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Category: Politics

History’s lessons on anti-immigrant extremism

History’s lessons on anti-immigrant extremism

Michael Luo writes: President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B visas consumed maga world over the holidays.) The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent….

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The Syrian women who want a say in running the country: ‘We’ve proved we can do anything’

The Syrian women who want a say in running the country: ‘We’ve proved we can do anything’

The Guardian reports: The feminist activist Ghalia Rahhal recalls with wry laughter her visit to the “blue building” in Idlib three years ago, an office where the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) monitored civil society organisations such as hers. Her colleague at a women’s rights organisation was once called there to hear a list of issues they were banned from working on: child marriage, divorce, and anything related to gender equality. Rahhal had already survived an assassination attempt in her…

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Biden notifies Congress of $8 billion arms sale to Israel

Biden notifies Congress of $8 billion arms sale to Israel

Axios reports: The State Department has notified Congress “informally” of an $8 billion proposed arms deal with Israel that will include munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells, two sources with direct knowledge tell Axios. Why it matters: This will likely be the last weapons sale to Israel the Biden administration approves. It comes amid claims from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in recent months that Biden had imposed a silent “arms embargo” on Israel. Some Democrats pushed the…

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‘From Ground Zero’: Oscar-shortlisted film features stories from Palestinian filmmakers in Gaza

‘From Ground Zero’: Oscar-shortlisted film features stories from Palestinian filmmakers in Gaza

  As the genocide in Gaza enters its 15th month, we look at From Ground Zero, a collection of 22 short films made in Gaza by Palestinian filmmakers surviving Israel’s bombings and brutal blockade. The film has been shortlisted for this year’s Academy Awards in the category for best international feature. “In spite of all what happened, we were trying to search for hope,” says filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, director of From Ground Zero, now playing in U.S. theaters. Masharawi was…

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Biden to block new offshore drilling along most of the U.S. coastline

Biden to block new offshore drilling along most of the U.S. coastline

Politico reports: President Joe Biden is planning to prohibit future offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the nation’s coastline, setting up a potential roadblock for Republicans’ plans to expand production in federal waters. Biden is set to announce on Monday that he will withdraw 625 million acres of coastline from future oil and gas drilling. That would encompass all of the Atlantic Coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific coast from Washington to California and parts of…

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The militia and the mole

The militia and the mole

By Joshua Kaplan This story was originally published by ProPublica John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed. On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the…

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How the Democrats lost the working class

How the Democrats lost the working class

Jonathan Weisman writes: Democrats had just absorbed a crushing defeat in the 1994 midterm elections when President Bill Clinton’s very liberal labor secretary, Robert Reich, ventured into hostile territory to issue a prophetic warning. Struggling workers were becoming “an anxious class,” he told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, two weeks after Republicans led by Newt Gingrich had gained 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Society was separating into two tiers, Mr. Reich said, with “a few…

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Trump has been rewarded with over $200 million in ‘donations’ since election day

Trump has been rewarded with over $200 million in ‘donations’ since election day

The New York Times reports: Since his victory in November, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s allies have raised well over $200 million for a constellation of groups that will fund his inauguration, his political operation and eventually his presidential library, according to four people involved in the fund-raising. It is a staggering sum that underscores efforts by donors and corporate interests to curry favor with Mr. Trump ahead of a second presidential term after a number of business leaders denounced him…

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Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change

Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change

Ivan Krastev writes: As I witnessed the despair and incomprehension of liberals worldwide after Donald Trump’s victory in November’s U.S. presidential election, I had a sinking feeling that I had been through this before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. The difference was that the world…

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Who is Tommy Robinson and why does Elon Musk want him freed from jail?

Who is Tommy Robinson and why does Elon Musk want him freed from jail?

NBC News reports: A convicted fraudster with a violent criminal record, Tommy Robinson is well known as the leader of the English far right, inspiring rallies of mostly white, mostly male followers shouting soccer-style chants against Islam and immigration. It has been jarring then, for many Britons to see Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — become the latest cause championed by the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk. “Free Tommy Robinson!” the billionaire entrepreneur and adviser…

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Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

Molly White writes: When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more significant: the growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk’s involvement began with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks reveal his growing role in this broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia,…

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U.S. military service is the strongest predictor of carrying out extremist violence

U.S. military service is the strongest predictor of carrying out extremist violence

Nick Turse reports: The two men who carried out apparent terror attacks on New Year’s Day — killing 15 people by plowing a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans, and detonating a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas — both had U.S. military backgrounds, according to the Pentagon. From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to…

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What is the duty of the Israeli left in a time of genocide?

What is the duty of the Israeli left in a time of genocide?

Hadas Binyamini writes: This past June, the news of a merger between two veteran Israeli political parties on the left of the Zionist spectrum, Labor and Meretz, passed without much fanfare. With the once-hegemonic Labor Party occupying only four of the Knesset’s 120 seats, and Meretz having been wiped out altogether in the 2022 election, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Lacking a compelling alternative vision to the perpetual subjugation of Palestinians under the boot of the Israeli…

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The fossil fuel industry spent $219 million to elect the new U.S. government

The fossil fuel industry spent $219 million to elect the new U.S. government

Karin Kirk writes: The 119th Congress comes with a price tag. The oil and gas industry gave about $24 million in campaign contributions to the members of the U.S. House and Senate expected to be sworn in January 3, 2025, according to a Yale Climate Connections review of campaign donations. The industry gave an additional $2 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign, bringing the total spending on the winning candidates to over $26 million, 88% of which went to Republicans….

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Biden has ‘done more damage to the foundations of international law than Trump did’

Biden has ‘done more damage to the foundations of international law than Trump did’

The New York Times reports: No foreign policy issue has been more divisive for Mr. Biden than his support for Israel throughout its war in Gaza. Emma Ashford [a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research group] said the administration’s hypocrisy was exposed by “the split-screen much of the world sees on Gaza and Ukraine — with an administration who says one conflict is an unacceptable war crime, and the other self-defense.” The Israeli military, supplied with American…

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Israel’s assassination campaign has renewed Israelis confidence that they can do anything anywhere

Israel’s assassination campaign has renewed Israelis confidence that they can do anything anywhere

Isaac Chotiner interviews political scientist Dahlia Scheindlin, a longtime expert on Israeli public opinion and analyst of the country’s domestic political scene: You mentioned April as a turning point. That was when the war against Hamas broadened regionally— It exactly lines up with April. I think we shouldn’t take the responsibility off of Hezbollah for its fateful decision, in the early morning hours of October 8th, to attack Israel—which basically internationalized or regionalized the conflict. But what happened in April?…

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