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Voting Isn't Optional: Defend Our Democracy Against Project 2025’s Assault
If Trump wins and this far-right agenda is to put into motion, it will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow.
Nov 04, 2024
We are one day away from the election, and too much is at stake for Black people. The questioning around Vice President Kamala Harris' Blackness and misconceptions about her plans for Black people continue to distract voters from the far-right, destructive manifesto fueling Donald Trump’s agenda, Project 2025: a dangerous declaration of oppression that risks civil rights and the democratic fabric of our nation.
Project 2025 details a disturbing vision for the future of Black people in this country: One where we have no rights, no control of our bodies, none where we can’t afford groceries, we can’t afford housing, where our children can’t even learn their own history because it is erased and whitewashed, and where politicians can spread dangerous lies about Black people without recourse. This manifesto seeks to erode the authority of vital government agencies, giving unprecedented power to the executive branch, leaving so many Black communities devastated. By threatening discrimination laws and targeting initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, Project 2025 will unravel decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.And with little to no federal oversight historical patterns of discrimination against Black communities will also worsen.
Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability.
One of the key civil rights standards Project 2025 seeks to eliminate critical safeguard that addresses unintentional discriminatory practices, is a backbone of civil rights protections. This is the disparate impact standard in discrimination cases. In 2013, in one of the largest fair lending cases in the DOJ’s history, Black customers in the Chicago area brought a large lawsuit against Wells Fargo after they paid $2,937 more in broker fees for their homes than similarly situated white customers. Without the disparate impact standard, the federal government would have been unable to demonstrate that Black communities had suffered disproportionate harm at the hands of Wells Fargo. At a time when the nation is grappling with a housing crisis, eliminating the disparate impact standard would exacerbate existing disparities and leave Black communities vulnerable to discriminatory housing and lending practices.
Project 2025 also seeks to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in our schools and businesses. In June, a U.S. federal court of appeals court deemed an Atlanta private equity fund unconstitutional for providing grants to women-owned and Black-owned companies, ignoring the systemic barriers that have historically excluded Black women from investment funding. And following the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, conservatives attacked critical programs designed to increase the number of Black medical doctors. In a world where Black mothers are dying more than anyone in childbirth, the need for Black doctors is needed more than ever. The Project 2025 manifesto seeks to take this further and delete all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from in our federal regulations and legislation. But let’s be very clear about what this will mean: these efforts will sabotage contracts, harm Black-owned businesses, and perpetuate historical injustices within Black communities.
Project 2025's agenda will wreak havoc on Black communities in a way we haven’t seen since Jim Crow. Black communities know what it’s like to be at the hands of a government without checks and balances and no accountability. As we are one day out from the election, Black people must vote in mass. We must recognize the urgency of this threat to our democracy and lean on tangible solutions to defend our rights for many generations. It’s time to take back our power, and let our voices be heard. Vote like your life depends on it because it does. We need all hands on deck to protect our future.
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Deepfakes of Black Trump 'Supporters' Spark Fresh Calls to Ban AI in Political Ads
"The spread of misinformation and targeted intimidation of Black voters will continue without the proper safeguards," said Color of Change.
Mar 04, 2024
Racial justice defenders on Monday renewed calls for banning artificial intelligence in political advertisements after backers of former U.S. President Donald Trump published fake AI-generated images of the presumptive Republican nominee with Black "supporters."
BBChighlighted numerous deepfakes, including one created by right-wing Florida radio host Mark Kaye showing a smiling Trump embracing happy Black women. On closer inspection, missing or misformed fingers and unintelligible lettering on attire expose the images as fake.
"I'm not claiming it's accurate," Kaye told the BBC. "I'm not a photojournalist. "I'm not out there taking pictures of what's really happening. I'm a storyteller."
"If anybody's voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that's a problem with that person, not with the post itself," Kaye added.
Another deepfake shows Trump on a porch surrounded by young Black men. The image earned a "community note" on X, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform formerly known as Twitter, identifying it as AI-generated. The owner of the account that published the image—which has been viewed more than 1.4 million times according to X—included the deceptive caption, "What do you think about Trump stopping his motorcade to take pictures with young men that waved him down?"
When asked about his image by the BBC, @MAGAShaggy1958 said his posts "have attracted thousands of wonderful kind-hearted Christian followers."
Responding to the new reporting, the racial justice group Color of Change led calls to ban AI in political ads.
"The spread of misinformation and targeted intimidation of Black voters will continue without the proper safeguards," the group said on social media, while calling for:
- Banning AI from political ads;
- Requiring disclosure of AI use for all other content;
- Banning deepfakes; and
- Restoring prohibitions on misinformation and lies about the validity of the 2020 election.
"As the 2024 election approaches, Big Tech companies like Google and Meta are poised to once again play a pivotal role in the spread of misinformation meant to disenfranchise Black voters and justify violence in the name of right-wing candidates," Color of Change said in a petition urging Big Tech to "stop amplifying election lies."
"During the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others consistently ignored the warning signs that they were helping to undermine our democracy," the group continued. "This dangerous trend doesn't seem to be changing."
"Despite their claims that they've learned their lesson and are shoring up protections against misinformation ahead of the 2024 election cycle,large tech companies are cutting key staff that moderate content and removing election protections from their policies that are supposed to safeguard platform users from misinformation," the petition warns.
Last September, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced bipartisan legislation to prohibit the use of AI-generated content that falsely depicts candidates in political ads.
In February, the Federal Communications Commission responded to AI-generated robocalls featuring President Joe Biden's fake voice telling New Hampshire voters to not vote in their state's primary election by prohibiting the use of voice cloning technology to create automated calls.
The Federal Election Commission, however, has been accused by advocacy groups including Public Citizen of foot-dragging in response to public demands to regulate deepfakes. Earlier this year, FEC Chair Sean Cooksey said the agency would "resolve the AI rulemaking by early summer"—after many state primaries are over.
At least 13 states have passed laws governing the use of AI in political ads, while tech companies have responded in various ways to the rise of deepfakes. Last September, Google announced that it would require the prominent disclosure of political ads using AI. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has banned political campaigns from using its generative AI tools. OpenAI, which makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot, said earlier this year that it won't let users create content for political campaigns and will embed watermarks on art made with its DALL-E image generator.
Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter campaign, told the BBC that "there have been documented attempts to target disinformation to Black communities again, especially younger Black voters."
Albright said the deepfakes serve a "very strategic narrative" being pushed by a wide range of right-wing voices from the Trump campaign to social media accounts in a bid to woo African Americans.
Trump's support among Black voters increased from just 8% in 2016 to a still-meager 12% in 2020. Conversely, a recent New York Times/Siena College survey of voters in six key swing states found that Biden's support among African American voters has plummeted from 92% during the last election cycle to 71% today, while 22% of Black respondents said they would vote for Trump this year.
Trump's attempts to win Black votes have ranged from awkward to cringeworthy, including hawking $400 golden sneakers and suggesting his mugshot and 91 criminal indictments appeal to African Americans.
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'Clarence Thomas Needs to Resign': Report Shines More Light on Justice's Gifts From the Rich
Thomas has "received benefits—many of them previously unreported—from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends" than was previously known, according to The New York Times.
Jul 10, 2023
An in-depth New York Timesstory examining Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' membership in an exclusive club of wealthy Americans—and the benefits he has reaped from the association—sparked fresh calls for his resignation on Sunday, with watchdogs and lawmakers decrying the new report as further evidence of deep-seated corruption at the nation's most powerful judicial body.
Months after his confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1991, according to the Times, Thomas was accepted into the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a group named after the Gilded Age American author Horatio Alger.
"At Horatio Alger, he moved into the inner circle, a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionized him and all that he had achieved," the newspaper reported. "While he has never held an official leadership position, in some ways he has become the association's leading light. He has granted it unusual access to the Supreme Court, where every year he presides over the group's signature event: a ceremony in the courtroom at which he places Horatio Alger medals around the necks of new lifetime members."
The new reporting comes on the heels of a series of revelations from the investigative outlet ProPublica, which uncovered decades of trips Thomas took on the dime of billionaire Harlan Crow, who is deeply enmeshed in right-wing politics.
ProPublica also found a previously undisclosed real estate deal between Crow and Thomas, who just recently joined his fellow conservative justices in ruling against affirmative action and student debt relief for more than 40 million Americans.
"But a look at his tenure at the Horatio Alger Association, based on more than two dozen interviews and a review of public filings and internal documents, shows that Justice Thomas has received benefits—many of them previously unreported—from a broader cohort of wealthy and powerful friends," the Times reported Sunday. "They have included major donors to conservative causes with broad policy and political interests and much at stake in Supreme Court decisions, even if they were not directly involved in the cases."
According to the Times, the justice's circle at the Horatio Alger Association has included billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington and the late Wayne Huizenga, "the entrepreneur who built the Blockbuster Video empire and owned the Miami Dolphins."
"In 2001, Mr. Huizenga's foundation joined Mr. Crow in helping underwrite the restoration and dedication of a library wing in Savannah in the justice's honor," the Times found. "In the 2000s, Justice Thomas made annual visits to South Florida to help Mr. Huizenga... pass out scholarships, sometimes also meeting with the team. At least once, Justice Thomas flew in a private jet emblazoned with the Dolphins logo."
"We have an unelected, unaccountable, corrupt body of people that stand in the way of democracy."
Thomas has also become close with ultra-millionaire executive David Sokol through the Horatio Alger Association. The
Times reported that Sokol "describes the justice and his wife as 'close personal friends,' and in 2015, the Sokols hosted the Thomases for a visit to their sprawling Montana ranch. The Sokols have also hosted the Thomases at their waterfront mansion in Florida."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has spent much of the last several years
spotlighting how shadowy special interests have captured the Supreme Court, tweeted Sunday that "billionaire emoluments to [Federalist Society] justices just keep piling up."
"More to come I'm sure, once we crack the omertà," Whitehouse added.
The watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reiterated its call for Thomas to resign following publication of the
Times story.
Unique among federal judges, Supreme Court justices are not bound by a code of ethics, leaving massive openings for the powerful lifetime appointees to accept gifts from wealthy people who have business before the court.
Last month, ProPublicarevealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took an undisclosed private jet flight to Alaska in 2008 with Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund tycoon directly tied to cases that reached the court in subsequent years. Singer also has financial connections to right-wing groups fighting student debt relief.
Days after ProPublica published its story, Alito joined Thomas and the high court's four other conservative justices in blocking the Biden administration's student debt cancellation program.
Mounting evidence of the conservative supermajority's corruption and the court's latest destructive rulings have intensified calls for sweeping high court reforms, including adding justices to the bench and imposing a binding code of ethics.
"We have to start coming to terms with just how much of a democracy we still don't have," Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, toldThe Guardian on Sunday. "We have an unelected, unaccountable, corrupt body of people that stand in the way of democracy, stand in the way of justice, and stand in the way of the will of the people."
In a "Dear Colleague" letter on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote that "Americans' faith in the judiciary is at an all-time low after the extreme MAGA right captured the Supreme Court and achieved dangerous, regressive policies completely at odds with what the vast majority of Americans want."
"At the same time, this MAGA-captured Supreme Court feels free to accept lavish gifts and vacations from their powerful, billionaire friends," Schumer continued. "And these are no ordinary billionaires—they are ideological extremists who bankroll hard-right MAGA causes and then bring those cases before the same justices they've patronized."
"Congress has clear authority to oversee the federal judiciary," he added, "and we must explore every option for restoring faith in our courts."
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