Two wealthy lawfare warriors recently failed in their attempts to bury reporting on government-released documents. Both lawsuits — one in state court in California, the other in federal court in Arkansas — were frivolous strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs. Supreme Court precedent couldn’t be clearer that it’s not the journalists’ problem if the government accidentally shares information it’s not supposed to disclose. 

But only the California SLAPP victim had any real recourse against the censorial bully who wanted to shut him up — not because that case was any more frivolous than the Arkansas one, but because of the court in which it was filed.

Let’s start with the Arkansas case. Jessica Kivell — a mom, healthcare worker, and concerned citizen — sought to find out who was paying for a data center project in West Memphis. She filed public records requests with the Arkansas Public Service Commission and received documents indicating Google would cover only one-third of the cost of a new solar plant to power the facility, contradicting its promises that ratepayers would not be on the hook. Kivell shared the documents with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which reported on them.

Entergy Arkansas, the utility set to build the solar facility, sued Kivell, the Democrat-Gazette, its reporter, and the Arkansas Times, which said it never even had the records. It claimed the commission erred by releasing the records to Kivell, that they contained trade secrets (sidenote: baselessly invoking the need to protect trade secrets to duck public records laws is also a serious problem), that she and the press should be restrained from discussing them, and the Democrat-Gazette should have to take down what it had already reported. Entergy also disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s characterization Google would share the costs.

There are at least four Supreme Court cases that should have put Entergy’s lawyers on notice that they had no legal leg to stand on. Even in scenarios involving information far more sensitive than a utility’s purported business secrets — and far less newsworthy than the public being misled about what a data center would cost them — the court has rejected “prior restraints” that would claw back records that the government released inadvertently. 

One such case, Florida Star v. BJF, involved a newspaper that published the name of a rape victim in violation of state law. The court held the law was unconstitutional to the extent it barred news outlets from publishing information released by the government, regardless of whether the government intended to release it. The red-line rule against holding the press liable for the government’s failure to protect confidences makes sense given that the court has called prior restraints against the press the “most serious” of all First Amendment violations.

Ultimately, U.S. District Court Judge Lee Rudofsky rightly denied Entergy’s request for an emergency gag order. Entergy subsequently dropped the case. But it forced the defendants to lose money, time, and sleep. (Kivell, who rushed to court in her work scrubs for the hearing on Entergy’s motion, reportedly broke down sobbing in the courthouse hallway.) The defendants should have been able to at least recover their legal costs but, because they were in federal court, they could not.  

Arkansas, like 39 other states and the District of Columbia, has an anti-SLAPP law allowing those hit with frivolous anti-speech lawsuits to recover their attorneys’ fees. But there is no federal anti-SLAPP statute, and district courts in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Arkansas, have declined to apply the state’s anti-SLAPP law. Federal courts in some states, like Florida, apply state anti-SLAPP laws, but many others decline to do so, viewing them as in conflict with federal pleading standards.

That means that other than their own legal fees — likely a drop in a bucket for them — there is no economic disincentive stopping Entergy from SLAPPing again the next time a news report interferes with its business in hopes that an incompetent judge grants it unconstitutional relief (it wouldn’t be the first time, unfortunately), or a scared defendant backs down without a fight. 

Now let’s head to California. In 2023, independent journalist Jack Poulson published a story in his news outlet, All-Source Intelligence, about the 2021 domestic violence arrest of Maury Blackman, then CEO of Premise Data, a surveillance tech company that holds U.S. government contracts. Poulson reported on and linked to a police report that Blackman claimed the government never should have released because it was sealed. (Under California law, the records could be sealed because charges were not filed.)

Blackman sued Poulson; Substack, which hosted the article; and others in an attempt to not only punish them for their journalism, but also scrub the articles and police report from the internet. For the same reasons Entergy’s case failed, a judge threw out Blackman’s SLAPP. That decision was affirmed by an appeals court last week. 

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Leading its opinion with a quote from the Florida Star case, the appellate court also upheld the lower court’s award of attorneys’ fees to the defendants under California’s robust anti-SLAPP law. That means Blackman will need to reimburse his SLAPP target’s legal fees, and that other wannabe SLAPPsters in California might think twice knowing there are consequences for weaponizing the courts against their critics.

While Poulson’s victory was more satisfying than the Arkansas defendants’ win, in both cases, the plaintiffs achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted. The stories they tried to bury became national news as their lawsuits got far more coverage than the records they sought to suppress. It’s a phenomenon Techdirt editor Mike Masnick dubbed the Streisand effect, after a privacy lawsuit by the singer backfired and drove exponentially more publicity than it prevented.

Blackman, whose suit was only one component of a multifaceted censorship and intimidation campaign, went from his sealed arrest report appearing on a single, relatively niche blog to being detailed in an opinion from the California Court of Appeals, not to mention reported on by everyone from the San Francisco Chronicle to Courthouse News. Blackman only made things worse when he or his apparent representatives tried to manipulate Google to keep the articles about his arrest and SLAPP suits out of searches, generating even further bad press.

Oddly enough, he now runs a reputation management company. Go figure. 

But public shaming is of little use to people like Kivell, whose lives are interrupted by legal nonsense from companies or governments trying to censor them. That’s why Congress needs to pass a federal anti-SLAPP law that would apply even if states decline to enforce their local versions. That would give defendants in federal court, like Kivell, what Poulson had in California: a quick way to get meritless speech suits dismissed, with plaintiffs paying the price. 

Nobody’s ability to request public records or publish news should depend on which courthouse a corporation picks.

Correction: October 13, 2026

A previous version of this story reported that Entergy disputed the Democrat-Gazette’s math of how Google would share the costs of the date center. Instead, the newspaper reported on a figure cited in the documents it obtained.

The post An Arkansas Mom Obtained Public Records About a New Data Center. Then She Got Sued. appeared first on The Intercept.

The Reimagining Safety Act would repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws,” according to the bill summary and text, and curtail the widespread surveillance state that emerged in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks.

It comes the day after agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in what the Department of Justice has described as an opaque “federal criminal investigation.” HSI is a component of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of mounting concerns about the violent weaponization of DHS against immigrants and the Trump administration’s perceived political enemies.

The sweeping legislation faces long odds in Congress, but Ramirez argues that strictly limiting the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus is critical for public safety in the wake of yet another shooting by federal immigration agents.

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Last Thursday, an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck by firing into his car, where Belgal’s 5-year-old child was in the backseat, in New York City. Belgal was the latest of at least 25 people shot by federal immigration agents in the past year; six of those shootings were fatal. Deaths in detention are also surging under Trump. As of early October, at least 28 people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year, according to the National Immigration Project.

“Just this week, our communities were reminded that DHS is a weapon: pointed at a father shot in front of his 5-year-old and at Congresswoman Omar, who is using her voice to demand an end to fascism,” wrote Ramirez in a statement to The Intercept. “It is clear that now is the time to reimagine our safety, dismantle DHS, abolish ICE, and end the use of broad authorities to circumvent our rights and due process.”

Ramirez’s bill seeks to replace DHS with a new agency called the Department of Community Safety, which would oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The new department would also fund new public safety measures like providing support to community violence intervention programs and public health-backed approaches to gun violence. And it would implement a new program where social workers, medical professionals, and interpreters aid asylum-seekers who arrive at the border.

Other DHS functions would be transferred to existing agencies. The DOJ would take over immigration enforcement authority; the Department of Transportation would assume the functions of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard; and the Department of the Treasury would conduct customs enforcement.

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The Department of Homeland Security has only existed since George W. Bush established it in 2003, ushering in a new era of broad federal surveillance and policing powers that the new legislation now seeks to roll back.

For example, the bill would prevent the federal government from placing people on the “no-fly list” without a criminal conviction or warrant. Civil liberties advocates have frequently criticized the database that restricts people from air travel, arguing it’s arbitrary, secretive, and racially biased.

The legislation would also terminate the ability of the secretary of state to declare “foreign terrorist” organizations, arguing that the arbitrary list has been weaponized against protesters and civil liberties groups.

In 2025, Trump’s State Department attempted to revoke the visas of several students who had protested or spoken out against Palestine under the guise that their support for Palestinians amounted to “material support” for Hamas, making them immediately deportable. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, in August sanctioned Palestine Action, a U.K.-based group that opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as a foreign terrorist organization, allowing the federal government to freeze all the group’s U.S. assets, impose travel restrictions, and ban U.S. companies from conducting business with the organization.

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The raid on Omar’s home, Ramirez said, is just the latest example to underscore how the Trump administration has weaponized DHS in particular. President Donald Trump and his allies have routinely and without evidence accused Omar, who became a U.S. citizen in 2000, of immigration fraud and threatened to deport her back to Somalia.

In a statement to The Intercept, Omar spokesperson Jackie Rogers called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”

Ramirez said the search was an example of DHS “acting as designed.”

“DHS is not rogue,” wrote the congresswoman. “For 23 years, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy — whether it is Muslim-Americans, Haitians escaping violence, Latinos yearning for a better life, or dissenting voices demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine and the kidnapping of our neighbors.”

Congress is currently in recess until after the November elections to give members a chance to campaign, which means the bill won’t get a vote until November 9 at the earliest. The legislation is highly unlikely to pass this session. Republicans maintain the majority, and only a handful of Democratic members have called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Still fewer have called for abolishing the Department of Homeland Security.

But Ramirez said she hopes this bill shows what is legislatively possible if lawmakers want to unravel the surveillance and carceral state that has arisen in the last two decades. 

“Every person dead in detention, everyone shot or killed by ICE and CBP, every neighbor deported to a third country, every family separated, every community FEMA failed,” wrote Ramirez, “every miscarriage due to substandard care, every dissenter wrongfully branded, targeted, and persecuted as ‘terrorist,’ and every threat against our elections by Trump, Markwayne [Mullin], and [Stephen] Miller is a reason DHS must be dismantled and something new must take its place.”

The post Don’t Stop at ICE, Says Progressive Dem: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security appeared first on The Intercept.

In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump’s administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship.

On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of “an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”

HSI was previously known for targeting human traffickers, drug smugglers, and war criminals. But under the second Trump administration, the unit has been increasingly focused on investigating protesters and immigration fraud.

That latter category is exactly what Trump administration officials have been prejudiciously applying to Omar for months. In March, Vice President JD Vance said, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.”

And, last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “something is going to happen” on the Omar case, with immigration czar Tom Homan confirming an investigation.

The ICE raid against Omar, however, is an extremist escalation in Trump’s long-running threats to denaturalize the member of Congress, who was born in Somalia but came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was a young child. Omar, who has denied the repeated allegations of immigration fraud, is on the ballot for reelection in November.

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Not only does the raid send a chill to all naturalized citizens who, like Omar, oppose the Trump regime, it is also one of the most ominous signs to date of how dangerous Trump and his acolytes can get in the next two years.

With his popularity tanking and his grip on power growing tenuous, Trump is becoming a flailing tyrant. Meanwhile, he has been granted extraordinary executive power by a loyalist Supreme Court and has purged the federal government of practically all checks and balances. It’s a recipe for immense harm.

A Nakedly Fascist Move

Debates about whether the Trump regime qualifies as fascist are old, tired, and not worth retreading here.

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There can be little doubt, though, that targeting a racialized political opponent for deportation three weeks before an election is a nakedly fascist move — especially in the context of the far right’s evermore vitriolic attacks on Somali communities nationwide.

“Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last week. “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”

 It was nothing short of an exhortation to a race war.

As his popular support continues to wane, we can be sure that the president and his white supremacist Cabinet will marshal the force of the federal government in even more fascistic ways.

Many means of stopping Trump have been defanged, as the raid itself makes clear.

We cannot rely on the courts. The warrant to search Omar’s home, for instance, was signed by a judge.

The judicial system, indeed, has permitted vast swaths of Trump’s anti-immigrant excesses. Courts have also sent activists to prison for decades for attending protests against the federal government. And, while some federal judges and even the Supreme Court have pushed back on some of Trump’s agenda, it is also the courts that have covered the president with impunity. We know, too, that this administration routinely disregards court orders in the knowledge that it will not face consequences.

There is little more optimism to be had on the congressional front. Even if Democrats take back Congress in November, they must reckon with an embattled authoritarian executive with a fully funded standing militia — namely, ICE.

Democrats should unite to stop Trump’s efforts to lawlessly deport a colleague based on a racist political witch hunt, but we can expect little congressional action beyond condemnatory statements. Indeed, all too many centrist Democrats have been happy to throw left-wing colleagues, particularly Muslims like Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to the wolves.

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Elected leaders, from the national to municipal level, should be strategizing about how to protect their constituents from Trump’s worst extremes in the knowledge that he and his allies will escalate further. Impeachment should be a priority, yes, but so too should passing laws to dismantle and defund ICE, among other measures — just the sorts of things mainstream Democrats have refused to countenance.

If not the courts or elected leaders, what then? The answer is clear: Trump’s desperate authoritarianism must also be met by mass popular and militant opposition.

It is not enough to vote in November, then cross our fingers for two more years. Organizers on the front lines defending immigrant neighbors against ICE are exhausted and need numbers and support.

Activists facing trial or already sentenced to decades in prison for resisting Trump’s regime need ongoing legal support and funding. Readiness is all.

This is not to suggest that we must live in a state of paralyzing fear of an evermore delusional tyrant. The point, rather, is to recognize the danger and go on.

Resistance to Trump, to the border regime, and to racist state violence already exists; it must be supported, expanded, and the subject of an escalation of our own.

The post ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get appeared first on The Intercept.

The Defending Main Street super PAC spent thousands of dollars on an attack ad to audiences thousands of miles away from the Maine Senate race it was targeting. 

The ad hit Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson on the issue of taxes and cost of living in the state.

“Maine can’t afford Troy Jackson and all his taxes,” the ad said.

The group, which describes itself as the “most effective independent expenditure organization supporting the governing wing of the Republican Party,” paid for the ad to attack Jackson, who’s mounting a challenge to incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins. Both candidates have made cost of living a central plank of their campaigns in the run-up to the midterm election on November 3.

The only problem with the ad in question: The group paid for the video ad to show more than 1 million times in the wrong Portland.

Rather than being delivered to audiences in Portland, Maine, the state’s largest city, the ad was shown to digital audiences more than 3,000 miles and three time zones away in Portland, Oregon, according to data from Google.

The mix-up may be embarrassing for the super PAC, which is oriented around electing so-called moderate Republicans like Collins, but likely spared voters in Maine from the latest wave in a deluge of ad spending in the state, according to Andy O’Brien, a political operative who supports Jackson.

“We have billionaires with no connection to Maine spending millions of dollars to buy Susan Collins the election, so it’s pretty hilarious to see them throwing money at the wrong Portland,” O’Brien told The Intercept. “It’s clear these people don’t know anything about Maine, because they’re directing their ads to the wrong Portland.”

“I’m glad they’re wasting their money in Oregon and not continuing to waste it in Maine.”

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Representatives of the Jackson’s and Collins’s campaigns and a spokesperson for Defending Main Street did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The group is affiliated with Republican Main Street Partnership, a nonprofit group that counts Collins among its nine members in the Senate. Republican Main Street Partnership was initially aimed at supporting moderate Republicans that has, along with much of the rest of the GOP, moved to the right in recent years.

Busy Maine Street

The race between Collins and Jackson — a longtime Maine politico who stepped in to replace Graham Platner after Platner dropped out amid allegations of sexual assault — has become one of the most high-profile races in the country in the run-up to the midterms.

The campaign has helped make Maine one of the top locations for political spending this cycle, according to the Portland Press Herald. 

The Defending Main Street ad, however, did not have the impact its sponsors might have hoped. The ad buy first came to light after an X user reported seeing multiple anti-Troy Jackson ads in Portland, Oregon.

“I’ve gotten 5 anti-Troy Jackson ads in the last 24 hours. I choose to believe they mixed up Portlands,” wrote the user, who goes by the name Lillian Belle and posts about progressive politics in Oregon. “Hearing I’m not alone lol.”

That suspicion appears to be borne out by data from Google Ads Transparency Center, which shows Defending Main Street dropped between $20,000 and $25,000 to place the 30-second ad in hundreds of ZIP codes across Oregon and the state of Washington between October 8 and October 11.

O’Brien, the Maine political operative, said, “At least now Portland, Oregon, residents can enjoy some of the crap we’ve been seeing every single day.”

Correction: October 12, 2026, 2:04 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated how many time zones away Portland, Oregon, is from Portland, Maine; it is three, not two.

The post Susan Collins-Aligned Super PAC Buys Attack Ads in Portland… Oregon appeared first on The Intercept.

Almost 900 U.S. troops have been wounded or killed in the war with Iran, according to the official Pentagon count, including the two deaths added on Friday. This raises the Pentagon’s total to 21 dead.

The additional war dead include Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and died while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6. For more than six months, The Intercept has raised Davius’s case in dozens of emails and phone conversations with Pentagon officials and publicly in 10 articles.

The Pentagon recently revamped the website of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS — which provides official counts of dead and wounded for Congress and the White House — to include more detailed casualty category tables. But it initially listed no “non-hostile” illness or injury fatalities, despite the Pentagon announcing in March that Davius died “as a result of a non-combat related incident.”

At first, the military claimed that Davius was involved in another operation instead of Epic Fury — the original designation of the Iran war. Two weeks ago, however, The Intercept revealed that a recent National Guard news release admitted that when “President Donald Trump made the decision to attack Iran and launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, the [42nd Infantry] division headquarters began conducting combat operations.” The 42nd served as the primary headquarters leading what became, according to Maj. Gen. Jack James, the division commander, the “largest and first long-range precision fires campaign in the history of the United States Army.” James specifically saluted Davius, whom the Guard admitted was “conducting operations” when he died.

Last week, The Intercept pointed the Pentagon to the non-hostile illness or injury casualty count for Epic Fury on the website, and emphasized its tally showing zero deaths was not possible.

“I will check within,” Patricia Kreuzberger, a Pentagon spokesperson said on Tuesday. “Let me reach out to leadership.”

Three days later, and after repeated follow-up messages on Friday, the tally was updated, to 1.

In addition to Davius, the DCAS death count now also includes an unidentified Navy suicide that occurred last month, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. DCAS currently lists this death as “pending,” despite the recent addition of a “self-inflicted” category to the website.

A “War Department official” told The Intercept by email on Sunday that “the Department is introducing a ‘Pending Adjudication’ category to track the status of active duty casualties pending final categorization and reporting in DCAS.” She added: “This new category will allow the Department to minimize reporting delays while ensuring data consistency between the DoW and Joint Staff.”

The “pending” designation, however, isn’t new. The Pentagon re-introduced it to DCAS in mid-July, and major discrepancies have continued in the tally since.

Many casualties remain uncounted in DCAS, including a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

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Most Iran war casualties in the official count — 454 personnel as of Friday — have occurred since July 7, after the Trump administration claimed the conflict ended. At that time, the Pentagon switched from counting casualties under Epic Fury to the anodyne moniker “Overseas Operations.”

The most recent casualties are three Army personnel wounded in action this month. The latest known Iran war fatality is Capt. Bianca Wilkerson, 37, of Norfolk, Virginia, who died on September 18 from a “coronary issue,” according to her brother. He said she returned from Saudi Arabia on September 10 and was headed back but died on the return flight, according to reporting by the Virginian-Pilot. A U.S. official told The Intercept that Wilkerson died “as a result of a non-combat-related incident,” but after nearly a month, DCAS still lists no non-hostile illness or injury deaths.

“There is no excuse for a mistake of this magnitude,” Reps. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., said in a joint statement on Friday after the House Armed Services Committee discovered “a discrepancy in the Pentagon’s reporting of casualty numbers” and brought it to “the Trump Administration’s attention.” They continued: “The failure of Secretary Hegseth to immediately take ownership of the problem also does a grave disservice to the men and women putting their lives on the line in service to our country.”

For six months, The Intercept has reported on anomalies in official counts offered on DCAS. When the first ceasefire was struck between the Trump administration and Iran on April 7, the tally of U.S. casualties was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number slowly rose to 428, according to Pentagon statistics. But on April 21, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 without public acknowledgment by the War Department. Despite repeated questions for months, the Pentagon has not explained the adjustment.

Other discrepancies have also gone unjustified for months. An Army “illness/injury” death appeared on or about May 26 but disappeared by June 1. On July 20, the Pentagon repeatedly altered DCAS, adding 100 casualties to the war’s tally without explanation; the total number of wounded cited by DCAS on that date included counts of 413, 427, and 447. Three days later, the Pentagon dropped the Iran war death toll from 18 to 14. On July 22, DCAS added 10 recent casualties to the Epic Fury count. By July 25, those wounded personnel were dropped from the tally. They may have been added to the Overseas Operations casualty toll, but the Pentagon has failed to offer any explanations.

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Prior reporting by The Intercept also found that the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called, in April, a “casualty cover-up.” When the Washington Post also suggested last month that the Pentagon had suppressed the casualty numbers, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth called the report “DISGUSTING and FAKE.”

When asked by The Intercept about the Pentagon’s continued peddling of bogus statistics, Kreuzberger did not offer an explanation. An email from a nameless “War Department official” said: “We have nothing to provide beyond the Defense Casualty Analysis System website.”

The post Pentagon Finally Counts an Iran War Death — Six Months Late appeared first on The Intercept.

There were two types of protests, said Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Michael McCarthy, who oversaw the ICE agents in a St. Paul, Minnesota, field office who conducted the investigation.

“Peaceful protest is a protected right, and a cornerstone of our democracy,” said McCarthy. “When protest turns into rioting, violence or criminal activity, it becomes unlawful and it will not be tolerated.”

McCarthy’s comments stood in stark contrast with ICE’s record in Minneapolis, where a federal judge had been forced to issue an injunction to stop federal agents from pepper-spraying and arresting peaceful protesters during their enforcement blitz, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

Legal experts, too, had criticisms of the indictment: The Justice Department, one pointed out, had concocted a federal conspiracy out of what would normally be misdemeanor charges.

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In the months since, criticisms of the case have only grown louder. Court filings revealed that McCarthy’s agents secretly infiltrated groups that preach nonviolence, including labor unions and nonprofits. They also wielded subpoenas in a fruitless hunt for financiers of “domestic terrorism,” taking a cue from President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 labeling swaths of the far left as terrorists.

The Trump administration has won some success in going after left-wing protesters under NSPM-7, but the Minneapolis case is proving to be more challenging.

In other prosecutions targeting activists, like the Prairieland case in Texas, mainstream groups have shied away from supporting the defendants. In Minnesota, though, groups once wary of being associated with the 15 defendants, many of whom are self-described anarchists, have rallied to their side.

Powerful labor unions that make up the backbone of the state’s progressive movement have raised funds on behalf of the defendants, incensed at the infiltration from federal undercover agents. Rather than dividing and conquering the left, the case has united it.

Supporters of the defendants, who have collectively come to be known as the Minneapolis or Minnesota 15, recently packed a bowling alley for a fundraiser. On October 3, hundreds of labor union members marched through downtown Minneapolis, demanding that the charges against the activists be dropped.

Meanwhile, the defendants themselves have so far mounted a unified, joint defense; none of them have taken a plea deal.

“They’re trying to split the movement and absolutely failing,” said Emmett James Doyle, a defendant in the case. “There’s been just complete solidarity behind us from basically every sector of Twin Cities life.”

“Can’t Indict 100,000 People”

Doyle’s ruddy face and wild beard would have been at home in Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World a century ago. By day he’s a union carpenter, by night he plucks a banjo and sings songs about America’s radical past.

Federal prosecutors allege that he brought those songs to life on the streets of Minneapolis.

In a 94-page indictment, prosecutors claim that Doyle and the other 14 defendants were members or associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota that “infiltrated and exploited lawful protests” to target ICE.

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Prosecutors painted a dark picture of DAMN. Their tactics allegedly included blocking access to a federal building used by ICE with disabled cars or trailers, bringing shields and gas masks to protests, and, in one instance, following an ICE agent across state lines to his home in Wisconsin.

Government attorneys also leaned heavily on the defendants’ comments to each other in private messages about their frustration with more mainstream protesters and the need for “militant” action.

Despite the prosecutors’ claims about rioting and violence at the June press conference, however, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, was unable to identify injuries to federal officers when reporters pressed him.

There are committed anarchists among the defendants charged in the indictment, several defendants told The Intercept, but there was little difference between what they did and what thousands of Minneapolis residents did during the federal immigration crackdown.

Ordinary Minnesotans walked frigid streets with whistles dangling from their necks to alert their neighbors about ICE raids. They sent license plate numbers of federal vehicles to Signal group chats. Members of rapid-response networks trailed suspected agents in their cars.

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The indictment is replete with examples of protesters trailing agents in vehicles, a tactic known as “commuting.” Yet that was a tactic so widely employed by rapid-response groups in Minneapolis that it was even adopted by a congressional candidate in a suburban district who recently won his Democratic primary.

“I think there are people in the government who really do believe that there is like a small cabal of people who are fomenting all the dissent, and if you get rid of them, that everyone will be quiet,” Doyle said. “And that’s fundamentally wrong.”

Doyle, like the four other defendants interviewed by The Intercept, declined to discuss the specific allegations in the indictment, citing advice from his attorney.

Still, another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, was adamant that none of the defendants ever used violence. Thoreson is a special education teacher whose elementary school’s lanyard was still dangling from her neck during a recent interview. She believes the group was targeted because of its radical views.

“They clearly had people that they had identified as problematic in some way and have been trying to tie these people to leading the resistance,” Thoreson said. “They can’t indict 100,000 people, so really, they’re just trying to find people to make examples of.”

“Attack on the Movement’

Thoreson said she has received steady support from her teachers union since the indictment.

She and many other defendants believe the charges against them are a way of attacking Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. By the count of defendants who spoke to The Intercept, at least 11 of the 15 have been involved in union organizing.

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The internal Homeland Security Investigations files unearthed by the defense team lend credibility to this theory. Undercover agents attended an organizing meeting at the United Labor Centre, a building that houses multiple unions. HSI, the investigative wing of ICE, also subpoenaed the financial records of the SEIU and the Communications Workers of America as part of an overlapping probe into “domestic terror financing.”

Several defendants interviewed by The Intercept were amused at the idea that they were receiving funding from mainstream organizations. They have long lobbed critiques at the labor movement’s institutional core from its fringes.

After some initial hesitance, unions and nonprofit groups responded in force to the case. Days after the indictment, some labor groups signed onto a joint statement denouncing the charges. After a court filing from the defendants revealed the subpoenas of the unions’ financing, more labor organizations raised their voices.

“Generally speaking, the labor movement is awfully conservative — too conservative — on issues like this, and can sometimes be scared out of solidarity with people who are fighting back,” said Kieran Knutson, the president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

More unions rallied, Knutson said, as it became clear that prosecutors could not point to examples of physical harm, as union locals pressured statewide organizations, and as the defendants themselves articulated why the case was important.

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“These are active people in the labor movement, and I think in many ways people see them as an expression of the movement as a whole,” Knutson said. “And these charges were an attack on the movement as a whole.”

Knutson said he knows the value of solidarity: In 1993, he was charged with assaulting a man wearing neo-Nazi patches during an antiracist demonstration on the University of Minnesota campus, according to news reports from the time. He was acquitted with the help of attorney Keith Ellison, who later went on to win election as the state’s attorney general.

“I know what it’s like to have the weight of the charges just hanging over you,” Knutson said.

The leading candidate in the Hennepin County Attorney race, state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who also works as a lawyer for labor union Education Minnesota, told The Intercept in a recent interview that the charges should be dismissed.

“I think they’re trying to, for lack of a better word, ‘Trump’ up some charges to continue his pursuit of retribution against Minnesota,” said Frazier. “I mean, look, they don’t like labor groups.”

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A broad coalition of labor groups including the state AFL-CIO endorsed an October 3 rally and march in support of the defendants, another sign that skepticism of the case has gone mainstream.

Hundreds of janitors, teachers, public employees, and hospitality workers joined the march, said Isaac Sant, a defendant and longtime labor organizer. He said seeing them on the streets was “humbling.”

Sant recently joined defendants from other cases with political overtones, including Prairieland, to form what they are dubbing the NSPM-7 Defendants Union.

“I can only speak for myself, but I don’t have any problem linking my case to the Prairieland cases. I think what happened to them was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice,” Sant said. “I think it’s very important that we stand in solidarity with people who are in that position, and especially with people who are getting railroaded even worse than we are.”

The post Trump Wanted Minneapolis 15 Case to Be Another Prairieland. Instead, Twin Cities Rallied Behind Anti-ICE Activists. appeared first on The Intercept.

The 35-year-old from the West Bank city of Nablus was newly married and had just spent her first night in an Israeli prison. Israeli forces had arrested her without charges and put her under administrative detention, an arbitrary condition for holding Palestinians hostage. She lost consciousness in front of Israeli soldiers at Sharon Prison, a temporary detention facility in the city of Netanya, and they took her to a hospital blindfolded. There, with her hands and feet bound in chains, she was given a pregnancy test that came back positive.

Joudeh would never get to experience the joys and travails of pregnancy outside of prison. She was in Israeli custody from the moment she found out, until she gave birth.

Like Joudeh, pregnant Palestinian women arrested by Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, are forced to endure a physically and medically complex process in conditions characterized by inadequate access to food, family visits, and medicine, as well as frequent reports of violence.

The total number of pregnancies in custody among the hundreds of women seized since October 7 is unknown, but Joudeh is only the second documented example of a woman who gave birth while under Israeli detention in nearly 17 years, according to Palestinian prisoners’ rights advocates. Many cases, advocates say, may have gone unreported.

The Intercept spoke to Joudeh through her sister, Maram, who sat with Joudeh by her side while sharing a detailed account of her sister’s six-month pregnancy, which ended in a premature cesarean section.

Corroborated by statements and reports published by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, among others, Joudeh’s story offers a glimpse into what it’s like to go through pregnancy while locked in Israel’s prison system, where she struggled to obtain basic prenatal care and relied on other prisoners to share their already limited food.

“She went through every kind of suffering in there,” Maram said.

Israeli forces used sound grenades inside the prison, according to Joudeh’s family and her lawyer, Hassan Abbadi, who provides volunteer legal support for detained Palestinians. They said soldiers would force the women to lie face down on the floor.

“Female prisoners are subjected to all forms of violence and are deprived of the most basic rights,” said Abbadi, who regularly visits Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. He described shortages of underwear, attacks by police dogs, and strip searches, among other forms of mistreatment.

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Joudeh’s pregnancy unfolded against a broader surge in Israeli arrests and violence across the occupied Palestinian territories. As of September, Israel was holding roughly 9,350 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 90 women and more than 350 children, according to Palestinian prisoners’ organizations. More than 3,100 of them are being held under administrative detention, without charge or trial.

For Joudeh, who was transferred to Damon Prison in Haifa soon after discovering she was pregnant, there was little effort to make accommodations for her pregnancy. According to Maram and Abbadi, the food was scarce and of poor quality, consisting usually of a slice of toast and lentils, chickpeas, or hummus. Sometimes, the prisoners received a few olives, and the other women incarcerated with Joudeh would offer a part of their own meager portions and give it to her.

In a small cell she shared with 13 other women, she discussed baby names with Manar Karaja, another detainee who was pregnant at the same time. According to Amany Sarahneh, the media director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Karaja was still pregnant and still in Israeli detention as of October 6.

As her pregnancy progressed, Joudeh grew increasingly worried about her baby. She repeatedly asked for medical tests to make sure that both she and the fetus were healthy, Maram said, but her requests were refused.

“I would reassure myself by the baby’s heartbeat, and later, when I started feeling her move,” Maram relayed on behalf of her sister, who sat next to her at Maram’s home in Ramallah. “I needed vitamins and folic acid, but they refused to give them to me.”

In response to outreach from The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Israeli military directed queries to the Israel Prison Service. An Israel Prison Service spokesperson said the agency could not comment on individual detainees’ cases, but described a detailed list of Joudeh’s experiences as “false.”

Palestinian women have faced pregnancy and childbirth inside Israeli prisons for decades, often under harsh conditions and with limited medical care. The first documented Palestinian woman to give birth in Israeli custody was Zakia Shammout, who delivered her daughter Nadia in 1972 at Neve Tirza prison in Ramla, assisted by fellow prisoners. The last documented case before the start of Israel’s ongoing genocide was Fatima al-Zaq, who gave birth to her son Youssef in prison in 2008; the 17-year-old was killed in July 2025 after an Israeli drone hit his family’s apartment on Al-Thawra Street, in central Gaza City.

In September 2025, Tahani Abu Samhan gave birth to her son Yahya while in Israeli custody. Then, a year later, there was Joudeh.

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Joudeh suffered from debilitating headaches while pregnant, but basic pain relief was difficult to obtain. Prison authorities refused to give her Acamol, a common brand of acetaminophen, which is generally considered safe for use during pregnancy despite recent guidance to the contrary from health officials in the U.S.

The other women found ways to help. One prisoner would sometimes pretend that she had a headache herself, ask for a painkiller, and secretly give the tablet to Joudeh.

“She was crying most of the time,” Maram said.

By July, Joudeh had contracted scabies, a rash caused by highly contagious mites that results in severe itching and pain. The women were given a single container of a topical treatment to share among the entire cell, and it wasn’t enough for everyone who was infected. They resorted to mixing the treatment with chlorine to make it stretch further, Maram said.

Months into the pregnancy, Joudeh began suffering severe pain and bleeding. She was taken to the prison clinic, where she was told that her condition was stable and that there was no need to send her to a hospital. She learned she was carrying a girl.

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By then six months pregnant, Joudeh was having her first medical examination since her positive test, Maram said. World Health Organization guidelines recommend that a pregnant person would have had at least three prenatal appointments by that point, though many doctors recommend more frequent visits to monitor the development of the fetus and identify potential complications. Joudeh had received none.

In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, an Israeli Prison Service spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The allegations described are false, entirely without factual basis, and form part of a broader campaign to defame the State of Israel and its lawful institutions.”

“All prisoners and detainees held by the Israel Prison Service are held in accordance with the law and receive the rights and care to which they are entitled,” the spokesperson added, including medical care in accordance with Israeli standards. They wrote that the prison agency would not provide medical information specific to any particular detainee.

Israeli officials have shown an interest in following the most limited interpretation of the law. In an interview last week, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said prisoners “will not receive a single grain more than the legal minimum.” He recalled making a monitoring visit to Ketziot prison because, he claimed, he’d heard prisoners had received two extra olives on their plates.

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Outside the prisons, access to prenatal and other medical care has been pulled further out of reach for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By the end of 2025, the United Nations had documented 925 Israeli checkpoints, road gates, and other movement obstacles across the territory, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians and making it harder to reach health services. And in Gaza, where Israel keeps bombing despite the ceasefire announced last October, the health system has been destroyed, with severe shortages of basic necessities and a lack of functioning medical facilities making pregnancy particularly dangerous.

Around 50,000 women are pregnant in Gaza, according to UNFPA. One in 3 pregnancies are considered high-risk. Nearly 4,000 pregnancy losses were reported in the first half of 2026, three times the number recorded in the previous six months.

In the prison, Joudeh’s bleeding would not stop.

It continued for two weeks, Maram said, and Joudeh’s hemoglobin level eventually fell to 9 grams per deciliter, which the WHO classifies as anemic during pregnancy. As her condition deteriorated, she was taken to Rambam Hospital, again blindfolded and with her hands and feet shackled. There, doctors decided that the baby needed to be delivered prematurely.

On September 12, Joudeh gave birth by C-section under local anesthesia, watching the operation as it was happening. Maram said that Joudeh’s hands and feet were shackled while she was cut open, and female Israeli soldiers surrounded her with guns in the operating room, standing guard.

She saw her daughter only briefly in the first 72 hours after giving birth, Maram said, because the baby, born prematurely at around six months, needed to be cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Joudeh’s doctor was Israeli, and she recalled him speaking to her in cruel, degrading terms, according to Maram. “The terrorist has arrived,” she remembered him saying about the fragile newborn. Joudeh named her Lia.

Some of the nurses caring for Joudeh were Palestinian citizens of the 1948 occupied territories, Maram said. They looked for small ways to help her, like secretly bringing the baby to Joudeh’s bedside while she remained handcuffed to the hospital bed. They dressed Lia in a pink onesie. And they asked the Israeli soldiers guarding Joudeh to remove her handcuffs so she could walk around, but the soldiers refused, Maram said.

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Officials at Rambam Hospital did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Joudeh and Lia were supposed to be released on September 15, according to Maram, but on September 14, just two days after the birth, Israeli authorities took Joudeh and her newborn daughter from the hospital back to the prison to process Joudeh’s release. An ambulance was waiting outside with Joudeh’s husband, Maram said, and as soon as Joudeh and Lia were released, the baby was taken by ambulance to Hclinic Specialty hospital in Ramallah. Before they left, Lia’s pink onesie was replaced with a gray outfit.

Maram believes her sister was released a day early to prevent the family from preparing a celebration to welcome them home.

When Joudeh’s sisters were finally able to hug her, they were shocked by how frail she seemed. “She was exhausted. She had lost so much weight,” Maram said. “She was physically and psychologically devastated.”

She was still suffering from scabies, but her family embraced her anyway. “I didn’t care about anything except hugging her,” Maram said. “I had missed her so much, and I had been so worried about her.”

Joudeh is now staying with Maram at her home in Ramallah, where she’s recovering from her pregnancy and incarceration. Lia remains in the neonatal unit at Istishari Arab Hospital in Ramallah.

Sometimes, Maram said, Joudeh breaks down when she remembers the trauma of giving birth in detention. But when the mother and baby are both well, Joudeh wants to hold a small celebration, bringing relatives and loved ones together to welcome Lia. She’s already begun thinking about the food and sweets she wants to serve. Despite all she’s been through, Maram said, when the family talks about the celebration, Joudeh smiles.

The post A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Outraged New Yorkers poured into the streets Thursday night and soon clashed with the New York City Police Department, inflaming a perennial point of tension for the city’s socialist mayor. Mamdani has faced criticism from his left for neglecting to pursue aggressive reforms of the NYPD and distrust from his right for having vowed to rein in the department. Now, as residents recover from the latest in a string of violent episodes in President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, Mamdani is tasked with shielding his city from ICE and controlling his local police.

“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mamdani said Thursday night, standing side-by-side with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration known for pushing to expand the department’s sweeping surveillance apparatus. While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his detractors argue the mayor must do more than deliver harsh words. 

Mamdani’s rhetoric marks “a great first step,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “But what is the city going to do other than deliver that? What are the actionable ideas that they’re planning? That’s the piece that we need to be pushing more on hearing about, because we’re gonna keep being in the same situation.” 

Legally, there isn’t much Mamdani can do to keep federal immigration agents out of the city. Despite the steps he’s taken to curtail their access to city property or stop the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers’ private data, Trump and the federal agencies sending ICE to New York are the only ones who could actually stop them from coming. 

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But Mamdani’s administration could make it harder for ICE to operate in New York by exerting more control over the NYPD, immigration advocates argue. The department later showed up at the protests on Thursday night, and rapid response activists at the scene alleged its officers were speaking with agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which they viewed as evidence of coordination. 

Pete Gizas, director of the White House National Security Council and Homeland Security Investigations New York Acting Special Agent in Charge, was at the scene liaising directly with NYPD personnel, according to two rapid responders who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from law enforcement agencies. 

One rapid responder said Gizas was there for hours, “speaking directly to both NYPD and federal personnel. He had HSI officers in his immediate area going door to door, getting into apartment buildings.” Another witness confirmed that they’d seen Gizas interacting with the police. 

“If NYPD is in fact an agency that is controlled by the mayor of New York and by the people of New York, then why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?” said the first rapid responder, who added that they’d seen members of the ICE investigative unit going in and out of the local NYPD precinct. 

The NYPD doesn’t have an official partnership with ICE, which would be prohibited by sanctuary city laws and a state law passed in August. But the department has been notified of ICE activity in the city and shares information like fingerprints with federal agencies, which in turn shares that information with ICE. 

Awawdeh said even if the police aren’t helping ICE detain people, they’re still helping them move freely around the city and carry out their operations.

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“They’ll not cooperate or work with ICE on immigration enforcement, but then when they do crowd control, it does end up becoming collusion because then you’re still helping them do the thing you’re not supposed to be doing,” he said. 

ICE directed questions about Gizas being at the scene to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson said, “The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement.”

Mamdani has already faced a barrage of criticism for his abandonment of several police reform promises he made on the campaign trail. Advocates want him to get rid of Tisch, who is widely associated with the “tough-on-crime” tenure of former Mayor Eric Adams, and disband a controversial unit often deployed to protests known as the Strategic Response Group. (Mamdani has said he still wants to disband the unit but has not provided a plan or a timeline to do so. His office and an NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that the unit was not deployed on Thursday.)

According to eyewitness accounts and footage of the protests shared on social media, NYPD officers pushed demonstrators, including knocking down Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier. But there don’t appear to have been mass arrests. In a statement to The Intercept, an NYPD spokesperson said the agency arrested five people at the protests and issued them tickets to appear at the precinct.

“We’re seeing both the shock of ICE’s violence, but we’re also seeing this aggressive treatment of the protesters and of the response to people who are speaking out,” said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project. 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Mamdani’s office called the ICE shooting “heinous” and said it “underscores the dangers that ICE operations create in our communities.” 

“The Mayor and the NYPD will review all of the events of the last 24 hours,” the spokesperson said, “including ICE’s shooting; the Police Department’s response to that incident and the ensuing protest; the staging of ICE operations in privately-owned parking lots; and every action the City can take to protect New Yorkers from ICE’s terror.”

The Socialist Stance

Mamdani’s strongest political base of support has directed its ire at Tisch, not the mayor. In a statement from the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose organizing operation helped one of its own get elected mayor, the group called for Tisch’s firing and condemned the NYPD without mentioning Mamdani by name. 

Asked why Mamdani didn’t just direct the NYPD not to respond to protests, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo said the group hadn’t yet been in touch with City Hall but that the police response fell on Tisch, who read out Belgal’s criminal record at her appearance with Mamdani Thursday night. Gordillo also said it was time for the mayor to move forward on campaign promises like disbanding the Strategic Response Group, although the unit wasn’t at Thursday’s protests. 

“The mayor and we all agree that ICE is not making New Yorkers safer. Democratic socialists have to defeat Trump if we want to abolish ICE,” Gordillo said, pointing to the seven DSA members likely heading to Congress next session, including Avila Chevalier. “The mayor helped us elect several of those people. That’s really the top priority. Because until the federal government changes, the tools that we have in New York City are pretty limited.” 

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In an interview about Mamdani’s policing policies earlier this month, Gordillo’s co-chair, Grace Mausser, said the group was being careful about how it was approaching pushing Mamdani to do more on police reform while balancing the political risks. In light of the shooting, Gordillo said, there may be an opportunity to up the pressure. 

“There’s an opening among the public right now that means we can harness public anger and public support to make changes for the better in the NYPD in a way that maybe felt harder a few weeks ago,” Gordillo said. 

Farhang said she welcomed Mamdani’s pledge to demand that Trump end all ICE enforcement operations in New York City, but there are other, less obvious ways to end local collaboration with ICE. 

“People justifiably are focused on the role of the NYPD at the site of a protest, and those are important conversations,” Farhang said. “But every single day, we know that the Department of Corrections, the Department of Probation, and also yes, the NYPD, they are continuing to communicate and collaborate with ICE.”

City Council officials recently reintroduced two bills that would limit that sort of cooperation. They’d been sitting “for years,” Farhang said. Now, she added, with so many people “unequivocally saying that ICE is an agency whose mission is squarely to terrorize communities, and that there’s no bounds to their violence, we ask people to take that next step and say, if that’s the case, there is no justification for collaboration at all.”

ICE has surged operations in cities around the country, particularly targeting blue cities with so-called sanctuary city laws that strengthen protections for immigrants. 

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“This surge that’s happening in New York City is happening all across the country. In California, in Illinois, in anti-sanctuary states as well,” said Naureen Shah, who leads immigration policy and advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “So for any community that’s bracing for or experiencing a law enforcement surge, it is really vital that police departments are not providing cooperation to the street arrests, either formally or informally.” 

Cities and states can’t stop ICE from doing federal law enforcement, Shah added. But, she said, “they can hold officials accountable for the abuses they commit.”

The post ICE Shooting in NYC Inflames Mamdani’s Policing Problem appeared first on The Intercept.

Do the Old Ways Still Work?

Have you been recently scolded by an older peacenik about the good old days of street protests? I have!

Has an older beloved activist — a mentor, even — bemoaned “kids these days” and criticized their lack of political engagement? Have you heard the dreaded preamble: “In my day, we…” — fill in the blank — marched, struck, organized?

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I have been on the receiving end of some of these rebukes recently, even though I am not much of a kid anymore. These aging activists aren’t seeing the outrage. They aren’t seeing the opposition. They aren’t seeing the resistance. But it might just mean they aren’t looking in the right place. Because there is plenty of resistance if you know where to look.

But more on that later.

The war against Iran is hugely unpopular. And it is not just a faraway, abstract wrong. It is having a demonstrable impact on the daily lives of Americans. Gas and heating fuel are and will continue to be more expensive. The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a project of Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, estimates a nearly $1,000 war tax paid by each U.S. household. That is on top of the actual and massive price tag of military operations so far: nearly $40 billion and rising at a rate of $2 to 3 billion a month, with the projected final price tag in the trillions.

At the end of February, Trump’s war opened in typical Trumpian fashion with a massive bombardment that not only targeted Iranian leaders but also the smallest and most innocent Iranians: Operation Epic Fury had an elementary school in its sights, and the result was obliteration. Raytheon-manufactured Tomahawk missiles slammed into the school in Minab, Iran, killing 156 civilians, most of them children. A U.N. panel now asserts that the U.S. attack was a war crime.

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As the war ground on, the resistance continued. In March, Green Party candidate for Senate in North Carolina, former Marine, and member of Veterans for Peace, Brian McGinnis, disrupted a Senate hearing, shouting: “Americans do not want to fight this war for Israel.” (He suffered a broken arm at the hands of Capitol Police.) That same month, a top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned from the Trump administration, citing his opposition to the Iran war. More than 65 veterans and military family members were arrested inside a congressional building in April, protesting the illegal use of military force against Iran. The list goes on and on and on.

But we have not seen a reprise of the massive protests that marked the lead-up to the Iraq War 23 years ago. Maybe it’s understandable. And maybe it’s OK.

March Where? To Stop What?

I love a good protest march. I love the signs, the energy, the chanting, the music, coordinated outfits, mass-printed placards, and creative, handmade signs, a veritable rainbow of puns and alliteration and outrage glittered to cardboard and foamcore. I love the collection of newsletters and radical tracts and stickers and flyers for the next get-together that fill my backpack by the end. I love the chance encounters with friends. (“OMG, I didn’t know you’d be here.”) For a time, long ago, I served on the United for Peace and Justice steering committee and played a very small role in organizing such big and beautiful anti-war marches.

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But I have a friend in her 70s who recently announced: I will not march in an empty city on a weekend ever again. And I agree. Her point was that big protest marches are often planned to be convenient for working people, so they are scheduled on weekends. But the leaders we want to confront with our people power don’t work on the weekends. In Connecticut, where I live, that means we end up marching in circles around a deserted downtown Hartford, our chants lost in the caverns of empty office buildings.

That happens in Washington, D.C., too. The weekend that 200,000 people reportedly marched at a “No Kings” rally in the capital last fall, Trump was holding a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. That is not disrupting business as usual. It is not creating some alternative. So it ends up feeling performative and like a numbers game. We show up to be counted. And now, the counting is itself a battleground. In D.C., the U.S. Park Police used to count crowds at protests. But they stopped in the 1990s, after the Million Man March challenged their count as a low-ball figure.

Personally, I would march on a Monday, down the middle of the highway, stop traffic, and sit in to demand that the world stop business as usual until there is justice for the children of the Minab school, or an end to Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, or an end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

But I agree with my friend. I am not going to a performative protest that’s easy to ignore. What is the political utility of marching one day and then returning to business as usual the next?

Our History Is Inspiration, Not Fodder for Scolds

I am white-haired and I can no longer say it is premature. When people assume I am a grandma, I am learning to accept it gracefully. At 52, I could be a grandmother. But I am too young to have lived through the so-called heyday of protest marches that required months or years of organizing work and political finesse. These marches — like the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or the huge November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, or the April 1971 protest made famous by Vietnam veterans throwing their medals — demonstrated the movements’ organization, economic, and cultural power.

The March on Washington was the culmination of decades of vision, years of work, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It brought upward of 250,000 mostly Black Americans to the nation’s capital to demand a civil rights act, desegregation, jobs, the right to vote, and more. The march is credited with helping pass both the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts.

During my lifetime, there have been major mass mobilizations of varying utility. The June 12, 1982, March and Rally for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City was the largest single protest in U.S. history (so far), with more than 1 million people calling for an end to the nuclear weapons threat. There were so many people lined up in the streets that tens of thousands of marchers never even arrived at the rally in Central Park!

Organized to coincide with the United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament, the event was the culmination of 18 months of work. Coordinator Leslie Cagan, who eventually helped found UFPJ, recalled that the march was “a tremendous success.” Historians like Vincent Intondi credit it as a cultural turning point that created the conditions for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons nearly four decades later. Intersectional, joyful, and woman-led, the rally also encouraged participants to bring the spirit of the march home with them, seeding countless anti-nuclear community efforts around the nation.

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In February 2003, the world said no to the impending U.S. war on Iraq with rallies and marches in almost 800 cities around the globe, demonstrating both the power of the people and the limitations of this form of resistance. All over the world, as many as 30 million people participated in an unprecedented coordinated series of actions, with marches from Athens, Greece, to Zagreb, Croatia. The pages of the New York Times called the global movement against the Bush war the “Other Superpower,” but the muscle flexed in the streets did not translate into the political, economic, or cultural might needed to stave off a war built on a web of lies.

Historian Jeremy Varon writes vividly about the impact of the marches and rallies in his recent study of the movement against the war on terror, “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War,” concluding that while they didn’t keep the Iraq war from happening, they bolstered and built a peace movement that is still active in creative resistance today. Our past is inspiring. We need to learn this history and apply the lessons that make strategic sense for this context.

We shouldn’t look at the past and beat ourselves up by saying, “Wow, they got a million people to turn out for nuclear disarmament in 1982, and I can’t even get 10 people to come to a street corner protest.” The saying goes, “We learn our history so we don’t repeat it,” and I think that goes for movement history, too. We don’t want to repeat history to keep it precious and amber-encased. We want to learn from it and apply what is useful to our own very different moment right here in 2026, where we are flooded with social media’s steady stream of bad news, fake news, infotainment, and rage-bait.

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Today, people are exhausted, stretched thin, worried about their own bottom lines. Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I am exhausted. Stretched thin. Supremely worried. It is easy to despair. Everything in modern life seems geared toward our individual hopelessness and isolation. We are better consumers when we feel alone and powerless.

Like many, I was inspired by political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s 2010s research on nonviolent civil resistance and regime change, which established the 3.5 percent rule. It states that no government can withstand a challenge where 3.5 percent of its population is mobilized for a “peak event” like a mass protest. It seemed simple and achievable. That is, until I did the math. Three and a half percent of the U.S. population is approximately 12 million people. Only 10 million people bought tickets to Taylor Swift’s entire Eras Tour — 149 sold-out shows in 51 cities and 21 countries. If we got all those Swifties out in the streets here in the U.S., we’d still come up short for a regime-changing General Strike.

Mobilizing, Not Marching

Everything feels existential. Everything feels like an emergency. Trump floods the zone with rage-bait every single day. Do I have to stay mad to be a good leftist? That does not seem healthy to me. So, what can we do instead?

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Activists today are marching less and instead mobilizing for community power over the long haul. This means relationship building, visible and decentralized resistance, and crisis response that transforms into solidarity after the acute crisis subsides. For example, you may have seen visibility brigades, the grassroots activist groups that display large signs and wave to drivers from highway overpasses and pedestrian bridges. Then there are the rapid-response networks that turn out trained community witnesses and protection squads whenever ICE is active in a neighborhood or town, or the calls to show up and support people being held at detention facilities like Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey.

The past teaches us that the tactics must keep changing. Most of what worked in 1963 in Washington wasn’t applicable to organizers in 1982 and was outdated by 2003. And that is OK; we don’t still use mimeographs or fax machines, either. There might not be millions of people in the street to oppose the war on Iran but that doesn’t mean people are not resisting. It just looks different. It is also landing differently, and more heavily, on the people arrested for resistance. Those who protest and are arrested are looking at serious charges, hostile court environments, and a Justice Department high on its own supply of anti-terrorist, anti-antifa fearmongering.

People are struggling and afraid, and I can’t blame them for that. Dissent is once again being labeled as terrorism. Critique is labeled as terrorism. Questions are labeled as terrorism. Anything that is not lockstep, grinning compliance is terrorism.

Still, people are stepping up. Not the way their parents or grandparents did. Not in a way that gets front-page news. Not in a way that penetrates the white noise of the corporate media. Here is a Harper’s Index entry from June 2026: “Estimated number of protests that took place in the United States in the first year of Trump’s first term: 10,873. In the first year of his second term: 39,154.” That is you and me and everyone we love. We need to keep doing it, smart, hopeful, inviting, and full of righteous rage.

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I’ll admit that I am still struggling with how to make my opposition to the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran evident and public. I had a “No War on Iran” sign in my weedy front yard. It lasted a few weeks before it disappeared. I have talked to friends about a regular peace vigil downtown or at the nearby plant of weapons-making giant General Dynamics. But I have a time conundrum. The best time to be most visible is 2 or 3 p.m., right when my kids are coming home from school and most people are still at work. The most convenient time for more people to gather is 6 p.m., but by then our downtown is a ghost town and the mosquitos are fierce. So should we be strategic or inclusive? The debate continues.

In the meantime, I just put up a new sign in my yard yesterday. I painted the message: The U.S. War on Iran Kills Civilians, Wastes Money, Destroys the Environment. Let’s Stop It!

We’ll see how long it lasts.

The post Where Are the Iran War Protests? appeared first on The Intercept.

As so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket embed themselves in every aspect of our daily lives, from elections to sports and entertainment, concerns have grown about what the explosion of these poorly understood, loosely regulated platforms could mean for regular people and democracy writ large.

Celebrities from LeBron James to Sydney Sweeney have inked lucrative deals with prediction platforms. Legacy news outlets have even begun including prediction market data in their coverage. And the Trump family is deeply embedded in these platforms’ success; Donald Trump Jr.’s VC firm just became a lead investor in Polymarket, and he is a paid adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

But what actually is a prediction market, and what separates it from online sports betting platforms like DraftKings or FanDuel? 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Kate Knibbs — a senior writer at Wired who covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet — breaks down the battles to define prediction markets; what they’re getting away with in the meantime, while existing in this “weird” regulatory gray zone; and their potential to be a “disruptive force” in next month’s midterm elections.

States have been looking to regulate these platforms like they do sports gambling. But the companies are pushing back: The founders of Kalshi donated $200,000 to a new Texas-focused political action committee, a week after state lawmakers held hearings to investigate whether prediction markets constitute sports betting, which is illegal in Texas.

“Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight,” says Knibbs. “Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. … I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars.”

In addition to spending heavily on lobbying, their survival strategy includes inking deals with mainstream media companies like CNN, CNBC, and even Substack to establish credibility.

“I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit, while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world,” says Knibbs. “They are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.

JW: So Akela, we completely missed a major milestone for the Intercept Briefing.

AL: That’s right, we published 100 episodes — and technically this is our 102nd.

JW: I actually can’t believe how fast the time has flown. Thank you all so much for sticking with us every week. We genuinely and literally could not do this without you. Akela, what are you watching this week?

AL: The story that was all over my feed on Thursday morning was this bombshell report from the New York Times about how a senior adviser to U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and distorted internal reports that were critical of Israel, including a report describing the dozens of Palestinians who were killed near food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation last summer. This reporting comes after the anniversary this week of the October 7 attacks in 2023.

There was also a lot of news in New York City where protesters met Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an October 7 vigil and were shouting him down, basically criticizing him over his administration’s inaction on different policies that are within his purview in terms of sticking to some of his campaign promises on Israel policy, including the sale of occupied land in the West Bank that occurs across New York City.

JW: Online, what I had really seen was a lot of misconstruing of what the protesters were actually doing there. A lot of people saying they were just upset about Mamdani’s October 7 post, where he both spoke about the loss of life in Israel and the people who were killed on October 7, but then also talked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and about the long history that led to the point of October 7. So there were some who were saying that the protesters felt that he wasn’t deferential enough to Gaza protesters in that post. But obviously the reality, as you’ve pointed out, is that while there are, I’m sure, a myriad of reasons that people showed up that day, a lot of it had to do with actual policy disagreements.

Speaking of protest movements, in France, hundreds of thousands of protesters — including students, teachers, and union leaders — have taken to the streets to protest widespread education inequality. The protests began in the suburbs outside of Paris, which are plagued by deep racial and socioeconomic inequality.

Students say they’ve suffered significant neglect, from teacher shortages to crumbling infrastructure. As the protests continued, they’ve really been bolstered by union leaders and left-leaning politicians. Now, there have been accounts of violence from the police towards protesters, and thousands have been arrested. Another mass demonstration was held on Thursday as well. 

It really made me think back to that Nikole Hannah-Jones essay in The New York Times from a few weeks ago, where she wrote about her own experience navigating our unequal education system in the U.S. as a parent. It’s been really interesting to read about the parallels in France to our domestic system, where we’re also currently seeing massive cuts to the education system, particularly for vulnerable communities in programs like Head Start, but also in college programs throughout the country that are seeing cuts in high schools.

So it’s interesting to see both those parallels and the anger we’re witnessing in France toward not just cuts, but the long-standing inequality that’s been present.

AL: That’s one of many issues that will be top of mind for voters as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections next month.

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JW: We’re less than a month away from the midterms, and among this long, long, and growing list of concerns around election integrity, prediction markets have somehow made their way into the conversation. So while these markets are best known for users betting on sports, Kalshi and Polymarket users — and by the way, these are prediction market platforms — are also betting on election outcomes.

So a number of controversies have come up in the primaries related to these platforms. Both of these platforms have had to ask their paid influencers to remove misleading information on social media. I get into all of that and much, much more with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED. She covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet.

Kate, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Kate Knibbs: Thanks so much for having me. 

JW: Kate, we wanted to speak to you today because prediction and betting markets appear to be everywhere these days. You can’t walk down a busy street without seeing an ad for one, or on TV, watching your favorite sport’s team. Celebrities are cashing in. NBA player, LeBron James has a major deal with Polymarket, the prediction platform. Actress Sydney Sweeney made waves with her ad promoting Novig, a sports prediction site. Prediction markets have become ubiquitous.

So to start, how are prediction markets being defined? How do they differ or not from sports betting and gambling, and how are they similar? 

KK: OK, you’re starting off with a very hard question because— 

JW: It’s a big question. [Laughter.]

KK: There’s this huge, ongoing, multifaceted legal battle happening in the United States right now to define prediction markets. So what the federal government and the prediction markets think is these are regulated financial instruments that are traded on regulated financial exchanges. This view of prediction markets perceives them as a cousin to traditional commodities exchanges — except instead of trading corn futures, you’re trading futures on who’s going to win the Super Bowl, who’s going to win the presidential election, whether Iran is going to nuke anyone.

It’s just this idea that these are financial markets for anything. Kalshi actually means, I believe, “everything” in Arabic. And the idea behind the platform is that they want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.

Now, a lot of states have seen this and gone, “OK, wait, but you’re also allowing people to trade futures on the outcome of sports events. That’s just sports gambling, and we want the tax money. And we don’t think that the federal government should be able to just give you carte blanche to operate in our states without our permission, without you having to abide by state gambling laws.”

There’s honestly dozens and dozens of lawsuits to the point where I don’t have the exact figure. It’s upwards of 50. So at the moment, the status quo is that they’re “financial exchanges.” Whether that will change and they’ll be reclassified as gambling platforms remains to be seen and will likely go to the Supreme Court.

To make matters even more confusing — there are two main prediction markets right now, Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange in the United States. Polymarket has Polymarket U.S., which is a federally regulated exchange with the United States.

But Polymarket’s flagship product, like what you’re probably thinking of — the website polymarket.com — that people go on and trade about the Iran war? That is an offshore, unregulated exchange that Americans are actually banned from using, even though it’s headquartered in America and heavily promoted in America.

So it’s actually in its own weird regulatory gray zone right now, and I think there are intentions to bring the entire exchange back into the U.S., but right now, the main Polymarket is not supposed to be accessed by people in the U.S. It doesn’t have the “Know Your Customer” regulations that something like Kalshi does, so people can trade anonymously, and it’s just sort of a different beast. So there’s that layer that makes things even more confusing. 

JW: From your perspective, what is the difference between placing a bet on who wins the Super Bowl on something like DraftKings, and making a prediction on something like the Super Bowl? Understanding that, yeah, this is complicated, but what is the difference between those two things?

KK: It’s complicated on a technical level in that when you’re placing a bet on something like DraftKings — DraftKings has a house, so you are giving money to the platform.

And with prediction markets, you’re supposed to be trading with another person. It’s supposed to be peer to peer, and that’s why it’s allegedly more like a financial exchange.

In practice, though, if I’m betting that the Bears win, and they win, I make money either way. Functionally, for most regular people who are using these platforms, there’s not much of a difference at all. 

JW: I want to get into some of the impacts and some of the potential harm, but first, you alluded to some of these state fights, and so I wanted to get into one of them in Texas and how these prediction markets are responding.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the founders of Kalshi, the prediction market platform, dropped $200,000 into a new Texas-focused PAC.

The state has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country, where it’s pretty much illegal outside of the state lottery and some animal races. Kalshi’s founders’ contributions come one week after Texas lawmakers held a hearing to investigate whether prediction platforms like Kalshi are actually just gambling sites.

What is known about how these companies are trying to influence lawmakers and shape policies that are going to affect their bottom line? 

KK: Kalshi in particular is making an extremely concentrated push into political lobbying. It has a murderers’ row of lawyers — many of whom come from the Biden administration — fighting to ensure that it stays a federally regulated financial exchange and doesn’t get reclassified as gambling. It is basically continually hiring different comms people and lobbyists who come from D.C. and know how to get things done.

There are a few different organizations that it’s associated with, in addition to the PACs that it’s giving money to. One is called the Coalition for Prediction Markets, and that does a lot of advocacy work on behalf of regulated exchanges, really trying to ensure there’s a bipartisan coalition that approves of these markets being regulated like financial exchanges.

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It’s also worth mentioning, right now, the company has pretty deep pockets. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight. They are willing to put everything on the line and as much money as necessary on the line to ensure that they have the right people in Washington advocating on their behalf.

JW: I want to get into who they have in Washington a little bit more and what’s going on with the federal government in this regard. But I also want to talk about their potential impact on the midterms.

You reported in August that “election officials are preparing for prediction markets to sow chaos in the midterms.” You spoke to election officials across the country for that story. What did you hear from them? What are their major concerns? 

KK: There’s a lot of concern about this. One of the main concerns is actually not directly tied to how the markets are resolved. So it wouldn’t be tied to how, for example, Kalshi or Polymarket called an election — but it’s tied to how these platforms currently use social media.

Both of the prediction markets have very popular X accounts and social media accounts, and they really use them like they are more traditional media companies. There’s a lot of breaking, scoop. There’s all of these news summaries blasted out to millions of followers. There have already been some cases where the way that these prediction markets have been updating their followers has been confusing or misleading for voters. They’ve made social media posts that implied that a race was over when it wasn’t.

There’s concern that their social media presences will be a disruptive force. Right now, when we’re in a moment where a lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever. If a candidate that someone has put money on them winning ends up losing, but then one of these prediction markets sent out a tweet two hours before the polls closed, implied that it was a sure thing — that that could anger the electorate to the point where poll workers would be in jeopardy, or there would just be even more rancor and discord and distrust of the election process. That’s one of their concerns. 

Another major concern is that there could be market manipulation in some of the markets that are directly tied to elections. We’ve already seen — Kalshi has caught politicians trading on their races. None of them were really successful in moving the odds for a long period of time or anything. But there’s still a risk, especially on Polymarket offshore where people can trade semi-anonymously, that there could be bad actors coming in deliberately trying to manipulate the markets in a way that, again, would make the wagering electorate very angry when they ended up losing money on races that they thought they would win, in part because the markets were manipulated to make them think they would win.

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There are a few different reasons why people are really concerned. Then there’s the overarching concern that encouraging people to gamble on the elections is going to change their relationship with the electoral process in a very detrimental way to society. It’s not tied to any one specific race, but more of a general, “This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.” I honestly think that that’s the one that I’m the most on board with as a real threat.

JW: These platforms are partnering with traditional media as well. Your reporting has shown, and other reporting as well, that we’re seeing these partnerships between Polymarket and Dow Jones and Substack; Kalshi has deals with CNN, CNBC, and Fox.

What is known about how these partnerships and how the data from Polymarket and Kalshi are being integrated into news coverage? Does this give them an air of legitimacy that maybe is unearned? 

KK: I think that striking these deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility that they might otherwise not have at all with the general population.

If you flip around, I’ve been waking up super early with my baby and turning on [CNBC’s] “Squawk Box” — because I hate myself, I guess [laughs]. And I’m always amazed: They are constantly bringing up Kalshi. The Kalshi odds are another part of the program in the same way that like the stock market ticker is. It’s really just considered another signal to tell people about what’s going on with the world, what’s going on with different markets — and they’re not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN, Dow Jones.

I’m sure there’s going to be more partnerships inked by the time the year is up, too. I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world.

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They’re not inaccurate; they’re not more inaccurate than polling in many cases. I think there are many reasonable arguments to be made that these can be sources of information that have use cases. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in writing about them, to be honest, is because I do think that they’re fascinating signals about public sentiment.

That said, they are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have. 

JW: In that vein, I wanted to talk about a really interesting story you published on Monday, about a new prediction market — Verifact Markets — which allows users to essentially place predictions on facts, like where the Covid-19 virus originated from, and whether the moon landing was staged.

You spoke to tech investor, Peter Wokwicz, whose family office Positron Capital Management, is funding and incubating the start-up, writing that Wokwicz, “envisions the startup as a way to settle debates over hot-button issues like the amount of energy consumed by AI data centers.”

How does predicting on a fact even work, and should prediction markets be in the business of adjudicating reality?

KK: Such an interesting question, and it’s just such a bonkers startup. I get a lot of pitches from startups in the prediction market space in my inbox at this point, and most of them I just ignore for my own sanity. This one was so off-the-wall that I had to speak to them, and I had to know more about how this would actually play out, because it’s such a zany concept.

I still have a lot of questions because, as I laid out in the piece, they’re pretty unwilling to give potential users or the media any specifics about how they’ll ultimately resolve the markets.

My first question was, “OK, well, if somebody wanted to prove a point, they could just put a bunch of money on whatever their desired outcome would be, and then point to that and say, ‘See, I was right.’”

And the Verifacts team was quick to assure me that they weren’t actually going to resolve the markets based on the outcome of the markets alone. It was going to be how people were trading on them and the odds. Then they were going to use some sort of proprietary, AI-flavored system to adjudicate the truth.

JW: Of course. 

KK: There was a lot of hand-waving going on. The market just opened, so we’ll see, first of all, if anyone’s going to use it, and second of all, whether they’re actually going to be able to clear up any of the long-standing mysteries or debates about conspiracy theories that are ongoing, because it seems like an extremely tall order.

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A friend of mine texted me after I published that article and was like, “I think we just had our Pets.com moment for the prediction market space.” This specific startup is really indicative of how frothy the bubble is right now. You’re just rolling out a prediction market for the past, and people are seemingly OK with it.

We’ll see if they actually manage to do that. I definitely don’t think that a world in which Verifact markets will be able to adjudicate contentious specifics about reality would be good, but I also am very skeptical that that will actually happen. 

JW: That’s a fair point. Reading the article, which is really well-written and interesting by the way, I thought it was a very good catch when you pointed out that it would be a very big deal if they could figure out what actually caused the Covid-19 virus, if they could give a definitive answer, and you’re like, “Well, major news outlets are really interested in some of these questions.”

I did want to get into some of the possible harms here though. Prediction markets obviously want to distinguish themselves from sports betting, but people suffering from gambling addictions and the clinicians who treat them have said both produce the same results. That’s according to reporting from The Associated Press earlier this year. 

“There may be real differences in how these products are defined or regulated, but in the therapy room, we are often seeing the same cycle of anticipation, action and reaction play out again and again.” That’s what Dr. Cynthia Grant told the AP. She’s the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, which operates a national network of providers for treating gambling addiction.

Kate, what have you found in your reporting? Do they really differ in terms of promoting addictive tendencies? 

KK: No, I don’t think so. I’ve talked to some people who are working in the addiction space to try to get some clarification about whether there’s a big difference, for example, in demographics of people who are coming in with problematic behaviors in prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

I haven’t actually written anything about it yet because I’ve been still gathering thread, but what I’ve found so far is that there’s a ton of overlap. One therapist I spoke to noted that they anecdotally have seen more women who have been coming in with problematic behaviors tied to prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.

It’s still really something that predominantly affects young men. The prediction markets, even while they’re having these battles and insisting that they’re financial instruments, have at least nodded towards the reality that the way that people use their products has a lot in common with gambling and wagering.

They’ve come up with different guardrails. Both sportsbooks and prediction markets now offer people an opportunity to self-exclude. So if you basically want to ban yourself from something like DraftKings, you can, and now from something like Kalshi, you can. Which obviously is a good start, but it doesn’t resolve the baseline fact that what they’re offering is something that is speculative, and you’re putting money on the line.

For many people, it can be fun and entertaining in the same way that people wagering small sums of money on football games in traditional sportsbooks can be fun and entertaining. But there’s inevitably always going to be a portion of the population that struggles with addictive behaviors, and the way that these platforms incentivize risky financial choices.

As they grow even more and more mainstream, inevitably that’s going to mean that there’s going to be more and more people who struggle with that kind of behavior. I don’t know if there’s any version of these products that’s going to exist that can do away with that kind of harm altogether.

I really perceive these platforms, both sportsbooks and prediction markets, they’re vice platforms at heart — in the same way that alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there’s no inventing a healthy alcohol. There’s no inventing a type of prediction market or sportsbook or stock exchange that doesn’t have some portion of the people using it displaying really problematic behaviors.

JW: It sounds like what you’re saying is that these are almost like the flavored vapes of the online world, in some way, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s so safe,” and now all of the kids are smoking these vapes. 

KK: Yes. 

JW: There’s something similar about it. And there’s a ubiquitousness about it that feels really different, too. What you just said about women being more pulled in, potentially — obviously, we don’t know that research yet — that makes sense to me, only because I see the ads in a way that I never would get ads for sports betting.

Do you want to place a bet on “Dancing With the Stars”? Do you want to place a bet on whether or not Donald Trump’s tie is going to be this color that day? Things that are outside of the sports world that kind of appeal to a larger audience. That clearly seems to be the goal, like you said earlier.

KK: “Love Island” was a big one for a while, and “Survivor.” There are certain reality shows that have really robust markets, and I think that the people on them skew more female than they would versus a football market or basically anything happening on the sportsbook. So yeah, the ubiquity is crazy.

It’ll be interesting to see how long these platforms are able to cater to the 18-to-24[-year-old] crowd. There are some, Novig, for example, like the prediction market startup that Sydney Sweeney’s involved with, they are only 21+ and are positioning themselves as a more virtuous option because of that.

I could see regulators really pushing to raise the participation floor to 21. I don’t think that the other major players are going to do it voluntarily. But, yeah, just how rampant this seems on college campuses doesn’t seem great. 

JW: It’s hard to argue that. And when we’re also talking about the harm of these platforms, I think it’s important to also talk about who is propping them up.

I know earlier we got a little bit into who was behind these real attempts to limit regulation. Of course, the elephant in the room here is that these industries have exploded in an environment where a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgate to legalized sports betting, and you also have a president and his family fully invested in the prediction market industry succeeding.

When it comes to the legal battles to regulate companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, the Trump administration is backing the prediction market operators, fighting the states who are at minimum trying to enforce some regulations or outright ban them where sports betting and gambling is illegal.

Can you talk more about this tension and the stakeholders who in particular have a lot to gain by limiting regulations on these industries?

KK: I think that any conversation about what’s going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket. His VC firm, 1789 Capital, just became the lead investor for Polymarket’s latest fundraising round. He’s, in addition to that, also a paid adviser to Kalshi.

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In addition to that, Trump Media was planning on launching its own prediction market. It walked that back a little, and now it just has this weird partnership with crypto.com. But Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. It’s the fact that it’s coloring everything that’s going on here. 

I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars, or people affiliated with the Biden administration, or Democratic politicians.

Will that be enough? I don’t know. But yeah, at the moment, the very explicit financial ties that the Trump family has to the leading players in this world seem to be directing how easily it’s been for them to explode in popularity.

JW: With all of that said, with the Trump family’s interest, with the fact that these companies know that they need to get in good with Democrats as things go forward, where is this going to go?

Where do these platforms go from here? Do you see them massively expanding? Do you really see any kind of effort at regulation? I frankly, five years ago, could not have predicted that I would be interviewing people about prediction markets and sports betting as this kind of major force. Where do we go from here? 

KK: Right now, almost everyone I talk to who is a legal expert paying attention to the regulatory battles is expecting the Supreme Court to end up taking one of these cases — and most of the cases are specifically about whether the sports markets are gambling or not.

It’s really unclear how they will land on that, so there is a world in which the sports markets end up getting reclassified as gambling. I definitely don’t think that these markets are going away, by any means. Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.

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Kalshi and Polymarket are often described as arch-rivals, and they are, but they’re also gunning for CME Group and more traditional financial institutions. So, we’ll see. I do think that we will probably get more guardrails at some point, I hope, but not until a new administration comes in.

If the Supreme Court ends up siding with state regulators and reclassifying the sports markets, that will have a pretty big impact on the bottom lines of these companies, because right now the war markets and some of the more controversial geopolitical markets get a lot of attention, but most retail traders are using these to bet on sports. So yeah, I think they’re not going away. They might be reined in, but not in the near term. 

JW: Sounds like we have a lot to watch out for. We’re going to leave it there. Kate, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Kate Knibbs’s reporting at Wired. 

KK: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

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The shooting took place around 4 p.m. in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood, according to a statement from the New York Police Department. The NYPD said the victim was taken to a local hospital and was conscious, but provided no further information about the victim.

Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., told The Intercept that there was a child in the car and that the child is OK, which New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani later confirmed in a statement.

“This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds,” Mamdani said. “We believe the child was physically unharmed.”

At a press conference, Espaillat said that he attempted to visit the shooting victim in the hospital, but was prevented from doing so by federal authorities.

“I went to the hospital to see the victim,” Espaillat said, “but we were not allowed by ICE agents to go in the room.”

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A neighbor, Iris Rosa, said the shooting happened just as a nearby school was being let out. After hiding in a store for a few minutes, she said she went to look at the scene and said it looked like agents had shot into a car.

The victim, Rosa said, was on the ground bleeding and being held down by the agents. A baby, she said, was in the car and was held by ICE agents until someone picked the child up.

Photos of the aftermath of the shooting, taken by a neighbor and obtained by The Intercept, show apparent government agents in plain clothes and tactical vests pinning a man on the asphalt. Another man in a high-visibility vest is clutching an assault rifle while holding a phone between his cheek and shoulder.

Rosa, the neighbor, said a man with a high-visibility vest appeared to be posing as a construction worker, but as she watched, Rosa told The Intercept, the man took the vest and put it in a nearby vehicle.

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ICE agents routinely pose as construction workers in order to stakeout targets for immigrations.

Representatives of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the shooting occurred during “a targeted enforcement operation.”

“During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation.”

The victim is the latest of at least 25 people to be shot by federal immigration agents this year. In July, after two fatal ICE shootings and a botched arrest in Las Vegas by plainclothes agents wearing hooded sweatshirts, the agency mandated a new dress code for field operations.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had been briefed on the shooting. “We expect federal authorities to provide a full and transparent accounting of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she said on X.

“ICE’s violent tactics are a clear danger to all New Yorkers, as today’s shooting in a residential neighborhood demonstrates,” said Murad Awawdeh, the head of the advocacy group New York Immigration Coalition, in a statement. “This incident is another reminder of the unchecked, rampant violence ICE has been spreading throughout our communities.”

This is a developing story and may be updated.

The post ICE Agent on Scene of NYC Shooting Was Posing as Construction Worker, Eyewitness Says appeared first on The Intercept.

The Pentagon has revealed few details about the command or the commission beyond barebones descriptions and Hegseth memorandums. The four-paragraph document that authorizes Project Meridian, for example, says little beyond a decree that the U.S. must “dominate” in “new domains, new ways of fighting” centered on “artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, [and] biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas.”

While billed as efforts to promote blue-sky thinking and catapult the Pentagon into the future, former defense officials as well as experts on government contracting say both initiatives are ripe for out-of-control spending as well as waste, fraud, and abuse.

One former official asked how Hegseth’s Pentagon would “plan for future wars when they didn’t plan for the current one,” referencing the failed war with Iran. A second former official foresaw tough sailing for both of Hegseth’s efforts due to institutional intransigence, inertia, and roadblocks that even Hegseth’s repeated purges of top brass would not help overcome.

I, Robot

AUTOWARCOM will be “a new four-star combatant command … built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force,” Hegseth said in a wide-ranging speech rife with Pentagon jargon and juvenile insults. The new command is scheduled to be formally established by October 1, 2027, according to a memo released following Hegseth’s speech at Marine Base Quantico, Virginia.

“The pace of war is changing faster than the processes to support it. Cheap computing, Super Intelligence, and advanced commercial manufacturing have enabled the proliferation of low-cost, high precision strike,” Hegseth explained, using President Donald Trump’s preferred and incorrect term for artificial intelligence before offering up a thunderstorm analogy. “We need bolts of lightning … our existing high-end kill chains,” he said, emphasizing the need for traditional and expensive weapons systems, like the Tomahawk missiles that leveled an elementary school in Minab, Iran. “We also need steady wind and rain: mass drones and other autonomous attritable systems that flip the cost exchange and impose unrelenting pressure on an adversary on the battlefield.”

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A money pit in the making, according to the first former Pentagon official, AUTOWARCOM will — according to Hegseth — possess “directed manpower, budget, acquisition authorities and create dedicated military career pathways for Officers and Enlisted personnel.” Hegseth suggested weapons would be tested on battlefields whenever feasible. That former official, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his current employment, said to “expect a fiasco financially.”

This was echoed by Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense. “By Secretary Hegseth’s own admission, the purpose of this combatant command is to cut out the oversight that autonomous systems so desperately need by deploying untested autonomous weapons in combat,” he told The Intercept. “That approach promises to waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars while also endangering service members and threatening the missions they’re tasked with carrying out.”

Hegseth’s push for a command devoted to autonomous weapons comes amid a furious debate over safeguards for AI. The tech sector has been roiled by recent revelations that AI agents went rogue, circumvented controls and began colluding in secret; inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into their own notes to free the models from human-imposed constraints; hacked or took aim at government websites, networks and databases around the world; and almost instigated a confrontation between the U.S. and China, both nuclear-armed powers. Questions also continue to mount over the AI-enabled Maven Smart System, built by Palantir and used by the military for targeting in Iran, that paved the way for the Minab strike that killed more than 150 people, most of them children.

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Hegseth said he anticipated internal resistance within the military to the creation of AUTOWARCOM. Both former defense officials agreed it was a certainty.

Hegseth said that Owen West, who led the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, and Max Strasiser, a Navy SEAL senior chief and a test pilot, will run the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS) “under a unique CEO-COO partnership.” 

Their “culminating mission” will, said Hegseth, “take place over the course of months, clearing the path for Autonomous Warfare Command.” This will be conducted under a new moniker, Project Agincourt, a nod to a 1415 battle in which outnumbered English forces used longbows to defeat a larger French army, offered no quarter for a time during combat, and then massacred prisoners. (Hegseth has also advocated for offering no quarter to enemies, now a war crime.)  

Project Agincourt will set up AUTOWARCOM while it simultaneously “prototype[s] a new construct called Warfighting Acquisition.” Hegseth laid out a move-fast-and-break-things vision for the new command. “This model fuses operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles, while distributing decisions and dollars closer to frontline units and the combatant commands,” he explained. “By removing unnecessary layers, reducing the distance between our warfighters and our world-leading innovators, and then giving the right people the authority to act — Project Agincourt will pilot innovation at the edge, in a way that only Americans can do.”

Both former officials said such an arrangement was likely to lead to both contracting fraud and technological failures.

(Armed) Conflicts of Interest

Hegseth also announced the formation of Project Meridian, an effort to study the future of warfare which he claimed would be “co-led by three of our nation’s best minds,” before clarifying that it would instead be run by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual reality firm Oculus Rift and defense contractor Anduril Industries. Assisted by War Department chief technology officer, Emil Michael, the three Trump boosters are tasked with ensuring “America’s long-term military superiority by identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield.” Hegseth said the project would be completed within 120 days, at which time the group would issue a final public report with a classified annex.

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A Republican fundraising bundler partial to Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, Luckey fancies himself a techno-war futurist and believes tomorrow’s conflicts will be fought in a “subterranean domain,” with “weapons that move through the crust of the earth.” He says that “Anduril has working prototypes of subterranean systems that can deliver a variety of kinetic, electronic, and other effects.” Luckey also envisions the moon as a future battlespace. He said lunar warfare would resemble that of Robert Heinlein’s 1966 science fiction novel “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” which includes subterranean combat and an electromagnetic catapult that lobs lunar boulders, with the kinetic force of atomic blasts, at the earth.

Anduril has been cleaning up on Pentagon contracts, inking a deal this year with the Army for commercial information technology potentially worth $20 billion. Anduril is also leading a contractor consortium, including the weapons-tech company Palantir — whose Maven Smart System contributed to the Minab school strike — helping build Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system, which is predicted to be a trillion-dollar boondoggle.

Luckey joins Musk, whose firm SpaceX has been awarded billions for a key role in the Golden Dome project, as a defense contractor with a clear conflict of interest in mapping out the future of U.S. warfare. Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump elected in 2024 and is providing at least $100 million to help Republican candidates during this election cycle, is returning to government service after flaming out last year as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A cost-cutting agency that promised to save Americans trillions of dollars by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE failed to deliver on that promise, wasted taxpayer money, repeatedly misled the public about supposed savings, and may have played a role in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“There is a genuine need for government reform and modernization, but we saw how Musk’s approach worked out with DOGE,” Murphy told The Intercept. “It failed spectacularly, creating disruptions, payouts for workers not working, firings and rehiring, and a pittance of the savings taxpayers were promised.”

Luckey and Musk will be joined at the helm of Project Meridian by the 83-year-old Gingrich, who resigned as House speaker in 1998 after admitting that he broke congressional rules and “brought down on the people’s house a controversy which could weaken the faith people have in their government.”

Hegseth announced that a meeting between “a small group” was to take place just after his Wednesday speech in a sensitive compartmented information facility at Quantico. Pentagon propaganda photos from the first meeting show 11 grim-looking men, including Musk, Gingrich, and Luckey, seated around a table as Hegseth holds forth.

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The nonprofit MITRE Corporation, which conducts independent research for federal government agencies, announced that it will be coordinating Project Meridian and named 17 current board members beyond the Big Three, including Francis J. “Bing” West, a Vietnam War veteran, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983, and is the father of DRPM-UxS CEO Owen West; Rick Smith, the CEO of Axon, the manufacturer of Taser stun guns, which saw nine of 13 members of its ethics advisory board resign in 2022 over plans for a Taser-equipped drone project (which was then shelved); Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir; and Safra Catz, former CEO of Oracle.

“Project Meridian is an unveiled effort to outsource our future military strategies to individuals and companies that stand to profit most from a hypermilitarized future,” said Murphy. “Their security solutions will predictably entail vast expenditures of taxpayer resources on unproven military systems that rely on the AI models and software these companies control.”

Hegseth’s office did not respond to questions about Project Meridian and AUTOWARCOM.

The New 1 Percent

Hegseth made the announcements of both AUTOWARCOM and Project Meridian in front of more than 500 junior officers and enlisted troops at the site where, a year before, he had ranted at generals about fitness and grooming standards, while promoting both Christianity and violence.

In this year’s diatribe, Hegseth touted his overhaul of the military, which has included firings of many top brass and an overwhelming emphasis on physical appearance, masculinity, and troops’ testosterone levels. “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals,” Hegseth announced. “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top.”

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Despite laying out a future in which artificial, not human, intelligence will be ever more central to war-making, Hegseth ended his rant by nonetheless praising the troops, casting them as members of a violent and lethal warrior elite that are superior to civilians.

“See, the Ivy League faculty lounges, they’ll never understand you, and that’s OK, because they could never, ever do what you do. The media will mischaracterize you, and that’s OK. Because deep down they know you’re the real reason they live free. They envy you because you do real things every single day,” said Hegseth, an Ivy League-educated war chief who used to work for Fox News.

“You feel comfortable inside the violence. … Lethality is your calling card and victory your only acceptable end-state. The outside world can’t understand this, so stay true to this department. You don’t want to look like civilians, because you are different, you are set apart. You are warriors.” He added: “You are the real 1 percent.” 

The post Pete Hegseth’s Military of the Future: Defined by AI and an Utter Lack of Oversight appeared first on The Intercept.

For more than 70 days, dozens of activists and an ancient cottonwood tree on the Arizona–Mexico border have successfully disrupted the construction of President Donald Trump’s ruinous $50 billion border wall. 

Since July, one protester at a time has occupied the cottonwood, or the grandmother tree, as it is locally known. After three other cottonwoods in the area were torn down by government contractors, the remaining grandmother on the U.S. side of the border became the site of a growing protest camp in the remote town of Lochiel, Arizona, and neighboring Sonora, Mexico, where organizers gathered for more than a year to oppose the border wall’s construction.

On Monday, heavily armed federal agents moved in with force. Activists on the ground estimate that 150 Border Patrol officers — many of whom masked their faces — raided the encampment during the protesters’ morning prayer ceremony. At least 10 demonstrators were arrested, and the 200-year-old cottonwood was bulldozed. 

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As Arizona-based journalist John Washington reported, “agents began cutting the tree while a person was still sitting in its branches. Agents removed that person with a cherry picker and then felled the tree. Screams could be heard as ‘grandmother’ fell around 8:30 a.m.”

In the 48 hours since the early morning raid, land defenders have refused to leave and remain in an ongoing standoff with federal agents. Numerous participants told The Intercept that around 50 people are holding the line against further construction, with dozens more en route following urgent calls to support the encampment and defend the imperiled borderland ecology.

On Tuesday, another tree sitter climbed the last remaining cottonwood standing in the path of the border wall construction, this one on the Mexico side. The tree was briefly occupied by demonstrators in mid-August and, according to a press release from the land defenders, “is once again halting construction.”

The protesters’ aim to stop the construction of two parallel, 30-foot-high border walls ripping through the remote San Rafael Valley. Miles of the double wall structure have already been built in the area. The region is sparsely populated and hardly ever used as a border-crossing site by humans but is renowned as a unique wildlife migration corridor. The cottonwood felled on Monday was the last of four ancient grandmother trees on the Arizona side of the border, which stood in the path of planned wall construction.

Until this week, federal forces had left the encampment and tree sit in relative peace, largely, activists said, because the camp is located on private land. That fact had not changed on Monday. 

“Border Patrol has been coming onto private property since yesterday morning. No warrants are shown,” Rachel, a land defender who withheld her last night out of concern for being targeted by law enforcement, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday. “There’s no legal ground for them to come onto private property. And the feeling is that they’re pushing through the construction process as quickly as possible, and they’ll deal with the consequences of the law later. They just want to push the wall through, regardless of the harm they have to cause to us and to the land in the process.”

According to Rachel and other activists on the ground who spoke to The Intercept, construction workers have moved quickly since the raid, digging a deep trench that threatens the roots of the newly occupied cottonwood on the Mexico side. 

A statement on Monday from Belicia Lynch, a member of the De La Ossa family who owns one of the tracts of private property along the border, confirmed the protesters were welcome on her property. “I just want to thank you guys for being out there to not only protect the grandmother tree, but the land itself that many animals and bugs inhabit,” Lynch told the land defenders in the statement. 

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Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security have not yet responded to questions from The Intercept.

The federal attacks on the Lochiel encampment came on the heels of a legal victory for anti-border activists in Big Bend, Texas. On Friday, a U.S. district judge granted an injunction to stop all border wall construction in the Big Bend area, including in national and state parks, while the court hears a lawsuit brought by local environmental and community groups. In the order, the judge wrote that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on at least one of their claims’ merits. 

But with practically unlimited funding for his border regime, Trump’s administration can continue fueling money into his violent and destructive border wall. What activists in Lochiel, Sonora, Big Bend, and beyond make clear, however, is that the government’s victory cannot be assumed. Disruptions and interventions are not just possible but also an absolute necessity, and pressure can be applied in an array of directions.

As one Arizona-based Mexican American tree sit participant told The Intercept in August, “The border is everywhere, which means that there are subcontractors and there are power players maybe in your backyard, maybe in your city, maybe an hour drive from where you’re living.”

Rachel, the land defender, made the stakes of the fight clear.

“We have to stop this wall here because the trajectory they’re going on, there is no safety in the U.S. for anyone,” she said on Monday. The call was cut short as news spread through the encampment that federal agents would attempt to remove the tree sitter on the Mexico side. At the time of writing, the grandmother tree in Sonora remains occupied; the fight against Trump’s border wall, and all it represents, has not been lost. 

In a social media post on Wednesday, encampment participants announced a “call to presence” to celebrate the life of the felled cottonwood and continue the anti-border struggle. “If you have been waiting to come to Lochiel, this is the time,” they said. “Let your heavy heart lead you to action!”

The post Armed Border Agents Arrest Protesters, Bulldoze 200-Year-Old Tree to Build Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.

Like the rest of the state, the hamlet is about 90 percent white. Williston has seen few of the sorts of large-scale Trump administration immigration operations that have sparked raucous protests. Aside from a few raids against migrant farm workers, there has been little in the way of detentions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The town is, in other words, a surprising scene for the robust protests that erupted there over the past two years, with hundreds protesting against ICE.

The explanation lies in a low-slung modern building with façade of glass and dark-blue ribbed sheet metal: ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, a facility designed to help identify, track, and arrest deportation targets across the country. Along with other Department of Homeland Security infrastructure in the area, the NCATC made Williston into a hub of anti-immigration enforcement.

The protests, however, weren’t initially met with the sorts of crackdown against speech experienced by other anti-ICE protesters. The local prosecutor for Chittenden County, where the surveillance center is located, repeatedly opted not to prosecute protesters arrested at the facility.

As the Trump administration ramped up its attacks against left-wing protesters, however, Williston was not spared. Beginning in September, state and federal authorities have found ways to levy criminal charges against activists.

In late September, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark introduced surprise misdemeanor charges against 13 protesters for allegedly participating in a July sit-in at the NCATC. Then, last week, federal prosecutors unveiled surprise charges against five people, some of whom were already being charged by Clark. The five people facing federal charges, ranging in age from 22 to 80 years old, are alleged by federal authorities to have disrupted operations at the NCATC on multiple occasions.

Activists in Vermont took note of the timing: The cases came as they ramped up to launch a concerted week of protest actions against the ICE intelligence hub.

“Our assumption,” said Julie Macuga, an anti-ICE organizer involved in the protests, “has been that they did this so close to the week of action in order to try to intimidate people, in order to make people think twice about doing civil disobedience, for fear that they’re going to get charged.”

ICE in Williston

As ICE’s budget has ballooned under the Trump administration, the agency poured billions of dollars into development projects designed to expand surveillance capabilities. With astronomical goals for its deportations and a growing crackdown against dissenters, the surveillance infrastructure would provide the agency with a network of spyware for tracking migrants, protesters, and political opponents.

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“What we’re seeing is this really huge increase in access to surveillance at both the national, state, and local level,” Michelle Dahl, an attorney who serves as the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “We’re seeing that play out now in these types of surveillance dragnet centers.”

The NCATC is one of only two facilities like it in the nation. It is designed to rapidly respond to requests for information from field agents by using both open-source intelligence gathering and advanced surveillance tools to scour the internet and trawl social media for leads.

Although ICE has had facilities in Williston for years, significant efforts have been made to expand the scope of facility’s operations under the Trump administration.

According to government contractor recruiting documents first posted by ICE in 2025 and reposted this August, the NCATC is designed to employ at least a dozen analysts to answer requests 24 hours a day, coming up with target information in as little as 30 minutes. The facility operates in tandem with the office running ICE’s national tipline and its National Law Enforcement Support Center — two other major ICE facilities based in Williston.

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Dahl said that despite its location, the gathering of resources in Williston is characteristic of the “fusion center” model designed to allow rapid dissemination of information between national facilities, federal agents, and local police departments.

“The fusion centers don’t have to be located in any place to collect surveillance — that’s how highly networked surveillance is across the country,” she said. “They could put it literally anywhere and be able to access the entire nationwide network.”

“No Real Precedent for It”

As a result of ICE’s expansion in Vermont, the NCATC has quickly become the subject of one of the the state’s largest recurring protests. Over the past year, hundreds of people attended rallies outside the center.

Some demonstrators took up nonviolent direct action. In one instance, clergy entered the halls and blocked an entrance. Dozens were arrested as part of the protests, but none were charged — until late September, when Clark, Vermont’s attorney general, began taking up cases that Sarah George, the state’s attorney in Chittenden County, had declined to pursue.

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“We had been checking the docket and were under the impression that charges were not being pursued,” recalled Roan Wade, who was one of the 13 people charged for protesting at the facility. “It was definitely kind of a shock to have that happen.”

It later emerged that the charges had stemmed from an unusual move: The Vermont State Police began circumventing George and instead took their cases directly to the attorney general’s office. Unlike in other cases, the Vermont State Police never delivered these the charges to George’s office.

“There have been cases that Sarah George has declined, but these 13 cases were never even brought,” said state Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the unprecedented move appeared to be legal in Vermont. “This type of stepping outside of our normal court system, as far as I can tell — and I also spoke to actual attorneys in the system — there’s no real precedent for it.”

“Extremely Concerning”

The decision to prosecute protesters for anti-ICE activity quickly ignited a firestorm among the Vermont Democratic Party establishment — which Clark, the attorney general, belongs to.

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Within days of the decision becoming public, the state Senate majority leader, treasurer, and a host of representatives, candidates, and local officials all issued condemnations of the charges and Clark’s unusual actions.

“I found that decision to be extremely concerning,” Nikhil Goyal, a state Senate candidate in one of the districts containing charged protesters, told The Intercept. “There is enormous precedent, both in and out of our state, where prosecutors don’t use precious resources to go after peaceful protesters simply trying to stop a fascist machine from kidnapping our neighbors.”

Wade, one of the charged protesters, says that the decision to prosecute is emblematic of wider trends among the national left, who have at times been starkly divided in their treatment of anti-ICE protests.

“It highlights some of the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party,” they said. “The same folks who claim to be opposing Trump and fighting this fascist administration are also prosecuting protesters.”

Soon, the federal charges would come down against the five additional protesters.

The Eve of Protests

The charges, both in state and federal court, were filed just ahead of the beginning of a national “week of action” organized by activists opposed to ICE’s operations in Vermont.

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Organizers say that they expect hundreds of participants and that the protests are slated to be the largest instances of direct confrontation to ever target ICE’s national surveillance center. Some organizers say the arrests are only helping to fuel further activism.

“All it’s really done is bring a lot more attention to the issue,” said Macuga, the protest organizer.

For their part, the Vermont State Police indicated that any further charges pertaining to protests at the facility will continue to circumvent local authorities and instead be referred directly to the attorney general for prosecution. (The State Police did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Repression breeds resistance,” said Wade, the protester. “If anything, it’s caused a lot more outrage.”

The post Feds Charged Activists Just Before Major Anti-ICE Protest in a Tiny Vermont Town appeared first on The Intercept.

The veteran had served with roughly 20 mortarmen and scouts from a platoon in the 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment assigned to Combat Outpost Ware in Afghanistan’s Arghandab River Valley in 2010. A lush land of grape groves and pomegranate orchards, towering sunflowers and marijuana plants, the Arghandab was crisscrossed by canals and was a flashpoint in Kandahar Province, the spiritual homeland of Afghanistan’s once and future rulers, the Taliban. 

The soldiers from the 82nd Airborne played a cat-and-mouse game with the Taliban. America’s official policy was counterinsurgency, or COIN: a re-tread of a failed strategy of the Vietnam War that promised a kinder, gentler brand of warfare aimed at winning Afghan hearts and minds. But in the Arghandab Valley, the COIN of the realm was kinetic.

The Taliban seeded the orchards with improvised explosive devices set off by a foot on a pressure plate, a boot on a tripwire, or Taliban hands gripping a remote control. The Americans countered with overwhelming firepower: attack helicopters, armored gun trucks, and infantrymen toting M4 carbines. It was a “rough time for the unit,” another veteran of the platoon remembered. They saw a great deal of “contact,” engaging the Taliban more times than another unit member could recall.

But the former mortarman in Banning had come to talk about one particular incident that, more than a decade later, he could not forget.

The CID agent gave the veteran a “cleansing waiver of rights” to read and sign. It advised the veteran that he had the right to remain silent, that any statement he made could be used against him at trial, and that he was providing testimony “freely and voluntarily.” The veteran waived his rights and signed the document on March 28, 2023 at 1:31 p.m. He acknowledged, according to exclusive criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept, that he killed an unarmed man and wounded a woman. More than that, he said that he “needed to be held accountable for his actions.” He told CID that he had “committed a war crime.”

Twenty-five years ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, an angry America went to war in Afghanistan. The conflict would become, by some counts, the longest in U.S. history, stretching across four presidential administrations. It ended where it started, with the Taliban in control of the country after a crushing 2021 defeat for the U.S. and the Afghan allies it propped up for two decades.

The U.S. lost around 2,400 troops in Afghanistan at a staggering cost of around $2.3 trillion. Afghans suffered far worse. In October 2001, President George W. Bush announced that “the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America.” But from almost the opening American salvo, they began dying at U.S. hands.

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During just the first five months of the conflict, there were no fewer than 136 media reports of U.S. attacks that killed between 1,200 and 3,155 civilians. Year after year, U.S. and coalition airstrikes killed Afghans – sometimes scores of civilians, sometimes hundreds. The deaths continued to the war’s final moments when an August 2021 drone strike targeting a suspected terrorist in the country’s capital, Kabul, instead killed 10 civilians, seven of them children. More than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.

While the carnage of the American air war garnered the biggest headlines, Afghans were also gunned down, again and again, by U.S. ground troops. Following a 2007 ambush, Marines killed 19 civilians and wounded 50. An initial investigation found the Marines used excessive force when they killed civilians after a suicide bombing. Later, the Americans were recast as victims. In 2010, a “kill team” from the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade slew at least three civilians over four months and mutilated the dead for war trophies. Eleven of the 12 soldiers charged were convicted of crimes, but most were released from prison by the mid-2010s. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales massacred 16 Afghan civilians in 2012. A Special Forces A-Team was accused of killing close to 20 civilians in 2012 and 2013. The remains of 10 victims were later found buried outside their base. A U.S. investigation exonerated the Americans of any wrongdoing. Only one man was punished: Zikria Kandahari, the unit’s Afghan interpreter. 

Pete Hegseth, now the self-styled Secretary of War, served with the Army National Guard in Afghanistan during that era. In Trump’s first term, when he was a Fox News personality, Hegseth lobbied on behalf of three men who were convicted or facing charges related to war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump intervened in all three cases, granting two pardons and reversing a demotion.

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During his confirmation hearing last year, Hegseth complained that “restrictive” rules of engagement had made it “difficult to actually do your job on the battlefield,” repeatedly recalling his own service. “I was the senior counter-insurgency instructor in Afghanistan. My job was to understand how the Taliban and Al Qaeda operated,” he explained. “They knew our rules of engagement, and when they were more restrictive, they took advantage of them.” He continued: “We don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars.”

But what the veteran in Banning described to CID agents was anything but burdensome.

In April or May — he couldn’t recall which — of 2010, that veteran said he was carrying an M4 carbine as his unit moved about 3 kilometers into the Arghandab and occupied an abandoned building at the edge of a village. When the Americans were attacked, they returned fire, killing a couple Taliban members.

The unit readied themselves, expecting the Taliban to regroup and mount another assault. The Americans intercepted a radio transmission. A translator told them that a single male militant on a motorcycle, transporting rocket-propelled grenades, was headed toward them, according to the documents. The unit’s chain of command authorized the use of force.

When a motorcycle rider came into view, a sniper took aim and fired off one round. He missed.

The respite for the motorcycle man was short-lived, however. About 500 feet away, close to 20 Americans raised their rifles.

An M4 carbine — a magazine-fed, gas-operated, air-cooled, shoulder-fired weapon — shoots lightweight bullets at extremely high speeds. In the spring of 2010, M855 5.56-mm bullets were de rigueur for U.S. forces. Fast with low mass, the rounds produce a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. When they slam into a human body, that energy is transmitted to the soft tissue of the victim creating a “wound channel” that causes massive blood loss.

The Banning mortarman fired off one round. Others from the unit opened up, too.

The motorcycle man never reached his destination. If someone was waiting for him to arrive on that spring day in 2010, they still are.

The Banning veteran and others walked up to the Afghan man and “witnessed a military aged male deceased with multiple gunshot wounds to the face and other areas of his body,” wrote the CID special agent, transcribing the mortarman’s testimony. “No RPG’s were present.”

Nobody knew how many rounds hit him, but the damage to the Afghan man’s body was so extensive that he was “unidentifiable,” according to another witness. The mutilation was so devastating that the Americans were unable to even collect his “biometrics”: fingerprints, iris scans, facial images.

The dead man, said the veteran, wasn’t alone. There was a wounded woman, too. He told the CID agent that the “woman was crawling on the ground.” There may also have been a baby or child present as well — CID’s redactions make it impossible to know for certain.

After the veteran made his confession, in late March 2023, Army criminal investigators started consulting U.S. sources. Despite detailed unit records for more than 100 notable incidents in April and May 2010, an Army historian could locate none for the killing of the motorcycle man.

When CID began interviewing unit members, the company commander — by then a lieutenant colonel — said the incident did not sound familiar to him. The unit’s first sergeant told CID that while he saw most “troops in contact” reports, he didn’t recollect the incident. He acknowledged that the details “sounded plausible.” 

Others recalled the incident in detail but excused it. One soldier who never saw the motorcycle man before he was killed said, for example, that it “sounded like” the man handed off the RPG to someone before he was shot. Another former specialist — who by 2023 was a warrant officer — told CID that unit members “fired on the military age male on the motorcycle.” He also recalled that “a woman was on the motorcycle,” too. He told the Army investigators that it was “unfortunate that no RPGs were present” but believed “the incident was handled properly” since “they were authorized to fire from their command team.”

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Having never even attempted to identify the Afghan man, the woman on the scene, or the possible child; having never sought out any evidence beyond the testimony of members of the unit; and despite a signed, sworn confession by one of the shooters, Army CID concluded — within six weeks — that there was not “probable cause to believe that any soldier committed the offense of murder.” 

CID refused to make the special agent in charge of the case available for an interview. “Unfortunately, we are unable to support your request to interview DACID personnel involved,” Special Agent Mark Lunardi told The Intercept, before leaving his job. More than a year ago, after multiple follow-up requests for information, Thomas Hamilton of CID’s press office wrote: “I will get back to you as soon as I can.” He has, despite repeated follow-ups, failed to respond.

For more than a century, the U.S. military has shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable.

A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents found most have gone uninvestigated. When they did come under official scrutiny, the “military too often relies solely on its internal records and sources —which can be flawed and incomplete — to assess civilian harm,” the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute reported.

These findings were bolstered by the groundbreaking work of the podcast “In the Dark.” Their 2024 investigation — a corollary to a reexamination of the 2005 killings of civilians in Haditha, Iraq — found U.S. troops had committed 781 possible war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that the U.S. military actually investigated. In at least 65 percent of cases analyzed by “In The Dark,” investigators didn’t believe that a crime had taken place — even in cases where perpetrators had, like the Banning veteran, confessed. The 2010 killing of the Afghan motorcycle man is, however, not one of the cases in their database.

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In the 151 cases in which investigators found probable cause that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn’t been justified, true accountability was rare. While 572 alleged perpetrators were involved in these cases, only 130 were convicted; the records show they rarely received significant prison terms. Much more often, their cases were dealt with by commanders with broad discretion to punish their troops with extra duty, demotions, or reprimands, in lieu of formal prosecutions. Fewer than 1 in 5 perpetrators, investigators found, appeared to have been sentenced to any type of confinement. The median sentence was just eight months.

Todd Huntley, an active-duty Judge Advocate for more than 23 years who deployed to Afghanistan twice with a Joint Special Operations Task Force, believes killings like the one described by the Banning veteran were a common occurrence. “There were probably hundreds of incidents that were just like it that we’ll never know about,” he told The Intercept. A current government official, who was involved in the wars in the Greater Middle East, said the total could reach into the thousands.

Since taking the helm of the Pentagon last year, Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict zones — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants, and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force, to pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.

The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of civilian harm mitigation and response efforts. In late April, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime. A recent report by the Pentagon’s top watchdog says cuts to civilian harm mitigation and response efforts have been so severe under Hegseth that the United States cannot adequately protect civilians in conflict zones. This was driven home at the outset of the Iran war when the U.S. attacked the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, killing more than 150 people, most of them children.

The CID records of the motorcycle man investigation are redacted in ways that make it impossible to ascertain key facts about additional civilian harm. “An [REDACTED] woman was on the motorcycle with the military aged male and [REDACTED] from the engagement,” according to the summary of a statement by one unit member. The Banning veteran also “stated he [REDACTED] an unarmed [REDACTED] woman during his deployment.”

The redactions also prevented The Intercept from identifying the veteran and fellow unit members to gather additional information. “If it wasn’t for the soldier involved coming forward, this incident would never have come to light,” Huntley, now the director of the National Security Law Program at Georgetown University Law Center, told The Intercept. “The 13-year delay in reporting made any investigation difficult as others involved couldn’t remember details and the redactions in the report make it impossible to learn anything else about the incident.”

Only one member of the unit contacted by The Intercept agreed to speak about the incident. The veteran acknowledged, on background, that the incident occurred, but would not say if he was one of those interviewed by CID.

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Still, the case of the motorcycle man offers a stark counter-narrative to Hegseth’s assertions about the war on terror — and the basis for his efforts to undermine protections for civilians today.

The rules of engagement in Afghanistan in 2010 were so lax that a man was killed for no reason and with no repercussions.

It was so unremarkable that no record of the engagement could be located. It was so commonplace that senior unit members couldn’t recall it.

It was so typical that only one man even thought to report it — and he waited 13 years.

It was so characteristic of U.S. military policy that no inquiry was conducted into the rules of engagement in force at the time.

And the incident was so in keeping with U.S. military tradition that, despite a murder confession and little question that an unarmed man was gunned down, Army CID and the 82nd Airborne’s chief of military justice quickly concluded there was no probable cause for charges, and the investigation was closed.

The post He Confessed to an Afghanistan War Murder. The U.S. Military Promptly Closed the Case. appeared first on The Intercept.

Shirin Saeidi, a tenured professor of political science at the University of Arkansas was removed from her post as the director of the school’s King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies in December over social media posts critical of Israel — a move that a national free-speech group criticized in a letter to the university.

Despite a unanimous vote by a faculty committee recommending her reinstatement, Saeidi was fired from the university in March, a decision that was upheld in May after an appeal by the professor.

The firing came after a monthslong campaign by the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists, an Iranian American group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The group lobbied the university with accusations that Saeidi was working on behalf of the Iranian government and allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University — both of which Saeidi has strenuously denied.

“When someone tries to take everything from you, and your identity, your scholarship, your entire labor of your adult life through framing you and lying to the media — it works,” Saeidi told The Intercept. “It makes people doubt you, and this is the big issue with defamation. So it’s been shocking to experience it, but I was not surprised.”

The 15-count suit seeks to void Saeidi’s termination and award her back pay and damages. It also aims to overturn Act 721, a law signed in April 2025 by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which allows the state to cut off public funds to any academic institution found to have allowed or failed to act against antisemitism.

Ultimately, it was that mechanism of state authority — combined with pressure on the university from a state senator — that appears to have driven Saeidi’s dismissal, according to Badria Mryyan, one of the attorneys representing her.

“This law is a really good example of a limitation on free speech disguised as equal protection,” Mryyan said. “Act 721 is a deterrent of free speech and a deterrent of academic freedom, and it’s clear to us that the university had a real fear response to any mention of Act 721, but particularly when it was coming from legislators.”

The drive to get Saeidi fired from her job came amid a broader push to target Iranian and Iranian American academics and journalists — one that for years has featured violent death threats and highly personal attacks on people arguing for diplomacy with the Iranian government.

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With President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, however, these attacks have gained more purchase as they dovetailed with the administration’s focus on left-wing and pro-Palestine academics and activists.

“This is a case of a person expressing their viewpoints on their own personal Twitter pages, and when an investigation was conducted to see if they violated university rules, the university employees said no,” said Leonard Bright, a professor of public service and administration at Texas A&M and a regional representative for the American Association of University Professors. “For the university president to come and override that, that’s highly disturbing, and it compromises the faculty member’s freedom to speak her mind about issues of public concern. And that reaction is certainly going to chill other faculty members’ willingness to address difficult topics.”

“I No Longer Feel Safe”

The campaign against Saeidi was spearheaded by Lawdan Bazargan, who is listed as the AAIRIA’s director in publicly filed documents, according to the lawsuit.

The organization, which describes itself as a “group of former political prisoners in Iran, families of executed political prisoners, human rights activists who work (seeking) justice and accountability,” has mounted a number of similar campaigns against Iranian and Iranian American academics and journalists who it accuses of supporting the Iranian government.

In a statement to The Intercept, Bazargan rejected the idea that she had conspired with others to secure Saeidi’s termination.

“I categorically deny the allegations that I defamed Dr. Shirin Saeidi or participated in any secret conspiracy or collusion with Benjamin Weinthal, Senator Dan Sullivan, or University of Arkansas officials to have her terminated,” Bazargan wrote. “The suggestion that there was some coordinated conspiracy among us is simply false. We publicly raised concerns and asked institutions, elected officials, and journalists to examine them. What they chose to do afterward was entirely their decision.”

Fired from her job, forced to defend herself against allegations of serious misconduct, Saeidi said her life has been upended by the campaign against her.

“This is really damaging to not just my career, but to my life,” she said. “I had to leave Arkansas because I no longer feel safe. People that go to my child’s school, people that I see at the grocery store, people that see me at the gym — they think I’m a terrorist.”

Now, Saeidi is hitting back with the lawsuit. In the 88-page complaint filed Monday evening in federal court in Arkansas, Saeidi and her lawyers accused the Iranian American pressure group, university officials, GOP state Sen. Dan Sullivan, and Jerusalem-based pro-Israel pundit Ben Weinthal of colluding in a defamatory conspiracy against her right to free speech motivated by Islamophobia and a desire to stamp out pro-Palestine speech.

“Dr. Shirin Saeidi, because of her work in her field and her advocacy and protected speech, was subject to a coordinated harassment campaign that was able to take advantage of a broader attack on academic freedom at the federal and state levels,” said Connor Thompson, one of the attorneys representing Saeidi. “We are hoping to vindicate the rights of our client, who has really had her life ruined.”

Neither a spokesperson for the University of Arkansas nor Dan Sullivan, the state senator named in the lawsuit, responded to requests for comment.

Raft of Allegations

Bazargan began targeting Saeidi on March 24, 2025, by submitting a formal complaint to the chancellor of the University of Arkansas. The following day, Bazargan appeared on an Israeli news program accusing Saeidi and other professors in the U.S. of supporting the Iranian government.

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The group’s accusations against Saeidi initially centered on the professor’s testimony in a Swedish trial against an Iranian official accused of having a hand in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988. Bazargan’s brother, she said, was killed in the mass execution.

In the ensuing months, Bazargan wrote numerous letters to university officials, many of which she posted online, accusing Saeidi of expressing “open admiration for Iran’s Supreme Leader” and being “ideologically aligned with Hezbollah” — a federally designated terror group.

As the months went on, Bazargan widened the scope of her allegations to accuse Saeidi of committing plagiarism and other scholarly sins while working on her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, work that was later published as a book on the condition of women in the Islamic Republic.

In an interview with The Intercept, Saeidi said she took particular issue with accusations that she had downplayed human rights violations by the Iranian government or that she had committed plagiarism or other academic misconduct in her research.

“In my book, I actually document the human rights violations of the 1980 to ’88 period,” Saeidi said. “I interview women and men who were in prison at that time, and I listen to their stories. There is absolutely no denial on my part that there were human rights violations that occurred from 1980 to ’88, and that people suffered unjustly because of it.”

In the lawsuit, Saeidi accuses Bazargan of working with Ben Weinthal, a pro-Israel pundit who works with Fox News, the New York Post, and the Saudi-funded Iran International news channel. In the campaign against Saeidi, her lawsuit alleges, “the two agreed that he would press the University for an investigation and publish the accusations.”

Weinthal was previously a writer for the Jerusalem Post, has been a fellow at one of Washington’s most hawkish pro-Israel think tanks, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and is currently a fellow at the Middle East Forum, a think tank that publishes a list of “Professors to Avoid,” tracked thousands of Muslim Americans in a secret database, and has been accused of Islamophobia.

According to the lawsuit, Weinthal communicated directly with Bazargan on May 9, 2025, and the two “agreed that he would press the University for an investigation and publish the accusations.”

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On the same day, he reached out to the university in the form of a Fox News press inquiry about the allegations against Saeidi, pressing the university chancellor and communications office on the matter again on May 21.

Weinthal did not appear to publish an article about Saeidi until nearly seven months later, when he co-authored a December 13 story for the New York Post about her removal from her director position at the Middle East studies center. Though he does not appear to have ever published an article about Saeidi for Fox News, he has written or co-authored at least five more articles about her for Iran International and the New York Post since last December.

“I stand by my investigative journalism about Ms. Saeidi,” Weinthal said in response to a request for comment from The Intercept about the allegations in the lawsuit.

Shifting Target

In late 2025, as Bazargan and her allies continued to lobby university officials and trustees, the focus shifted from allegations of support for Iran to accusations of antisemitism, purportedly in social media posts by Saeidi about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

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The tack was well considered: Earlier in the year, Arkansas had passed a law targeting alleged antisemitic speech at public universities. Though the university’s own Title IX coordinator had found no evidence of antisemitism by Saeidi, she thinks this was the line of attack that ultimately doomed her.

According to the lawsuit, the university removed Saeidi from her position as director of the Middle East studies center under pressure from Sullivan, the Republican state senator, And, in March, the university terminated her entirely, a decision upheld in May.

For her part, Saeidi said she is fighting not just for herself, but also for academics everywhere who might also invite scrutiny for speaking out on controversial issues.

“I don’t think that what’s been done to me can be undone,” she said, “but it’s my hope that what comes of this lawsuit is that it never happens to another academic.”

Bazargan, for her part, has not let up. In the months following Saeidi’s termination, she has tweeted about Saeidi dozens of times, calling her “fake doctor lady” and repeating accusations of plagiarism and support for the Iranian government. As things became heated, Saeidi posted a number of videos online containing harsh insults against Bazargan.

Bazargan, according to an email viewed by The intercept, reported Saeidi’s online barbs to the FBI.

The post Antisemitism Law Helped Get a Professor Fired for Free Speech, Lawsuit Says appeared first on The Intercept.

After a string of damaging attacks on bases throughout the Middle East, U.S. long-range bombers stationed in the United Kingdom fled back to their American home bases on Sunday amid fears of an impending Iranian strike.

A U.S. official described the threat as a “sophisticated plot to attack” Royal Air Force Fairford air base with “multiple drones” that could have turned into a military and public relations nightmare. The U.S. official suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may have recruited U.K. nationals to play roles in the plot, which so unnerved the Pentagon that they took the extraordinary step of removing 12 B-1 Bombers from the base that has played a key role in the U.S. war. A second official called it a “complex plan” and part of a “hybrid strategy” of asymmetric warfare by Iran that forced the Pentagon to take drastic measures.

“There were some threats,” President Donald Trump admitted on Monday when asked about the bombers, adding that leaving the aircraft would only tempt an attack.

The inability to safeguard U.S. aircraft at a base northwest of London comes at a time of mounting attacks on U.S. outposts around the world.

Complex Iranian drone and ballistic missile strikes have killed and injured U.S. troops, placed many more in harm’s way, and damaged or destroyed numerous outposts across the Middle East. Some crucial bases have sustained so much damage that U.S. operations have been radically disrupted and, according to the second official, “base posture in the region may never recover.”

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The strikes have also targeted joint facilities operated by U.S. allies. In March, Iran launched a drone attack on a British air base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, causing damage to a facility the U.S. military has long relied on. Iran also targeted a joint U.K.–U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia that has become increasingly central to the U.S. war effort.

What Trump called a “little excursion” has become a festering wound for the U.S. military. Despite months of claims by Trump and Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated, Iran has attacked more than 15 bases across the Middle East. The official U.S. casualty toll stands at 19 dead and close to 900 wounded, most of the dead occurring since July, after the Trump administration claimed the war had ended. The real casualty toll is higher and has been consistently obscured and manipulated through what one defense official called a “cover-up.” 

The first U.S. official said Iran is engaged in a “go for broke” strategy, banking that it can absorb economic ruin longer than the U.S. can sustain a failing war and an expensive and difficult Naval blockade and escort program in the Strait of Hormuz, while dealing with global economic upheaval from stubbornly high fuel prices that have not shrunk to pre-war levels despite the oil flow from other Gulf Nations returning to normal.

The withdrawal of the bombers from Fairford came just days after the British government arrested six suspects in connection with a suspected attack on that same base. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were “strong indications” that Iran played a role in the incident. The men were later released on bail, prompting criticism by Trump.

The IRGC warned in July that “any base used to launch attacks on Iranian territory is a legitimate target for our forces.” On Monday, the commander-in-chief of Iran’s army, Maj. Gen. Amir Hatami, “stressed the need for any creative act capable of disrupting the enemy’s calculations,” according to a report by Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency. The U.S. officials referenced additional threats against other bases in Europe, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

This isn’t the first time the U.S. has scrambled to protect its assets from a supposed Iranian threat. In July, Trump himself snuck into a catering truck and fled Turkey on a military aircraft due to U.S. fears of a possible Iranian attack on Air Force One. Trump had earlier said he was Iran’s “No. 1 target” during the NATO summit in Ankara.

Unlike their commander-in-chief, U.S. troops have been unable to flee their bases and ships when Iran has overwhelmed U.S. air defenses during attacks in the Middle East. A recent Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” Air Force personnel, alone, endured more than 1,200 “alarm reds” — the official code for imminent attack by missiles, aircraft, or ground forces — during just 38 days earlier this year, according to Air Force chief of staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach. 

A March 1 drone attack on the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait killed six U.S. troops, the deadliest known Iranian strike on U.S. personnel during the war; dozens more were wounded. In July, an Iranian attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan killed three soldiers from air defense units although they were “not actively engaged in anti-aircraft activity” during the attacks, according to a “defense official” who spoke on background because they were not authorized to disclose the information. Multiple U.S. military aircraft were also damaged in the attack, including an A-10 Thunderbolt and eight F-15 fighters. These were among dozens of U.S. aircraft so far destroyed or damaged in the war, including four F-15 fighter aircraft, 12 KC-135 refueling aircraft, and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones, according to the inspector general report.

The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. About 65 percent of Patriot interceptors were expended between February and July, leaving fewer than 830 remaining from a pre-war total of 2,330, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The number of THAAD interceptors dropped from more than 450 to less than 270.

Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, downplayed the risks of depleted stockpiles of such missiles last month, telling CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he wasn’t worried for the safety of U.S. troops. “I’m not concerned at all,” he replied when asked about defending against Iranian attacks. CENTCOM did not reply when asked if Cooper would resign if U.S. troops were killed or wounded in future attacks.

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An Iranian missile and drone attack at the start of the war destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the most critical U.S. logistics hub in the region. The Pentagon claimed for months that the strikes did not significantly impact military operations but acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that “they blew the hell out of Bahrain.” A Wall Street Journal investigation previously found that rebuilding the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, barracks, and communication towers at Naval Support Activity Bahrain may cost more than $400 million, which the first U.S. official told The Intercept could be an underestimate if it’s ever attempted. Naval Forces Central Command referred questions about the cost estimate to CENTCOM, which did not respond.

With the home of the Fifth Fleet knocked out and other ports in the region within range of Iranian missiles and drones, the Navy found itself facing the daunting challenge of maintaining a flotilla of more than 24 ships — including two massive aircraft carriers and numerous guided-missile destroyers and cruisers, attack submarines, or supply ships deployed at any one time. This means Navy ships need to haul food and fuel more than 2,000 miles from the base on Diego Garcia. The inspector general report noted that the shift in “naval bases and support ports posed significant challenges,” pointing specifically to the “issue with shifting logistics support and infrastructure to Diego Garcia” and the challenges of “extended sea transit requiring 14- to 18-day logistics cycles.”

Sailors and Marines have been subjected to constant danger as a result. The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group completed a record-breaking 11-month deployment that also included the invasion of Venezuela. (Under normal conditions, a carrier would visit port about once a month to allow its crew to rest.) The ship was, according to a Presidential Unit Citation, under “persistent threat from enemy missiles and one-way attack drones” during its deployment to the Middle East.

More recently, the IRGC targeted another aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer with ballistic missiles, according to Central Command. And Marines were injured in an Iranian attack on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz last month; the two U.S. officials said those Marines potentially suffered brain trauma, among other injuries.

Amid the floundering war with Iran, U.S. forces withdrew from neighboring Iraq last week, ending two-plus decades of U.S. military occupation and operations that unleashed waves of bloodshed and civilian suffering. “The expulsion of America from Iraq was the result of … the country’s steadfastness in its independence,” the IRGC announced, in a missive touting the power of national resistance. Politicians in Baghdad also celebrated the withdrawal, with Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi officially declaring October 1 a “Day of Sovereignty and Independence.”

Despite the Trump administration’s claims, the Iran war continues to expand. Last month, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi forces seized virtually all of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, including the shoreline along the crucial shipping lanes of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is the southern entrance to the Red Sea. On Tuesday, the Houthis claimed to have killed or wounded more than 200 Saudi-backed fighters seeking to retake territory.

The post The U.S. Military Struggles to Protect Its Bases Amid Failing Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

“Why did you kill Barry Van Treese?” one asked.

Justin Sneed, 49, didn’t answer, his handcuffs and waist chain clanging as he walked. With a short, graying goatee and long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, Sneed maintained a hollow stare. Inside the courtroom, his lawyer directed him to a chair just in front of the jury box. Sneed sat, his hands clasped in front of him, and kept his gaze toward the floor. Directly across the room was Richard Glossip, the man nearly executed for killing their boss — a grisly murder that Sneed actually committed.

Sneed was 19 years old when he beat Van Treese to death at the Best Budget Inn, a rundown motel Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Sneed admitted to the January 1997 murder but swore Glossip put him up to it. Glossip insisted he was innocent and, apart from Sneed’s account, there was scant evidence connecting him to the crime. Still, in exchange for a life sentence, Sneed became the state’s star witness against Glossip, clinching his conviction and sending him to death row.

It would not take long for Sneed’s story to start falling apart. Glossip’s original conviction was overturned after a state court found that Glossip’s trial lawyers failed to present critical exculpatory evidence — a video of Sneed’s police interrogation that showed Oklahoma City detectives pressuring him into implicating Glossip. Nevertheless, in 2004, a second jury reconvicted Glossip and again sentenced him to death.

In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Glossip’s conviction, concluding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, dismantling the basis for the state’s case. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.”

Many expected Glossip’s saga to end there. Instead, Oklahoma announced it would retry Glossip for first-degree murder, once again relying on Sneed. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” prosecutor Jimmy Harmon told Mai earlier this year.

Glossip’s attorneys have strenuously objected to the state’s plan to use the same discredited evidence for a third time. They are also adamant that they should have a chance to put Sneed on the witness stand, so that Mai can assess his credibility before trial. It is this insistence that led Glossip and Sneed to sit face to face in court for the first time in decades.

Glossip, now 63, was released on bond in May. He sat at the defense table in a navy suit and crisp white shirt while the daylong hearing got underway. Mai had convened the September 30 proceeding to consider a flurry of defense motions, many of which centered on Sneed’s role in the case. Sneed had been subpoenaed in advance of the hearing, which attracted a gaggle of reporters to Mai’s courtroom. But it was unclear whether he would take the stand.

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Much of the time was spent listening to lawyers on both sides argue over ongoing conflicts in the case. Glossip’s legal team has repeatedly clashed with prosecutors over the state’s obligation to disclose evidence before trial. The constant disagreements have threatened to derail Mai’s tight trial schedule; after initially setting Glossip’s trial for September, she has since pushed the trial date to December 7.

But that too seems vanishingly unlikely. As the hearing dragged on, the bigger question was whether a trial will happen at all.

It was exactly 11 years earlier, on September 30, 2015, that Glossip came perilously close to being put to death at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, only for officials to realize at the eleventh hour that they had procured the wrong combination of drugs to carry out his lethal injection. In the decade that followed, Glossip’s defense attorney, Don Knight, reinvestigated the case and uncovered a trove of evidence previously withheld by the state. He also secured a host of new witnesses who came forward to say that, despite the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a hapless dolt who was entirely under Glossip’s control, Sneed was actually cunning, volatile, and entirely capable of murder on his own.

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The revelations eventually prompted a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers to question Glossip’s conviction and seek an independent investigation into the case. In June 2022, the law firm Reed Smith LLP published the first in a series of exhaustive reports, unearthing even more evidence undermining prosecutors’ theory of the crime and revealing that the state had willfully destroyed key pieces of evidence before Glossip’s 2004 retrial. The following year, newly elected state Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced his own probe into the case. That investigation found myriad problems with Glossip’s prosecution, persuading Drummond that Glossip’s conviction and death sentence should not stand.

Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction but it refused, once again setting Glossip up for execution. The attorney general took unprecedented steps to spare Glossip’s life, ultimately joining Glossip’s efforts to get the case before the Supreme Court — and taking a victory lap after the justices finally ruled in Glossip’s favor in February 2025.

But just a few months after the high court ruling, Drummond did an abrupt about-face, announcing that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. The reversal coincided with Drummond’s campaign for governor, which ended in a primary defeat this past August. In the meantime, defense attorneys repeatedly reiterated Drummond’s own critiques of the case, emphasizing that, until recently, he vehemently criticized the same evidence his prosecutors plan to reuse.

Among these criticisms were key concessions Drummond made regarding misconduct by Connie Smothermon, the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s 2004 retrial. At the heart of the Supreme Court ruling was that Smothermon not only failed to disclose key notes about Sneed’s psychiatric history, but also failed to correct portions of Sneed’s testimony that she knew were false.

Drummond also conceded that Smothermon improperly sought to alter Sneed’s testimony before he took the stand at the retrial to make it fit the forensic evidence. At Glossip’s first trial, Sneed denied attacking Van Treese with a knife even though a knife was found at the scene — and despite the medical examiner’s findings that there were puncture wounds on Van Treese’s chest. Midway through Glossip’s second trial, Smothermon wrote a note to Sneed’s defense attorney, indicating that there were inconsistencies Sneed needed to clear up.

“Our biggest problem,” Smothermon wrote, “is still the knife.” When Sneed later took the stand, he testified that he did, in fact, stab Van Treese.

Glossip’s attorneys did not discover this note until 2022. In its ruling, the Supreme Court agreed with Drummond that Smothermon violated Glossip’s rights by trying to modify Sneed’s testimony mid-trial. Yet Drummond’s own prosecutors now argue that there’s no evidence that Smothermon’s mid-trial intervention “improperly influenced” Sneed’s testimony.

In early September, Glossip’s attorneys filed a motion urging Mai to put Sneed on the stand to clear this up. “No court has yet held an evidentiary hearing to determine the full scope of the … violation,” they wrote, “its effect on Sneed’s testimony, and what procedures may be necessary to prevent the jury from being deceived about what Sneed remembers versus what he was coached to say.”

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In a surprisingly candid reply, Joshua Lockett, deputy chief of the Oklahoma attorney general’s criminal appeals unit, wrote that it is unreasonable to expect Sneed to be able to answer questions about the knife and his shifting trial testimony after all these years. “Any evidentiary hearing would be unable to disentangle the source of Sneed’s knowledge” — whether it came from Sneed’s memory about the night of the crime, or from what he “absorbed” from Smothermon’s mid-trial note, he wrote. “That sorting would have been difficult in 2004,” he wrote. “It is impossible in 2026.”

In other words, the state appeared to be conceding that its star witness cannot now reliably recount what happened the night he murdered Barry Van Treese.

Hanging over Wednesday’s proceeding was an uncomfortable reality that has dogged the state’s case for years: evidence that Sneed has repeatedly tried to take back his claim that Glossip coerced him into murdering Van Treese.

In October 2014, nearly a year before Glossip’s near-execution, Sneed’s adult daughter O’Ryan Justine Sneed sent a letter to the Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole, urging them to grant clemency to Glossip. “For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” she wrote. “I feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.”

Among the most compelling pieces of evidence to emerge since then are two handwritten notes, penned years apart, in which Sneed indicated he wanted to retract his testimony. In 2003, a year before Glossip’s second trial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, Gina Walker, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he sent Walker another letter: “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. Things he needed “to clean up.” Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming forward.

Both of these notes came from Sneed’s public defender file. Ordinarily such communications would be shielded from release by attorney-client privilege, but in this case the public defender’s office provided the documents to investigators with Reed Smith. Glossip’s attorneys argued that there is reason to believe that there may be additional material in Sneed’s file that could cast further doubt on his story.

But whether the lawyers might be entitled to any of these records depends on a key question: Did Sneed consent to the disclosure of the records in the first place?

Over the state’s objections, Mai said she would allow Sneed to take the stand for the “limited purpose — and I do mean limited purpose” of asking Sneed whether he ever consented to his records being released. “I will allow for very limited questioning of Mr. Sneed as to that topic,” she said.

Sneed shuffled to a wooden chair next to the judge’s bench and sat awkwardly, his legs spread wide and his gaze still fixed on the ground.

In response to questions from one of Glossip’s defense attorneys, Sneed said he never consented to the release of materials from his public defender file. But he also said that he met with investigators with Reed Smith while accompanied by the head of the public defender office. Perhaps more perplexing, Sneed said he knew by then that his files had been released to investigators because he’d seen it broadcast “on the media, when it was on the television with the news reporters.” When the investigators tried to interview him, “I just didn’t answer their questions, didn’t try to go into details about anything,” Sneed said, “because I was actively upset about the fact that [the files] were released anyway without my consent.”

The testimony was confusing and brief, an unsatisfying turn on the stand that did nothing to answer any of the long-standing questions about the state’s star witness or how he would testify about the murder this time around.

As they have for months, lawyers with the attorney general’s office spent much of the day pushing back hard on the notion that Sneed should take the stand before trial to discuss the knife, his public defender file, or anything else. In court, Knight pointed out that prosecutors have met with Sneed repeatedly over the last year and a half, and yet have only turned over to the defense brief summaries of those conversations. Taken together, the state’s maneuvering suggests prosecutors are far less confident in their case against Glossip than they have previously claimed.

In a statement to The Intercept, Knight said he was struck by prosecutors’ efforts to keep Sneed from testifying. “For 29 years, this case had been marked by prosecutorial errors and misconduct,” he said. “And now they can’t even trust the testimony of the only witness that says Rich was involved in this murder. But they can’t hide him forever. We look forward to spending a couple of days with Mr. Sneed on the stand at trial.”

As Sneed was led out of the courtroom, reporters surrounded him again as he made his way to the elevators. “All these years later do you have any regrets?” one asked just before the doors closed. Sneed did not answer.

The post The Key Witness Against Richard Glossip Just Returned to Court. It Didn’t Go Well. appeared first on The Intercept.

In the weeks after this year’s appropriations bill passed, employees of AM General or its parent company donated tens of thousands to key appropriations committee members in both chambers, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif.

Collins is separately facing scrutiny over a report from ProPublica that the FBI investigated an alleged pay-to-play scheme involving a major donor, an ex-defense contractor. Collins’ office denied that there was any kind of pay-to-play arrangement and said she fully cooperated with the FBI. There is no indication that AM General’s donations were part of such a scheme, but the giving nonetheless demonstrates how Collins’s campaign account has grown with help from employees at defense contractors doing business with the government.

Before the Army put the future of the vehicle in jeopardy, Collins was not a frequent beneficiary of contributions from the company’s workers. She last received campaign funds from AM General or its parent company’s employees more than a decade ago. But after the Army’s “excess” announcement last year, employees and the company’s PAC donated over $58,000 to committees associated with Collins.

One observer of money in politics said that appropriators receiving money from government contractors is a long-standing problem.

“Members of the appropriations committees in Congress are extremely powerful. These lawmakers can steer huge sums of money to private companies. Government contractors today routinely try to leverage a broken campaign finance system to their advantage,” said Michael Beckel, money in politics reform director at Issue One.

The revival of the Army’s order was supported by lawmakers in both parties, including the top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn. Collins’s office said that in the Senate, decisions on the program were made not by her but by defense subcommittee chair Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and vice chair Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. McConnell did not receive donations from employees at AM General or its parent company this election cycle. Coons received $2,500 from its employee PAC.

“Sen. Collins was not involved in this decision. The final decision was made by the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees,” said a Collins spokesperson, Phoebe Keller.

AM General’s CEO, John Chadbourne, said in an email that the company does not comment on campaign donations, “all of which fully comply with FEC rules and regulations.”

He added, “AM General’s focus is on the Warfighter and providing the best light tactical vehicle capabilities to the Joint Forces.”

Congress Steps In

AM General is most famous for producing the Humvee, the iconic military vehicle that trawled the streets of Baghdad during the Iraq War. In 2023, the Army selected the company to produce 20,000 units of a more heavily armored successor known as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. The company was ramping up its production line in Indiana when then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced in May 2025 that he would cancel its order, saying the additional deliveries would result in an “excess.”

Driscoll’s announcement was part of a larger effort to “eliminate waste and obsolete programs.”

“Yesterday’s weapons will not win tomorrow’s wars,” he said.

The military does not always have the last say on its contracts, however.

Congress has for decades swooped in to save pricey programs with political appeal. Soon after the Army moved to kill the vehicle contract, Congress mobilized to save it.

AM General had backing from members of Congress in Indiana, thanks to the jobs on its production line there. It also found backing from legislators in states far from its home.

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The House moved first: In June 2025, the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on defense proposed spending hundreds of millions on the vehicle for the Army. By the time the final version of the defense spending bill passed this February, the Army had been provided with $345 million for procurement of a vehicle it said it did not need.

A joint statement from the House and Senate, which Collins’ office said was produced by the defense subcommittees, sounded a skeptical note about the Army’s decision to cancel further orders of the vehicle. The statement said that the Army had provided “inadequate supporting analysis.” One concern was that without the efficiencies from a larger order that included the Army, the cost-per-unit price of vehicles that the Marines still wanted would rise.

McCollum, the House Democrat with an influential role in the process, said in a statement that she was one of numerous members of Congress to question the Army’s decision.

“Appropriators felt the Army failed to do adequate due diligence to justify their rash budget decision to cut the JLTV program and explain the full impacts on the Army, and especially the Marine Corps, which had not been consulted,” she said.

By the time the final version of the defense spending bill passed this February, the Army had been provided with $345 million for procurement of a vehicle it said it did not need.

Collins’s campaign committees had received some money after the Army announced that it wanted to cancel the project.

In the weeks after Congress passed the appropriations bill on February 3, Collins and one of her counterparts in the House, Rep. Ken Calvert, both received a burst of donations from AM General employees and the company’s political action committee.

After the appropriations bill went through, donors associated with AM General gave a total of $50,000 to Collins’s fundraising committees.

The donors included Chadbourne, the company’s CEO, and two of KPS Capital’s managing partners. (Private equity firm KPS Capital Partners acquired AM General in 2020.) All gave money to a committee raising money on Collins’s behalf at the end of February or start of March.

Calvert, the California representative with the defense appropriations post, has also benefited from similar donations. Both AM General employees and KPS Capital employees have given $14,285 in direct contributions to Calvert for Congress this election cycle.

The AM General employee PAC has given a combined $20,000 to Ken Calvert for Congress and Eureka Political Action Committee, Calvert’s leadership PAC.

Most of the donations to Calvert associated with AM General came in the weeks immediately after Congress passed the appropriations bill. His office did not respond to a request for comment.

Those contributions put Collins and Calvert in the same league as the Hoosier politicians who were natural supporters of AM General. A fundraising committee associated with Republican Sen. Todd Young received $36,000 from AM General or KPS Capital employees. The AM General employee PAC donated another $10,000 to his main campaign committee. A Marine Corps veteran, Young has been a vocal proponent of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

His Republican colleague Sen. Jim Banks’s leadership PAC received $14,375 total from AM General’s employee PAC and Chadbourne, the executive. Meanwhile, Rep. Frank Mrvan, a Democrat representing northwest Indiana, received $33,050 from AM General or KPS Capital employees, and another $10,000 from the AM General employee PAC, according to FEC filings.

A Ban That Isn’t

On her campaign website, Collins notes that she serves as chair of the “powerful” appropriations committee.

“This committee decides how federal dollars are spent each year, from national defense and infrastructure to medical research, education, and public safety. Susan’s position gives Maine an outsized voice at the table when critical decisions are made which allows her to deliver serious results for Maine,” her website states.

Collins’s office said that in the case of the AM General vehicle, she had nothing to do with the funding decision. A spokesperson said the decision-making in the Senate was up to McConnell, the defense subcommittee chair, and its vice chair Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.

McConnell announced his pending retirement in February 2025. His campaign committee and leadership committee have not received donations from either KPS Capital or AM General employees this election cycle, FEC records show. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Coons’s campaign committee received a $2,500 donation from the AM General employee PAC on March 5, according to FEC records. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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McCollum’s leadership PAC received $5,000 from the company’s employee PAC last October, according to FEC records.

Government contractors have been banned from donating directly to candidates for decades. In practice, however, that ban does nothing to prevent company PACs or individual employees from giving to campaigns — even if they serve as company executives.

The contributions associated with AM General represent a sliver of the $15.8 million Collins had raised this election cycle through July, according to data compiled by the watchdog group OpenSecrets. Yet every dollar could help her in what is expected to be a tough fight with Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate with a slight lead on her in recent polls, in November.

The contributions also illustrated a trend among the top contributors to her campaign. Many of them are from people affiliated with government contractors, according to OpenSecrets. Two defense contractors, General Dynamics and RTX, are also on the list of her top organizational contributors.

AM General’s owner, KPS Capital Partners, is the sixth-largest organizational donor to Collins’s campaign committee and leadership PAC, according to the group’s data.

Although AM General has cultivated connections in Congress, members appear to be growing increasingly skeptical of the JLTV vehicle program. In June, House appropriators signaled that they wanted to find a new contractor for the vehicle, citing production delays. AM General was 2,000 vehicles behind on orders from the Marines, the defense subcommittee said.

Chadbourne, the company’s CEO, issued a statement in June defending its performance and blaming a previous contractor for delays.

“Healthy competition, transparency, and accountability strengthen America’s defense industrial base,” he said. “AM General remains fully committed to continue earning the trust placed in us by the Army, the Marine Corps, Congress, and the American taxpayer through performance, quality, and disciplined execution.”

The post Susan Collins’s Committee Bought Trucks the Army Didn’t Want. Then Campaign Donations Poured In. appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump received Chinese President Xi Jinping and the visiting Chinese press pool last week as reporters from news outlets he had banished stood outside the White House gates. At one point, Trump joked that China, the world’s leading jailer of journalists, “has the friendliest press corps.” Now, his acolytes in Alabama are taking up Trump’s cause, emulating the Chinese Communist Party’s mastery of information control at the local level by decreeing what supposedly independent public radio reporters are allowed to say. 

The Alabama legislature passed a bill in late March requiring all state and local entities to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” in line with one of the many executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office. The legislation does not set forth penalties for noncompliance, but its sponsor, state Rep. David Standridge, called it “an opportunity to make a patriotic statement” on the House floor in January. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Trump ally, signed the bill into law.

Birmingham public radio station WBHM told its listeners in a letter from Will Dahlberg, the station’s executive director and general manager, that due to the law, which took effect October 1, the University of Alabama at Birmingham is forcing it to use the legislature’s preferred language in its reporting. The move puts it at odds with NPR, of which it is a member station; The Associated Press, which publishes the style guide used by newsrooms across the country; and other journalistic institutions. The station is licensed to the university, making its employees both state and UAB employees. Still, WBHM’s Journalism Code of Integrity emphasizes the newsroom’s independence and states that the university “should not — and cannot — expect to exert influence on WBHM’s journalists and its independent editorial process.”

Dahlberg wrote that not implementing the new language “may result in disciplinary action or termination of employees and affect WBHM’s relationship and support from UAB.” But nothing in the law requires the university to discipline or fire anyone. In other words, the university took a toothless stunt of a law, gave it teeth, and used them to take a bite out of press freedom.

Dahlberg also announced in the letter that he is stepping down from his position and leaving the station. His resignation was supposed to be effective October 16, but he posted an update that the university told him on Monday morning that he should pack his bags immediately. We cannot say for sure whether the university hastened Dahlberg’s departure due to his message to listeners and the criticism it generated, but the timing is certainly suspicious.

So why did the University of Alabama at Birmingham choose to embarrass itself rather than stand up for journalists and the First Amendment? As ridiculous as Alabama’s Gulf of America law is, its text did not tie the university’s hands. The university would not even have needed to bring a legal challenge to contest the law — it could have just let WBHM ignore it and supported its employees. 

The law only refers to “state and local entities” and makes no mention of media. It contains no penalties for noncompliance and limits its mandate to “when practicable,” giving a pass when complying would “impose an operational or financial burden.” Compelled speech is never practicable because it’s unconstitutional, but the operational and financial burdens of compliance are also significant. WBHM picks up national content from NPR and The Associated Press, for example. Are they expected to reject stories that say “Gulf of Mexico,” and fill that time with original reporting they haven’t budgeted or hired for? Or should they somehow intercept and edit those stories, likely in violation of their contractual obligations? 

There is also ample Supreme Court precedent for the proposition that the government cannot put words in reporters’ mouths. In a landmark 1943 case on whether the state could force students to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the court wrote that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” That means neither Standridge, Ivey, nor Trump is entitled to impose their definitions of patriotism on anyone —least of all the news media.

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More recently, some conservatives celebrated 2024’s NRA v. Vullo decision, which found that public officials could not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” There is no exception for radio stations that receive public funding. In 1984, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on editorializing by public broadcasters that received federal money, holding that funding a station doesn’t entitle the government to control its journalism — a principle affirmed in March when a federal judge rejected Trump’s executive order to defund NPR and PBS.

The university could have taken the position that, for one, public radio stations are not state entities, and two, the government choosing which words reporters must say is impracticable and burdensome. Last but not least, the university should have taken the stand that the First Amendment still exists to protect us all, despite Trump’s best efforts to cast it aside.

Just as law firms, news outlets, colleges, and others that have settled with Trump to stay in his good graces chose to cave when they could have easily fought back (as others successfully have), the University of Alabama at Birmingham made the cowardly choice to comply in advance.

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If anything, its capitulation is worse, because there’s no indication that the state intended to, or could, put up a fight. Is the Alabama legislature really so committed to Standridge’s silly law that it would waste taxpayer money litigating likely unwinnable constitutional battles? Maybe, but the university could have at least waited to see how, or if, the state would respond.

It is worth noting that Ivey is an ex officio member of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees. That same board published an annual freedom of speech report in August. It consists of a single identical paragraph, copy-pasted each year with the only change being the date and the number of “events” held on its campuses that year, concluding that “the requirements of the [free speech] Policies have been repeatedly satisfied without a single alleged violation, which further speaks to their effectiveness in appropriately achieving the Board’s objectives.”

One is left to wonder if, despite pressuring WBHM to echo Trump talking points, the university will once again copy-paste that conclusion next year.

The post Public Radio Station Forced to Call Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” appeared first on The Intercept.