Six days of horror: America’s thirst for executions returns with a vengeance by Ed Pilkington

 Five executions, five states: a glut of judicial killing not seen in 20 years took place last week – and there was nothing random about it

 The death penalty is waning in America. Most states have abolished it or put it on pause, the annual crop of executions and new death sentences is in decline, and public opinion is turning steadily against the practice.

So the battle to break America’s primal adherence to a-life-for-a-life is prevailing.

Not this week, it isn’t. Five executions. Five different states over six days of horror.

This was the week in which America’s ailing death penalty bit back. Such a concentrated glut of judicial killing was last seen more than 20 years ago in the US.

Across the US south and midwest – from Alabama to Missouri, Oklahoma to South Carolina, and of course in the heart of it all, Texas – states fired up their death chambers. Experts said it was a random coincidence that so many capital cases, with their convoluted legal journeys, came to a climax at once.

But there was nothing random or coincidental about the disdain for probable innocence that was on display this week. Nor about the racial animus, or the callous indifference to life animating supposedly “right-to-life” states.

 “This week has exposed the reality of the death penalty in America, in all its brutality and injustice,” said Maya Foa, joint executive director of the human rights group Reprieve. “Across the US, executing states are going to ever more extreme lengths to prop up the practice.”

 

While much of the US is focused on Donald Trump’s remolding of the Republican party and his efforts to bring his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement back to the White House in November’s election, a parallel shift has taken hold in the death penalty world, albeit behind the scenes and largely unnoticed. Republican prosecutors, many of whom pay lip service to Trump and his Maga values, have become increasingly aggressive in pushing capital cases to finality.

The federal courts, which Trump transformed by appointing more than 200 judges during his presidency, have also changed their tune. Where they once acted as a failsafe against unreliable convictions, they now largely step aside.

That is especially true of the US supreme court, with its new ultra-right supermajority secured by Trump’s three appointed justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

“There’s been a radical shift in the legal culture as it relates to the death penalty in the past six years,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who perhaps more than anyone has alerted Americans to the inequities of death row. “The refs are gone, there is no more oversight.”

The result, Stevenson said, was that the rump of largely southern states still wedded to capital punishment are now unbound. “Without safeguards, without accountability, the states have leeway to do pretty much what they want,” he said.

 

Any analysis of the death penalty in America should begin with innocence. It’s the great fear that until recently concerned even hardcore supporters of capital punishment – that the state might be poised to kill an innocent person.

That anxiety also guided the supreme court. “Death is different” was their mantra – the idea being that with no appeal possible once a condemned man’s heart has been stopped, his conviction had better be sound.

 

“There was a time when if you had a decent innocence case, with enough questions raised, then you could rely on the courts to stay the execution,” said Stephen Bright, one of the most revered capital defenders who for more than 40 years has exposed injustices across the US south. “But look at Missouri. It’s just unbelievable.”

By Missouri, Bright was referring to the case of Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55. Doubts in his death sentence for murdering a local newspaper reporter, Lisha Gayle, in 1998 were abundant.

Though there was plenty of DNA material left on the kitchen knife used to commit the crime, none of it matched Williams’s. Other forensic evidence had been destroyed or contaminated by prosecutors, leaving the defendant to be sent to death row on the basis of two witnesses with incentives to testify against him including leniency in their own criminal cases and a $10,000 reward.

With so many glaring contradictions, calls for a reprieve grew deafening this week. They came from the victim’s family, the Gayles, who pleaded for a stay of execution.

They came too from the current prosecuting attorney in St Louis county who was so concerned that a miscarriage of justice had been committed by his own office that he even signed off on a court-approved agreement to spare Williams’s life.

Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Maga loyalist who has used the power of his office to try to overturn Trump’s 34 felony convictions in the New York hush-money case, was unimpressed. He threw out the court-backed deal, swept aside the searing doubts and sent Williams to the death chamber.

The US supreme court was also unimpressed. The supermajority of six ultra-conservative justices, Trump’s triad of appointees among them, refused to consider a last-minute petition from Williams, without offering an explanation. The three liberal-leaning justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented, saying they would have granted a stay, but were overruled.

Williams was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6.10pm on Tuesday.

“You’ve got the prosecuting attorney saying don’t execute this guy, the victim’s family saying don’t execute this guy, and you go ahead and execute him,” Bright said. “Really? I mean, what’s the point of that?”

 

Two of the five prisoners killed this week had strong claims of innocence. In addition to Williams, there was Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah, 46, AKA Freddie Owens, who last Friday became the first person to be executed by South Carolina in 13 years.

Yet again, no forensic evidence linked Allah to the murder of a convenience store cashier, Irene Graves, in 1997. Yet again, he was sent to death row on the testimony of a self-interested party, in this case his co-defendant who last week came forward and gave sworn testimony that Allah had not been present at the robbery.

Despite such misgivings, Henry McMaster, the Republican governor of South Carolina, who has called Trump “the face of America’s strength”, declined to grant Allah clemency. The supreme court also refused to hear an appeal, with Sotomayor this time dissenting.

Allah was pronounced dead at 6.55pm last Friday.

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Three of the five men executed this week were Black. They were Williams and Allah, and a third man on death row, Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52.

Littlejohn was executed by Oklahoma on Thursday for the 1992 murder of a convenience store owner, Kenneth Meers. Doubts swirled around his conviction, too. Littlejohn confessed that he had been part of the robbery, but insisted that he had not pulled the trigger.

Once more, such concerns did not trouble the state’s Trump-endorsed governor, Kevin Stitt, who declined clemency. His decision was paradoxical, given that Stitt has bragged about Oklahoma being the “most pro-life state in the country”.

 

The heavy bias towards Black prisoners going to their deaths this week reflects a nationwide reality. Since 1976, 34% of all those executed have been African American, while just 13% of the country’s population are Black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

In Williams’s case, the racial rot went deeper. Shortly before he was executed, the original trial prosecutor testified that he had removed a potential juror from the jury pool partly because he was Black – a discriminatory move that is banned under the US constitution.

Six of the seven potential Black jurors were thrown out, creating a final jury with 11 white members and one Black member.

“I don’t think anything represents our long history of racial injustice more dramatically than the tolerance of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty,” Stevenson said. “For a Black defendant to be tried by a nearly all-white jury in a county with a substantial Black population, and have the courts look the other way, that’s the shadow, the pollution, that the history of lynching and segregation and punitive enslavement has created.”

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Another trait in the way the death penalty is now administered was on lurid display this week. Some call it brutality, others cruelty, and in the case of Alan Miller, it has even been denounced as torture.

On Thursday, Miller, 59, was put to death by Alabama for the 1999 shootings of three of his co-workers. The state used nitrogen gas effectively to suffocate him – an experimental killing technique that has only been deployed once before in US history, with the execution in January of Kenneth Smith, also by Alabama.

An eyewitness for the Associated Press described Miller’s death by nitrogen in hauntingly similar terms to Smith’s: “He shook and trembled on the gurney for about two minutes with his body at times pulling against the restraints. That was followed by about six minutes of periodic gulping.

 

 

But that convulsive death was not the most disturbing aspect of Miller’s end. This was the second time that guards had escorted the prisoner to the death chamber and strapped him to the gurney – Alabama had tried to kill him once before and failed.

In court documents, Miller told how in September 2022, nameless officials dressed in green and aqua scrubs spent 90 minutes searching for one of his veins through which they could inject lethal drugs. They stuck needles into his biceps, inner arms, elbow pit, hands and feet.

When that didn’t work, they slapped his neck to see if that might produce results, then suspended him upside down on the gurney to aid blood flow. They left him dangling there, head down, for 20 minutes.

“Mr Miller was deeply disturbed by state employees silently staring at him while he was hanging vertically from the gurney,” the court document says.

Miller’s 2022 execution had a happy conclusion, of sorts. Shortly before midnight, the department of corrections admitted defeat and sent him back to his cell, then promptly began the paperwork to get him back in the death chamber.

This week they got their way. Miller was pronounced dead at 6.38pm on Thursday.

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Spare a thought for the fifth condemned man to die this week, Travis Mullis, 38. Of the five, he attracted least media attention, and yet his execution by Texas also speaks volumes.

Mullis, who was convicted for killing his three-month-old son, Alijah, in 2008, was what is known as a “volunteer” – meaning, he actively wanted to die, waiving all appeals and urging his executioners on.

In his last statement, Mullis called his death a form of “assisted suicide” – which is not inaccurate.

Texas, a state that bans physician-assisted suicide, loaded Mullis up with the sedative pentobarbital and helped him slip away.

He was pronounced dead at 7.01pm on Tuesday.

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Where does this week’s orgy of death leave the US? Anyone hoping for answers from the current political moment are likely to be disappointed.

Trump has indicated that if he wins in November, he will pursue the federal death penalty with even more gusto than he did when he was last in office. In the final days of his presidency, his administration executed 13 federal prisoners – more than under any president in 120 years.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate, has gone silent on the subject. She used to be an avowed abolitionist, but now she declines to comment, and this summer the Democratic party quietly removed opposition to capital punishment from its official platform.

That leaves Bryan Stevenson fearful for the future. He said: “When people are executed even when the prosecutor says they are likely innocent, when others are subjected to torturous multiple executions, when the death penalty continues to be so skewed by race – then you know that the integrity of the United States, its moral quotient, is in question.”

 

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How to Effectively Message Against Book Bans | Back Talk by P.C. Sweeney

 For the past four years, EveryLibrary has been working to fight the book-banning movement. A large part of that fight is developing effective messaging against book bans, as well as conducting extensive message testing, surveys, and focus groups to understand the impact of messaging and determine which messages perform best.

 

THIS IS NOT A GOOD-FAITH DISCUSSION

The first thing we need to understand when we’re messaging about book bans is that we are not operating in a good-faith discussion, and we need to stop acting as if we were. In a good-faith discussion, both parties agree to an honest, respectful dialogue with the willingness to change their view if facts and data are presented. However, book banners are neither acting honestly nor respectfully. They will not consume new information and change their minds once educated on the issue. The individuals and organizations banning books are not looking to be educated. They don’t care about learning about the Miller Test for pornography, they are not interested in reading the books to put their propagandist images of a handful of pages into proper context, and they aren’t going to change their minds about books being banned. We have to stop acting as they will do any of these things.

We also need to understand that the messaging used by the book banners to engage with the public is pure propaganda. The books in question are not pornography, and in every case where the Miller test has been applied or the books have been read by the review board to put them in context, they are not removed from school or public libraries. We also know that these books are not tools for grooming and the books being removed often teach children how not to be groomed, about body autonomy, that it's okay to say no, and how to report someone acting inappropriately toward them. That’s the opposite of grooming.

Pro–book banning messaging and propaganda is used as a tool to build political power and influence for people and organizations to elect or appoint individuals to positions that allow them to govern and control Americans. We’re seeing school board candidates, gubernatorial candidates, and state and federal legislators run with book bans as part of their platform.

Political power only comes from two places: people and money. If you have either of those on your side, you have the power to influence politics. While it would be nice if legislators supported things because they were good for America, they support things with political power and influence over their own issues.

PEOPLE POWER

People can drive politics, and whoever has the most strategic access to American voters has the power to influence political outcomes. For example, the reason we can’t discuss Second Amendment rights in the United States is because the National Rifle Association (NRA) can immediately send an email to a million voters in a legislator’s district and create an incentive for that legislator to support the NRA’s agenda. If the legislator says something against the NRA, they risk losing the next election, thanks to an NRA email. Conversely, if the legislator says something in favor of the NRA’s agenda, they have the benefit of winning the next election.

One of the scariest aspects of people power is that a movement for change does not require that most people favor the change. In fact, research by Erica Chenowith found that no movement has ever failed that activated just 3.5 percent of the community . So if the individuals who are seeking to regulate American’s access to books can engage with just 3.5 percent of the public in a meaningful way, they will have the political power they need for lasting change.

 

FINANCIAL POWER

The other side of building political power is through money. For example, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a lobbying group that uses corporate money to lobby on behalf of corporate interests. Since a large portion of their agenda would not be palatable to the American public, and because they have access to a vast network of corporate money, they are using corporate funding to push their agenda. They use this money to make candidate contributions and partisan donations, and have a number of legal ways to move money to individuals in positions of power in government. These monetary incentives give them more opportunities to persuade legislators to make decisions that favor ALEC’s agenda. If a legislator comes out against their agenda, they can withhold money, and if a legislator supports their agenda, the legislator can gain access to those financial resources.

Unfortunately, there are not any organizations within the library space that have the financial resources to create and use political power through the use of money. In fact, EveryLibrary is one of the only organizations in the industry that has the legal structure, as a 501c4, to spend money in such a way that it can be used to influence politics, and EveryLibrary would need tens of millions of dollars annually to be effective.

THE BAD NEWS

The bad news is that the book banners understand political power. They are using their messaging as an opportunity to raise money and identify supporters and build influence. They have a major financial incentive to fundraise off the false narrative that they’re banning books about pornography in order to protect children. They can send an email to their supporters that claims they “protected children from pornography, so please make a $5 donation today,” raising millions of dollars by banning books. They are also building audiences, identifying supporters, and engaging communities by creating state and local chapters. This means that they are building political power and influence through both money and people. As an industry we need to understand this if we want to push back.

THE GOOD NEWS

The good news is that, by far, the majority of Americans are on our side. In survey after survey, between 70 and 80 percent of Americans on both sides of the aisle oppose book bans . However, we don’t know who those people are. That means we have the opportunity to win, but only if we understand that we need to use our messaging to identify individuals on our side and cultivate them into action to build a national network of Americans who are willing to take a stand against censorship. The way that most political organizations identify their supporters is through petitions, email campaigns, and events. These are the same tools that EveryLibrary uses to identify library supporters and build a national voter file of library supporters.

WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE

How do we effectively message in this environment? In 2022, EveryLibrary conducted political polls with the national firm Embold Research. This research included focus groups with message testing and message testing within the polling itself. Throughout the previous four years, we also conducted internal A/B testing of various messages for virality, engagement, and persuasion. Through this internal and external research, we were able to identify a number of highly effective messages against book bans.

One of the things we found throughout this testing is that the most effective messages are ones that use the fewest words or need the least amount of explanation. The reason that book banners are gaining traction is because “protecting children from porn” (even though that’s not what they’re doing) is an effective message that doesn’t require explanation. Understandably, the majority of the public is against exposing children to porn and immediately understands that message without explanation. However, our response has often been to explain the Miller Test in detail, long discussions about how it’s not pornography, the Pico ruling , how collection development policies work, and academic writings on the benefits of comprehensive sexual education. These messages are far too long, complex, and academic to be effective with the general public.

We also found that messages that reinforce the language of the book challengers allow them to control the message. The more often we repeat their language and messages, the more we solidify their messages in the minds of the public. Messages that don’t repeat the false narrative about pornography in libraries are the most effective ones.

The messages I present below are clear and concise and, according to our data, are effective at engaging 70 to 80 percent of the public and moving them into favorable action for libraries.

GOVERNMENT REGULATION

To be clear, the book-banning movement is leading to real outcomes in state legislatures across the country. Many states are creating government legislation that would regulate what Americans are allowed to read. When we tested the message “don’t let the government regulate your reading,” we found significant support from both Republicans and Democrats. Americans generally do not want the government making decisions for them about what books they are allowed to choose for themselves and their families.

We also found that messages around the legislation being enacted in dozens of states that would allow for the incarceration of library workers are very effective. Americans do not want to see librarians dragged to prison just because a legislator decided a book was inappropriate. Americans seem to understand that countries that begin arresting librarians and educators are on the path to dictatorship and fascism. Therefore, messages like “liberty and freedom have never begun by arresting librarians” are effective at inciting people to action.

RIDICULING THE MOVEMENT

I often fear that we take the book banners more seriously than necessary. Facing them head-on often just repeats and reinforces their messages with the public. The public is taking their messages seriously, mainly because libraries are.

While there are real damaging outcomes stemming from this movement, it is still not a serious movement among people who are truly concerned about the welfare of children. Their hyperbolic and ludicrous messaging that librarians are groomers and pedophiles does not deserve our serious attention. When we tested messages that lampooned the book banners, made them look weird and strange, and cast them as out-of-touch outsiders, we found that those messages were extremely effective at disarming them. If we can make a joke at the expense of the censors or otherwise make them appear inept, corrupt, or silly, they lose their power. If we take their messaging seriously, so will the public, and we will only reinforce their messaging instead of ours.

An effective way to do this is to make an example out of the ludicrous nature of book bans or point out some of the most absurd book bans that have occurred. According to our own tracking , more than 4,000 different titles have been challenged in the last two to three years alone. Yet the only ones the public sees are a handful of pages out of context from three or four books that are not at all representative of the kinds of titles that are actually being banned.

Some real-life examples of this absurdity of book banning include the banning of a book about seahorses because a Moms for Liberty activist at a school board meeting said it was too sexy . They’ve tried to ban books about crayons , tried to ban books about butts , forced librarians to draw pants on goblins , and had the dictionary removed from some schools for review because it has bad words in it.

Our testing found that when we expose the public to some of the most egregious examples from the other 4,000 books that have been targeted, they realize the true nature of the book banning movement.

THE BANNING OF CHILDREN’S AND YA CLASSICS

By far, most of the public opposes banning classic children’s books and literature, especially the popular books that people have read as children. When we talk about books like Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of a Young Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Lord of the Flies being banned, we see a significant increase in opposition to book bans. The most interesting thing about this messaging is that the book bans do not need to be current. The discussion of classic books being contested over the span of the last 50 years helps the public put book bans into a historical context and envision a world with more bans. However, we are still seeing many classic children’s books being challenged and we are seeing books being banned that teach about historical figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King . We should be highlighting the banning of these books in our messaging.

LEAST EFFECTIVE MESSAGES

Not all the messages we tested were effective. In fact, some tested below 30 percent of public support, and a few of those surprised us. But generally, the least effective messages were ones that took the censors seriously, were overly academic, or required long-winded explanations. Unfortunately, we were extremely surprised to see that the most support for book bans occurred when messaging was about LGBTQIA+ issues, comprehensive sex ed, or issues around Critical Race Theory, politics, and fascism. The public either didn’t care about such messaging or they were outright supportive of book bans in those areas. Discussions of those marginalized communities moved the most people to actually support book bans.

FIGHTING BACK

Messaging is great, but it’s nothing unless we can use it to identify our supporters and call them into action. Simply putting these messages into the world will not ensure that we triumph over book bans. Winning against censorship means sophisticated community organizing, building relationships of power with organizations, identifying supporters and cultivating them into action, and ultimately electing leaders who support libraries and the freedom to read.

Unfortunately, most libraries, as government organizations, don’t have the tools, resources, or legal authority to build the movement they need to fight off the activists attacking them. The most effective defense against book banners comes from members of the local community who are willing to fight back. Platforms such as fightforthefirst.org allow community members to launch petitions and communicate with supporters to help them organize the community against groups who are seeking to censor the library and eliminate the community’s right to read.

If your library is facing book bans, you can fight back.

We need to talk about Jared Kushner's sketchy Saudi-backed fund by Zeesham Aleem

 Why is Donald Trump's son-in-law raking in millions in fees from investors but not delivering them money?

 

An investigation led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has discovered what he sees as new red flags surrounding the equity fund of former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. In three years of work, Kushner’s fund, Affinity Partners, has taken billions from foreign investors and made over $100 million in investment fees. Yet in that time, Wyden points out in a letter to Affinity, the firm has not “distributed a penny of earnings back to clients.” Wyden now warns that Kushner’s fund’s behavior is lending weight to suspicions that have existed since Affinity’s founding: that it was a potential tool for foreign governments to curry favor with a possible future Trump administration.

“Affinity’s investors may not be motivated by commercial considerations but rather the opportunity to funnel foreign government money to members of President Trump’s family, namely Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump,” Wyden wrote in the letter to Affinity. “Affinity’s failure to deploy capital in a timely fashion while charging excessive fees has reinforced my view that Affinity is likely part of a compensation scheme involving U.S. political figures designed to circumvent the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

 

Chad Mizelle, Affinity Partners’ chief legal officer, has denied accusations that the fund has behaved inappropriately or failed to comply with any laws.

But Wyden is right to be raising questions about Kushner’s fund. According to The New York Times, of the $3 billion the fund has secured for investment, 99% comes from overseas sources — mostly the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. As the Times reports, the private equity industry research firm PitchBook “found that most private equity firms started to pay at least some profits within 2.5 years.”

 

That Kushner’s fund hasn’t distributed earnings yet doesn’t necessarily mean it is doing something untoward, but it does raise questions — especially given the history of the fund. The nature of Saudi Arabia’s investment in Kushner’s fund set off alarm bells years ago. According to a 2022 Times report, a screening panel for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund expressed several concerns about investing in Kushner’s fledging private equity fund, including:

‘[T]he inexperience of the Affinity Fund management’; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for ‘the bulk of the investment and risk’; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them ‘unsatisfactory in all aspects’; a proposed asset management fee that ‘seems excessive’; and ‘public relations risks’ from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

 

As I wrote at the time, the investment was so large and so financially imprudent that it prompted observers to ask whether it was the returning of a favor. Kushner and Salman, often known as MBS, reportedly formed a close relationship during the Trump administration, and Kushner reportedly defended MBS in the White House after Saudi government agents murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

At the same time, there is a question as to whether MBS could view the investment as a down payment on an extra Saudi-friendly future Trump administration.

 

Kushner has told the Times that any delay in investing funds was the result of market conditions. But given what we know, it is impossible to rule out an informal quid pro quo type of dynamic in the whole arrangement. Kushner’s fund is a convenient vessel for Saudi Arabia — and investors from other Gulf states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — to signal support for Kushner, and thus his father-in-law. Kushner has said he won’t serve in another Trump administration, but even if we can take him at his word, he’s still part of Trump’s family, and he has a direct line to Trump to advise him informally.

Kushner’s private equity fund continues to act as a potential instrument for autocratic foreign governments to quietly influence U.S. policy, and the odder its behavior as a fund, the more it will appear to serve as a possible de facto laundering operation. If Kushner wanted to avoid such concerns — because corruption comes not just from conflict of interest, but the appearance of it — he could have declined to do business with foreign investors from countries he worked with closely during his time in the White House. Instead, he has chosen to cash in, and the legitimacy of American democracy is footing the bill.

No, immigrants aren’t eating dogs and cats – but Trump’s claim is part of an ugly history of myths about immigrant foodways

 Adrienne Bitar 

 

When Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said during the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, that Haitian immigrants are eating pets, food historians like me were not surprised at the slur. Trump’s lie followed a long American history of peddling ugly rumors about immigrants stealing and eating pets.

Dietary rules that unite and define American cuisine can so easily be perverted to use disgust to divide Americans. In the U.S., cow is food and dog is friend. Chicken is food. Cat is companion. The sharp lines between the animals Americans eat, love, protect and exterminate help write the dietary rules that define American norms.

What we eat, what we don’t and with whom we break bread are just some of the food rules that unite and define Americans. Think of how turkey – or tofurkey – unites Americans behind the Thanksgiving ritual. Bottled water. Ice. Ballpark hot dogs. Airplane pretzels. Movie theater popcorn.

Food can also establish group identity apart from the mainstream. Think of the many factions of vegan, vegetarian, paleo, grain-free and carnivore dieters who use food to express a political position. Also, of course, religious dietary proscriptions have worried scholars for centuries so that Jews, Muslims and Christians may never share a meal. 

 There is no evidence that Haitians are stealing and eating pet cats and dogs. There is evidence, however, that racists have long twisted dietary rules to divide people and dehumanize immigrants. Trump told a lie to draw a line between Americans and others who allegedly eat the animals Americans love.

 

The legend of delicious pets

The myth of eating pets traces back to old legends in Europe, Australia and the United States that “immigrants are stealing our cats and dogs for their dinner tables or to serve in ethnic restaurants,” writes the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand.

Two of the most common food-based legends center on “Oriental restaurants serving dog (or cat) meat, and legends about Asian immigrants in the United States capturing and cooking people’s pets,” Brunvard writes.

By 1883, the legend was so well-established that the Chinese-American journalist Wong Chin Foo offered US$500 to anybody in New York for proof that Chinese people were eating cats or rats. No proof was found, but that didn’t stop the racist jokes or urban legends.

None of the many examples deserve retelling. But scholars, for example, have cited “sick jokes” such as a “new Vietnamese cookbook is titled 100 Ways to Wok Your Dog.”

Or as comedian Tessie Chua joked about her multiracial Chinese, Filipino and Irish identity in 1993 when she said, “That means I eat dog, but only if I can wash it down with Guinness Stout!”

In 1971, mainstream news outlets, including Reuters, reported an “outrageously silly urban legend” of a pet poodle named Rosa served at a Hong Kong restaurant, complete with chili sauce and bamboo shoots.

In 1980, Stockton, California, was seized by racist rumors of Vietnamese families stealing expensive purebred dogs for dinner.

As recently as 2005, the TV show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” showed wedding guests vomiting after being misinformed that they had eaten a German shepherd named Oscar, prepared by a Korean-American florist. “Oscar is bulgogi!,” Larry David cries.

Scholars calls these tropes a “nativist backlash” and “vehicle for anti-immigrant and especially anti-Asian sentiments in the U.S.”

A long history of food-based slurs

More precise, maybe, than the adage that “we are what we eat” is that we are what we won’t eat. Shunning our neighbor for their vile food – stinky, strange, unpalatable – is also decidedly an American tradition.

“Garlic eater” was at one time recognizable in the U.S. as an ethnic slur for Italian Americans in the early 20th century. The names “spaghetti bender” and “grape stomper” were also used, but “garlic eater” stuck because, as one scholar argued, “garlic served as an ‘olfactory signifier’” – a distinguishing odor – “for the alien who consumed it.”

So when far-right radical Laura Loomer tweeted in September 2024 that the White House “will smell like curry” if Kamala Harris becomes president, she was also using food to stoke racist fears.

Americans aren’t alone in doing this. Some Persians call Punjabis “dal khor,” meaning dal-eater, and some Romanians call Italians “macaronar,” meaning macaroni-eater. Both are slurs. Iranians have been known to call Arabs “malakh-khor,” or locust-eater, and Southern Italians sometimes call Northern Italians “polentoni,” or polenta-eater.

To an outsider, being called a lentil- or polenta-eater seems more like praise for a healthy diet than a racial epithet, but such are the vagaries of racism: People hate who they hate and justify it however possible.

Other examples of how food can distinguish communities abound. In the Amazon, the Parakanã people appreciate tapir meat but abhor monkey. The Arara people, their neighbors, feel the opposite. Both groups are disgusted by one another. Curry, garlic, tapir, polenta, lentils – it doesn’t matter what the nail is, but how the hammer hits.

 

Rumors with real-life consequences

Urban legends about food and racist rumors can have serious consequences. Earlier in 2024, a false rumor that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in Fresno, California, cooked pit bulls led to such vile harassment that the owner, David Rasavong, moved the restaurant to a new location.

After Trump repeated the myth during the debate that immigrants eat pets, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, quickly became the target of bomb threats, forcing city buildings and schools to close. Members of the Haitian community have said they fear for their safety.

But there’s a more hopeful side to the issue of food being used as a way to divide or unite people, too. The Latin origins for the words company and companionship mean the people we share our bread with.

Garlic is now as central to American cuisine as apple pie. Nowadays, Americans are so much the better for the sushi, garlic and curry – and the diversity behind the deliciousness – that flavor American cuisine.

Fact check: Springfield had more murders under Trump than under Biden-Harris by Daniel Dale, CNN

 

Facing intense criticism for promoting false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting and eating other residents’ pets, Sen. JD Vance has tried to pivot by blaming Vice President Kamala Harris and the influx of Haitians during her vice presidency for a variety of broader social issues in the city.

Some of those issues have been widely acknowledged, such as a strain on the local health care system. But Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, added a startling claim in a CNN television interview on Sunday: that Harris and the immigrant influx have caused a big spike in murder.

“I’m talking to my constituents and I’m hearing terrible things about what’s going on in Springfield, and Kamala Harris’ open-border policies have caused these problems,” Vance said. Moments later, he said, “Murders are up by 81% because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen to this small community.”

We looked into this claim and found it’s a good example of how statistics can be cherry-picked and misleadingly framed to serve unfounded narratives.

“During the time that I’ve been with the prosecutor’s office, which is 21 years now, we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community – as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders,” Daniel Driscoll, the Republican top prosecutor in Clark County, in which Springfield is the largest city, said in a Friday interview.

Vance was citing real data, but he didn’t mention what the underlying numbers are.
Spokesperson William Martin said Vance was talking about official Ohio figures showing that Springfield had five murders in 2021 and nine murders in 2023.

That four-murder increase is indeed an increase of 80%. An increase from five murders one year to nine murders two years later, though, does not prove Vance’s claim that Harris and immigrants have caused a murder spike — or even that there is a current murder spike.

In small communities, Driscoll said, “if you were to have one murder one year and two murders the next year, you’ve suddenly got a 100% increase in the rate, but that’s not an appreciable difference in the number of murders you have.” He said what he looks at is “trends” — and “we’ve not seen any trend showing that the amount of murders is going up in Clark County.”

Here are five significant problems with Vance’s narrative:

1) Springfield had more total murders under President Donald Trump than under Biden-Harris.

Vance said murders in Springfield have soared “because of” Harris’ policies. But a quick glance at Springfield’s murder numbers for the last three presidential terms – which are easily available online from the FBI and the state of Ohio – immediately calls his assertion into question.

President Barack Obama’s second term: 30 murders. Six in 2013; seven in 2014; 12 in 2015; five in 2016.

Trump’s term: 33 murders. Nine in 2017 (he took over from Obama on January 20 that year); 13 in 2018; three in 2019; eight in 2020.

President Joe Biden’s term through 3.5 years: 22 murders. Five in 2021 (he took over from Trump on January 20 that year); six in 2022; nine in 2023; two in the first half of 2024.

Even if you exclude the half-year 2024 data and only compare the three completed years of the Biden-Harris administration to either the first three years or last three years under the Trump administration, there have still been fewer murders under Biden-Harris.

2) Murder in Springfield was down significantly in the first half of 2024.

Vance didn’t mention that the same official Ohio data he cited for 2021 to 2023 shows that Springfield had just two murders from January through June 2024, the most recent period for which the official data is available. Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, told CNN that his own tracking shows Springfield was still at two murders through July — a decrease of 60%, Asher said, from five murders through the same point of last year.

It’s possible that the rest of 2024 will be worse. But it’s also possible that the full-year 2024 number will end up down from 2021 or just slightly up from 2021, rendering Vance’s 80% increase obsolete. At the very least, the early-2024 number should caution against treating the 2023 number as evidence of an ongoing upward trend.

3) There is no evidence immigrants caused even the 2021-to-2023 increase.

As we’ve repeatedly noted in fact checks about crime, identifying specific reasons for particular cities’ increases or decreases in any given year is notoriously difficult. And nobody has demonstrated that Haitian immigrants in particular or immigrants in general were responsible for the four additional murders in 2023 compared to 2021. (One prominent local case from 2023, in which a Haitian immigrant committed aggravated vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally crashed his minivan into a school bus and killed a child, is not classified as a murder, and the child’s father has said explicitly that it was not a murder.)

Local and state officials have certainly not attributed the uptick in murder to immigrants. Driscoll described it as “luck, or a lack thereof.” And Andy Wilson, now Ohio’s public safety director under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and formerly the Clark County prosecutor before Driscoll, told reporters this week that the main public safety issue with regard to Haitian immigrants in the state is safe driving, “not crime” and “not violence.”

4) Small numbers mean big percentage changes.

It’s not clear that there was any particular social, political or economic reason behind the 2021-to-2023 increase Vance was citing. When the absolute number of murders is as low as it is in Springfield, a tiny number of random happenings — one resolved or unresolved dispute, one bullet fired a bit to the left or right, one unusually slow or fast ambulance response — can cause impressive-sounding percentage changes in the annual figures.

Driscoll said he has seen people shot in the head who survive and people shot in the arm who die. “The difference between a shooting victim and murder victim is sometimes millimeters,” he said.

Springfield’s murder numbers have fallen within a narrow range, from a low of three murders to a high of 13 murders, for a full decade — and the high of 13 and the low of three were set under Trump in consecutive years, 2018 and 2019. It wouldn’t make sense to blame Trump for the high (which was a 44% spike from the year prior) or credit him for the low (which was a 77% decline from the year prior), since these numbers fluctuate for reasons even the local police have said are hard to pinpoint.

“Given that murders are rare, there is a ton of variation from year to year that is best explained as random, especially when the murder total is small,” Asher said in an email. “There is a lot of random variation that goes into whether a shooting victim dies, and sometimes you’ll see increasing shootings but decreasing fatalities in a year with the opposite occurring the following year.”

5) Comparing 2023 to Trump-era 2020 would show a much smaller increase than the one Vance mentioned.

Vance bolstered his case against Harris by choosing to compare 2023, when there were nine murders in Springfield, to 2021, when there were five murders there. But since more than 11 months of 2021 fell under the Biden-Harris administration, it would arguably make more sense to compare 2023 to 2020, the last full calendar year under Trump, if you are at least attempting to assess the impact of Biden-Harris policies.

Doing that 2023-to-2020 comparison would yield a 13% increase, from eight murders in 2020 to nine murders in 2023. Again, that is likely just random variation — but it’s not 80%.

How social media assassination conspiracies are uniting pro- and anti-Trump voters by Marianna Spring

 

Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.

About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.

The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.

Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.

I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.

Dozens of evidence-free posts I found suggesting both incidents were staged have racked up more than 30 million views on X. Some of these posts came from anti-Trump accounts that did not seem to have a track record of sharing theories like this, while a smaller share were posted by some of the former president’s supporters.

For Democrat Camille, Trump’s team orchestrated this to boost his chances of winning the election.

Wild Mother - who already follows QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory which claims Donald Trump is involved in a secret war against an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles - wants to believe Trump’s own team staged the attack in order to frame his supposed enemies in the "Deep State".

The Deep State is claimed to be a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services looking to thwart certain politicians.

There is no evidence to support either of the women’s theories.

 

The idea that news events have been staged to manipulate the public is a classic trope in the conspiracy theory playbook. Wild Mother says she is no stranger to this alternative way of thinking.

Camille, however, says this is the first time she has ever used the word "staged" about an event in the news like this. She always believed Covid-19 was real and she was extremely opposed to false claims the 2020 election had been rigged.

But on 13 July this year, when she was sitting in front of her TV at home watching live as Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, she says she immediately thought: "Oh, that's staged."

The way Donald Trump was able to pose for a photo and raise his fist in the air was what ignited Camille’s suspicions.

She had questions about how the US Secret Service allowed the shooting to happen in the first place. The director of the service has since resigned over failings that day.

 

The shooter was a 20-year-old called Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service snipers. His motives remain unknown – which left many questions wide open. And so Camille’s thoughts continued to spiral.

Already sceptical that something did not add up, Camille turned to X for more answers. In the years before the shooting, she had already started spending more and more time on the social media site, formerly known as Twitter. She had taken an interest in pro-Democrat anti-Trump accounts and followed some of them.

"I would admit to you that I spend too much time on social media now, and it, in my mind, is kind of a problem," she tells me.

 

Recent changes to how X’s "For You" feed works meant she started seeing more posts from accounts she does not follow, but that pushed ideas in line with her political views. Lots of these accounts had also purchased blue ticks on the site, which give their posts more prominence.

So when the first assassination attempt happened, unfounded conspiracy theories suggesting it had been staged were not only recommended directly to her feed - but were all the more convincing as they came from other profiles with the same political views she holds about Donald Trump.

Most of the social media companies say they have guidelines to protect users and reduce harmful content. X did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

'Like watching a magic show'

Wild Mother had also turned to social media to find her tribe - having been called "a weirdo, an alien, a diamond in the rough" offline - and has built a following of thousands.

As we stand chatting in a waterfall in the small town she calls home, she explains how she began sharing her views on natural medicine and motherhood in 2021.

Then she started posting unproven theories about what was happening behind the headlines - such as on the Princess of Wales' health or the Baltimore bridge collapse earlier this year - and saw her views and likes rack up.

She says she has been immersed in what she calls this "alternative idea about reality" from a young age and believes we have been lied to about what really happened when John F Kennedy was assassinated in the 1960s, when 9/11 happened in 2001, and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She started to like Trump when she began spending more time online during the pandemic and became exposed to the QAnon movement, which she believes could be linking all these events. As a mum, she was especially concerned about allegations around child abuse and trafficking its supporters often talk about.

"I would never in my life even imagine some of the stuff that I've had to hear is going on right now, under our noses. And it blows my mind. We have to be able to protect our most innocent," Wild Mother says.

 

QAnon supporters were among the crowd that stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January, 2021, in a violent protest against Joe Biden's election victory. Now Wild Mother wants to believe the idea she has seen on social media that they might have been involved somehow in staging Trump's shooting in July - in order to frame the Deep State.

But Wild Mother says, according to the posts she has seen online, "good guys in the military", known as White Hats, had been doing covert operations to counter the Deep State. And one theory that popped up on her feed claimed the July assassination attempt was staged by them to show the public the threat Trump is under.

Wild Mother doesn't claim to know for sure if the QAnon theory is true - but she does know what she wants to believe.

"I think our country needs rescuing from our government right now. It's a horrible mess. A horrible mess," she says.

Once Wild Mother started to question whether a news event could have been staged, it seemed as though any of them could be.

"It's like going to a magic show as a kid and then that you find out for the first time that the magician is pulling one over on you. Now, every time you go to a magic show, you know what they're doing," she tells me.

 

As both Camille and Wild Mother came to rely more on social media, the beliefs they picked up contributed to a fracturing of their relationships in the real world.

Camille finds it hard to have conversations with some of her close family who support Trump, while Wild Mother says it played a part in her separating from her now ex-husband, who she says strongly opposed conspiracy theories.

"Does it make it difficult? Yes. Did it create a wedge? Was it possibly one of the things that ended my marriage? Maybe," Wild Mother says.

Meanwhile, Camille also found herself embroiled in arguments on X which left her with her guard up in the real world, too. "It's a little scary because I feel like every time I leave the house, it's a potential for conflict," she says.

This atmosphere of suspicion and conflict doesn’t just have consequences for these women’s personal lives - but for society too.

Officials, election workers - and politicians around the USA have found themselves subject to hate and threats as a consequence of this wider belief that almost anything and everything - including elections - is being rigged and staged.

For Wild Mother, people are "walking a really fine line" between seeking justice and harmful behaviour.

"It's not writing your senators and calling them racist names. But if you were somebody who truly did your research and found that there was an issue, do I agree that you should use your voice? Absolutely," she says.

"I think that we all have ways of doing that. For them, it just so happens to be harassing people."

While Wild Mother and Camille say they have never threatened anyone themselves - and strike me as empathetic, kind people - the mistrust fostered in part by their social media feeds has eroded their faith in society and its institutions.

Camille, who was so opposed conspiracy theories, now finds herself using the language of them.

She appears to be one of many recruited into this way of thinking - by July’s assassination attempt and the social media algorithms drawing people deeper into an online world detached from reality.

 

Tim Walz tests the limits of his working-class appeal in Pennsylvania’s ultimate swing county by Meredith Lee Hill

 Democrats see major opportunities to boost turnout in Northampton County. It’s also a microcosm of the challenges Harris and Walz face nationally with working-class men. 

 

BETHLEHEM, Pennsylvania — Democrats in one of the most important swing counties in the U.S. were eager for Tim Walz to fire up the party faithful during his Saturday visit. They were also hoping he’d pull in some of the still skeptical working-class voters Kamala Harris needs to woo to clinch the must-win state and secure her best path to the White House.

But even the gun-owning, car-fixing Midwest dad is facing skeptics of his own in this former steel town.

 

On Saturday, the campaign dispatched Walz to a campaign rally in their Northampton County stronghold of Bethlehem, a city of 80,000 in the Lehigh Valley, where voters are known for backing centrists. President Joe Biden won this county by less than one percentage point in 2020, after it went for Donald Trump once and Barack Obama twice. Democratic Rep. Susan Wild, who flipped the longtime GOP congressional seat blue in 2018, is one of the most endangered House Democrats this November.

But while hundreds of Democrats and local residents waited in line to pack into the Freedom High School gym to hear Walz speak Saturday morning, the challenges facing the Democratic ticket in the region were clear around other parts of the county — notably, with younger working-class men.

Walking his dog across town in Bethlehem, AJ Janssen, 47, described himself as a liberal and independent who supported Bernie Sanders in past Democratic primaries. He’s the kind of Democratic-inclined voter the Harris campaign is hoping Walz can attract here and across the country.

But Janssen, who works for the city, isn’t planning to vote. And, Walz’s visit this weekend didn’t give him any second thoughts about his plans.

“I don’t support either of them,” Janssen said of Harris and Trump.

 Eli Lovell, 22, works in inventory and receiving at a shipping company in Easton, a city of 30,000 just northeast of Bethlehem. He doesn’t like Trump, but isn’t enthused about Harris either. He doesn’t plan to vote, and Walz coming to the area hasn’t swayed him.

 

“I probably won’t be there,” Lovell said.

Democrats are hoping Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, can be the antidote to at least some of that sentiment. And the need to reach out to such voters is clearly on the campaign’s mind, especially in Pennsylvania where recent polls show Harris just narrowly up or tied with Trump as she makes gains with voters on her handling of the economy.

Walz’s team even recently posted a campaign video of Walz surrounded by a group of young men after a rally, where one told the governor that he was an undecided voter but, he added: “I think I’m decided now, though” after hearing the governor speak. Walz told the men to “talk to their friends” about voting, adding his frequent stump speech refrain that even if people aren’t into politics: “Too damn bad. Politics is into you.”

Former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent, who represented a key part of Lehigh Valley in Congress for 14 years and served with Walz for 12, said it was “a smart move” for the Harris campaign to send the governor to Bethlehem.

“Northampton County is the quintessential swing county in Pennsylvania and maybe the country,” said Dent, a centrist Republican who was a frequent critic of Trump before he resigned in 2018.

“I’m not big on making predictions, but I will make this prediction: Whichever candidate wins Northampton County will win Pennsylvania, and the White House,” he said.

 

It’s likely Walz will have more luck turning out the base in the blue-trending suburbs here than trying to sway working-class men in the county that is a mix of historically Democratic cities and small towns, suburbs and deep red rural stretches.

But Walz has another purpose as well — driving Democratic turnout in the adjacent, redder rural counties in the region.

 

Saturday’s rally was Walz’s third visit to the Keystone State since Harris tapped him as her running mate. He made a campaign swing through several red counties in Pennsylvania earlier this month, including stops at a local store and a Democratic party office in Lancaster County, where Trump won by 16 points in 2020.

Democrats there are clear-eyed about the objective.

“He doesn’t have to win these rural counties. He doesn’t have to win my county. It’d be nice if we did. I’d love it. They’d probably build a statue of me or something,” said Tom O’Brien, the Lancaster County Democratic chair. “But if he can put a dent in it in places like this, they’re gonna win Pennsylvania.”

“And if you win Pennsylvania, you’re going to win the whole thing,” O’Brien added.

 

At the Saturday rally, around 3,000 people filled the high school gym on a warm fall day to hear Walz speak, according to the campaign. The governor, largely sticking to his campaign stump speech, sliced into Trump, touted Harris’ economic plans for middle-class voters and told the crowd they have “a binary choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.”

Democrats still have a major opportunity to boost their margins in the city of Bethlehem and the county’s blue-trending suburbs. In a nod to turning out the base, Walz told the rally crowd if Trump “tells the truth, he doesn’t get a damn vote,” so instead he and Republicans “tell lies.”

Matthew Boyle, 61, was in line several hours before the rally even started — wearing a Harris 2024 that read: “Grab him by the ballot.” He was excited to hear from Walz.

“Trump is a moron,” Boyle said, who lives in Bethlehem and works at a food manufacturer.

 And, during his rally, Walz sought to make a connection between his state and this region’s industrial legacy. He repeated a story that he originally told a rally crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania’s other critical swing county, about their shared history: Minnesota miners powered the Pennsylvania steel mills that built the tanks that liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny. Chants of “USA!” broke out.

 

Democrats are also targeting the region’s significant Hispanic population, in an effort to drive turnout and keep working-class Latinos from turning more toward Trump as families weather the bite of inflation. Thirty percent of Bethlehem and nearly half of nearby Allentown’s population is Hispanic, many with Puerto Rican heritage.

At the rally, Walz recognized the seventh anniversary of the devastating 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. He was joined onstage by actress Liza Colón-Zayas of The Bear and actor Anthony Ramos of Hamilton, who pressed attendees to vote for Harris and Walz. The audience roared when Walz arrived and they chanted “We’re not going back” throughout the event.

But during the rally, an ongoing series of pro-Palestine protesters waving Palestinian flags and yelling interrupted Walz, in a sign of the ticket’s own tensions with some left-leaning voters.

Democratic organizers here have come around on their support for Walz, after Harris picked the Minnesota governor over their own highly popular Gov. Josh Shapiro. Now, they couldn’t be more thrilled to have Walz in the area, where Democrats are desperately trying to hang onto territory Biden won back from Trump in 2020.

“He checks all the boxes. He identifies with everyone. If there was ever a Joe Schmo or a John Smith, Tim Walz is that guy,” said Tameko Patterson, who chairs the local Democratic party in Monroe County just to the north.

 In neighboring Lehigh County, which Biden won by almost eight percentage points in 2020 and includes a small slice of Bethlehem, Democrats see an opportunity to increase their margins — especially in their stronghold of Allentown, Pennsylvania’s third-most populous city with 125,000 residents.

 

Kathy Michalik, 72 and her husband Joe, 74, live in Macungie, a small borough outside Allentown in Lehigh County. They’re voting for Harris.

“Trump is on the same track he’s always been on. And that is not for the American people, but for himself,” Michalik said.

In another boost, Democrats in the area have never had so many volunteers to door knock across the sprawling area, Northampton County Democratic chair Matt Munsey said.

But they acknowledged there’s lots of work ahead in the final sprint.

Rob Miller, a 49-year-old independent voter from Bethlehem, said he doesn’t think he’ll vote in this election. “Trump sticks his fucking foot in his mouth a lot,” Miller said, but “economically, I probably like his policies better than Harris.”

Josh, 39, a small business owner who lives in Bethlehem has voted for Democrats in the past and said he was worried about Harris’ plan for taxes. He didn’t want to provide his last name.

Who is he voting for? “Probably Trump, even though I don’t like him.”

Walz, while he faces some of the same limitations as any Democrat trying to reach key voting blocs in the area, could help shift perception more than Harris — as Republicans are pouring millions of dollars into attack ads in the state to depict her and Democrats as out-of-touch, radical liberals.

“Walz appeals to people who might be skeptical, or who might not be aware of her background,” Munsey said. “I think their values are pretty similar, but it’s a different image.”

 

A Nazi magazine regularly published manipulated photos and misinformation, long before the age of AI Daniel H. Magilow

 

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed in August 2024 that a photograph of a large crowd of supporters welcoming Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to Detroit on Aug. 7 was doctored. Trump falsely wrote on Truth Social that the crowd did not exist because “she ‘A.I.’d’ it.”

Multiple independent news sources, including Reuters and the BBC, confirmed that the photograph was not created by artificial intelligence. The large crowds at other Harris rallies also suggested that this turnout was not an anomaly. But minuscule details such as the apparent lack of reflections on the plane made some conspiracy theorists skeptical.

Trump himself came under fire after fake, AI-generated images made by his supporters of him amid crowds of smiling Black supporters circulated. But even if Trump seems willing to share fake images, he does not have a monopoly on the practice.

After a bullet grazed Trump’s ear on July 13, for instance, some people – including those who identified as anti-MAGA activists – shared social media posts and memes asserting the false idea that the assassination attempt was staged.

 

These kinds of accusations – that fake-looking images are real, that real-looking ones are fake – have been a common feature in politics, particularly among extremists, especially since the early 20th century.

That’s when it first became technically possible to routinely print photographs in newspapers and magazines. During this era, a new form of media blossomed, as magazines began using photographs, rather than just drawings, for illustration purposes. These magazines were particularly popular during the Weimar Republic, a government in power in Germany from 1919 through 1933, before the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, most often known as the Nazi party.

During the 1920s, Germany experienced an unstable economy, parliamentary paralysis and an increasingly polarized society.

During this economically and politically tumultuous time in Germany, photo manipulation in popular news publications – particularly one run by the Nazis – was rampant.

 

The rise of the Nazis’ publication

I am a scholar of Germany, and as part of my research on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I have been researching an idiosyncratic Nazi propaganda magazine called the Illustrated Observer – or, in German, the Illustrierter Beobachter.

The Nazis, who formed as a political party in 1920, started publishing this magazine in 1926. The magazine, published through 1945, provides valuable historical context for understanding today’s political mudslinging about fake and doctored photos. It also shows how, left unchecked, publishing fake information could potentially contribute to dire political consequences, such as a rise in fascism.

As the Illustrated Observer’s name suggests, it belonged to a genre of publications that Germans call Illustrierten, literally translating to “illustrateds” in English.

These magazines included serious news stories and photojournalism, but also short fictional stories, jokes, cartoons and crossword puzzles. And because of advances in printing technologies, they also included lots of photographs.

These glossy, stylishly illustrated tabloids were so popular in Germany that the most popular publication, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung – or Berlin Illustrated Newspaper – had a circulation of 1,844,130 copies each week by 1929.

The actual readership numbers surpassed this figure, as multiple people in homes, hotels and cafés in Germany would share copies of the newspaper.

‘Who lies?’

In July 1926, the Illustrated Observer published a spread that included eight large photographs of a Nazi rally held in the town of Weimar. It included one photo that was taken with a wide-angle camera lens that exaggerates the crowd’s size.

Alongside this camera trick, the Nazis also used misleading captions and photo cropping to skew how people would likely interpret this and other photographs.

The Nazis were still a small political party in 1926, but they were steadily gaining power, and this sort of photographic trickery helped fuel their rise.

The caption for the photo that shows a crowd of people at the Nazi rally hatefully shouts: “Who lies? Photography or the Jewish newspapers?”

With this question, the Illustrated Observer aimed to discredit centrist newspapers, which accurately reported that the rally was a noisy and violent affair attended by hooligans, whom one journalist mocked as “Hitler-people.”

A few months later, the Illustrated Observer’s Christmas 1926 issue included a story headlined “The Jews and their servants.” A tightly cropped photo showed U.S. President Calvin Coolidge surrounded by about a dozen rabbis, who were dressed conservatively and had top hats and thick beards, traditional for Orthodox Jewish men.

But this was not the full story. The photograph was cropped, and the original image showed a much larger group portrait of more than 100 people who attended a religious Zionist meeting at the White House. Through cropping and misleading headlines, the Illustrated Observer falsely tried to show that a small, conspiratorial group of Jews controlled the American president.

 

A flashback to the 1920s

These kinds of photo manipulations were common during the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first but ultimately failed experiment with democracy that left the doors of power open to the Nazi takeover in January 1933.

The Nazis effectively used a visually striking mix of incendiary words and images in their magazine to constantly sow the seeds of doubt among readers. It was hard to know which photographs were real and which were fakes – and, thus, who was telling Germans the truth and who was not. This practice eroded confidence in the news, fueled further conspiracy theories and made it hard to know which political party to trust.

These conflicts from a century ago will sound familiar to people following the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Now, there are also claims of doctoring images, angry rebuttals, accusations of media bias and an intense, conspiratorial fixation on details that supposedly expose certain images as fakes.

To some, the knowledge that the current political trend of photo doctoring is not new may make it easier to dismiss this as a fact of life in politics. But to others, the ominous historical consequences of unchecked photo manipulation might be too significant to ignore.