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The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldeans ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trumps grip on red America.

Aldeans combative new song, Try That in a Small Town, offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

In Aldeans lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trumps political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to make America great again.

Read: Trumps rhetoric of white nostalgia

Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold, Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. The fact that country music is a channel for that isnt at all surprising.

Aldeans belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to Americas status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwoods God Bless the U.S.A., a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggards 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and runnin down my country would see, as the title proclaimed, the fightin side of me. (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where we dont burn our draft cards down on Main Street.)

Haggards songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixons presidency, as did Greenwoods during Ronald Reagans. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forcesincluding globalist elites, the deep state, and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrantsthat allegedly threaten them.

Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

In various national polls since Trumps first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensiblea process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watcha collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of good ol boys, raised up right delivering punishment to people who cuss out a cop or stomp on the flag. Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldeans description of good ol boys, did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he’s denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, Whether he admits it or not, both Aldeans song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.

Aldeans song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trumps defeat in 2020.

A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called retribution for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that were trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.

That fear of being displaced in a evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electoratewhat Ive called the coalition of restoration. From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to make America great again. Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of Americas future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.

Read: How working-class white voters became the GOPs foundation

As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldeans song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nations diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trumps, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, hes describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of Try That in a Small Town is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldeans good ol boys raised up right, itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

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Southport stabbing victim reveals how she survived attack – and fears ‘it could happen again’

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Southport stabbing victim reveals how she survived attack - and fears 'it could happen again'

A girl who was stabbed in the Southport attack has told Sky News how she thought she was going to die that day.

Warning: Some readers may find this content distressing

It is exactly a year since Axel Rudakubana killed three girls and attempted to murder eight others at a summer holiday Taylor Swift-themed dance event in the seaside town.

The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was stabbed in the back and the arm after going to the class with her younger sister.

She is now campaigning for children to have mandatory first aid training at school in response to the growth of knife crime.

She said she clearly remembers what happened that day.

Flowers and tributes near the scene of the attack a year ago. Pic: PA
Image:
Flowers and tributes near the scene of the attack a year ago. Pic: PA

“Some of the girls were sat down in a circle making bracelets with the teachers, and a couple of them were getting up to get beads. I was standing between two tables and he came through the doors.

“He stabbed a little girl in front of me and then came for me and stabbed my arm. I turned and then he stabbed my back, even though I didn’t feel it at the time.

“There was a bunch of girls huddled around so I just started pushing them down the stairs, telling them to get out and run.

“I was thinking ‘Where’s my sister?’ and ‘We need to get out’.”

She and many of the other victims ran to the house of a neighbour for shelter. “I just thought that I was going to die,” she said.

Killer ‘looked possessed’

The girl said she can clearly picture Rudakubana that day.

“What I remember most about him is his eyes. They just didn’t look human, they looked possessed. It was kind of like a dream and you’re on a movie set and watching yourself go through it and make these decisions.

“It’s just kind of like adrenaline. People like to think they know what they’d do in that situation but, in reality, you don’t until you’re in it.”

Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King were murdered in an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed class.
Image:
Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King were murdered in the attack

Six-year-old Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, who was seven, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar died in the attack. It is something she finds difficult to talk about.

“I don’t think I can express how I feel about it,” the girl said. “A lot of anger and sadness.”

In January, Rudakubana was jailed for life and must serve a minimum of 52 years before he can be considered for release.

The chairman of the public inquiry into the atrocity called the attack “one of the most egregious crimes in our country’s history”.

Carrying knives ‘disgusting’

The girl who survived has now launched a campaign, supported by a clothing range called “Go Anywhere, Be Anything” to raise funds, to improve the ability of schoolchildren to help in the event of knife attacks.

“Everyone that’s going out and carrying knives is getting younger and younger,” she said. “And to think that it’s people my age is like disgusting.

“I just want to try and do the best I can to let people know that it’s not okay to do that and that they need to think about what they’re doing and the risks and how they’re harming themselves and other people.”

Her sister, who was also there that day, helped design “Go Anywhere, Be Anything”.

Read more:
Missed chances to stop Rudakubana

‘Terrorism has changed’, says PM

A three-minute silence will be held in Southport at 3pm to mark one year on from the attack. In an open letter to the community, Sefton Council wrote: “This period is incredibly hard for the families of Alice, Bebe and Elsie and all of those children and adults injured or who suffered lifelong psychological impact of witnessing the attack, and we acknowledge the huge impact on their lives, too.

“We must not forget the local people who rushed to support and to our emergency responders. They all remain always in our thoughts.”

It is a sentiment shared by the survivor.

“You live in fear every day that it could happen again,” she said.

“Physically I’m getting better every day and healing. Obviously, my scars stay as a reminder but everyone from that day is going to have mental scars forever.”

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Revealed: The scale of cheap Chinese imports flown into UK without paying any tariffs

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Revealed: The scale of cheap Chinese imports flown into UK without paying any tariffs

The scale of cheap Chinese e-commerce imports flown into Britain without paying any tariffs has become clearer following a Sky News investigation into this new multi-billion pound phenomenon.

We have uncovered the first official estimate of the value of so-called “de minimis” imports into Britain, ahead of an official inquiry into whether this legal clause – which excludes packages worth less than £135 from paying customs duties – should be allowed to continue.

Companies like Shein and Temu have become big players in British retail, not to mention elsewhere around the world, by manufacturing cheap products in China and then posting them directly to consumers, benefiting from the de minimis rules.

Inside the cargo plane

Clothing manufacturers in the UK claim that de minimis makes it nearly impossible to compete with these Chinese competitors, raising questions about the viability of domestic textile and apparel production.

However, economists argue that the main beneficiaries of the policy to exclude cheap imports from customs are lower-income households, since it allows them to spend less on their shopping. Removing it, they say, would disproportionately affect poorer families.

The government has committed to an inquiry into the rules, which are also being changed in the EU and the US, but up until now there has been no official estimate of its scale.

According to HM Revenue and Customs data released to Sky News following a Freedom of Information request, the total declared trade value of de minimis imports into the UK in the last fiscal year (2024-25) was £5.9bn.

That was a 53% increase on the previous year (£3.9bn), underlining the scale of growth of e-commerce imports into the UK.

While it is hard to gauge how much revenue this means the Treasury has forgone, an illustrative 20% tariff on flows of that order could raise more than £1bn.

De minimis trade is growing

While that sum alone would not fill the fiscal black hole faced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the coming budget, it would nonetheless be nearly enough to pay for the government’s recent U-turn on winter fuel allowances.

Sky has also obtained the first television access deep into the supply chain, helping bring those goods into the UK, as it boarded a flight that had just travelled from Chongqing to Bournemouth Airport.

We filmed inside the belly of a plane belonging to European Cargo, one of a number of air cargo firms booming as a result of these trade flows.

Read more:
The rarely examined trade clause about to become a very big deal
UK city’s clothing industry in crisis

The untold story about de minimis is that it hasn’t just had an impact on shopping habits in the UK, or for that matter, the textiles manufacturing sector – it has also changed patterns of distribution.

Struggling regional airports that never saw their passenger numbers recover after the pandemic are now re-establishing themselves as hubs for cargo.

European Cargo is now the single biggest airline at Bournemouth Airport, despite not carrying a single passenger.

Other regional airports like East Midlands Airport and Prestwick in Scotland are seeing rapid growth in flows of trade.

All of which raises the stakes for the government’s inquiry into the de minimis system.

At present, there is no timeline for its decision, but removing the clause would have far-reaching effects across the economy.

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Europe sets its sights on multi-billion-euro gigawatt factories as it plays catch-up on AI

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Europe sets its sights on multi-billion-euro gigawatt factories as it plays catch-up on AI

Data storage tapes are stored at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which will house the U.S. supercomputer to be powered by Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin chips, in Berkeley, California, U.S. May 29, 2025.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Europe is setting its sights on gigawatt factories in a bid to bolster its lagging artificial intelligence industry and meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing sector.

Buzz around the concept of factories that industrialize manufacturing AI has gained ground in recent months, particularly as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stressed the importance of the infrastructure at a June event. Huang hailed a new “industrial revolution” at the GTC conference in Paris, France, and said his firm was working to help countries build revenue-generating AI factories through partnerships in France, Italy and the U.K.

For its part, the European Union describes the factories as a “dynamic ecosystem” that brings together computing power, data and talent to create AI models and applications.

The bloc has long been a laggard behind the U.S. and China in the race to scale up artificial intelligence. With 27 members in the union, the region is slower to act when it comes to agreeing new legislation. Higher energy costs, permitting delays and a grid in dire need of modernization can also hamper developments.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, told CNBC that the bloc’s goal is to bring together high quality data sets, computing capacity and researchers, all in one place.

“We have, for example, 30% more researchers per capita than the U.S. has, focused on AI. Also we have around 7,000 startups [that] are developing AI, but the main obstacle for them is that they have very limited computing capacity. And that’s why we decided that, together with our member states, we are investing in this very crucial infrastructure,” she said.

These are very big investments because they are four times more powerful when it comes to computing capacities than the biggest AI factories.

Henna Virkkunen

European Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty

“We have everything what is needed to be competitive in this sector, but at the same time we want to build up our technological sovereignty and our competitiveness.”

So far, the EU has put up 10 billion euros ($11.8 billion) in funding to set up 13 AI factories and 20 billion euros as a starting point for investment in the gigafactories, marking what it says is the “largest public investment in AI in the world.” The bloc has already received 76 expressions of interest in the gigafactories from 16 member states across 60 sites, Virkkunen said.

The call for interest in gigafactories was “overwhelming,” going far beyond the bloc’s expectations, Virkkunen noted. However, in order for the factories to make a noteworthy addition to Europe’s computing capacity, significantly more investment will be required from the private sector to fund the expensive infrastructure.

‘Intelligence revolution’

The EU describes the facilities as a “one-stop shop” for AI firms. They’re intended to mirror the process carried out in industrial factories, which transform raw materials into goods and services. With an AI factory, raw data goes into the input, and advanced AI products are the expected outcome.

It’s essentially a data center with additional infrastructure related to how the technology will be adopted, according to Andre Kukhnin, equity research analyst at UBS.

“The idea is to create GPU [graphics processing units] capacity, so to basically build data centers with GPUs that can train models and run inference… and then to create an infrastructure that allows you to make this accessible to SMEs and parties that would not be able to just go and build their own,” Kukhnin said.

How the facility will be used is key to its designation as an AI factory, adds Martin Wilkie, research analyst at Citi.

“You’re creating a platform by having these chips that have insane levels of compute capacity,” he said. “And if you’ve attached it to a grid that is able to get the power to actually use them to full capacity, then the world is at your feet. You have this enormous ability to do something, but what the success of it is, will be defined by what you use it for.”

Telecommunications firm Telenor is already exploring possible use cases for such facilities with the launch of its AI factory in Norway in November last year. The company currently has a small cluster of GPUs up and running, as it looks to test the market before scaling up.

Telenor’s Chief Innovation Officer and Head of the AI Factory Kaaren Hilsen and EVP Infrastructure Jannicke Hilland in front of a Nvidia rack at the firm’s AI factory

Telenor

“The journey started with a belief — Nvidia had a belief that every country needs to produce its own intelligence,” Telenor’s Chief Innovation Officer and Head of the AI Factory Kaaren Hilsen told CNBC.

Hilsen stressed that data sovereignty is key. “If you want to use AI to innovate and to make business more efficient, then you’re potentially putting business critical and business sensitive information into these AI models,” she said.

The company is working with BabelSpeak, which Hilsen described as a Norwegian version of ChatGPT. The technology translates sensitive dialogues, such as its pilot with the border police who can’t use public translation services because of security issues.

We’re experiencing an “intelligence revolution” whereby “sovereign AI factories can really help advance society,” Hilsen said.

Billion-euro investments

Virkkunen said the region’s first AI factory will be operational in coming weeks, with one of the biggest projects launching in Munich, Germany in the first days of September. It’s a different story for the gigafactories.

“These are very big investments because they are four times more powerful when it comes to computing capacities than the biggest AI factories, and it means billions in investments. Each of these need three to five billion [euros] in investment,” the commissioner said, adding that the bloc will look to set up a consortium of partners and then officially open a call for investment later this year.

Bertin Martens, senior research fellow at Bruegel, questioned why such investments needed to subsidized by government funds.

“We don’t know yet how much private investment has been proposed as a complement to the taxpayer subsidy, and what capacity and how big these factories are. This is still very much unclear at this stage, so it’s very hard to say how much this will add in terms of computing capacity,” he said.

Power consumption is also a key issue. Martens noted that building an AI gigafactory may take one to two years — but building a power generation of that size requires much more time.

“If you want to build a state-of-the-art gigafactory with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, you have to count on the power consumption of at least one gigawatt for one of those factories. Whether there’s enough space in Europe’s electricity grid in all of these countries to create those factories remains to be seen… this will require major investment in power regeneration capacity,” he told CNBC.

UBS forecasts that the current installed global data center capacity of 85 GW will double due to soaring demand. Based on the EU’s 20-billion-euro investment and the plan for each factory to run 100,000 advanced processors, UBS estimates each factory could be around 100-150 MW with a total capacity for all of the facilities of around 1.5-2 GW.

That could add around 15% to Europe’s total capacity — a sizeable boost, even when compared to the U.S., which currently owns around a third of global capacity, according to the data.

Following the announcement of the EU-U.S. trade framework, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday that U.S. AI chips will help power the bloc’s AI gigafactories in a bid to help the States “maintain their technological edge.”

“One could argue that it’s relatively easy, provided you have the money. It’s relatively easy to buy the chips from Nvidia and to create these hardware factories, but to make it run and to make it economically viable is a completely different question,” Martens told CNBC.

He said that the EU will likely have to start at a smaller scale, as the region is unable to immediately build its own frontier models in AI because of their expense.

“I think in time, Europe can gradually build up its infrastructure and its business models around AI to reach that stage, but that will not happen immediately,” Martens said.

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