<“You are being lied to,” Elon Musk posted on X yesterday. He’d know, because he’s doing the lying.

Musk was retweeting a wildly false post insisting that violent crime is on the rise, by an X user whose avatar is an imperial stormtrooper from Star Wars (red flag!). The account’s previous brush with infamy came when Donald Trump posted a screenshot of the account suggesting that Swifties supported him; Taylor Swift cited that in endorsing Kamala Harris this week. Despite beginning with the words “FACT CHECK” in bold—another red flag—the post is actually a vivid example of a new big lie driven by Donald Trump and his allies, full of easily debunked nonsense.

The user’s fundamental claim is that despite what the FBI’s data and all other legitimate statistical sources show, crime—especially violent crime—is actually rising, as Trump claimed in this week’s debate. The former president tried to say that crime was up, and when moderator David Muir corrected him, Trump replied, “The FBI—they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.” This is false. Violent crime is down. Trump is wrong, as is Musk.

The X user makes a slightly, though only slightly, more sophisticated version of Trump’s argument. Or rather, he or she throws more claims at the wall in the hopes they’ll stick, but they shouldn’t. I’ll take some of the big claims in order. As the tweet reads:

Less than a year after taking office, Biden-Harris’s administration had the FBI dismantle the long-standing crime reporting system, replacing it in 2021 with a new, ‘woke’ system that is optional for state and local law enforcement agencies to use.

Starting in 2021, the FBI’s national crime estimates were based on reports to a system called the National Incident-Based Reporting System, moving from the old Summary Reporting System. NIBRS itself is not new; it dates to 1988. The Biden administration had nothing to do with the switch. The decision to move to NIBRS was made in 2015, and it was implemented in January 2021, before Trump left office.

The old Summary Reporting System gathered only limited data on a limited number of crimes. The switch was intended to improve the quality of America’s crime data. But the data remain plagued with troubles. For one thing, national crime rates are not available until late the following year: 2023’s numbers are currently expected from the FBI some time later this month. And because the country has an estimated 18,000 law-enforcement agencies—from the 36,000 officers of the NYPD to local constabularies with a single officer—collecting good data from all of them is hard.

NIBRS has never solved all of those problems, but it does provide more detailed data than SRS, tracking more types of crimes, for example. The reason the FBI kept using SRS was that not enough agencies had switched to NIBRS. To fix that, the FBI announced that, starting with 2021 numbers, it would collect data only from agencies that reported via NIBRS, and would stop using the old system.

Crime experts widely agree that, as a result of that transition, the numbers for 2021 are dubious. In the past, typically a small percentage of agencies had failed to report stats to the FBI—something like 5 or 6 percent. In 2021, a third of U.S. agencies failed to report. It’s important to remember that the FBI crime estimates are just that: estimates. Because the FBI had worse data, it had to make more assumptions in 2021

But by 2022, the most recently available year of FBI data, that problem was largely solved, partly because more agencies had shifted over to NIBRS. The X post says, “As a result, at least 6,000 law enforcement agencies aren't providing data, meaning that 25% of the country’s crime data is not captured by the FBI.” That claim may be based on a July 2023 Marshall Project article saying that 6,000 agencies hadn’t submitted 2022 data. That was accurate at the time, but then the FBI decided to allow submissions via the old system, which meant that overall participation matched the historical average. I have no idea where the 25 percent number comes from, but all cities with more than 1 million people were included in the 2022 FBI data, while small towns and state police tend to have lower reporting rates. A greater number of crimes take place in larger cities, and no category of agency is at less than 77 percent, so that claim appears to be completely invented.....>

<....The rest of the post doesn’t stand up either. For example, it implies that liberal policies by prosecutors in New York City are falsely driving down crime rates in the data. But Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, notes that reported violent crime in New York has actually risen—hilariously, something that would presumably help the poster’s overall argument, if he or she weren’t so sloppy. Even so, the charge misses the point, because prosecutors don’t report these numbers—police departments do. These are statistics not about charges or convictions but about crime reports. Whatever the failings of progressive prosecutors, they don’t have anything to do with FBI crime estimates.

The X post also claims that NIBRS is “woke” and allows “agencies to record pronouns and gender identities, including transgender and nonbinary, as well as the sexual preferences of both criminals and victims.” As far as I can tell, this is invented out of whole cloth. The submission specifications include nothing like that.

“It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the Biden-Harris regime and the Democrats replaced the FBI’s universal crime data system with a new optional system to fabricate this massive decrease in ‘reported’ crime,” the post goes on.

But as we’ve seen, it’s not only far-fetched; all of the predicates are untrue. (The system has also always been voluntary.) The other problem is that although the FBI numbers are the acknowledged national standard, they’re not the only numbers available that show the same results. Many cities and states make their numbers publicly available online. Those numbers tell a consistent story: In most places, crime rose sharply in 2020 and has been receding ever since, though in general it’s still higher than in 2019. The Real-Time Crime Index, an invaluable new tool for tracking changes in crime made by the independent statistics firm AH Datalytics, shows the clear downward trend in violent crime and other offenses.

The X post is more or less totally false, but its goal is not to correct the record but to spread an atmosphere of fear and paranoia—to suggest to voters that they are not safe, and that the best way to guarantee their safety from the “American carnage” Trump has described is to vote him into office and abridge certain people’s rights. Trump has always seized on crime fears and lied about incidence of crime, but he’s working especially hard at it now. In addition to the inconvenience of his own 34 felony convictions, Trump has the problem that crime spiked in his last year in office and has been dropping since. Rather than change the subject, Trump wants to change perceptions of reality.

Crime data are not as reliable, or as timely, as would be ideal. Some crimes—especially those such as domestic violence and child abuse, whose victims feel shame—are thought to be drastically underreported. People who distrust police may also hesitate to report crimes. Given these difficulties, researchers tend to look carefully at the murder rate, because it is thought to be the most reliable statistic, as murders are almost always reported, and nearly impossible to hide. Today, murder statistics also point to a general downturn in crime. And that gets at the real lesson: No crime data should be taken in isolation. It’s essential to look at as many metrics as possible, understand their limitations, and emphasize trends over absolute numbers.

But not all the statistics measure the same thing. Trump and his campaign yesterday cited the National Crime Victimization Survey to insist that crime really is up sharply. But as AH Datalytics’ Jeff Asher, the best guide to understanding crime statistics, has written, NCVS is less reliable than the FBI crime trends because it doesn’t include murder (homicide victims seldom respond to surveys), doesn’t specify the year crimes occurred (it asks about the past six months), and is subject to the same problems that have bedeviled other public-opinion polls in recent years. But, Asher contends, the trends in the two sources usually align anyway: “Both measures tell us that the nation’s violent crime rate in 2022 was substantially lower than it was in the 1990s, largely in line [with] where it was over most of the last 15 years, and likely slightly higher than where it stood in 2019.” The numbers for 2023, released yesterday, show a decline from the previous year. It’s also nonsensical for Trump to claim that the FBI is producing fraudulent numbers but then cite Justice Department figures as the gospel truth.

Mark Twain joked that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. But some statistics are actually pretty reliable, which is why cynics turn to lies instead.>

<In a press conference from his Los Angeles-area golf club, former President Donald Trump revisited several topics from Tuesday night's debate, repeating several false and misleading claims on issues including crime, the economy and immigration.

Here's are [sic] the facts:

Trump again falsely claims crime skyrocketed under the Biden administration

CLAIM: New numbers show that crime has skyrocketed under the Biden administration.

THE FACTS: Violent crime surged during the pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year — the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records.

But FBI data released in June shows that the overall violent crime rate declined 15% in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. One expert has cautioned, however, that those figures are preliminary and may overstate the actual reduction in crime.

On Friday, Trump cited numbers he said were from the “bureau of justice statistics” to claim crime was up. This appears to be a reference to the National Crime Victimization Survey recently released by the Justice Department, which shows that the number of times people were victims of violent crime increased by about 40% from 2020 to 2023. The report notes, however, that while the rate of violent victimizations in 2023 was higher than it was in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate in 2019, when Trump was president.

That survey aims to capture both crimes reported to police and crimes that are not reported to police and is conducted annually through interviews with about 150,000 households. It doesn’t include murders or crimes against people under the age of 12.

No basis for claims that violent crime has spiked as a result of the influx of migrants

CLAIM: Thousands of people are being killed by “illegal migrants” in the U.S.

THE FACTS: This is not supported by evidence. FBI statistics do not separate crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, nor is there any evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. In fact, national statistics show violent crime is on the way down.

Inflation has not reached record levels

CLAIM: Prices have gone up “like no one’s ever seen before.”

THE FACTS: That's not accurate. Inflation did soar in 2021-22, though it rose by much more in 1980 when inflation topped 14%. It peaked at 9.1% in June 2022.

Economists largely blame the inflation spike on the pandemic’s disruptions to global supply chains, which reduced the supply of semiconductors, cars and other goods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also pushed up gas and food prices. And Biden’s stimulus checks and other spending contributed by turbocharging spending coming out of the pandemic.

Inflation has now fallen to 2.5%, not far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Prices are still about 19% higher than they were before the pandemic, but the Census Bureau reported Tuesday that household incomes have risen by a similar amount, leaving inflation-adjusted incomes at roughly the same level as they were in 2019.

Trump raises false claims to suggest voting systems are fraudulent

CLAIM: The voting system isn't honest. Millions and millions of ballots are sent out “all over the place. Some people get two, three, four or five."

THE FACTS: Election officials have procedures in place to ensure that only one mail ballot is issued to each eligible voter. When a voter requests a mail ballot, election officials will verify that person’s eligibility by checking voter registration records -- looking to match the voter’s information to what’s on file and, in some cases, checking that the voter’s signature matches as well.

When a ballot is sent out by an election office, that ballot is assigned to that specific voter. If someone else tries to use that ballot, the voter’s information will not match the office’s records for that ballot and it will be rejected. Election officials constantly update their voter lists to ensure they are accurate, removing dead people, those who have moved out of state or are not eligible.

In some cases, ballots are canceled -- if a voter makes a mistake and requests a new ballot or decides to vote in person instead of using a mail ballot. In those cases, the original ballot is marked in such a way that if that original ballot were to show up at the election office it would be flagged and rejected.

<....Trump misrepresents a revision of U.S. job numbers

CLAIM: A whistleblower forced the government's recent downward revision of job gains by 818,000.

THE FACTS: That's false. The preliminary revision occurred as part of a normal annual process and was released on a previously disclosed date. Every year the Labor Department issues a revision of the number of jobs added during a 12-month period from April through March in the previous year.

The adjustment is made because the government’s initial job counts are based on surveys of businesses. The revision is then based on actual job counts from unemployment insurance files that are compiled later. The revision is compiled by career government employees with little involvement by politically appointed officials.

The Biden administration is not secretly flying hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country

CLAIM: Harris and the Biden administration are secretly flying in hundreds of thousands of “illegal immigrants.”

THE FACTS: Migrants are not secretly being flown into the U.S. by the government. Under a Biden policy in effect since January 2023, up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can enter the country monthly if they apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at a specified airport, paying their own way. Biden exercised his “parole” authority, which, under a 1952 law, allows him to admit people “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”>

How do ya like that, <ursus banalus>, you crashing <bore>? Less than 4100 posts before I nail the number you love to hate, you gormless, worthless twat.

#heartlandscumowned

<A Texas jury will soon decide whether a convoy of supporters of then-President Donald Trump violently intimidated former Democratic lawmaker Wendy Davis and two others on a Biden-Harris campaign bus when a so-called “Trump Train” boxed them in for more than an hour on a Texas highway days before the 2020 election.

The trial, which began on Sept. 9, resumes Monday and is expected to last another week.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that six of the Trump Train drivers violated state and federal law. Lawyers for the defendants said they did not conspire against the Democrats on the bus and that their actions are protected speech.

Here's what else to know:

Dozens of cars and trucks organized by a local Trump Train group swarmed the bus on its way from San Antonio to Austin. It was the last day of early voting in Texas for the 2020 general election, and the bus was scheduled to make a stop in San Marcos for an event at Texas State University.

Video recorded by Davis shows pickup trucks with large Trump flags aggressively slowing down and boxing in the bus as it tried to move away from the Trump Train. One defendant hit a campaign volunteer's car while the trucks occupied all lanes of traffic, slowing the bus and everyone around it to a 15 mph crawl.

Those on the bus — including Davis, a campaign staffer and the driver — repeatedly called 911 asking for help and a police escort through San Marcos, but when no law enforcement arrived, the campaign canceled the event and pushed forward to Austin.

San Marcos settled a separate lawsuit filed by the same three Democrats against the police, agreeing to pay $175,000 and mandate political violence training for law enforcement.

Davis testified that she felt she was being “taken hostage” and has sought treatment for anxiety.

In the days leading up to the event, Democrats were also intimidated, harassed and received death threats, the lawsuit said.

“I feel like they were enjoying making us afraid,” Davis testified. “It's traumatic for all of us to revisit that day.”

In opening statements, an attorney for the plaintiffs said convoy organizers targeted the bus in a calculated attack to intimidate the Democrats in violation of the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” an 1871 federal law that bans political violence and intimidation.

"We're here because of actions that put people's lives in danger,” said Samuel Hall, an attorney with the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The plaintiffs, he said, were “literally driven out of town by a swarm of trucks.”

The six Trump Train drivers succeeded in making the campaign cancel its remaining events in Texas in a war they believed was “between good and evil," Hall said.

Two nonprofit advocacy groups, Texas Civil Rights Project and Protect Democracy, also are representing the three plaintiffs.

Attorneys for the defendants, who are accused of driving and organizing the convoy, said they did not conspire to swarm the Democrats on the bus, which could have exited the highway at any point.

“This was a political rally. This was not some conspiracy to intimidate people,” said attorney Jason Greaves, who is representing two of the drivers.

The defense also argued that their clients' actions were protected speech and that the trial is a concerted effort to “drain conservatives of their money,” according to Francisco Canseco, a lawyer for three of the defendants.

“It was a rah-rah group that sought to support and advocate for a candidate of their choice in a very loud way,” Canseco said during opening statements.

The defense lost a bid last month to have the case ruled in their favor without a trial. The judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”>

<Republicans are reprising efforts to legally challenge election law in three key battleground states that could help decide who wins in November.

Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada are targets of the blitz, led by the Republican National Committee alongside state parties who are questioning election integrity when it comes to absentee ballots, the use of digital voter cards and whether noncitizens are being allowed to vote.

All three states were narrowly won in 2020 with Trump winning North Carolina by 1.3 percent and President Biden taking Michigan by 3 points and Nevada by 7 points and are considered toss ups in 2024, according to DDHQ averages.

Trump notoriously challenged his 2020 overall election loss, and the lawsuits filed this week also come as election deniers see their power solidified on the state level, worrying legal observers who say that gives a glimpse into what potential chaos might loom in 2024.

Absentee ballots in Michigan

The Michigan lawsuit, filed on Thursday, argues Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson failed to require the “proper” verification of absentee ballots through her office’s election guidance, which Republicans say omits certain requirements.

The RNC and Michigan Republican Party have asked a Michigan court to reject absentee ballots without a written statement on the envelopes saying the signature on said envelope has been verified by local election officials.

The state Secretary of State’s office said the practice in question is a “simple administrative procedure” and that the suit is an “abuse of our judicial system and a waste of all our time.”

“This lawsuit could have been an email,” said spokesperson Angela Benander. “This is not about the law, our processes, or election administration. It’s about getting a headline that causes voters to doubt the integrity of our election processes.”

Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra claimed in a statement that the Secretary of State was “interfering in Michigan’s elections, disregarding the very laws she’s supposed to enforce.”

Absentee ballots and digital voter IDs in North Carolina

On Tuesday, the RNC and North Carolina state Republican party filed a lawsuit against the State Board of Elections questioning the integrity of absentee ballot policy. The suit argues that board revisions to absentee ballot law conflicted with state statute requiring ballots to be sealed for it to count.

RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement that the board’s decision was “inconsistent with state law and diminishes protections for absentee ballots.”

“We have filed suit to uphold election integrity and ballot safeguards,” Whatley said.

In a separate lawsuit filed Thursday against the board, the RNC and state Republican party argued a state court should block a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill policy which allows students and employees to use digital IDs for in-person voting.

In August, the state election board voted 3-2 to approve the use of UNC-issued digital IDs for voting, but Republicans say the IDs do not comply with state voter ID law.

“When the NCSBE majority wrongly approved use of this so-called Digital ID, we said we would not stand for it,” said state party Chairman Jason Simmons in a statement. “This lawsuit will ensure that Voter ID laws are faithfully followed in North Carolina elections.”

This is the RNC’s fourth lawsuit against the election board.

Voter rolls in Nevada

Meanwhile, in Nevada, the RNC and Nevada GOP sued the Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, arguing that his office is allowing non-citizens to register to vote despite state officials maintaining there are protections in place that prevent that from happening.

“Only United States citizens are eligible to vote in Nevada’s elections. There are already numerous safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens, or anyone ineligible to vote, from casting a ballot,” a statement from the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office said. “Any claims of a widespread problem are false and only create distrust in our elections.”

Republicans, however, claim there is evidence of “thousands” of non-citizens on voter rolls who could cast their vote in November and influence election outcomes.

“Allowing non-citizens to vote suppresses legal voters, undermines the democratic system, and violates the law,” Whatley said.

The suit also targets Nevada Democrats, who Republicans argue are supporting the alleged practice.

<Donald Trump made a feeble attempt to fend off bipartisan outrage over his association this week with Laura Loomer, the far-right social media activist and failed congressional candidate. As he tried to distance himself somewhat from her controversial opinions, Trump said she is not connected to his campaign and that he disagrees with her “statements.”

“Laura Loomer doesn’t work for the Campaign. She’s a private citizen and longtime supporter,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Friday afternoon. “I disagree with the statements she made but, like the many millions of people who support me, she is tired of watching the Radical Left Marxists and Fascists violently attack and smear me, even to the point of doing anything to stop their Political Opponent, ME!”

Trump did not say specifically which of Loomer’s statements he disagreed with, but he has plenty to choose from. Loomer, 31, has a long history of making racist, offensive statements: She has called herself a “proud Islamophobe,” cheered the death of thousands of migrants, said 9/11 was an “inside job,” spread conspiracy theories about mass shootings and, more recently, posted a racist attack against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Loomer accompanied Trump to Tuesday’s debate and then to Sept. 11 memorial services the next day, which sparked especially intense criticism, given her past comments about 9/11. Trump’s fraternizing with Loomer this week caused such a stir that even Republicans Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Lindsey Graham have publicly urged him to disavow her.

Trump’s allies have long regarded the far-right provocateur as a “liability,” according to NBC News. But the former president’s affinity for Loomer is not new. He endorsed her in 2020 during the first of two failed runs for Congress. He has called her a “terrific” person and talked glowingly of her support for him. And The New York Times reported last year that Trump wanted to hire Loomer for a role in his campaign.

Now, Loomer’s high-profile appearances alongside Trump this week suggest that cracks may be widening in his campaign, NBC News reports, as his aides and advisers struggle to keep him away from people who encourage his worst political instincts.

Amid the backlash to her proximity, Trump has tried to walk a line between defending his association with Loomer and distancing himself from her beliefs. He told reporters on Friday that he does not “control” her and described her as a “free spirit.” Yet when asked about her conspiracy theories, he has pleaded ignorance, saying, “I don’t know that much about it.”>

Standard Hump: play both ends against the middle.

<Elon Musk was forced to put his money where his mouth is on Friday when Brazil's Supreme Court ordered banks to seize over $3 million from financial accounts owned by X and SpaceX's Starlink to settle fines incurred by Musk's social media platform.

The Brazilian Supreme Court, in a statement on Friday, indicated that Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the seizure of $1.3 million from an X bank account and $2 million from a Starlink account.

De Moraes levied the fines against X after the company refused to appoint a legal representative to respond to government requests to remove accounts or specific posts on the platform. The targeted accounts were affiliated with "digital militias" that de Moraes says have been methodically spreading misinformation supporting ousted far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.

"After the payment of the full amount that was owed, the justice considered there was no need to keep the bank accounts frozen and ordered the immediate unfreezing of bank accounts/financial assets," the Brazilian Supreme Court's statement said.

The company accounts, which had been frozen, have been reinstated. Still, the seizure indicates that Musk will face significant financial costs to sustain battles over his stated goal of protecting free speech online.

Musk himself has a far-from-perfect track record on protecting speech rights — including complying with requests to restrict content from the increasingly authoritarian governments of Turkey and India — but even the most reluctant supporters of Musk say he has a point in Brazil, as the Brazilian justice has taken a more extreme stance to address disinformation than other democratic leaders.

Some of the far-right groups de Moraes has sought to restrict online have argued that Bolsonaro's loss in the 2022 election was caused by election interference and supported a mob that stormed Brazil's Congress to start a military coup that would have seized control of the country's government.

Like the US, Brazil has enshrined speech protections in its constitution, but the Brazilian government has wider discretion to ban certain kinds of speech than the US government.

Musk has countered that the individuals targeted by de Moraes' legal actions have not been convicted of a crime, and therefore, the Brazilian judge's attempts to restrict their online activity amount to censorship. In retaliation for the actions taken against X, Musk has goaded the Brazilian justice online, comparing him to Lord Voldemort from the "Harry Potter" franchise and suggesting de Moraes' legal orders amount to violations of Brazilian law that should lead to the judge's imprisonment.

The battle between Musk and de Moraes has escalated for months, leading to the seizure of funds from X and SpaceX. While the connection between the social media site's legal woes and the satellite communications company's responsibility for the former's fines is tenuous, de Moraes has dragged both companies owned by Musk into the fray.

Musk's refusal to comply with court orders to remove specific content from his social media platform led to de Moraes threatening to issue an arrest decree against Rachel Nova Conceicao, a representative for X, prompting Musk to close X's office in Brazil.

De Moraes then ordered X banned from Brazil — a demand that SpaceX's Starlink initially refused to comply with before reversing course and blocking access to the platform from its constellation of internet-providing satellites after its license to operate in the country was threatened. Other internet service providers in the country readily complied with de Moraes' order to block the platform, avoiding similar actions by the judge.

Legal analysts have questioned de Moraes' move to force Starlink to pay fines levied on X, given that the companies' only connection is that the same person owns them.

"Starlink is a different company. Belonging to the same economic group doesn't mean it is also responsible for a debt it did not take part of. It didn't even have a chance to defend itself," The Associated Press reported Brazilian jurist Lênio Streck said on social media. "What could Starlink have done to avoid what other company did?">

If the <boy from brazil> goes down on de Moraes, maybe he will come across for his hero and restore sweetness and light to that favela.

<Elections officials are making changes to Minnesota’s automatic voter registration system after finding some potentially problematic entries, but they say they are not aware of anyone ineligible who has been registered to vote via the system.

The Secretary of State’s Office said this week that more than 90,000 people have been registered or pre-registered since April, when Minnesota's new system went live. Residents who apply for and receive state-issued IDs such as driver's licenses are now automatically registered to vote without having to opt in if they meet legal criteria. And 16- and 17-year-olds can pre-register to vote once they turn 18.

Around 1 percent of those automatic registrations have been flagged for potential problems, said Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson, whose department issues driver's licenses and other official identification cards, Minnesota Public Radio reported.

Secretary of State Steve Simon said those roughly 1,000 voter registrations will be kept “inactive” until the names, addresses and citizenship status are confirmed. He also said additional checks will be made to ensure that voters registered through the system meet the eligibility criteria. Flagged individuals will be notified that, if they are eligible, they will need to register to online, at their local election office, or in-person at their polling place on Election Day.

Republican legislators raised questions about the automatic voter registration system earlier this month. Jacobson told them in a letter on Thursday that he is not aware of any instances of Minnesotans being registered to vote who are ineligible to cast a ballot, but that the process improvements they are making will strengthen the verification system.

Republicans [sic] House and Senate leaders responded Friday saying they still have questions. They said 1 percent of registrants could work out to around 1,000 people. They asked for the actual number, and pressed for confirmation on whether any were allowed to vote in the August primary election.

“The election is 52 days away, and early voting begins on September 20. Minnesotans want to trust our elections are secure and fair,” they said in a statement.

While Minnesota grants driver's licenses to residents regardless of immigration status, officials say the identification document requirements provide sufficient safeguards against illegal voting.

In Oregon, which has a similar automatic registration system, officials acknowledged Friday that the state has mistakenly registered more than 300 non-citizens as voters since 2021 in what they described as a “data entry issue” that happened when people applied for driver’s licenses.

An initial analysis by the Oregon Department of Transportation revealed that 306 non-citizens were registered to vote, spokesperson Kevin Glenn said. Of those, two have voted in elections since 2021. State and federal laws prohibit non-citizens from voting in national and local elections.>

<Sofia Nelson, a lawyer and former Yale Law School classmate of Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, warned on Saturday that the Ohio senator is working to "hijack" former President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in favor of a far more rigid and orthodox theocracy called post-liberalism.

In an op-ed for MSNBC published Saturday morning, Nelson said that the post-liberal movement, unlike MAGA, seeks to replace existing social and political power structures with orders rooted in conservative Catholic social teachings.

Nelson contends that post-liberalists, like Vance, seek to position themselves within the MAGA movement with the aim of inheriting Trump's political base once he leaves politics. Their goal is to turn the GOP into a pro-theocracy party, Nelson said. The op-ed warns about the danger of a post-liberal rise and the need to counteract it, not just for the sake of defeating Trump, but to maintain the democratic values underpinning U.S. society. "There is some policy overlap between MAGA and post-liberalism in their shared opposition, for example, to immigration and transgender rights. But the ideological overlap between the groups is a shared affinity for authoritarianism," Nelson wrote. "The post-liberal right, which has goals that even MAGA Republicans would find extreme, is attempting to hijack the MAGA movement to push its own agenda."

Nelson befriended Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, while they were attending Yale Law School. Nelson, who is transgender and uses they/them pronouns, had a falling out with JD Vance when he launched his political career and backed bans on transgender minors receiving gender-affirming care. They told CNN's Erin Burnett in July that the senator's shift in opinions were motivated by his ambition for "political power and wealth."

In the op-ed, Nelson pointed to Vance's alleged influences within the post-liberal movement.

"Despite the time we spent as friends, I have no real insights (other than political expediency) into what drew him to post-liberal men like the academic Patrick Deneen, columnist Sohrab Ahmari, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and expat journalist and author Rod Dreher, who was present for Vance's baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019," Nelson wrote. "What I do know is that Vance used to condemn Trump's racism and be empathetic to how such rhetoric made Americans feel unwelcome in their own country. But these men have had an obvious and heartbreaking effect on Vance's worldview."

Nelson said Vance's "obsession" with birth rates and his remarks about childless women reflect his post-liberal belief structure. They also point out that Vance's comments in favor of eliminating "no-fault divorce" drifts further to the right on marriage issues than what is contained in The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 initiative, a political movement led by conservative think tanks that aim to shape the next Republican administration's policies.

Trump has repeatedly denied having any relation to Project 2025, but many of its contributors are former members of his administration, and his own platform, called Agenda 47, shares broad policy similarities on several issues.

Trump again stated during Tuesday's presidential debate that he has "nothing to do with Project 2025," adding, "I haven't read it. I don't want to read it, purposely. I'm not going to read it."...>

<...."Post-liberalism, unlike MAGA, has no grassroots following. Most Americans aren't Catholic, and most Catholics support the separation of church and state. But post-liberalism, despite its ideological and moral disdain for Trump, needs MAGA, Nelson wrote. "To accomplish any of its goals, it must leech off of a populist movement. The movement needs to exploit Trump's popularity for its own unpopular aims. This may explain why Vance, who had more integrity when I knew him, abruptly flipped from calling Trump "cultural heroin" to the greatest president of his lifetime."

Newsweek has emailed Vance's office, along with the Trump-Vance campaign, Saturday morning for comment.

In July, The New York Times published an article on 90 emails and text messages from Vance to Nelson from 2014 to 2017. The then-future senator expressed opinions in the messages that differ greatly from his more recent public remarks, including telling Nelson: "I hate the police."

Luke Schroeder, a Vance spokesperson, said in a statement issued after the article was published that it was "unfortunate this individual chose to leak decade-old private conversations between friends to The New York Times,"while insisting that "despite their disagreements, Senator Vance cares for Sofia and wishes Sofia the very best."

Vance's opinions on Trump have shifted considerably over the years, with the Hillbilly Elegy author previously declaring himself a "never Trumper" and questioning whether the then-future president was "America's Hitler" in 2016.

In June, Vance told the Times that he "first met Trump in 2021" and changed his opinions on the former president soon after.>

<The House GOP’s inability to coalesce around a strategy to address a looming government funding deadline is sparking a blame game among Republicans, after opposition from multiple factions helped thwart Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) strategy to avert a shutdown at the end of the month.

Grappling with his razor-thin House majority, Johnson opted to try the spending plan proposed by hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus: attach a conservative proposal, a bill to require proof of citizenship to vote, to a six-month extension of funding as an opening salvo to the Democratic-controlled Senate. Former President Trump has also called to condition government funding on the voting bill.

The Speaker, though, was forced to pull a scheduled vote on that legislation this week. Now, Republicans frustrated with yet another legislative drama defined by GOP infighting are pointing fingers.

“It’s disappointing that we cannot get the majority of our own members to vote for a bill that they all support, which is attached, and support appropriations bill that are lower than their Democratic counterparts and are at the level that the law dictates,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said.

“I have no problem [with] what the Speaker is trying to do, I have a problem that members aren’t supporting what the Speaker is trying,” he added.

Opposition to the bill came from far-flung corners of the conference. Some fiscal hawks — mostly from outside the Freedom Caucus — objected to any funding extension. Defense hawks, headlined by House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), were concerned about the impact the bill will have at the Pentagon. And moderates worried about a shutdown threat so close to the election.

One House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic, slammed the hard-liners for derailing the Speaker’s negotiation tactic.

“Once again, the hard-liners swing and miss. They get nothing, because they don’t actually know how to negotiate,” the GOP lawmaker said. “If they can’t pass a bill, you can’t actually get something you want.”

But a senior GOP aide fired back at the those targeting the hard-liners.

“Moderates are like Democrats, they always want to blame conservatives, but this time it’s defense hawks who decided to grow a spine 30 days before the election,” the aide said.

And Cole — who said he understood where the defense hawks were coming from — also expressed disagreement with the opposition from that corner.

“I do not disagree with Mike Rogers, one of my closest friends in Congress … I do not want a six-month CR [continuing resolution]. But I still think it’s better to pass something and take the threat of a government shutdown off the table than to do nothing,” Cole said. “I’ve never had a bill that I thought, boy, that’s a perfect bill. Not a consequential bill. But it’s all a game of give-and-take and we need to do that. Right now, the Speaker’s bargaining for all of us.”

GOP lawmakers supportive of the funding gambit were hopeful that passing the conservative proposal would strengthen the conference’s leverage in forthcoming negotiations with Senate Democrats.

That effort has turned some of the typical GOP politics upside down, changing some usually antagonistic hard-liners into key proponents of the effort.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), the lead sponsor of the voter proof of citizenship bill — called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — and advocate for pairing it with a six-month funding extension, who has found himself at odds with leadership in the past, lamented the opposition from some of his “self-described conservative friends.”

“They’re not actually giving the Speaker the ability to go do what we’re asking, generally, to go do. I find it ironic. But it is what it is,” Roy said.

“I don’t think we ought to be funding government without forcing some changes in reforms. Right? That was the point here,” Roy later added. “Can we get this in the next year, avoid a lame-duck omnibus? Can we force a question on something as important as voting integrity and American citizen voting? Some of my colleagues want to run around squawking about 12 appropriations bills when we only have five passed, in part because of debates back and forth within the conference.".....>

<....Other conservatives, however, have staked opposition to Johnson’s funding plan because of the lack of spending cuts and use of a continuing resolution, raising concerns about the ballooning deficit.

“We’re drawing ourselves into a complete economic collapse that we can’t come back from,” Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) told reporters while explaining his opposition.

A second House Republican expressed frustration with mixed messages from the right flank.

“What do they want? Regular order, or do they want to be in a position where we have a CR?” the House Republican said.

Two of the Republicans publicly opposed to Johnson’s spending plan — Reps. Matt Rosendale (Mont.) and Andy Biggs (Ariz.) — are members of the Freedom Caucus. And in August, the caucus explicitly requested Johnson’s plan: a continuing resolution that runs into early 2025 paired with the SAVE Act.

Rosendale said his position should “dissuade one of the rumors that if you’re in the Freedom Caucus, that you have to vote just like the Freedom Caucus,” adding that the group’s members “have different things that they agree upon, plenty of things they don’t.”

Some Republicans suggested that those in the right flank are acting as disingenuous negotiators.

“I don’t want to be critical of anybody, but there are some who ask for things and even if they get it they still won’t vote for it, which then is pretty clear that they’re not dealing in good faith and that it’s all about getting press and getting clicks,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a senior appropriator.

While the current dynamics are getting under the skin of House Republicans, it is not a new phenomenon for the conference.

House Republicans have tried to pass regular spending bills with funding levels they knew the Democratic-controlled Senate would never accept, only to pull the measures or watch them fail on the floor due to opposition from within the House GOP. A year ago, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) attempted a remarkably similar strategy — attaching a GOP border bill to a continuing resolution — that failed on the House floor, prompting him to pass a “clean” stopgap with the help of Democrats.

And while frustration is bubbling up in some GOP corners over the opposition to Johnson’s spending strategy, one House Republican said he is not phased because the behavior has been status quo this Congress.

“This sort of dynamic has happened enough times in the 118th that I wouldn’t say frustration is rising. I would say that, unfortunately, the membership has just kind of started to accept it as situation normal,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) said. “I still think we should be able to muster some frustration. We can be a better team. I think we need to be a better team. The stakes are high enough, we should get our act together and back the Speaker’s play.”>

<A gunman’s ability to get within shooting distance of former President Trump on Sunday has again raised the specter of violence in the American political landscape, a development that analysts said is all too expected as Trump’s followers vowed it would make them even more determined to reelect him.

Just two months after a would-be assassin’s bullet clipped Trump’s ear in Butler, Pa., the Secret Service fired shots at a man with an assault rifle who had hidden himself in foliage less than 500 yards from the former president.

The identity and motives of the suspect had not been revealed by late in the afternoon, but followers of the former president immediately rallied around him.

“FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! TRUMP 2024,” wrote one supporter on Trump’s Truth Social platform.

“The greatest warrior,” chimed in Kash Patel, a former appointee in Trump’s Defense Department.

In another post, Trump appears as a heroic figure, fists firing as he strides across a battlefield. “I AM SAFE AND WELL!” the missive read. “Our president Donald Trump.” It was followed by hands praying.

After the first attempt on Trump’s life, in July, supporters and even some neutral political observers predicted that the violence would push him to an insurmountable lead over President Biden.

But much has changed since then — most notably Biden’s failing debate performance, which caused him to drop out of the presidential race and to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. By many measures since then, it has been Harris who has had the momentum in the campaign.

“Donald Trump's high point of enthusiasm was immediately after the shooting in Pennsylvania, heading into his own convention,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and ardent Trump critic. “The Republicans were absolutely convinced that they were going to win a landslide election.

“This latest incident gives his base yet another reason to show up and maybe for people on his side to say, ‘This is what we are fighting against,’ “ Madrid said. “But in terms of the enthusiasm gap, that advantage still goes to Harris and I wouldn’t think that will change.”

Said longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz: "I was pretty sure that Trump's defiant gesture after being fired upon [in June] would propel his reelection. To my surprise, it hasn't even been the most important event of the campaign. This second shooting incident is not likely to have an impact, either. I don't see anything other than a war having a meaningful, measurable impact on a decisive segment of the population."

Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consulting firm, said his organization just held a large summit on political violence that was full of U.S. government officials and leading academics — attendees of which would not be surprised by Sunday's incident.

Clarke said one of the major takeaways from the conference was that the U.S. was likely to see "a lot more political violence" moving forward given "the general polarization in this country, where everyone is heavily armed and pissed off."

"Many people are concerned about what happens after November, no matter which candidate wins," he said.

"The things that make people angry these days are ubiquitous, and it's just so easy to get a weapon, and easier than I guess a lot of people thought to get close to a president or former president," he said.

Data show extreme right-wing violence is the largest threat, but violence from the extreme left is also a danger, he said.

"There's been a kind of reciprocal radicalization as the far right — these neo-Nazi scumbags — become more prominent," he said.

Trump stokes anger and fear on a daily basis with his political rhetoric, which did not soften after the first attempt on his life, and Clarke said he worries that will only increase now.

"We're pretty much in the thick of it here, and I'm just very concerned for the rhetoric as it ratchets up," he said.

He said "a responsible leader should frequently talk about uniting the country instead of dividing it," but he doesn't expect that from Trump.

"The general political climate is more heated and more vitriolic and this is what sells — it's part of the social media age, where being moderate doesn't get you any clicks or followers," he said....>

<....Some of Trump's followers say that the sharp rhetoric against him, particularly critiques that say he is a threat to democracy, have spurred on those who would do him harm.

"The Democrats have put Trumps [sic] life in danger by calling him a danger to Democracy!" one follower said Sunday on Truth Social. "He had an attempted [sic] on his life on July 13th and the Democrats continued to call him dangerous! Now he just had another attempt on his life in West Palm Beach!"

Dr. Garen Wintemute, who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, has been studying political violence for years. Since 2022, his group has conducted a large, nationally representative annual survey on Americans' support for — and personal willingness to engage in — political violence.

The group just got back its 2024 data, collected before the first attempt on Trump's life, and Wintemute said it is encouraging in that it shows no increase in Americans' acceptance of political violence from 2023.

In 2022, nearly a third of respondents said they believed violence was usually or always justified to advance at least one political objective. Republicans and MAGA-supporting Republicans were more likely than others to think that, as were white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and firearms owners.

In 2023, racists, sexists, antisemites, homophobes and transphobes were similarly more likely to believe violence was justified to advance political objectives.

Still, Wintemute said that two-thirds of respondents in 2022 and three-fourths in 2023 rejected political violence. And, of the respondents who said they considered it justified for at least one political objective, the majority said they were unwilling to engage in violence themselves.

In the latest data, Wintemute said, "we're not seeing an increase in support for political violence from 2023 to 2024 and there was an increase from 2022 to 2023."

He said that was "good news" considering 2024 is an election year, and he had anticipated support for political violence to go up.

For the first time this year, Wintemute said, they asked people how likely they were to participate as a combatant if large-scale violence broke out, and again found "good news": "The vast majority of people — 85% or so — said it wasn't likely that they would participate as a combatant."

Almost as important, he said, was a finding that, of those who said they would not be a combatant, most were not open to changing their views if urged to by family or friends. But among those who said they would be a combatant, many said they would be open to changing their minds.

What that shows, Wintemute said, is that "we have to be committed to preventing retaliatory violence" by being vocal about our opposition to it.

"It's our job to be wet ground, so that when a spark of political violence falls, it stops right there and it doesn't initiate a conflagration — there's no response to it," he said.

"It's also our job — the vast majority who reject violence — to speak out about that."

Another academic who has done a survey of Americans and their attitudes toward political violence said more needs to be done to condemn such attacks.

“All political leaders and presidential candidates should immediately condemn political violence,” said University of Chicago political scientist Robert A. Pape, “regardless of whether it comes from the left or right, rather than wait for a spiral of escalation to occur.”

Pape surveyed more than 2,000 Americans in late June, before the first attempt on Trump’s life on July 13. The survey found a disturbing willingness, across the political spectrum, to say that violence was warranted to eliminate political goes.

The poll, from the Chicago Project on Security & Threats, released in June, showed that 6.9% of Americans — or the equivalent of 18 million adults — believed that it was justified to use force to restore Trump to the White House. In another question, 10% of Americans — or the equivalent of 26 million adults — said they believed political violence is justified to prevent Trump from becoming president again.

The researchers found that millions of those, in both camps, who said political violence would be warranted also owned guns.

“What’s happening, unfortunately, is directly in line with our surveys,” Pape said, “which show not only people are supporting the use of force to prevent Trump from becoming president, but many of them are gun owners.”>

<"DEI hire," "didn't earn it," randomly blaming diversity — rightwing pundits have parroted those claims throughout the year, flinging the language at high-ranking officials or doling them out in the face of tragedy.

Far-right commentators hurled the phrase at Vice President Kamala Harris both before and after her surprise ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket. But before her, ultraconservative lawmakers, pols and influencers wielded the language against White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, all of whom share in having held prominent positions and being Black.

For Evelyn Carter, a social psychologist and diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, the anti-DEI refrain from the right sounds all too familiar.

"It is the latest iteration of a challenge that has come up for, I mean, as long as I can remember. Twenty years ago, it was 'you're an affirmative action hire' or 'you're a diversity hire,'" she told Salon, recalling how peers at Northwestern University lobbed such comments at her and other Black students when she attended in the 2000s.

Since the label "DEI hire" has gained popularity among the far-right, many on the left have harangued it as another dog whistle, a form of coded language with multiple meanings, that allows ultraconservative political actors to disparage powerful professionals of color. Others have argued that the phrase is a thinly veiled way of saying the N-word, and even conservative officials have spoken out against its use.

The broad consensus around what "DEI hire" implies — if not outright means — is clear: at best it looks racist and sexist; at worst, it just is. But how easily its meaning is ascertained raises questions about whether "DEI hire" is a dog whistle in the traditional sense, more slur-adjacent as some suggest, or something new.

Still, if United States history has imparted anything, it’s that this language isn’t isolated to just words. It often materializes in action that works to the detriment of the people the language is meant to exclude. Against a backdrop of a national effort to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools, universities and corporations, the right's mobilization around "DEI" and "DEI hire" appears all the more dangerous.

Anti-DEI sentiment erupted into the mainstream in December 2023 as far-right influencers pushed for then-Harvard University President Claudine Gay's resignation amid campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war. The campaign for her ouster started with far-right activist and journalist Christopher Rufo and found an amplifier online in users like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman before coming to a head after her controversial response to concerns of antisemitism on Harvard's campus during a congressional hearing.

As the claim that the university's first Black president was a diversity hire took off, the plagiarism allegations that Rufo and others also leveled about her early research, coupled with the blowback from her response, became evidence of her supposed lack of qualifications.

Gay's takedown was strategic — Rufo admitted as much in a January interview with Politico the day after Gay announced her resignation, telling the outlet: "When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader."

Rufo had been rallying against what he calls "DEI bureaucracy" long before last winter, and his anti-DEI campaign followed his 2020 crusade against critical race theory (CRT), once understood as an academic, legal framework interrogating the role of color-blind institutions and laws that undergird systemic racism.

The anti-CRT effort saw some success. In the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, CRT, with help from Rufo, quickly became something of a "radical left" boogeyman. For the right, it came to represent an educational doctrine hellbent on fortifying racial resentment, and conservative officials felt the need to take action against it.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to the anti-CRT effort by enacting the 2022 "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," which prohibits classroom discussions and workplace trainings that made students and employees feel discomfort around their race. At the national level, former President Donald Trump in 2020 issued an executive order that admonished "blame-focused diversity training."

Still, the anti-CRT effort did not receive the kind of traction among the public that anti-DEI sentiment has seen thus far....>

<...."The shift from attacking CRT to attacking DEI enables people to go after Black people and women in positions of power," said Jason Stanley, a co-author of "The Politics of Language" and a professor of philosophy at Yale University. "It was unclear with the CRT stuff, which was also a dog whistle, how you were going to use it to go after individual people. But what we had coming out of [the George Floyd protests] was a backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion offices, and then the expression morphed."

Since Gay's resignation, rightwing pundits have tacked a derogatory "DEI" moniker onto a smattering of subjects and people.

On social media, they sought to blame Boeing aircraft failures on the company's adherence to an internal diversity initiative. When a container ship crashed into a Baltimore bridge in March, they found fault for the tragic collapse in duly elected Mayor Brandon Scott, who they dubbed the city's "DEI mayor," and accused Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a fellow Democrat, of prioritizing diversity in his appointment of Ports of Baltimore Commissioner Karenthia A. Barber (both Barber and Moore are Black).

"We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word, and the fact that I don’t believe in their untruthful and wrong ideology," Scott said of the attacks during an appearance on MSNBC's the ReidOut at the time.

While Rufo, in his Politico interview, insisted the "DEI hire" invocation against Gay was "absolutely not fueled by racial animus" or sexism, it's clear the label largely comes off that way. It's taken on dog whistle status — even if it might not completely operate like one.

A dog whistle secretly communicates one targeted idea to an in-group while also offering an innocuous separate message to people outside of that group. As such, they often carry two meanings, the first being more acceptable and broadly understood, while the other, problematic meaning is meant to only to be understood by the speaker's intended audience. The number "88," for example, when used by white supremacists, is a code for the letters HH, or, "Heil Hitler."

How that language traditionally works is by relying on plausible deniability when confronted about the hidden message in order to keep it coded, explained Jennifer Saul, a University of Waterloo professor of philosophy whose research focuses on political language, including racist, sexist and deceptive speech.

While "DEI hire" ticks these boxes — on the surface discrediting the target's qualifications by claiming a policy privileges their race or gender, while underneath tying that alleged inadequacy to the target's race or gender, if not standing in for a slur — the plausible deniability component of its function is much harder to locate.

"In this case, the surface message isn't very good. It's not very acceptable either, and it looks pretty darn racist. And the hidden message is even worse," Saul told Salon. "So if it is working like a dog whistle, it's a slightly differently functioning dog whistle."

The term "DEI" on its own already comes with a number of negative associations. It can represent an affront to a supposed American meritocracy, while also being a reminder of a poorly done or cumbersome mandatory workplace training. Packaged into a dog whistle, those negative associations make it a "multifunctional term" that can be doled out in a number of different contexts to do "negative work," making it a "well-suited attack" for the right, Saul said.

"Dog whistles are only necessary where you're saying something anti-democratic because democratic public reason is governed by certain norms" like having full, equal respect, added Stanley. Using a dog whistle, then, "is threatening for democracy because democracy is all about equality, not making some people into second class citizens."

To Ian Haney López, author of "Dog Whistle Politics" and a UC Berkeley law professor, "DEI hire" is a "classic dog whistle" insofar as it triggers "deeply internalized racial and gender resentments" while offering users a "seemingly neutral and principled way to defend" them.

Where do these fears and resentments come from? One answer is the diversifying population of the country, which research indicates can make white Americans "feel threatened," offered Carter, whose social psychology research has interrogated how to detect and discuss racial bias.

"A lot of that is because, when it comes to an understanding of the way that our country and our world operates, it is one that relies on white people and whiteness being the source of power, the main decision makers, and everyone else who is not white or who is not aligned with that practice being on the losing end," she said....>

<....Claudine Gay, Vice President Harris and other targets of this "DEI hire" language "represent the kind of figurative representatives of this threat to whiteness," speculated Luvell Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who researches hate speech, racial slurs and racial humor. "Using phrases that aren't particularly well hidden seem to be more acceptable because the threat seems to loom larger — at least that's the perception — in a way that it might not have been in the 80s, for example."

Because most Americans are aware that the phrases are meant to communicate something negative, the use of "DEI hire" against Black professionals and officials "seems to mark a shift in the way that this kind of language is being employed," Anderson told Salon. That change, he said, follows "what our politics makes possible with respect to the way that power is operating, both at the policy level, but also at the discussion-level."

Haney López's theory of "dog whistle politics" locates the strategy's origins in the 1960s, with the 1964 campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater and the 1968 bid of then-Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. Both deployed the "Southern strategy," described as such because it strove to appeal to white Southern voters who opposed racial integration following the Civil Rights Movement's success.

While Goldwater's direct opposition to the Civil Rights Act failed to garner enough support to secure an electoral victory, Nixon's re-up on the strategy four years later, using racially coded language like "states' rights," "forced busing" and "law and order" to describe policies that let those voters know he had their interests in mind — "maintaining white dominance" as Haney López puts it — proved more successful.

Here, "the plausible deniability is a deniability about the racial strategy, the racist demagoguery of Goldwater and mixing themselves," explained Haney López, whose scholarship explores constitutional law and race.

Republican candidates would continue to build on dog whistle politics as a strategy to appeal to white Southern evangelicals over the next few decades.

During his campaign in the 80s, Ronald Reagan's warning of the "welfare queen" misusing government funds soon came to evoke an image of a Black single mother who exploited that financial support to the detriment of American taxpayers. George W. Bush's use of "wonder-working power" during his presidential campaign, while benign to a general audience, also called upon a religious association in evangelical circles that signaled allegiance to the group, according to Luvell Anderson.

But dog whistle politics, though not explicitly termed as such, also stretch much farther back through history to the post-enslavement era, argues Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a Harvard University professor of history, race and public policy.

Over a century ago, when Black people began to migrate from the South, Americans in the North used the language of Black criminality to justify segregation in places like Philadelphia, Chicago and New York, attempting to characterize Black people as criminal threats to distinguish themselves from Southerners who'd employ racial slurs. Later, in the South, the Jim Crow laws that restricted Black Americans' 14th Amendment rights and freedoms used "colorblind language" in an effort to use other legal maneuvers as proxies for race, like in the case of disenfranchising clauses that prohibited someone from voting if they weren't descended from people who had been voters.

"American politics, for 120 years since the end of slavery, has been defined by uses of political speech to signal a commitment to keeping Black people in their place, to limiting their freedom," Muhammad said.

Those politics still remain in policies and practices that work to reinforce that supposed place for Black Americans and other minoritized groups, Haney López argued, citing Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow."

Mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black Americans, grew, in large part, in response to "dog whistle competition about who could use the language of crime to stampede white voters in their fears of African Americans," Haney López explained. Racial politics and resentment expressed in coded language drove the erosion of the social safety net, helped along by the Republican Party's interest in boosting big business and dismantling marketplace regulations. The "violence and rhetoric of criminality" applied to Central American migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border also buttresses the nation's mass deportation, he added, noting Border Patrol's status as the nation's largest law enforcement agency.>

<....The right's mobilization around DEI also raises the possibility that similar consequences can arise, Haney López and Muhammad said.

"The danger here is that, by scapegoating, maligning and essentially holding up a vision of America that is in stark contrast to the realities of a country that is becoming populated by more people of color, political violence will be normalized as results in a way that we haven't seen in a generation or two," Muhammad said. "In other words, we'd be reaching back into a kind of arsenal of weapons that have long been deployed against nonwhite people who had the audacity to make claims on the same rights as white Americans."

He pointed to the "authoritarian and arguably fascist regimes" Black Americans lived under post-slavery and Reconstruction: antagonism from a police state, having to contend with propaganda that held the natural leaders were white, Jim Crow politics that rejected Black women's bodily autonomy, particularly with respect to sexual violence and forced sterilization.

"If you want to see the future, you only have to look to what happened to Black people in this country 400 years after slavery began," Muhammad said, noting that the difference now is that the right is "targeting anyone who is not on board with an authoritarian vision of an American future" as evidenced by ongoing attacks on civil liberties, bodily autonomy and explicit calls for theocracy. "That's what homegrown fascism looks like in America."

By the rise of the Trump era, dog whistles' form had changed, according to Haney López. Instead of the plausible deniability of their hidden messages being directed outward to deny claims of bigotry from critics, it now turns inward from the speaker to — in this case — the MAGA base.

This new function of plausible deniability allows the base to tell itself, "We're not racist, we're just worried about criminals," or, "We're not racist, we're just concerned unqualified applicants are getting important jobs they don't deserve." This change, Haney López explained, is, in part, due to the success of the Civil Rights Movement, which transformed white America's racist perspective into a belief that such views are immoral.

Trump and other Republican's rhetorical tactics play off that form, giving the base a rationale for embracing their fears, while also building solidarity with the group by eliciting accusations of bigotry, he said. The galvanizing force Trump generated from backlash around Hillary Clinton's 2016 "basket of deplorables" comment serves as an example of that dynamic.

So, too, does a 2022 ad for JD Vance, then running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, titled, "Are you a racist?" In the ad, which opens with Vance asking the viewer the title question and if they "hate Mexicans," Vance concludes with a staunchly populist message: "I'm JD Vance and I approve this message because whatever they call us, we will put America first."

"Racism is the core of their campaign," Haney López said, "and yet they want a public discourse in which the very idea that they're racist is not only absurd, but offensive and indicative of liberal condescension and bias."

That dynamic has translated into policy and legal challenges as Republicans have mobilized against critical race theory and DEI — and the impacts of those moves have become visible.

In June of last year, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott enacted a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion in the state's universities, which included eliminating campus multicultural centers and identity groups. A 2023 Florida ban on dedicating state funding to DEI policies and programs at state universities shuttered their DEI offices, eliminated connected positions and reallocated dedicated millions to other measures.

Some institutions of higher education across the nation have begun to review and roll back race-conscious scholarships in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling race-based affirmative action in university admissions unconstitutional. Others have seen dips in Black, Latino and Asian American student enrollment as the new academic year gets underway.

In the private sector, grant programs seeking to address inequities in access to funding for women of color have been hit with lawsuits. Fearless Fund's grant program, which aimed to boost Black women's businesses with $20,000 in venture capital funding, on Wednesday announced that they agreed to discontinue it in a settlement after a lengthy legal battle....>

<....Shelton Goode, a diversity, equity and inclusion expert, told Salon that the crusade against DEI has also placed a strain on the industry as practitioners navigate the shift in attitudes. He said his business consultancy, Icarus Consulting, saw a 68% drop in its revenue between June 2023 and June 2024, which he attributes to the successful weaponization of DEI.

This movement against DEI, an extension of Nixon-era politics, "undoes the progress that we've made and that we're still trying to make toward being an integrated, multiracial society," Haney López said. "It redescribes the progress as instead racial threat."

The characterization of Vice President Harris is an "escalation" of the ousting of Claudine Gay, which is also an escalation of the attack on DEI in Florida, Texas and other states, added Muhammad.

"So Kamala Harris, in some ways, represents an answer to Trumpism, and it is her embodiment of all of the work of trying to make this country embrace its future and live up to its full demographic possibilities, a country that will, by definition, look more like Kamala Harris than Donald Trump in the future," he said. "This is what this is all about. It is a political movement to forestall, to roll back, to destroy, the effort to make American democracy work for everyone."

When Nika White, a DEI practitioner and the founder of Nika White Consultancy, first saw how the far-right was wielding "DEI hire" against the vice president, she didn't have much of a reaction to it.

"I decided that I wanted to be more unbothered by it, and that felt a bit more empowering and like a way to reclaim agency," she told Salon, noting she expected that rhetoric to arise. "It's a distraction. It sows discord, and it's something that I don't want to give power to."

Since the rightwing crusade against DEI began, White said she has lost a handful of clients, including a university system in her state of South Carolina responding to the affirmative action decision. At the same time, she said she's also had an equal number of clients renew their commitment to DEI and continue their work, and she's instructed them to fortify their legal preparedness in the face of the attacks.

Still, White and Goode are concerned with what's next for DEI work and practice. They pointed to the proposed eradication of federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives outlined in "Project 2025," a 900-page policy guideline created by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation for what the next conservative administration, presumably that of Trump should he win, should work to implement if elected this November.

The proposals culling DEI from government agencies and offices, White and Goode warn, pose a danger to the practice and the people DEI is meant to assist by raising the potential for more hostility to be directed toward them and eliminating policies that increased the number of qualified people of color and other marginalized groups in career fields in which they are underrepresented.

But "regardless of whether Trump wins, it's already happened — that future is already here," Muhammad argued. "The only question is: will the federal government become an instrument of authoritarian state-level politics and policy vision — that the Heritage Foundation has now enshrined in a document — that would then eliminate any form of power or resistance to defining the entirety of America that way?"

When reached for comment over email, a Heritage Foundation spokesperson said someone at the organization would be able to respond via phone call. After providing a number, Salon never received a phone call, nor did the organization respond to a follow-up email.

While at least 140 of his former aides and associates have been connected with "Project 2025," Trump maintains he has nothing to do with, nor knows anything about, the document.

"We know what the tools of domination look like. More of our future hinges on this election than at any point, and more of our future will depend on what even happens if Harris wins or the Democratic Party secures the White House — it's not over. It ain't over," Muhammad said. "There's way more to come, much more work to do, and looking at what's happening at the state-level tells us all we need to know about what their vision is for the entire nation.>

<House Republicans running in the most competitive races of the 2024 cycle are urging their colleagues to finalize government spending legislation, warning that a shutdown could cost them their majority when voters cast their ballots next month.

The concern clashes with the desires of former President Donald Trump, who has pushed Republicans to pass proof-of-citizenship voting legislation as part of any funding bill ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline and risk a partial shutdown to get it done.

But without the votes at the moment to pass the SAVE Act voter identification legislation with a six-month spending package, Congress is barreling toward a shutdown possibility at a time when voters are most engaged in the election.

“We're 54 days away from an election, and the American people are focused on issues of affordability, grocery costs, energy costs, housing costs,” said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who is running for reelection in a toss-up district. “I think any shutdown would be idiotic and undermine the focus on the issues that are actually impacting the American people.”

The circumstances are nothing new: Budget disagreements typically drag out until the eleventh hour as both parties fight to include their own priorities, with a final deal often not made until hours before the deadline. And even then, the deal often fails to solve the problem but rather punts the deadline until later in the year through a continuing resolution.

That’s what lawmakers saw this time last year when House leaders struggled to pass a spending deal due to disagreements within the GOP conference and some hard-line Republicans publicly calling for a shutdown if their demands weren’t met. That ultimately resulted in then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) making a last-minute deal that relied on mostly Democratic votes to pass.

But this time around, the calls for a shutdown come just two months before a critical election — worrying some lawmakers who are running in tight races that could be upended if the government were to close.

“The American people will determine the outcome of that election, and certainly we don't need to be shutting the government down in the interim,” Lawler added.

The House was initially scheduled to vote on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) continuing resolution proposal Wednesday, but the package was pulled from consideration just hours before the vote due to a lack of support from GOP lawmakers. Now, the House remains at a standstill just three weeks before a lapse in government funding is set to take place.

The time crunch has some vulnerable incumbents on edge, prompting calls to pass a stopgap spending deal to avoid any sort of shutdown.

“Every day closer to a shutdown complicates our races. As soon as we adopt a CR, things settle again,” one House Republican running in a toss-up district told the Washington Examiner.

Others have criticized their colleagues who have openly called for a shutdown, noting they are in deep-red districts that likely wouldn’t feel the same effects as those fighting in tough districts.

“I think we are in hand-to-hand combat politics and some of those in cubicles making decisions — they’ve never been in hand-to-hand combat,” another GOP lawmaker said. “We cannot shut down.”

It’s not yet clear what the plan is for the spending proposal moving forward. House GOP leaders are expected to continue discussions over the weekend before reconvening Tuesday. Congress is slated to go on recess on Sept. 27 until Election Day. If the government enters a shutdown on Oct. 1, Congress would likely be stuck in Washington, D.C., to sort a deal and off the campaign trail.>

<After Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance helped supercharge a false, racist rumor that Haitian refugees in small-town Ohio were stealing and consuming people’s household pets, the fiction was duly parrotted by running mate Donald Trump during a nationally televised debate against Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” the former president insisted, wildly, at the Tuesday evening event. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

A day earlier, the Trump-Vance campaign issued a press release baselessly accusing “unvetted” Haitians of consuming not only domestic animals, but hunting and eating local wildlife, such as ducks and geese, as well. The compounding myths, which the leader of notorious neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe gleefully took credit for having helped popularize, were swiftly debunked by, among others, the Springfield mayor, city manager, and police department.

But the claims have not only inflamed existing tensions in Springfield, they have also managed to further traumatize a group of people who fled civil war and ceaseless gang violence for the sleepy Rust Belt town of 58,000.

“It’s creating so much panic in the community,” Springfield resident Viles Dorsainvil told The Independent. “... The words that come out of their mouths matter. They are looking for the highest office in America. They have the obligation to do better, because words are powerful.”

Dorsainvil, 38, emigrated to the US from Haiti in 2020 and moved to Springfield in 2021. He works for the county, processing people’s applications for public assistance, and last year founded the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, a tiny all-volunteer nonprofit, as a resource for new arrivals.

In the days since Vance and Trump seized upon the false narrative about Haitians feasting on cats and dogs, Dorsainvil said he has heard from parents afraid to send their children to school, new homeowners who want to sell and move out of state, and people too frightened to leave their residences.

One Haitian-born business owner in Springfield told a local reporter that her landlord was now trying to evict her from her commercial space, chalking the effort up to anti-Haitian sentiment.

“They call the center to know how it is out there, if it is safe for them to come out,” Dorsainvil said. “And we let them know, when they are going out, to be careful.”

Simmering hostilities toward Springfield’s Haitians boiled over last August, when a Haitian man driving without a valid license crashed into a school bus, killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark. The driver, who was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the accident, was subsequently sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison, on charges of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide. In December 2023, 22-year-old Springfield resident Izaye Eubanks, who is Black, was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for hate crimes against at least eight Haitians in the area.

In August, a dozen masked neo-Nazis from Blood Tribe marched through Springfield’s downtown, carrying assault-style rifles and swastika flags. Angry residents appeared at a town council meeting two weeks later to loudly decry the new stresses the rapid addition of up to 20,000 Haitians over the past three to four years — very quickly boosting the city’s population by as much as one-third — has placed upon schools, healthcare providers, and social services. They aired grievances about the federal government “dumping” immigrants on them, claiming, without any evidence, that Haitians are bringing crime and “scaring the females here in town.” One man, who the mayor had removed from the premises following his remarks, said he was a Blood Tribe member and that he had “come to bring a word of warning.”

“Stop what you’re doing, before it’s too late,” said the man, who identified himself using a pseudonym. “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”

On Thursday morning, Springfield City Hall and other locations in the area were evacuated following a bomb threat sent to multiple city agencies and media outlets. On Friday, a pair of emailed bomb threats forced evacuations at two elementary schools and a middle school, which shut down for the day. No explosives were found at the schools or at any of the other locations listed in the threat, which included City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and a third elementary school, Springfield authorities said in a news release....>

<....Springfield’s Haitian residents, almost all of whom are in Springfield legally, in various immigration categories, feel a mixture of sadness and surprise about having become targets of the outrage, according to Springfield NAACP President Denise Williams.

“I want JD Vance to hear my voice — I need him to apologize to the city of Springfield, Ohio,” Williams told The Independent. “It is absolutely racist, up close and personal. That comment should have never been made at that level, without investigating it first… Please put this in bold letters, with quotation marks around it: All of this rhetoric needs to stop immediately.”

Ohio Lt. Gov. John Husted, who in January endorsed Trump’s bid to retake the White House, squarely blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the “overwhelming influx” of immigrants into the Buckeye State over the past four years.

How did they get here? Husted mused earlier this week in a series of posts on X.

In fact, it was his boss, Gov. Mike DeWine — his own 2022 re-election endorsed personally by Trump — who invited them.

“Dear Secretary Pompeo: The State of Ohio has a long and successful history of welcoming and assimilating refugees from all corners of the globe,” DeWine wrote in a December 2019 letter to Mike Pompeo, Trump’s then-secretary of state, as he and Husted wrapped up their first year in office. “Ohio also has a well-developed support network to welcome and assimilate refugees, primarily lead [sic] by our faith-based communities.”

“Given our ability to successfully welcome and assimilate legitimate refugees, and the administration’s stringent vetting process, I consent to the placement and/or resettlement of refugees within the State of Ohio,” DeWine’s letter concluded.

Five years prior, “Welcome Springfield,” a program helmed by an evangelical pastor and lifelong conservative Republican named Carl Ruby, was launched. It was an attempt to breathe new life into the city, and included a resolution declaring Springfield “a community welcoming of immigrants, and immigrant-owned businesses.”

Initially, the new residents were mostly South Americans, Ruby told The Independent. Haitians began arriving in significant numbers around 2019 or 2020, he said.

The population of Clark County peaked in 1971, and has been on the decline ever since. Businesses in Springfield closed, factories shuttered, and home prices cratered. The opioid epidemic hit the region particularly hard. Young adults moved elsewhere for opportunity, further depressing Springfield’s economy, according to Kathleen Kersh, an attorney at the nonprofit Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) in nearby Dayton.

According to the most recent figures available, immigrants make up 5.1 percent of Ohio’s Congressional District 8, which includes Springfield, as compared to the national average of 13.6 percent.

“When you hear rhetoric that the people who are coming here are coming from mental institutions and jails, the people I meet with on literally a weekly, if not semi-weekly basis, are electricians, are doctors, are attorneys, are teachers, are human rights activists, are successful businesspeople,” Kersh, who provides free legal services to Springfield’s Haitian community, told The Independent.

There are also many blue-collar Haitian immigrants equally important to Springfield, according to Kersh, who pointed to a number of farms that have gone under in recent years “because of the difficulty in attracting workers to do these really difficult, strenuous jobs.”

To support the population increase, and to counterbalance the commensurate increase in the cost of housing, Springfield is now working with developers to increase its supply of residential stock, “a trend not seen in decades,” Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck said in a video address on Wednesday. Over the next few years, Heck went on, Springfield plans to add some 2,000 new residential units.

“While we are experiencing challenges related to the rapid growth of our immigrant population, these challenges are primarily due to the pace of the growth, rather than the rumors being reported,” Heck contended.

The city has appealed to the Biden administration for financial aid. At the same time, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced he has “directed his office to research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities.”....>

<....A coalition of community providers have monthly brainstorming sessions about how best to coordinate their efforts, Kersh said. Faith-based groups, as DeWine noted in his 2019 letter to Mike Pompeo, and as evidenced by Ruby’s efforts, are a large piece of the puzzle. Orchard Alliance, a Christian nonprofit headquartered in Colorado Springs, last year helped finance a move to a new facility for a Haitian church in Springfield.

“These Haitian immigrants face an uphill battle, often receiving public criticism for their presence in the city and accusations of criminal behavior — despite employers and city leaders acknowledging them as kind-hearted, hard-working members of the community,” Orchard Alliance exec Peter Burgo told The Independent.

A spokesman for the Springfield Police Department said he found it “sad” that opportunists had seized upon outright falsities to “spread hate and spread fear.”

“We get these reports ‘the Haitians are killing ducks in a lot of our parks’ or ‘the Haitians are eating vegetables right out of the aisle at the grocery store,’” Officer Jason Via told NPR. “And we haven’t really seen any of that. It’s really frustrating. As a community, it’s not helpful as we try to move forward.”

Basil Fett, who retired last year as choral director for the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, has lived in town since 1977 and said he felt Republicans were exploiting the Haitian community for political gain.

“If they can get these people whipped up and all fearful, they can maybe get people to vote for them,” Fett told Cleveland.com. “Instead of, ‘I’ve got answers for your problems,’ no, all they’re offering is fear, fear, fear.”

And Nathan Clark, whose son died in last year’s bus crash, spoke out following Vance’s and Trump’s comments, telling local politicians that the intense hatred now aimed at Haitians made him wish the driver involved had instead been “a 60-year-old white man.”

“Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said at a recent City Commission meeting. “They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.”

On Thursday, Carl Ruby and a group of fellow pastors held a press conference to call for unity and to denounce racism and bigotry, which Dorsainvil said he found heartening.

“All that we can do is, let’s stay in solidarity,” Dorsainvil told The Independent. “Let’s work together. Let’s pray for each other. Let’s walk with each other. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s have good and meaningful conversation. Let’s raise our voice on behalf of the minority and the vulnerable. If we conjugate our force, our strength, and keep moving forward, that would be very great.”>