Elon Musk responded on X that ‘parody is legal in America’. Photograph: Chesnot/Getty Images
Doctored campaign video featuring US vice-president reposted by Tesla chief executive watched 128m times
Kamala Harris’s election campaign has accused Elon Musk of spreading “manipulated lies” after the Tesla chief executive posted a doctored video featuring the vice-president on his X account.
Musk reposted a manipulated Harris campaign video on Friday evening in which a fake Harris voiceover says: “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire,” and that anyone who criticises her is “both sexist and racist”.
Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator, accused Musk of violating the platform’s guidelines. According to X’s synthetic and manipulated media policy, users are barred from sharing “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm” although allowances are made for satire provided it does not “cause significant confusion about the authenticity of the media”.
A spokesperson for Harris’s presidential campaign said: “The American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice-President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
AFTER months in which Labour argued that such is the dire state of the economy that Tory spending limits must be maintained, the Chancellor of the Exchequer now says that further cuts in public expenditure are needed.
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The question raised by any talk about varying the structure of taxation is where taxes fall. The richest 10 per cent of families hold 43 per cent of all wealth. The bottom 50 per cent — and be sure that this includes the greater proportion of people who see themselves as working class — possess less than 10 per cent of wealth.
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When the overwhelming majority of voters, including Tory voters, see public ownership of rail, mail, water and energy as desirable this is not simply a yearning for the more efficient delivery of these services and utilities than private ownership is able to provide. More, it is an expression of a clear understanding that revenues from these myriad transactions should not be privately appropriated but applied to the common good.
The present Labour administration has, with rare exceptions, ruled out the recovery into public ownership of privatised sectors and, less performatively than Gordon Brown in his day but no less systematically, has assured the corporate world that not only are the foundations of private ownership safe but that Labour, even more than its Tory predecessors, holds appeasing the bond markets a central part of its economic strategy. Hence the cuts announced today.
Reeves’s dilemma is highlighted by the necessity to find £1 billion to fund the juniors doctors’ pay increase; something similar for the teachers and a backlog of other public-sector pay claims.
Under this system spending is always about priorities. But there is money about. She is already committed by Starmer’s diktat to find £57.1bn in defence spending in 2024-25 which is a 4.5 per cent increase in real terms. No cuts there!
A bigger source of revenue would result from taxing wealth at the same level as income by raising the capital gains and dividend tax rates to the level at which workers pay on their wages.
An even bigger windfall would result from a socialist economy in which all rents, interest and profits arising from human economic activity were held in common rather than being privately acquired.
Smoke billows following an Israeli airstrike in the southern Lebanese border village of Chihine on July 28, 2024. (Photo by Kawnat Haju/AFP via Getty Images)
A barrage of Israeli strikes across Gaza killed many dozen Palestinians over the weekend, while a strike attributed to Hezbollah killed 12 children in Israeli-controlled territory.
Israel’s war in Gaza continued in full force on Saturday and Sunday, with at least 66 Palestinians killed in roughly the last 24 hours, as international attention shifted to concern about an all-out war with Lebanon following an attack on Israeli-controlled territory that killed 12 children, with international diplomats pushing for deescalation.
At least 66 people were killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza in a 24-hour period, and another 241 were injured, the enclave’s health ministry reported Sunday. Fifteen were also killed in strikes on Khan Younis that apparently weren’t included in the 24-hour count, including a four-month-old girl, Al Jazeera reported.
The strikes in Gaza came as the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, a heavily armed militia and political party in Lebanon, intensified. A rocket attack on a soccer field in the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, an Israeli-controlled territory, killed 12 children—the most deadly attack on Israeli-controlled land since October. The victims were Druze Arab; it’s not clear from media reports if they were Israeli citizens.
Israel blamed Hezbollah for the attack, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was “every indication” that the group was behind it, though Hezbollah denied responsibility, which it hasn’t done for previous strikes.
“Hezbollah will pay a heavy price, which it has not paid up to now,” Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in an overnight statement.
The Israel-Hezbollah conflict, featuring cross-border strikes, has killed more than 500 since October, including more than 100 civilians, but has thus far remained relatively contained, with both sides saying that they are willing to engage in full-scale war but want to avoid it. About 100,000 people in Lebanon and 60,000 in Israel have been already displaced due to the strikes.
Hezbollah is seen as far stronger and better equipped than Hamas, the Palestinian militant and political group which Israel is seeking to eliminate, following the group’s massacre of more than 1,100 Israelis on October 7. Both groups are classified by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
Israel’s conflicts with the two groups are related and ending one could help end the other. Hezbollah has said it would stop its attacks if a cease-fire in Gaza is reached.
Experts are calling on U.S. diplomats not just to diffuse Israel-Hezbollah tensions but also to use its leverage, as the main arms supplier and backer of Israel, to bring an end to the assault on Gaza.
“The U.S. administration has not done enough to [reach a ceasefire] in Gaza,” Heiko Wimmen, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera on Sunday. “The incident in Majdal Shams is a potent reminder of why it is necessary to bring this unending conflict to an end.”
For now, the violence continues on multiple fronts. An Israeli drone strike killed two Palestinians in the West Bank on Saturday and injured 28, according to Al Jazeera.
A Palestinian boy walks past the rubble of a school destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, July 27, 2024
ISRAELI air strikes destroyed a school used by displaced Palestinians in central Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 30 people, including several children.
Seven children and seven women were reportedly among the dead taken from the girls’ school in Deir al-Balah to al-Aqsa Hospital.
Israel’s military said that the air raid was targeted at a Hamas command centre used to direct attacks against Israeli troops and store “large quantities of weapons.”
Hamas slammed the Israeli claim as false.
Civil defence workers in Gaza said thousands had been sheltering in the school, which also contained a medical site.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least another 12 people were killed in other strikes on Saturday.
Just Stop Oil are being branded “fanatics” for disruptive actions whose like hardly raised an eyebrow a decade ago
I wasn’t terribly surprised to see, in the weekend Morning Star, a letter suggesting that while the sentencingof theJust Stop Oil Five was overly harsh, they deserved punishment for their conspiracy to disrupt traffic on the M25.
The Star is, to be fair, generally quite supportive of JSO’s right to protest, while having some knee-jerk types in its readership, particularly in the crusty old tankie set. But such complaints get at the heart of an issue JSO has had for some time — they’re often really annoying even for their nominal allies.
Many of them are quite posh and can sound patronising or smug. Their targets are disruptive but less often to the wealthy and more to a cross-class cohort of art lovers, or pagans, or sports enthusiasts, or holiday makers. And motorists, of course. Roger Hallam, as their most famous face, often acts like a self-aggrandising edgelordwhose projects have a habit of getting people in trouble without much of a plan for long-term support.
It sometimes makes JSO hard to love, and it gives grouches in politics and the media an excuse to label them attention seekers, or cultists, or extremists.
But here’s the thing: for all their PR controversies, JSO aren’t actually extreme at all, and not only in comparison to, say, cops throwing their weight around on a Friday night, or any major event that gridlocks a city centre. Comparing them to similar campaigns from the 1990s or even the early 2000s, JSO are tamer than Lassie. The anti-roads movement,Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!,Reclaim The Streets, even Greenpeace — have all mounted considerably more disruptive campaigns within living memory. You can find reports on some of them in old issues of Freedom and Schnews.
In fact, a quick look through the latter’s archive for mentions of the M25 very quickly turns up this articlefrom 2012, with the Tories already in power, which notes the following action:
On Monday 16th July a Greenpeace co-ordinated swoop saw seventy-seven petrol stations within the M25 shut down, and another thirteen in Edinburgh - hitting Shell on the forecourt and in their pockets. Activists disassembled the emergency fuel shut off switches and chained the pumps together, stopping business for the day.
Twelve years ago, shutting down nearly the entire refuelling system around London and Edinburgh wasn’t considered big enough to fluster the Graun, which reported the whole thing as just another news story for the day. Shell were careful to say they respected the protesters’ views, and the police didn’t even bother to comment! My goodness what a difference a few years makes. Can you imagine the level of dribbling outrage the press would indulge in now?
This impressive gap in the treatment of disruptive protests on the same road is symptomatic of an issue touched on in a recent Freedom discussion, which has been worsening for a long time and accelerated, strangely, alongside the culture wars. While the left was accused of going woke and indulging in cancel culture, the right was becoming so pathetically unable to handle confrontation that it changed the laws to jail people for being annoying. Part of Suella Braverman’s anti-protest law(since struck down) literally gave police the power to break up protests for being “too noisy”.
And now we’re at the point where Hallam and co. are being jailed for 4-5 years each for conspiracy to disrupt the flow of traffic. But what’s worse is they’ve managed to somehow convince the public this is all a response to sudden rising environmental “fanaticism” entailing behaviour we’ve never seen before. A straight-up bald faced lie to a population who, if they are adults, should be able to personally remember examples of this not being the case which has nevertheless sunk in as truth. What a stunning propaganda victory! If the left had done it, you can bet your life the word “Orwellian” would be burning holes in printing presses across the nation.
Which brings us back to our letter writer in the Star. The left (and of course the anarchists) need to remember our history, and why it is that solidarity applies even to people we don’t get on with ideologically (or personally). We need to be much, much better at getting our heads out of our arses and fighting back against the demonisation of disruptive protest. It’s not a matter of whether we approve of JSO or Roger the Public Nuisance, or whether think their work is counterproductive in terms of public opinion.
Because not too long ago what they’ve been doing wouldn’t have been a jailable offence, or even a front page one. Not too long ago, columnists opining about disruptive protest being “anti-democratic” would have been quite rightly ridiculed for their lack of commitment to human rights. JSO’s re-designation as extremists courting much-deserved jail time is our re-designation.
Kier Starmer needs to be pressured on this from all sides. He has, after all, taken away the left’s voice in Parliament. Now he needs to hear it in the streets.
