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.”
The Conservative candidate has changed his tune on climate action, recently attacking Labour’s net zero policies and arguing for new fossil fuel extraction.
Former Conservative minister Robert Jenrick, who has today entered the race to lead the Tory party, has a growing record of attacks on climate action.
The MP for Newark – who saw a 23.9 percent swing against him in the general election, and served as secretary of state for immigration under former prime minister Rishi Sunak – has attacked what he calls “net zero zealotry”, and has labelled the UK’s net zero target “dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality”.
This is despite Jenrick having hailed the UK’s “world-leading commitment to net zero by 2050” as recently as 2020.
Jenrick has also called for the building of “new gas power stations” and supports new fossil fuel extraction, including North Sea oil and gas, and the opening of new coal mines.
His candidacy follows the Conservative Party losing a landslide election on 4 July against a Labour Party committed to climate action, during which the Tories supported new North Sea oil and gas extraction, and the delaying of key climate reforms.
Almost half of voters (49 percent) believe renewable energy would lower household bills, while only 14 percent say the same for more fossil fuels, according to polling by More in Common.
This week saw what climate scientists believe could be the hottest day on record thanks to climate change. The world’s leading climate science group, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that there is “a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all”.
Attacks on Labour’s Climate Agenda
In his response to the announcement of Labour’s legislative agenda in the King’s Speech last week (19 July), Jenrick used an address in the House of Commons to launch an attack on the government’s climate policies, spreading familiar misinformation.
Jenrick said that “despite being only responsible for one percent of global emissions, we find ourselves with a government pursuing for ideological reasons a net zero policy which is going to make it harder for our own consumers to afford their bills, [and] which is further going to erode our industrial base”.
Downplaying a country’s emissions is a “widely deployed” tactic used to delay international climate action, according to academics. Contrary to Jenrick’s claims, the UK’s cost of living crisis has been made worse by its dependence on fossil fuels, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
And rather than “eroding our industrial base”, net zero policies are already creating new jobs and economic development. The UK’s net zero economy grew nine percent in 2023 to £74 billion – equivalent to 3.8 percent of the total UK economy, and supported more than 765,000 jobs, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
Jenrick also attacked Labour’s green investment vehicle, Great British Energy – launched today – as a quango “which serves no apparent purpose”, warned that new solar farms would “despoil our countryside”, and claimed that “200,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector have been put in danger”, using a widely debunked figure.
The chief advisor to the National Farmers Union (NFU) has said solar farms “do not in any way present a risk to the UK’s food security”, while NFU president Tom Bradshaw has attacked the claims made by Jenrick and others as “sensationalist”.
On 11 July, when Labour announced its decision not to defend the new proposed coal mine in Cumbria in the High Court, Jenrick posted on X: “First the oil and gas industry, now coking coal for the steel industry. Less than a week in and jobs and economic growth are already being sacrificed on the altar of Labour’s net zero zealotry.”
In 2021, Jenrick decided not to challenge the planning application for the new mine – the UK’s first deep coal mine in more than 30 years, which would extract 2.8 million tonnes of coking coal a year, emitting an estimated 220 millions tonnes of greenhouse gases over its lifetime.
Net Zero U-Turn
Jenrick’s attacks on Labour’s green policies mirror his growing criticism of climate action – despite having previously celebrated the Conservatives Party’s support for net zero.
In February, Jenrick wrote an article for The Telegraph – a newspaper that regularly publishes attacks on climate science and net zero reforms – claiming that voters are sick of the “dishonesty” from politicians about “what net zero entails”.
He said that the UK’s 2050 net zero ambition was decided upon in the summer of 2019, “while the country was occupied by Brexit debates”, and was “nodded through the Commons with fewer than 90 minutes of debate”.
At the time, Jenrick, who was Treasury minister, welcomed the adoption of the target. In 2020, while serving as communities secretary under Boris Johnson, Jenrick praised the UK’s “world-leading commitment to net zero by 2050”. Ahead of the 2019 general election, he said that voters should support the Conservatives on the basis that the UK was the “first advanced economy in the world to pass a net zero target”.
Yet, in the February 2024 Telegraph article, Jenrick wrote that it was obvious to him “at the time” that the costs associated with net zero “were likely to be astronomical.” The article went on to claim that “reaching net zero by 2050 requires us to overhaul the material foundations of our economy in just three decades”, and that the result “is a dangerous fantasy green politics unmoored from reality and that lacks the buy-in of the public”.
Climate Denial Links
Jenrick’s campaign for Tory leader is being run by fellow Conservative MP Danny Kruger.
Kruger is the chair of the New Conservatives faction in Parliament – a group that advocates for more socially conservative, right-wing ideas within the Tory party, campaigning against “woke” culture, and immigration.
It also appears that New Conservative press officer Sam Armstrong is serving as one of Jenrick’s campaign aides, although Armstrong neither confirmed nor denied his role when approached for comment.
As DeSmog has revealed, the New Conservatives received £50,000 in December from the Legatum Institute, a free market think tank that formerly employed Kruger as a senior fellow.
In May of this year, Jenrick gave a speech to the Legatum Institute’s ‘Free Market Roadshow’ event at the group’s London office, where he called for new fossil fuel plants. He said: “We are smothering our ability to build new nuclear power stations, to build new gas power stations, which we’ve got to have to have the base capacity that we need as a country, in this mesh of regulation.”
The Legatum Institute’s parent company is UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group, which co-owns the right-wing broadcaster GB News. The outlet frequently spreads climate denial, both via its presenters and guests.
Kruger is also on the advisory board of another Legatum project, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), alongside some of the world’s most high-profile climate science deniers.
Jenrick has pledged to win back voters who have switched from the Tories to Reform UK, the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, which is bankrolled by climate deniers and polluting interests, and campaigns to “scrap all of net zero”.
Polling from the Conservative Environment Network, a green caucus backed by dozens of Tory MPs, found that only two percent of voters who planned to switch from the Conservative to Reform saw climate change as the most important issue for them in July’s election.
Immediately after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when little was known about the white male shooter (except that he was a registered Republican), right-wing politicians directly blamed Democratic rhetoric for the shooting.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X (7/13/24), just days before Trump named him as his running mate:
The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
(That Trump might be considered a fascist did not always seem so far-fetched to Vance; in 2016, he privately worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler”—Reuters, 7/15/24.)
“For years, Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy,” Sen. Tim Scott posted on X (7/13/24). “Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”
Rather than denounce both the assassination attempt and these hypocritical and opportunistic attacks on critical speech, the country’s top editorial boards cravenly bothsidesed their condemnations of “political violence.”
‘Unthinkably uncivil’
The Washington Post (7/14/24) described Trump’s exhortation to “remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness” as a call for “national unity.”
In an editorial headlined, “Turn Down the Heat, Let in the Light,” the Washington Post (7/14/24) praised Donald Trump for appearing to call for national unity. The Post wrote that the assassination attempt offered Trump the chance to “cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction.”
The editorial board quickly admonished both sides equally for “unthinkably uncivil” actions and “physical violence.” They pointed to protesters who “harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes,” universities that have “become battlegrounds,” and the “bipartisan hazard” of political violence, citing Nancy Pelosi’s husband and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise.
(The link the Post inserted leads to an earlier editorial in which they condemned peaceful protests outside Supreme Court justices’ houses as “totalitarian,” and recommended that the protesters be imprisoned—FAIR.org, 5/17/22).
New York Times editors, meanwhile, called the shooting “Antithetical to America” (7/13/24), a formulation clearly more aspirational than actual. “Violence is antithetical to democracy,” the editorial board wrote, acknowledging moments later that “violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.” They explained:
Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series “The Danger Within” in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.
It’s a remarkable obfuscation, in which responsibility is ascribed to no one and—as at the Post—everyone.
Curiously, the 2022 editorial series the Times cites (11/3–12/24/22) did make clear where most of the responsibility lay, explaining that “the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.” It pointed out that of the hundreds of extremism-related murders of the past decade, more than three-quarters were committed by “right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists.” While there have been occasional attacks on conservatives (like the attack on a congressional baseball game that wounded Scalise), the Times noted,
the number and nature of the episodes aren’t comparable, and no leading figures in the Democratic Party condone, mock or encourage their supporters to violence in ways that are common from politicians on the right and their supporters in the conservative media.
But two years later, the Times, like the Post, carefully avoids bringing that much-needed clarity to the current situation and apportions responsibility for avoiding political violence equally to both sides:
It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.
Of course, there’s a crucial difference between criticizing Trump and his allies for their anti-democratic positions and actions—which is what the Democrats and the left have done—and actually threatening and calling for violence, as the right has been doing.
The list of examples is nearly endless, but would prominently include Trump’s incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6; his personal attacks on prosecutors, judges and politicians who have subsequently required increased security protections; and his refusal to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” His supporters have repeatedly called for armed uprisings after perceived attacks on Trump, including immediately after the assassination attempt.
That’s why it’s critical that leading newspapers push back against right-wing attempts to equate criticisms of Trump with calls for violence.
‘Grossly irresponsible talk’
The Wall Street Journal (7/14/24), unsurprisingly, took this bothsidesism the farthest.
Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.
We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.”
Readers of those top US papers would have to look across the pond to the British Guardian (7/14/24) for the kind of clear-eyed take newspaper editors with concern for democracy ought to have: “There must also be care that extreme acts by a minority are not used to silence legitimate criticism.”
J.D. Vance was chosen as Trump’s Vice President, one of the most right-wing options for the ticket (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
At its National Convention, the leading conservative party in the US promotes its presidential ticket and ultra-conservative platform
The Republican National Convention, started on July 15, will continue until July 18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The RNC officially confirmed former President Donald Trump as their nominee for the 2024 presidential elections, to take place in November.
Many in the US, of all political tendencies, were increasingly giving up on the prospect of a second Biden presidency even before Trump’s attempted assassination largely due to Biden’s disastrous debate performance and several political gaffes surrounding the NATO Summit. The Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago from August 19 to 22, where the Democrats will officially select their nominee for the presidency. Until the first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, Biden’s incumbent status and victory in the primary elections made him essentially a shoe-in for the nomination. Since then, Biden’s nomination has been widely called into question.
Trump’s second presidency seems increasingly inevitable, with polls from recent days predicting a clear Trump victory. Much of the RNC has been dedicated to deifying Trump, who was notably ridiculed by the Republican Party establishment when he first ran for president in 2016. Trump’s own pick of Vice President, Ohio Senator and bestselling author J.D. Vance, once lamented privately to a friend that he was not sure if Trump was simply a “cynical asshole” or “America’s Hitler.”
Vance and the “America First” comeback
Vance refused to vote for Trump in 2016. But like most of the Republican Party, even the most established and powerful figures within the party have fallen in line behind Trump. Even Marco Rubio, who ran a vicious primary campaign against Trump in 2016, hoped, in vain, to become Trump’s VP.
However, Vance has since become one of the most conservative politicians in Congress, fully embracing what has become known as the “America First” political ideology. This conservative tendency is a break from the “neo-conservative” ideology that brought some of the most brutal foreign interventions in US history, such as the invasion of Iraq. In contrast, “America First” is characterized by isolationism, including a fierce opposition towards military aid to Ukraine. However, while “America First” politicians reference policies that could ostensibly benefit workers, such as lowering inflation and cutting on foreign military aid, these politicians have no issue promoting New Cold War policies against China, or chipping away at the little social spending that exists in the US.
“Our God still delivers, and he still sets free. Because the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but the American lion got back up on his feet,” said Senator Tim Scott, also a former Trump VP hopeful, on the first day of the convention, referring to the assassination attempt against the former president.
With its total capitulation to the ideology of Trump’s campaign and his base, the Republican Party seems to be attempting to mask a widely unpopular policy platform behind a pro-worker facade.
Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien addressed the convention on Monday, becoming the first Teamsters leader to speak at the Republican National Convention. O’Brien did not outright endorse him, and has reportedly also asked to speak at the DNC. According to a Teamsters spokesperson, the DNC has yet to accept that request.
The Republican Party is notoriously hostile to organized labor, responsible for some of the harshest anti-union legislation in the world, leaving workers in conservative states uniquely susceptible to exploitation. Workers in so-called “right to work” states, where unions are prohibited from ensuring every worker who enjoys union benefits pay union dues, weaken the power of trade unions in those states. Republican-controlled states often have less regulations on corporate greed across the board, with some of the lowest minimum wages in the country.
RNC platform proudly embraces xenophobia and militarism
Despite the RNC’s appeals to workers, the RNC is promoting one of the most politically backwards platforms as it puts its full support behind some of the most ultra-conservative politicians in the country. The Republicans put their attack on migrants front and center in their policy platform, pledging to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” as well as completing Trump’s border wall (which Biden continued to build).
Indeed, the platform, while emphasizing isolationism, also does not shy away from furthering US militarism. “Keeping the American People safe requires a strong America. The Biden administration’s weak Foreign Policy has made us less safe and a laughingstock all over the World,” the platform states. “The Republican Plan is to return Peace through Strength, rebuilding our Military and Alliances, countering China, defeating terrorism, building an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, promoting American Values, securing our Homeland and Borders, and reviving our Defense Industrial Base.”
Vance’s selection as VP, as one of the most conservative options that Trump could have possibly gone with, also signals the further entrenchment of the Republican Party with its ultra right-wing. “Vance’s nomination to be Trump’s running mate signals that the Republicans are doubling down on their false appeal as fighters for working people. In reality Vance is a Silicon Valley capitalist committed to militarism and boosting the profits of big business. His appointment, rather than a figure who would be considered more moderate like Doug Burgum, suggests that hardline repressive policies like a mass deportation campaign are likely under a potential second Trump administration,” Walter Smolarek, editor of Liberation News, told Peoples Dispatch. “Vance is also an anti-China fanatic, and would likely push for more and more escalation in the new Cold War.”
The 2024 US Presidential elections are now set to be a battle between the ultra-right represented by Trump, and the right-wing of the Democratic Party represented by Joe Biden. To find a true alternative to the right, people in the US may have to look outside of the two major parties.
Labour’s stance on Gaza under Keir Starmer cost the party votes at the general election | Chris Kleponis/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Starmer’s stance on Gaza has already reduced support for Labour – and that will only worsen in the coming months
The Labour Party’s landslide general election victory on 4 July has been compared to the party’s previous wins under Tony Blair in 1997 and Clement Atlee in 1945. But Keir Starmer won a far smaller vote share than either Blair or Attlee and, unlike in 1997 and 1945, the mood of the victors was hardly euphoric – more damp squib than firework display.
The party’s win was not down to any widespread love of Starmer’s policies, but a deeply embedded antagonism to the 14 years of the Tory rule, aided by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives, the collapse of the SNP vote in Scotland and an unusually low national turnout.
Labour was further held back by an unexpectedly large number of voters who abandoned the party – many of whom were motivated by its stance on Israel’s assault on Gaza. The mainstream media has wrongly attributed this to the UK’s substantial Muslim minority, portraying it as just a sectarian issue – ignoring the anger and hurt felt by many on the left.
Independent candidates stood primarily on a pro-Gaza ticket across many parts of the north of England, the Midlands and London. Five were elected – a record for a general election – and many more came close, most notably Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North, who managed to reduce new health secretary Wes Streeting’s majority from 5,218 to just 528.
Overall, in 57 constituencies, Labour’s biggest challenger was an independent or a candidate from the Green Party or the Workers Party. The Greens’ leap forward was particularly notable – they came in second place in 40 seats, all currently held by Labour, up from three in 2019.
As the new independent candidates said repeatedly throughout the election campaign, Gaza is just one reason for dissent from the new Starmer norm. Many traditional Labour supporters are also unhappy that the party is moving decidedly rightwards and embracing Big Business, as revealed last week by openDemocracy. Labour now seems likely to end up as a centre-right party – effectively disenfranchising several million people.
Even so, Labour’s position on Gaza was undeniably a big factor in its fall in majorities in many seats. It presents a problem for Labour in general and Starmer in particular that is simply not going to go away – and has several components.
The first is that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his far-right Knesset supporters have long espoused the view that defeating Hamas in Gaza requires inflicting punishment on the whole civilian population. It is this so-called Dahiya doctrine that is largely responsible for the appalling loss of life among Palestinians.
The death toll in Gaza is at least 37,000, with as many as 10,000 missing, mostly buried under the rubble, and well over 70,000 wounded. The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, recently published a letter that suggested that if indirect deaths – including those due to disease, malnutrition and increased infant mortality – are included then the total number of human lives lost could reach 186,000.
The second is that there is no end in sight for the current war. There are occasions when talks seem to be getting underway but they repeatedly come to nothing, as they have done for the past six months at least. The Palestinian suffering is huge but the Hamas military leadership believes it can persevere, especially as claims by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) that most of Gaza has been cleared of Hamas turn out to be false.
Israel’s current leadership has little interest in a long-term ceasefire. Netanyahu will certainly persist with his attack on Gaza until at least the US presidential election in November, now hoping that Donald Trump surviving the recent shooting will help to secure his win. Meanwhile, Israel’s steady encroachment on Palestinian land and people in the West Bank is a further sign of a long-term insistence on permanent control “from the river to the sea”.
Finally, there is one more factor that is rarely understood. The sheer scale of the loss of life and wider Palestinian suffering due to the Israeli assault on Gaza has already caused a long-term – perhaps permanent – shift in attitudes towards Israel and support for Gaza in the UK, which reaches far beyond Muslim communities.
This shift will likely only increase as more and more evidence emerges about the Israeli conduct of the war. Last week the highly experienced foreign correspondent, Chris McGreal, published a report on the IDF’s repeated use of fragmentation artillery shells in densely populated urban areas. Perhaps the most devastating of all such ordnance being used is the Israeli M339 tank shell, whose manufacturer, Elbit Systems, describes it as “highly lethal against dismounted infantry”. No doubt even more so against children.
The deliberate human impact, especially on children, is appalling and causes injuries that would be difficult to treat even in well-equipped and fully functioning hospitals – of which there are none left in Gaza due to Israel’s bombing campaign.
Other similar reports will surely follow McGreal’s and the combined impact will last years, substantially adding to calls for international legal action against Netanyahu and his government.
Unless there is a radical change in policy towards Israel now that Starmer is in Downing Street, the assault in Gaza will remain a problem for Labour well into the future. Add to this the wider view that Labour is moving markedly to the right and the huge parliamentary majority may not be as stabilising as it first seemed.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
UK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
dizzy: We get news stories in the UK recently – since the general election and the new Labour government – of Zionists Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy calling on Israel for a ceasefire, even allegedly saying this to Benjamin Netanyahu, etc. That’s very difficult to accept and you can see through their actions e.g. objecting to ICC warrants, that they are fully supportive, assisting, aiding and abetting, complicit in Israel’s actions.
