theguardian--2020-10-15--Trump's attacks on Obamacare could cost him in Texas and Florida

When Donald Trump began campaigning for the presidency that he captured in 2016 , he promised to decimate the Affordable Care Act .
His agenda was in no way hidden .
“ It ’ s got ta go , ” Trump said of the ACA in an interview with CNN ’ s Dana Bash .
“ Repeal and replace with something terrific.
” More than five years later , the president still hasn ’ t articulated a plan for a system to replace Obamacare .
But his administration ’ s repeated attacks on Barack Obama ’ s signature presidential achievement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have contributed to a dramatic surge in the number of uninsured Americans – and provoked a movement that might shape the results in two huge battleground states .
“ There is absolutely no doubt that healthcare is one of the top issues in this election and one of the most important for Latino voters in Florida , ” said Abel Iraola , a spokesman for the Florida office of NextGen America , which supports progressive candidates by rallying the youth vote .
“ Latino families in Florida are facing the brunt of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to their pocketbooks.
” This was true well before the pandemic hit , and not just for Latinos .
According to a Capital & Main analysis of data released by the US census bureau last month , the number of uninsured Americans increased by 2.3 million in the first three years of the Trump administration – prior to the onset of Covid-19 , which has since prompted mass layoffs and job and benefits losses in the millions .
Moreover , from 2016 to 2019 , the two states that saw their numbers of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with 240,000 newly uninsured , and Texas , which saw its count swell by an astounding 689,000 .
Those two states , both captured by Trump in his first presidential run , are now considered dogfights , and their collective 67 electoral votes could easily swing the election .
Trump won Florida by 1.2 percentage points in 2016 , but a compendium of polls by FiveThirtyEight in mid-October showed Joe Biden with a 4.6-point lead .
And in Texas , where a Democratic presidential candidate has not taken the general election since Jimmy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just a 1.4-point lead .
Four years ago , he took the state by nine points .
“ I think , I firmly believe – I almost know – that this election for president is going to come down to Texas , ” Beto O ’ Rourke told CBS News .
“ My contention is that this is Biden ’ s to lose.
” As the 2016 results proved , forecast models for a country as large as the US are inherently difficult , and the fate of those electoral votes this year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ another factor at work in both Texas and Florida that could spell a difference : a Latino population that has been put under crushing economic pressure and health insecurity by Trump administration policies and has been mobilized into action by pro-Democratic organizers .
“ There ’ s a lot of energy to turn this cultural anti-immigrant momentum around , ” said Alison Yager , director of policy advocacy for the Florida Health Justice Project , a nonprofit that does not take political positions .
“ Advocates are very motivated to remedy this.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and there is little question that the Trump years have been brutal on Latinos .
The attempt to dismantle Obamacare initially failed , but congressional Republicans managed to effectively eliminate the individual mandate , which had assessed penalties on those who did not obtain health insurance and prompted more to participate .
Trump ’ s administration , meanwhile , slashed funding for outreach programs designed to help people sign up for insurance through the ACA .
More ominously , it is asking the US supreme court to wipe out the ACA entirely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Amy Coney Barrett , whom many Democrats believe would agree to strike down the law .
According to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation , Florida has more people enrolled through the ACA exchange than any other state : 1.9 million .
Texas is third at more than 1.1 million .
( California is second . )
“ Many of the zip codes with the highest rates of enrollment in Florida , and by extension the country , are heavily Latino , ” Iraola said .
Florida and Texas , led @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the 12 states that have declined to expand Medicaid coverage , severely limiting healthcare access for millions of low-income workers .
In Texas , Latinos comprised 61 % of the non-elderly uninsured in the state in 2018 ( the most recent year available ) despite accounting for only about 40 % of its population , according to the Kaiser Family Foundation .
“ An often-ignored factor in the ‘ Texas miracle ’ economy is the outsized contribution of immigrant Texans who drive essential sectors , including agriculture and construction , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrote in the El Paso Times .
“ Instead of protecting our essential workers on the front lines of this pandemic , we are putting their lives at risk by denying them health coverage.
” A report by the Commonwealth Fund , meanwhile , found that Florida was one of 17 states with more than a five percentage point disparity in the uninsured rates between white and both Black and Hispanic adults .
According to 2018 census data , 15 % of white adults in Florida were uninsured , compared with 21 % @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hispanics .
The Commonwealth report declared Florida ’ s health system to be among the worst in the nation , adding that it has more children without a “ medical home ” than any other state .
Latino children in Florida and Texas have suffered during the Trump years , according to a report just released by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute .
Texas is home to 19.7 % of the nation ’ s Latino children but now accounts for 37.4 % of its uninsured Latino kids , said Edwin Park , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In 2019 , Florida was one of the five states with the highest rates of uninsured Latino children at 9.6 % ; Texas was the highest , at 17.5 % , according to the Georgetown report .
Overall , Latino children have experienced the greatest loss of health coverage , by percentage , of any ethnicity in the US during the Trump years of 2017-19 , pre-Covid .
Those kinds of numbers exasperate advocates like Yager , who noted that the combination of administration policies and the pandemic itself have taken a deep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ numbers of people have lost their insurance in just the last six months , and that includes essential workers , ” she said .
“ That ’ s a cohort of newly uninsured in non-expansion states , when we should be using every tool available to us to see to it that every kid who can be covered is covered.
” And the Trump administration ’ s changes to the “ public charge ” rule , which allows the government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants who have received public assistance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an important role here ” , Yager said .
“ Immigrants are shying away from using benefits , including healthcare , for fear of jeopardizing their status – even though in many cases these are benefits they ’ re absolutely entitled to .
It ’ s a repressive force that is really clearly intended to intimidate.
” Will any of it matter when it comes to voting in a presidential election ?
Late summer polling certainly suggests so – and so does recent political activity in Florida and Texas .
In a poll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Houston and Univision , more than 90 % of Latino voters in Texas said they were certain or likely to participate in the election – and 66 % said they would vote for Biden , compared with 24 % who said they ’ d vote for Trump .
A New York Times/Siena College poll in September had Biden at 57 % to 32 % for Trump among Hispanic voters there .
That ’ s a significant development in a state in which 30 % of eligible voters are Latino .
Florida ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in part because it incorporates people of Cuban , Puerto Rican , Venezuelan and other backgrounds who often have wildly disparate political views , including whether to become involved at all .
A Univision poll showed Biden with a 52 % to 36 % lead over Trump among registered Latino voters in the state .
Both the Trump and Biden campaigns have poured money and resources into Florida , where Biden is attempting to rally Puerto Rican voters and Trump hopes to secure his base of Cuban American support .
In Texas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ written in capital letters ; there , Biden ’ s $ 6m advertising buy has been augmented by a $ 1m push from the Lincoln Project , a group of current and former Republicans working to defeat Trump .
Among their primary missions : appeal directly to Hispanic voters , often with ads in Spanish .
And one x-factor is still lurking : the number of Latinos who are motivated to vote in 2020 for the first time .
According to the Pew Research Center , Latinos are expected to be the largest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election , something that has never before been the case .
They will account for 13.3 % of eligible voters overall – and they may well tip the scales in both Florida and Texas .
If it happens , Iraola says , it will be in part because Latino families have been asking to be heard on healthcare issues for years , to no avail .
“ I think in this election you find that what Latino voters are worried about is how they ’ re going to protect their families while working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to afford healthcare if they need it , ” Iraola said .
“ The public health infrastructure is so weak due to Republican refusal to expand Medicaid or address serious deficiencies in the system that it makes it hard to separate the economic argument from the health one .
All of it is on the ballot .
”

When Donald Trump began campaigning for the presidency that he captured in 2016, he promised to decimate the Affordable Care Act. His agenda was in no way hidden. “It’s gotta go,” Trump said of the ACA in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. “Repeal and replace with something terrific.”
More than five years later, the president still hasn’t articulated a plan for a system to replace Obamacare. But his administration’s repeated attacks on Barack Obama’s signature presidential achievement, along with other policy decisions, have contributed to a dramatic surge in the number of uninsured Americans – and provoked a movement that might shape the results in two huge battleground states.
“There is absolutely no doubt that healthcare is one of the top issues in this election and one of the most important for Latino voters in Florida,” said Abel Iraola, a spokesman for the Florida office of NextGen America, which supports progressive candidates by rallying the youth vote. “Latino families in Florida are facing the brunt of this crisis on every level, from healthcare to their pocketbooks.”
This was true well before the pandemic hit, and not just for Latinos. According to a Capital & Main analysis of data released by the US census bureau last month, the number of uninsured Americans increased by 2.3 million in the first three years of the Trump administration – prior to the onset of Covid-19, which has since prompted mass layoffs and job and benefits losses in the millions. Moreover, from 2016 to 2019, the two states that saw their numbers of uninsured rise most sharply were Florida, with 240,000 newly uninsured, and Texas, which saw its count swell by an astounding 689,000.
A Joe Biden shouts as she attends a rally outside the ‘Latinos for Trump Roundtable’ event in Doral, Florida, last month. Photograph: Marco Bello/AFP/Getty Images
Those two states, both captured by Trump in his first presidential run, are now considered dogfights, and their collective 67 electoral votes could easily swing the election. Trump won Florida by 1.2 percentage points in 2016, but a compendium of polls by FiveThirtyEight in mid-October showed Joe Biden with a 4.6-point lead. And in Texas, where a Democratic presidential candidate has not taken the general election since Jimmy Carter in 1976, Trump is averaging just a 1.4-point lead. Four years ago, he took the state by nine points.
“I think, I firmly believe – I almost know – that this election for president is going to come down to Texas,” Beto O’Rourke told CBS News. “My contention is that this is Biden’s to lose.”
As the 2016 results proved, forecast models for a country as large as the US are inherently difficult, and the fate of those electoral votes this year remains unknown. But there’s another factor at work in both Texas and Florida that could spell a difference: a Latino population that has been put under crushing economic pressure and health insecurity by Trump administration policies and has been mobilized into action by pro-Democratic organizers.
“There’s a lot of energy to turn this cultural anti-immigrant momentum around,” said Alison Yager, director of policy advocacy for the Florida Health Justice Project, a nonprofit that does not take political positions. “Advocates are very motivated to remedy this.”
The issue of healthcare drives that motivation, and there is little question that the Trump years have been brutal on Latinos. The attempt to dismantle Obamacare initially failed, but congressional Republicans managed to effectively eliminate the individual mandate, which had assessed penalties on those who did not obtain health insurance and prompted more to participate. Trump’s administration, meanwhile, slashed funding for outreach programs designed to help people sign up for insurance through the ACA. More ominously, it is asking the US supreme court to wipe out the ACA entirely while trying to fast-track a conservative nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, whom many Democrats believe would agree to strike down the law.
Cars show their support of Biden and Harris at a ‘Rally For the Latino Vote’ in Miami last month. Photograph: Michele Eve Sandberg/Rex/Shutterstock
According to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Florida has more people enrolled through the ACA exchange than any other state: 1.9 million. Texas is third at more than 1.1 million. (California is second.) “Many of the zip codes with the highest rates of enrollment in Florida, and by extension the country, are heavily Latino,” Iraola said.
Florida and Texas, led by Republican governors, also are two of the 12 states that have declined to expand Medicaid coverage, severely limiting healthcare access for millions of low-income workers. In Texas, Latinos comprised 61% of the non-elderly uninsured in the state in 2018 (the most recent year available) despite accounting for only about 40% of its population, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“An often-ignored factor in the ‘Texas miracle’ economy is the outsized contribution of immigrant Texans who drive essential sectors, including agriculture and construction,” the state legislators Rafael Anchia and Mary González wrote in the El Paso Times. “Instead of protecting our essential workers on the front lines of this pandemic, we are putting their lives at risk by denying them health coverage.”
A report by the Commonwealth Fund, meanwhile, found that Florida was one of 17 states with more than a five percentage point disparity in the uninsured rates between white and both Black and Hispanic adults. According to 2018 census data, 15% of white adults in Florida were uninsured, compared with 21% of Black adults and 26% of Hispanics. The Commonwealth report declared Florida’s health system to be among the worst in the nation, adding that it has more children without a “medical home” than any other state.
Latino children in Florida and Texas have suffered during the Trump years, according to a report just released by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. Texas is home to 19.7% of the nation’s Latino children but now accounts for 37.4% of its uninsured Latino kids, said Edwin Park, a research director at the institute. In 2019, Florida was one of the five states with the highest rates of uninsured Latino children at 9.6%; Texas was the highest, at 17.5%, according to the Georgetown report. Overall, Latino children have experienced the greatest loss of health coverage, by percentage, of any ethnicity in the US during the Trump years of 2017-19, pre-Covid.
Those kinds of numbers exasperate advocates like Yager, who noted that the combination of administration policies and the pandemic itself have taken a deep toll on Latino families. “Huge numbers of people have lost their insurance in just the last six months, and that includes essential workers,” she said. “That’s a cohort of newly uninsured in non-expansion states, when we should be using every tool available to us to see to it that every kid who can be covered is covered.”
And the Trump administration’s changes to the “public charge” rule, which allows the government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants who have received public assistance such as Medicaid, “clearly plays an important role here”, Yager said. “Immigrants are shying away from using benefits, including healthcare, for fear of jeopardizing their status – even though in many cases these are benefits they’re absolutely entitled to. It’s a repressive force that is really clearly intended to intimidate.”
Will any of it matter when it comes to voting in a presidential election? Late summer polling certainly suggests so – and so does recent political activity in Florida and Texas.
A Trump supporter attends a rally outside the ‘Latinos for Trump Roundtable’ event in Doral last month. Photograph: Marco Bello/AFP/Getty Images
In a poll conducted last month by the University of Houston and Univision, more than 90% of Latino voters in Texas said they were certain or likely to participate in the election – and 66% said they would vote for Biden, compared with 24% who said they’d vote for Trump. A New York Times/Siena College poll in September had Biden at 57% to 32% for Trump among Hispanic voters there. That’s a significant development in a state in which 30% of eligible voters are Latino.
Florida’s Latino vote is more difficult to gauge, in part because it incorporates people of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and other backgrounds who often have wildly disparate political views, including whether to become involved at all. A Univision poll showed Biden with a 52% to 36% lead over Trump among registered Latino voters in the state.
Both the Trump and Biden campaigns have poured money and resources into Florida, where Biden is attempting to rally Puerto Rican voters and Trump hopes to secure his base of Cuban American support. In Texas, meanwhile, the story is being written in capital letters; there, Biden’s $6m advertising buy has been augmented by a $1m push from the Lincoln Project, a group of current and former Republicans working to defeat Trump. Among their primary missions: appeal directly to Hispanic voters, often with ads in Spanish.
And one x-factor is still lurking: the number of Latinos who are motivated to vote in 2020 for the first time. According to the Pew Research Center, Latinos are expected to be the largest racial or ethnic minority in this presidential election, something that has never before been the case. They will account for 13.3% of eligible voters overall – and they may well tip the scales in both Florida and Texas.
If it happens, Iraola says, it will be in part because Latino families have been asking to be heard on healthcare issues for years, to no avail.
“I think in this election you find that what Latino voters are worried about is how they’re going to protect their families while working essential jobs, how they’re going to afford healthcare if they need it,” Iraola said. “The public health infrastructure is so weak due to Republican refusal to expand Medicaid or address serious deficiencies in the system that it makes it hard to separate the economic argument from the health one. All of it is on the ballot.”


theguardian--2020-10-15--Young Texans like me are not politically apathetic – we're tired

On 8 November 2016 , the night Trump became president , I was a senior at Texas A & M , a large football university in the small town of College Station .
When I walked across the stage and grabbed hold of my degree a few weeks later , I couldn ’ t wait for it to become my one-way ticket to New York .
I wanted nothing more than to leave my state of Texas , especially because of its unchanging political climate .
Both inside and outside of my lecture halls , I felt surrounded by narrow-minded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conservatism .
The subtle racism and intolerance I had observed as a child became increasingly overt during and after the election .
Growing up desi in Texas , my existence was pulled between learning square dancing in elementary school and scurrying off to Nanna ’ s house to learn Arabic afterwards .
The monologues I memorized as a teenager from my favorite Bollywood movies sat awkwardly among the Brooks and Dunn country tracks in my head .
I never fully belonged to one part of my hyphenated identity and nor do I now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so much , with its sprawling landscape , comfort foods , and friendly disposition also became my enemy .
Where was I supposed to fit within its Republican values of religious guilt and intolerance ?
In hushed conversations by boys in pastel shorts and fishing shirts , I heard racial slurs slung around without remorse and the women who dared to speak up to them called “ annoying bitches ” .
Gross , misogynistic and racist memes saying immigrants should go back to ‘ their country ’ got shared on my timeline by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ school .
Did they know other people could see what they were sharing ?
Did we not receive the same education ?
So I fled Texas for New York , hoping to find my political home .
As someone who left Texas to escape the ignorance that surrounded me , it was surprising for me to land in New York and find a different kind of intolerance .
I have seen many people talk about how much they want Trump out of office , while simultaneously denouncing young people ’ s “ unrealistic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this country .
As a 25 year old burdened with student loans and part of the first generation to be worse off than our parents , I found it disheartening to see my generations ’ politics dismissed by people with disproportionately less social and financial burdens than their younger , more diverse counterparts .
I fled the rampant racism of the south , only to come face to face with the disconnected elitism on the east coast .
Supposed liberals , laughing off ideas that would make the lives of the less wealthy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a universal basic income , the erasure of student debt .
These ideas are only radical if you don ’ t need them .
My generation is not lazy , idealistic or apolitical .
We are the creatives pioneering on TikTok ; the generation who needs two jobs instead of one to get by .
We work harder than our older counterparts to make rent and pay off student debt , while being dismissively referred to as “ side-hustlers ” .
Yes , we are hustlers .
But not by choice .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ political apathy .
We ’ re told we don ’ t show up to the polls because we don ’ t care .
It is true that 40 % of non-voters in 2016 were millennials , the reason for not showing up is not as cut and dried as apathy .
Young people are just as , if not more likely , to have contributed to a political campaign ; contacted an elected official , or canvassed in the last year as almost every age group except seniors .
My fellow young people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are tired .
The candidates that energize us are mocked .
When we backed Bernie Sanders , people called us radicals , bros , socialists .
When the squad – the group of new , radical , congresswomen of color who have so inspired millennials – was dismissed by Nancy Pelosi as only speaking for “ their Twitter world ” , it feels like a self-important finger saying “ shh ” to America ’ s youth .
It ’ s another act of silencing that makes me feel like a political foreigner , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I moved back to the suburbs of Houston .
In a global pandemic that forced us to become shut-ins , I wanted to leave the confines of my shoebox apartment and craved wide open spaces .
Upon my return home , I found myself in the same position I was in a few years prior .
My morning drives were punctuated by Trump signs , pinned to the 10-foot-tall windows of grand , lavish estates .
I know the people who inhabit these gated communities , tucked away behind perfectly manicured bushes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parents ’ friends , my friend ’ s parents .
These charming members of my community know my family is Muslim – the group of people so vilified by the president he put a point-blank ban on people from “ Muslim countries ” from coming into the US .
They know my mother is a public school teacher – the group of people the secretary of education has abandoned and sent back to school amid a pandemic .
They know I am a journalist , the group of people set upon by vigilantes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ president as the “ fake news media ” .
None of these facts matter to the people who continued to invite us over for summer barbecues or send me money every year on my birthday .
Their ability to separate our background from their politics is a luxury and privilege I envied .
Envy soon planted seeds of resentment .
Left and right , I cut ties with people I had known for years .
I began to look at everyone that crossed my path with Trump-colored glasses .
Is that a red @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eagle in their profile picture ?
Cancelled .
For four years , these thoughts consumed me .
They still do .
Just because I understand why my peers are experiencing political fatigue , doesn ’ t mean it ’ s easier to swallow .
In fact , it makes me feel more lonely .
What terrifies me is not the rampant , full-throated Trump supporters in Texas , it ’ s the people around me who seem so fed up with politics , they seem not to care about anything at all .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ contagious .
One night , after being rebuffed by a friend who didn ’ t want to hear me complaining about compromised mail voting any more , I caught it , too .
“ Dude , we get it .
You care about politics and want to change the world .
Can we just watch a movie now ?
” my friend had said .
This was the very friend that spent her weekends nannying other people ’ s children to pay down the student loans she was drowning in .
How could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to embody the social justice warrior trope not just to older people , but to my peers as well .
Even though we belonged to the group of people that could benefit the most from political change , I felt like my friends had drunk the political Kool-Aid .
For the next few weeks , I barely read the news .
I didn ’ t have the energy .
What was the point ?
I accepted the fact that Trump may very well be re-elected .
For my mental health and sanity , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reality .
I have a deep respect for the Greta Thunberg ’ s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ’ s of the world .
I hope to fight alongside them in some capacity .
But I often wonder if these warriors take breaks and lay down their armor if even just for a few hours to stare at a blank wall or go for a walk .
How do they keep pushing on when doors are slammed in their face ?
I am hoping to get there soon – especially as the news has become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even my politically disinterested friends felt the tremors from the earthquake of events that shook the nation .
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died .
The intimate details of Trump ’ s taxes were finally revealed , showing a president who pays less in tax than me .
And in the greatest plot twist of this never-ending dystopian , horror film in which we all live , Trump and a slew of other republicans caught the very virus they spent months playing down .
The cynic in me knows these will be mere blips on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country will suffer from amnesia as it heads to the polls , or when it chooses to stay home instead .
But in the meantime , I refuse to adopt a defeatist attitude .
I am back to being vocal and passionate .
Sometimes it ’ s just online .
Sometimes I just share a post .
I might not be screaming “ the end is near ” in the town square like the local lunatic any more , but I am having conversations with people if and when they are willing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to high school with – a solid red , air-force Texan - responded to a post I put on my Facebook .
“ Apparently 12 years of tuition-free public schooling is not considered socialism .
But add four more years and suddenly it ’ s a communist plot , ” the post read .
“ Holy shit … That ’ s actually a really good point , ” he responded .
It might sound small , but it made me happy to know I can change the way someone I know looks at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside of the scope of their usual outlets .
And if that ’ s all I can achieve , I can sleep at night .

On 8 November 2016, the night Trump became president, I was a senior at Texas A&M, a large football university in the small town of College Station. When I walked across the stage and grabbed hold of my degree a few weeks later, I couldn’t wait for it to become my one-way ticket to New York.
I wanted nothing more than to leave my state of Texas, especially because of its unchanging political climate. Both inside and outside of my lecture halls, I felt surrounded by narrow-minded thinking, disguised as patriotism and fiscal conservatism. The subtle racism and intolerance I had observed as a child became increasingly overt during and after the election.
Growing up desi in Texas my existence was pulled between learning square dancing in elementary school and scurrying off to Nanna’s house to learn Arabic afterwards. The monologues I memorized as a teenager from my favorite Bollywood movies sat awkwardly among the Brooks and Dunn country tracks in my head. I never fully belonged to one part of my hyphenated identity and nor do I now. And so the state I loved so much, with its sprawling landscape, comfort foods, and friendly disposition also became my enemy. Where was I supposed to fit within its Republican values of religious guilt and intolerance?
In hushed conversations by boys in pastel shorts and fishing shirts, I heard racial slurs slung around without remorse and the women who dared to speak up to them called “annoying bitches”. Gross, misogynistic and racist memes saying immigrants should go back to “their country” got shared on my timeline by the same people who attended my high school. Did they know other people could see what they were sharing? Did we not receive the same education?
So I fled Texas for New York, hoping to find my political home.
As someone who left Texas to escape the ignorance that surrounded me, it was surprising for me to land in New York and find a different kind of intolerance.
I have seen many people talk about how much they want Trump out of office, while simultaneously denouncing young people’s “unrealistic” and “idealistic” hopes for this country.
Phone bank volunteers call potential voters from Bernie Sanders’ Colorado campaign office on 3 March. Photograph: Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images
As a 25-year-old burdened with student loans and part of the first generation to be worse off than our parents, I found it disheartening to see my generation’s politics dismissed by people with disproportionately less social and financial burdens than their younger, more diverse counterparts. I fled the rampant racism of the south, only to come face to face with the disconnected elitism on the east coast. Supposed liberals, laughing off ideas that would make the lives of the less wealthy tangibly better: a free healthcare system, a universal basic income, the erasure of student debt. These ideas are only radical if you don’t need them.
My generation is not lazy, idealistic or apolitical. We are the creatives pioneering on TikTok; the generation who need two jobs instead of one to get by. We work harder than our older counterparts to make rent and pay off student debt, while being dismissively referred to as “side-hustlers”. Yes, we are hustlers. But not by choice.
Young people are often blamed for their political apathy. We’re told we don’t show up to the polls because we don’t care. It is true that 40% of non-voters in 2016 were millennials, the reason for not showing up is not as cut and dried as apathy.
Young people are just as, if not more likely, to have contributed to a political campaign; contacted an elected official, or canvassed in the last year as almost every age group except seniors. My fellow young people are not uninformed or dispassionate; they are tired.
The candidates that energize us are mocked. When we backed Bernie Sanders, people called us radicals, bros, socialists. When the Squad – the group of new, radical, congresswomen of color who have so inspired millennials – was dismissed by Nancy Pelosi as only speaking for “their Twitter world”, it feels like a self-important finger saying “shh” to America’s youth.
It’s another act of silencing that makes me feel like a political foreigner, wherever I go.
US representatives, from left, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make up ‘the Squad’. Photograph: Erin Scott/Reuters
In April 2020, I moved back to the suburbs of Houston. In a global pandemic that forced us to become shut-ins, I wanted to leave the confines of my shoebox apartment and craved wide-open spaces.
Upon my return home, I found myself in the same position I was in a few years prior. My morning drives were punctuated by Trump signs, pinned to the 10ft-tall windows of grand, lavish estates. I know the people who inhabit these gated communities, tucked away behind perfectly manicured bushes. They are my neighbors, my parents’ friends, my friend’s parents.
These charming members of my community know my family is Muslim – the group of people so vilified by the president he put a ban on people from “Muslim countries” from coming into the US. They know my mother is a public school teacher – the group of people the secretary of education has abandoned and sent back to school amid a pandemic. They know I am a journalist, the group of people set upon by vigilantes and police alike, dubbed by the president as the “fake news media”. None of these facts matter to the people who continued to invite us over for summer barbecues or send me money every year on my birthday. Their ability to separate our background from their politics is a luxury and privilege I envied.
Envy soon planted seeds of resentment. Left and right, I cut ties with people I had known for years. I began to look at everyone that crossed my path with Trump-colored glasses. Is that a red ball cap? Is there a bald eagle in their profile picture? Cancelled. For four years, these thoughts consumed me. They still do.
A home bears signs supporting Donald Trump. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Just because I understand why my peers are experiencing political fatigue, doesn’t mean it’s easier to swallow. In fact, it makes me feel more lonely.
What terrifies me is not the rampant, full-throated Trump supporters in Texas, it’s the people around me who seem so fed up with politics, they seem not to care about anything at all.
It’s like it’s contagious. One night, after being rebuffed by a friend who didn’t want to hear me complaining about compromised mail voting any more, I caught it, too.
“Dude, we get it. You care about politics and want to change the world. Can we just watch a movie now?” my friend had said. This was the very friend that spent her weekends nannying other people’s children to pay down the student loans she was drowning in. How could she not care?
I had come to embody the social justice warrior trope not just to older people, but to my peers as well. Even though we belonged to the group of people that could benefit the most from political change, I felt like my friends had drunk the political Kool-Aid. For the next few weeks, I barely read the news. I didn’t have the energy. What was the point? I accepted the fact that Trump may very well be re-elected. For my mental health and sanity, I chose to make peace with that reality.
I have a deep respect for the Greta Thunbergs and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world. I hope to fight alongside them in some capacity. But I often wonder if these warriors take breaks and lay down their armor if even just for a few hours to stare at a blank wall or go for a walk. How do they keep pushing on when doors are slammed in their face?
I am hoping to get there soon – especially as the news has become unavoidable again. This past month, even my politically disinterested friends felt the tremors from the earthquake of events that shook the nation. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. The intimate details of Trump’s taxes were finally revealed, showing a president who pays less in tax than me. And in the greatest plot twist of this never-ending, dystopian horror film in which we all live, Trump and a slew of other Republicans caught the very virus they spent months playing down.
The cynic in me knows these will be mere blips on the timeline of this presidency. And the country will suffer from amnesia as it heads to the polls, or when it chooses to stay home instead.
But in the meantime, I refuse to adopt a defeatist attitude. I am back to being vocal and passionate. Sometimes it’s just online. Sometimes I just share a post. I might not be screaming “the end is near” in the town square like the local lunatic any more, but I am having conversations with people if and when they are willing.
Recently a guy who I went to high school with – a solid red, air-force Texan - responded to a post I put on my Facebook.
“Apparently 12 years of tuition-free public schooling is not considered socialism. But add four more years and suddenly it’s a communist plot,” the post read.
“Holy shit … That’s actually a really good point,” he responded.
It might sound small, but it made me happy to know I can change the way someone I know looks at an issue, to make them look outside of the scope of their usual outlets. And if that’s all I can achieve, I can sleep at night.


theguardian--2020-10-15--How Black Lives Matter reshaped the race for Los Angeles’ top prosecutor

The race for top prosecutor in Los Angeles has become one of the most important criminal justice elections in the US this year , with Black Lives Matter activists pushing the contest to the forefront of national debates on racist policing and incarceration .
Jackie Lacey , the first woman and first African American to serve as LA district attorney , is facing a tough challenge from George Gascón , a former San Francisco district attorney who has positioned himself as a progressive candidate dedicated to police accountability and reducing the prison population .
The election comes as nationwide protests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ highlighted the role of district attorneys as some of the most influential and least accountable players in America ’ s criminal justice system .
And the top prosecutor job in LA oversees the country ’ s largest local prosecutor ’ s office , funneling defendants into the world ’ s largest jail system .
The race has drawn interest from across the country , with police groups pouring millions into Lacey ’ s campaign , and celebrities , tech billionaires and political heavyweights such as Bernie Sanders throwing their support behind Gascón .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ stake with the presidential race , but what affects us most on a daily basis is the DA , ” said Melina Abdullah , co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA .
“ The DA determines what crimes are prosecuted , what crimes go unenforced … and whether we will continue to lock up Black and brown people with reckless abandon.
” A 63-year-old south LA native , Lacey joined the district attorney ’ s office as deputy in 1986 .
She wasn ’ t thinking about the power of prosecutors at the time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was “ just looking for a better job ” .
During her first year on the job , her father was shot in his front yard in the city ’ s Crenshaw district .
He survived , but the case went unsolved and it changed the Lacey family .
“ We became much more aware , much more fearful , ” she said .
Lacey said the shooting shaped her view on victims ’ rights , and helped motivate her in court as she rose up in the ranks .
She was elected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ becoming the first Black woman to take the lead of the agency of 1,000 lawyers .
Lacey quickly faced criticism from south LA residents and a Black Lives Matter movement that was growing in national prominence , and eventually wider backlash from liberal groups who viewed her approach as overly punitive .
They charged she had sent 23 people to death row as prosecutor , more than any other county in the US in recent years .
All but one were people of color .
She has also done little to address the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ noted , with LA locking up more people per capita than the majority of California counties .
While she has made some progress on alternatives to incarceration , a recent study suggested that thousands in jail with mental illness could have been given services instead .
And most people in jail are Black and brown .
Lacey has scoffed at the idea of broadly scaling back prosecutions : “ Word gets around with the predators and with the criminal community that you can get away with stuff , and they will flock to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to deteriorate , ” she told the Guardian .
She also warned about the alleged risks of releasing people convicted of serious offenses , despite research showing that people serving life sentences rarely re-offend if they are granted parole .
And she has fought for the right to continue prosecuting children under the age of 12 , and to continue trying youth as adults , arguing heinous offenses merit it .
Among Lacey ’ s biggest flaws , critics say , has been her failure to rein in police violence , charging just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her eight years in office .
She declined to prosecute officers who were caught on camera escalating encounters , officers who had fired their weapons at unarmed civilians , and even a case where the LA police chief had publicly called for charges .
Officers have killed hundreds of people during her tenure .
For the past three years , activists and family members of victims of police shootings , largely Black and Latino , have protested outside of Lacey ’ s downtown office every week .
“ She really left us no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organized the first protest in 2017 after Lacey refused to meet with Black Lives Matter LA .
“ Police go out and murder people who are running away and Jackie Lacey protects them , ” said Fouzia Almarou .
Her son was killed by Gardena police while fleeing in 2018 , in a shooting Lacey deemed justified self defense .
Lacey has repeatedly argued that the law gives officers wide latitude , and that she doesn ’ t want to bring a case she would lose .
She told the Guardian she believed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ The truth of the matter is when somebody doesn ’ t want to be arrested and they start fighting , all bets are off , because one of these folks is going to have to take control of the situation , ” she said .
Many of the activists who ’ ve been fighting Lacey have thrown their weight behind her contender , George Gascón .
Gascón immigrated from Cuba at age 13 , and grew up in Cudahy in south LA , where he said he struggled to learn English @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ When we saw the sheriff ’ s department as kids , we run the other way , ” he told the Guardian about his childhood years .
Gascón became a Los Angeles Police Department patrol officer , was promoted to assistant chief and eventually headed a police department in Arizona and then San Francisco .
In 2011 , he became the city ’ s first Latino district attorney .
Gascón fought bitter battles with law enforcement groups once he pushed to reduce punishments for low-level offenses and investigated racism in the police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like Lacey , he refused to prosecute police shootings , even amid intense public outrage .
In 2018 , Gascón cleared five officers who were caught on video shooting Mario Woods , a young man who held a knife but did not appear to pose any threat to the officers .
“ I voted for Gascón and I ’ ve lived to regret that , ” said Gwen Woods , Mario ’ s mother .
“ He didn ’ t have a spine to stand up for what was right and he allowed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off.
” Unlike Lacey , however , the San Francisco district attorney did pursue changes to the law , arguing that it should be easier to prosecute : “ I was very open about my frustration and saying that the shootings were unnecessary , but under the law at the time , we could not go any further.
” He successfully lobbied for a state law that would allow prosecution of officers who kill when force is “ unnecessary ” .
If the policy had been in place when Woods was killed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he told the Guardian : “ If I have any regrets , it ’ s that I didn ’ t campaign sooner to change the law.
” Gascón has pledged to reopen some cases of police killings in LA and has campaigned on a number of other major criminal justice reforms .
“ We can see incarceration and safety are not necessarily synonymous , and the fact that this is becoming more obvious to many , it ’ s very , very energizing to me , ” Gascón said .
He said his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in prison when they are up for parole , has pledged not to transfer teens to adult court , won ’ t pursue the death penalty , and has vowed to abandon “ gang enhancements ” , which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways .
Gascón has racked up a wide range of endorsements , from LA ’ s mayor , the California governor , vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris , and musician John Legend .
The LA public defenders ’ union , took the rare step of supporting his candidacy because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s approach as so punitive and regressive that it was worth campaigning for a challenger .
“ [ Lacey ] continues the march from slavery to mass incarceration with her policies , ” said Alisa Blair , a deputy public defender , who volunteered on the Gascón campaign ’ s policy committee .
“ Her entire legacy has been one of very archaic law and order punishment.
” Myesha Lopez , whose father was killed by LA sheriff ’ s deputies , said she considered a vote for Gascón as a vote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t have confidence in either : “ The only hope with him is that there ’ s enough public pressure to make him accountable .
Either way , Jackie Lacey needs to go.
” Abdullah , too , said she was hesitant to personally endorse Gascón , noting that the prosecutor ’ s office will remain a part of an unjust system , and the nature of the job means she will be protesting him if he ’ s elected : “ He knows that , ” she said , adding that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to meet with her and other families of those killed by police .
Asked if she had any regrets about her handling of police killings , Lacey said no , but then later clarified : “ I do wish I had spent more time with Black Lives Matter LA just trying to figure this out , because I do in my heart of hearts , feel we ’ re on the same side .
”

The race for top prosecutor in Los Angeles has become one of the most important criminal justice elections in the US this year, with Black Lives Matter activists pushing the contest to the forefront of national debates on racist policing and incarceration.
Jackie Lacey, the first woman and first African American to serve as LA district attorney, is facing a tough challenge from George Gascón, a former San Francisco district attorney who has positioned himself as a progressive candidate dedicated to police accountability and reducing the prison population.
George Gascón announces his intention to enter the Los Angeles district attorney race. Photograph: Allison Zaucha/The New York Time/eyevine
The election comes as nationwide protests over police killings and racial inequality have highlighted the role of district attorneys as some of the most influential and least accountable players in America’s criminal justice system. And the top prosecutor job in LA oversees the country’s largest local prosecutor’s office, funneling defendants into the world’s largest jail system.
Quick Guide Jackie Lacey v George Gascón: the key issues Show Jackie Lacey Death penalty: sent 23 people to death row
Gang enhancements: supports enhanced sentencing based on alleged gang ties
Police killings: does not support stricter laws to allow prosecution of officer
Juvenile prosecution: transfers children to adult court in select cases
Incarceration: opposed reforms to reduce punishments for low-level offenses George Gascón Death penalty: opposes, would not send people to death row
Gang enhancements: would not pursue enhancements, due to discriminatory databases
Police killings: lobbied for changes to law, and has pledged to reopen LA cases
Juvenile prosecution: would not prosecute children as adult
Incarceration: pushed for less harsh punishments, supports reduced incarceration Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback.
The race has drawn interest from across the country, with police groups pouring millions into Lacey’s campaign, and celebrities, tech billionaires and political heavyweights such as Bernie Sanders throwing their support behind Gascón.
“Everyone understands what’s at stake with the presidential race, but what affects us most on a daily basis is the DA,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA. “The DA determines what crimes are prosecuted, what crimes go unenforced … and whether we will continue to lock up Black and brown people with reckless abandon.”
Jackie Lacey’s historic win, followed by protests
A 63-year-old south LA native, Lacey joined the district attorney’s office as deputy in 1986. She wasn’t thinking about the power of prosecutors at the time, she told the Guardian, she was “just looking for a better job”.
During her first year on the job, her father was shot in his front yard in the city’s Crenshaw district. He survived, but the case went unsolved and it changed the Lacey family. “We became much more aware, much more fearful,” she said.
Jackie Lacey was elected LA district attorney in a historic 2012 vote. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP
Lacey said the shooting shaped her view on victims’ rights, and helped motivate her in court as she rose up in the ranks. She was elected in a historic vote in 2012, becoming the first Black woman to take the lead of the agency of 1,000 lawyers.
Lacey quickly faced criticism from south LA residents and a Black Lives Matter movement that was growing in national prominence, and eventually wider backlash from liberal groups who viewed her approach as overly punitive.
They charged she had sent 23 people to death row as prosecutor, more than any other county in the US in recent years. All but one were people of color.
She has also done little to address the high incarceration rates of Angelenos, they noted, with LA locking up more people per capita than the majority of California counties. While she has made some progress on alternatives to incarceration, a recent study suggested that thousands in jail with mental illness could have been given services instead. And most people in jail are Black and brown.
Lacey has scoffed at the idea of broadly scaling back prosecutions: “Word gets around with the predators and with the criminal community that you can get away with stuff, and they will flock to your city … I want LA not to deteriorate,” she told the Guardian.
She also warned about the alleged risks of releasing people convicted of serious offenses, despite research showing that people serving life sentences rarely reoffend if they are granted parole. And she has fought for the right to continue prosecuting children under the age of 12, and to continue trying youth as adults, arguing heinous offenses merit it.
Among Lacey’s biggest flaws, critics say, has been her failure to rein in police violence, charging just one officer for an on-duty killing in her eight years in office. She declined to prosecute officers who were caught on camera escalating encounters, officers who had fired their weapons at unarmed civilians, and even a case where the LA police chief had publicly called for charges. Officers have killed hundreds of people during her tenure.
A banner posted by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles calls for Jackie Lacey’s ouster. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP
For the past three years, activists and family members of victims of police shootings, largely Black and Latino, have protested outside of Lacey’s downtown office every week.
“She really left us no choice,” said Abdullah, who organized the first protest in 2017 after Lacey refused to meet with Black Lives Matter LA.
“Police go out and murder people who are running away and Jackie Lacey protects them,” said Fouzia Almarou. Her son was killed by Gardena police while fleeing in 2018, in a shooting Lacey deemed justified self-defense.
Lacey has repeatedly argued that the law gives officers wide latitude, and that she doesn’t want to bring a case she would lose. She told the Guardian she believed existing laws to be “appropriate”. “The truth of the matter is when somebody doesn’t want to be arrested and they start fighting, all bets are off, because one of these folks is going to have to take control of the situation,” she said.
George Gascón’s enemies: police and protesters
Many of the activists who have been fighting Lacey have thrown their weight behind her opponent, George Gascón.
Gascón immigrated from Cuba at age 13, and grew up in Cudahy in south LA, where he said he struggled to learn English and eventually dropped out of school. “When we saw the sheriff’s department as kids, we run the other way,” he told the Guardian about his childhood years.
Gascón became a Los Angeles police department patrol officer, was promoted to assistant chief and eventually headed a police department in Arizona and then San Francisco. In 2011, he became the city’s first Latino district attorney.
Gascón fought bitter battles with law enforcement groups once he pushed to reduce punishments for low-level offenses and investigated racism in the police department he used to lead.
But like Lacey, he refused to prosecute police shootings, even amid intense public outrage. In 2018, Gascón cleared five officers who were caught on video shooting Mario Woods, a young man who held a knife but did not appear to pose any threat to the officers. “I voted for Gascón and I’ve lived to regret that,” said Gwen Woods, Mario’s mother. “He didn’t have a spine to stand up for what was right and he allowed the executioners of my child to get off.”
George Gascón became San Francisco’s first Latino district attorney in 2011. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Unlike Lacey, however, the San Francisco district attorney did pursue changes to the law, arguing that it should be easier to prosecute: “I was very open about my frustration and saying that the shootings were unnecessary, but under the law at the time, we could not go any further.”
He successfully lobbied for a state law that would allow prosecution of officers who kill when force is “unnecessary”. If the policy had been in place when Woods was killed, he would have filed criminal charges, he told the Guardian: “If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t campaign sooner to change the law.”
Gascón has pledged to reopen some cases of police killings in LA and has campaigned on a number of other major criminal justice reforms.
“We can see incarceration and safety are not necessarily synonymous, and the fact that this is becoming more obvious to many, it’s very, very energizing to me,” Gascón said.
He said his office would not fight to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, has pledged not to transfer teens to adult court, won’t pursue the death penalty, and has vowed to abandon “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
The limits of ‘progressive’ district attorneys
Gascón has racked up a wide range of endorsements, from LA’s mayor, the California governor, vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and musician John Legend.
The LA public defenders’ union, took the rare step of supporting his candidacy because, lawyers said, they viewed Lacey’s approach as so punitive and regressive that it was worth campaigning for a challenger.
“[Lacey] continues the march from slavery to mass incarceration with her policies,” said Alisa Blair, a deputy public defender, who volunteered on the Gascón campaign’s policy committee. “Her entire legacy has been one of very archaic law-and-order punishment.”
Myesha Lopez, whose father was killed by LA sheriff’s deputies, said she considered a vote for Gascón as a vote against Lacey – and that she didn’t have confidence in either: “The only hope with him is that there’s enough public pressure to make him accountable. Either way, Jackie Lacey needs to go.”
Melina Abdullah speaks during a Black Lives Matter protest in August. Photograph: Richard Vogel/AP
Abdullah, too, said she was hesitant to personally endorse Gascón, noting that the prosecutor’s office will remain a part of an unjust system, and the nature of the job means she will be protesting against him if he’s elected: “He knows that,” she said, adding that she did appreciate that he was willing to meet with her and other families of those killed by police.
Asked if she had any regrets about her handling of police killings, Lacey said no, but then later clarified: “I do wish I had spent more time with Black Lives Matter LA just trying to figure this out, because I do in my heart of hearts feel we’re on the same side.”


theguardian--2020-10-15--US election: what a Biden or Trump victory could mean for Britain

The British government has a long history of misreading America – from Lord Palmerston expecting the Confederacy to survive the civil war , to Ernie Bevin being shocked that the US would not pay the UK ’ s postwar bills , to Tony Blair believing in 2003 that he could ride the US military tiger in Iraq and create a democracy .
Few serving or former British diplomats are confidently predicting the outcome of this November ’ s presidential election , or even whether an increasingly erratic Donald Trump will accept the result as legitimate .
The collective delusion about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now and polling day , two fears will stalk the Foreign Office .
The first is of a late October surprise – a Trump military showstopper in the Middle East or the South China Sea , designed to convulse America .
The betting is that caution will prevail .
“ Trump talks very tough , but he has a habit of not following through ” said Peter Ricketts , the former UK national security adviser .
The second is of a November impasse – a constitutional crisis as Trump disputes the result .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ It is noticeable that Trump ’ s most consistent message this election is that it is rigged.
” Kim Darroch , the former UK ambassador to Washington and an early Trump sceptic , notes all the preparations being made for a challenge in the supreme court .
All observers agree that if the US can reach a consensus on the outcome , it will be the most consequential election for American foreign policy since 1940 .
The implications , in turn , for the UK and for the kind of government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lord Ricketts points out that the UK is already at a historic turning point .
“ Put together Brexit , the return of muscular nationalism and the pandemic , you have an extraordinarily important moment , probably the biggest strategic moment facing the UK since the war .
The US election only adds to that.
” The outcome will throw up a particularly acute personal dilemma for Johnson .
He knows Trump is wildly unpopular with the British electorate .
The latest Pew research shows that only 19 % of Britons have confidence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Johnson can reassure his party that rule-breaking populists still have a winning appeal for those who feel betrayed by mainstream politics .
What have been described as “ counter-order movements ” will have shown they have not run out of steam .
Johnson has invested heavily in his relationship with Jared Kushner , the president ’ s son-in-law , so much so that , according to Lord Darroch , Johnson is the leader with the warmest personal relationship with the Trump family .
Sir Ivan Rogers , the former British ambassador to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drawn to Trump .
“ He is quite Trumpite in method ; he was always fascinated by Trump and his strategy to take the other side by surprise and destabilise it , ” he said .
So there are personal and political advantages for Johnson in four more years of Trump , and Downing Street may have been complacently slow to get alongside Trump ’ s opponent , Joe Biden .
But potentially the single biggest consequence of the election in the short term will be for Britain ’ s relations with Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might feel forced to wait until after the US election to decide how to jump on Brexit – whether to go for the clean break advocated by Dominic Cummings or the slow regulatory dealignment by stealth now favoured by Michael Gove .
Paris is clearly happy to keep Johnson waiting until he feels the cold winds of a Biden victory coming across the Atlantic .
Lisa Nandy , the shadow foreign secretary , has for some time been warning that whatever the frustrations with Trump , Biden would not be plain sailing for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sure the relationship would get less complicated .
There is a view amongst some – not , perhaps , amongst those necessarily closest to Biden , but amongst the new younger Democratic generation – that Britain has absented itself from a world role by stepping outside the EU and that , in as far as relations with Europe are critical , it is France and Germany who are the key partners and Asia is more of a preoccupation than Europe anyway , ” Nandy said .
Some of the older generation close to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a senior diplomat in the Bush and Clinton administrations , share that criticism of Brexit .
“ Brexit is going to hurt the UK , ” Burns said .
“ It is going to diminish the UK ’ s standing in the world , and I say that as someone who has deeply supported the special relationship for several decades.
” Burns recalled that as assistant secretary of state , “ every morning I would ring John Sawers , then political director at the Foreign Office , or he would ring me .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ trust me .
He could make us understand Brussels and translate Brussels ’ views back to us .
Britain played that kind of middle connecting role that felt important to us.
” He added : “ Britain will no longer be able to be the great connector between the EU and the US as it was over the past several decades.
” He named Germany , owing to its size , and Ireland , as a connector country , as the two countries that Biden Democrats would naturally favour .
Darroch agrees .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ will be to repair the relationship with Europe .
That will give us less clout , ” he said .
Johnson ’ s perceived threat to tear up the Good Friday agreement in an effort to secure the Brexit he seeks reduced that clout further in Congress .
“ A lot of us in the US prize the relationship with the EU , ” said Burns .
“ I do not believe the EU is a competitor to the US , as President Trump does , but I see instead the EU as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , climate change , the global economy.
” That does not mean the UK diplomatic machine could not deftly adapt to Biden .
Brian Wilson , a Foreign Office minister in 2000 , recalls : “ These moments of transition in the Foreign Office are a sight to behold .
It ’ s a case of ‘ the king is dead , long live the king ’ .
The only thing that matters is to get in there first.
” Jeremy Greenstock , the former UK ambassador to the UN , suggests “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” .
Biden is a family man shaped by his Catholicism , while Johnson is remembered by aides to Barack Obama for claiming Obama opposed Brexit because he was Kenyan .
But the predominant initial emotion for UK diplomats if Biden wins will be relief .
“ The UK Foreign Office has not seemed comfortable with Pompeo or Pence , or with the turnover of staff , ” said Greenstock .
“ Biden would hold out the promise of professionalism.
” Moreover , with Biden , alliances once again become “ foundational ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US ambassador to the UN , puts it .
Calls to the UK foreign secretary ’ s private office before the US acts will be restored .
A low point under Trump came 18 months ago with the pullout from Syria and abandonment of the Syrian Kurds without a call to Britain .
That shook the Foreign Office and the intelligence services .
The importance of alliances as a route to leverage is at heart of Biden ’ s support for a D10 , an expanded G7 of democracies – an idea that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Scowcroft Center in 2014 and is now frequently mentioned by Dominic Raab , the UK foreign secretary , as a possible new intelligence network .
The primacy of liberal alliances is also symbolised in Biden ’ s plan for a “ summit of the democracies ” , an idea that is more developed than some realise .
Power said the summit would focus on the fight against corruption , a theme of the UK ’ s last G7 chairmanship under David Cameron .
Theresa May and Boris Johnson ’ s administrations dropped this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cause some problems .
Power singled out the UK as “ a venue where oligarchs have planted their money and the rules are permissive ” .
But Britain , chairing the G7 next year , should be able to absorb this agenda .
Biden would at some point offer to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and cautiously try to create the virtuous circle in relations with Tehran that European powers have favoured .
Above all , Britain ’ s chairmanship of the UN climate change conference Cop26 becomes infinitely easier with a Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Paris climate change treaty – it is legally due to leave on 4 November – badly needed terrain will have been created in which China and the US can cooperate as well as compete .
That will create a balance in US-China relations that Trump ’ s decoupling agenda lacks .
True , the UK has been on its own journey about China , shocked by the takeover of Hong Kong , dispensing with the belief that engagement through trade will liberalise China , and bowing to Washington ’ s assessment of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 5G and its reluctance to open its markets .
But Raab , on a visit to the US last month , kept stressing : “ If you are going to shift the dial on climate change , China has got to be part of it.
” The trick is to construct a firewall between the issues on which positive engagement with the Chinese system will be beneficial , and those that justify rivalry .
Greenstock counsels against thinking that Biden could simply restore American hegemony , or even wish to try to do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States global leadership is not a passing shock created by the Trump presidency or coronavirus .
It is instead the product of forces that have been developing for many decades .
American isolationism is a reaction in the US electorate to globalisation , and that is not going to go away .
Trade and communications everywhere have globalised , but politics has localised , ” he said .
By contrast , a steroid-infused Trump victory achieved against the odds would utterly change the calculus , by revealing something about America .
“ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not so much be four more years of Trump but that America voted for the man knowing what he was like , ” said Greenstock .
“ Previously they took a chance on him .
Voting for him again , knowing how he behaves , says something much more long-term and strategic about American polity .
That is what worries me.
” Inevitably , this scenario sends a chill through diplomats as they imagine the wider price the UK might pay for the friendship of Trump , unchained and vindicated , in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of parenthesis , hold out any hope for a more reflective , emollient or statesmanlike second term .
“ I fear it will be Trump in spades rather than Trump minus , ” said Ricketts .
This is also the view of Brett McGurk , the US diplomat who led the fight under Obama and Trump against Islamic State .
“ No diplomat in the Trump administration can speak with authority across the table with a counterpart , whether a friend , adversary , competitor , because there is no real policy and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and everybody knows it .
And that makes the basic blocking and tackling – the fundamentals of diplomacy – very hard .
The truth is that a lot of these problems are not being managed at all.
” Sawers , the former head of MI6 , has described the damage that Trump ’ s style of leadership has already wrought to the UK diplomatic radar system .
“ The first instinct of the UK government is to work out the US position on any one subject and operate from there , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Trump and the stabilising influence we have had for the last 70 years will not be there.
” The British lodestar has gone missing .
The sense of anxiety only grows when British diplomats privately speculate on how Trump might handle specific files in his second term .
Take Iran .
The transatlantic tensions over the nuclear deal have been managed ever since Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 .
Trump turned to a course of maximum economic pressure designed to bankrupt Iran , so forcing the supreme leader , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ negotiating table or out of power in a revolution .
By contrast , France , Germany and the UK have argued that engagement can work .
Mike Pompeo , Trump ’ s secretary of state , dismisses the Europeans ’ faith in the deal as almost religious , and has always targeted the UK as the weak link , the country most likely to succumb to US pressure to quit the deal – something that would represent a symbolic British break with European diplomacy .
That pressure would only increase in a second @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , according to Ricketts , that Johnson would have the means to continue the resistance .
In extremis , sanctions – Trump ’ s weapon of choice – will be deployed , but this time against the UK .
The next nightmare is the future of Nato .
Trump is not moved emotionally by the defence of Europe , only by the financial cost to the US .
The memoir of Trump ’ s former national security adviser John Bolton describes how close Trump came to announcing US withdrawal from Nato and Europe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in August : “ I think Nato is at risk in a second Trump term .
I don ’ t think people in Europe fully realise that.
” If populism triumphs in the US , and Johnson has Trump back in office cheering him on , Johnson may feel dragooned into another of Trump ’ s likely second-term projects : the destruction of the European Union project .
Britain ’ s role as the explainer , the bridge across the Atlantic , would be finished .
In return for the UK ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phenomenal trade deal ” that Johnson craves to show Brexit ’ s tangible benefits .
But perhaps the biggest risk to the UK – whatever the outcome of the election – is the slow re-emergence of America ’ s isolationist impulse , re-expressed in Trump ’ s America First stance .
Biden has forsaken forever wars and demands a new integration of foreign and domestic policy , so that the needs of US blue-collar workers are part of US state department thinking .
As far back as February 1939 , a member of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senator Arthur Vandenberg , eloquently made the case for isolationism .
“ I still thank God for two insulating oceans and even though they be foreshortened they are still our supreme benediction , if they be widely and prudently used.
” Whatever America ’ s sympathies and natural emotions , he wrote , America could not be the protector of victims of outrage all around .
Persuading America to engage with at least some of these outrages may be the UK ’ s biggest challenge over the next four years .

The British government has a long history of misreading America – from Lord Palmerston expecting the Confederacy to survive the civil war, to Ernie Bevin being shocked that the US would not pay the UK’s postwar bills, to Tony Blair believing in 2003 that he could ride the US military tiger in Iraq and create a democracy.
Few serving or former British diplomats are confidently predicting the outcome of this November’s presidential election, or even whether an increasingly erratic Donald Trump will accept the result as legitimate. The collective delusion about the 2016 election hangs heavy.
Between now and polling day, two fears will stalk the Foreign Office. The first is of a late October surprise – a Trump military showstopper in the Middle East or the South China Sea, designed to convulse America. The betting is that caution will prevail. “Trump talks very tough, but he has a habit of not following through” said Peter Ricketts, the former UK national security adviser.
The second is of a November impasse – a constitutional crisis as Trump disputes the result. One former Foreign Office staff member said: “It is noticeable that Trump’s most consistent message this election is that it is rigged.” Kim Darroch, the former UK ambassador to Washington and an early Trump sceptic, notes all the preparations being made for a challenge in the supreme court.
All observers agree that if the US can reach a consensus on the outcome, it will be the most consequential election for American foreign policy since 1940. The implications, in turn, for the UK and for the kind of government Boris Johnson will lead are enormous.
Lord Ricketts points out that the UK is already at a historic turning point. “Put together Brexit, the return of muscular nationalism and the pandemic, you have an extraordinarily important moment, probably the biggest strategic moment facing the UK since the war. The US election only adds to that.”
The outcome will throw up a particularly acute personal dilemma for Johnson. He knows Trump is wildly unpopular with the British electorate. The latest Pew research shows that only 19% of Britons have confidence in Trump.
Yet if Trump wins, Johnson can reassure his party that rule-breaking populists still have a winning appeal for those who feel betrayed by mainstream politics. What have been described as “counter-order movements” will have shown they have not run out of steam.
Donald Trump supporters at a rally in Orlando, Florida. Photograph: John Raoux/AP
Johnson has invested heavily in his relationship with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, so much so that, according to Lord Darroch, Johnson is the leader with the warmest personal relationship with the Trump family.
Sir Ivan Rogers, the former British ambassador to the EU, also senses Johnson is drawn to Trump. “He is quite Trumpite in method; he was always fascinated by Trump and his strategy to take the other side by surprise and destabilise it,” he said. So there are personal and political advantages for Johnson in four more years of Trump, and Downing Street may have been complacently slow to get alongside Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden.
But potentially the single biggest consequence of the election in the short term will be for Britain’s relations with Europe. Some former UK diplomats think Johnson might feel forced to wait until after the US election to decide how to jump on Brexit – whether to go for the clean break advocated by Dominic Cummings or the slow regulatory dealignment by stealth now favoured by Michael Gove. Paris is clearly happy to keep Johnson waiting until he feels the cold winds of a Biden victory coming across the Atlantic.
Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, has for some time been warning that whatever the frustrations with Trump, Biden would not be plain sailing for the UK. “I am not sure the relationship would get less complicated. There is a view amongst some – not, perhaps, amongst those necessarily closest to Biden, but amongst the new younger Democratic generation – that Britain has absented itself from a world role by stepping outside the EU and that, in as far as relations with Europe are critical, it is France and Germany who are the key partners and Asia is more of a preoccupation than Europe anyway,” Nandy said.
Some of the older generation close to Biden, such as Nicholas Burns, a senior diplomat in the Bush and Clinton administrations, share that criticism of Brexit. “Brexit is going to hurt the UK,” Burns said. “It is going to diminish the UK’s standing in the world, and I say that as someone who has deeply supported the special relationship for several decades.”
Burns recalled that as assistant secretary of state, “every morning I would ring John Sawers, then political director at the Foreign Office, or he would ring me. I could trust him. He could trust me. He could make us understand Brussels and translate Brussels’ views back to us. Britain played that kind of middle connecting role that felt important to us.”
He added: “Britain will no longer be able to be the great connector between the EU and the US as it was over the past several decades.” He named Germany, owing to its size, and Ireland, as a connector country, as the two countries that Biden Democrats would naturally favour.
Darroch agrees. “One of Biden’s priorities will be to repair the relationship with Europe. That will give us less clout,” he said.
Angela Merkel and Donald Trump at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017. Photograph: Lukas Barth/EPA
Johnson’s perceived threat to tear up the Good Friday agreement in an effort to secure the Brexit he seeks reduced that clout further in Congress. “A lot of us in the US prize the relationship with the EU,” said Burns. “I do not believe the EU is a competitor to the US, as President Trump does, but I see instead the EU as perhaps our greatest partner on human rights, climate change, the global economy.”
That does not mean the UK diplomatic machine could not deftly adapt to Biden. Brian Wilson, a Foreign Office minister in 2000, recalls: “These moments of transition in the Foreign Office are a sight to behold. It’s a case of ‘the king is dead, long live the king’. The only thing that matters is to get in there first.”
Jeremy Greenstock, the former UK ambassador to the UN, suggests “any trust will have to be earned”. Biden is a family man shaped by his Catholicism, while Johnson is remembered by aides to Barack Obama for claiming Obama opposed Brexit because he was Kenyan.
But the predominant initial emotion for UK diplomats if Biden wins will be relief. “The UK Foreign Office has not seemed comfortable with Pompeo or Pence, or with the turnover of staff,” said Greenstock. “Biden would hold out the promise of professionalism.”
Moreover, with Biden, alliances once again become “foundational”, as Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the UN, puts it. Calls to the UK foreign secretary’s private office before the US acts will be restored. A low point under Trump came 18 months ago with the pullout from Syria and abandonment of the Syrian Kurds without a call to Britain. That shook the Foreign Office and the intelligence services.
The importance of alliances as a route to leverage is at heart of Biden’s support for a D10, an expanded G7 of democracies – an idea that was first developed by Washington’s Scowcroft Center in 2014 and is now frequently mentioned by Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, as a possible new intelligence network.
The primacy of liberal alliances is also symbolised in Biden’s plan for a “summit of the democracies”, an idea that is more developed than some realise. Power said the summit would focus on the fight against corruption, a theme of the UK’s last G7 chairmanship under David Cameron. Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s administrations dropped this ball, and the Biden agenda could cause some problems.
Power singled out the UK as “a venue where oligarchs have planted their money and the rules are permissive”. But Britain, chairing the G7 next year, should be able to absorb this agenda.
Joe Biden at a campaign event in Duluth, Minnesota, in September. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Biden would at some point offer to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and cautiously try to create the virtuous circle in relations with Tehran that European powers have favoured.
Above all, Britain’s chairmanship of the UN climate change conference Cop26 becomes infinitely easier with a Biden White House. If the US rejoins the Paris climate change treaty – it is legally due to leave on 4 November – badly needed terrain will have been created in which China and the US can cooperate as well as compete. That will create a balance in US-China relations that Trump’s decoupling agenda lacks.
True, the UK has been on its own journey about China, shocked by the takeover of Hong Kong, dispensing with the belief that engagement through trade will liberalise China, and bowing to Washington’s assessment of the threat posed by Chinese control of 5G and its reluctance to open its markets.
But Raab, on a visit to the US last month, kept stressing: “If you are going to shift the dial on climate change, China has got to be part of it.” The trick is to construct a firewall between the issues on which positive engagement with the Chinese system will be beneficial, and those that justify rivalry.
Greenstock counsels against thinking that Biden could simply restore American hegemony, or even wish to try to do so. “This crisis in United States global leadership is not a passing shock created by the Trump presidency or coronavirus. It is instead the product of forces that have been developing for many decades. American isolationism is a reaction in the US electorate to globalisation, and that is not going to go away. Trade and communications everywhere have globalised, but politics has localised,” he said.
Long queues on the first day of early voting in Texas. Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma/Rex/Shutterstock
By contrast, a steroid-infused Trump victory achieved against the odds would utterly change the calculus, by revealing something about America. “The real tragedy of a Trump re-election would not so much be four more years of Trump but that America voted for the man knowing what he was like,” said Greenstock. “Previously they took a chance on him. Voting for him again, knowing how he behaves, says something much more long-term and strategic about American polity. That is what worries me.”
Inevitably, this scenario sends a chill through diplomats as they imagine the wider price the UK might pay for the friendship of Trump, unchained and vindicated, in a second term. Few, by way of parenthesis, hold out any hope for a more reflective, emollient or statesmanlike second term. “I fear it will be Trump in spades rather than Trump minus,” said Ricketts.
This is also the view of Brett McGurk, the US diplomat who led the fight under Obama and Trump against Islamic State. “No diplomat in the Trump administration can speak with authority across the table with a counterpart, whether a friend, adversary, competitor, because there is no real policy and the president just shifts on a dime and everybody knows it. And that makes the basic blocking and tackling – the fundamentals of diplomacy – very hard. The truth is that a lot of these problems are not being managed at all.”
Sawers, the former head of MI6, has described the damage that Trump’s style of leadership has already wrought to the UK diplomatic radar system. “The first instinct of the UK government is to work out the US position on any one subject and operate from there,” he has explained. “Four more years of Trump and the stabilising influence we have had for the last 70 years will not be there.” The British lodestar has gone missing.
The sense of anxiety only grows when British diplomats privately speculate on how Trump might handle specific files in his second term. Take Iran. The transatlantic tensions over the nuclear deal have been managed ever since Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018. Trump turned to a course of maximum economic pressure designed to bankrupt Iran, so forcing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, back to the negotiating table or out of power in a revolution. By contrast, France, Germany and the UK have argued that engagement can work.
Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, dismisses the Europeans’ faith in the deal as almost religious, and has always targeted the UK as the weak link, the country most likely to succumb to US pressure to quit the deal – something that would represent a symbolic British break with European diplomacy. That pressure would only increase in a second term, and there is no guarantee, according to Ricketts, that Johnson would have the means to continue the resistance. In extremis, sanctions – Trump’s weapon of choice – will be deployed, but this time against the UK.
Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, speaks to Donald Trump after a photocall at a Nato leaders’ meeting in December last year. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP
The next nightmare is the future of Nato. Trump is not moved emotionally by the defence of Europe, only by the financial cost to the US. The memoir of Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton describes how close Trump came to announcing US withdrawal from Nato and Europe. Bolton told the Aspen security conference in August: “I think Nato is at risk in a second Trump term. I don’t think people in Europe fully realise that.”
If populism triumphs in the US, and Johnson has Trump back in office cheering him on, Johnson may feel dragooned into another of Trump’s likely second-term projects: the destruction of the European Union project. Britain’s role as the explainer, the bridge across the Atlantic, would be finished. In return for the UK’s help, Trump could deliver the “phenomenal trade deal” that Johnson craves to show Brexit’s tangible benefits.
But perhaps the biggest risk to the UK – whatever the outcome of the election – is the slow re-emergence of America’s isolationist impulse, re-expressed in Trump’s America First stance. Biden has forsaken forever wars and demands a new integration of foreign and domestic policy, so that the needs of US blue-collar workers are part of US state department thinking.
As far back as February 1939, a member of the “America First committee”, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, eloquently made the case for isolationism. “I still thank God for two insulating oceans and even though they be foreshortened they are still our supreme benediction, if they be widely and prudently used.” Whatever America’s sympathies and natural emotions, he wrote, America could not be the protector of victims of outrage all around.
Persuading America to engage with at least some of these outrages may be the UK’s biggest challenge over the next four years.


theguardian--2020-10-15--Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden

Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden , sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election .
In an unprecedented step against a major news publication , Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report .
Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying : “ We can ’ t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the “ link may be unsafe ” .
Twitter said it was limiting the article ’ s spread due to questions about “ the origins of the materials ” included in the article , which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 .
Twitter policies prohibit “ directly distribut [ ing ] content obtained through hacking that contains private information ” .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ series of tweets on Wednesday , saying some of the images in the article contained personal and private information .
Twitter ’ s policy against posting hacked material was established in 2018 .
Jack Dorsey , the CEO of Twitter , said the company ’ s communication about the decision to limit the article ’ s spread was “ not great ” , saying the team should have shared more context publicly .
Facebook , meanwhile , placed restrictions on linking to the article , saying there were questions about its validity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ process to reduce the spread of misinformation , ” said a Facebook spokesperson , Andy Stone .
The move marks the first time Twitter has directly limited the spread of information from a news website , as it continues to implement stricter rules around misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections .
On Wednesday evening Twitter also reportedly locked the personal account of the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the article .
In recent weeks Twitter announced it would warn users who attempt to retweet a link without first clicking on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also started to take action against misinformation and calls to violence posted by Donald Trump and other public figures .
Wednesday ’ s actions around the New York Post article drew swift backlash from figures on the political right , who accused Facebook and Twitter of protecting Biden , who is leading Trump in national polls .
The New York Post blasted the companies , saying they were trying to help Biden ’ s election campaign and falsely claiming no one had disputed the story ’ s veracity .
“ Facebook and Twitter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re propaganda machines , ” it wrote in an editorial .
Meanwhile , the Republican senator Ted Cruz wrote a letter to Dorsey , saying : “ Twitter ’ s censorship of this story is quite hypocritical , given its willingness to allow users to share less-well-sourced reporting critical of other candidates.
” Trump ’ s campaign director , Jake Schneider , called the blocking of McEnany “ absolutely unacceptable ” and McEnany herself tweeted : “ Censorship should be condemned.
” Trump tweeted that it was “ terrible ” that the social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ article – in fact , it was restricted , not removed – and renewed his calls to “ repeal section 230 ” , a measure that keeps website hosts from being held responsible for content posted .
Ironically , repealing section 230 would require Twitter to take down more content , including many of Trump ’ s tweets .
Even non-conservatives criticized the choice to limit the spread of the article as one that will play into the rightwing narrative that big tech firms censor conservative views .
The decision was indeed quickly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ text of the story on their website in order to share the link without censorship .
The article implicates the former vice-president in connection with his son Hunter ’ s Ukraine business and was headlined : “ Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.
” The unnamed owner of the computer repair shop told the newspaper he passed a copy of the hard drive on the seemingly abandoned computer to Rudy Giuliani , Trump ’ s personal lawyer .
The story focused on one email from April 2015 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thanked Hunter for inviting him to a Washington meeting with his father .
But there was no indication of when the meeting was scheduled or whether it ever happened .
“ Investigations by the press , during impeachment , and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘ not legitimate ’ and political by a GOP colleague , have all reached the same conclusion : that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing , ” said Andrew Bates , a spokesman for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officials have attested to these facts under oath.
” The campaign said it was not told by Facebook or Twitter that any action would be taken regarding the article .
“ We have reviewed Joe Biden ’ s official schedules from the time and no meeting , as alleged by the New York Post , ever took place , ” the Biden campaign added .
Others cast also doubt on the report , citing Giuliani ’ s record of producing disinformation and making bogus claims about both Bidens and Ukraine .

Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election.
In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the “link may be unsafe”.
Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.
The company further explained the decision in a series of tweets on Wednesday, saying some of the images in the article contained personal and private information. Twitter’s policy against posting hacked material was established in 2018. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, said the company’s communication about the decision to limit the article’s spread was “not great”, saying the team should have shared more context publicly.
Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt — jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.
The move marks the first time Twitter has directly limited the spread of information from a news website, as it continues to implement stricter rules around misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. On Wednesday evening Twitter also reportedly locked the personal account of the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the article.
In recent weeks Twitter announced it would warn users who attempt to retweet a link without first clicking on it for more context. It has also started to take action against misinformation and calls to violence posted by Donald Trump and other public figures.
Wednesday’s actions around the New York Post article drew swift backlash from figures on the political right, who accused Facebook and Twitter of protecting Biden, who is leading Trump in national polls.
The New York Post blasted the companies, saying they were trying to help Biden’s election campaign and falsely claiming no one had disputed the story’s veracity. “Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines,” it wrote in an editorial.
Meanwhile, the Republican senator Ted Cruz wrote a letter to Dorsey, saying: “Twitter’s censorship of this story is quite hypocritical, given its willingness to allow users to share less-well-sourced reporting critical of other candidates.”
Trump’s campaign director, Jake Schneider, called the blocking of McEnany “absolutely unacceptable” and McEnany herself tweeted: “Censorship should be condemned.”
Trump tweeted that it was “terrible” that the social media companies “took down” the article – in fact, it was restricted, not removed – and renewed his calls to “repeal section 230”, a measure that keeps website hosts from being held responsible for content posted. Ironically, repealing section 230 would require Twitter to take down more content, including many of Trump’s tweets.
Even non-conservatives criticized the choice to limit the spread of the article as one that will play into the rightwing narrative that big tech firms censor conservative views. The decision was indeed quickly politicized – with House Republicans publishing the text of the story on their website in order to share the link without censorship.
The article implicates the former vice-president in connection with his son Hunter’s Ukraine business and was headlined: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”
The unnamed owner of the computer repair shop told the newspaper he passed a copy of the hard drive on the seemingly abandoned computer to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.
The story focused on one email from April 2015, in which a Burisma board adviser thanked Hunter for inviting him to a Washington meeting with his father. But there was no indication of when the meeting was scheduled or whether it ever happened.
“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”
The campaign said it was not told by Facebook or Twitter that any action would be taken regarding the article.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” the Biden campaign added.
Others cast also doubt on the report, citing Giuliani’s record of producing disinformation and making bogus claims about both Bidens and Ukraine.
AFP contributed reporting