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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Donald Trump’s chances of winning the southern battleground state of North Carolina in November’s presidential election have been threatened by explosive allegations of racist comments on a pornography website by Republican governor candidate Mark Robinson.

The furore around Robinson erupted on Thursday after CNN reported that in posts from 2008 to 2012 on pornography forum Nude Africa he called himself a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for “reinstating slavery”.

Robinson has vowed to stay in the race and in a short video posted on X he denied making the comments, blaming his Democratic opponent Josh Stein for “a story leaked by him” to the press.

The allegations about Robinson come as Trump is already under fire for being too close to the radical fringes of the Republican party.

The former president has faced calls to distance his campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right social media influencer who has flown on his plane and accompanied him to events, and to disavow baseless claims that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. 

North Carolina is emerging as a must-win state for Trump. While it has voted for the Republican White House candidate in every race since 2008, Democrats are increasingly confident that the state is winnable.

Since Kamala Harris became the party’s candidate, the Democrats have been gaining ground in North Carolina, especially in more affluent college-educated suburbs. Trump is leading Harris in the state by 1.3 percentage points, according to the FT’s poll tracker. 

Robinson has been one of Trump’s closest allies and protégés in recent years. At a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina in March, the former president endorsed Robinson and called him “Martin Luther King on steroids”, referring to the late civil rights activist and preacher.

“I think you’re better than Martin Luther King,” Trump said, then joked that Robinson might not consider it a compliment. 

During a campaign event in Wilmington, North Carolina in 2022, Trump said Robinson was “one of the hottest politicians in the United States of America”, and had “become a friend of mine”. Robinson was also given a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin in July. 

Trump was scheduled to campaign in the state on Saturday.

Democrats have seized on the revelations. In a post on X, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper wrote that “Donald Trump and NC GOP leaders embraced Mark Robinson for years knowing who he was and what he stood for including disrespect for women and inciting violence. They reap what they sow”.

The CNN allegations included Robinson posting that “slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few”, and that he liked “watching tyranny on girl porn”. 

The North Carolina Republican party said in a statement on Thursday that Robinson “has categorically denied the allegations made by CNN but that won’t stop the Left from trying to demonise him via personal attacks”.

Even prior to the CNN report, Democrats criticised Robinson as an extreme and toxic politician. 

“Mark Robinson is a very dangerous candidate for governor” Drew Kromer, chair of the Mecklenburg County Democratic party, said this week. “He will take away the status of North Carolina as one of the final places in the south where women can go to get reproductive healthcare . . . I don’t think people can fully appreciate the downstream consequences that would have on folks all over this country.”

This story originally appeared in Truthout on Sep. 19, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

Every day I encounter, in some form or another, the idea that everything is doomed to always get worse. Faced with a daily inundation of horrors and political bad news from around the world, it’s easy to slide into feeling that nothing can change and that no actions we can take make a difference.

But we have to resist this feeling, because this is the mindset of nihilism — it’s what authoritarians want us to feel. Their power thrives on our exhaustion and silence.

I often wake up and fall asleep unsure of my own ability to truly face this world as it is, in the fullness of pain and grief, in the obscene cruelty of a genocide aired on social media. I watch fascist leaders on TV making light of others’ pain and bragging about being strong men, hypocritical liberals claiming empathy while funding destruction.

I protest and write and collaborate and read, looking hopefully to literature and science fiction for a sense of a better future, or at least a more deliciously imagined one. But every day I also contend with nihilistic ideas, the worry that people are set in their ways, the fear that nothing can change for the better.

This is the work of media overwhelm and attention saturation, the constant feed of outrage mixed with frivolity, without suggestions for action or connections to others. The current media landscape, and the trend toward believing that everything is always getting worse, can create a feeling that nothing we do makes any difference. We cannot let this work on us.

Daily inundated with pulls toward nihilism, I stay hopeful through a careful practice, a careful focus on what matters. Here are five things keeping me hopeful right now.

1. The Elders

I have been listening to The Nerve! Conversations with Movement Elders, a podcast of the National Council of Elders that pairs young activists and organizers with elders who have been in the movement since the 60s or 70s. In the most recent episode, elders Frances Reid, Loretta Ross and Barbara Smith joined with younger activists Nautica Jenkins and Hannah Krull to talk about voting and national politics.

“No Black person has ever had the luxury of relying on the Supreme Court for our liberation,” said Ross, a longtime southern Black organizer, responding to questions about recent devastating Supreme Court decisions. “We never fell for that okie doke … it’s people’s power that decides how people’s human rights are upheld and respected.”

The elders throughout this podcast series assert that we need multiple tactics, long-term visions and also short-term strategies to improve immediate conditions. They discourage activists from getting broken down by infighting or seeking political perfection over effective action. And they discourage us from thinking of ourselves or our moment as special.

“One of the sayings from the civil rights movement that I was told,” Ross said, “was that we’ve got to stop thinking of ourselves as the entire chain of freedom. Because the chain of freedom stretches back towards our ancestors and stretches forward towards our descendants. We just have to make sure that the chain doesn’t break at our link, do not give up because of apathy or being so sure that we’re right that we’re not willing to question what we’re doing, or how we’re dissuading people from being active.”

2. The Young People

At the Socialism 2024 conference in Chicago this September, I heard members of the youth antiwar organization Dissenters speak about their practices of international solidarity.

A lot of the ambient “kids-these-days” talk is about how young people don’t know about organizing for power, or are obsessed with superficial and siloed forms of identity politics, or are apathetic. Anyone who believes that would change their minds if they took the time to listen to youth organizers like these speak about global imperialism. Three Dissenters — Christian Ephraim, Rubi Mendez and Josue Sica — reported back on their recent delegations to Cuba, the Philippines and Guatemala, giving detailed analyses of the lessons about the force of U.S. imperialism and the power we have to challenge that from the belly of the beast. They drew parallels among anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles around the world, connected U.S. support for dictatorial leadership abroad to U.S. support for the genocidal Israeli government, and provided specific action steps for supporting struggles in each country.

Meanwhile Peyton Wilson, the communications organizer for Dissenters who moderated the panel, called on everyone in the room to stop being despairing and instead “join an organization.” The message felt disciplined, old-school, inspired and fresh. I thought to myself, imagine being born after 9/11, into a society of mass shootings and endless war and climate catastrophe; coming of age as Donald Trump was voted into office; going out into the world just as the Democrats served up another four years of half-baked policy; and deciding that the only option is to acknowledge your relative privilege and access and keep on fighting with everything you’ve got. It put hope in my bones to see and feel this — not naïve optimism, but a refreshing sense of responsibility.

3. Small-Scale Organizing Works.

In my capacity as the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, I work with a lot of incarcerated writers, and we often do flash call-ins and protests over censorship, clemency campaigns and retaliatory actions taken against our folks in prison. These abuses range from shutting people in rooms without AC during the hottest Texas summers to “sentencing” people to indefinite solitary confinement without due process. While not every one of these campaigns is successful, a surprising number are — when prisons target people with additional forms of punishment, they are also assuming the outside world won’t pay any attention. Just this year one of our folks finally emerged from years of solitary confinement; another accessed necessary health care; another had major advances in her case for freedom, all with the support of small but strong outside campaigns.

As incomplete and sometimes unsatisfying as they are, each success like this should be celebrated. They show people inside that they are not alone, and they show prison officials that they are being watched. They lead to concrete change and raise consciousness about the inherently abusive nature of prison itself. Phone blasts, emails, petitions — they make an actual difference and they strengthen our networks of resistance. Participating in small-scale actions like this reminds me to focus on what I can do where I am, right now.

4. Our Movements Are Changing the Conversation.

We are still witnessing a genocide in Palestine. We are still watching as people are churned and cycled through criminal legal systems in the U.S. We are still watching the acceleration of climate catastrophe as most of our leaders walk the deadly road of “compromise” on the Earth’s future.

But we also can’t and shouldn’t deny that our movements for justice are changing the conversation. Take trans people — currently a scapegoat and pariah of right-wing activists. I’m not happy to be in the crosshairs, but the reality is that we have cracked open a universe of possibility with our movements for trans liberation, showing people that gender is a constellation rather than a binary, influencing health care providers and educators and social services to expand and accommodate us, insisting on more expansive languages, and sensitizing the general public to the routine violence against us, particularly against trans women and Black and Brown trans people. There is immense vulnerability that comes with these successes, and it will take disciplined solidarity to stem the tide of the attacks on our communities. And still, we should not deny or ignore that we have, through organizing, changed the conversation about trans bodies — and therefore about all bodies — permanently.

In recent years, our movements have worked unexpected wonders in carving out space in the public conversation for abolition, and for mutual aid, and for just economic futures that see beyond capitalism. We have also moved the public in the U.S. significantly on Palestine; in spite of an aggressive and persistent pro-Israel propaganda campaign perpetuated from the very top levels of power in this country, a majority of U.S. adults support a ceasefire in Gaza and disapprove of Israel’s violence in the Gaza Strip. A Harvard Kennedy School survey this spring found that young people support a permanent ceasefire by a 5-to-1 margin. Led by Palestinians, U.S. solidarity actions have generated meaningful change in the conversation — although we have yet to exercise our power to stop the genocide. Building that power requires us to steadfastly recognize and build upon those wins. To ignore them only cedes more space to those who would have us give up hope.

5. Joy and Humor

In The Nerve podcast, Loretta Ross recalled a mentor of hers when she was young advising her to “lighten up.”

“You should have joy and pleasure from being on the right side of history,” he told her, “not anguish and despair. Let the other people have that.”

Joy is not just icing on the cake or the purview of the privileged. It is an exercise in hope that has always been rigorously practiced by people facing impossible situations of oppression. Laughter, pleasure and small acts of connection are precisely where we find our power — and the soul fuel that makes it possible to go on.

Hope isn’t a feeling or a firm belief that things will go our way; it is, as Mariame Kaba often says, a discipline. Practicing hope means paying attention to what is possible, and planting ourselves in the places where we can help those possibilities grow. These acts may be as simple as putting a pen to paper, picking up a phone to call or venturing into the streets to protest. Grief and even despair may overshadow us some days. But wallowing in hopelessness is exactly what they would have us do, those who would break the chain of freedom. Our actions, even in the face of apathy and overwhelm, are just links in the chain.

Related

Israel’s military has launched an investigation after its soldiers were filmed throwing the bodies of three dead Palestinians off a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank.

Footage of the incident, filmed in the northern town of Qabatiya, near Jenin, then appears to show an Israeli military bulldozer picking up and removing the bodies.

The images have sparked widespread outrage. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Friday that it was “a serious incident” that did not “conform” to its values and what was expected of its forces.

Local Palestinian officials say at least seven people were killed by Israeli forces in Qabatiya on Thursday.

Under international law, soldiers are obliged to ensure that bodies, including those of enemy fighters, are treated with respect.

The IDF said it carried out a counterterrorism operation in Qabatiya, during which four militants were killed in an “exchange of fire” and three others were killed after a drone strike on a car.

A journalist in Qabatiya told the BBC that on Thursday morning Israeli troops had surrounded a building in town.

He described how four men who were in the house then escaped to the roof and were shot by snipers.

Fighting continued in the town and when it had subsided, he then said he saw Israeli troops go up to the roof and drop the bodies down over the side, where they were then loaded onto a bulldozer.

Asked about the incident shown in the footage, the IDF said: “This is a serious incident that does not conform with [our] values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”

The military said that one of those killed in Qabatiya was Shadi Zakarneh, who it identified as being “responsible for directing and carrying out attacks in the northern West Bank area”.

It said he was “the head of the terrorist organisation” in Qabatiya but did not specify which group he belonged to.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in the West Bank, described the incident on X, formerly known as Twitter, as a “crime” which exposed the “brutality” of the Israeli army.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby described the footage as “deeply disturbing”.

“If it’s proven to be authentic, it clearly would depict abhorrent and egregious behaviour by professional soldiers,” he told reporters.

There has been a spike in violence in the West Bank since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war in Gaza.

More than 690 Palestinians have been killed there since then, the Palestinian health ministry says, as Israeli forces have intensified their nearly daily search and arrest raids.

Israel says it is trying to stem Palestinian attacks in the West Bank and Israel, in which at least 33 Israelis have been killed.

In Gaza, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli military action, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Steve Cohen used to charter a yacht in the Mediterranean with friend and art dealer Larry Gagosian. But he never really switched off.

“We’d be in the middle of a wonderful dinner in Italy and he’d have to race back to the boat to trade,” said Gagosian, recalling how the hedge fund billionaire would have screens installed below deck to create a de facto trading floor.

“I said, Steve, I love you, and I love taking trips with you, but it’s not the most relaxing.”

However, after an investment career spanning almost half a century, Cohen, 68, announced this week he was stepping back from trading at Point72, the hedge fund he set up a decade ago, to focus on running the firm.

Point72 rose from the ashes of an insider trading scandal at its predecessor SAC Capital that cost $1.8bn to settle, with Cohen subsequently barred for two years from managing external investors’ money.

As the firm has grown rapidly over the past few years, the relative size of Cohen’s trading book has shrunk — a letter to investors this week said it was less than 1 per cent of the firm’s overall portfolio.

“He believes his strategic guidance and intervention will have a greater impact” than his individual trading on the firm’s investment performance, the letter said.

Cohen has many other interests, ranging from ownership of his beloved New York Mets and philanthropy supporting veterans and children’s health to an art collection worth more than $1bn that includes works by Pablo Picasso, Jeff Koons and Alberto Giacometti.

This week’s move underlines how Cohen is preparing Point72 to outlast him. The firm said he would be “taking a break from trading his own book”.

Born in 1956 and raised in Great Neck, New York, the third of seven siblings, Cohen credits playing poker at high school with teaching him “how to take risks”.

He began his investment career in 1978 trading options at brokerage Gruntal & Co before setting up SAC Capital in 1992, named after his initials.

The hedge fund industry was in its infancy and the early SAC was known for its cut and thrust atmosphere, juicy payouts for those who did well — and a disposable approach to talent.

Cohen was even known to fire people on the spot if they disappointed him, according to one person who used to work with him at SAC.

“Steve treated the business like a baseball team — if your shortstop is not performing then you trade him for someone else,” the person said. “There’s no personal relationship, it’s just business.”

Cohen surrounded himself with the top moneymakers but sitting close to him could be intimidating. He expected his employees to share his ferocious work ethic, quizzing them during Sunday meetings to prepare for market opening the following day.

“He is not an easy gentleman, he is not a wallflower,” said a second colleague from the SAC years. “He’s a very complicated individual but very smart, a very good trader and knows how to reinvent himself.”

Supporters of Cohen say his edge came from a seemingly instinctive ability to spot market patterns and, as the years rolled on, his experience.

“Whatever’s going on, he’s seen it all before . . . he has seen it and every iteration of it,” said the first person who worked with him.

From 1992 to 2013, SAC boasted annual returns of about 30 per cent, making it one of the world’s top performing hedge funds.

Investors clamoured for access, coughing up an annual management fee of roughly 3 per cent and up to an enormous 50 per cent performance fee, far higher than the industry standard “two and 20”.

Growing to manage more than $15bn at its peak, SAC’s returns seemed almost too good to be true. They were.

In 2013 a team of New York prosecutors led by US attorney Preet Bharara brought several charges against Cohen’s SAC Capital and affiliated firms. It alleged that insider trading at SAC was “substantial, pervasive and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry”.

They said numerous portfolio managers and research analysts obtained “material, non-public information” from “dozens” of listed companies and then traded on that inside information.

SAC incentivised portfolio managers or analysts that brought “high conviction” trading ideas to Cohen where they had an “edge” over the competition, the indictment said, with portfolio managers and analysts encouraged to pursue “industry contact networks” — but without effective controls to make sure they were not receiving inside information.

SAC Capital pleaded guilty in a $1.8bn settlement, the largest ever for insider trading. But prosecutors ultimately stopped short of charging Cohen — who did not admit personal fault — with criminal or civil insider trading charges, believing they did not have enough evidence.

For a time he appeared to retrench, managing his own money in Point72, which was set up as a family office.

By 2018 he had opened it up to external investors and after a difficult first year when the fund was flat, Point72 began, in Cohen’s customary baseball lingo, “hitting doubles” — gaining more than 10 per cent in every year except 2021.

Those who know him say that as the hedge fund industry has become more institutional and straight laced, Cohen has also mellowed with age.

But he still has his quirks. Ahead of one visit to the London office, the fridge was stocked with Dr Pepper, Skittles and Post-it notes warning “do not touch”, according to a person familiar with the situation, while the local team made sure the air conditioning was suitably cool for the boss.

Point72 employs 2,800 people, runs more than double the assets of SAC at its peak and marks one of the hedge fund industry’s greatest redemption stories.

In an unforgiving industry, Cohen is notable for his longevity, and regarded as a pioneer of the so-called multi-manager hedge fund approach, alongside Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Millennium Management’s Izzy Englander.

Like Pete Rose, the baseball player whose legacy was later soured by sports gambling, Cohen’s brush with the law means even the “best hitter ever” has a “little asterisk” next to his name, said one rival hedge fund manager who knows him.

But they added: “Stevie can still have another chapter.”

Cohen and Point72 declined to comment.

For Gagosian, his friend’s shift from player to coach may mean their holidays can resume.

“We stopped chartering boats together,” he said. “Maybe now we’ll do it again.”

Sir Keir Starmer, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Chancellor Rachel Reeves will not accept any further donations for clothing after a row over donations, a Downing Street source has said.

The prime minster has been embroiled in a growing controversy after it emerged he had repeatedly accepted gifts including sunglasses, tailoring and personal shopping for his wife from Labour peer Waheed Alli.

The Financial Times has reported that Ms Rayner and Ms Reeves declared thousands of pounds in work clothing from wealthy donors as general office support.