Politics & Stuff

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Labour quietly discussing plans to replace YOUR NHS GP appointments with ‘self-care’

https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2024/09/26/nhs-self-care-gp/

At Labour conference, the governing party held a seminar entitled “How to Save 25 million GP Appointments: The role of self-care in delivering an NHS fit for the future”.

Who needs NHS doctors?

Private consumer health giant Haleon sponsored the session. And Labour has so far failed to commit to the health spending the NHS needs. Funding the NHS’ Long Term Workforce Plan would cost around an extra £20bn more than manifesto commitments from Labour.

To be sure, prevention strategies can ease pressure on the NHS. But starving the NHS of funding while claiming one can replace 25 million GP appointments with ‘self care’ is a concerning combination. France spends £40bn (or 21%) more annually on public healthcare than the UK, when taking into account population size. It has a lower GDP per person.

Labour’s lack of funding, also inherited from the Conservatives, has key material impacts. The UK has a very low number of hospital beds, at 2.43 per 1,000 people. Meanwhile, France has over double with 5.73. And Germany (albeit with a higher GDP per person) has 7.82.

The UK is also low on doctors per 1,000 people, at 3.21. Some of the highest are in Austria at 5.45 and Norway at 5.18.

When it comes to capital investment, the UK further lags behind European countries. If the UK spent the same as the average investment of 14 EU countries in technology and buildings, we’d have spent £33bn more between 2010 and 2019.

Spending less with the same outcomes is of course beneficial: that shows a more efficient use of resources and expertise. But it’s clear from the waiting times, amount of doctors and hospital beds that this isn’t the case. Indeed, UK people with unmet care needs are among the highest in Europe. That’s despite having less people over 80 as a percentage of the population than in countries like France and Germany.

Just treat yourself!

So do Keir Starmer and health secretary Wes Streeting want to make up for these shortfalls with so-called ‘self care’? And with profit-driven companies like Haleon seeking to make shareholder cash from diverting people from NHS treatment?

Fund it properly.

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Appeals panel signals skepticism over NY civil fraud case against Trump

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4901615-trump-ny-fraud-case-judgment-appeal/

A New York appeals panel on Thursday appeared wary of the state’s civil fraud case against former President Trump that ended in a $464 million judgment against him and his business.

During arguments lasting more than an hour, the five-judge panel on the Appellate Division — New York’s midlevel appeals court — questioned whether any constraints apply to the law New York Attorney General Letitia James used against Trump. 

The law gives the state sweeping power to bring actions against businesses that engage in “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or otherwise demonstrate persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business.” 

“How do we draw a line, or at least put up some guardrails, to know when the AG [attorney general] is operating well within her broad — admittedly broad — sphere … and when she is going into an area that wasn’t intended for her jurisdiction?” Justice John Higgitt asked.

A lower judge in February ruled that Trump, the Trump Organization and top executives, including two of Trump’s sons, falsely altered Trump’s net worth on key financial statements to reap tax and insurance benefits.  

He ordered them to pay a combined $464 million, plus interest, of which $454 million is owed by Trump alone, and exacted several other penalties. As of Thursday, interest on the judgment has surpassed $24.7 million, bringing the grand total to more than $489 million. That figure will continue to balloon until Trump pays.  

Trump attorney D. John Sauer, who represented the former president before the Supreme Court in his presidential immunity challenge, argued before the panel that the state’s case was brought too late and that decades-old financial statements should not be the basis for such a “crippling” financial penalty. 

Sauer also reiterated arguments made at trial that banks wanted to work with the Trump Organization, did their own due diligence and found no fraud.   

“They did do their own due diligence,” Sauer said. “The uncontradicted testimony in the summary judgment record is ‘Everything we did was independent; we didn’t rely on the numbers.’” 

New York’s Deputy Solicitor General Judith Vale argued on the state’s behalf that the law gives the attorney general “broad” discretion, but two justices interrupted her opening remarks to ask whether there are any other examples of the state suing “equally sophisticated partners” in such a manner.  

“Because I’ve gone through the case that you’ve cited, and all of them always involved consumer protection aspect — it involved protection of the market,” Justice David Friedman said.  

“You don’t have anything like that here,” he added.  

The arguments held high stakes for Trump. If the panel affirms the lower court’s ruling, it would mark a catastrophic hit to the former president’s wealth and business empire — both of which underpin the persona that rocketed him to the White House.  

In addition to the eye-popping financial penalty, Trump was banned from holding top leadership positions at any New York company for three years and an independent monitor was appointed to oversee his business. 

His sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, both executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization, were blocked from serving in leadership roles for two years, on top of the $4.7 million penalties they each owe.  

Those penalties are on pause after Trump posted a $175 million bond earlier this year, blocking James’s office from collecting the massive judgment during the appeal.  

If the panel’s ruling is unfavorable to Trump, interest on the judgment would continue to mount during an appeal to the state’s highest court. If he loses there, he’ll be forced to pay up.  

Despite his estimated $3.7 billion net worth, only approximately $413 million is made up of liquid assets or cash and personal assets that could be used to pay the judgment, according to Forbes.

A ruling on Trump’s appeal is expected in coming months, though it’s unlikely that a decision will be reached before Election Day.   

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https://www.kenklippenstein.com/api/v1/file/cf621103-974c-43a1-8d78-acfb340302b2.pdf (RESEARCH DOSSIER J.D. VANCE)

 

fucking hypocrite Musk..............'free speech' for me but not for thee!

Elon Musk Suspends Reporter Who Published JD Vance Dossier

https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-dossier-leak-hack-iran-ken-klippenstein-1960044

 

The X, formerly known as Twitter, account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended on Thursday following the release of a dossier about Senator JD Vance that was allegedly from an Iranian government hack.

"Here's the dossier the media refused to publish," Klippenstein wrote in a post earlier.

Klippenstein, who is a former reporter at Intercept, published the dossier to his substack website about three hours prior to the account suspension on Thursday. It is still available to be viewed at the time this article was published.

"The dossier has been offered to me and I've decided to publish it because it's of keen public interest in an election season," Klippenstein wrote. "It's a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I'll let it speak for itself."

Newsweek reached out to Klippenstein and X via email for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.

The dossier goes through personal information about Vance, his campaign finances during his run for senate, voting records, military records, business records and his "anti-Trump record and establishment ties."

It includes information that said Vance was "one of the chief obstructionists to US efforts to providing assistance to Ukraine," as well as having "criticized public health experts and elected officials for supporting some Black Lives Matter protests while condemning anti-lockdown [Covid] protests."

The dossier also said that Vance "previously criticized the idea of a Southern border wall," called illegal immigration "about money," and that he "opposed Trump's Muslim ban."

Newsweek reached out to the former President Donald Trump and Vance campaign for comment

The Dossier also mentions Vance's wife Usha, who clerked for Kavanaugh.

The FBI announced in July that Iran had allegedly been separately plotting to kill the former president. Federal officials later revealed that Iran had hacked and stolen confidential information from the Trump campaign.

Iranian officials have denied involvement in any plot to assassinate Trump and called the hacking accusation "unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing."

"Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing," the Iranian Mission to the United Nations said in a statement shared with Newsweek. "As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.

In August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identified "increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns."

"This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump's campaign, which the IC [intelligence community] attributes to Iran," the statement said.

Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime that Iran should "pay a price" for allegedly targeting Trump and attempting to "undermine" the 2024 presidential election.

 

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Secret Service agent sexually assaults Kamala Harris staffer, say witnesses

https://boingboing.net/2024/09/26/secret-service-agent-sexually-assaults-kamala-harris-staffer-say-witnesses.html

If you want to stay safe, stay far away from the Secret Service.

In the organization's latest scandal, a Secret Service agent has been accused of sexually assaulting one of Kamala Harris' female staffers last week in a hotel room, while others were there.

The agent — who is now on administration leave — was part of the vice president's protective detail and had joined a group of Secret Service members and Harris staffers for dinner and drinks during a campaign scouting trip in Wisconsin. After dinner, the group headed up to the woman's room, where the agent then allegedly "forced himself on the woman and groped her," according to witnesses via The Independent.

The group reportedly intervened, kicking the agent out of the room. He was so drunk, witnesses said, that he then passed out in the hallway.

Although disappointing, given the Secret Service's long history of disgusting behavior, this latest allegation of drunkenness and sexual assault comes as no surprise. The takeaway here: if you find yourself among Secret Service "protectors," be sure to have hired body guards at your side.

From CNBC:

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating allegations that one of its agents sexually assaulted a female staff member of the office of Vice President Kamala Harris, the agency confirmed Wednesday.

Two law enforcement officials told NBC News that the agent was intoxicated when the alleged groping occurred.

The local Secret Service field office was told about the alleged assault, and the agent's gun and badge were confiscated, one of the officials told NBC. …

The incident comes as the Secret Service continues to face sharp criticism for the attempted assassination of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on July 13 during a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania.

Trump was nicked by a bullet, one rally attended was killed and two other men were wounded when a gunman who was able to climb up to a roof overlooking the rally site fired at the former president before the shooter was killed by a Secret Service sniper.

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PM’s rejection of Lebanon ceasefire plan ‘shatters’ ties with Biden — TV report

Strategic affairs minister, with Netanyahu’s approval, said to have reached understandings with US on process, with premier meant to speak about it at UN General Assembly

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-rejection-of-lebanon-ceasefire-plan-shatters-ties-with-biden-tv-report/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s backtracking on an agreed-upon ceasefire process covering both Lebanon and Gaza shattered relations with US President Joe Biden, according to a TV report Thursday evening that set out what it claimed was the sequence of events leading to the apparent collapse of the effort.

Channel 12 news reported that Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer had reached agreements in principle with the US on the approach with Netanyahu’s approval before the prime minister vowed Israel would continue to strike Hezbollah “with full force” as he landed in New York to attend the annual UN General Assembly, rebuffing the ceasefire push.

After the report aired, an Israeli official said, “As we said, Israel was updated about the American proposal but never agreed to it,” contradicting both the position of the White House press secretary and a senior Western diplomat who spoke to The Times of Israel and said that both Israel and Lebanon had backed the plan.

The process began earlier this week with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan reaching out to Dermer, and saying that steps must be taken to prevent the Israel-Hezbollah escalation spilling out of hand, Channel 12 reported.

Dermer reportedly responded that Netanyahu wanted to avoid all-out war.

Discussions then got underway on a temporary ceasefire during which a more permanent arrangement could be negotiated. This intended arrangement would be based on ongoing efforts by US envoy Amos Hochstein and on UN Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Lebanon war, and also on the Gaza hostage-ceasefire proposal unveiled by Biden at the end of May, the report said.

The Iron Dome fires interception missiles at rockets fired from Lebanon, seen over Safed, September 26, 2024. (David Cohen/Flash90)

This broad framework was intended to enable Israel to say it had separated the northern front crisis from Gaza, while Hezbollah could argue that it was ceasing its attacks because the Gaza war would be coming to an end.

According to what Channel 12 called “an emerging understanding,” Netanyahu was to have related to the intended arrangement during his speech to the UN General Assembly on Friday. He was expected to declare that Hamas had been defeated militarily in Gaza and announce the transition to the next phase of that war.

The US-Israel discussions reportedly continued in unspecified “wider forums” ahead of Netanyahu’s departure for New York early Thursday morning, including with the participation of Maj. Gen. Eliezer Toledano, the head of the IDF’s Strategy Directorate and a former military secretary to Netanyahu.

It was recognized that even if the intended arrangement did not come to fruition, the effort to reach it would provide greater legitimacy for the US to stand firmly behind Israel if regional war were to break out, Channel 12 reported.

While this diplomatic process, overseen by Netanyahu and Dermer, continued, the IDF carried on with its strikes on Hezbollah. Netanyahu updated a small number of ministers about the developments.

When word of the potential ceasefire began to emerge from the Biden administration in Washington on Wednesday, it was with Netanyahu’s knowledge and approval, the report said.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also insisted Thursday that the US’s call for a ceasefire had in fact been “coordinated” with Israel, despite the rejection, adding that talks were continuing at the UN General Assembly in New York.

French President Emmanuel Macron (R) meets with US President Joe Biden during the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 25, 2024. (Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

“We had every reason to believe that in the drafting of [the statement] and in the delivery of it that the Israelis were fully informed and fully aware of every word in it. We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t believe that it would be received with the seriousness with which it was composed,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing with reporters.

Asked if it was fair to say that the US wouldn’t have published the statement had it not believed that Israel was on board with the plan, Kirby responded in the affirmative.

Nonetheless, the White House still believes that it is possible to reach a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah and have continued talks with Israeli counterparts even after Netanyahu’s remarks upon landing in New York.

“We’ve seen Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comments. We still believe an all-out war is not the best way to get people back in their homes. If that’s the goal, we don’t believe an all-out war is the right way to do that,” Kirby said.

A French official told The Times of Israel that “there were conversations at a very high level between the US, France, and Israel, and from those conversations, we understood there was a basis to go ahead with the joint announcement.”

“We understand that Netanyahu has to deal with the domestic political reaction as well, but for us, the possibility for a ceasefire to allow negotiations remains alive,” said the official.

Additionally, a senior Western diplomat told The Times of Israel that both Israel and Lebanon privately gave mediators their support for the arrangement before it was announced. The diplomat also said that Netanyahu and his aides were closely involved in crafting and approving the joint statement.

While Netanyahu was en route to the US, Biden and French President Emanuel Macron jointly announced the 21-day ceasefire plan.

People and rescuers gather at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted an apartment on al-Qaem Street in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 26, 2024. (Ibrahim Amro/AFP)

The understanding was that Netanyahu would relate publicly to the intended arrangement when he landed in New York on Thursday and it would be possible to take the effort forward, the report said. Netanyahu was set to say that while Israel continues to battle Hezbollah, it welcomes any ceasefire initiative that would safely enable the return of northern Israeli residents to their homes. There were even draft texts of what Netanyahu would say, according to the report.

But then came the wave of political criticism of the nascent ceasefire in Israel, and “everything turned upside down,” the report said, leading Netanyahu to distance himself from truce proposals, issuing denials from his plane.

Channel 12 quoted a source familiar with the details as saying, “Obviously the president of the United States would not lead a process like this without the agreement of Prime Minister Netanyahu. This backtracking completely shatters what remains of relations with the Biden administration.”

The Western diplomat who spoke with The Times of Israel said Netanyahu’s conduct is an extension of how he has handled the Gaza hostage talks, in which he has privately agreed to show flexibility only to make public statements immediately afterward aimed at calming his political base but that risk thwarting progress in negotiations.

Reporters traveling with Netanyahu were told that no such arrangement was discussed by the security cabinet. But, the report said, the issue was discussed in the ad hoc forum Netanyahu assembled in recent days, attended by several key ministers although not by Defense Minister Yoav Galant. He told them about the discussions and the US-French ceasefire efforts. Several ministers made plain their opposition to a ceasefire, and Netanyahu told them the plan was also an effort to bolster Israel’s legitimacy.

Channel 12 reported that Netanyahu, having hardened his position in the wake of the political criticism at home, told reporters on his plane, when asked whether Israel would seek to kill Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, “If Hezbollah does not get the message we have conveyed in the past week, including the elimination of senior figures, it’ll understand in a different way.”

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew reiterated Thursday evening the Biden administration’s call for a 21-day ceasefire while stressing that Hezbollah was the party that instigated the ongoing conflict along the border.

“Since Hezbollah began its rocket attacks on Israel on October 8, round after round of strikes and counter strikes have driven people from their homes,” Lew wrote on X.

“The unacceptable risk of broader regional escalation demands immediate action,” he continued, arguing that the ceasefire backed by over a dozen countries “is the best way for diplomacy to restore safety for citizens to return to their homes.”

“Conditions in the north of Israel and the south of Lebanon must change to permit their safe return. At the same time, we press forward every day for an agreement to release the hostages and achieve a ceasefire in Gaza,” Lew added.

Amid the talk of a ceasefire, some 25 rockets were launched from Lebanon at the Lower Galilee in the evening, setting off sirens in several towns and injuring one person.

According to the military, the rockets all struck open areas.

Paramedics treated a 45-year-old man who was moderately wounded by shrapnel in the attack, the Magen David Adom ambulance service said in a statement.

An Israeli Air Force drone struck the launcher used in the attack a short while later, the IDF said.

Troops of the 7th Armored Brigade carry out a drill in northern Israel, in a handout photo published September 26, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)

Overall Thursday, Hezbollah launched more than 175 rockets at northern Israel.

In preparation for a further escalation of the conflict, troops of the IDF’s 7th Armored Brigade wrapped up a drill simulating a ground offensive in Lebanon, the military said.

According to the IDF, the drill took place several kilometers from the Lebanon border, and simulated ground operations and combat in “complex and mountainous terrain.”

The drill was the latest in a series carried out by the IDF for a potential ground offensive in Lebanon.

Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.

Since Israel escalated its airstrikes on the Hezbollah terror group on Monday, more than 630 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

At least a quarter of those killed have been women and children, according to Lebanese health officials. More than 2,000 were wounded. Israel has said that many Hezbollah operatives are among the dead.

Edited September 26, 2024 by Vesper

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The New York Post doesn’t survive the How It Started vs How It’s Going test.

Rupert Murdoch helped install Eric Adams who was already allegedly receiving illegal payoffs from Turkish nationals and companies for a decade. As soon as Eric Adams won the Democratic primary he sat ran uptown for a dinner at Rao’s with Republicans Bo Dietl and billionaire John Castamatides.

Mayor Adams railed against President Biden about the migrant crisis, but those migrants were bussed to New York by Republican governors from Texas and Florida. It’s time for Governor Kathy Hochul to deal with this Republican Trojan horse and remove Mayor Eric Adams from office now.

Edited September 26, 2024 by Vesper

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Elon Musk calls for boycott of ‘Soviet’ UK over business summit snub

Tesla billionaire has accused the government of releasing paedophiles to jail people for social media posts after he was not invited to an investment meeting

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/elon-musk-attacks-soviet-uk-over-business-summit-snub-vjdx2nzv0

Elon Musk has stepped up his war of words with the UK government after being denied an invitation to an upcoming business investment summit.

Responding to the news of the snub, the Tesla billionaire said: “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted paedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts.”

The owner of X has not been asked to attend the International Investment Summit by the new administration following a spat with Sir Keir Starmer over the role that social media platforms played in the summer riots.

Violence flared around the UK after three children were killed in an attack in Southport. Starmer told social media companies at the time: “Violent disorder was clearly whipped up online. That is also a crime. It is happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere.”

In response, Musk goaded the prime minister, blaming Britain’s multiculturalism for the clashes. “If incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable,” he wrote, adding on a post of a police arrest: “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”

The comments were condemned by ministers as being “totally unjustifiable” and “pretty deplorable”.

In August, jail terms were handed down to some individuals who had encouraged unrest on social media.

About 1,750 inmates were released early from jails in England and Wales this month in an effort to alleviate the overcrowding crisis. Terrorists and sex offenders are excluded from the scheme.

Musk’s slight by Labour, first reported by the BBC, is a volte face from the previous government, which actively courted the tech entrepreneur.

He was one of the most prominent attendees at the inaugural AI safety summit held in Bletchley Park last November and took part in a live-streamed “fireside chat” with Rishi Sunak as the grand finale to the event.

Jeremy Hunt, the shadow chancellor, said it was a “big loss” for Britain that Musk would not attend and told the BBC that the Tesla owner had previously signalled he was considering building an electric car plant in Britain.

Kemi Badenoch, who is standing to be Tory leader, said she was a “huge fan of Elon Musk” and praised his stand in favour of free speech.

She told The Spectator: “I look at Twitter before he took over and after: there is a lot more free speech. Yes, there are many, many more things that I see on, well, X, as he calls it, that I don’t like. But I also know that views are not suppressed the way that they were. That there was a cultural establishment — that was very left — that controlled quite a lot of discourse on that platform.”

A spokesman for the Department for Business and Trade declined to comment.

The International Investment Summit will take place on October 14, two weeks before the budget, and aims to bring money and interest into the UK’s business landscape. Hosted by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, it will bring together 300 business leaders.

It is part of a plan to “make clear that the UK is open for business”, the summit’s announcement said, “as the government resets relations with trading partners around the globe and creates a pro-business environment that supports innovation and high-quality jobs at home”.

While Labour’s leadership spent a good deal of time repairing relations with business through a “smoked salmon and scrambled eggs offensive” in the run-up to the election, a series of proposed policies to strengthen employee rights have left some employers nervous of the new administration.

Edited September 27, 2024 by Vesper

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First man charged with riot jailed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7859z8mx5o

 

Kieran Usher pleaded guilty to riot following disorder in Sunderland

The first adult in England to be charged with riot following widespread disorder last month has been jailed for four years and four months.

Kieran Usher, 32, of Sunderland, pleaded guilty after being filmed working with a group of at least 20 people "to rain missiles on to attending police officers" in the city, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

Judge Gittens told Newcastle Crown Court Usher’s actions had brought "shame on the city of Sunderland and shame on the union flag he was wearing".

Hundreds of people were involved in a night of violence on 2 August, during which police officers were repeatedly attacked, a building was set ablaze and businesses looted.

Video footage played to the court showed a masked Usher holding a phone in one hand with a can of lager in the other.

The court heard he played "a leading role escalating the disorder", picking up missiles, throwing them at police officers and beckoning others in the crowd towards the police line.

Four officers needed hospital treatment.

 

Usher was caught on CCTV throwing missiles at police

Usher's defence said he did not associate with the far right and wore the flag to fit in with the people who were there.

In his sentencing remarks, Judge Gittens said right-thinking members of the community were left "shocked, distressed and in fear" by the violence on display.

The judge took into account that Usher, who has learning difficulties, made full admissions to police and pleaded guilty at the first opportunity.

Northumbria Police Chief Constable Vanessa Jardine has said the cost of policing the riots ran to more than £1m.

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European Ethnic Cleansing Proposal Embraced by America’s Far Right

https://globalextremism.org/post/ethnic-cleansing-embraced-americas-farright/

Calls by European extremists for mass deportations of immigrants are finding support in the U.S.

Over the past few days, several U.S. far-right influencers have been advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants, using the term “remigration.” This recent trend in the U.S. was kickstarted when Donald Trump tweeted that he “will immediately end the migrant invasion of America” by “return[ing] Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).” 

Remigration is a term that has until now primarily been used in European extremist circles as a “solution” to “Le Grand Remplacement,” (“The Great Replacement”) which argues there is an organized effort, often led by Jews, to “replace” white populations in Western countries with refugees, immigrants, and generally people of color, ruining “European culture” and impacting elections. The rapid spread of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory in extremist circles has inspired the perpetrators of several mass casualty terrorist attacks across the globe. 

“Remigration” isn’t only about returning recent refugees and immigrants to their home countries. It’s about calling for state policy to deport all people of non-European or non-Christian descent “back” to their “home countries,” in essence, a call for ethnic cleansing. The racist proposal has transcended fringe neo-Nazi and other extremist groups, with far-right political parties picking it up such as Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), whose members were present at a November 2023 lecture on remigration delivered by de-facto Identitarian leader and once avowed neo-Nazi Martin Sellner. Although denying that his “masterplan” would affect citizens, Sellner dubbed the plan “unstoppable,” and believed it “will prevail in the 21st century.” AfD denied official participation in the meeting, but was widely condemned for some of its members engaging in such a discussion, particularly given Germany’s WWII history.

Anti-immigrant propaganda advocating for remigration has spread across the globe, from fringe online platforms to mainstream political discourse, thanks in part to the poor content moderation practices of major social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Remigration has infiltrated pop culture discussions in America, such as in the gaming industry, manifesting in video game modifications like one in Bethesda’s Fallout 4 which removes all people of color in Boston, Massachusetts, national sports, and even the “White Boy Summer” trend, which was co-opted by white supremacists after Tom Hanks’ son, Chet Hanks, made it go viral.

Now that Trump’s tweet of September 15 mentioning remigration has amassed over 55 million views, far-right influencers are trying to make remigration mainstream across the United States. Popularity of the term on fringe platforms had a significant surge. Gab, a platform similar to Twitter, saw a 850 percent increase in use of the term from September 14 to 15. On September 21, instances reflected a 2,275 percent increase from September 15. 

MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec reacted on Telegram by saying “MAGA 2024 will provide remigration assistance that is proven safe and effective,” followed-up by a post repeating the phrase “SAFE AND EFFECITVE (sic) REMIGRATION.” The South Texas Proud Boys shared a post with a video originally tweeted by Canadian Holocaust denier Alex Vriend of the white supremacist movement Diagolon. The video features an image, in 1950s pin-up style art, of a woman pointing a group of men to an airplane, with the American flag and “Remigration” written above. Based on the text on the airplane, and the airplane’s nose sticking through the American flag, it’s likely the image was AI-generated. Vriend has made several other posts in the same vein.

The South Texas Proud Boys shares an image, likely AI-generated, calling for remigration (Source: Telegram)

American Renaissance, a white nationalist publication with strong ties to the transnational far- right, lauded remigration as a “necessary” policy “if the west is to be saved.” They celebrated the recent mainstreaming of the term, saying “the fact that it is being openly discussed in the United States is a course (sic) for profound optimism.” A Telegram channel dedicated to VDARE.com, an American white nationalist website, shared a post made on Identitarian leader Martin Sellner’s English-language Telegram channel saying remigration, which is the “dream of all european and western people worldwide,” is now “exploding internationally.” Neo-Nazi Ryan Sanchez, former member of the white supremacist movements Rise Above Movement (RAM) and Identity Evropa (formerly the American Identitarian Movement) who was kicked out of the U.S. Marine Corps for his involvement in the white nationalist scene, also celebrated the term’s mainstreaming. 

A VDARE Telegram channel shares Sellner’s post claiming that remigration is the “dream of all european and western people worldwide,” and that it is “unstoppable” (Source: Telegram)

Use of the term in American politics was celebrated by far-right extremists transnationally. The National Party, an Irish white nationalist political party, and its founder, Justin Barrett, have made posts about remigration in the United States. One day after Trump’s tweet, Barrett simply posted “Remigration” on his Telegram channel. The National Party’s Telegram channel made a post on September 18 saying “pets want mass remigration.” An image attached to the post contains someone holding flyers saying “turf them out,” (meaning “get rid of them”) with a flaming pitchfork. Inclusion of a cat in the photo is no doubt an allusion to recent false and racist conspiracy theories that Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. British neo-Nazi Mark Collett celebrated Trump’s mentioning of the term, sharing a post saying that remigration is “inevitable.” Marcus Follin, better known as “The Golden One,” a Swedish white supremacist influencer, shared a post on Telegram referencing Trump’s use of the term, captioned “are you tired of winning yet?” 

The National Party, shortly after Trump’s tweet, posts propaganda calling for “mass remigration.” (Source: Telegram)

While the concept of remigration and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory originated in Europe, both ideas have spread like wildfire online, including in the United States. Despite its connection to several instances of terrorism, far-right politicians in multiple countries have pushed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and recent escalation of anti-immigrant rhetoric has been fueled by bogus conspiracies about Haitians, labeled as “invaders,” (a term associated with the “Great Replacement”) eating cats in Ohio. The community has faced bomb threats and the subsequent closures of schools due to threats associated with the anti-Haitian propaganda. 

Edited September 27, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,195]

How Immigration Became a Lightning Rod in American Politics

Anti-immigrant think tanks and advocacy groups operated on the margins until Trump became president. Now they have molded not only the GOP but also Democrats in their image.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/immigration-trump-tanton-fair/

https://archive.ph/MbhPl

This article appears in the October 2024 issue, with the headline “How Immigration Became a Lightning Rod in American Politics.”

 

On one of his few lucid moments during the only debate of the 2024 election cycle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the sitting president suggested he would be tougher on the border than his predecessor, blaming the former president for the demise of a “bipartisan border deal” that would have boosted the Border Patrol’s funding and significantly reduced access to asylum. Biden and top congressional Democrats had spent months negotiating its provisions, granting more and more concessions to conservatives in the hopes that they’d stop claiming that Biden had lost control of the southern border.

 

But “when we had that deal done,” Biden said, Trump “called his Republican colleagues and said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.’” The far right had refused to grant Biden a “win” on immigration, even if it meant forgoing exactly what they claimed they wanted.

 

This was a very different Biden than the one who had gone up against Trump four years earlier. When the two shared a debate stage in 2020, Biden accused Trump of presiding over unimaginable cruelty toward migrants: babies torn from their mothers’ arms at the border, some never to be reunited; undocumented workers rounded up on the job; asylum seekers shunted back to Mexico without a hearing. But there Biden was, a little over three months ago, saying in effect that he’d tried to finish the job Trump had begun, only to be stymied by Trump himself.

 

Biden’s pronouncements would soon take a backseat to the flurry of concern over his pitiful debate performance and his visibly declining health. He soon dropped out of the race, passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he’d once tasked with addressing the “root causes” of migration from Central America. But Biden’s pivot in the debate and the months preceding it symbolized a rightward lurch on immigration that may have been initiated by the GOP but has since become the dominant position of the Democratic Party.

 

Meanwhile, in his campaign to get back to the White House, Trump has tacked even further to the right. Immigrants, Trump has said, are “poisoning the blood of our country.” If elected, he’s declared to thunderous applause, he’ll begin “mass deportations” on day one. “Send them back!” the crowd chanted when “illegal aliens” were mentioned at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, holding signs that read “Mass Deportation Now!”

 

This shift came stunningly fast. Just three election cycles ago, in the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election, a postmortem by the Republican National Committee (RNC) attributed Romney’s defeat to his poor performance among Latino voters and recommended that the party should become more inclusive, perhaps softer on immigration. Even Trump—at the time an outspoken businessman with no public political ambitions—said that Romney’s stance on immigration was ridiculous. “He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal,” Trump said in 2012. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

 

Three years later, announcing his own run for president, Trump descended a gilded escalator at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and promised to build an impenetrable border wall. Throughout his 2016 campaign, Trump ignored the RNC’s recommendations and embraced the ethos of the Tea Party, channeling incoherent populist rage into a nativist platform.

 

The promises of mass deportations and a “big, beautiful wall” were all Trump, but a policy wonk he was not. Trump’s immigration policy was devised by the alumni and allies of a single ecosystem of intertwined think tanks, nonprofits, and advocacy groups—one that once operated largely on the margins but that, beginning with Trump’s ascension to the presidency, has set the tone of the national immigration debate. Few of Trump’s immigration policies survived legal challenge, and even fewer are still in place today. Congress didn’t pass a single immigration bill during Trump’s term, nor has it under Biden.

 

But immigration restriction is now dogma among Republicans and Democrats alike. The choice is no longer between a party that wants to turn away migrants and one that claims to welcome them, but rather between opposing sides that, despite their broader differences, disagree only on the best way to “secure” the border at any cost.

 

Turning point: Launching his 2016 presidential run, Trump pledged to “build a great wall” between the US and Mexico, signaling his dramatic shift on immigration.(Christopher Gregory / Getty Image)

It’s not an overstatement to say that the modern immigration restriction movement owes its existence to one man: a charismatic eye doctor from rural Michigan named John Tanton. Once described by a former ally as “the most influential unknown man in America,” Tanton spent decades building a network of anti-immigration groups from the ground up, transforming post–World War II nativism from a fringe view held by a small group of white supremacists into a mainstream political movement.

 

Tanton, a veteran of the mid-century conservationist and population control movements, saw population growth as a major hurdle to long-term sustainability. Trying to convince his fellow nature lovers of the connection between international migration and environmental ruin, Tanton founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, in 1979, dedicating himself to reversing the demographic changes that had taken hold in America in his lifetime. Over the next three decades, Tanton would found and help provide funding for a constellation of anti-immigration advocacy groups, including the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), U.S. English, and NumbersUSA.

 

Tanton was born in Detroit in 1934, a decade after the Immigration Act of 1924 put the first permanent numerical limits on immigration in US history. The legislation capped immigration from Europe and allocated slots using a quota based on the composition of Americans’ national origins as of the 1890 census.

 

The effect was an immediate and drastic reduction in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: More than a million European immigrants arrived in the United States in 1907; in 1925, that figure was just over 160,000. As a result of the act, Southern and Eastern Europe were no longer the main source of immigrants to the US. (African and Asian migration were effectively banned; no restrictions were implemented on migration from Latin America.)

 

The 1924 law kept America overwhelmingly white and Western European through Tanton’s young adulthood. But in 1965, a year after he graduated medical school, the country changed forever. The Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, overturned the national-origins quota system, replacing it with one that prioritized family reunification.

 

The new law more than doubled the number of immigrant visas issued each year and didn’t count the immediate relatives of US citizens against these quotas. At the same time, Hart-Celler imposed numerical limits on Latin American and Caribbean migration for the first time in US history, unwittingly creating the conditions for a rise in unauthorized migration decades later. The law led to new patterns of immigration that slowly shifted America’s racial composition.

 

The descendants of the Southern and Eastern European immigrants who had been considered unassimilable decades earlier were, after a rocky start, incorporated into the American melting pot; the newcomers, meanwhile, were regarded with hostility, accused of being inferior to the generation of immigrants who had come before them.

 

As was the case at the turn of the 20th century, the wave of immigrants who arrived after 1965 were met with hostility. In 1977, David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said that he and his followers would be patrolling the US-Mexico border in search of migrants. Two years later, Klan members descended on a Texas fishing village that had recently become home to Vietnamese refugees.

 

Tanton and his wife were mostly insulated from these changes in Petoskey, the tiny northern Michigan town where he found work as an ophthalmologist. A decade earlier, at the end of the 1960s, Tanton had read The Population Bomb, the biologist Paul Ehrlich’s polemic on overpopulation. For Tanton, each refugee who resettled in America meant another drain on resources, another blight on the environment. He conceived of FAIR as a liberal anti-immigration group, and its early talking points were about how unfettered immigration hurt working-class people of color at home and contributed to a brain drain abroad, not to mention its effects on population growth.

 

All these decades later, it’s hard to grasp how out of step this was. After Hart-Celler and before FAIR’s emergence as a major political player, immigration restriction was the domain of Klansmen and white separatists. It wasn’t, as Tanton wrote in his 1978 funding request to Cordelia Scaife May—the reclusive Mellon heiress who would go on to bankroll his movement—“a legitimate position for thinking people.”

 

The first test arrived quickly. Months after FAIR’s founding, Congress began working on the Refugee Act of 1980, an effort to streamline the ad hoc system that allowed people fleeing their countries to find protection in the United States. FAIR hired a lobbyist to push for a provision that would cap the number of refugees admitted each year at 50,000. Instead, the bill that President Jimmy Carter signed into law allowed the sitting president to choose the annual limit in consultation with Congress.

 

That year, more than 207,000 refugees were resettled in the United States. Six years later, FAIR once again got caught up in—and lost—a legislative battle, this time over the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided a path to citizenship for nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.

 

The bill passed with bipartisan consensus, and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law. Few in Congress were swayed by FAIR’s arguments for deporting unauthorized immigrants. “We didn’t convince anybody,” founding member Otis Graham told The New York Times in 2011. FAIR had built a membership base of 4,000 by 1982, but it wasn’t enough for Tanton, who, according to notes taken during a board meeting that year, believed it was “time to change our methods.” Tanton was realizing that environmental issues didn’t appeal to most Americans; what did was watching their communities change and feeling powerless to stop it. In a 1986 memo,

 

Tanton wrote that FAIR had been too reliant on large donors and too focused on lobbying members of Congress, with little to show for it. Instead, he outlined a “long-range project” to “infiltrate” congressional immigration committees. “Think how much different our prospects would be if someone espousing our ideas had the chairmanship!” he wrote. Until then, it would be difficult to influence national politics. Tanton decided to start small.

 

About face: In the 2020 presidential debates, Joe Biden decried Trump’s immigration policies. By 2024, that had changed.(Morry Gash / AP)

Tanton got his first chance to test his new theory of the power of a grassroots immigration restriction movement in 1988, when another organization he’d founded earlier that decade, U.S. English, placed the question of language on the ballot. Tanton had created U.S. English to help organize campaigns to make English the official language of several states, some of which had large and steadily growing Latino populations. The crusade began in California, where U.S. English bankrolled a local group’s efforts in support of an English-only ballot initiative.

 

After the California measure succeeded, U.S. English led similar campaigns in a far-flung mix of states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South Dakota in 1987, and Arizona, Colorado, and Florida the following year. Some were states where the demographics were shifting, while others, like North Dakota, were trying to preempt these changes. In all, however, the question was about more than language; it was about who belonged in America—and to whom it should belong in the future.

 

The English-only campaigns were marred by allegations of racism from the outset. Opponents criticized Tanton’s groups for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, a New York–based eugenicist organization. But it wasn’t until someone leaked a memo from Tanton written two years earlier that the Arizona campaign seemed doomed. “Can homo contraceptivus compete with homo progenitiva if borders aren’t controlled?” he mused in the 1986 memo, which was distributed to attendees of the annual anti-immigration retreat he had begun hosting a year earlier. “Or is advice to limit one’s family simply advice to move over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?”

 

He posed other troubling questions in the memo: Will Latino Catholics be able to assimilate to American culture? Will they bring their customs of bribery, violence, and disregard for authority to the United States? And why do they have so many kids in the first place?

 

The people who attended Tanton’s retreat—including Jared Taylor, the publisher of the white nationalist journal American Renaissance—must have welcomed these questions, but the public didn’t. Despite U.S. English’s bipartisan background and high-profile endorsements—its first director was former Reagan aide and prominent Latina activist Linda Chavez, and Walter Cronkite was on the board—it could no longer claim plausible deniability regarding allegations of racism.

 

Chavez resigned after the memo leaked and disavowed the organization; Cronkite, too, bailed. But with the help of a last-minute canvassing push funded by May, U.S. English eked out a victory, with 50.5 percent of Arizona voters supporting the measure. The elections weren’t as close elsewhere in the country: More than 60 percent of Colorado’s voters supported the amendment, as did 84 percent of Florida’s.

 

There was a setback: A federal judge later blocked Arizona’s English-only measure. Even so, grassroots activism, Tanton came to understand, was the key to enacting policies that curtail immigration. All Tanton had to do was help people realize what they already knew in their hearts to be true: America was a nation of immigrants, yes, but the newcomers were unlike those who came before. “I think there is such a thing as an American culture, however difficult it may be to define,” Tanton said in a 1989 oral history of his advocacy.

 

Some could argue that “hyphenated Americans” belong to this culture just as much as people whose forebears date back to the colonial period, Tanton said, but that was “an incorrect view.” In a 1986 interview with The New York Times, FAIR’s first executive director, Roger Conner, a former environmental lawyer, described previous waves of immigrants as “entrepreneurial,” while more recent arrivals had little interest in working or assimilating. “For some reason,” Conner said, “Mexican immigrants are not succeeding as well as other groups.”

 

By 1990, FAIR claimed to have 50,000 members, and the organization was finding other state-level initiatives to support. In 1994, the group backed Proposition 187, a ballot initiative in California that banned undocumented immigrants from using any government services in the state, including public schools and non-emergency healthcare. In 1986, Tanton had written that California’s system could do this, “but the political will is lacking to implement it.”

 

To build that will, Tanton created and funded groups like Americans for Border Control through his umbrella organization, U.S. Inc. Proposition 187’s supporters claimed that not only were the undocumented overburdening public services and contributing to overcrowding in the state, but their presence in California would lead to long-term gains in political power for Hispanic Americans.

 

Nearly 60 percent of Californians voted for Proposition 187, but a federal judge blocked the initiative from going into effect. Still, as with Arizona’s English-only measure, the defeat of Proposition 187 provided a valuable lesson for FAIR: Change happens when ordinary people decide they’re fed up with something and come together to do something about it. If the groups that allow people to do that don’t exist, why not create them?

 

Everywhere they passed, anti-immigrant ordinances like Proposition 187 and the English-only measures granted a degree of legitimacy to long-held racial animus. In Colorado, someone posted a sign reading “No Ingles, No Travato“—an attempted translation of “No English, No Job”—at the entrance to a construction site. “We checked. Because of the English-only bill, we know it’s legal,” a superintendent at the site told the Los Angeles Times. In California, Proposition 187 proved to be just as effective a recruitment tool as it would have been had it been implemented.

 

Tanton’s journal, The Social Contract, has published dozens of articles about Proposition 187 in the decades since the referendum passed. “When thousands of [people] marched to protest” the measure, an article from The Social Contract’s 1996 issue on so-called “anchor babies” declared, “they carried the flag of Mexico, not the Stars and Stripes.”

 

Tanton’s organizations not only activated dormant anti-immigrant feeling; they actively fomented it, often using the news media to launder their talking points. FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA—the latter founded in 1996 by Tanton’s acolyte Roy Beck—became reporters’ go-to sources for all things related to immigration restriction, largely because there were few other groups to quote.

 

Representatives of the three organizations blamed nearly every problem, from littering in public parks to gridlock on the highways, on immigration. At the height of the tough-on-crime ’90s, immigration was being portrayed as a gangs and quality-of-life issue; after the September 11 attacks, the permeability of the border became a national security threat.

 

FAIR and its allies were succeeding in changing public sentiment on immigration. Soon FAIR, through its legal arm, the Immigration Law Reform Institute, began offering its legal services to local governments. In 2006, when the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, passed a law fining landlords for renting apartments to undocumented immigrants and employers for using them as workers, it hired Kris Kobach, who would become one of the foremost attorneys pushing immigration restriction.

 

Not long after, the town council of Valley Park, Missouri, unanimously voted to implement a similar policy. Kobach defended Valley Park after a landlord sued over the measure, then went on to draft legislation for other cities—and defended the cities when those policies were challenged in court.

 

The measures faced years of lawsuits, and the cities had to pay Kobach hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. “It was a sham,” the mayor of Farmers Branch, a Texas city that hired Kobach in 2007, told ProPublica, which reported that Kobach earned at least $800,000 for his legal and advocacy work over a 13-year period.

 

Ineffective and expensive as they were, the ordinances helped cement Kobach’s status as the go-to lawyer for local and state governments that wanted to take a hard line on immigration. In 2010, Kobach drafted Arizona’s infamous SB 1070, colloquially referred to as the “Show Me Your Papers” law. An Arizona state senator later described it as “model legislation” for dissemination through the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing “bill mill.” Copycat bills were soon introduced around the country. By 2012, Kobach was informally advising the Romney campaign on immigration.

 

Most of the bills that Kobach drafted or defended were blocked by the courts, never implemented, or watered down to the point of meaninglessness. But every city that passed or even debated an anti-immigrant ordinance helped Tanton’s groups send a message to Congress: Americans aren’t interested in immigration reform or amnesty for the undocumented; they want those people out. “God forbid he ever gets hit by a Mack truck or something,” the Immigration Law Reform Institute’s general counsel said in 2012 of Kobach, who by that point was working for the group on the side while serving as Kansas’s secretary of state. “It would change the course of history.”

 

Tanton’s “long-range project” to affect national politics by starting at the local level was working. The organizations under the umbrella of FAIR and U.S. Inc. had built a grassroots army and won over small-town mayors. And some of those mayors were now entering national politics. After three failed bids for a seat in Congress, Lou Barletta, the Hazleton mayor who hired Kobach to defend the city’s anti-immigrant ordinance, was elected to the House of Representatives in 2010.

 

Among Tanton’s other supporters were Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, who kicked off his first term in 1999 by founding the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus; Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley; and Jeff Sessions, the soft-spoken Alabama senator whose diminutive presence belied his virulent racism.

 

In 2000, FAIR and its sister organizations helped defeat the Latino and Immigrant Fairness Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for qualifying undocumented immigrants. The following year, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus’s membership nearly doubled overnight, from 16 to 30 members.

 

FAIR would face its biggest tests yet beginning in 2006, when Congress appeared poised to pass a bill granting green cards to more than 6 million undocumented immigrants. The legislation failed, but in 2007 a group of senators once again attempted to persuade their colleagues—and the nation—to support immigration reform.

 

The bill sponsored by the “Gang of 12,” including Lindsey Graham and John McCain, had bipartisan support and was backed by President George W. Bush. Its opponents had something stronger: a grassroots army, hundreds of thousands strong, who threatened to withhold their votes from politicians who put “illegals” ahead of Americans.

 

Most Americans, in fact, were in favor of granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants who met certain conditions—but they, too, were swayed by the campaign against the bill. Polls found that many voters who agreed with the 2007 bill’s provisions opposed the idea of “amnesty” and the bill specifically. The discrepancy between what people said they wanted and what they actually supported was the result of a coordinated effort by FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA.

 

Every day, as part of a campaign led by NumbersUSA, lawmakers received thousands of calls, letters, and faxes urging them to vote against the bill. “The fax machines would run out of paper,” a Republican House staffer recalled years later. Most of the messages came from a familiar group of people—“frequent fliers,” the staffer called them—but the volume of calls swayed those who were undecided. The callers “lit up the switchboard for weeks,” Senator Mitch McConnell, who voted against the bill, said in 2011, when immigration reform was back on the table. “And to every one of them I say today: Your voice was heard.”

 

The 2011 bill failed as well and was reintroduced in 2014, this time by a “Gang of Eight”—a sign of waning support in Congress. “The longer it stays in the sun, the more it smells, as they say about the mackerel,” Sessions said of the reform bill in 2014. Certain that it would pass in the Senate, Sessions—at the time still a fringe member of his party—set his sights on tanking the bill in the House. To ensure that the legislation failed, he enlisted his young aide, a 29-year-old from California named Stephen Miller.

 

Sowing seeds: Jeff Sessions, left, one of the most prominent anti-immigration voices in the Senate, with his aide Stephen Miller.(CQ Roll Call via AP)

Miller—the son of Santa Monica liberals who would introduce himself to college classmates by saying, “My name is Stephen Miller, I’m from Los Angeles, and I like guns”—started his career as a press secretary for Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann. After he took a job with Sessions, Miller became close with researchers at CIS; he used the group’s data to convince other Republicans of the harms that immigrants posed.

 

Sessions had long been close with FAIR and CIS, but with Miller’s help, he became a leader of the anti-immigration-reform movement within Congress and was instrumental in defeating the bill in 2014. “The whole point was to taint the bill in the eyes of Republicans in the House,” CIS president Mark Krikorian told Miller’s biographer. “Sessions, with Miller’s help, really did succeed in preventing that bill from passing.”

 

Miller, too, was influenced by Tanton, sometimes in obscure ways. In 1983, Tanton persuaded May, his billionaire patron, to cover the costs of reprinting and distributing The Camp of the Saints, a French novel that depicts a dystopian future in which Europe and the US are besieged by hordes of dark-skinned migrants.

 

The book didn’t receive much acclaim outside white supremacist circles when it was first published in 1973. But Tanton acquired the rights and arranged for it to be published through the Social Contract Press. It’s unclear when Miller read the novel, but in September 2015, he persuaded Breitbart to run a story about it, according to e-mails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I think it was growing up in California, he saw the role that mass migration played in turning a red state blue,” a former Senate colleague of Miller’s told Politico. “He was fearful that would happen to the rest of the country.”

 

After Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Miller persuaded Sessions to become the first sitting senator to endorse him. Miller offered his services as an informal adviser to the campaign and then, after a few months, demanded a job. Trump shared Miller’s instincts; in 2014, he’d cautioned Republican legislators against supporting immigration reform by implying that the beneficiaries of amnesty would vote for Democrats.

 

Miller wrote Trump’s speeches and helped turn his xenophobic promises—a border wall, a Muslim ban—into policy proposals. And when Trump took office, Miller and Sessions were rewarded: Sessions was named attorney general, and Miller became a senior policy adviser for Trump.

 

With Miller’s help, Trump stocked his agencies with alumni of the anti-immigration think tank ecosystem. Trump appointed Francis Cissna, a former employee of FAIR ally Chuck Grassley, to head US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees legal migration. Julie Kirchner, the executive director of FAIR from 2007 to 2015, was hired to advise the acting director of Customs and Border Protection in April 2017, before moving to USCIS a month later.

 

During his first few months in office, Trump implemented dozens of policies—including expanding immigrant detention, reviving partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies, and expediting certain deportation proceedings—that seemed to have been lifted from a 2016 wish list that CIS had published before Trump secured the nomination. In 2017, for the first time, CIS was invited to ICE’s semiannual stakeholder meeting. Representatives from FAIR and NumbersUSA also attended.

 

But Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was tumultuous. Staffers resigned with an alarming frequency, often after Miller pressured them to implement increasingly hard-line policies. Miller and a key ally, Gene Hamilton, senior counsel for Trump’s first DHS secretary, spent months pushing for a family separation policy at the US-Mexico border.

 

Elaine Duke, Trump’s second DHS secretary, balked; Kirstjen Nielsen, her successor, eventually gave in to the pressure. It didn’t fare well for her: After mass protests and calls for congressional inquiries, Trump ended the family separation policy and Nielsen handed in her resignation.

 

Miller’s position as an adviser to the president gave him wide latitude in the White House. “The process for making decisions didn’t exist when we came in,” an immigration official in the Biden administration recently told The New Yorker. “It was calls with Stephen Miller in which he yelled at the career officials, and they went off to do what he said, or to try.”

 

For a brief moment in the wake of Biden’s 2020 victory against Trump, immigrant advocacy groups felt relief. The nation had voted against separating migrant families and banning Muslims. This optimism was cut short by Republicans, who started to spout immigrants-are-invading rhetoric almost as soon as Biden took office. Two months into Biden’s term, the Heritage Foundation accused him of causing a “crisis” at the southern border.

 

Miller and his crew seized the narrative early, pushing the Biden administration into a defensive posture. Biden’s team quickly abandoned the promises they had made during the 2020 campaign to undo the harms that had been perpetrated by Trump’s DHS and to build a new, humane immigration system in its place. While Biden has rolled back some of Trump’s harshest policies at the border and created pathways for migrants from certain countries to lawfully enter and work in the United States on a temporary basis, these are half-measures at best.

 

Public sentiment on immigration has shifted significantly since Biden took office—and now, with Kamala Harris as the nominee, the Democrats are sending a far different message than they did in 2020. One of Harris’s first campaign ads touts her experience as a “border state prosecutor” who “took on drug cartels and jailed gang members” and reminds voters that as vice president, she backed the “toughest border control bill in decades.” Harris’s warning to would-be migrants in 2021—“Do not come”—is now the kind of thing a growing number of Democratic voters seems eager to hear.

 

In February, a Gallup poll found that immigration was the most important issue for voters. And in July, a poll found that 55 percent of American adults want to see immigration to the United States go down—the first time in more than 20 years that a majority of voters have said they want fewer immigrants in the country.

 

Having convinced the public that illegal immigration is out of control, the nativist right is now shifting its efforts toward limiting legal migration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to remake the federal government under a Trump presidency includes a chapter on the DHS that recommends reducing or outright eliminating visas issued to foreign students “from enemy nations”; reimplementing USCIS’s denaturalization unit to strip certain naturalized citizens of their status; retraining USCIS officers to focus on “fraud detection”; eliminating the diversity visa lottery; ending so-called “chain migration”; and creating a “merit-based system that rewards high-skilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family-based and luck-of-the-draw immigration.”

 

John Tanton, more than anyone else, understood the power of harnessing the public’s fears and anxieties in the service of a broader political project. FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA’s public campaigns may have focused on illegal immigration, but the organizations were founded to undo the harms that Tanton believed stemmed from the legal immigration facilitated by the Immigration Act of 1965. Project 2025, if it comes to fruition, may be what he and his disciples have long been waiting for.

 

The indefatigable Tanton, who died in 2019 after a long battle with Parkinson’s, did not live to see the very Democrats who once chanted “Immigrants are welcome here” embrace policies of restriction. If he had, it’s hard to imagine that he would’ve been surprised. In the 1989 oral history, Tanton said that those who “deal in the world of ideas” come to expect a common trajectory: “The first response of many people is to say, ‘I never heard of it before.’ And the second response after they thought about it for a bit was to say, ‘It’s anti-God.’ And the third response after they’d realized the idea was right was to come around and say, ‘I knew it all along.’” 

Edited September 27, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,195]

The Mayor’s Strategy

[Vesper 30,195]

Bibi’s Wider War

Today on TAP: Not good for the Jews, not good for Kamala Harris

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-27-bibis-wider-war/

People protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York, September 27, 2024.

After a week of bloody moves to disable Hezbollah, shrugging off civilian collateral damage, Prime Minister Netanyahu is in New York, of all places, to address the U.N. General Assembly. Among leaders of democracies, it’s hard to find one who is more hated in more places than Netanyahu; and Israel becomes less of a democracy daily.

But from Netanyahu’s perspective, his strategy is winning. In the short run, Israel’s bravado and technical cleverness (exploding pagers?!) has weakened Hezbollah and decapitated some of its key leaders. Iran, Hezbollah’s patron and supplier, has also been humiliated and its response has been surprisingly restrained. Meanwhile, Israel has also damaged Hamas.

But all of this is short-term. The hatred that Bibi’s actions have incubated will only produce new generations of Arab fighters, with even more determination not to negotiate a settlement but to wipe out Israel. Even Netanyahu can’t kill all of them, and time is not on Israel’s side.

There has been a lot of anxious commentary about Israel’s latest actions destroying any chance of a regional agreement and instead creating a wider war. What exactly does that mean?

Netanyahu has made it pretty clear that he would prefer Donald Trump to Kamala Harris. Rejecting President Biden’s (far too feeble) pressures for a negotiated cease-fire does double duty for Netanyahu. It makes the Democrats look weak and unreliable as keepers of the peace, and sets the stage for Netanyahu’s next, even riskier move, which is to create a regional war that drags in the United States.

How would that occur? At some point, Iran has to react. One of the casualties of Israel’s latest attack on Hezbollah was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, who was severely injured when his pager exploded last week at the embassy in Beirut.

And in late July, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, by detonating a remote device previoiusly planted in a heavily fortified Iranian government guesthouse for foreign dignitaries, no less. Iran protested, but did nothing. The Iranians look helpless and pitiful.

The last time Iran took military action against Israel, last April, it was in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing 16 people including Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior Quds Force commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Iran’s response was symbolic and deliberately limited. Iran fired some 300 missiles and drones, most of which were slow-moving and easy for Israel’s Iron Dome defense to shoot down.

But this time, after repeated humiliations, Iran’s response may not be so restrained. Iran has several hundred more advanced missiles. And Russia, Iran’s patron, could easily supply more.

Many Bibi-watchers believe that his cynical plan is to provoke Iran into a much larger-scale attack, even one that would kill many Israeli civilians, in order to drag the U.S. into a regional war. That would be catastrophic for Israel in the long run, but in the short run it would serve Bibi’s purpose of staying in power and making Biden look even weaker.

For now, the entire West is joining the U.S. in urging Netanyahu to back off and agree to a cease-fire. That may well require Biden to finally get serious about cutting off Netanyahu’s supply of offensive weapons.

And where is Kamala Harris in all this? Unfortunately, Joe Biden is the president. She can’t very well second-guess his foreign policy, except privately. A Harris speech signaling a different approach is one she should give after she is elected, not before. That is, unless the combination of Netanyahu’s deliberate ploys and Biden’s weakness help elect Donald Trump.

Edited September 27, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,195]

Shared Zones of Interest

Harris and Trump’s foreign-policy aims in the Middle East proceed from the same incentive structures and presuppositions about U.S. supremacy.

https://prospect.org/world/2024-09-27-shared-zones-of-interest/

The aftermath of a bombing in the West Bank in August. Former Trump advisers have proposed a “One Jewish State” solution.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if elected, are sure to produce vastly different outcomes on nearly every domestic issue in contention: women’s reproductive rights, taxation, public education, corporate regulation, the environment, and immigration. There’s far less divergence, however, on foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Like the Biden administration before it, a Harris administration may be softer around the edges, a “Trump lite” if you will, with rhetoric and sentiments favoring human rights and international law but no policies to back them.

There are two principal reasons for this. First, Harris and Trump’s worldviews are grounded in an article of faith that has undergirded America’s post–World War II foreign policy: maintaining U.S. hegemony and supremacy. There is full agreement, as Kamala Harris recently declared at the Democratic convention and reiterated in her debate with former President Trump, that the U.S. must have the “most lethal” military in the world, and that we must maintain our military bases and personnel globally. While Trump may have a more openly mercenary approach, demanding that the beneficiaries of U.S. protection in Europe and Asia pay more for it, he is a unilateralist, not an isolationist. At bottom, neither candidate is revisiting the presuppositions of U.S. primacy.

Second, both Harris and Trump are subject to the overwhelming incentive structure that rewards administrations for spending more on the military and selling more weapons abroad than any other country in the world. The sell-side defense industry has fully infiltrated the U.S. government, with campaign donations and a revolving escalator to keep Republicans and Democrats fully committed to promoting their interests. The buy-side foreign regimes have gotten in on the pay-to-play, ensuring handsome rewards to U.S. officials who ensure weapons sales continue. And all sides play the reverse leverage card: If the U.S. doesn’t sell weapons, China and Russia (or even the U.K. and France) will. There is no countervailing economic pressure, and little political pressure, to force either Harris or Trump to consider the domestic and global harms of this spending and selling.

In the Middle East, the incentive structure is at its most powerful, combining the influence of the defense industry and the seemingly bottomless disposable wealth of the Gulf States. And there are two additional factors—the unparalleled influence and control of the pro-Israel lobby, which rewards government officials who comply with its demands and eliminates those who don’t; and Arab control over the oil and gas spigots that determines the prices Americans pay for fuel. As a result, continued flows of money, weapons, and petroleum will ensue, regardless of who wins in November. Within these confines, there are some marginal differences in how Trump and Harris will approach specific issues in the region, but it is doubtful they will be significant enough to be dramatically consequential.

LET’S START WITH ISRAEL. Democrats have become increasingly divided over the Biden administration’s “unconditional,” “ironclad” support for Israel in the face of its yearlong onslaught in Gaza. It has forced self-proclaimed Zionist Joe Biden to throw a few bones to progressive and Muslim American voters, with heightened rhetorical criticism of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment, a brief delay in restocking Israel’s diminished supply of bombs, and even sanctions against “bad apple” Israeli settlers who have terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank. A strong majority of Democratic voters now oppose military aid to Israel and support Palestinian rights and freedom.

Harris no doubt feels pressure to promise some recalibration of Biden’s policies, but she has largely confined this to expressions of sympathy for Palestinian “suffering.” She has reiterated the Biden team’s pleas for a cease-fire, but refused to support conditioning aid to Israel to achieve this. Her representatives at the Democratic convention went out of their way to make clear that there will be “no daylight” between her and Biden’s policies on Israel, and that like Biden, she will stick to “frank conversations” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And like every administration before hers, she will feel the sway of her pro-Israel donors much more than her voters once elected, making it unlikely that her policies will shift away from Israel to any consequential degree. There’s no reason to believe she will walk back Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, as the Biden administration has failed to do.

It may not be up to either Trump or Harris to choose a course of action on Iran, if Israel’s efforts to escalate to war succeed.

The Biden administration prioritized securing more Abraham Accords, a series of normalization measures between Israel and surrounding Arab states, in lockstep with Trump administration efforts. Whether Harris will continue this remains to be seen. But neither she nor her chief national security adviser, Phil Gordon, has said anything to suggest moving away from this goal. The war in Gaza has crushed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s dream of delivering Saudi normalization for Israel; but for Netanyahu’s savagery, his persistent rejection of a cease-fire, and his declarations that he will never agree to a two-state solution, this would already have been achieved. Both Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may be saving such a deal as a bargaining chip with the next administration, but under these circumstances, the Saudi price will now be much higher.

The Biden team has already agreed to two outstanding demands: a bilateral U.S.-Saudi security agreement, and construction of a civilian nuclear plant, with enrichment to take place inside Saudi Arabia. But without tying them to Israeli normalization, it’s doubtful that the Senate will approve these terms. It’s conceivable that Trump will actually take a tougher line with Netanyahu than Harris, forcing him at least to accept a cease-fire, though not a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood, to secure Saudi normalization. But it’s just as conceivable that Trump pushes for a separate stand-alone deal with Saudi Arabia, as the Saudis have proposed.

THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE IN ISRAEL-PALESTINE where Harris and Trump will likely differ is on the move by Israel to formally annex most or even all of the West Bank. David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel in the prior Trump administration, has openly endorsed Israeli apartheid and proposed annexation of the West Bank, minus political rights for Palestinians living there. Friedman has stated that he plans to closely consult with Trump on this “One Jewish State” solution. Trump delivered everything else on Friedman’s wish list—including Jerusalem, Golan, the Abraham Accords, and moving Israel under the U.S. Central Command—the last time he sat in the Oval Office. He has also made clear that he sees Israel-Palestine not as a struggle to end apartheid and occupation, or to establish Palestinian self-determination, but as a real estate dispute between Jews and Arabs. “Israel is a tiny little spot compared to these giant land masses … I actually said, ‘Is there any way of getting more? It’s so tiny,’” Trump has said. It stands to reason that he would ultimately support Israeli annexation of the West Bank, as well as Israeli demands that “other Arabs” take in the Palestinian population.

A Harris administration, in classic Democratic fashion, would wring its hands, wag its finger, and ramp up rhetorical condemnation of Israel were it to move on annexation. But it’s doubtful that it would stop arms transfers or support U.N. Security Council sanctions for such an unlawful and dangerous act. If the horrors in Gaza have not been enough to persuade candidate Harris to demand even a mere suspension of U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, it’s doubtful that annexation would persuade a President Harris to do so.

Sadly, international law prohibitions on acquiring territory by force are now greatly eroded, thanks in no small part to the United States. The Trump administration not only recognized smaller Israeli annexations of Palestinian territory but Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. The U.S. has completely ignored the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s occupation is illegal and that it must remove its forces and citizens from the occupied Palestinian territories, so it’s hard to see how even more “illegal acts” would tip the Harris administration into abiding by international law.

Harris should have sufficient support to try to dissuade Israel from moving forward with annexation plans. Netanyahu may calculate that he can afford to be in the Harris doghouse for a few years until annexation becomes old news, and the forced displacement of Palestinians, alongside the accompanying humanitarian catastrophe, becomes the new news. It’s much easier politically to remedy humanitarian harms with aid than it is to fight and punish violations of a severely eroded law.

Harris and Trump will also have different strategies to deal with the International Criminal Court’s ongoing prosecution of war crimes in Gaza. The ICC has indicted both Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but has delayed issuing arrest warrants against them. Like he did before, Trump will move again to sanction the court’s prosecutor, staff, and their families, and may escalate further by demanding that other countries sanction the court, and even push them to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC. Harris, like Biden, is unlikely to take action against the court, but also like Biden, is likely to exert maximal pressure behind the scenes to stymie the prosecution. Trump would definitely, and Harris most likely, refuse to arrest Netanyahu should he arrive in the U.S. after an arrest warrant is issued, further diminishing the court’s standing as a global court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

NEITHER THE BIDEN NOR THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION achieved any of their oft-stated goals to “withdraw” from the Middle East and “pivot” to Asia. But Trump may be the stronger candidate in his ability to avoid broader entanglement in a regional war, given his willingness to act as the boss of the Middle East. He refused, for example, to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense after the massive 2019 attack on its oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais. A small group of Muslim American voters have said they will vote for Trump specifically because they believe that he alone can bring Netanyahu to heel and avoid a war with Iran.

While Biden notably ended the war in Afghanistan and has finally secured an agreement to remove U.S. forces from Iraq, he has entered into a new war footing in Yemen, attacking Houthi forces for blockading and raiding ships headed to or from Israel. Biden also massively expanded the deployment of American military forces to the region, and suffered numerous attacks on U.S. troops in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, primarily on behalf of Israel. And of course the Biden team has put the finishing touches on the defense agreement for the Saudi regime, prepared to deliver for free what Trump would likely extract more concessions for.

Where both administrations will converge is on continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, and Israel. While the Biden administration initially promised to halt weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, it caved to the built-in incentive system. While Trump has made clear his enthusiasm for maximal weapons sales for maximal profit, the Harris team, like the Biden team before it, will speak more softly but deliver similar results. Such weapons sales and support for abusive regimes in the region are perceived as a cost worth paying in the shared worldview that prioritizes U.S. military domination of the Middle East.

What remains a toss-up is policy on Iran. Harris’s lead national security adviser, Phil Gordon, played a leading role in supporting the nuclear deal with Iran during the Obama administration, and has written extensively on the failures of regime change efforts in the Middle East. Harris supported the Iran deal, condemned Trump for canceling it, and would likely want to pursue it again. But extreme anti-Iran sentiment among both Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats would pressure her against moving forward, particularly if the conflict between Iran and Israel continues to flare up. For now, at least, candidate Harris is treating any less pugilistic policy on Iran as an opening for political attack; on September 5, she criticized Trump on X for suggesting he would consider lifting sanctions on Iran. (His reasoning was that sanctions hurt the U.S. economy, encouraging de-dollarization.)

Assuming Trump remains guided by anti-Iran extremists, he will continue to oppose the nuclear deal, reinvigorate his “maximum pressure” policies, and likely support further surprise attacks on Iranian facilities and targets—like the extrajudicial execution of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani and nine others—and even a low-level state of war. If Trump continues to free himself from extremists like John Bolton, however, he may well pursue an agreement with Iran, if only to prove he’s the president who can deliver the best deals.

But it may not be up to either Trump or Harris to choose a course of action on Iran, if Israel’s efforts to escalate to war succeed. If tensions in the region spiral, there will be no room for a new nuclear deal, and the only question will be whether or not the U.S. steps in to fully back Israel. For both candidates, that remains unclear.

In September 2020, on the eve of the presidential election, I wrote a similar piece evaluating what a Trump or Biden presidency would look like, writing that “Biden is expected to return to a more moderate, but fundamentally unchanged approach of prior administrations, which centres on close ties to Israel and arms sales that fuel the region’s arms race.” Four years later, with the very same values and incentives at play, a Harris term appears poised to follow the same course.

Foreign policy largely remains the province of an elite clique of decision-makers. None but the tiniest segment of the electorate prioritizes foreign-policy issues in their voting choices. But changing course from normalizing America’s very abnormal policies in the Middle East isn’t impossible. Legislative reforms can and should tackle the malign influence and infiltration of the defense industry and foreign states, just as open debate can reform outdated ideological commitments. Public opinion clearly desires a new approach; the only challenge that remains is forcing our own government to comply with the will of the people.

Edited September 27, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,195]

 

[Vesper 30,195]

the shit is likely going to hit the fan

Region braces for intensification after Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah’s assassination

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/28/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-hamas-war-news-gaza/

The Middle East was bracing for possible retaliation from Hezbollah or its allies after Israel and Hezbollah announced the death of Hasan Nasrallah, the militant group’s longtime leader. The Israel Defense Forces said it “eliminated” Nasrallah in a Friday strike on Hezbollah’s “central headquarters” that leveled several residential buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Israel’s defense minister said the strike was one of “the most important countermeasures” in Israel’s history, as Hezbollah allies across the region called for a swift response. The U.S. State Department urged the departure of some employees and their family members from Lebanon as it warned of an “unpredictable security situation.”

In the hours since Israel’s Beirut strike killed Hasan Nasrallah, several international leaders and organizations have taken to social media to comment on the attacks.

President Joe Biden lauded Nasrallah’s death Saturday and wrote in a statement that the United States “fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself” against Iranian-backed militant forces. His administration has been brokering cease-fire talks for Israel’s operations in Gaza and Lebanon.

“It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability,” Biden said.

Leaders and political groups in the Middle East condemned Israel’s attacks in Beirut and mourned Nasrallah.

Iranian Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei declared five days of mourning for Nasrallah, state news outlet Mehr reported Saturday.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wrote in a statement Saturday that he is mourning the loss of Nasrallah and “the victims who fell as a result of the brutal Israeli aggression.”

Former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri wrote in a statement Saturday that the assassination was “a cowardly act.” Hariri wrote that this incident has “plunged Lebanon and the region into a new phase of violence.”

 

Key updates

 

Hezbollah has confirmed the death of its leader, Hasan Nasrallah. In a statement Saturday it said...

 

Israel says it has killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah

 

Hundreds sleep outdoors after evacuation orders in Beirut suburbs

[Vesper 30,195]

Trump’s “Vastly Overpriced” $100,000 “Swiss Watch” Is Probably Made in China, Experts Say

The former president's new timepieces are the laughingstock of watch aficionados, who cast doubt on their true origins — "as ersatz as the man himself."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/style/trump-watch-likely-made-in-china-overpriced-1236013728/

 

He’s hawked gold sneakers, commemorative coins and even a cryptocurrency venture in recent months, so Donald Trump‘s latest retail effort — to sell a pricey gold watch emblazoned with his name — should surprise no one. But timepiece experts aren’t impressed.

On Thursday, Trump debuted a pair of watches available for sale: a dive model dubbed the “Fighter” that is limited to 1,000 pieces and retails for $499 or $799 depending on style, and a seemingly high-end tourbillion design that is depicted as being crafted of 18-karat gold and embellished with diamonds on the bezel. Limited to 147 pieces, that model is listed for an astounding $100,000. All pieces display Trump’s name prominently on the dial, while the more expensive model features a sapphire caseback with his signature.

Word quickly spread among the status-watch community, which was overwhelmingly unimpressed. “This is cobbled together, patently unoriginal and vastly overpriced,” says Ariel Adams, founder and editor of A Blog to Watch, one of the industry’s most popular sites for timepiece information and education. “It’s very clear he’s working with a white labeler, which is nothing new. Anyone can go to a white labeler and say, ‘I want a watch with this case, this bracelet and these other details,’ and a white labeler will Frankenstein it together, put your name on it and sell it to you. But the price you sell it for is up to you. That the markup came from someone on Trump’s team is obvious here. Even the $500 piece from another brand would go for maybe $200.”

A marketing director of a well-known Swiss brand, who asked not to be named to keep his opinion separate from the company that employs him, agreed. “I belong to a collector group that maintains an ongoing group chat, and the initial reaction was that it had to be fake. After that, everyone was laughing,” he said of the more expensive piece. “When you look at all of them, they scream Chinese-made watch. None of them is worth the asking price.”

Indeed, even though the website touts “Swiss-made” when describing the watches, it’s not uncommon among manufacturers of lower-priced designs to manipulate that designation by purchasing some Swiss-made parts and assembling the watch in another country. By Thursday afternoon, several experts across social media pointed out that the more expensive watch’s tourbillon, a mechanism designed to improve accuracy and typically found in pricier timepieces, seemed to be sourced from both Switzerland and China. “Those blue screws on the tourbillon cage are a dead giveaway that it was partly made in China. You won’t find blue screws on a tourbillon made in Switzerland,” noted the marketing director. “And you can pick up a Chinese tourbillon for $100.”

“Fifteen years ago, if you wanted a Swiss-made tourbillon, it would be $50,000,” Adams confirmed. “But the Chinese came along with a lower-priced tourbillon, so today you can get a tourbillon watch for around $6,000. But it shouldn’t be confused with a tourbillon design fully made in Switzerland.”

Several other details also reveal a lack of quality. “The gem-setting looks very rough, while the indices on the dial also look set within the markers, not outset, which also looks very amateurish,” the marketing director noted. “And if you play the video, you can see dust on all the screws. It’s really terrible.”

“[The tourbillon watch] is as ersatz as the man himself,” added Adam Craniotes, founder and president of Red Bar Group, an international network of watch collectors that extends to 85 cities around the globe. “They can employ all the superlatives they want on their site, but [collectors have] already figured out that it’s a half-Swiss, half-Chinese tourbillon you can buy off the rack. Any value from this watch would only come from melting it down and selling the gold and diamonds.”

In addition to wording that might inspire an eye roll among serious watch collectors — “You’ll be wearing the absolute statement of success,” the tourbillon description notes — both models are also lacking information typically found on legitimate watch sites. The tourbillon model, for example, does not list the watch’s case size, a basic detail every wearer wants to know to ensure the case is suitably proportioned to his or her wrist. The total carat weight of the 122 diamonds on the bezel also isn’t listed. Adams says both omissions are likely intentional, an idea supported by a website note identical to one used when Trump was selling his gold sneakers: “The images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product.”

“By withholding specifics, they’re able to make preproduction changes while staying true to the description on their site,” Adams explained. “And being generous, those diamonds could cost anywhere from $10 to $30 each.”

Regardless of whether they’re interested in the lower-priced dive model or the tourbillon selling for six figures, interested consumers would be smart to peruse the site’s fine print. Also, like the gold sneakers Trump was selling back in February, the watches are being sold only as preorders, which absolves Trump and his merchandising team of any responsibility for paying upfront for the pieces — but it also means purchasers will wait to receive them, with delivery dates estimated to be “October/November/December” in the site’s FAQ section, with the added note that “Shipping and delivery dates are estimates only and cannot be guaranteed.”

“It’s basically a Kickstarter campaign, and not a very imaginative one,” Craniotes said. “They’ve taken design cues from already established watches and slapped his name on them. The red dial [on the diver style] I’m sure is a callout to MAGA red, but overall there’s just a sense of generic-ness and laziness about the whole venture.”

Craniotes’ mention that any value might only be derived from selling the gold and diamonds also can be justified by a disclaimer at the bottom of the site: “Trump Watches are intended as collectible items for individual enjoyment only, not for investment purposes.”

Adds Adams: “This is a fundraising scheme that we’ll be joking about in the future.”

An email sent via the website, requesting specific information about the watches, such as who was manufacturing them and where, was not answered. 

[Fernando 6,585]

16 hours ago, Vesper said:

the shit is likely going to hit the fan

Region braces for intensification after Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah’s assassination

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/28/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-hamas-war-news-gaza/

The Middle East was bracing for possible retaliation from Hezbollah or its allies after Israel and Hezbollah announced the death of Hasan Nasrallah, the militant group’s longtime leader. The Israel Defense Forces said it “eliminated” Nasrallah in a Friday strike on Hezbollah’s “central headquarters” that leveled several residential buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Israel’s defense minister said the strike was one of “the most important countermeasures” in Israel’s history, as Hezbollah allies across the region called for a swift response. The U.S. State Department urged the departure of some employees and their family members from Lebanon as it warned of an “unpredictable security situation.”

In the hours since Israel’s Beirut strike killed Hasan Nasrallah, several international leaders and organizations have taken to social media to comment on the attacks.

President Joe Biden lauded Nasrallah’s death Saturday and wrote in a statement that the United States “fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself” against Iranian-backed militant forces. His administration has been brokering cease-fire talks for Israel’s operations in Gaza and Lebanon.

“It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability,” Biden said.

Leaders and political groups in the Middle East condemned Israel’s attacks in Beirut and mourned Nasrallah.

Iranian Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei declared five days of mourning for Nasrallah, state news outlet Mehr reported Saturday.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wrote in a statement Saturday that he is mourning the loss of Nasrallah and “the victims who fell as a result of the brutal Israeli aggression.”

Former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri wrote in a statement Saturday that the assassination was “a cowardly act.” Hariri wrote that this incident has “plunged Lebanon and the region into a new phase of violence.”

 

Key updates

 

Hezbollah has confirmed the death of its leader, Hasan Nasrallah. In a statement Saturday it said...

 

Israel says it has killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah

 

Hundreds sleep outdoors after evacuation orders in Beirut suburbs

What you think is going to happen?

A bigger war? Just Hezbollah? or other countries? 

[Vesper 30,195]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

What you think is going to happen?

A bigger war? Just Hezbollah? or other countries? 

A lot depends on what Iran does.

[Vesper 30,195]

wrong forum, arff

Edited September 29, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,195]

The far right won the most votes in an Austrian election for the first time since the Nazi era

Far-right Freedom party finishes first in Austrian election, latest results suggest

Party wins 28.8% of votes ahead of centre-right People’s party’s 26.3%, according to near-complete count

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/29/far-right-freedom-party-winning-austrian-election-first-results-show

The Freedom party react to early results in the Austrian parliamentary elections on Sunday. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

 

The far right won the most votes in an Austrian election for the first time since the Nazi era on Sunday, as the Freedom party (FPÖ) rode a tide of public anger over migration and the cost of living to beat the centre-right People’s party (ÖVP).

The pro-Kremlin, anti-Islam FPÖ won 28.8% of votes, beating the ruling ÖVP of the chancellor, Karl Nehammer, into second place on 26.3%, according to near-complete results.

The opposition Social Democratic party scored its worst ever result – 21.1% – while the liberal NEOS drew about 9%. Despite devastating flooding this month from Storm Boris bringing the climate crisis to the fore, the Greens, junior partners in the government coalition, tallied 8.3% in a dismal fifth place.

The Communist party and the apolitical Beer party looked unlikely to clear the 4% hurdle to representation. Turnout was high at about 78%.

Profiting from a rightwing surge in many parts of Europe and taking Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a model, the FPÖ capitalised on fears around migration, asylum and crime heightened by the August cancellation of three Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna over an alleged Islamist terror plot. Mounting inflation, tepid economic growth and lingering resentment over strict government measures during Covid dovetailed into a huge leap in support for the FPÖ since the last election in 2019.

Its polarising lead candidate, Herbert Kickl, who campaigned using the “people’s chancellor” moniker once used to describe the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, said he was ready to form a government with “each and every one” of the parties in parliament.

“We have written a piece of history together today,” he told cheering party supporters in Vienna. “We have opened a door to a new era.”

Nehammer called the result, which will send shock waves through Europe, “bitter” while his defence minister, Klaudia Tanner, admitted the debacle for the governing parties was a “wake-up call”.

Because it failed to win an absolute majority, the FPÖ will need a partner to govern. Unlike the other centrist parties, the ÖVP has not ruled out cooperating with the far right in the next government, as it has twice in the past in taboo-breaking alliances at the national level.

Nehammer, however, repeated on Sunday that a scenario in which Kickl, a former hardline interior minister, became chancellor was a non-starter, setting up a potential showdown in which the FPÖ would have to either jettison Kickl or take a backseat in government to win the ÖVP’s support.

The Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, called the result ‘bitter’. Photograph: Heinz-Peter Bader/AP

“We’ll see in the coming weeks which is more important to FPÖ voters – claiming the chancellor’s seat or Herbert Kickl,” the political scientist Peter Filzmaier told ORF, adding that exit polling had shown it was issues and not personalities that had motivated voters.

Kickl, a bespectacled marathon runner, was a protege of Jörg Haider. The former firebrand FPÖ leader and Carinthia state premier, who died in 2008 in a drink-driving crash, transformed the party founded by ex-Nazi functionaries and SS officers into the ultra-nationalist force it is today.

The Austrian Jewish Student Union has sued Herbert Kickl, party leader of the far-right FPÖ, for allegedly making anti-Semitic statements. [EPA-EFE / Daniel Novotny]

Migrant groups have expressed fear for the future in Austria, which critics say has failed to fully own up to its Nazi past and role in the Holocaust. Rabbi Jacob Frenkel of Vienna’s Jewish Council called the election a “moment of truth”.

At his final rally in central Vienna on Friday, Kickl drew cheers from the crowd railing against anti-Russia EU sanctions, “the snobs, headteachers and know-it-alls”, climate activists and “drag queens in schools and the early sexualisation of our children”. He hailed a proposed constitutional amendment declaring the existence of only two genders. But the biggest applause line remained his call for “remigration”, or forced deportation of people “who think they don’t have to play by the rules” of Austrian society.

Nehammer actively sought during the campaign to co-opt the FPÖ’s tough stance on immigration, which the far right hopes to bring to bear at the EU level using Austria’s outsized influence in Brussels due to its geographical prominence and strong alliances. Congratulations to Kickl poured in from rightwing populist parties across Europe including Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party.

“The government has drastically reduced asylum applications,” the chancellor said on Thursday. “But we need more: asylum procedures in third countries before asylum seekers come through several European countries. And more: complete access to social welfare only after five years of residency in Austria.”

It was a remarkable comeback for the FPÖ, humiliated five years ago after the so-called Ibiza scandal in which Austria’s then deputy chancellor and party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, was caught on video at a Spanish luxury resort discussing a potential bribe from a woman purporting to be the niece of a Russian oligarch.

The disgraced Strache and his parliamentary leader, Johann Gudenus, who had initiated the meeting, were forced to resign, triggering snap elections in which the ÖVP, then led by “wunderkind” chancellor Sebastian Kurz, triumphed. Two years later Kurz quit politics amid a corruption investigation.

The last term has been marked by a stunning reversal for the government, an ÖVP coalition with the Greens, even by the baroque standards of politics in this Alpine country of 9 million. The conservatives shed 11 points in support in that time, with the FPÖ leading in the polls since late 2022 and coming first in European parliament elections in June.

Coalition negotiations are expected to take several weeks before a new government is in place. Regardless of the outcome, the ÖVP seems poised to hold on to power, either in an alliance with the far right or an unwieldy, unprecedented three-way coalition with smaller centrist parties, similar to Germany’s unpopular government. A two-way alliance with the Social Democrats could eke out a wafer-thin majority but analysts said such a pact was unlikely.

Edited September 30, 2024 by Vesper