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Trump Says His New York Rally Marked by Crude and Racist Insults Was a ‘Lovefest’

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Donald Trump Holds A Press Conference At His Mar-a-Lago Club

(PALM BEACH, Fla.) — Donald Trump on Tuesday called his rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, an event marked by crude and racist insults by several speakers, a “lovefest.”

That’s a term the former president also has used to reference the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Speaking to reporters and supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump claimed “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as his Sunday night rally in his hometown of New York City.

“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he said. “It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved.”

That’s despite criticism from Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and many who watched — including Republicans — about racist comments made by speakers during the pre-show targeting Latinos, Black people, Jews and Palestinians, along with sexist insults directed at Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s set, in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage,” stirred particular anger given the electoral importance of Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania and other key swing states. The Trump campaign took the rare step of distancing itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico but not other comments.

The president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party, Ángel Cintrón, called the “poor attempt at comedy” by Hinchcliffe “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible.”

“There is no room for absurd and racist comments like that. They do not represent the conservative values of republicanism anywhere in our nation,” Cintrón said in a statement.

Read More: How a Racist Joke About Puerto Rico at a Trump Rally Could Impact the Election

Trump used the event at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to criticize Harris’ record on the border and the economy, saying that, “On issue after issue, she broke it” and “I’m going to fix it and fix it very fast.”

With just a week before Election Day, some Trump allies have voiced alarm that the event, which was supposed highlight his closing message, has instead served as a distraction, highlighting voters’ concerns about his rhetoric and penchant for controversy in the race’s closing stretch.

Speaking before the event to ABC News, Trump said he didn’t know the comic who delivered the most egregious insults, but he did not denounce the comments either.

“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” he said, according to the network, insisting that he hadn’t heard Hinchcliffe’s comments. But, when asked what he made of them, Trump “did not take the opportunity to denounce them, repeating that he didn’t hear the comments,” ABC reported.

Trump is set to campaign later Tuesday in Pennsylvania, a state where the Latino eligible voter population has more than doubled since 2000, from 206,000 to 620,000 in 2023, according to Census Bureau figures. More than half of those are Puerto Rican eligible voters.

He also will hold a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which has a large Hispanic population, on Tuesday night.

Angelo Ortega, a longtime Allentown resident and former Republican who’s planning to vote for Harris this time around, said he couldn’t believe what he’d heard about Trump’s rally.

“I don’t know if my jaw dropped or I was just so irritated, angry. I didn’t know what to feel,” said Ortega, who was born in New York but whose father came from Puerto Rico. Ortega has been campaigning for Harris and said he knows of at least one Hispanic GOP voter planning to switch from Trump to Harris as a result of Hinchcliffe’s comments.

“They’ve had it. They’ve had it. They were listening to (Trump), but they said they think that that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Ortega, a member of the Make the Road PA advocacy group.

Trump “didn’t make the comment about Puerto Rico. The comedian made the comment about Puerto Rico. But it is his political forum.”

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Michael Rubinkam in Allentown, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.


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Harris’s Economic Message ‘Hasn’t Broken Through,’ Dem Strategists Say, Sparking Frustration

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Democratic strategists are frustrated that Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic messaging “hasn’t broken through” to voters, noting that many are still “wondering about her vision,” the Hill reported.

“Her economic message hasn’t broken through,” a major Democratic donor said. “And the economy is the issue most people care about. She narrowed the gap a little on the issue, but she’s left a lot of people wondering about her vision.”

Harris has struggled to connect with voters on economic issues since she replaced President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket in July. With just a week until the election, voters continue to trust Trump’s approach to the economy over Harris’s, 46 percent to 38 percent, according to a Reuters poll released last week. In battleground states, 61 percent of voters say the economy is on the “wrong track” under the Biden-Harris administration.

Democratic strategist Steve Jarding said Harris has not “done a good enough job” countering Trump’s criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s economic record.

“Where I don’t think she’s done a good enough job is, [Trump] gets away with saying, ‘The economy is the worst it’s ever been, there’s more unemployment, inflation is the highest it’s ever been.’ None of that is true,” Jarding said.

Another Democratic strategist agreed that Harris’s economic messaging “left a lot to be desired.”

“I still think there are folks out there who can’t tell you what she plans to do,” the strategist said. “That should have been something our side hammered home every day.”

Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under the Bill Clinton administration, on Monday urged Harris to “respond forcefully to the one issue that continues to be highest on the minds of most Americans: the economy.”

“When all of [the polls] show the same thing—that Kamala Harris’s campaign stalled several weeks ago yet Trump’s continues to surge—it’s important to take the polls seriously,” Reich added.

The Harris campaign recently signaled that it would focus more on economic messaging in the final days before the election. 

“[Harris] has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).  “I wish this had taken place two months ago. It is what it is.”

The post Harris’s Economic Message ‘Hasn’t Broken Through,’ Dem Strategists Say, Sparking Frustration appeared first on .


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Race for Pennsylvania: Democrats dominate early voter turnout

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(NewsNation) — Nearly twice as many Democrats than Republicans have voted early in Pennsylvania — a swing state that played a pivotal role in the outcomes of the past two presidential elections.

Tuesday marks Pennsylvania residents’ last chance to request mail-in or absentee ballots. With more than 1.4 million early ballots cast, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in a close race that could flip the state.

Registered Democrats had returned 849,849 ballots as of Tuesday, compared to the 468,067 that registered Republicans have returned so far, according to state election data.  

Early voting data, however, only shows a person’s party affiliation — not how they voted.

Election officials need to process mail ballots before they can count them — an undertaking that varies by state. It often takes several days or weeks to finalize election results and certify a winner.

Trump maintained a narrow lead over Harris Tuesday in Pennsylvania. That’s according to the latest forecasts from NewsNation’s partners Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) and The Hill, which predict Trump has a 51% chance of winning in the Keystone State.

The opposite was true as recently as Oct. 17. The candidates were tied until Trump gained a slight lead on Oct. 21.

Pennsylvania is home to 19 electoral votes — the most of any battleground state this election cycle, DDHQ noted. Pennsylvania hasn’t backed a Republican presidential candidate by double digits since Richard Nixon in 1972.

Trump narrowly carried the state by 0.7%  in 2016 but lost his hold on Pennsylvania to Biden in the 2020 election.

Ronald Raegan was the last Republican to win the state’s electoral votes twice.

Here’s a closer look at Pennsylvania’s early voter turnout as of Tuesday morning:

Total ballots returned:  1,473,825

  • Democratic: 849,849
  • Republican: 468,067
  • Other: 155,909

Total mail-in ballots returned: 1,435,280

  • Democratic: 831,501
  • Republican: 452,875
  • Other: 150,904

Total absentee ballots returned: 38,545

  • Democratic: 18,348
  • Republican: 15,192
  • Other: 5,005

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HUR Allegedly Sets Fire to a Mayor’s Office in Central Russia

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Five police cars in Megion also set aflame, source says

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Barnard College Under Fire for Inviting Anti-Semitic UN Official Who Blamed Israel for Oct. 7 Attack To Speak

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Barnard College is facing backlash for inviting United Nations official Francesca Albanese to speak on campus this week. Albanese has blamed the Jewish state for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and compared Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

A pro-Israel U.N. watchdog is urging Columbia University’s sister school to cancel Albanese’s Wednesday speech, warning that inviting the “internationally condemned anti-Semite” contributes to the “egregiously anti-Semitic hostile educational environment” on campus. The Wednesday event is hosted by Barnard’s human rights, economics, and anthropology departments, the New York Post reported.

“This is exactly the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that has led to allegations of Columbia fostering an egregiously anti-Semitic hostile educational environment, and to allegations of the harassment, threats, and intimidation against Jewish and Israeli students,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said in a letter sent Monday to Barnard College president Laura Rosenbury and Columbia president Katrina Armstrong.

Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, has argued the Jewish state does not have a right to defend itself against Hamas and liked posts on X endorsing the anti-Semitic trope of the “Jewish billionaire class.” She likened Netanyahu to Hitler in a July X post, and hours after the Oct. 7 attack, she said the “violence must be put into context.” Albanese also said that the victims of Oct. 7 “were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.”

Albanese also accused Israel of committing genocide and advancing a “settler-colonial project in Palestine.”

Columbia University was ground zero for anti-Israel student protesters last spring. In the letter, UN Watch criticized the Ivy League institution for “enabling” hundreds of students, faculty, and others to overtake the university’s South Lawn last spring, where “the harassment and abuse of Jewish and Israeli students only intensified, filled with calls for a global Intifada—the worldwide murder of Jews—and other anti-Semitic slogans and chants.”

“By inviting Francesca Albanese, an internationally condemned anti-Semite and supporter of Hamas terrorism, Columbia will be subjecting itself to additional claims for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, New York Human Rights Law and New York City Human Rights Law, and the Ku Klux Klan Acts,” the letter reads.

Israel banned Albanese from the Jewish state in February. The International Legal Forum, an activist group of more than 4,000 lawyers, called on the United Nations to fire Albanese for her “anti-Semitism and virulent bias” and for “endorsing the murder of Israeli civilians, including children.”

A Barnard spokesperson defended the event on campus.

“Barnard’s educational mission depends on the exploration of challenging ideas. The College has long permitted academic departments to host discussions and debates on difficult topics with speakers who represent a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds,” the college told the Post.

The post Barnard College Under Fire for Inviting Anti-Semitic UN Official Who Blamed Israel for Oct. 7 Attack To Speak appeared first on .


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Europe Allows Ukraine to Increase Electricity Imports

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The EU regulator has allowed Ukraine to increase electricity supply from EU countries, as Ukraine braces for a hard winter

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Ukraine, South Korea Agree to Deepen Security Cooperation

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The war is becoming “internationalized,” Zelensky said

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Inside Ron DeSantis’s Quest to Trample the Will of Florida Voters on Abortion

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the last year throwing the full weight of his administration behind killing Amendment 4, a citizen-led ballot initiative to enshrine the right to an abortion “before viability” in the state constitution.

DeSantis’s opposition to the amendment is not altogether surprising — if approved by voters in the November election, it would effectively invalidate a six-week abortion ban that he signed into law, which went into effect in May. But his tactics have been raising alarm bells, even from within his administration. Earlier this month, the general counsel for the Florida Department of Health resigned in protest over cease-and-desist letters he claimed DeSantis’s office ordered him to send to television stations that aired an ad in support of the proposed amendment.

The letters were just the latest in a series of drastic steps the governor has taken to interfere with direct democracy this election cycle. DeSantis’s administration has taken to the courts to block the abortion amendment, which made it onto the ballot with the support of 1 million Floridians, as well as another citizen-led effort to legalize marijuana. The governor has deployed the state’s election police to intimidate petition signers, and used state agencies and systems to spread misinformation about what both amendments would do. And according to estimates, he’s spent more than $19 million of public money along the way.

Democracy and voting rights experts say that these efforts are all a part of DeSantis’s well-worn anti-democratic playbook, pointing to the series of voter restrictions pushed through by DeSantis and his allies, including a law that created an office focused on investigating alleged election crimes. And if he succeeds in quashing the amendments, critics argue, there will be no reining him in. DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s been an intentional weaponization of every state agency to pursue his political agenda,” said Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando. “And, of course, that’s been centered on Amendment 4, but it’s been a pattern of behavior on several fronts.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, right, listens as Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, left, speaks during a news conference in the aftermath of the apparent assassination attempt of Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
Gov. Ron DeSantis listens as Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, left, speaks during a news conference on Sept. 17, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Photo: Lynne Sladky/AP

The DeSantis administration and allied state officials have relied heavily on the legal system and courts to stifle both the abortion ballot measure and the separate effort to legalize marijuana, Amendment 3.

State law requires the attorney general to ask the Florida Supreme Court if proposed constitutional amendments meet certain legal requirements. In doing so, the attorney general can also make an argument for or against it. Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that both amendments did not pass legal muster and tried to block them from appearing on the ballot. The court was unimpressed with her arguments. In April, the court rejected Moody’s claim that Amendment 3 was unclear and improperly drafted to cover multiple subjects, since it would both decriminalize and commercialize recreational marijuana.

In a separate opinion that same month, the court rejected Moody’s argument that voters might be confused at the scope of Amendment 4. “[T]he broad sweep of this proposed amendment is obvious in the language of the summary,” the court ruled in a particularly biting decision. “Denying this requires a flight from reality.” 

State law also requires that a financial impact statement appear beside citizen-led initiatives on the ballot. Last year, a four-person panel stacked with DeSantis loyalists drafted a financial impact statement for Amendment 4. According to Keisha Mulfort, senior communications adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, “typically” these statements will simply say that the financial impact is “indeterminate.”

And that’s what the panel said about Amendment 4 at first. At the time, Florida’s six-week abortion ban was tied up in litigation, and the panelists wrote that the uncertainty of the outcome made it such that “the impact of the proposed amendment on state and local government revenues and costs, if any, cannot be determined.”

After the Florida Supreme Court allowed the ban to go into effect, a judge ordered the panel to revise the financial impact statement, arguing that it was “unclear and confusing.”

The panel’s members are two representatives selected by DeSantis; one person appointed by Republican House Speaker Paul Renner, an outspoken opponent of Amendment 4; and conference chair and coordinator of Florida Economic and Demographic Research, Amy Baker. After meeting again in July, the panel released a revised statement.

“The financial impact statement was written by the same politicians who want to keep this extreme abortion ban in place.”

“The proposed amendment would result in significantly more abortions and fewer live births per year in Florida,” the new statement reads. “The increase in abortions could be even greater if the amendment invalidates laws requiring parental consent before minors undergo abortions and those ensuring only licensed physicians perform abortions. There is also uncertainty about whether the amendment will require the state to subsidize abortions with public funds. Litigation to resolve those and other uncertainties will result in additional costs to the state government and state courts that will negatively impact the state budget.”

Baker was the only dissenter.

Advocates for Amendment 4 were swift to call out the misleading language in the statement, which they unsuccessfully challenged in court. In a statement, the ACLU of Florida took particular issue with the speculation about future litigation, arguing that the statement should have been a “neutral explanation” of the amendment’s likely impact to the budget, and contending that DeSantis and his loyalists hijacked the process for political gain.

“The intention of the government was to mislead people,” said Mulfort. “The financial impact statement was written by the same politicians who want to keep this extreme abortion ban in place. They know that their position is deeply unpopular and they have resorted to unfair and deceptive tactics to trick voters.”

The Election Police

In September, a police detective showed up at Isaac Menasche’s home. The officer questioned Menasche about whether he signed the petition to get Amendment 4 on the ballot, according to an account Menasche later posted to Facebook. “The experience has left me shaken,” wrote Menasche, who said police arrived with a 10-page dossier on him, which included a copy of his driver’s license and a copy of the petition he signed.

Although the full scope of the investigation is unclear, additional petition signers have come forward saying they were questioned by law enforcement about the initiative. And the state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security reportedly opened over 40 separate investigations into petition gatherers on the campaign.

Natasha Sutherland, senior adviser to the Yes on 4 campaign, said it’s hard to read what happened to voters like Menasche as anything other than an intimidation tactic. “Knocking on folks’ doors, scaring them from engaging in the democratic process, the citizens initiative process, it’s really unfortunate and harmful to the democratic process,” she said.

Sutherland said that the concern isn’t just about one petition; it’s about a culture of fear around civic engagement. “If they got a few press hits out of it, scared a few voters that read [about] it, that would mean they won’t sign a petition in the future for an amendment,” she argued. That would be a win for DeSantis.

A few weeks after voters were visited by police, the election crimes unit released a report accusing Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition working to pass Amendment 4, of “widespread” fraud and hit the organization with a fine of $328,000, which FPF has said it will contest.

The Office of Election Crimes and Security’s late-stage report about the measure’s signature drive launched more than a dozen lawsuits in courts around Florida, all of them shepherded by the same retired state Supreme Court justice, Alan Lawson. The effort is being underwritten by an unnamed “angel financier,” Lawson told the Miami Herald, and it asks judges to remove Amendment 4 from the ballot or invalidate it if it passes.

“There’s no possible world where a judge somehow tries to keep it off the ballot at this stage,” said law professor Michael Morley, director of Florida State University’s Election Law Center, given that many people have already voted on Amendment 4. And while there’s some precedent for courts invalidating a ballot measure after it passes, it’s a high bar.

“It’s not enough just to show there were mistakes,” Morley said. “For an after-the-fact challenge, it has to be systemic fraud.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a rally with members of Florida Physicians Against Amendment 4 at The Grove Bible Chapel in Winter Garden, Florida, on Oct. 22, 2024. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a rally with members of Florida Physicians Against Amendment 4 at the Grove Bible Chapel in Winter Garden, Fla., on Oct. 22, 2024.
Photo: Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Unprecedented Ad Blitz

In addition to the legal challenges, the DeSantis administration has funneled millions of dollars from at least six state agencies’ budgets against the abortion and marijuana amendments. The state has racked up an estimated $19.3 million in bills, as documented in detail by Orlando-based investigative reporter Jason Garcia, based on recent contracts and purchase orders.

“We have never seen a governor direct state agencies to aggressively oppose a ballot measure that has qualified for the ballot,” said Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political scientist who studies ballot initiatives.

The administration has spent much of this money on advertisements — and in doing so, is benefiting from an ambiguity in Florida law, according to Morley. There is a clear prohibition on local and county officials spending public funds on ads about ballot measures, and another law against state officers and employees using their titles and authority to weigh in on candidate elections.

“But for political appointees at the state level on ballot initiatives? That’s a gray area,” Morley said.

The governor is taking full advantage of that grayness to pump out advertisements and other materials opposing Amendment 4, both explicitly and in ads that defend the current ban without mentioning the ballot initiative. In one recent ad, which was sponsored by four state agencies, an anti-abortion doctor who was appointed by DeSantis to Florida’s medical board tries to soften the state’s ban, which is one of the strictest in the country.

The ad is part of a “Florida Cares” campaign spearheaded by the Agency for Health Care Administration, which set up a website that explicitly opposes Amendment 4 and decries its supporters as deceptive “fearmongers.” In September, AHCA took out TV and radio ads defending the current ban, then launched paid ads on Facebook and Instagram in early October. AHCA’s social media ads on those platforms have been co-sponsored by the state departments of Children and Families, or DCF; Education; and Health.

In September, Floridians Protecting Freedom and the ACLU of Florida tried to challenge the legality of AHCA’s media campaign, but a judge quickly tossed the lawsuit. In October, the Florida Supreme Court rejected a similar challenge.

Other departments are running anti-marijuana ads, which are styled as public service announcements and were rolled out as early voting started on Amendment 3. On Monday, DCF posted one such ad to X, which was co-sponsored by the Department of Health. On October 23, DCF, with the backing of the Health and Education departments, started running one such ad on Facebook and Instagram. The three departments co-sponsored another ad that was posted online on October 20, and the state Department of Transportation put out its own in mid-October.

Like AHCA, DCF has used its website and official social media presence to amplify DeSantis’s campaign against the two ballot measures, including by sharing videos of the governor railing against the proposed amendments at press conferences.

“We could sit here and have an entire article on all of the things that the government could be spending that money on that we actually need in the third most populous state in the country.”

The administration’s ad blitz has laid bare the state’s spending priorities. As Garcia reported, almost $3.9 million for recent DCF ads apparently came from the state’s opioid settlement fund, which by law is meant for programs that curb the opioid epidemic. (DCF did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the ads or their funding source.)

“Honestly, we could sit here,” Sutherland said, “and have an entire article on all of the things that the government could be spending that money on that we actually need in the third most populous state in the country, and fighting to keep an abortion ban isn’t one of them.”

In addition to funding its own ad campaign, the DeSantis administration has also gone on the offensive against pro-Amendment 4 advertisements. In early October, the state Department of Health sent threatening letters to dozens of TV stations that carried a pro-Amendment 4 ad. The letter alleged that Floridians Protecting Freedom’s advertisement posed a “sanitary nuisance” because it supposedly misrepresented the state’s abortion ban. The Department of Health threatened the stations with criminal proceedings over the ad.


Related

State Lawyer Quits Over Ron DeSantis’s Unconstitutional Attacks on Abortion Amendment


The amendment campaign sued to stop the DeSantis administration from blocking political speech through threats and the thin pretense of public health. It was in that litigation that the Department of Health’s former top lawyer filed an affidavit revealing that DeSantis’s closest legal advisers had drafted the letters without his input.

The Federal Communications Commission condemned the letters, and a federal judge quickly ordered the DeSantis administration to stop using the state’s legal apparatus to chill political speech. But Moody continued to defend the state’s authority to send similar threats, and the health department signed contracts worth up to $1.4 million with two law firms to represent the state regarding “false political advertisements.” On Tuesday, the judge extended the temporary order until after Election Day.

Tina Luque (L) talks with Amelia Zehnder, "Yes On 4!" volunteers, prepare to handout materials on ending Florida's strict abortion ban in Orlando, Florida, on October 6, 2024. Known as "Amendment 4," the question will appear on the same ballot as the US presidential vote, and seeks to restore the right to terminate pregnancies until the point of viability in the nation's third most populous state.Since May, Florida has enforced a ban on abortions after six weeks -- before many women even know they are pregnant. (Photo by OCTAVIO JONES / AFP) (Photo by OCTAVIO JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
“Yes On 4!” volunteers prepare to hand out materials on ending the state’s strict abortion ban in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 6, 2024.
Photo: Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images

Suppressing the Vote

Ashley “AG” Green, an organizer with Dream Defenders, a grassroots abolitionist organization in Florida, said DeSantis’s anti-democratic tendencies have been apparent since he ran for governor six years ago. “He’s truly rigged the game at every level,” Green said.

Back in 2018, Green was working on the campaign to pass a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to the roughly 1.4 million Floridians with previous felony convictions.

Then gubernatorial candidate DeSantis raged against the proposed amendment while campaigning against Democrat Andrew Gillum, making explicit his intentions to fight against its implementation. On election night, Green recalled a “crushing sense” that even though they’d won the fight to pass the amendment, DeSantis’s victory would somehow taint it.

And they were right. In 2019, the Republican-controlled state legislature began passing a series of laws dulling the effects of the constitutional amendment. On the regulatory side, DeSantis ignored calls from advocates to create a central database where “returning citizens” could easily check to make sure they’d paid off their fines and court fees, a prerequisite to voting, leaving them to navigate a labyrinth of different state and local court systems.

Then came the election police. In 2022, DeSantis signed into existence the Office of Election Crimes and Security, a law enforcement body tasked with investigating election fraud and related crimes. Critics immediately sounded the alarm that the unit would be used to intimidate voters and create a culture of fear, particularly for the millions of newly enfranchised voters in the state who had no easy way to check their voting eligibility. 

Early one morning in August 2022, Florida police raided the homes of 20 returning citizens for alleged voter fraud. Body camera footage would later reveal that many of the people arrested were shocked and confused, some having even received official documentation from the county about their eligibility. “Voter fraud?” exclaimed one of the women arrested, 55-year-old Romona Oliver. “I voted, but I ain’t commit no fraud.”

The targeted voters were “people who maybe hadn’t voted in 20 or 30 years and are finally getting their rights restored, so excited to be able to vote again, only for the police to knock on their door,” said Andrea Mercado, executive director of Florida Rising, a civic engagement organization in Florida. “It seems very spiteful, but also focused on trying to create a climate of fear that if, you know, some fee somewhere hasn’t been paid, that by voting they will risk being incarcerated.” 

The law creating the elections police is just one of several new statutes impacting the voting process. “It is particularly egregious that many of these new laws disproportionately affect the voting rights of people of color,” said Jonathan Webber, Florida policy director with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Webber pointed to Senate Bill 7050, a 2023 law that imposed new “bureaucratic” regulations and financial penalties for community-based voter registration groups. “Black and Hispanic voters are more dependent on these organizations than their white counterparts, making voter registration drives essential for their full participation in our democracy. Without these efforts, it is unclear how many eligible citizens will participate this year,” he said. “This situation is disheartening, anti-democratic, and completely unnecessary.”

The threat to voter mobilization groups isn’t hyperbole. In 2022, Green said her organization had to stop doing voter registration work after threats of legal action from DeSantis’s election police. Despite attempts to restart their efforts in 2024, capacity issues and the legal risks “felt pretty insurmountable,” she said.

“All of the possible penalties that third-party voter registration organizations could potentially face for doing work they’ve done for decades, that’s adding up to a really bad environment,” concurred Leah Wong, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “These are just some of the things he’s done to create an environment where people feel less empowered to vote.”

Eskamani, who is up for reelection this year, said that despite the mountain of obstacles DeSantis has erected, it’s imperative that people show up to vote anyway.

“If we don’t win, and they’re successful, it gives permission for so many other extremists, for so many other governors to do the same thing,” she said. “To use public money to campaign, to weaponize every state agency to pursue a political agenda.”

Update: October 29, 2024, 12:00 p.m. ET
This article was updated to mention a new court order extending a temporary restraining order against the DeSantis administration until after Election Day.

The post Inside Ron DeSantis’s Quest to Trample the Will of Florida Voters on Abortion appeared first on The Intercept.


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The U.S. Tasked Deborah Lipstadt With Monitoring Antisemitism. She’s Been Busy

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US Special Envoy For Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt Interview

Deborah Lipstadt came to her job as U.S. Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism with a boatload of credentials and a lifetime of experience. Her authority as a historian of the Holocaust had won not only awards, but also a historic judgment by a U.K. court against David Irving, the Holocaust denier who sued Lipstadt for defamation after she called him one.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But on Oct. 7, 2023, the world’s focus lurched to a fresh horror, answered by a war that requires, as Lipstadt put it in a recent interview, “that you hold more than one idea in your head at a time.” Lipstadt spoke to TIME about how her job is changed and how she sees the reaction to the Israel-Hamas War. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You are the President’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. How’s it going? Business is booming, and I’m the only one in the Administration who wants a recession [in my field].

Does that mean your job has gotten easier or harder in the past year? When I came into office, my very first speech talked about the need to get people to take anti­semitism seriously. “The Jews have it made! What’s the problem?”—I have less of that now. I hear from people telling their 12-year-old grandson who wears a kippah, “Put on a baseball cap. For safety’s sake.” On the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

You grew up when Israel was the underdog. Whole generations have known it first as an occupier. I was there during the Six-Day War. I was a kid, but, you know, we didn’t know what was going to happen. That profile has changed dramatically. At the same time, there is still an intense hatred among many entities surrounding Israel that want to see its demise.

How can one distinguish between criticizing Israel and being antisemitic? To hold Jews everywhere responsible for what goes on in Israel is antisemitism. But if criticism of Israel’s policies was antisemitism, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are protesting in the streets on a Saturday night would be antisemites.

Your academic work is centered on the Holocaust. Is hearing what’s happening in Gaza described as a genocide triggering in any way? There’s a definition of genocide. You can say this is a tragedy; many people in Gaza are not supporters of Hamas. You can say the suffering is immense and without a seeming end. But that’s not a genocide.

Read more: The New Antisemitism

Between what happened in Israel on Oct. 7 and in Gaza afterward, sometimes it can seem like the traumas are in competition. There certainly are competing traumas. I don’t get into competitive suffering. Your two compacted molars doesn’t make my one feel better. I don’t think it takes you anywhere. We are talking about responding to an attack. The 1,200 dead on Oct. 7 is [as a proportion of the population] like 48,000 Americans. If anybody had said we should sit silently by after 9/11, not respond? If someone hits, you’ve got to hit them back.

Did you just say we? That’s right. That’s a good point. I was speaking both as an envoy for Joe Biden—who flew there after the attack—and, yes, I speak also as a Jew.

Do you think Jewish people in general feel as if their fate is attached to Israel’s? I think some Jews do. Some Jews feel that if anything would happen to Israel they would be less safe in the world. There are many Jews who feel that way.

Does it work the other way? If ­Israel is delegitimized—a big word inside Israel—are Jews more vulnerable? I think so. I think in many places, yes. And we also have to think about it. You want to talk about a genocide? Talk about the genocide of the Uighurs.

That’s not happening on camera though, is it? The Chinese have made sure of that. But if someone were to find a group of Chinese nationals and beat them up [in retaliation], we’d be appalled.

Rachel Weisz played you in Denial, the movie about your being sued for libel by a Holocaust denier. Are you still in touch? We email. After I got appointed, she told the producers they have to call her ambassador. She took the part really seriously. Her father escaped from Hungary, and her mother was born in Vienna to a Jewish father, and they had to get out. So she came to this quite personally.


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An Insurrectionist Once Helped Lead This Police Department. Insiders Speak Out About Its Culture of White Supremacy.

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In the nearly four years since supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol building, federal prosecutors have indicted at least 35 current or former law enforcement officers for their role in the insurrection, according to an Intercept analysis. 

Among their targets was Alan Hostetter, a former California police chief who entered the Capitol grounds with a hatchet in his backpack on January 6, 2021. He was sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison late last year, among the longest sentences so far out of more than 1,500 prosecutions stemming from the events of that day.   

An Instagram post shows Alan Hostetter (left) at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
An Instagram post shows Alan Hostetter, left, at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Screenshot: Court filing, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California

Hostetter, who represented himself at trial, spouted a wide range of conspiracy theories during his closing argument, including that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The judge overseeing Hostetter’s case emphasized his experience as a police officer during the proceedings. “No reasonable citizen of this country, much less one with two decades of experience in law enforcement, could have believed it was lawful to use mob violence to impede a joint session of Congress,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in court last year. In July, Lamberth denied Hostetter’s request to be released from prison while he appeals his case, noting that it’s too risky for him to be freed ahead of the “looming” November election. (Hostetter did not respond to efforts to reach him before his conviction.)

Before his journey from police chief in La Habra, California, to insurrectionist, Hostetter spent 22 years at the Fontana Police Department, a small agency in the mostly working-class region southeast of Los Angeles known as the Inland Empire. The area has a history as a hotbed for white supremacist views most commonly associated with the deep South, which have earned it the nickname “Invisible Empire”— a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

For more than three years, filmmaker Stuart Harmon and I have investigated the culture of policing in Fontana. We spoke with several veterans of the local police department, including four whistleblowers who are featured in a new film published today by The Intercept. We also reviewed hundreds of pages of internal documents, interviewed residents and attorneys, and made several attempts to speak with the police department’s leadership. They declined to answer our questions. 


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In the aftermath of the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which reignited nationwide protests against police racism and impunity, many departments across the country — including the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department — came under renewed scrutiny for officers’ misconduct and abuses. But there are thousands more small-town police departments across the country that are rarely scrutinized, an untold number of them run with near-absolute authority by police leadership whom few residents, let alone officers, have the courage to challenge. 

The Fontana Police Department, which in 2013 earned the grim nationwide record for “worst minority representation” among cities with more than 100,000 residents, offers a snapshot of how such departments are run. And as we learned, its history of violence and racism is deeply intertwined with that of the city itself.

Decades of industrial development — and later abandonment — transformed Fontana’s demographics and character from an orange farm town attracting white settlers a century ago, to a booming steel town after World War II, to a trucking hub for warehouses and low-wage shift jobs today.

Throughout the city’s history, demographic change was met with racist backlash. As recently as 1981, men in white hoods marched through downtown Fontana, near the police station — a moment captured in archival photos. A year earlier, a Black lineman was shot by members of the KKK and left paralyzed. The incidents echoed earlier ones, including the burning to death of a Black family in their home, in the 1940s, after they refused to leave their all-white neighborhood.

Today, Fontana is home to a majority Latino population. But the mansion of a former grand dragon of the KKK still stands, not far from the police department — underscoring a point that the late writer Mike Davis, who was born in Fontana, made in his monumental work “City of Quartz.” “The past is not completely erasable,” Davis wrote, “even in Southern California.” 

Rare, Unvarnished Testimony

I began looking into the Fontana Police Department days after the January 6 insurrection. Hostetter, who left the department in 2009 after climbing the ranks to deputy chief, had not yet been publicly identified as one of the law enforcement veterans involved, but one of his previous subordinates emailed me a tip about “a White Supremacy group operating at my former police agency.”

David Moore, a 25-year veteran officer who started his career at the LAPD before transferring to Fontana, had come across an investigation I had published years earlier, revealing the FBI’s longtime, quiet probe into white supremacist infiltration of police departments across the country. While the FBI’s involvement was news at the time, the infiltration itself had been an open secret in many of those departments. Moore, who is Black and currently works for a federal defense contractor, didn’t mention Hostetter in his email but wrote instead of widespread racism reaching all the way to the top of the department’s leadership. At times, Moore wrote, that racism crossed the line into white supremacist extremism.

Moore had already described the racism in horrific detail in a discrimination lawsuit he filed against the Fontana PD in 2016. (He amended the lawsuit to charge wrongful termination once he was fired in 2017 in what he says was retaliation for his whistleblowing. In a legal filing, the Fontana PD dismissed many of the allegations around racism as irrelevant to the case. The department settled with Moore and another officer earlier this year, and the case was dismissed in April.)

In his email, Moore laid out a long list of allegations, including that officers routinely used racial slurs to refer to both residents and colleagues of color, and that once, his co-workers had performed a mock lynching of a Martin Luther King Jr. figurine.

One claim in particular was shocking for its cruelty. In 1994, before Moore joined the department, a homeless Black man’s body was found outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken near police headquarters only half an hour after he was released from police custody. He had been fatally choked and later stabbed, according to an autopsy report. When he was taken in for the autopsy, someone placed a half-eaten chicken wing in his hand and took a picture. For years, officers at the department circulated the photograph, which they treated as a joke. An officer who spoke up about the incident told The Intercept he was later forced out.

As Moore grew increasingly disillusioned with department leadership, he began researching the emblems he saw his colleagues sport. He learned that the lightning bolts, runes, and the German eagle that were tattooed on their bodies or featured on their badges were symbols associated with neo-Nazi ideologies. The department’s Rapid Response Team, an elite and notoriously violent unit, displayed as its logo a Nordic owl, another symbol favored by white supremacists. 

Moore had denounced all this for years, first internally, then in his lawsuit, and eventually to a local writer, who published the allegations to a muted response. Fontana was a forgotten place, he told me, whose residents, many of them poor and undocumented, are too busy working multiple jobs and fearful of retaliation to openly criticize the department, despite knowing its abuses firsthand.

It is in small departments like this that extremism could fester in silence, he believed. “We must show people in California and the U.S. in general, that White supremacy is alive and active in law enforcement,” Moore wrote. “Very few Officers have the courage to speak out about it.” 

Moore, who spent the better part of the last decade embroiled in a fight against the Fontana PD at a huge personal cost, knows from experience why so few officers speak up. Others who denounced problems internally — including his co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, Andy Anderson — were also forced to leave their jobs or resigned out of fear and frustration. One even moved to a police department across the country to get away from Fontana. 

We spoke with Moore and Anderson long before they settled their lawsuit, an agreement that neither they nor the police department wanted to talk about. “While the City and its Police Department believe their conduct was in all respects proper and legal, the City’s insurer recognizes the uncertainty litigation presents, as well as costs associated with litigation,” Christopher Moffitt, a lawyer representing the police department, wrote in an email. “David Moore and Andrew Anderson believe a settlement is in their best interest for these same reasons. The Parties have agreed to limit our comments about the lawsuit to this statement.”

Moffitt also said that the police department could not respond to The Intercept’s other questions “in connection with your reporting on the litigation.”

As The Intercept has previously reported, police departments large and small are shrouded in a code of silence that rewards loyalty over ethics. And as a powerful 2021 USA Today investigation exposed, officers who denounce abuse and misconduct by colleagues are ostracized, forced out of their jobs, or worse. Many current and former Fontana officers, Moore cautioned back in 2021, would never speak about what they had witnessed. But he offered to connect me to three who would speak to me on the record, and more who would talk but would not want to be named. 

It was a rare offer of access to officers’ unvarnished testimony, now captured in a film that offers an unusually blunt perspective on policing from within — even as it comes from individuals who remain deeply committed to the institution itself.

“Sadly, the silent majority complacently stands by while rogue officers seem to take the lead,” Moore wrote. “This needs to stop.”

The Vital Projects Fund supported the reporting and production of this film.

The post An Insurrectionist Once Helped Lead This Police Department. Insiders Speak Out About Its Culture of White Supremacy. appeared first on The Intercept.


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