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Tag: democratic socialists of america

  • Bringing Zohran Mamdani to the Big Screen

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    In August of 2023, Zohran Mamdani launched his reëlection campaign for State Assembly at Sac’s Place, a pizza place in Astoria. Beneath bistro lights strung above the restaurant’s back patio, he gave a speech to a crowd so small that his address almost became a conversation.

    “So,” Mamdani began, “I wanted to start us off by asking the question, What does a working person deserve?”

    “Everything!” one listener piped up.

    “Now you’re gonna ruin the whole speech,” Mamdani replied, genially chagrined. “That’s where I’m headed!” He was rumpled in the summer heat and wearing a collarless white shirt. Watching nearby were a state senator, Jabari Brisport, in a red Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt, and Diana Moreno, the D.S.A. activist whom Mamdani would eventually endorse to succeed him in his Queens Assembly seat. The event was one of the minor but revealing moments that might have been forgotten, if not for the presence, at Mamdani’s shoulder, of Julia Bacha, a documentarian who had just begun following him.

    There was no press on hand that day—“not a single other camera,” Bacha recalled recently, while showing me the rough footage in Adobe Premiere. That was often the case, in the two and a half years Bacha spent with Mamdani. She has just begun editing some two hundred hours of material, a process she expects to last for the next four or five months. The result will be her next film: the story of a little-known state assemblyman’s path to becoming New York City’s mayor.

    This was not what she had imagined when she first approached Mamdani. Bacha is a New York-based filmmaker whose work, which includes the films “Budrus” and “Naila and the Uprising,” has earned a Peabody and a Guggenheim; she is the creative director of Just Vision, a nonprofit dedicated to storytelling about Israel-Palestine. (“We highlight the efforts of Palestinian and Israeli civilians who are working to end the occupation and secure a free, equal and safe future for all through unarmed means,” the group explains on its website, adding that it does not advocate a specific policy solution to the conflict.) After growing up in Brazil, Bacha went to college at Columbia; she was a student in New York on September 11th, and became interested in Middle Eastern history and politics in its wake. “There was a lot of sympathy for the United States in the immediate aftermath,” she told me. “That was so quickly squandered by the politicians of this country by going into a march of revenge and war.”

    Bacha’s last film, “Boycott,” from 2021, tracked three Americans who brought suits to challenge state laws restricting the right to protest Israel. “It was a film about defending the right to speak,” she said—an important subject, but also somewhat abstract. “I wanted the next film to be more of a proactive story.” What did it look like when a person with some power—an elected official, for example—used their right to speak on behalf of Palestinians? What would the public response be? Bacha had seen attitudes shift in the two decades that she’d been making documentaries about the Middle East; in early 2023, for the first time, more Democrats told Gallup that they sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis. It seemed to her that there was a gap between the way politicians acted and what many constituents wanted. What would happen if someone recognized it?

    Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji canvassing for the reëlection of State Assembly member Sarahana Shreshta in the Hudson Valley, June, 2024.

    Photograph by Talal Jabari

    As Bacha contemplated her next project, she started hearing about a group of New York organizers who wanted to stop charities from using tax-deductible donations to fund Israeli settlements. “I learned that they had found, in Zohran Mamdani, someone who was willing to actually introduce legislation,” she told me. The proposed Not on Our Dime! act was greeted with an immediate letter of condemnation from twenty-five of Mamdani’s fellow Assembly members, who called the bill “a ploy to demonize Jewish charities with connections to Israel.” In her documentary, Bacha wanted to ask whether Mamdani and his co-sponsors could hold on to their seats in the next election. When she approached him that summer, he was “very open and interested,” she recalled, and he seemed to respect the demands of her process, including her need for independence. “He’s the son of a filmmaker,” she said. “He’s also a very disciplined person, so I think he felt pretty confident that he could have a camera around.”

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    Molly Fischer

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  • Socialism, But Make It Trump

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    Here in this country, Republican opposition to public ownership remains implacable, at least in theory. Conservatives have long argued that government-run enterprises, such as Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service, are innately inefficient, and attacked even modest public initiatives as dangerous flirtations with socialism. Ironically, however, it’s a Republican President, Donald Trump, who is busy expanding the frontiers of the state by having government agencies take sizable stakes in privately run companies.

    In August, the chip manufacturer Intel announced that the Trump Administration would acquire 433.3 million of its shares for $8.9 billion, which translated into an ownership stake of just under ten per cent. This was one in a flurry of deals that has allowed the federal government to acquire either direct ownership stakes or options to purchase ownership stakes in the future, in five rare-earths companies, and obtaining a so-called golden share in U.S. Steel, which it received when the Trump White House approved its sale to the Japanese company Nippon Steel. Although this unusual arrangement didn’t grant the government any ownership rights to future profits that U.S. Steel generates, it gave the President the right to veto certain moves by the company, including decisions to shutter factories or move operations abroad.

    To be sure, this isn’t the first time that the U.S. government has acquired stakes in major companies, and the basic principle of rewarding the taxpayer for providing financing to private businesses is a sound one. (Bernie Sanders, hardly a fan of Trump, voiced qualified support for the Intel deal.) During the great financial crisis of 2008-09, the federal government supplied emergency financing to the carmaker General Motors and the insurance company A.I.G., taking ownership stakes of roughly sixty per cent and eighty per cent, respectively, which it subsequently sold off. It also seized control of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taking an eighty-per-cent ownership stake that it still has today.

    These government rescues were all crisis measures. Trump’s stakebuilding, which some observers refer to as “state capitalism,” is more arbitrary and opaque, and subject to his whims. Obviously, he isn’t a socialist, but, if a Democratic President were to intervene in the business sector in the ways that he has, many Republicans would be screaming about creeping socialism.

    The Intel transaction grew out of some unfinished business from the Biden Administration, which, through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, agreed to give the struggling chipmaker around eight billion dollars in federal grants and eleven billion dollars in loans for the construction of new plants in the U.S. that would help the company catch up with overseas rivals. When Trump returned to the White House, only about a quarter of the promised money had been passed on to Intel, and it wasn’t clear what would happen to the rest. Evidently, the Trump Administration demanded an equity stake in exchange for transferring some of the money, and Intel could hardly say no. The federal government is now its largest shareholder.

    The Administration has already used the powers granted by its golden share in U.S. Steel. In September, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, heard that the company was planning to shutter a plant in Illinois and told its chief executive that Trump would exercise his right to block the move. U.S. Steel reversed course. This sort of interventionism is anathema to free-market conservatives, and it’s far from clear where it will end. Lutnick has said the Administration is even considering taking ownership stakes in big defense contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, presumably as the price of renewing their lucrative federal contracts.

    There has also been some speculation that the Trump Administration could end up doing some sort of finance-for-equity deal with a big artificial-intelligence company, such as OpenAI, which is making huge investments in data centers that it needs to train and run its models. According to Sam Altman, the firm’s C.E.O., it has committed to spending $1.4 trillion in the course of the next eight years. Its revenues are growing fast: Altman said that by the end of this year they will be running at an annualized rate of twenty billion dollars. But the company is still spending far more than it takes in, and it needs to raise a great deal of external funding. Last week, Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, said it was looking to “an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental,” and she raised the possibility of obtaining a federal-financing guarantee, which would reduce the firm’s borrowing costs and shift to the government at least some of the risk if OpenAI were unable to repay its loans. Essentially, if the company underperformed, the taxpayer could be left to pick up part of its tab.

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    John Cassidy

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  • Facts about Tyler Robinson, suspect in Charlie Kirk shooting

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    As soon as officials announced the name of the alleged assassin of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, internet theories about the suspect’s background and motives quickly outpaced confirmed facts.

    Authorities said Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident, shot and killed Kirk Sept. 10 on the Utah Valley University campus. Kirk was close to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

    Officials took Robinson into custody in the evening of Sept. 11. Announcing the arrest Sept. 12, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox shared four phrases etched on bullet casings found with a gun investigators believe was Robinson’s.

    When the news became public, Americans began searching for information on Robinson and sharing theories about him and his family. Much of that information, especially in the early hours after the news broke, was inaccurate. Some online users chased wrong leads and implicated innocent people in the process. 

    Here is some confirmed information about what’s true and what’s not in Robinson’s background, as of Sept. 12.

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    Suspect is not the person who donated to Trump

    One X post identified a $225 donation to Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign from a Tyler Robinson in St. George, Utah. But that’s a different Tyler Robinson than the suspect, according to records.

    Federal Election Commission records show that a person with that name in St. George contributed $224.48 on Oct. 5, 2020, to Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee. The donor listed their occupation as an entrepreneur, and other records show a person with that name and zip code is 32 years old.

    As of the date of the donation, the Robinson who is the suspect would have been 17 years old. People who are 17 can legally donate to candidates under certain conditions, but we did not find donations in federal records from the suspect.

    Robinson was an unaffiliated, inactive voter

    An X post said Robinson was a registered Republican in Utah, “according to state records.”

    That’s not what records show. The website voterrecords.com — which draws from public government records — shows a person with identifying information that matches the suspect reflects he was an unaffiliated, inactive voter.

    We contacted the Washington County, Utah, elections department to ask questions about his voter registration and did not hear back.

    An inactive voter is a registered voter who has not voted in two regular general elections and has failed to respond to a notice sent by the county clerk.

    Inactive voters must verify or update their address before receiving a ballot. Ballots are mailed only to active voters.

    About 27% of active registered voters in Utah are unaffiliated, and about half are Republican. 

    This photo released by the Utah Governor’s Office Sept. 12, 2025 shows Tyler Robinson. (Utah Governor’s Office via AP)

    No evidence that Robinson is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America

    Social media users said Robinson was a member of the Salt Lake City Democratic Socialists of America. The organization said he is not a member of any of its chapters, and the photos and videos users have pointed to as evidence of his affiliation do not show Robinson. 

    Priscilla Yeverino, a national spokesperson for the organization, said the group has no members named Tyler Robinson “anywhere in the country.” Yeverino said the organization has received several photos of people alleging they are Robinson, “which is vehemently false.”

    Users shared a video they allege showed Robinson speaking at an event for the Salt Lake City chapter days before the shooting. The full video from Sept. 6 shows the speaker is chapter co-chair Matty Jackson.

    Other users have shared a photo of a man they allege is Robinson wearing a red t-shirt with a bee that says “Salt Lake DSA.” Before Robinson was confirmed as the suspect, some users on social media shared the same photo identifying the man as Jack Bellows. Bellows describes himself as a community organizer and is running for Salt Lake City Council. A screenshot from an Instagram live video of Bellows has also been shared on social media posts identifying him as Robinson.

    Internet finds meanings for mysterious etchings on bullet casings

    Before Robinson’s arrest, online posters and eventually the Wall Street Journal had reported on an internal, unreleased FBI memo that said etched phrases on bullet casings could have expressed his support for transgender rights. But law enforcement officials later walked that interpretation back, as did the newspaper. 

    At the press conference, Cox announced the specific texts etched on four bullet casings found with a Mauser Model 98 .30-06 caliber bolt action rifle:

    • “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this?”

    • “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao”

    • “Hey fascist! Catch!” followed by an up arrow symbol, a right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols

    • “If you read this, you are gay LMAO”

    The phrases unleashed speculation about their meaning. Some users familiar with video game culture zeroed in on potential sources, with many of them couched in layers of irony and sarcasm.

    According to the website “Know Your Meme,” the phrase “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this?” has been circulating online since at least 2013, particularly to parody online role-playing subcultures, including “furries,” a community that dresses up as anthropomorphized animal characters.

    On the surface, the phrase “Hey fascist! Catch!” seems to indicate that the person who fired the weapon was someone on the political left opposed to fascism. However, X users said the phrase and the arrow sequence comes from the game Helldivers 2, which envisions battles involving fascist-uniformed fighters. A move in that game that involves pressing a series of arrows allows players to drop a 1,100-pound bomb — the game’s most destructive weapon.

    “Bella Ciao” is an Italian song with antifascist roots from World War II that have made it a popular resistance song in various international contexts. Commentators, including journalists, also said it has been used in the World War II-themed video game “Hearts of Iron IV” and has sometimes been adopted, in an ironic way, by far-right groups.

    “These reported messages seem to be sending strong ‘subcultural batsignals,’” said Whitney Phillips, a University of Oregon assistant professor of information politics and ethics who has researched shooters with ties to internet meme culture.

    Phillips said she first used that term in a 2015 book on internet trolling “to describe the winking self-referentiality you often see in trolling and trolling-adjacent communities, and which have appeared in many shooter manifestos in the last 10 years,” including a 2019 mass shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand.

    But Phillips added that phrases like the ones on the bullet casings go further, by seeking to provoke the public.

    “These don’t seem to be messages intended to be, essentially, private sigils — an expression of private rage from the shooter to Charlie Kirk,” Phillips said. “There seems to be a further aim of maximum publicity, specifically publicity aimed to arouse the strongest possible responses in as many audiences as possible.”

    PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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  • Large US tech companies face new EU rules | CNN Business

    Large US tech companies face new EU rules | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    The world’s largest tech companies must comply with a sweeping new European law starting Friday that affects everything from social media moderation to targeted advertising and counterfeit goods in e-commerce — with possible ripple effects for the rest of the world.

    The unprecedented EU measures for online platforms will apply to companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat and TikTok, among many others, reflecting one of the most comprehensive and ambitious efforts by policymakers anywhere to regulate tech giants through legislation. It could lead to fines for some companies and to changes in software affecting consumers.

    The rules seek to address some of the most serious concerns that critics of large tech platforms have raised in recent years, including the spread of misinformation and disinformation; possible harms to mental health, particularly for young people; rabbit holes of algorithmically recommended content and a lack of transparency; and the spread of illegal or fake products on virtual marketplaces.

    Although the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) passed last year, companies have had until now to prepare for its enforcement. Friday marks the arrival of a key compliance deadline — after which tech platforms with more than 45 million EU users will have to meet the obligations laid out in the law.

    The EU also says the law intends “to establish a level playing field to foster innovation, growth and competitiveness both in the European Single Market and globally.” The action reinforces Europe’s position as a leader in checking the power of large US tech companies.

    For all platforms, not just the largest ones, the DSA bans data-driven targeted advertising aimed at children, as well as targeted ads to all internet users based on protected characteristics such as political affiliation, sexual orientation and ethnicity. The restrictions apply to all kinds of online ads, including commercial advertising, political advertising and issue advertising. (Some platforms had already in recent years rolled out restrictions on targeted advertising based on protected characteristics.)

    The law bans so-called “dark patterns,” or the use of subtle design cues that may be intended to nudge consumers toward giving up their personal data or making other decisions that a company might prefer. An example of a dark pattern commonly cited by consumer groups is when a company tries to persuade a user to opt into tracking by highlighting an acceptance button with bright colors, while simultaneously downplaying the option to opt out by minimizing that choice’s font size or placement.

    The law also requires all online platforms to offer ways for users to report illegal content and products and for them to appeal content moderation decisions. And it requires companies to spell out their terms of service in an accessible manner.

    For the largest platforms, the law goes further. Companies designated as Very Large Online Platforms or Very Large Online Search Engines will be required to undertake independent risk assessments focused on, for example, how bad actors might try to manipulate their platforms, or use them to interfere with elections or to violate human rights — and companies must act to mitigate those risks. And they will have to set up repositories of the ads they’ve run and allow the public to inspect them.

    Just a handful of companies are considered very large platforms under the law. But the list finalized in April includes the most powerful tech companies in the world, and, for those firms, violations can be expensive. The DSA permits EU officials to issue fines worth up to 6% of a very large platform’s global annual revenue. That could mean billions in fines for a company as large as Meta, which last year reported more than $116 billion in revenue.

    Companies have spent months preparing for the deadline. As recently as this month, TikTok rolled out a tool for reporting illegal content and said it would give EU users specific explanations when their content is removed. It also said it would stop showing ads to teens in Europe based on the data the company has collected on them, all to comply with the DSA rules.

    “We’ve been supportive of the objectives of the DSA and the creation of a regulatory regime in Europe that minimizes harm,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs and a former deputy prime minister of the UK, in a statement Tuesday. He said Meta assembled a 1,000-person team to prepare for DSA requirements. He outlined several efforts by the company including limits on what data advertisers can see on teens ages 13 to 17 who use Facebook and Instagram. He said advertisers can no longer target the teens based on their activity on those platforms. “Age and location is now the only information about teens that advertisers can use to show them ads,” he said.

    In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN the DSA deadline “is an important milestone in the fight against illegal content online. We are mindful of our heightened responsibilities in the EU as a major technology company and continue to work with the European Commission on meeting the requirements of the DSA.”

    Snapchat parent Snap told CNN that it is working closely with the European Commission to ensure the company is compliant with the new law. Snap has appointed several dedicated compliance employees to monitor whether it is living up to its obligations, the company said, and has already implemented several safeguards.

    And Apple said in a statement that the DSA’s goals “align with Apple’s goals to protect consumers from illegal and harmful content. We are working to implement the requirements of the DSA with user privacy and security as our continued North Star.”

    Google and Pinterest told CNN they have also been working closely with the European Commission.

    “We share the DSA’s goals of making the internet even more safe, transparent and accountable, while making sure that European users, creators and businesses continue to enjoy the benefits of the web,” a Google spokesperson said.

    A Pinterest spokesperson said the company would “continue to engage with the European Commission on the implementation of the DSA to ensure a smooth transition into the new legal framework.” The spokesperson added: “The wellbeing, safety and privacy of our users is a priority and we will continue to build on our efforts.”

    Many companies should be able to comply with the law, given their existing policies, teams and monitoring tools, according to Robert Grosvenor, a London-based managing director at the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. “Europe’s largest online service providers are not starting from ground zero,” Grosvenor said. But, he added: “Whether they are ready to become a highly regulated sector is another matter.”

    EU officials have signaled they will be scrutinizing companies for violations. Earlier this summer, European officials performed preemptive “stress tests” of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, as well as Meta and TikTok to determine the companies’ readiness for the DSA.

    For much of the year, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton has been publicly reminding X of its coming obligations as the company has backslid on some of its content moderation practices. Even as Breton concluded that X was taking its stress test seriously in June, the company had just lost a top content moderation official and had withdrawn from a voluntary EU commitment on disinformation that European officials had said would be part of any evaluation of a platform’s compliance with the DSA.

    X told CNN ahead of Friday’s deadline that it was on track to comply with the new law.

    Analysts anticipate that the EU will be watching even more closely after the deadline — and some hope that the rules will either encourage tech platforms to replicate their practices in the EU voluntarily around the world or else drive policymakers to adopt similar measures.

    “We hope that these new laws will inspire other jurisdictions to act because these are, after all, global companies which apply many of the same practices worldwide,” said Agustin Reyna, head of legal and economic affairs at BEUC, a European consumer advocacy group. “Europe got the ball rolling, but we need other jurisdictions to win the match against tech giants.”

    Already, Amazon has sought to challenge the very large platform label in court, arguing that the DSA’s requirements are geared toward ad-based online speech platforms, that Amazon is a retail platform and that none of its direct rivals in Europe have likewise been labeled, despite being larger than Amazon within individual EU countries.

    The legal fights could present the first major test of the DSA’s durability in the face of Big Tech’s enormous resources. Amazon told CNN that it plans to comply with the EU General Court’s decision, either way.

    “Amazon shares the goal of the European Commission to create a safe, predictable and trusted online environment, and we invest significantly in protecting our store from bad actors, illegal content, and in creating a trustworthy shopping experience,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “We have built on this strong foundation for DSA compliance.”

    TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story.

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