico, and how he mishandled the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island in 2017. Trump’s rally was full of disturbing parallels to a 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden supporting the Nazi Party, and the racism was just the icing on the cake. Americans who oppose such racism, including the many Puerto Ricans living in battleground states, should keep that in mind when they head to the polls.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187592/trump-team-erase-racist-puerto-rico-joke

2024-10-28 14:35:01

Fox News (Yes, Really!) Exposes Joe Rogan’s Shady Pro-Trump Move
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Even Fox News has raised its eyebrows at podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan’s decision not to interview Vice President Kamala Harris despite penning in a three-hour slot for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.During a Sunday discussion on the network between Fox News host Howard Kurtz and pundit Caroline Downey, the MediaBuzz anchor claimed that it was Rogan who had stiffed the Harris campaign. Downey argued that the lopsided interview opportunity proved a “net benefit” to Trump’s campaign, since “every TV hit that Kamala Harris does, she comes off more bitter, more angry, and more jaded, whereas Trump comes off as a normal guy.”“So, you know, Kamala Harris claims she’s trying to cater to the younger generation, but she’s sticking to legacy media interviews for the most part, and she refused to go on Rogan,” Downey said.But Kurtz was quick to push back on Downey’s behind-the-scenes speculation.“Well, no, I don’t think that’s true. I think she wanted to go on Joe Rogan, and I don’t think Rogan wanted her,” Kurtz said. “I think it would have been a good thing if she’d gone.”“So, even though Rogan, I believe, has refused to have Trump on in the past, he seemed largely sympathetic to the former president, and you heard him dismiss the media as a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” the host added.In recent weeks, Trump has dodged mainstream news appearances, including going so far as to break election tradition by refusing to sit for a 60 Minutes interview in September, which he reportedly backed out of last-minute over fears that the rigorous show would fact-check him.Instead, Trump has relegated his TV appearances to friendlier, more sycophantic networks, including Fox News, whose anchor Maria Bartiromo did not interrupt or correct Trump when he claimed that the real Election Day threat is the “enemy from within” while suggesting that the military should forcibly involve itself in handling the election results.But a chat with Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters for either candidate.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187601/fox-news-joe-rogan-donald-trump-interview

2024-10-25 20:55:01

Trump Issues First Call to Arms Over Election Fraud Conspiracies
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Donald Trump and his allies have suggested for months that the 2024 election will be “stolen,” much like they did in the 2020 cycle, prepping unfounded claims ahead of time that the election will be undermined by “noncitizen” voters, overseas ballot programs, and mail-in voting.But on Friday, Trump officially called it, writing a “cease and desist” on Truth Social that effectively announced the Republican presidential nominee already believes that the November election is rigged—mere days into early voting.“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump posted. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation!” Trump fleetingly acknowledged in September that he did, factually, lose the 2020 election. But his insistence on Friday that he would definitely win the 2024 race came with a threat: that anyone working for the other side of the aisle—from attorneys to election officials and donors—will face consequences when he does.“Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”Trump’s allies have concretely worked to skew election results in battleground states. In Georgia, a pro-Trump state election board issued prohibitive regulations that would have made it significantly more difficult for the state to find people willing to volunteer for the increasingly arduous job. Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s board days before the August move, describing Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”Those regulations included mandating that poll workers hand-count ballots after they were electronically filed, and granting local election officials the authority to refuse to certify the results. Both of those rules were thrown out by a judge earlier this month.Meanwhile, some of the most powerful conservatives in the federal legislature, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, have refused to state on the record that they will unequivocally accept the 2024 presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press earlier this month, Johnson wavered on whether he would do his job to certify the results regardless of who won, insisting that he would only do so “if the election is free and fair and legal.” “I think Donald J. Trump is your next president, and that can’t happen soon enough,” Johnson said at the time.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187578/donald-trump-first-call-election-fraud-conspiracies

2024-10-24 20:25:01

Damning Report Exposes How Little Time Josh Hawley Spends in Missouri
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Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is treating his home state of Missouri like a flyover state, according to a new report that shows just how rarely the hawkish Republican lawmaker returns there. Records of Hawley’s taxpayer funded travels reviewed by St. Louis Magazine revealed that the Missouri Republican has traveled between Washington, D.C., and the Show-Me State only 33 times between March 2019 and January 2024—an average of six times per year. Many of Hawley’s trips were short: eight of them involved Hawley hightailing out of Missouri after less than 48 hours. More than half the time, Hawley was traveling home around the holidays, which tended to be longer stays. Hawley’s longest trip home was between April 1, 2020, and May 1, 2020, around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.While taxpayer funded trips provide an incomplete picture of Hawley’s travel, it is a relevant data point when considering his travel plans. It’s common for senators to expense travel between Washington and their home state, according to Democratic strategist Jacob Long, who spoke with St. Louis Magazine.Lucas Kunce, a Democrat running to unseat Hawley, responded to the report Thursday in a post on X. Kunce wrote that Hawley “isn’t running for reelection to keep serving us—he’s running to keep up his luxury lifestyle on the coast.”Hawley has previously attacked “coastal elites” and “liberal elites” as part of his political campaigns.The senator and his family previously purchased a house in Virginia, which is now valued at $1.7 million. He previously listed his sister’s residence in Ozark, Missouri, as his voting address, but now has two properties associated with his name in Christian County, less than a mile apart, according to the Kansas City Star. The one he technically owns was only bought in 2023. October has been a rough month for the self-described Christian nationalist. Earlier this month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board endorsed Kunce, calling Hawley the “worst sitting senator in America right now,” and criticized him for pumping his fist in support of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Hawley also came under fire over his use of a private jet to campaign around Missouri, which was first reported by the Missouri Independent. Hawley had previously attacked his 2018 opponent, Democrat Claire McCaskill, for using a private jet, but apparently spent more than $132,000 on chartered flights between mid-December and June.“Missouri’s flyover country for this guy,” said Kunce at the time, pointing out that he had been campaigning in a minivan with his wife and 16-month-old son.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187513/josh-hawley-damning-report-little-time-missouri

2024-10-24 14:25:01

Old Man Trump Is So Desperate for a War, He’s Inventing Them Now
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Donald Trump made up a fictional war with France Wednesday, and then claimed to have stopped it.During a speech in Duluth, Georgia, Trump—who previously touted himself a “wartime president” but now lies about how peaceful and safe his time in office was—was bragging about his record when he falsely claimed he really had prevented an international conflict. “You have no idea what I did in the White House. I stopped wars … with France!” Trump said. “France, you know the France story? They were gonna charge us, think of this, 25 percent to all Ameri—I have to protect American companies, whether we like ‘em or not. Some of ‘em I didn’t even like. You know Google is treating us much better, did you notice that? What happened to Google? They’re treating us much better.”“They say McDonalds was one of the most viewed things that they’ve ever had,” Trump cheered. Trump: "You have no idea what I did in the White House. I stopped wars with France."His brain then flits to Google and McDonald's. All of this in about 30 seconds. pic.twitter.com/yxgYlycUCM— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 24, 2024While there was obviously no threat of war with France, it’s possible that Trump was referring to a trade skirmish with France from his time in office. Paris passed a digital services tax on large tech companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon in 2019. In response, Trump threatened to place tariffs of up to 100 percent on French goods such as champagne and luxury bags. Undeterred, France ordered the tech companies to pay up in 2020. After Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, he suspended Trump’s plan for retaliatory tariffs against France. So the “war” Trump stopped wasn’t a war, it was a trade fight. And he didn’t even stop it. If anything, he escalated it. But this might explain his incoherent weave from France, to Google, to back to his favorite subject, himself.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187489/donald-trump-invent-war-france

2024-10-24 10:05:03

Searching for the Elusive Man Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin
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One evening in December 1850, an escaped slave named John Andrew Jackson arrived at a handsome, white clapboard house in Brunswick, Maine, cold and desperate for somewhere to stay. He was fleeing north to Canada, striving to evade the slave-catchers who had just been empowered by a new law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to capture runaways even in free states like Maine. Upon arriving at the Brunswick house, Jackson encountered its mistress, a young housewife (and burgeoning writer) named Harriet Beecher Stowe. She considered whether to grant him refuge. Her husband was hundreds of miles from home. Before the Fugitive Slave Act had passed, Stowe later reflected in a letter, she might have “tried to send him somewhere else.” But these were desperate times. She allowed Jackson to sleep under her roof, giving him a bed in “our waste room.” Jackson, a gifted raconteur, entertained her children with stories and songs. Jackson stayed with Stowe for just a single night, but—writes the historian Susanna Ashton—it was “an encounter that, quite possibly, changed the world.” As Ashton argues in her intriguing new book, A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe drew on this fleeting interaction when, just seven weeks later, she began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel, which tells the story of a long-suffering enslaved man, sold at least 300,000 copies in its first year and helped to inflame the passions of a nation hurtling toward war.Yet if Stowe’s protagonist was so forbearing that his name has become an epithet, Jackson is a far more compelling figure. An epic, thousand-mile escape from slavery to freedom was only the first act in a life that spanned the pulpit, the jailhouse, and a daring attempt to buy his former owners’ land. Jackson told his own life story in an 1862 memoir that serves as one of Ashton’s main sources. She came upon the memoir while “hunting down rare or out-of-print slave narratives” and was so entranced by Jackson’s “big personality” that she decided to dig further. The resulting book, though billed as biography or literary history, is more properly read as somewhere between a detective story and a caper. In searching for John Andrew Jackson, Ashton has depicted with nuance and restraint a life story that complicates the kind of mawkish or tidy assumptions about enslaved people contained in many works, perhaps most famously Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her main character’s elusiveness is the story’s most remarkable feature.“I was born in South Carolina,” begins John Andrew Jackson’s memoir, published a decade after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His parents, Betty and the unusually named Doctor Clavern, were slaves on the Sumter County plantation of Robert English. John Andrew came into the world in 1825, one of the more than 50 slaves owned by English, most of whom were forced to pick short-staple cotton beneath a burning sun. For reasons still obscure, he was apparently also known to his enslavers as “Jackson.”English was a striver, a locally powerful but widely disliked property owner; his wife, Elizabeth, and four daughters were memorably abusive, apparently delighting in whipping their slaves. According to Jackson’s memoir, the youngest English daughter, Martha, once ordered Jackson’s sister to be whipped 100 times for refusing to stop praying; the sister died as a result of the beating. Jackson himself was forced to endure “many whippings,” he would write.Sometime before 1840, Jackson began a relationship with another enslaved woman, Louisa, with whom he soon had a daughter, Jinny. English was irate, as Louisa belonged to a neighboring enslaver, meaning Jinny and any other children Jackson and Louisa would have would be the property of Louisa’s owner. English beat Jackson every time he visited Louisa—“at least every week,” Jackson later wrote. “I shall carry these scars to my grave.” To make matters worse, Louisa’s owner soon moved to Georgia, sundering Jackson’s family.Jackson apparently sought solace in prayer—and in resistance. In 1846, he somehow acquired a pony and rode it to a religious meeting without permission, an act of defiance so unforgettably bold that Irving Lowery, an enslaved man who lived nearby, wrote about it more than 50 years later in his own memoir. Elizabeth English ordered her overseer to give Jackson a hundred lashes—“a terrifying punishment … not far off from being a death sentence,” Ashton wrote—but he managed to flee into the nearby trees. Realizing he was “stuck in the swampy woods without recourse, supplies, or a feasible plan for sustainable escape,” Jackson returned the next day, but soon thereafter, on Christmas Day, he retrieved his pony and escaped for good. Desperate to recapture their lost property, the English family ran an advertisement offering a reward for his apprehension. Noting his cleverness, the advertisement warned white readers that Jackson “speaks plausibly.”Armed with little more than his plausible tongue, Jackson managed to charm a procession of acquaintances into helping him escape nearly 900 miles to Massachusetts. He quickly set about trying to raise enough money to purchase Louisa and Jinny’s freedom, making valuable contacts with nearby abolitionist activists. Soon, he was traveling around Massachusetts, telling his story and soliciting donations. It was the beginning of a life of storytelling, reinvention, and tireless fundraising.Not long thereafter, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, forcing Jackson to flee once again. It was on his trip north that he spent a single night at the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. From her waste room (essentially a storage closet), Jackson moved on to other towns in Maine, apparently passing the freezing winter of 1850–51 in Portland. Once again, his skill at connecting with nearby activists ensured his safety—and ultimately his passage into Canada.Ashton recounts the remainder of Jackson’s life with aplomb, ably covering his years of lecturing in Canada and then in England, his itinerant preaching, his acquisition of literacy, his decision to write a memoir, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina, and his remarriage, to Julia Watson, a runaway slave from North Carolina. The details of Watson’s life are few, but it is evident she accompanied her husband to England and sometimes lectured onstage alongside him, making her “possibly the first African American woman to speak in the British Isles about her enslaved experiences.” Throughout the 1860s, Jackson attracted fans and donations yet consistently alienated allies, including financial benefactors. He had “spent his life carefully constructing a persona of resilient bravado,” Ashton writes carefully; he “wasn’t a man to back down.” Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Jackson and Watson returned to the United States, where he found work with the Freedmen’s Bureau. He set about trying to buy up his former owners’ land and turn it into a community for freed slaves—or for his own family. It was just one among many utopian visions for the postwar South, and—like most of these visions—it faded amid fierce white supremacist resistance.Jackson continued to lecture and fundraise but repeatedly encountered legal jeopardy; in North Carolina, authorities brought charges of financial swindling against him (Ashton calls them “trumped-up”) and he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. The aging man served little of it, briefly escaping from prison and then managing to secure a swift release after journalistic allies turned his conviction into an international scandal.In reconstructing a life that included so many wild twists and turns, Ashton has accomplished a remarkable feat of historical excavation.Toward the end of his life, Jackson did attain small plots of South Carolina soil, including property that had “almost certainly” been owned by “English family relatives.” But his dreams for this land amounted to little. It was “not unlikely” Ashton writes, again with tact, that he was “pilfering or profiting from goods that had been donated.… He had always been a bit of a hustler, a survivor.”In reconstructing a life that included so many wild twists and turns, drawing on sources drenched alternately in their recordkeepers’ racism and the protagonist’s self-mythologization, Ashton has accomplished something remarkable, a feat of historical excavation. She unearths myriad newspaper articles, court records, and letters, though she also reflects on “what can and cannot be recorded.” The result of her digging is a nuanced depiction of Jackson, a man possessed of almost unfathomable resilience and also chutzpah, a combination that led to both iconoclasm and apparently fraud. Understandably, her sources do not allow Ashton to paint her other characters as convincingly, occasionally resulting in a flattening sentimentality. Jackson’s mother, Betty, “must have been someone special. Someone fearless”; his wife, Julia Watson, “must have been remarkable.” Must they? Ashton is on firmer ground in refusing to make such demands of Jackson.The most newsworthy of Ashton’s conclusions are her claims about Jackson’s influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe. For it is these claims—featured centrally on A Plausible Man’s book jacket and in its marketing material—that go beyond the biographical, instead seeking to reframe one of the most famous works of American literature. While Ashton insists that the more “significant story” inspired by Jackson was “his own,” no doubt many readers will arrive at this book trying to learn more about the origins of another.From nearly the first moment it appeared in print, Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired readers to try to discover Stowe’s inspirations. Within a year, Stowe had published The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an assemblage of the press reports, slave narratives, and other sources from which she claimed to have either drawn or found subsequent “confirmation.
https://newrepublic.com/article/184492/searching-elusive-man-inspired-uncle-toms-cabin

2024-10-24 10:05:02

Anti-Abortion Activists Want to Have It Both Ways
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Since Roe was overturned, abortion rates have gone up in most states with abortion bans, The New York Times reported Wednesday. Perhaps this might alarm anti-abortion activists, like Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-choice group Students for Life America, prominent among those who helped end Roe, and who the Times interviewed for their story. For Hawkins, the fault lies with states doing exactly what the Dobbs decision allowed them to do: make their own abortion laws. “A serious breakdown in the law takes place when one state attempts to interfere with another state’s efforts to protect their citizens,” Hawkins told Times.This is, obviously, spin. But what’s striking is how Hawkins’s spin contradicts the prominent narrative of conservatives, including Trump and JD Vance, who claim that Dobbs merely “returned abortion to the states.” Claiming that Dobbs simply empowered the states to decide is how Republicans attempt to have it both ways: acknowledge the popularity of legal abortion yet still please the anti-abortion activists they need on their side.Hawkins, though, maintains that having fifty competing legal regimes governing abortion would be total chaos. And the implied solution to all this disorder is simple: a national ban on abortion.Hawkins is not some undergraduate with edgy, “heterodox” opinions, the kind who pops up in the page Times with some frequency. Around the time she actually was a student, according to her own biography, she was working for the Republican National Committee and was an appointee in the George W. Bush administration. Students for Life may sound like a smallish group who hand out literature on campus—some chapters do—but conservative dark money maestro Leonard Leo sits on their board. They are in the same network of Leo-backed groups, such as the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom, who lobby Congress together and file amici briefs in the same Supreme Court cases, including the case meant to take mifepristone, which can be used for abortions, off the market. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts spoke at Students for Life’s annual summit in January. “We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told the student attendees. Heritage also had a Project 2025 promotional booth. The Project 2025 anti-abortion agenda shares much with Students for Life’s.Even when they win, the anti-abortion movement poses as the victims. No one should be surprised that Hawkins, who seeks an end to abortion altogether, is not concerned with “states’ rights,” as it were. A national ban is already part of the Republican Party platform adopted at this year’s convention, even though Trump and Vance may pretend it is not. I don’t mean the platform’s single use of the word “abortion,” which appears in its opposition to “Late Term Abortion.” Rather, the gesture toward a possible national abortion ban is buried in what might read like the most banal reiteration of promises to uphold the Constitution: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” This is a thinly veiled reference to a dubious anti-abortion legal strategy: that a fertilized egg is a legal person with constitutional rights—rights that, inevitably, outweigh the rights of the pregnant person.That’s an incredibly extreme move, one that shreds the intentions of the 14th Amendment, one of three Reconstruction-era amendments that recognized recently emancipated Black people in the United States as citizens, and the cornerstone of countless civil rights decisions by the Supreme Court into the 20th century—including Roe. Hawkins is extreme, even by anti-abortion movement standards. She wants to outlaw birth control pills and IUDs, claiming they “put women at risk and they kill children.” As part of this effort, she and Students for Life routinely push health misinformation, casting contraception as a form of abortion, or insisting that an abortion to save the life of the mother is not an abortion, but an act of “maternal-fetal separation.” She must know, as she can see the same polls everyone else does, that such positions are deeply, deeply unpopular. That may be why some of the more extreme measures she is pushing, such as giving fertilized eggs rights as legal persons, tend to come a bit cloaked or buried in jargon.Hawkins was not wrong when she tried to paint the post-Roe world as one in which states’ laws are interfering with one another, with pregnant people caught between conflicts in the laws where they live and the laws where they travel to obtain an abortion. But she is not being honest. She helped unleash this chaos. And now she wants to benefit from it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/187476/students-for-life-abortion-states

2024-10-24 10:05:01

Europe’s Electric Vehicle Woes Are a Lesson for EVs Everywhere
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Electric cars got top billing at this year’s Paris Auto Show. At the world’s largest such showcase, a central exhibition hall featured an “electric factory” display designed, in the colors of the French flag, to mimic the spine-like assembly lines that churn out electric cars and internal combustion engines. Along the exteriors of those lines were a series of questions answered inside of them, where clumps of teens on school trips and car enthusiasts stood by read to hear the answers: are electric vehicles produced in France? What new professions are created by electric vehicle production? Just outside the exhibition grounds, autoworkers that spend their days in real-world auto factories had a question of their own: Why are so many of them losing their jobs? A few hundred trade unionists from France, Italy, the United States and elsewhere gathered in the rain to rail against Stellantis chief Carlos Tavares, the embattled CEO whose global auto group is fending off accusations of mismanagement from workers and investors alike. Late last month, Stellantis issued a profit warning amid lower than expected sales “across most regions.” The company has temporarily suspended production of its fully electric Fiat 500e, citing low sales as it temporarily lays off workers in Italy; Stellantis plans to start producing a hybrid version of the car in 2025 or 2026. Similarly, in the United States, the company has blamed “market conditions” to backtrack on a pledge—enshrined in its contract with the UAW—to re-open and expand an idled plant in Belvidere, Illinois to include a $3.2 billion battery plan. Stellantis recently announced, too, that it will expand production of its best-selling, gas-powered Dodge RAM pick-ups in Mexico. Starting on October 12, they began laying off approximately 1,100 workers from their Warren Truck Assembly Plant in Michigan after ending production of the RAM 1500 Classic pickup there.On October 18, Stellantis workers in Italy carried out a 24-hour nationwide strike, culminating in a rally that brought an estimated 20,000 people out to Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. UAW members recently authorized their own strike against Stellantis, and are in tense negotiations with the company over unrealized investment commitments. The company has filed 9 federal lawsuits against the UAW and 2 dozen locals disputing the union’s contract violation claims and right to strike over them, arguing the pledge was always “contingent upon plant performance, changes in market conditions and consumer demand.”Amid all this, Tavares has tried to paint himself as a stalwart defender of electrification, ready to weather the winds of change even if that proves difficult in the near-term. Speaking to the Financial Times at the Paris Auto Show, he warned that slowing the transition to electric vehicles would be “a big trap,” and blamed governments for failing to provide adequate incentives to make the switch. Unions on either side of the Atlantic, however, argue that they’re paying the price for Stellantis’s longtime, short-term focus on maximizing profits and executive pay. “Stellantis has underinvested in this,” i.e. the electric transition, says Maurizio Oreggia, international coordinator for the Italian metalworkers’ union FIOM. He agrees that the Italian government and European Union aren’t doing enough to offer public support for electrification; bolstering those is among FIOM’s top demands. But he also sees Stellantis’s own choices as a key reason why the automaker is falling behind. “This transition is necessary given climate change, if you look at the situation of the planet. But we’ve known we have to do this for many years,” he adds. Instead of reinvesting profits into research and development, improving working conditions or electrification, “they have distributed profits to shareholders, never to the workers.” Earlier this month, Stellantis announced that it had bought $1.1 billion worth of stock back from shareholders since August. Tavares received a 56 percent pay bump last year. Defending his lavish compensation package in April, Tavares said it was simply part of the contract between himself and the company, “just as there are contracts for soccer players and for Formula 1 drivers.”The situation facing autoworkers is especially acute in Italy, where anger at Stellantis is pitched. Stellantis was created in 2021 through the merger of the French auto group Peugeot and Fiat Chrysler Automotives. Fiat has long been Italy’s only mass-market automaker, responsible for the bulk of the roughly 1.5 million cars made there as recently as the early 2000s. This year, Italy is expected to produce fewer than 500,000 cars, half as much as it made in 2018 and 250,000 less than it made last year. That decline has been especially hard-felt in the northern city of Turin, the longtime home of “Mamma Fiat” that has seen four car plants close since 1982.“The trend is downward in all European countries, but in Italy it’s been particularly strong. Various governments never allowed a foreign player to enter the Italian domestic market for car production,” says economist Simone Gasperin. In addition to heavily subsidizing auto plant construction, Italy historically used state-owned enterprises to support its car industry. That included efforts to build out the country’s highway system and offer cheaper gasoline prices via Eni. Through Alfa Romeo, Gasperine explains that the Italian government “was able to inject a dose of competition, which made Fiat more sensitive to things like investing to remain competitive. It was a way to reduce their monopolistic power.” Fiat acquired Alfa Romeo in 1986 amid a wave of privatizations. Since then, successive governments have generally relied on consumer-side subsidies to bolster its auto sector. And whereas the Inflation Reduction Act’s consumer-side EV incentives require that cars and their components be made in the U.S. or its trade partners in order to qualify, EU law generally prohibits these kinds of domestic content requirements.Even the comparatively generous state support for automakers to go electric in the United States can’t make up for their decades spent doubling down on internal combustion engines. Companies have reliably resisted regulatory efforts—like more stringent fuel efficiency standards—that might have spurred innovation. “Stellantis was one of the slowest, if not the slowest, to begin their transition to the next generation of vehicles,” says UAW Region 4 Director Brandon Campbell, who joined the demonstration in Paris and the strike rally in Rome; he first came to the union when he started working at the Belvidere plant in 1994. “They’re paying the price for that, but that is driven by their poor management and their poor decisions.” (For the sake of disclosure, my partner works for the UAW.)The EU has moved to end the sale of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2035, a decisions now facing fierce pushback powerful parties within the bloc. While such a policy certainly spurs demand for EVs, it’s not at all clear that European companies will be making them. “Europe has already a much more developed EV market than the U.S., but is not prepared to produce most of the EVs that will be sold here,” Gasperin tells me. As Chinese companies roll out affordable EVs at home and abroad, Stellantis and other European automakers have felt pressured to lower prices in order to compete with foreign competition and convince consumers to buy the still relatively limited range of electric models they’re producing. Larger and more expensive cars make for bigger margins, though. In the U.S., where there’s no looming phase-out deadline for gas-powered cars, automakers including Stellantis have seemed content to double down on mostly gas-powered best-sellers like the RAM and Ford F-Series—however limited the demand for those hulking, pricey trucks and SUVs might be elsewhere.“Manufacturers’ only strategy is to preserve their margins,” Sophie Binet, secretary-general of France’s powerful General Confederation of Labour (CGT), told those gathered outside the Paris Auto Show last week. “Given our salaries, no worker can afford a car that costs 40, 50, 60 or 100,000 euros.” As the factories making those cars close, and companies move production abroad, she quipped that “the CGT project is simple: a small economical electric vehicle entirely manufactured in France, which could be sold for around 15,000 euros.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/187470/stellantis-strike-electric-vehicles

2024-10-23 17:25:01

Trump Brings Back Notorious 2020 Lawyer in Sign of Trouble to Come
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Less than two weeks from the election, Donald Trump is speaking to one of the lawyers who helped him contest the 2020 election results. The New York Times reports that Trump has been in touch with Kurt Olsen, who spoke to Trump several times over the phone on January 6, 2021 while a violent mob attacked the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election results for Trump. Olsen later faced court sanctions in 2022 for making baseless claims about voting machines in Arizona.Olsen has reportedly told Trump this time around that the former president should take legal action to make sure voting machine data from Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia is preserved, according to the Times. Trump reportedly encouraged this line of action.Trump and Olsen first met in late 2020, as the then-president was talking to anyone offering to help him stay in power. Olsen later joined the Texas attorney general’s doomed appeal to the Supreme Court to stop Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. When that failed, he drafted a civil complaint based on the lawsuit, and tried to bring it in person to the acting U.S. attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen. Justice Department officials found the complaint flawed, and said it didn’t seem viable. In 2022, Olsen represented Kari Lake in her failed attempt to overturn her loss in the Arizona race for governor. In July, Olsen was hit with an ethics complaint from the States United Democracy Center and Lawyers Defending American Democracy, who asked the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission and the District of Columbia’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel to investigate Olsen’s election denial activities.“Kurt Olsen has abused his law license to spread lies about our elections in the courtroom time and time again, and his pattern of unethical conduct shows he’s not going to stop,” said Gillian Feiner, Senior Counsel at the States United Democracy Center, at the time.The fact that Trump is seeking out someone the Times describes as a “fringe figure” suggests that he is worried enough about the coming election to attempt the same dangerous schemes as he did in 2020. None of Olsen’s schemes worked then, but Trump still has the ability to whip up confusion and incite an angry mob. Plus, he now has his supporters in important election posts across the country. The former president still hasn’t faced any consequences for his actions four years ago. What is he willing to try this time?
https://newrepublic.com/post/187450/trump-2020-lawyer-overturn-election

2024-10-22 20:15:01

Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution” Reveals Plan to Steal a Swing State
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Donald Trump’s cronies are already making plans to overturn North Carolina’s election results if a majority of the state’s voters choose Kamala Harris for president. Ivan Raiklin, a supporter of the former president who calls himself Trump’s future “secretary of retribution,” has prepared a plan to deliver North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes to Trump, regardless of how the votes go. Ralkin, an attorney and military veteran, has close ties to people in Trump’s inner circle, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was pardoned by the former president. Raiklin told his plan to an audience at the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour over the weekend in Selma, North Carolina, after being introduced by Flynn, according to Rolling Stone. Raiklin claimed that Hurricane Helene’s devastation may hurt Republican turnout in the state and give Democrats the edge on November 5, so he asked the crowd to pressure the state’s Republican leadership to ignore a favorable Democratic result. Specifically, the leaders he mentioned were North Carolina state House Speaker Tim Moore and embattled Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, who presides over the state Senate. Raiklin’s plan involves the state legislature reacting quickly in January 2025 before the election results are certified by Congress, but only if Trump loses. “If it’s legit, we don’t have to worry, right?” Raiklin told the partisan audience. “But who thinks it’s going to be legit? You think they’re just going to give it to you? No, there’s going to be a fight!” Raiklin told the crowd to “apply the necessary motivation” to the state’s Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature, by telling the senators and representatives that “they have the political obligation to remedy an illegitimate election.” In Raiklin’s mind, this process, which he said is “the only way … we can address” the “calamity in western North Carolina” in a “legal, moral, ethical manner under our Constitution,” would be livestreamed on Rumble and Elon Musk’s X, adding that he hoped the “radical left media” would “start to cry.”Raiklin’s plan is far-fetched, but not far off from the many fake elector schemes attempted after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. While each one of those was thwarted, Raiklin’s cryptic language could incite MAGA-aligned protesters into attempting to force the state’s legislature to overturn a possible Democratic victory, which could turn into a mini-January 6. It all depends on whether Raiklin’s half-baked plan garners any support, or if he’s exposed as a blustering troll.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187411/trump-secretary-retribution-plan-steal-swing-state-north-carolina-election

2024-10-22 15:45:01

Elon Musk’s Massive Plan to Help Trump Is Hilariously Crumbling
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Reports of glitchy-door knocking canvassing by Elon Musk’s super PAC just got way more real, spelling serious trouble for Donald Trump, who has almost entirely outsourced his door-to-door efforts in battleground states to the billionaire technocrat.It was previously reported that the app used by Trump and Musk’s canvassers was plagued by design problems and glitches, making it difficult to determine whether employees in swing states were actually doing their jobs. Now, it seems that some employees are exploiting the app’s faulty location functions.A video made by one Nevada-based canvasser with a vendor working with Musk’s America PAC demonstrated for users just how easy it is to fake door-knocks. The video shows users how a GPS-spoofing app can make it appear as if the user went to the homes of Trump voters. In reality, they didn’t need to go anywhere, and could simply falsify survey responses. The video, which was obtained by The Guardian, has been shared with hundreds of canvassers, but it’s unclear how widespread the spoofing practice actually is. America PAC and several of its vendors including Blitz, the vendor operating in Nevada and Arizona, released a joint statement. “Every door that is marked leaves unique fingerprints, and the fingerprints of a door marked with a spoofing app leave these fingerprints in neon colors. We have tech-enabled auditing and fraud prevention tools to identify and dismiss the bad apples, the Pac doesn’t pay a dime, and the door gets knocked by the next canvasser,” the statement said. Blitz, the vendor operating in Arizona and Nevada uses a “Quickbooks Workforce” app to monitor the location of its canvassers, two people familiar told The Guardian, but even that can be manipulated by simply turning off location services.This poses a particular problem in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona. Leaked data from America PAC, also obtained by The Guardian, showed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada last week were flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric that indicates faked door-knocks. Trump’s allies have been begging him to ditch Musk, and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders report that they’ve seen little of the efforts Musk has apparently poured $75 million into over the last few months.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187389/donald-trump-elon-musk-plan-ground-game

2024-10-22 14:40:01

Trump Reveals Why He Wants America to Return to 1798 in Ominous Speech
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When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he has a specific ideal year in mind: 1798, when slavery was legal and when America carried out mass deportations based on little pretext. Speaking to a crowd in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump on Monday vowed to “rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered” by jailing and deporting immigrants by utilizing an arcane 200-year old law. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18– no, of 1798,” said Trump, first mixing up his dates. “Think of that, 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We are not gonna play games.’ “We have to go back to 1798.” Trump: We have to go back to 1798 pic.twitter.com/o3RWSRLHJk— Acyn (@Acyn) October 21, 2024Believe it or not, this is not the first time he has made such a ridiculous claim. Over the past month, Trump has regularly suggested sending America back more than two centuries in order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Speaking on October 11 in Aurora, Colorado, he suggested he’d bring back the law to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” He also spread misinformation about “migrant crime” in the area and nationwide, and called his plan to target suspected gang members “Operation Aurora.”The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is one part of four laws put in place by President John Adams as part of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” meant to protect against French invasion. These laws allowed the government to increase citizenship requirements, crackdown on disloyalty, and deport noncitizens en masse. The law was meant to protect the United States only during “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government,” or if a foreign nation had threatened war. Notably, it was used by President Franklin Roosevelt to detain thousands of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps during World War II.It’s unclear under exactly what pretext Trump would use the law. Would he make the case that MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua gang is a foreign nation? Or would he settle for the GOP’s language of declaring war on Mexico? As Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Axios, “the rhetorical framing of migration as an invasion is not only something that turns up the temperature in the political landscape, but it’s also something that is meant to conflate legal and rhetorical concepts.” Even if he has no real plan to use a 200-year-old law in an authoritarian crackdown, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio, this type of language can result in vigilante violence against everyday people.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187380/trump-america-return-1798-immigrants

2024-10-22 09:00:15

Trump Makes Asinine Speaker Choice for Rally in Key Swing State
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If Donald Trump wanted to distance himself from Project 2025, he sure isn’t doing a great job.Joining Trump for his bus tour across Pennsylvania this week is Monica Crowley, his former assistant secretary of the treasury for public affairs. But perhaps more importantly, Crowley is also a signed contributor to the Project 2025 Mandate For Leadership, which Trump has been desperately trying to disavow as the election nears.A footnote reads in Project 2025, Crowley is not simply a passive signatory. “All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Monica Crowley [and others] deserve special mention,” the document reads.Crowley will join Trump as he stumps at nearly dozens stops across the state. This comes after Crowley took on a role helping JD Vance prepare for his vice presidential debate last month, serving as a mock moderator for the senator during practice sessions. Throughout the campaign, Trump has denied his many connections to the Project 2025 manifesto and its signatories. Earlier in October, Trump ranted about “Lyin’ Kamal [sic] Harris” and her mission to “make a thing called Project 2025 the central theme of her campaign, advertising and all.” Trump claims he has “nothing to do with it, NEVER READ IT, NEVER SAW IT,” but evidence says otherwise.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187370/trump-speaker-choice-rally-swing-state

2024-10-22 09:00:14

“Black Nazi” Who? Trump Feigns Ignorance of GOP Candidate in N.C.
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Donald Trump is no longer simply trying to distance himself from North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Now, the former president is outright pretending he doesn’t know anything about the scandal-plagued gubernatorial candidate.At a campaign stop in the Tar Heel state on Monday, Politico asked Trump whether he would still urge his supporters to vote for Robinson. “I’m not familiar with the race right now. I haven’t looked, I haven’t seen it,” Trump said.Within the span of eight months, Trump has gone from endorsing Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” to dodging questions about him.Last month, a bombshell CNN report alleged that Robinson had left inflammatory and lewd comments on a pornography website’s message board, including calling himself a “Black Nazi.” Trump has neglected to withdraw his endorsement of Robinson, or really address the scandal at all.Still, as Trump has sought to drum up votes in North Carolina, Robinson has been notably absent and hasn’t appeared with the Republican presidential nominee since August.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187372/trump-feigns-ignorance-mark-robinson-gop-north-carolina

2024-10-22 09:00:12

MAGA’s New Outrageous Tim Walz Conspiracy Tied to Russian Disinfo Plot
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Earlier this month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was plagued by MAGA rumors that he had sexually groomed a former student of his. Now, it appears that unfounded gossip was funded by a familiar source of misinformation: Russia.Last week, an anonymous account on X, “DocNetyoutube,” claimed that he had spoken with a former student of Walz’s who had been abused by him during Walz’s tenure as a high school teacher and football coach. That same account had a history of elevating other conspiracies, and conveniently, was deactivated shortly after the accusations gained ground. It was unclear whether the account had been offlined by the account owner or if X had removed it.Experts believe that the Russia-aligned network called Storm-1516 was behind the account, reported Wired. Storm-1516’s content relies heavily on faked primary sources, fooling American viewers into believing that fabricated documents, audio, and video support their baseless conspiracies. NBC News estimated that the prolific group—whose false narratives have lured politicians at the highest levels of government, including Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—is responsible for at least 50 conspiracies in the last year alone.A video circulated by another account on X elevated a deep fake of a man identifying himself as the former student, Matthew Metro. But the real Metro—who was tracked down by The Washington Post on Monday—dispelled the outlandish smear, telling the paper that he was dismayed to find out that a group had used his identity to fuel a vicious and false attack on Walz. Metro told the Post that he had attended one of the schools that Walz taught at, but had never met him.Last month, another pro-Trump misinformation superspreader was ousted as a beneficiary of Russian state-controlled media. Tenet Media, which funded the work of popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern, folded under the pressure of a Justice Department investigation that found the company had been backed to the tune of millions of dollars from Russian state-controlled media.Weeks later, another burgeoning MAGA outlet, Intelligencer—which has no apparent connection with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer—was caught with ties to Russia. Some of Trump’s closest allies were tied to the outlet, including former Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona Mangiant. Nearly half of the company’s board members are former aides, surrogates, or fake electors for Trump’s previous campaigns.The site’s financial backing did not indicate that it had received funds directly from the Kremlin. Instead, Intelligencer began as a subsidiary of a right-wing radio station in Australia that covers a host of conservative U.S. issues, including climate change denial and Covid-19 conspiracies, until George Eliason, an American journalist with experience in Ukraine, took over the website. In recent months, Intelligencer’s conspiracy-laden articles were shared by the likes of Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187376/maga-tim-walz-conspiracy-russian-disinformation

2024-10-18 17:05:01

Trump Bemoans Harvey Weinstein’s Prosecution in Bonkers Interview
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Donald Trump expressed surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s legal trouble in an interview on The Dan Bongino Show Friday morning.“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlongged. He got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of the king of the woke, right? And yet he got it. And I figured that maybe he wouldn’t get hit so hard,” Trump told Bongino. Trump seemed to be insinuating some sort of left-wing or liberal conspiracy behind who faces criminal charges in referring to Weinstein, a convicted serial sex offender and longtime Democratic donor. “So when they do get hit, they get hit. But that’s the only one I can think of. Normally they protect everybody. What they did with [Eric Adams] is very suspect,” Trump added, referring to the recently indicted New York City mayor, a Democrat. Donald Trump just now:"I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlongged, he got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of king of the woke, right? And yet he got hit."What? pic.twitter.com/GNb5m0dOcf— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) October 18, 2024There’s a lot to unpack from Trump’s comments, as his claim that liberals tend to protect their own from prosecution also isn’t true, considering the cases of Democrats Senator Bob Menendez and Representative Henry Cuellar this year as well as others in recent decades. Trump also brought up Weinstein unprompted, and said “I don’t know him well.” This raises the question of whether the former president is lying and did know Weinsten, which then raises further questions about whether Trump knew about Weinstein’s reputation as a serial abuser. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, considering Trump’s own record with sexual abuse.It’s a reminder of Trump’s relationship with another infamous sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The former president has praised Epstein as a “good salesman” and was named in the documents released following a lawsuit against the billionaire from one of his victims.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187321/trump-bemoans-harvey-weinsteins-prosecution-bonkers-interview

2024-10-17 22:15:01

DeSantis Lawyer Sounds Alarm About Administration’s Authoritarian Turn
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Last week, a lawyer who worked for the Florida Department of Health resigned, and a letter obtained Thursday by the Miami Herald indicates that he didn’t like the state agency’s decision to prosecute television stations for airing political ads.John Wilson, the head attorney for the department, wrote in the letter that “A man is nothing without his conscience.”“It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency,” Wilson wrote. Earlier this month, the department sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations who aired political ads supporting Amendment 4, a ballot initiative which if approved by Florida voters on Election Day, would increase access to abortion. The letters threatened to criminally prosecute the stations that didn’t take the ads down. Wilson, along with Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the head of the department, are facing a federal lawsuit over the letters. The plaintiff is the group behind Amendment 4, Floridians Protecting Freedom, who allege that the threats violate the Constitution’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.In his letter, Wilson stated that he had worked for the state for 14 years, and as the department’s general counsel since 2022, and said that circumstances convinced him that he couldn’t work there anymore.“I wish that were not the case, but I take great comfort in knowing that the lawyers I leave behind will rise to the occasion and provide you the zealous representation you deserve,” wrote Wilson, but the letter didn’t go into more detail, according to the Herald. The ads feature a woman named Caroline who said that she received a terminal brain cancer diagnosis when she was two months pregnant and would have lost her baby, as well as her own life, if she didn’t receive an abortion.“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline said in the ad. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine. Amendment Four is gonna protect women like me.”Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has spared no effort to fight against the ballot initiative even as his state was hit by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, spreading misinformation on his X account along with his legal threats. Last month, the state even sent police officers to the homes of people who signed a petition supporting the ballot initiative. At the time, DeSantis defended the zealous police action and even invoked the Republican bogeyman of voter fraud. It would appear that he’s very worried about the state’s abortion ban being negated at the ballot box.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187293/desantis-lawyer-sounds-alarm-administrations-authoritarian-turn

2024-10-17 17:45:01

Harris’s Harsh Takedown of Fox’s Bret Baier Exposes MAGA’s Biggest Lie
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Judging by the video that Kamala Harris’s campaign is circulating, her aides are pleased with one particular exchange during her interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. In it, Harris dressed down Baier for playing video of Donald Trump that sanitized away his threat to unleash the military on “the enemy within.”Many observers immediately surmised that this moment—which showed Harris digging in hard against Baier—could wreck Trump’s most cherished spin about Harris. As Andrew Egger noted at The Bulwark, Harris punctured the “right-wing caricature” of her as “an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet.”But this is a seminal moment for another reason as well. It starkly revealed the degree to which Fox News—and by extension Trump’s other right-wing media propagandists—has constructed an informational universe around Trump that, at the most fundamental level, is comprehensively fictional. MAGA’s biggest deception of all may be its portrayal of Trump as enjoying public support that is not just authentically, broadly, deeply majoritarian, but also is only constrained from realizing its full explosive potential by interference from corrupt institutions like the media and the Deep State. The reality is the opposite: Without the massive propaganda support system he benefits from—and the gravitational pull it exerts on mainstream news outlets—Trump, who has never enjoyed majority support in this country, probably could not long politically survive.Harris’s confrontation with Baier illustrates the point. After Harris pointed out that Trump has threatened to target an “enemy within,” Baier said that Fox News had asked Trump to address those comments at its town hall on Wednesday. Baier then played Trump’s response at that town hall, but he left out the footage of Trump recommitting to targeting the “enemy within,” only airing Trump’s insistence that he is the one treated as the enemy. Watch the Harris’ campaign video of the moment:Fox News selectively edited out the clip of Trump they played during their Harris interview, omitting the part where he called Americans who don’t support him “the enemy within,” “dangerous,” “sick,” and “evil” pic.twitter.com/Rk7Bsr8qA9— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024That makes Trump look uniformly like the victim of corrupt political prosecutions—prosecutions that are actually in keeping with the rule of law—while omitting Trump’s explicit doubling down on his threat. Harris called out the omission. “With all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’” Harris noted. “You didn’t show that.”Baier protested, but Harris kept it up, essentially accusing him of concealing what he knows to be true about Trump. “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” Harris said. She added:He has talked about going after people that are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.What Harris revealed here is that, at the most basic level of all, Trump is campaigning on an explicit vow to treat the opposition and its voters as sub-American. He has threatened persecution of the “vermin” opposition, vowed to use federal disaster relief money to extort blue states into doing his bidding, floated sending the military into Democratic-run cities, and, now, made it all even more explicit with his latest “enemy within” rants. Trump is essentially running on an open promise to serially violate his oath of office to carry out a kind of scorched earth campaign against blue America. Baier knows all this is toxic among swing voters. And so the picture of Trump he presented was one in which the only victim of persecution is Trump himself.What’s more, in a little-noticed move, Baier also inflated Trump’s public support. Baier asked Harris: “Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?” But that’s false: It’s largely tied in all of them, with Harris retaining an almost imperceptible edge in enough states to win the Electoral College. Baier also repeatedly said “half” or “50 percent” of the country backs Trump. But again, Trump has never enjoyed majority support at any point.MAGA is a minoritarian movement that derives energy from treating itself as “the people” and the non-MAGA majority as rooted in political aspirations and beliefs that are in some sense illegitimate. Yet Baier erased Trump’s lack of majority support, and downplayed his explicit campaigning on a vow to violate his oath of office toward the more populous rest of America that doesn’t support him. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters has shown, Fox often downplays and sugar-coats Trump’s most explicitly anti-democratic threats and actions. Baier carried out that project at an exceptionally high- profile moment.Something similar happened with Baier’s widely discussed questions on immigration. It’s true that Harris had trouble answering them—no one would deny that the Biden administration has struggled to manage the immigration system—but this is partly because here again, Baier constructed a largely imaginary world. The basic premise of his questions was that under Trump, all migrants were either detained all the way through their removals or forced to wait in Mexico; that none were released here; that crimes committed by migrants occurred only during the Biden years and are directly traceable to lax border policies.But as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has demonstrated, none of this is true. During the period that Trump’s Remain in Mexico program was in effect, only a small minority of apprehended migrants were forced to wait there. And according to Reichlin-Melnick’s calculations, tens of thousands of migrants were released into the interior while Remain in Mexico was in place, which debunks the Fox News host’s suggestion that it created some sort of enforcement panacea.In fact, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier has shown, hundreds of thousands of migrants were released all throughout the Trump presidency. That’s fewer than under Biden—in part simply because more have migrated during his presidency for all sorts of complex geopolitical reasons—but far from the migrant-release-free utopia Baier presented.Why did Trump release so many migrants? Because Congress under-resources the executive for processing and detaining them, and because the law requires some releases. In Baier’s fictional portrayal of the situation, if migrants are released, it can only be a function of the executive’s permissiveness. But every administration has done this—including Trump’s. How many migrants released by Trump then committed crimes? We don’t know—in part because Democrats don’t highlight such crimes to demonize immigrants the way Republicans do. In the universe Baier constructed, none of these complications exist.Harris deserves credit for calling out Baier’s MAGA clean-up efforts. But all this raises a bigger question: How much public support would Trump have right now if Fox and other right-wing outlets had not been pumping out sanitizing propaganda about him and his presidency for the last 10 years?
https://newrepublic.com/article/187269/harriss-harsh-takedown-foxs-bret-baier-exposes-magas-biggest-lie

2024-10-17 17:45:01

Man With Biggest Platform in the Country Complains He’s Being Censored
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JD Vance would not stop complaining Thursday about having been “censored,” when what he was actually describing was being corrected.During a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—a publicized event with a large crowd, hardly censorship—Vance transformed a speech meant to be about economic issues into a diatribe about free speech. He repeatedly claimed that Kamala Harris wanted to censor Americans’ speech—without providing any actual instances where she had done so. “We have leaders who would rather censor their fellow citizens than listen to them and persuade them,” Vance said. He referred to his previous, and fully debunked, claims alleging that illegal immigrants had taken over the cities of Springfield, Ohio; Aurora, Colorado; and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. “We are seeing all across this country that criminal gangs, sometimes, are moving into our communities and making it unsafe for American citizens,” Vance said. He immediately tried to walk-back his gross generalization. “And even if it’s not criminal gangs, sometimes it’s people moving into our communities who have no legal right to be there.”However, the groups that Vance has discussed, Haitian immigrants in Springfield and Charleroi, do have a legal right to be there. They are in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, a legitimate legal status that Vance has conveniently decided he doesn’t believe in. As for Aurora, Vance and Donald Trump have pushed claims that Venezuelan gangs have laid claim to apartment buildings in the area, an allegation that has been challenged by both residents and law enforcement.Vance blamed the “thousands upon thousands of children” of undocumented immigrants for a decline in the quality of American education, and blamed immigrants for long wait times in emergency rooms. At no point did he actually detail any supposed “censorship” of his words, but Vance’s statements about these immigrants have been subject to thorough fact-checks because they were all, in reality, untrue. Despite all the supposed government censorship, he did manage to get the words out without being arrested, which must have been a relief. Later, Vance turned back to the subject, claiming that he and Trump would “always fight for your right to speak your mind.”“The genius of the First Amendment is that when we debate our ideas, rather than censor one another, we can actually come to the table. We can disagree but still share a meal with one another afterwards,” he said.“You do not bring our fellow citizens together by trying to silence them. You bring our fellow citizens together by talking to them. And inviting the conversation about how we’re going to make this country better, and fix our problems.”Of course, when Vance or Trump are invited to the table, they lose their minds at the slightest bit of correction, not censorship. Vance himself flew off the handle after the smallest fact-check during the vice presidential debate. “We may not always agree with each other, but we will fight for your right to speak your mind because this is America, and we get to say whatever the hell we want to,” Vance concluded his speech Thursday. He has repeatedly proved that painfully clear. It’s worth noting that Vance and Trump haven’t limited their misinformation campaigns to immigration, but have also spent the better part of the last two weeks spreading false claims about federal hurricane relief efforts, all while the work was actually undercut by MAGA lawmakers, who opposed emergency funding until they wanted it.In any case, it seems that Vance should be more worried about self-censorship, as his running mate has started pulling out of interview after interview.
https://newrepublic.com/post/187273/jd-vance-kamala-harris-censorship-conspiracy